Dried tears caked in layers over the shackled one’s cheeks. Reddened bruises circling bound wrists, scarred breasts, and bruised cheeks moved Dr. Ulrick Thune gazing unbelieving at the once stunning example of physical beauty he had known. Now it straggled despoiled on a stool before him in the chamber. “Mr. Nols . . . ,” he said softly, holding a flashlight. “Mr. Nols . . . Nathan. Wake up.”
Nathan’s beleaguered head slowly rose. His dimmed eyes opened, and though dim, the crystals still shone. Dr. Thune’s heart quelled at the lack of bitterness and hate in the man’s look, and the quiet dignity he maintained. Was this the way out of pain, he wondered. To not hate. It was too much for him to contemplate then, if in fact, any of what he was seeing was even real in the head of the man before him. “Mr. Nols, it’s me, Ulrick Thune. Dr. Thune. What are you doing here? How you get here, I can’t imagine. Let me help you leave.”
Nathan’s head shook.
“You can’t want to stay here. Let me get you released. Please.”
No, Nathan’s head shook side to side.
“But how? I don’t understand. Why you here? I won’t insist you answer, but you here? I am not here to degrade, inflict pain or depredation. It’s not for that, you understand. Purely academic for me. My interest lies in all things human. Depravity, wonder, everything. I would never defile you. My interest is academic. Only scientific.”
“Go . . .”
“Are you, do you, enjoy this?”
“No.”
“Then in heavens name why? Why, Nathan?”
“Go please.”
“I’ll go but only if you promise you’ll call me, explain. I’m leaving my card in your pocket. I believe, I have always believed you are an extraordinary person. Your gifts as in New York. Nathan, I believe together we can do great things. Great things. I leave tomorrow, but promise you will call me.”
Nathan nodded.
“Together Nathan, together we can change the world.”
Nathan nodded.
“Contact me. Tell me your story. Yes?”
Nathan’s head acquiesced.
“Whatever reason you’re here, I will understand and accept,” Thune said leaving. “I am with you. I will protect you. You can trust me. Trust me.” The door closed.
Darkness swallowed the chamber’s inhabitant again. Gasping, his breast heaved. Invisible cries no one heard, shuddered through his wretched body.
Whenever the door next opened, whatever number he or she was, like a trained animal, Nathan’s legs pushed him back up against the wall again to receive. “You have accomplished the time,” said whoever was unlocking his shackles. “Congratulations, you have finished. You and your friend, the only ones.”
“Truly? . . . Fully?” Nathan said as if drunk.
“Yes. You have finished, sir. Please go now. There is your money.” The attendant pointed to an envelope on the floor. “In euros as promised, you get it all. Go now. Do not return. Tell no one.”
Nathan’s cuffs dangled open against the wall. He did not stop to rub the sores on his wrists. He bent stiffly for the envelope. The light reflecting from the main tunnel into the hallway smarted. He welcomed the tunnel’s rank smell mixed with air coming from outdoors, outside, outside where life resided, outside, where a new day waited. He dizzied and fell against the doorway. Slow, take it slow, his mind said. The pain, injuries, they’ll go away. Gus. Gus. Now to Gus.
“Ohhhh!” someone screamed. “My God!” someone screamed in Russian. “My God! Ohhhhh!”
Nathan saw the attendant jump out of the cell next to his that Gus had entered. “Help! Help!” the attendant yelled, running to the main tunnel.
Nathan shuffled to Gus’ cell. He picked up the flashlight the attendant dropped, turned it to the figure against the wall, and there was Gus revealed hunched over. Against his body seated on the highstool slumped another, Gus’ legs wrapped around it. “Gus . . . Gus.” Nathan approached pushing aside the corpse held in Gus’ stiff embrace. “Gus.”
Came the faintest moan.
“Gus.”
“Nathan . . . ,” Gus breathed.
“Gus, we made it, you made it. They’re releasing us. We can go on. Go on.”
Gus nodded but knew he’d go nowhere. He would not be leaving that place. His time on Earth had ended.
“Hang in Gus. They’re coming to release you.”
