by David Nickle
“I had killed it,” Orlok said miserably, when Andrew drew near enough. “You saw it. You looked on it. It was dead.”
“There were no signs it was alive,” Andrew agreed.
“I killed it.”
Orlok wheezed and coughed and spat, flecks of blood hitting his shirt.
“Put your mask back on,” said Andrew, and Orlok grinned at him, with horribly bloody teeth and said: “Take yours off.”
Andrew regarded Orlok silently a moment. The gas had been at work on him for some time. The skin of his face was blotched red, and his eyes were deeper red and swollen. He was weakened badly. But at the core, like the Juke above him, he had strength.
“Will you put on yours if I do that?” asked Andrew finally, and Orlok nodded, and Andrew thought: It has come to this. A childish game.
He drew a breath, and reached behind his head and undid the strap that held it on. He shut his eyes and pulled the mask off. It felt as though he’d had vinegar thrown in his face. After it’d been stung by bees. But he held tight and waited.
Orlok laughed, and coughed, and said: “Gut!” Andrew heard him pulling his own mask on, and say again, through the muffling of the filter: “Good!”
Andrew reattached his, held the mask away from his face a finger-width, exhaled hard to drive the trace of phosgene away, and tightened it. His eyes still stung as he opened them. Orlok regarded him through the goggles.
“You didn’t kill it,” said Andrew. “I don’t think you’ve ever killed one, have you?”
Olga had stepped around behind Orlok, and another of the Russians stepped to his side. He looked at them both.
“I battled, killed, and ate the first—” said Orlok, and he began to cough, and tried to take off his mask. Olga took one arm, the Russian the other, and bent them behind his back.
“Perhaps,” said Andrew, although he knew the correct answer was no. Orlok had not fought and devoured a larval Juke in utero. He had encountered one. He and the Juke had come to an accommodation.
And in the end, Orlok was still doing God’s will.
Andrew nodded to Olga. She draped Orlok’s arm over her shoulder, and the other did the same, and together they lifted him and guided him away between the pillars of throats, across the backs of the supplicant dead.
After a moment, Andrew followed.
Albert Zimmermann met Andrew at the doors to the kitchens.
“You removed your gas mask,” he said.
“I did. It was the only way to persuade Orlok to put his back on.”
Zimmermann shook his head, making the reflected daylight flash in his goggles. “He should be dead.”
“He may die yet,” said Andrew. “But it won’t happen out there.” Zimmermann nodded. “How are you?”
Andrew explained that he hadn’t drawn breath, and kept his eyes closed, but that he could feel it on his skin.
“It would be good for you to get upstairs,” said Zimmermann. “By happy coincidence, there is a tower room with clean air—and that is where Jason took your wife and Ruth.”
“And Dominic?”
“He is there, with the rest of your Société.”
They passed through the main kitchen, and at length into the great hall, where there had been a deadly firefight. Andrew counted seven bodies, clad in gasmasks and coats and stopped. There might have been twice that number, and they were being attended by four of the force from the bunker. Andrew found that he could not look at them—that their number added to the much greater sum of death that he had just left beneath the Juke, and that together, they drew a feeling something like the horror from the banks of the Kootenai, when he’d witnessed the flotsam of the Eliada dead drifting downriver. Them, killed by the Cave Germ. These ones, by gas and bullets.
Zimmermann hurried them up the stairs, and along another hall, and up the stairs again.
“They are all safe,” said Zimmermann as they mounted the narrow stairs to the turret room. “Up there, where the air is clear. Just as you had foretold.”
Andrew removed his mask.
The air was sweet here in the tower, but it wasn’t clear and that was fine with Andrew. He drew deep of it as he climbed the last of the stairs, savouring the scent of the Juke’s spoor. When he stepped into the light, he found that all of the despair, the sickness of the things that he had witnessed, nearly all of it, was again receded.
He smiled in the daylight, at his family . . . and they smiled too, all of them, even Johannes Bergstrom, whom neither Zimmermann nor prophecy had warned him of. He stripped off his coat, and before he had, Annie took hold of him and they embraced.
