Then he looked away and saw that the black cloth squares on the benches were not cushions, but were black robes. All those present—he now counted five women, two in SS uniform, and seven men, four in uniform—were drawing the robes over their work clothes and uniforms. They seemed bored by this, even faintly derisive of the dark pomp and hidden ceremony of it. They slid the robes over themselves, some more elegantly than others. Most of the military officers removed their gun belts and Sam Brownes.
Carter distantly remembered reading somewhere that SS during the war carried a dagger, but he was surprised to see these officers carried one at their belts and another, longer knife in a long sheathe running across their chests along the Sam Browne’s chest strap. Every one of the officers drew the knife and put it to one side before removing the Sam Browne, and every one of the others in civilian dress had a similar knife waiting wrapped in black paper on top of their robes. Carter was standing close enough to see one of the temporarily unattended knives in detail and was surprised to see the weapon looked antique. The blade was maybe ten inches long and the steel—if it was steel—was pitted. It wasn’t a dagger, either, but only sharpened along one edge. The tip was pointed enough to allow it to be used as a stabbing weapon, but that seemed almost an afterthought. It made Carter think of a huge blade for an outsized cutthroat razor more than anything else. The handle did nothing to diminish this illusion, being of aged ivory. Something was carved into the handle, but when he tried to read it, it was as if the light made the lettering squirm and change beneath his gaze.
Then the woman to which it was assigned finished pulling the robe over her head and fixing her hair after its passage, and took the knife. She held the black paper in her off hand and drew the blade down it to test it. It was terrifyingly sharp, shearing through the sheet as easily as if it had been cutting water. The paper did not bend or curl under pressure at all, because no pressure was required. The woman’s face did not show pleasure at how sharp the blade had proved or any form of satisfaction, but only impatience. She turned toward the center of the room, and Carter saw all the twelve were ready.
The officer Carter had first seen in the room upstairs stepped forward. He started saying something, and whatever it was, it wasn’t German. It wasn’t anything Carter had ever heard before. His voice rose, and the words became clearer and more distinct and less bearable with every syllable.
Carter didn’t need to guess what was going to happen, he hadn’t seen any number of shitty films with sacrificial scenes in them to not know where this was going, yet at the same time, it felt off, as if the cultists (robes, daggers, and weird rites in a secret location said “cult” to Carter) hadn’t bothered reading the script properly. The guy doing the chanting was doing it alone, and he did it with all the passion of somebody reading from a dictionary. Carter realized the man was bored and, looking around the circle, most of them shared that boredom. This was something they had done before, many times, and grown inured to. It was necessary, but dull. They were going to take twelve lives and they regarded it like taking out the garbage or filling out their tax returns. Carter had seen some evil in his life, but he’d never seen it looking anywhere near this banal. He wanted to wake up before the inevitable happened. He needed to wake up.
He could not. He did not.
The senior officer stopped his chant abruptly. There was a change in the room. Carter couldn’t seem to feel much in the dream, but he felt cold now, an aching distant cold as if he wasn’t just losing heat to his immediate surroundings, but to somewhere else a long, long way away. It seemed the circle of twelve felt it as well. They looked at one another a little warily, but they were not worried. Not really.
One of the unconscious people—a Russian? Ukrainian? Pole? none of those places really existed anymore—groaned like they were sick and stirred where they lay by the flame. The woman standing behind them tutted, said something, Hurry up. The leader stepped forward and lifted the head of the man lying before him by the hair. The man’s hair was thin, and the officer’s grip slipped, leaving him with a hank of hairs torn out by the roots. The man’s head thudded painfully against the flame’s stone surround, but he did not stir from his sleep. The dull thud of the head against stone was loud in the room, and a couple of those present snorted with amusement. The senior officer glared at the unconscious man as if it were his fault. He lifted the man’s head again, this time by cupping his chin in the palm of his hand, and when the throat was exposed he quickly slashed it with his knife, clean across from jugular to carotid, parting the cartilage of the throat as he went.
