Volk

by David Nickle

  “We all take our own paths,” said Kurtzweiller. “I am a scientist. I am moved by the majesty of nature.”

  “Biology,” said Muckermann. “Which of course explains your desecration of the Host. Tell me, Manfred. What did you learn, tearing apart its corporeal form?”

  Kurtzweiller looked at Andrew now, and then at Lewis, and finally at Dominic, and then back at Muckermann. “We found no skeletal structure, beyond teeth,” he said.

  “And they are more like claws,” said Andrew. “Made from something like keratin, not bone.”

  Lewis interjected. “We have collected samples of tissue, which although significantly necrotized should prove useful for analysis at a later date. But—”

  Muckermann interrupted: “You don’t answer my question. I ask you what you learned, and you tell me what you have observed!”

  “Observation precedes learning,” said Kurtzweiller.

  “And observation is not learning,” said Muckermann, “without reflection. Without perhaps finding the capacity for reflection.” He took a sip from his goblet. “What might you have learned? I will tell you the answer to save you time. You have learned what it is, to stand before God.”

  “It is an animal,” said Andrew.

  “Spoken,” said Muckermann, looking at Andrew at last, “by an animal.”

  Andrew drew a breath, and found his fingers drawing tight on the edge of the table.

  “That wine is going to your head,” he said in English. He lifted his own goblet, and the nearest jug, and poured the water back, with exaggerated care. “Vergib mir,” he said. “I had forgotten you lacked the capacity for the languages of men. I will try and be clear. In words such as you might understand.”

  Muckermann did not respond, so Andrew continued.

  “Here is what we have learned, Mein Herr . . . after much reflection. We have learned that there may be no God to pray to, no God that will strike us down if we do not pray. But there is a great parasite. We have learned that even wise men might bow down before this thing, and even chaste women might lie down for it.

  “We have learned that when this happens, when a woman spreads her legs . . . the parasite lays its eggs in her, and steals her uterus, and so propagates itself. We have learned that it will do this in men too, laying its eggs in flesh as a botfly might. We have learned that it then turns to the kin of those men and women . . . and commands them, like the queen to her colony of ants. To look after its worldly needs. The needs of its flesh.”

  Muckermann smiled, hesitantly at first, then laughed and shook his head.

  “Animal,” he said. “Do you not know that we have studied this creature? That true men have looked upon it? Of course, there is flesh, and it eats to sustain it. Of course, it borrows our flesh to transmutate. All these matters are points of observation, of the workings of a magnificent biological machine. And I will say that for a time, I thought the same: that it was simply the machine. That it was a blasphemy. How much easier is it to believe that? That the touch of the profound, the spiritual, come from a thing such as that, is merely a mechanism. And must perforce, be a lie.”

  He turned back to Kurtzweiller.

  “Which of course is a fallacy. It may be a lie; it may not. If we rely solely on our senses . . . our observations . . . calling the numinous a lie is easy. For we may then separate ourselves, and deny it, and seek our spiritual engagement elsewhere, or worse, through cynical materialism, forego the spirit entirely. I followed this reasoning also, for a time.” He emptied his goblet and poured himself more of the water. “But in the manner of our faith . . . the discipline of my Jesuit order . . . I soon came to understand that this was not enough.”

  Dominic nodded slowly. “You are employing the Ignatian system of discernment of spirits,” he said, and Muckermann snapped fingers and pointed at him.

  “Indeed! One of you a good Catholic. Jesuit?”

  “Taught be one,” said Dominic and Muckermann smiled broadly.

  “Yes. I spent much time in Berlin,” he said, “after we lost our hold on the valley. It seemed to me that we were meddling with a demonic force—a thing that would take us from God. It seemed to me as though it were seducing me, as it might well have seduced the others. And so I left—I fled—and continued my work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and left the work here to Doctor Bergstrom . . . to old Plaut.