“I knew you were coming,” whispered Annie, and Andrew just said: “I knew too.”
The risen Juke had ceased its feeding, and the dangling mouths rose up from the backs and bellies of the dead as one, to form a fleshy, quivering mandala that spread outward from its perch atop the tripod. One of those mouths hovered outside the windows of the turret, its spiralling teeth shifting and turning like a hypnotist’s coin. The men of the Société stared into it as though actually mesmerized—particularly Lewis, who tentatively reached toward the glass again and again, drawing back and gasping when the Juke’s appendage twitched in seeming response. The rest of them stayed farther back, in what Andrew supposed was a reasonable fear that that mouth might just start feeding again, on everyone here.
Andrew himself wasn’t that worried—not about that.
“What happened to your foot?” Andrew asked Jason. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Took a bullet,” said Jason, and motioned to Ruth. “I guess she figured she owed me one.”
“He was out of his mind,” said Ruth. “He was going to get himself killed.”
“I probably would have,” said Jason. He shifted on that foot, and set his jaw as he winced, and he looked around at the window. The Juke. “What is this?” he said. “It was dead.”
“Gods don’t die,” said Andrew, and Jason stomped that bad foot so it was worse, and turned back at him.
“This is not God,” he said. “You damn well know that. It’s a Juke,” said Jason. “A living Juke. Not God. That’d be something other.”
Andrew shook his head. “There’s nothing other, Jason.”
Annie meanwhile was looking close at Andrew’s cheek. She ran a fingertip over one of the punctures at the edge of his jaw. Andrew reached up and took her hand, kissed it, and said to them all: “I have a message for you.”
Annie stepped away, and Andrew stepped to the middle of the room. His own hand moved to the punctures on his cheek, strayed down to the deeper puncture, in the pit of his bad right arm.
“Not all of you the same. But Annie . . . Ruth, Jason . . . it is especially for you. And Manfred, William, Dominic . . . even you, Johannes . . . it will lay some questions to rest.”
Andrew paused again, and drew breath in deep.
“When I was fleeing Eliada, for fear of lynching,” he said. “I met the Juke. I understood that when I drew near it, it showed me things that were lies. Heavenly lies.”
“They were lies,” said Jason.
“They were not true,” he said. “And we had always agreed that it therefore followed, that they were not good.”
Ruth sidled farther from the Juke’s mouth, so she backed on a window that overlooked the chateau’s roof.
“That thing is no species of goodness,” she said. “What have you done to yourself, Andrew?”
Andrew sighed.
“I’ve met the Juke,” he said. “I’ve spoken with it.”
Bergstrom cleared his throat. “The Juke cannot speak,” he said gently. “We know that when a Juke seems to speak, it is really only you. Embellishing its lie.”
The Juke’s mouth tapped against the glass, and from below, another of those throats swung up. Those who hadn’t been looking might have thought a bird had flown into the glass. And then another. And another still.
“I have a message for you all,” Andrew repeated.
Albert Zimmermann had heard the message already. And as Andrew spoke, he quietly stepped to the stairs and pulled the gas mask back on. He almost escaped unnoticed. Dominic Villart followed closely, and when they were halfway down stopped him.
“Do you not wish to hear what Doctor Waggoner has to say?” asked Zimmermann.
“What has happened to him?”
“You heard him—he has met the Juke.”
“No doubt,” said Dominic. “Look at his face. The Juke has infected him.”
Zimmermann took a few more steps down the stairs and pulled off his mask. He sniffed; the air was still safe here. It would not be, he thought, as few as five steps lower.
“It may well have. But it has done so most persuasively. He has a message. You should heed it.”
“What is the message?” Dominic stepped close to him. “You’ve heard it already. That is why you are fleeing.”
“I have heard the message,” said Zimmermann. “And you are correct. It is why I am fleeing.”
“What? What is the message?”
“I am not sure that I can do it justice,” said Zimmermann. “But it shouldn’t be too difficult to guess. Andrew has become . . . oracular, I believe the term is.”