Carter cried out then, but nobody heard.
The blood flowed quickly and, Jesus Christ, thought Carter, there was a lot of it. It poured into the gutter around the flame, gushed into it, but it did not simply pool there.
The blood caught fire. Carter had seen a lot of blood in his life and he was pretty familiar with its properties, but he had never once considered it flammable. Yet there it was, burning in strange wide flames, like liquor on crêpes suzette. Carter belatedly realized that, whatever was feeding that “eternal flame,” it sure as fuck wasn’t a butane cylinder out back. The flames leapt high, and they burned in colors that hurt Carter’s mind, and those of the other watchers too, judging from the way they turned their heads and half-closed their eyes. The flame eagerly devoured the flood, the sibilant roar of the flames almost hiding the sound of the man dying, his last breaths hissing and wheezing out of the open trachea. As the blood slowed, the officer picked up the man by his feet and shoved him into the flame headfirst. He burned quickly, like a cordwood bundle soaked in gasoline, and his bones burned fastest of all. Inside a minute, there was nothing but some spiral ashes dancing in the air.
To the frustration of the woman whose assigned sacrifice was coming round, the victims were murdered in strict counterclockwise order. Some handled themselves more efficiently than others; one of the men had trouble maneuvering his victim into the fire and had to have help from a neighbor to his embarrassment and a subdued chorus of sighs. Not one of them showed the most momentary sign that they felt compromised, barbaric, or monstrous. They had become accustomed to the unspeakable, and atrocity was humdrum.
Eventually the stumbling process of murder was enacted eleven times in ways that ranged from the workaday to the sort of humiliation you usually only see when somebody screws up a PowerPoint presentation for senior management. At the last of the twelve stations, the woman who was assigned to it was all but stamping her foot with impatience when her turn to kill finally came. It arrived a little late. The twelfth victim was almost conscious and was stumbling to her feet.
The robed woman wasn’t in the mood for shit from some blue collar who didn’t know her place. She swung the long, ugly knife in her hand from a chef’s blade-up grip to a knife fighter’s blade down, stepped up to the confused Russian—at least the few words she said sounded Russian to Carter (What happened?)—and swung the knife into her right breast. The woman screamed, the pain punching through whatever was left of the veterinarian level of tranquilizer she’d endured, and stepped back. The edge of the raised bench-like circle around the flame caught her in the back of the leg, and she almost fell, but recovered herself in time. She staggered, trying to catch her balance, almost falling sideways but grabbing at the edge of the break in the circle to recover her balance.
The senior officer muttered something that felt in Carter’s mind like For fuck’s sake, the twelfth cultist blushed angrily, and in anger more than guile, she punched the Russian woman. The Russian gave ground once more but this time, there was no bench to stop her.
Only the flame.
She stepped into it and … nothing happened. The strangely colored fire lapped around her legs as high as the knees and did not burn or hurt her. She stood there confused, the flames circling her shins like an affectionate cat. Then a dribble of blood ran from between her fingers where she had her hand over the wound in her breast, and, as it entered the flames, it
burned like gasoline. The fire climbed the falling trail of droplets faster than they could fall and, in a moment, had reached the wound.
The Germans, no, the Nazis, no—Carter realized with a squirming shock that it was truly possible to be more evil than Nazis—the cultists in their secret little murder room stepped back as the unnatural fire wormed its way between the woman’s … the screaming woman’s fingers, and in a second, it was inside her. It was something new to the jaded circle. There were gasps, cries, and at least one laugh.
The Russian woman’s blood burned brightly in her veins and arteries and, when it reached them, her bones burned more brightly still. Yet, for all the fury of her immolation, it took her a long time to die, and Carter was forced to watch every second. Nor was he alone as an unseen observer; something stood by his side, watched the final sacrifice, and was satisfied by it for reasons Carter could not and dared not guess at. It was as aware of him as he was aware of it. He did not look upon it because he feared above all things he might see. It did not look upon him because he was not worth the trouble.
