by David Nickle
The end of the gas bombardment did not end the fighting. It merely signalled another phase. Having begun. Ruth drew their attention to the grounds where the Juke carcass still hung. Beneath and around that, more masked stormtroopers were advancing and firing into the chateau. There were bodies around them—more than before, naked and filthy, some coughing but too many still.
Jason cursed to himself. There were no guns in the turret room, and while he wouldn’t have used one to shoot the gas squads for fear of giving away their position . . . he might have put one to good use now as the troopers advanced. Or if not now, when the attackers made it up the stairs.
And they would make it up the stairs.
Jason flexed the toes of his injured foot and winced as fresh pain shot from it. More than a gun, he found himself wishing for the oblivion that came living under Orlok’s, and the Juke’s, spell. Things had seemed a lot better from that perspective.
“Jason,” said Ruth, “Annie, get down please.”
Annie, peering out a window facing toward the valley, ignored Ruth, but Jason did as he was told. A face in the window wasn’t as obvious as a rifleman there, but Ruth was right: it was still a risk. He slid back onto the floor between Bergstrom and Ruth, fast enough that he nearly cried out at the pain in his foot. Kurtzweiller crept over to Annie, and tugged on her skirt.
“Hide yourself,” he said, and she shook her head, still looking out over the valley.
“Why would I hide myself from my husband?” she asked. “Here he comes.”
“He’s not there,” said Ruth, and Jason chimed in:
“He’s not, Annie. It’s the perfume . . . the Juke carcass. It’s playing tricks on you. Showing you what you want to see.”
Annie smiled and shook her head, and repeated: “Here he comes.”
“Here comes someone,” said Lewis, who was nearest the stairwell. “Someone’s on the stairs.”
They all fell silent at that and listened . . . and sure enough, the wooden steps of the spiral staircase were creaking under heavy footfalls. Jason tried to get his good foot in a position that he might be able to move, do something, but he didn’t have a sense of things. Ruth held her elbows close—she looked as though she were going to be ill. Lewis, meanwhile, stepped back so he would be out of sight of anyone coming up. . . .
The footfalls stopped.
“Do not shoot,” said a voice that Jason thought he recognized, and that Kurtzweiller clearly knew well.
“Dominic!” he said. “No danger of that. Come on up.”
The footfalls resumed, and soon young Dominic Villart emerged from the stairwell. Accompanying him was Albert Zimmermann, a gas mask dangling from his neck, and a carbine slung over his shoulder.
“Herr Thistledown,” said Zimmermann. “I might have thought you would find the highest ground in a battle.”
He held the rifle loosely, barrel pointed downward. Jason thought that might’ve been the same one as he’d filched from the farmhouse. But there were no bullets in that one. Over his chest, Zimmermann wore a belt of ammunition, and empty spaces indicated that there were likely bullets in the magazine now. This worried Jason more than it did Ruth.
“You abandoned us, Albert,” she said. “Where did you go?”
Zimmermann smiled thinly. “Into this valley,” he said. “Deep. I am sorry that I didn’t say goodbye or explain myself. Matters had become pressing, and I needed to report.”
He stepped around Jason and crouched in front of the window, looking out at the Juke, and with a sharp tap of the gun barrel, shattered the glass. He shouldered the carbine, sighted and fired twice, then changed his target and fired once more.
Kurtzweiller turned to Dominic for explanation as Zimmermann reloaded.
“I met him in the hallway on the top floor,” said Dominic. “Or rather he found me. He might have shot me. If I had been armed I might have shot him.”
“Good thing that you weren’t,” said Zimmermann as he stuffed the sixth bullet into the carbine. “We were both looking for the highest spot. It is safe from this terrible gas—and a good vantage point for me.”
“He is not with the Nazis,” said Dominic, and Zimmermann agreed with a sharp laugh. Ruth swatted at a fly that had landed on her cheek. She saw little to be amused about.
“You’re working for the Russians,” said Ruth. “You have been all along.”
“No,” said Annie, “I don’t think he is.”
