She would not run a risk like this again, but what, she wondered, was the alternative? To keep him imprisoned in the attic—and somehow unnoticed by her husband—until the end of the war, whenever that might be? That, too, was impossible. Only in a world as consumed with hatred and violence as this one could an impulsive act of compassion have led to such a quandary.
“Kurt?” she said, slipping into the barn. “It’s all right to come out now.”
His cane was lying by the floor of the ladder to the loft.
“It’s only me.”
His head poked over the edge of the loft. “Ist es sicher?”
“Yes, it is safe now.” She was surprised that he had been able to get up there with the bad leg. “It is safe,” she repeated, but with far less conviction than she might have wished.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“When are you going to be done with that blowtorch?” Graf asked, impatiently. “I have important things to do in here today.”
“You told me to make this,” Heinrich Schell replied, still tending to his work, “so I make it.” The flame was white hot, and with goggles on his eyes and his huge hands stuffed into a pair of asbestos-lined gloves, Schell was welding together two tin panels stripped from an empty Guinness barrel. He had seen, and repaired, any number of these barrels in his time running the Prussian Guard, a public house on the so-called Charlottenstrasse of London. Now he was molding a cylinder eighteen inches long, closed to a point at one end and capped at the other.
It was shaped like a miniature zeppelin, Graf reflected, but if all went well, it would be even more devastating. Much as he hated having anyone else in his laboratory, there was no way around it. He simply couldn’t do everything, metallurgy for instance, himself. And so he had handed over to Schell the instructions, sent by secret courier from the Colonial Office, for the construction of the canister. When completed, it would be hidden away in the battered viola case under his bed.
Rather than distract him again, Graf took a few minutes to comb over the diagrams once more, for the fuse, the burster, the filling port. Such a device, commonly employed for the dissemination of poison gas on the battlefield, had never been used for the purposes he had in mind, but he was certain that his scheme would prove as workable as it was elegant. He, Dr. Anton Graf, would win the war without employing a single cannon, plane, or submarine. But how odd, he thought, that his sole accomplice should be this stolid dullard, with whom he had not much more in common than nationality and a deep-seated antagonism toward all things English. It was odd that they even knew each other.
The previous September, very soon after the outbreak of the war, Graf had been in the Prussian Guard one night, celebrating the cultivation of a particularly promising culture, when another boatload of Belgian refugees had come to London with their tales of German atrocities, tales Graf immediately discounted as pure propaganda. But as usual, the British mob had been riled up, and headed for the German district of town to square accounts. It was a surprisingly warm and summery evening, all going well, until a crowd, including many of the pub’s regular customers, suddenly converged on the place with bricks and bats and a thirst not for beer, but for blood. Graf saw them through the front window, which was shattered a moment later by a barrel thrown right through the glass. It caromed off one table and thumped onto Graf’s, who ducked in the nick of time. The door was banged open, and the mob surged through, overturning chairs, smashing mirrors and anything else in sight. Fire quickly followed when a burning torch was tossed onto the alcohol spilling from the broken bottles behind the bar.
Schell, taken by surprise, tried to fight at first, but even a man of his size and fury could do only so much against the seething mass of frenzied Britons. Graf saw him hurl three or four men out of his way with Herculean strength, sending one of them all the way back through the smashed window, and crowning another with a heavy beer mug. It was only when Schell’s barking dog, Munchen, a schnauzer named after the town where Schell had been born, was lifted up by a man in the mob and hurled directly into the flames now rising to the rafters that he seemed to lose his senses altogether, digging a meat cleaver out from under a counter and slashing through the mob willy-nilly. In the distance, Graf, cowering behind a coatrack, had heard the shrill sound of police whistles, the rumble of fire wagons, and had somehow managed—shouting orders at him in German—to stop him from fighting anymore and run out the back door of the pub before it was too late.
Dazed and bloodied, Schell had tried one more time to rescue his dog from the fire, but the animal had already been consumed by the flames, and as if he were leading a lost blind child, Graf dragged Schell into the deserted alleyway, then through the labyrinth of streets and all the way back to his own safe haven in Aleister Crowley’s townhouse. There, Schell had hunkered down ever since, nursing his thirst for revenge and becoming a devoted worshipper at the altar of all things perverse and occult. At the latter, he had proven to be a quick study.
“There,” Schell said, extinguishing the blowtorch and lifting the goggles from his eyes. “It is done.”
“Try the cap. See if it fits.”
“It will fit,” he replied, lifting the three-pronged cap and screwing it to the open end of the cylinder. “Ja?”
“Das ist gute Arbeit.”
“Now are you going to tell me what it’s for?”
“In good time, in good time.” Graf was reluctant to share his plans with anyone, particularly someone as prone to drink, and inclined to rage, as Heinrich Schell. Even Graf’s distant overseers, in the Schutztruppe branch of the Colonial Office at Wilhelmstrasse 62 in Berlin, didn’t know precisely what he was up to. Better that way.
“The Master keeps asking me when he will see some gold,” Schell said. “He says that he is tired of experiments. He is tired of excuses. He needs gold.”