The Russian woman’s screams were like the roar of a furnace, but presently died away as she was consumed and shrank away to nothing in the contaminating fire.
When she was all gone, one of the cultists said something that the dream told him meant We should do them all that way next time, and there was more laughter.
Once more, said the leader. Then Case Seidr will finally make this unnecessary.
The presence by Carter left, and he found the iron grip of being that had held him there fade away, and he tumbled from the scene like a man half-waking.
Chapter 20
THE DARK ISLANDS
The dream became less real and therefore more bearable. Carter felt able to relax and rest in the warm nonexistence of sleep, which he was vaguely aware was the point of sleep after all, and not an excuse for his strange and unwanted talent to drag him off unbidden into cisterns of European depravity, which even unconscious he found irritatingly classier than American depravity.
He enjoyed the small pleasures of oblivion for some time, and his mind tumbled down avenues without letup or focus. His breathing steadied, he stopped sweating, his heart beat slowly and steadily. He was aware of little in that deep well.
Scent came to him first. A human smell of skin, close and intimate, and he fell to wondering how long it was since he’d slept with a woman, and it seemed like a very long time, back, back, back long before the world was unfolded and since then he’d been too focused on fixing the universe as he understood it and maybe hadn’t spent enough time meeting new people, which, in the abyssal, velvet well of deep sleep, now seemed like a good and worthwhile thing to do, and he was sorry he hadn’t seen that before.
Even before the world unfolded, it had been some months since he’d been in any sort of relationship, since before the Suydam case. There’d been what he’d hoped might turn into something with Gina who was a PAA at the precinct but that ended up as only a one-night stand because she hadn’t mentioned she was changing jobs and would be working at an NGO in Baltimore, and—Carter remembered as he tumbled down the rabbit hole of fractured and unreliable associations—was definitely a shame as the one night in question had been a good one, and he had made a point of not drinking too much beforehand, even though he was nervous and worried he was going to fuck things up, but that had turned out to be a good call and he thought then, knowing he was asleep tried to remember for when he wasn’t because it was a good thought, that maybe she wasn’t at an NGO in Baltimore in the Unfolded World and maybe they could meet up again and just maybe fuck again because it had been very good and …
Smooth soft skin. Dear fucking god but he loved skin against skin, the scent and the touch, and he suddenly realized he was having an erotic dream and that he was too asleep to wake from it even though he knew it was an erotic dream and that was just excellent, yes. He just wished he knew who his unconscious mind was fixating on.
Was it Emily Lovecraft? The idea settled upon him like a warm hug and he was happy to be in its embrace. It grew hotter and tighter around him, and when a voice whispered a question, he said, “Yes.”
* * *
Lovecraft had been pretty pleased with herself that she’d managed to get some sleep during the fragmented journey to Adak, especially as it had given her the opportunity to mock Carter, who had barely managed a minute. Yep, calling him a zombie and him being so tired all he could do was accidentally play along with the joke by going “Murrrr…” out of exhaustion had been pretty sweet. She was pretty confident he’d passed out as soon as he was in his bunk, though. She, on the other hand, had brushed her teeth, sighed, and got dressed again, because no way was she going to be able to sleep.
She felt tired, yes, but nowhere near enough to get her anywhere near sleep, so she decided she would go for a walk around the deck, tire herself out that way, and maybe the sea air would work its magic and make her drowsy. She could but hope. Shrugging on her jacket, she went up the short corridor running by the staterooms assigned to researchers on the port side—Carter’s was on the starboard, she knew—went up the stairs at the fore end—the ladder, as the crewman who’d directed her to her room had called it—and so up onto the deck.
It was cold, but not bitterly so. The Aleutians weren’t really that far north for all her making out they were essentially Arctic when Carter first told her where the ZPE team was bound. In fact, she’d seen later when she’d opened the atlas and looked, they were more or less on the same latitudes as, say, Belgium. The big difference was that they didn’t have the Gulf Stream to keep them warm. Even now beneath an almost clear sky, a low sea fog hung across the waters where the Pacific met the Bering.