“You are right, Frau Waggoner. I am working to protect my family,” said Zimmermann. “As I have always.”
He turned and shouldered the carbine, took aim, fired three more times and then stopped, and raised his head, and peered down, ducking back at the cracking of gunfire.
“What is it?” asked Jason, and Zimmermann said: “Orlok,” then looked again and said: “No.”
Only it was Orlok.
Jason peered down and saw him—striding across the grounds from the house toward the Juke, and he was firing a pistol—a Luger it appeared. Facing him were stormtroopers . . . not so many as before . . . and one or two of them were firing back. Everyone, even Orlok, was wearing gas masks. Everyone who was firing, was missing their marks.
And everyone who was not firing . . . well, they stood transfixed, in the shadow of the living Juke.
The flies peeled away from it like a black veil, swirling into the sky and spreading to the side as if drawn upward by an invisible hand. They filled the turret room too, radiating from the shattered pane where Zimmermann had broken the glass. Zimmermann pulled his gas mask back on, and Jason wished he had one for himself, though not for the flies . . . maybe the air that they were bringing, that was tricking him into seeing what was there underneath those flies, now revealed. He leaned hard on his bad foot, making the pain so bad that it brought tears. It did no good.
This was no illusion.
The sailcloth form of the Juke was writhing, and parts of it were falling away, crumbling like ash. Underneath, strands of wet pink flesh dangled low, and whipped to and fro. As he watched, one of those fleshy strands seemed to flower—and it fell farther until it touched the ground. Jason squinted. That wasn’t quite right. It touched the naked buttock of a girl, one of the yellow-haired Volk who’d fallen to the phosgene. It quivered, and the flowering thing at the end took hold, and the girl’s hip lifted off the ground.
She was not the only one. The ground surrounding the Juke was littered with Volk . . . scores of them. Some were dead . . . others merely collapsed and helpless, choking on the gas. More of the flowers . . . the mouths . . . dropped from the great tripod where it had been hung, touching first earth, then as though sniffing their way along, creeping across the dirt to a leg, or a belly, or an upturned face, and then the flower would latch tight, and lift. . . .
Jason swallowed, his mouth dry.
Every time it lifted . . . what it was doing was chewing . . . digesting the new offering left in its reach by the unwitting stormtroopers and their phosgene attack. In Eliada, that offering had come from the larders of the workmen and their families, brought into the cathedral of the sawmill. Here, it was simple slaughter. The sacrifice was human.
And the humans—the ones below who still lived—were starting to understand that. The pale forms so far below looked like nothing so much as maggots, as grubs, inching away from the reach of the Juke . . . writhing as one of its flowering maws took hold. Some of those screamed, as best as they could through their damaged throats, and tried to fight. As Jason watched, one of them had some success, tearing away the mouth that had taken hold of his pectoral. But its absence had left him flayed, and he squealed and wept as he tried to right himself—keep the raw flesh away from the dirt.
“Give me the rifle,” Jason said to Zimmermann, and when Zimmermann asked him why, he pointed to that one. As Zimmermann stared, Jason took the gun, shouldered it and sighted. He fired three times. Hit twice.
For all the good that it did. The goddamned mouth returned to the corpse and continued fe
eding. Wordlessly, he handed the rifle back to Zimmermann.
“We can’t stay here,” said Ruth.
“We can’t,” agreed Jason. “But the house is full of poison gas. We got one mask in here and old Zimmermann’s wearing it. No way out.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Zimmermann, still looking outdoors. “We will not be here for very much longer.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ruth.
“People are coming for us,” said Zimmermann.
“People?”
Zimmermann turned around to face them. His gas mask made him look like nothing so much as a huge insect.
“My masters,” he said. “You were right, Fräulein Harper. The Russians, the Communists.” Carefully, he set his rifle down against the windowsill overlooking the Juke. “They are nearby. Some are here now. Such as myself. Please, Fräulein, do not be so . . . offended.”
“I should be the one offended,” said Jason. “I trusted you.”
