The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  From here, he could also hear the comings and goings of the guards and others, and listen in on scraps of their conversations as they passed by the darkroom’s door. Something had happened that had hushed them all to whispers. While Herr Doktor Ritter was away in Berlin… and it had to do with the crying woman’s babies. Pavli lay on his cot, eating a few scraps he had stolen from the kitchen, and wondered what the answer to the riddle might be.

  Voices shouting outside woke him up. He could tell from the chill of the air that it was well past midnight. From the darkroom he crept into the hallway, where a window overlooked the graveled drive. He could see Herr Doktor Ritter, still wearing his black gloves and belted trench coat, gesturing angrily at the Scharfuhrer and the other guards behind him; the whole scene was caught in the bright angle of headlights from Ritter’s BMW cabriolet. Pavli listened carefully, keeping well to the side of the window so he wouldn’t be seen, but could make out only that Ritter was chewing out one of the guards, the next in rank behind the Scharfuhrer. The guard tried to give some kind of explanation, some reason as to why he had disobeyed one of Ritter’s orders, but finally fell silent, shrinking beneath the tongue-lashing. Ritter turned on his heel at last and got back into the cabriolet. Its engine growled through the night’s silence as it picked up speed through the gates and out onto the road leading back toward Berlin.

  Pavli drew away from the window and returned to the darkroom. The scene in front of the asylum had seemed so strange, like a dream from which one wakes and can only partly remember. The glare from the cabriolet’s headlights had turned Ritter and the guards into ghostly figures, drained of color.

  He crawled beneath the cot’s blankets. There had been enough mysteries twining around each other for one night. Answers might come with the day – he closed his eyes and wished for sleep.

  ***

  Daylight brought nothing but more whispers and the grim silence surrounding them. The guards knew what was up, but were no more likely to tell him than he was to ask. In Ritter’s absence, the Lazarene men and women were left in their separate dormitories, to speculate among themselves as to what had happened. And what would happen next.

  Pavli remained undisturbed, even forgotten by the guards and the others, in the retreat of the darkroom. In another night’s darkness, he raised his head from the rolled-up jacket he used as a pillow. The faint sounds from the end of the corridor outside had woken him from the sleep into which he had fallen.

  Light slipped beneath the door to Herr Doktor Ritter’s office and laboratory. Pavli hesitated, coming close to drawing back inside the darkroom and the safety of the cot… but only for a moment. He stepped out into the corridor, his bare feet making no sound upon the floor.

  “Ah. There is my trusted assistant.” Ritter had his boots up on the desktop as he leaned back in his chair. A bottle and a half-empty glass sat close at hand. “Don’t be afraid.” He made a welcoming gesture to the face that had peered around the door. “Come in. Join me.”

  “Pardon me, sir…” Pavli froze with his hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t mean to disturb you… I just wanted to make sure everything was all right…”

  “Yes, yes; of course you did.” A note of impatience entered Ritter’s voice. “Of course you weren’t snooping around – why should you?” He picked up the glass and tossed back its contents. “But I’m not asking you to come in here; I’m ordering you to. There, does that make you feel better?” A loose smile raised a corner of Ritter’s mouth.

  As he stepped closer to the desk and the circle of light thrown by its lamp, Pavli could see that Ritter still had on his trench coat, the belt unfastened so that the garment was cast back from his uniform jacket beneath, the dark leather draped over the chair’s arm like wings. His high collar was undone, showing more of the unshaven stubble of his neck and chin. Alcohol and fatigue had reddened the rims of his eyes.

  “Sit down, Iosefni. Here, you should be drinking, too.” Ritter reached back and fetched another glass off the shelf behind him. “We have a victory to celebrate.” He poured, then pushed the glass across the desk.

  Perched at the chair’s edge, Pavli sipped something that tasted like fire on his tongue. It burned all the way down his throat.

  Ritter held his own glass up to admire the inch of clear liquid. “You’ve made quite a favorite of yourself among my men. With your little photography studio… very admirable.”

  “I meant no harm -”

  “Oh, stop trembling like that. Your constant attitude of fear offends me.” Ritter filled his glass again. “What cause have I ever given for you to mistrust my assurances of your safety? I value the work you do for me. Even these portraits you do for the guards – they show a good eye. You Lazarenes are a clever race; much like the Jews in that regard. This shows the principle of selective breeding in action, I suppose. The more attempts are made to exterminate such so-called ‘lesser breeds,’ the surer it will be that the ones who are left are even cleverer and more given to survival. You see -” Ritter broke off, smiling ruefully at the sound of his own lecturing voice. “I shouldn’t tire you with my pet theories. Let us just say that I have some differences with those colleagues of mine who see murder as the only possible response to the challenge presented by the non-Aryan races. You have no idea of the struggle I went through to have your odd tribe rounded up and brought here, rather than sent to… another place. You should thank me, Iosefni; I have kept the lives of you and your brethren safe in the palms of my hands.”

  Pavli nodded slowly. He knew that much was true.

  “So you will have to forgive me if I deal harshly with those who endanger my research.” Ritter tilted his glass, swirling its contents around. “One of your customers will not be coming back for another portrait sitting. Jurgen – you remember him, the very stocky one? – I’ve had him transferred to the Eastern Front. I don’t imagine he’ll return from there. But that is the consequence of his having disobeyed my express orders. The unpleasant encounter you suffered, the woman bewailing the loss of her twin babies… Jurgen was responsible for that.”