Gus’ end of season fingers remained frozen around his unsuccessful taking, having only taken John Henry’s skull bone, his brains sucked down to the eyebrows. He had failed to make it. His end of season stores barren, his body had given out and he collapsed.
Held in Nathan’s arms, his milky eyes rose to look at his friend. “Nathan . . .”
“Yes Gus.”
“Nathan . . . , do not seek in The Book beyond equality with men. Let go any desire for power beyond or over them, else become like them . . . villainous, destructive, and cruel . . . and an even greater monster.”
What tears Nathan had left in him spilled.
“Do you hear me, Nathan?”
“Yes Gus.”
“The overlord’s power . . . , you want what no one should have. The power they own. Monster you are not, but monster you would become. Refuse it or you will destroy . . . and it will destroy you.”
“Gus. Gus,” Nathan cried.
“I’m cold, dear boy. Cold,” his lips shivered. “It has been a privilege to know you. I’m only sorry to have disappointed one another. Yet still a great privilege.” His head slid down as its eyes closed the last on the oldest yulen.
Nathan bayed as his hand brushed strands of thinned hair on the noble, pockmarked head, worms feeding on its sores. Swallowing back tears, he bent to take Gus’ device off the floor, and faltering along the dank corridor, left the debauched place.
XXV
When Nathan exited the giant cone, he did not know if it would be day or night. It was cool but unlike every previous day in Minsk, sun shone that fortunate day. He felt grateful for the change in weather that made his emergence from darkness to light a reception worthy of a king, sovereign of planets . . . or conqueror of worms. He sensed irony forming that brought tears as he stumbled to the barren ground. Czar of Worms his mind laughed, and his own laughter echoed. Rising to his feet, his stinging eyes trained on a man getting into a car across the street, and he hobbled there.
The man agreed to drive him wherever he wanted. Nathan said Hotel Yaroslav.
As they reached the building, he looked away not wanting to see the place of Leeda’s death, and told the man to keep going. He’d only wanted to get his bearings to find the only person he knew in Minsk.
The driver left him at the gypsy medicine woman’s camp. Nathan located her, and through enough sign language and euros, she brought him into her hovel.
Promptly after settling the exhausted beat-up man on a raised mattress, she proceeded to apply herb-dipped ointment to his cuts and bruises. He did not refuse, the substance seeming nothing more than olive oil and herbs.
He asked for vodka, and she showed him a bottle—only one hundred euros. He would quickly learn Russian for one hundred euros. Anything he needed or she offered, cost one hundred euros. He was happy to pay.
She summoned a plodding young man, a grandson, who attended to running her guest’s errands. The man returned with a set of new clothes, pair of shoes, bottle of rubbing alcohol, and bag of tubers like the ones that she earlier supplied her guest and his friends.
With the alcohol, she cleaned the dirt from his body as he instructed. It stung and reddened his skin but did not burn as pure water would. She also used it to wash his hair. When she combed it, many strands stayed on the comb, and it confirmed to him he’d entered his late season, although the end days still weeks away.
She was surprised he did not want to eat, and offered him thin soup at no charge out of the kettle from which she and her grandson ate. She insisted that before the Sun was too low, they help him outside.
They settled him
beside her ramshackle place in a chair mended with wire hangers. The loving Sun warmed and anointed the olive oil covering his face. His soothed joints and beat-up muscles rested at last as if a sun king’s throne, and then Gus’ phone buzzed.
“Greetings, Mr. Nols,” Hain said, seated in his customary position, the tall oil of the lovely young woman beside him to the rear, the large book open on his lap. “My, but you’re not looking too bad. You must have had fun.”
“Hello, Mr. Hain,” Nathan said unsmiling.
“Do I detect glumness, Mr. Nols?”
Nathan did not answer, only looked down.
“I do detect some gloominess. But be cheered, you’re on your way here. So much for sadomasochism. Tell me, is it overrated?”
“Gus is gone.”
“I was wondering when you’d tell me. Too bad. And tell me—”
“Yes he suffered.”
“Good . . . good . . . although sorry to lose him. Well, not too sorry. And you, did you suffer?”