“No,” said Zimmermann. “You took a chance with me. You said so yourself at the time. And largely, it has paid off. If you had wished it, I would have helped you escape from here with me when I took the plane. You did not wish it, so I did what you asked of me: kept Ruth Harper safe from the Nazis. I also ensured my own family’s safety. By reporting. Will you blame me for that?”
“Scarcely matters,” said Jason. “You’ve got the gun.”
“And the mask,” agreed Zimmermann. “I am sorry, Jason.”
And with that, he lifted the rifle and started toward the stairs.
“I will be back,” he said, “very soon.”
Jason counted eleven mouths, descended from the middle of that teepee, but Annie spotted three more—not fully distended, but waiting high in the middle like the filaments of a much larger bloom. She had seen such things before—fleeing Eliada with Andrew at her side, in the rafters of the sawmill—and she readily identified these ones, with a cool precision.
“They’d come down and gobble up a pig,” she said. “Suck the flesh off the bone.”
Of course, that one in Eliada was fresh born, or near to it. This one was . . . what?
“Reborn,” said Annie when Jason wondered exactly that.
Kurtzweiller and Lewis set to speculating on this Juke’s apparent resurrection. It had, by all their examinations, appeared dead. But there was clearly living tissue in some protected segment of the necrotizing husk that Orlok had boasted of having killed.
It was Ruth who noted that the Juke in Eliada had appeared to be very resilient. “Even when hanged, the creature survived unscathed.” Feigning death, she said, may have proven to be a very effective survival strategy in the long run. Particularly when resurrection followed.
The Juke grew still, or nearly so, and the gunfire, sporadic as it was, had ceased altogether. The fighters who still stood stepped back, and watched the Juke’s distended throats pulse and quiver as they fed the thing so high above them. Only one approached the carnage, and of course that was Orlok.
Jason pressed his hands and face against the glass, as if that might afford him a better view. Orlok stepped carefully around the bodies on the ground, and finally knelt before one that the Juke had found. It was a boy . . . a fellow that Jason thought he might remember from as early as his first day here in the valley, but not well enough to place a name. Orlok bent close to his face, as though trying to hear. He sat up then, and reached behind his head to loosen the strap on his mask. He pulled it free, let it dangle round his neck, and bent forward again. Did he kiss the boy? Too far for Jason to say. But after that, he reached around and gripped the mouth, which had latched on the boy’s thigh. As he pried, the boy screamed, and begged: “Nein! Nein!”
Orlok took hold of the Juke’s throat next, and tried to tear at it. But he soon gave up at that too, and sat on all fours a moment, gasping. The feeding continued, as if he were not there.
“He murdered Muckermann,” said Dominic, watching alongside Jason. “He tried to break his neck, but was too weak from the gas. Finally, it was just a pillow on his face.”
Jason looked at him. “When?”
“Just before I came here. To escape that gas. See? That’s my mask around his neck. He took it from me.”
There was a crack! of gunfire again, and another, and then several more. Jason missed the effect at first, but Ruth pointed to the edge of the clearing, where one of the retreating brownshirts had just fallen and two others now knelt and raised their rifles to the side of the house. They fired twice before they too fell.
“Jason,” said Ruth, and when he looked he saw that she was crouched down, as were Kurtzweiller and Lewis. Jason followed suit, and so did Dominic.
For the second time, Annie refused.
“Andrew,” she said, beaming down at the gunfire. This time, Jason chanced to look himself, and then he looked again, and drew a quick breath, and he said it too.
“Andrew.”
Annie made for the stairs, too quickly for any to stop her—let alone Jason with his gunshot foot. Jason was fast enough to stop Ruth. But Dominic went after her.
Ten
The mask was too hot, and close, and Andrew was sorely tempted to pull it off by the time they arrived at the chateau. It was one thing to wear it in the enclosure, at the riverside . . . something else to wear it marching up a hill on a rocky path, on a warm sunny day. He wanted to tear it off. And by some measures, it wouldn’t make a difference if he did—any more than it really did when he finally yanked that other mask away, coming through the pass. But it wasn’t just the smell of the Juke now. The Germans were using poison gas, that’s what Deutsch said. Best case without a mask: Andrew would spend the rest of his life a patient in his own sanatorium.