“That is correct.” Dominic nodded. “And so he preaches that the Juke is God.”
“He would not be wrong,” said Zimmermann. “But of course the presumption rests on what you might think God is.” He leaned on the rail. “Doctor Waggoner persuaded me to bring him here and help him deliver it to his friends . . . his flock, as he called them . . . Herr Thistledown, Fräulein Harper, Frau Waggoner . . . and I have done that. He’s right—it is a message for them first and foremost. But it speaks to us all, Dominic. And I can say that if you hear it . . . it will likely change your life.”
“And yet you have heard it, and you flee,” said Dominic, and Zimmermann nodded, and pulled his mask to his face.
“Indeed, I flee,” he said, and stepped alone into the deathly miasma of the chateau, while above, glass began to shatter.
Jason Thistledown was grinding his heel into the bridge of his injured foot, hard enough that he worried that he might lose that foot after all, when the Juke pierced the turret room. The mouth itself didn’t enter all the way, but it sent a spray of glass inside, shattering a pane of glass as it did, and it rested a moment on the shattered sill, opening and expanding, then snapping back, pulling more of the window with it.
“Doc,” shouted Jason, “We got to get out of here. Put on that mask of yours. Go get us help. Get us away from this.”
“No getting away,” said Andrew. “Not from this. This is everywhere.”
Jason ground his foot some more, and thought that he would have to thank Ruth properly one day; the pain was nearly crippling, but more importantly, still entirely novel—and as such, it kept the lies, the visions at bay . . . surely better than cuts and cigarette burns and anything else that Jason had tried over the years since Eliada. He slipped, and fell to a knee. Ruth bent down and helped him stand again. As Jason righted himself on the sill, Dominic emerged from the stairs, and announced that Zimmermann had left. Outside, the mouths of the Juke withdrew, and fell again to the ground—and a sweet and familiar smell filled the turret room.
“Breathe deep,” said Andrew, and everyone—everyone but Jason—did so. Jason watched each of them as they held it in their lungs: Bergstrom fell to his knees, his eyelids fluttering; Kurtzweiller and Lewis turned to stare out the broken windows, at the giant that now scrabbled at the dirt beneath it. Annie began to laugh, and Dominic joined her. Ruth held onto Jason tightly, and he held onto her back, and finally, took the weight off his foot and allowed himself some relief. . . .
And finally, he did breathe. And the perfume filled him up, and the pain—all the pain, from the moment his ma fell ill to the bullet hole that tore his foot—drifted off like dead leaves in a stream . . . along with all the other troubles and pains and wickedness of the world. And watching that, Jason did laugh.
God help him, he laughed and he laughed.
The Russians had fashioned a special litter, strong enough that it could hold a man as large as Orlok. It was an adaptation of one of the many devices that the Germans had used to wrangle the Juke, when they were in control of the compound. At one point, the casing at its centre had been airtight, but some calamity had ruined that, and in any case, it would not then have fit the man.
It took five men to carry Orlok to the front of the chateau, and from there to a truck that had made its way along crude tracks by the Germans from the compound. It would eventually find its way back to another track made by Austrians, and then on through the mountains. Eventually, the truck would find its way to an airfield, well and safely in Austria, where a fuelled aeroplane waited. Zimmermann emerged from the front doors just as the truck pulled up. He was met by Arnold Deutsch, no longer wearing his gas mask, who waved and clapped him on the shoulder.
“The air is fine out here, Herr Zimmermann,” said Deutsch. “The mountain breeze has scrubbed it clean.”
Zimmermann pulled off his mask.
“If not, we die together.”
Deutsch smiled and shook his head. “I doubt it will come to that. I will miss working with you however.”
“I am sorry I cannot say the same.”
Now Deutsch laughed. “I understand entirely, Herr Zimmermann. Well, your debt is discharged,” he said. “Your family is safe . . . I suspect would be safe, one way or another. And you may live your life as you choose, in Germany if you wish. Of course, if you like, you could come with us. We could use a co-pilot, to fly that one—” he motioned to the truck, and Orlok “—back to Lipetsk. I understand you know the way . . . and of course you are familiar with the passenger and the cargo.”