  “But in the absence, I felt . . . a yearning . . . what I thought might be a calling: a seed, that was either of doubt, or of faith in the everlasting.” Muckermann took a deep drink. “And so I meditated upon it and upon the questions that Saint Ignatius had devised. Was this what God would want of me? To deny the Word, without allowing myself to entirely hear it? Was hiding here, reading dispatches from Doctor Bergstrom, a truly courageous act of faith? Or its opposite?

  “Thus it was that I resolved to return here . . . and live, in the manner of the völkisch ideal . . . as Orlok has revealed it.” He emptied his goblet once more.

  “And so I think I have learned. That outside—” he made an encompassing gesture “—it is machinery, but it is machinery of divinity. And it is but a part of God’s true machine. Now revealed unto us. We men. Perhaps not you, Neger.”

  “You worked all of that out by yourself?”

  “It was revealed to me.”

  Andrew sat up a little straighter. “How?”

  “I do not need to explain myself to you.”

  Bergstrom put a hand on Andrew’s arm. “This doesn’t matter,” he said in English.

  “It matters,” said Andrew quietly, and then, in German: “How can you know? You have only looked inward.”

  Muckermann set his elbows on the table on either side of his empty plate.

  “I came to a decision,” he said, “to draw closer to God. I observed you, Doctor, doing much the same thing, through the entire day—also come here. To what? Beyond communing with the divine?”

  “To understand.”

  Muckermann smiled.

  “It is the same thing,” he said.

  Bergstrom cleared his throat, in what Andrew took as a naked attempt to change the subject.

  “Is there food?” he asked.

  “Have you brought any from Herr Orlok?”

  “No.”

  “Then only what you see before you,” said Muckermann.

  Bergstrom lifted the cover off the platter. It was not precisely bare: there were some apples, rotted brown . . . and there was the remains of a carcass—a rabbit perhaps?—that had long ago dried out, and in any case appeared picked clean. Entirely rotten . . . desiccated . . .

  But it was all old enough that it carried scarcely any odour, to mask the sweet perfume of the air in this place.

  “Shall we pray?” asked Muckermann. “Give thanks, for this bountiful feast before us?”

  And with that, the air was filled with a crackling sound—and then music that was, to Andrew’s ear, all too familiar.

  “Plaut,” said Bergstrom under his breath, as the music from Stuttgart filled the ballroom, and the naked creature by the phonograph began to dance.

  “Oh, Herr Plaut,” he said.

  This too: exultation.

  The song was the same as the one that had filled Hauptbahnhof—unmistakably. But it had a constraint, an orthodoxy to it, not surprisingly, as this was no improvisation, but performed by a proper orchestra, a German vocalist singing the lyric. Andrew took the fork from his place setting into his fist, and pressed the tines of it into his thigh. He knew on a level that he ought to press it in harder . . . to jam it hard enough to break skin . . . but the music, the memory of the thing that had happened in the train station . . . his own inclination, said otherwise: Wait.

  Andrew wished he had his notebook, and thought about getting up to fetch it from his bag—just across the hall, at the base of the stairs. There were observations to record. He was salivating, at a scent that seemed to suggest a stew, filled with meats and herbs, redolent with garlic and perhaps fruits—maybe app
les. He looked to the platter, thinking that he might now see it—that Muckermann’s insistence that it contained a bounty might now be borne out. But that was not so . . . it was the same collection of offal . . . dried and rotted . . . that he had seen before. Looking at it did nothing to diminish his appetite.

  And there was Plaut—or rather, the creature that Bergstrom had identified as Jurgen Plaut.

  The first moment Andrew looked on him, he was struck with the simple oddity of a man, small in height but wide around the middle . . . greying hair, too long, and askew as though he’d slept badly on it . . . and naked. He was bent over the phonograph, having just set the needle on the cylinder, and as Andrew watched, stood straight and looked back at him.

  In the swell of the song, Andrew looked away . . . perhaps to confirm the smell of the food against the evidence of his eyes . . . and when he looked back, the thing that was Plaut was grinning at him, a dozen steps nearer, and still staring, with eyes that were all pupil, black chips of obsidian. He swayed, his hands in the air, and Andrew was inclined to do that also, lift his arms in some kind of praise. Instead, he pressed the fork tines harder into his thigh—not quite enough to drive the vision from his mind, but enough to quiet the inclination.