He held back with Deutsch while the rest of his men, and women, moved forward to take the chateau. They were very skilled, these ones—one or two veterans of the War, but others had been responsible for a more specific sort of work. They were, Deutsch explained as they waited, well-suited to this task. “They are remorseless,” he said.
Deutsch was careful never to say that they were professional killers who had come to watch over the bunker and his research. By not using the words he had, Andrew understood that Deutsch meant to help Andrew shield himself from the consequences of their actions. Andrew appreciated that, in the same way, he hoped, that Deutsch would come to appreciate his own omissions.
So they waited.
There was gunfire. Not as much as Andrew would have expected. But he had never attended a gun battle such as this . . . had been spared the war. How could he know one way or another? Deutsch was no help either.
“I am a chemist,” he said. “I have learned over time not to guess.”
Andrew had been applying that lesson himself, when it came to guessing the fate of Annie, and Ruth, and Jason.
There was nothing but to wait.
They were crouched behind a low ridge, well out of sight of the chateau, when two of Deutsch’s comrades returned for them. In their coats and masks, they were hard to discern, but by her height and shape Andrew recognized Olga. She had watched him and pulled him away from his encounter the day before, and he knew her better than some of the others.
“It is clear?” asked Deutsch, and Olga answered in Russian. He turned to Andrew: “It is fine now.”
They climbed around the ridge and made their way to the chateau. As they grew nearer, they began to pass bodies: the Hitler-Jugend, bare and slender, and others . . . the Nazis, Andrew presumed. They were wearing masks, either on their faces or pulled away. Some of each appeared to have been shot. But not all.
Some still moved. Deutsch urged Andrew not to try to tend to those ones and Andrew moved along. He didn’t tell Deutsch that he was not intending to try and help . . . that he knew there was nothing he could do for phosgene gas victims here . . . that truly, he was more interested in arriving at the chateau.
They were met by a group of five Russians, their rifles slung in front of them, on th
e front steps. They conferred with Deutsch, again in Russian, and Deutsch stepped back, and looked up at the house, and asked again, and nodded.
“We must go to the back of the chateau,” he told Andrew, his muffled voice seeming also higher. “Orlok is there. An extraordinary thing has happened.”
Andrew asked what that was, and Deutsch was quiet for a moment.
“It lives,” he said.
Andrew did try to take his mask off when he saw it, and only Deutsch and Olga’s intervention prevented him. The Juke towered over the carnage—undeniably alive—a magnificent echo of the photograph at the riverbank, surrounded by supplicants; now tending to their flesh, drawing from it, haloed by flies. Deutsch pointed to the ground, where pale clouds of the gas clung in divots like puddles, and Andrew resisted. But oh, he wanted to smell it.
“You have work to do here,” said Deutsch, and he pointed to the figure crouched beneath the arms, within the forest of throats. It was Orlok. He had a gas mask dangling from his neck—he had made that choice to breathe the air of the Juke here freely. . . .
“You should stop,” said Olga to Andrew. “We should retreat. We did not anticipate this.”
“Not precisely,” said Andrew, and he thought again about Eliada—the true face of the living Juke that he had seen before plunging into the Kootenai—and the photographs, and documents . . . that he had seen before plunging again into another river.
“But I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said and looked at Olga and the rest. “This doesn’t change things.”
Olga nodded, in her mask looking like nothing then but an insect—one of the flies, overgrown, that still swirled about this place.
Olga and two others assembled around Andrew. The two held their rifles ready; Olga produced a revolver and held it at her side. And in this way, they stepped into the shadow of the Juke.
Orlok saw them coming and tried to stand. But he slipped and fell back, and coughed long and hard.
“We don’t want to fight,” said Andrew in German, and introduced himself. Orlok beckoned him closer.