“I think I will leave that to you,” said Zimmermann. He looked back at the chateau . . . which from this angle looked just the same as it ever had.
“It is your choice, my friend,” said Deutsch. “But I am sure that you will find yourself in the air again, one way or another.”
“Where else would I go,” said Zimmermann, “at the end of history?”
1940
The Best of All Possible Worlds
“Was it beautiful?”
“Most definitively.”
Ozzie Hayward wasn’t going to lie. He was comfortable with himself, and pleased with where he was sitting in life, and everything was good. It was beautiful.
“Tell the folks when you first heard it.”
Ozzie leaned close to the CBS microphone, a bit too close, and the sound man gave him a look and twisted a dial to reset the level.
“I was in a train station, right here in Germany. Bavaria, I guess. Stuttgart. Nine years ago. You been there?”
“I sure have, but I don’t know about the folks at home. Tell us about Stuttgart.”
“Great big old train station—fancy as a church cathedral. We were there, on the way to Munich.”
“Nine years ago. Those were troubled times here in Germany.”
“Especially for Negroes you mean,” said Ozzie. His interviewer nodded and because it was for the radio, also said “Yes.”
“Well it was, and in a way, that’s what we were doing there. We were helping a fellow Negro make it into Germany. He was looking for a friend, you see . . . Remember the Nazi Party?”
A big laugh at that. “Hitler’s Nazis. Oh sure. They were all over Munich, now weren’t they?”
“That’s right. Well, this fellow’s friend had fallen in with them. He was going on in to pull his friend back out. Before it was too late. Crazy plan, you think about it.
“So. Me and the boys thought it’d be safer for him if he were travelling with a jazz band. Everybody likes a jazz band. Even then. Don’t matter the colour of the skin.” Ozzie lit up a cigarette and crossed one leg over the other. “We were coming from Paris, had to switch trains in Stuttgart which is how we ended up there, not Munich. It was the middle of the night.
Only a few people around there. I got to tell you something, Eddie . . . mind if I call you Eddie?”
“You go right ahead, Ozzie.”
“Well Eddie, that’s where I first heard that song. We were catnapping in the station, waiting for our train south to Munich, with all our instruments stacked up around us in a great big pile. And I guess we drew a bit of attention. There were some fellows on their way north, waiting out the night too. And they wanted a show.”
“Did they buy a ticket?”
Ozzie laughed. “They did not. They did have something else though. One of those fellows, he wanted to hear a song.”
“The song?”
“In a way,” said Ozzie. “But not quite. It was a fine song, I suppose. He hummed it for us, ya-da-da-da, like that. He wasn’t very good at it, but we got the gist. He gave us the beat all right. And my boys . . . we knew even then how to play, riff, on just a little something. So we started up. And we did.”
“So that wasn’t the song.”
Eddie stubbed his own cigarette out in the ashtray on the dressing room table. It was still mostly empty, hours yet before Ozzie and Le Noir Qui Danse would take the stage. Eddie was a slender fellow, dark hair slicked back to the side, and heavy eyebrows that would make him look always angry if he weren’t always smiling. Eddie didn’t know much about jazz, but that was alright. He knew about asking questions.
“Here’s something you ought to know about jazz music,” said Ozzie. “Folks think a jazz song is just that—just one song. Goes on for three, four minutes and then it’s over. That sound about right to you?”
“Sounds right to me. But I got a feeling you’re going to tell me I’m all wrong.”
Ozzie laughed and drew smoke. “It’s all one song,” he said. “Started somewhere back in New Orleans, maybe Cuba, maybe all the way over in Africa, before any of us were born. And the rhythm, the beat . . . it just gets passed along, one player to the next. Sometimes we stop, but we stop to rest, not because we’re done.”
He looked at his cigarette, and deemed that done, and stubbed it out alongside Eddie’s.