Graf carefully removed his spectacles and cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief before answering. “You may inform your master”—pronouncing the last two words in such a way as to imply that while Schell might regard Crowley as his master, Graf did not—“that the work will be done when it is done. In the meantime you may show him this,” he said, producing a burgundy velvet pouch from his vest pocket.
Schell opened the drawstring and peered at the golden dust and nuggets jumbled inside. “You made this?”
Graf hooked the sidepieces behind his ears and blinked at Schell through his polished lenses. “What, do you think the Bank of England gave it to me?”
“How much of this can you make?” Schell asked.
“It all depends on how long I am left alone to do my work.” In fact, it all depended on how many more times the Colonial Office was willing to smuggle him similar pouches. As far as they knew, Graf was just dunning them for his laboratory expenses. If they had known it was to convince a character like Aleister Crowley that alchemy was being successfully performed in his cellar, they’d have laughed themselves out of their chairs. It was a joke he would share with them one day when the war was over and won. But for the moment, all he wanted was his lab back.
“Now, take that pouch and leave me be.”
Schell pocketed the sack, tossed the goggles and gloves onto the worktable, and trudged up the steps. Once Graf heard the door at the top of the staircase close, he pulled the viola case out from under his bunk and opened it. Lifting the empty cylinder, still warm, he laid it inside the green felt interior.
Soon, he thought, it would be traveling like an arrow straight at the breast of the British empire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When the train from Southampton finally arrived at Waterloo Station, it was late on a drizzly afternoon. Wells, with the ever-dependable Sergeant Stubb by his side, waited in the carriage until the wounded had been helped off. Soldiers with missing limbs, bandaged heads, gauze masks to conceal the hideous damage from gas, shot, and shell, limped into the arms of waiting nurses, or were loaded onto stretchers and carried down the platform. As Wells watched through th
e grimy window, one of them, half-blind, stumbled into a stanchion post, another fell to his knees and retched onto the tracks. They moved like phantoms in the gray station light, and when Wells finally followed the grim parade outside, he saw a long row of Red Cross ambulances, supplemented by private cars and even horse-drawn bread vans, courtesy of Lyons bakeries, lined up to receive them. From here, they would be transported to several of the nearest hospitals including Charing Cross, London in Whitechapel, and on the South Bank, Guy’s—where he would soon be making a sad mission of his own.
“I’ll be quite all right now,” Wells said to Stubb, taking back his suitcase, now much the worse for wear.
“Quite sure?” Stubb said, rasping around the Victory lozenge. The brief re-exposure to the gas underground had exacerbated his problem. “My orders are to see you all the way home, you being a national treasure and all that.” A smile flitted at his lips.
“This national treasure can find its way to St. James’s Court, unassisted,” Wells said, extending his hand and clasping Stubb’s. “I shall see you again, Sergeant.”
“Right you are.”
“And thank you.” So inadequate to the weight of all that he owed him, but he knew that Stubb would understand its full import.
And then the sergeant was gone, and it was up to Wells to walk several streets away, in the rain, before he was able to commandeer a cab just dropping off a gaggle of young people, erupting in laughter, outside a popular hotel.
“The whole bottle of Dom? All by herself?” a girl crowed.
“Yes,” a young man replied, “and without a glass!”
The others cheered, and fell into the door being held open by a bellman.
When Wells climbed into the back seat and the cabbie saw his uniform and suitcase, he harrumphed and said, “Glad to be rid of that lot. Were you over there?”
Wells confirmed it.
“Welcome back to Blighty.”
“Good to be back.”
“Me, I was over in Africa, I was, fightin’ the Boers. But lor’, that was fifteen—no, sixteen—years ago now.”
For the remainder of the ride, Wells was happy to let him expatiate on his service in South Africa, but when the cab pulled up before his building, and Wells looked up at the darkened window, the drapes standing open but no one waiting between them, he was touched by a familiar melancholy.
Opening the door to his flat, it was hardly a hero’s welcome he received. A curtain stirred in the draft, and the smell of stuffy, dusty air assailed his nostrils. But it was blessedly quiet, and private, and serene. He leaned against the back of the door, and simply took in the unreality of it. This was the first moment that he felt he had well and truly escaped from the Front—and by the skin of his teeth.
He knew the sensation was one to be savored because he also knew it would pass, swiftly and inexorably; that was both the blessing and the curse of human nature. The horrors would fade, but with them the appreciation of the beauty of the commonest things in ordinary life—the comfortable chairs, the clean tea towels, the soft carpet underfoot. If only one could forget the former hardships, while preserving the latter sense of joy; that would be a trick worth mastering.
As he went about his business, turning on the lights and drawing the curtains closed, banging on the radiators to get them going again, he found himself at loose ends in the flat. After shaving and bathing (ah, the miracle of hot water!) and putting on his civilian clothes—an old tweed suit and waistcoat—he took the notebook and letter that Friedrich Von Baden had given him, and sat down in one of the wingback chairs that flanked the fireplace.