  Muckermann showed no such restraint. Plaut had come around the table to find Muckermann and embrace him, as he stood, and clasped his hands over his head. Plaut began to sing along:

  “In our small beach basket, in shade from the sun

  “We hide in there together, where our love has begun.”

  Other voices joined in, as the lyric moved to describe two lovers on a sunny beach, snuggling under canvas and perhaps laughing at the others at water’s edge—so unfortunate as to be alone with nothing but the emptiness of nature.

  Other voices: Johannes Bergstrom, his eyes cast to the ceiling; Lewis, head bobbing in rhythm as he broke key and rhythm; and Kurtzweiller, who had also risen, to reach across to the platter, and take what for an instant seemed a shining plum.

  It was not just those voices, though—it seemed like a chorus, of angels perhaps, their voices carrying from the heavens.

  And Andrew thought, or rather heard:

  Stop waiting.

  Choose.

  Hermann Muckermann had made a decision. Andrew had to give him that.

  The Jesuit had looked upon God—upon a demonstrable lie of God, by a mechanism which he and his cohort had understood well. He had understood it well enough that he was able to cast it away—to remove himself from its influence, and return to himself and his work. He had returned to his other work—curatorial work—and in so doing, turned his eye back toward that transformative moment. And free of influence, he had dug into the matter . . . into his own soul and heart . . . and he had made a choice. To return and to see. See if it were really God, or a revelation from God, or just a demon, a simple animal. Just a lie.

  Andrew had to give him that.

  And had there been a moment, there in the dining room, he might have confessed that through his own life, he had done much the same thing: fled from Eliada, and the Juke, and America his birthplace. And through those years, Andrew could not look away either. In his own way, he had gone through his own ordeal—not Jesuit, not Catholic, but not wholly secular either. The Société de la biologie transcendantale was not only about understanding an organism—was it? Its manner of inquiry . . . perhaps it would have been better to spend the time in meditation, and to have simply looked into themselves rather than the lenses of microscopes.

  That might have yielded more useful meaning.

  And it might, thought Andrew as Dominic touched his shoulder, and leaned over him to touch his wrist, not be too late to discover that meaning.

  Maybe—

  Andrew cried out, as Dominic pulled the table fork from Andrew’s thigh and stabbed it again, and pulled it out and pressed a wadded napkin onto the fresh wound.

  “We have to go, Dr. Waggoner,” said Dominic. “Look!”

  Andrew pushed down hard on his new injury and pushed his chair back. There was blood—not a lot, he’d missed an artery, which was a blessing—and the pain was extraordinary . . . worse than the wasp venom.

  He swore at Dominic, who now had his arms under Andrew’s, and was trying to lift him.

  “Look!”

  Andrew rose to his feet—the motion sending a wave of pain up through his hip now—and looked to where Dominic now pointed.

  The room had filled up.

  Standing at the stairs were maybe a half-dozen people, naked as Plaut. Perhaps they were the same as they’d seen the night before at the farm—perhaps they were others. It was difficult to tell, as these ones seemed to be caked in mud and twigs—as though they’d been rutting in the woods outside. They barely seemed human, but for their voices . . . raised up in a chorus.

  Streaming in from the front, there were others . . . likewise, singing and swaying. More appeared around Plaut and Muckermann—standing close, moving in an orgiastic harmony. The words of the song had shifted too—no longer German, maybe not a language at all . . . a moaning and hissing sound that still seemed to follow the melody, but drew deeper, and higher.

  Kurtzweiller, Lewis . . . they seemed oblivious to all of it, or rather they seemed to be swept up, as a clutch of young people came to lay hold of their arms, and guide them back into what seemed a throng of more.

  “Manfred!” Andrew shouted. “John!”

  Kurtzweiller looked back at Andrew, and smiling, shook his head. Lewis seemed not to have heard. He raised his hands with the others to the song, and danced.