She was leaning on the rail when one of the crew came by. He greeted her and they stood in silence as the RV Frederick Cook made its way westward through the silent waters. Lovecraft nodded at a shape looming up from the sea no more than a mile to the north. “Where’s that?”
“Amchitka,” he said. “We’re going the scenic route, or you’d never have seen it.”
“Scenic route?”
“Sailing south of the islands. Forecast is for strong northerlies and if we’re going to get blown off course, better that it takes us away from them. The shallows around them are dense with rocks. Add a couple of hours to the trip, but better safe than sorry, eh?”
“No argument from me.” She nodded at the island. “No lights. I guess no one lives there?”
The crewman half-laughed. “Not if they have any sense. The government used it for underground atomic tests in the sixties and seventies. It’s not supposed to be radioactive, but who’d want to live there to find out? Kind of a shame, though. Two good-sized airstrips on it, but the place has been abandoned for more than twenty years now. Only usable in an emergency, otherwise it’s off-limits. This is as close as we’re allowed to go. It is a shame. It would have made a good island-hop between Adak and Attu for helicopters maybe, if there was a fuel dump there.”
Lovecraft was looking at the island. “They let off nukes there?” The knowledge made the dark mass of bleak stone seem haunted.
The crewman nodded at the sky. “You’re privileged to see the stars here. The skies aren’t clear here often. Not often at all.” He bid her a good night, and continued toward the bow.
Lovecraft looked at the stars. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so many. So far from the light pollution of any city, they only had to contend with the ship’s own lights, and they were nowhere near powerful enough to make the sky glow and obliterate the smaller stars.
And there were so many of them. Lovecraft had never lived outside a town, had rarely traveled outside built-up areas during the night, and she realized now how much she had been missing. She could see the phantasmal glow of the Milky Way, and the knowledge that she was looking toward the core of her own galaxy, that the glow was made up of uncountable millions of stars great and small, young and dying, made her feel tiny. Tiny, but no
t insignificant, because to her mind significance was a very human value in itself, and as a human, she carried at least a few grains of it. In fact—and she smiled as she thought it—she had been directly involved with an event of cosmic significance. Maybe more than a few grains, then, even if few people knew it.
Then she remembered that one of those few people was Henry Weston, and her smile faded quickly. She looked up at the stars, but perhaps a few of them looked down upon her, and minds of unimaginable sophistication and impenetrable processes played games with her and her “significance” for goals beyond the comprehension of any human.
The night sky lost its charm for her then, and she didn’t feel so very privileged to see it. As the menacing bulk of Amchitka Island, force-fed nukes and left to cool, diminished in the ship’s wake, she went below.
* * *
She’d come up the port ladder, but now the starboard was closer and she did not desire to be under the leering stars a second longer than necessary. She’d have to walk back to the bulkhead to get on to the connecting corridor, which would add a minute to her journey, but that was still preferable. As she reached the bottom of the ladder where the corridor turned before the starboard hallway of staterooms and was just turning the corner, however, she saw a door open somewhere toward the end. She truly didn’t want to run into anyone who might get between her and her bunk by hassling her with friendly conversation when she just wasn’t in the mood. She stepped around the corner of a small open cubby that held a fire extinguisher and a few cleaning supplies. If whoever it was happened to see her, she’d say she’d thrown up in her cabin and was just looking for something to tidy up.
She needn’t have worried. The person in the corridor walked straight past and through the bulkhead door, opening and sealing it behind them as the crew had instructed them to do during the night watches. Lovecraft watched them go through narrowed eyes. It was the scientist who she’d been introduced to at Adak, Dr. Lurline Giehl, to whom Lovecraft’s internal annotation system had added the labels “Abwehr,” “Nazi,” and “bitch.” She had not liked Giehl at all on first meeting, yet had glued a fake smile on and stayed civil so far. But now Giehl had a light sweat on her, obvious under the lights, and a suspicion was forming in Lovecraft’s mind.
After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft) Page 19