The letter, still sealed, was addressed in English, but the notebook was written in German. Colonel Bryce, to whom he would hand it over the next day, would want it translated immediately. Wells wondered what it would reveal. Would it indeed contain the seeds of some terrible scheme to further the kaiser’s war effort, or would it be the ravings of a man consigned to a life among the living dead, a man, like all the others down there, with no country to return to?
The notebook page that Wells was looking at—where several chemical formulas were entered—suddenly swam before his eyes, and he pressed two fingers to the skin just above the bridge of his nose and squeezed, hard. Ever since that night in the underground, when the gas had leaked into the chamber, he had been prone to these sudden but brief attacks of neuralgia. His eyes would become momentarily unfocused, sounds around him muffled, his temples throbbing. Sometimes the air was tinged with a murky, unpleasant scent. And then, in a minute or two, the feeling would pass, leaving him drained but all right again. He would have to ask Bryce for a referral to a London physician who might be familiar with such symptoms. He could hardly be the first to have experienced them.
He was just preparing a plate of some stale biscuits and a tin of sardines—all that he could find in the cupboard—when he heard the shrill whistle of an air-raid warden outside. Hurrying to the front windows, he glanced outside—night had fallen—and yanked the curtains tight. As he returned to the kitchen, there was a peremptory knock on his door. Had he failed to secure them properly?
“I come,” he said, as he made his way to the foyer. He didn’t bother to peer through the peephole, but opened the door and then stood, surprised, as Rebecca said, “I hope you won’t think I’m making a habit of this.”
“How did you even know I was home?”
“Your curtains were drawn. They’ve been open ever since you left.”
“You’ve been checking?”
“I could deny it, but what would be the point?”
Neither had moved an inch.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Wells moved to one side, and once the door was shut, felt her arms wrap around his neck, and her lips pressed to his cheek. He was caught so off guard that he did not respond, his arms hanging limply at his sides.
“I must say,” she murmured, “I had hoped for more of a greeting than that. I was so worried about you that I’ve barely been able to sleep.”
“You should not have been.”
“Yes, I should have,” she said, holding him at arm’s length and studying his face. “You’ve been through something terrible—I can see that.”
He was not about to challenge it.
Nor did he challenge her when she tossed her coat over the back of the sofa, or when she kissed him again—this time with even greater ardor—or when she took him by the hand and led him, not unwillingly, toward his own bedroom. What had gotten into the girl? It was as if she had thoroughly rehashed their last encounter here, perhaps all the time he was away, and was determined now to rewrite the script, to make it play out the way she had originally intended. He already knew she was a girl of bold convictions, and this appeared to be evidence of it yet again.
But what of his own convictions? Even as he lay back on the bed, atop the quilt that Jane had made, he recalled balking, the last time, at anything further. But he did not have that kind of resistance in him now. He had seen so much death, he needed this reaffirmation of life.
This was nothing new to him; for years, young women had been irresistibly attracted to the nectar of his renown. But for every one of them that he had seduced, there was another who had done the seducing. Even so, in Rebecca he sensed something very special, something that would render this much more than a mere dalliance. His desire for her was as great as any he had ever known—at the Front, it had only grown—and when her face hovered above his for just a moment, and he gazed into the dark liquid pools of her eyes, he was overcome with passion, the kind he had felt as a young man still making his way, and his name, in the world.
He rolled her over, and she let out a sigh—recognition that the battle had been won, the tide had turned, he now wanted her—and his fingers tore at the buttons of her blouse. She laughed with pleasure, and clawed at him playfully, like a big cat.
“Oh, so you’re a panther now, are you?” he said.
“I could be, if you
wanted me to,” she said, nipping up at his neck.
“I do.”
“But only on one condition.” Her perfect teeth shone white in the darkness. “You must be my jaguar.”
“Then that’s what we’ll be,” he said, slipping his hands up under her skirt, nimbly unfastening the tops of her stockings, and dragging them down—his fingernails, ragged from the trenches, deliberately scratching her skin as they went. “Jaguar and panther.”
Could it be that he had hit upon his ideal counterpart, a girl who relished the playful aspect of sex as much as he did?
Once he had undressed her, he leaned back on his haunches and, as was his wont, simply surveyed the beauty of her body—the full breasts, sloping gently to each side, the heaving rib cage, the darker triangle between her legs. Most girls—nearly all, truth be told—folded their legs, or demurely covered themselves with one hand when they saw him looking there. But not Rebecca. She stared up into his eyes, eager to see his reaction, to see the quickening of his passion, which fed her own.
“Panther,” he breathed, stripping off his own clothes, then bending his head, and his bared teeth, to her breast.
“Jaguar,” she whispered, her hand snaking down, catching him from below with a firm grasp. Her fingers were supple and cool and, for a newcomer, surprisingly adept.
Their embrace was fierce, and her face, at the moment of consummation, was revealed in a flash of light from a searchlight beam that penetrated a slit in the bedroom curtains. She cried out and he gripped her tight, holding on until, minutes later—both of them spent—they lay together in the dark, limbs still entwined, letting their normal breathing return.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 16