“Directions to your place, Mr. Hain.”
“Tsk-tsk. A spoil sport.”
“Mr. Hain . . .”
“Directions are coming. Belgium. You’ll like it. Ever try our chocolates? Oh no, you don’t eat chocolate. The beer? That either. Well, I’ll find something for you to enjoy. The Book is within your grasp, Mr. Nols. Come soon. I believe I see you’ve entered late season. We’re going to have such fun you and I.”
As soon as Hain hung up, a message with an address in Brussels arrived and he saved it.
The old gypsy later brought out a blanket, covered him to his collar with it, and pointed to the Sun and that it was good for him. He agreed, his eyes closing. If only its rays were like alchemy, turning his skin, limbs, and organs into the perfect health he would know if he made it through that end season’s taking and into the glory of a new cycle in early season.
Where was Gus, he wondered. Had they dumped his body? The way the man of dignity died, with his years, his goodness. . . . So common it was for them to end in the sorriest of conditions and places; never an earl’s ending, a king’s burial for them. Ignominy, humiliation, was their lot. To live long but die bad, was it worth the price?
Gus’ last words he would wipe them from his memory. No more for him the way of yulen. Whatever was in The Book to save him and his from this chimera, yulenhood, that they believed the greatest blessing of nature, it would end, at least for him and any of his who would listen. Let Gus rail from whatever place he might be, but he would live no more cowering below men. His spirit would as in the glory of rebirth at the start of early season, remain in that glory—if The Book of Yulen could make it so. Higher ideals? Only if they could serve power. What good the virtuous gifts of yulenness when confronted with lowness as he’d just endured, and that he would be forced to endure again and again, cycle end to cycle end on to death. No more was it enough to defend against men, or even be their equal. Power was what mattered. Power as they had. Power to bend, turn, and make Earth their servant. Was what he wanted—odd? Were his thoughts somehow corrupt? It was outrageous for him to think so now.
His eyes sprang open. His mind cleared itself of the sentimentality of their race and the bone they’d been sold as treasure. He wanted to know nothing of caution, nothing of balance, nothing of cost and sacrifice and payment for sins and presumptions. Men carried no doubts or holds, not manly men, the ones who moved mountains and advanced their race for the better. What nature had denied him, he of The Book, the one who had dared to seek and find wisdom, he would dignify and empower in him and in his kind.
No longer would he be denied. He’d no longer be the one to flee, but the one who flew. Soar with eagles. Errant toward the Sun. Fly above and conquer pain and weakness. Bring liberation to his kind and allow each in his own way to triumph over oppression. Warmth and good life would be theirs. They would grow, not entangled and snarl like roots and branches of aged trees, but vivacious and vigorous as cane shooting straight to the skies. No more would he and his remain inferior before the aggressive and barbaric. No more would they bear powerlessness, aloneness, and shame. If he could think as he did and question as he questioned, nature had made it so, and so he was not corrupt, infirm, or invaded by some unnatural disease.
He was enlightened by nature, by God if there were, by Creation, by someone or something that put the possibility of challenge in his head. This then made it acceptable, and not as Gus, T or others would challenge to call it corrupt. He was son of nature and he was allowed. He would pass through the gates that had opened to him. He would pursue through the valley of affliction the flight of eagle to Sun’s end. The ground shook. It was the gypsy woman rocking the broken chair. The Sun had sunk below the distant dwellings. She held out the tubers he wanted, cleansed and ready to chew.
He spent the night chewing the redcurrant and turmeric. The juice seeped through his mouth walls to let blood carry the odor canceling matter wherever and however it would eliminate the end of season smell his body gave off. It would improve his chances of attracting and achieving a life-fulfilling taking. Drifting between sleep as he chewed, his thoughts kept returning to Hain. Would he stick to his agreement? He was man, and unlike the trustworthiness of his own, it meant Hain might not. Gus had believed he would, but would he? The thought kept him up but allowed him to dissolve his entire handful of odor eating substance.
When cocks crowed, he stirred from nurturing sleep on the gypsy’s lumpy mattress better than any royal’s bed. Rested, his soul had begun to heal, and the ointments had helped mend his body.