  “Come.” Dominic led Andrew away from the table, and this time, Andrew followed. Limping, they made for the wide doors to the patio outside, and stepped through them into the twilight.

  “Can you smell it?” asked Dominic. As he said the words, Andrew could: a terrible cloying stench that carried the notes of the stew he thought he’d smelled—but now felt septic, gag-inducing.

  “Jukes,” said Andrew, and Dominic nodded.

  “I remember this smell from Iceland,” he said, “from the ruined church building. It is just the same.”

  Andrew winced and adjusted the napkin on his leg.

  “You really got me a good one,” he said. “I might slow you down a bit—”

  “That is all right,” said Dominic. “I’m running on an empty stomach. We’ll go as fast as we can.”

  “Where?”

  “Far,” said Dominic.

  And with that, Andrew Waggoner and Dominic Villart set off from the chateau, as fast as they could, downslope. Although the sky overhead was still bright, the ground was as dark as night, in the shadow of the mountains to either side. The ground was clear for a space . . . then levelled, and they found themselves amid trees, neatly planted. These were the orchards.

  They cleared the orchards and loped through taller trees, and along a meadow, and then through a thicker forest . . . and they stopped, finally, when they had no choice. They came against a high fence. Andrew leaned against it, and gingerly removed the cloth, to probe the wound. It still bled, and hurt ferociously, but it wasn’t bad.

  “This fence,” said Dominic. “You know what it is?”

  Andrew looked up. The fence was high—he could see the top of it against the sky. Maybe twelve feet? It was steel, and looked fairly new.

  “The Juke compound,” he said. “The original one. Where they bred these things. They made concentric rings of fencing. This is the outermost.”

  “We have stumbled into it,” said Dominic. He tested the fence, shaking at it with both hands. “Past here, the centre of the mystery.” He turned and slid down the fence, to sit beside Andrew. “We should go in.”

  Andrew regarded him. “We’ll need protection,” he said, and Dominic shrugged.

  “We seem to have gotten this far,” he said.

  Andrew dabbed his injury. He wished he’d managed to bring his bag.

  “It does sting,” he said. “What did you do to
yourself? For pain? To stop the Juke . . . ?”

  Dominic showed him his left hand, and the ring finger.

  “See?” he said, and Andrew squinted.

  “You tore the nail off,” he said, and Dominic nodded.

  “I don’t want to see any more ghosts,” he said.

  “Well that’s one way—”

  And Andrew stopped. They both stopped, as the glare of a bright torch light struck them through the bars of the fence, then vanished, and finally returned, and held.

  “Bitten bleiben sie im Licht!”

  Dominic helped Andrew up, and gripping the fence with one hand Andrew raised the other in supplication to the order—as he squinted into the encompassing glare.

  Seven

  Pain is an ordinary thing. And in this aspect, it is extraordinary.

  It is the most common experience among us. Perhaps it is common to every living thing. It is one of the few universals—at once a proof of life, and a warning of death.

  Pain is the snap of a trap on a leg. It is a cut of a sharp knife into the soft flesh of a palm. It is in the simple kinetic consequence of a bad fall on sharp rocks. It is an elbow, shattered by a tree branch. It is a shattered heart.

  Or a bullet, lodged in a foot.

  “Why?” said Jason Thistledown.

  He saved that question, only asking it after directing Ruth Harper past the old guard shack to where the road climbed into the mountains—after Annie Waggoner had done what, to his mind, was a passable job pulling off his left boot and binding the foot underneath it. There were men on their trail, but they were on foot for now, so Jason reckoned there was a moment of leisure, to get at least the beginning of an explanation from Ruth as to why she’d fired a Luger into his foot as she had.

  “You were out of your mind,” said Ruth. “I didn’t think a slap in the face would be enough.” She glanced over, before returning her attention to steering the truck past a particularly tricky drop. “You would have done the same for me.”

  Jason shifted on his seat, and winced. “I wasn’t out of my mind,” he said, and looked at Annie, who didn’t meet his eye.