He conveyed to the gypsy woman his need to be driven to Belgium. He pointed it out on a wall map of Europe hanging with magazine pictures of singers, food dishes, and foreign scenery. Her grandson could take him, three thousand euros. He considered himself lucky. They could have stolen his money as he slept, or stolen it while awake for that matter, and thrown him out on his ear. They were thieves, but principled ones. He counted out the three-thousand plus a gift to her.
>
Nathan and the gypsy’s grandson made the trip to Belgium in what looked like a cross between a truck, hearse coach, and milk wagon, but as long as they remained in the right lane, none of it flew off. In several days, the thing crossed Rue du Noyer into Brussels and headed north to Hain’s supposed home.
The conveyance stopped at the point that Nathan’s GPS identified as his destination. The young gypsy and he bid farewell, and Nathan climbed concrete steps leading to an elegant but unimposing house on an unassuming tree-lined suburban street.
With no bell on the front door, he used the brass knocker the shape of a slender woman’s hand. No one answered, and about to knock again, the door opened. Before him stood Conrad Hain, tie and cardigan as in his transmissions.
“Mr. Nols. I’ve been expecting you. The cheer your arrival brings you cannot know. Please come in. And stay.”
XXVI
Conrad Hain led Nathan Nols to the study that Nols recognized as the one Hain called from during their journey.
“Normally,” Hain said, motioning Nathan sit in the chair opposite his, “I’d offer such a desired guest to dine, but no point of that with you. Besides, I can see you’re anxious for The Book.”
Nathan stood eyeing the desk behind Hain bearing the large text Hain had kept on his lap when speaking with them. “I am . . . yes,” Nathan said, nearing the table and the glowing tooled red leather cover with faded gold leaf edged pages.
“Please stop there, Mr. Nols. We need to talk about a final item.”
However, enthralled from finally being so close to what he’d sought so hard and long, Nols did not hear Hain, and kept toward the desk.
“Stop,” Hain ordered.
Abruptly Nathan realized that the glow from the book he’d been taken by, came from a ceiling spotlight shining on it.
“Here,” Hain said, moving Nathan back to the chair. “There’s time for that.”
Nathan yielded and went to the chair, passing the life
-size oil of the lovely young woman with the ring of wildflowers crowning her brow’s golden hair, except that instead of being on the floor stand where it stood during the calls, it hung over a lighted fireplace.
“Your daughter.”
“Yes,” Hain said alarmed, his tone turning concerned. “Did you know her?”
“I don’t think so. I simply presumed. Too young to be your wife, I assumed. Forgive my presumptiveness.”
“She is my daughter.”
“Very pretty.”
“She was.”
“l’m sorry.”
“The day she died my life ended, or it did for a while, until I found something to resurrect it that gave me purpose to live. Without it, my life having turned so bitter and immaterial, I would have joined her.”
“I’m glad you found something to give you meaning, help you through.”
“Why, thank you,” Hain smirked. “But The Book. It’s almost yours.”
“Almost? But I completed the trial. You said—”
“I said that after your test in Minsk, you’d be on your way to my home. There is a final test, Mr. Nols.”
There was no point in arguing. “And it is?”
“Very simple. It won’t even tax you of calories. Your end season, which I can see you’ve entered, won’t be strained as your cycle has these many weeks.”
“The test, Mr. Hain.”
“You’ll remain as my guest in your own private room that I prepared for you. You’ll rest. You can sleep. You won’t have to do anything. Occasionally we can talk. Interested?”
“For how long?”
“Until you leave.”
“How long?”
“Not beyond your season’s end days.”
“That’s nearly four weeks.”
“Then let’s get you started. Let me show you the room. It’s very clean and bright. Nothing like the accommodations you just came from.”
Hain stood and Nathan followed him through a foyer and down a hall to where Hain stopped before a wall, and where he then bent to a low half door. He opened it, and stepping back with Nathan, he had him look in. “You see, nice and clean and bright.”
Yulen: Return of the Beast – Mystery Suspense Thriller (Yulen - Book 2) Page 25