  “What -” Pavli looked up from his glass. “What happened to them?”

  “The babies?” Ritter’s face darkened with anger. “Waste. Idiocy.” He knocked back the dregs in his glass and slammed it down upon the desktop. “Here, I’ll show you something you might find… instructive.” He reached down beside his chair, into an open satchel of black leather, the kind that ordinary doctors carried. From it he took a heavy glass jar, sealed with a stopper and a smear of wax around the edge. A fluid clear as alcohol but thicker sloshed inside.

  For a moment, Pavli thought he saw a pair of goldfish swimming languidly in the jar, the fancy kind with a long trailing tail at the end of their bulbous forms. But they weren’t quite the right shape, and he could tell, even as unlit silhouettes, that they weren’t alive.

  Ritter turned the lamp so it shone straight upon the jar sitting in the middle of the desk. “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “Look more closely.”

  Pavli leaned toward the jar. The thickness of the glass distorted the two objects floating inside. He saw a milky-white sphere streaked with red, then, as it turned, a circle of jewel-like blue. The other drifted toward him, its red tail twisting behind, exactly the same but that it bore a circle of golden-brown, a dot of black at the center…

  Then he knew what had happened to the woman’s babies. Or to at least one of them.

  “Those fools,” murmured Ritter, as he laid his hand on the side of the jar, contemplating the pair of eyes suspended in preserving fluid. “This is the use they make of my lovely children…”

  This is a dream, thought Pavli. I’m still asleep. I didn’t wake up. I never woke up, I just went on sleeping and dreaming, not even in this bed here… I’m not here, I’m in my bed with my brother Matthi sleeping next to me. The eyes – a child’s, smaller in diameter than an adult’s – gazed back at him, as though he were part of the dead child’s dreaming. And I’ll
wake up, and I’ll get dressed and walk out onto a little narrow street in Berlin. And that will be real… not like this…

  “He had already dissected this one.” Ritter’s voice sounded far away. “The other child had already been given its injection and was dead, but hadn’t had the knife taken to it yet.”

  Not a dream. Pavli drew back from the jar, feeling dizzy and nauseous. “Who… who did this…”

  Ritter’s expression turned to disgust. “That idiot Mengele. At the camp in Auschwitz -”

  Pavli had heard the name before. Not the man’s name, but the word that was the German for the Slovenian village – Oswiecim – from which the false gypsy had returned with all his whispered stories. “It was in Block Ten,” said Pavli. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course.” Ritter nodded. “That is where my esteemed colleague Mengele performs what he likes to think of as his experiments. It’s all just butchery. I’m appalled to think that the man actually has a medical degree, that he studied with Mollinson and von Verschuer. When I heard some of his crackpot notions…” Ritter tilted his head back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I knew of the man’s obsessions with twins – he sorts them out himself, as each new trainload is brought in. The little ones call him Onkel, he treats them so well, with bits of candy in his pockets for them. Pets and fusses over them, right up until the moment he takes them into the dissection room…” A shrug. “He fancies himself an expert on the matter of human eye coloration – he has some notion that he can change brown eyes to blue, by injecting coal tar dyes directly into the pupils. Perhaps he thinks he can turn dark-eyed Jews into Aryans that way. That’s the level of his scientific thinking. Of course, he just winds up blinding the poor little bastards with his needle.”

  “So he came here.” Pavli had begun to understand. “This Mengele – he came here. Because of us… because of the Lazarenes…”

  “I’d warned him off. I told him there would be hell to pay if he tried to snatch any of my heterochromes for his stupid experiments. He wouldn’t be able to resist – his obsessions have reached the point of madness by now. That’s why I gave specific orders to all the guards here. If Mengele turned up with transfer orders for any of my research subjects, nothing was to be done in my absence; it didn’t matter from how high up the orders came, how urgent he made them sound.” Ritter laid his hand on the jar’s curved stopper. “Whatever he used to bribe that fool Jurgen, to let him in here and take away those twins, I hope Jurgen found the price satisfactory.”

  The things of which Ritter spoke still sounded dreamlike. It was as if he and his rival dealt in some rare form of livestock, an unusual breed of rabbits to be kept in cages at the back of their laboratories.

  “This time, however, that quack Mengele overreached himself.” A thin smile formed on Ritter’s face, his eyes half-lidded, as though contemplating some pleasant memory. “I don’t think he realized how highly my research is regarded by the officers of the Ahnenerbe. The greatest degree of personal support is afforded to me by Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler himself. And why wouldn’t it be so? Mengele amuses himself, down there in that little hellish empire he has created in his Block Ten, with his muddleheaded injections and dissecting sprees; that is all that having power over human lives means to him. While I…” Ritter nodded slowly, savoring his own words. “I will penetrate to the heart of that life. The seal of the scrolls will be broken, and every mystery will be read out to me…”

  The doctor’s voice dwindled to silence. In his nervousness, Pavli had drunk most of the fiery alcohol in his glass. Its warmth spread across his chest and through his limbs. The room seemed bigger now, its walls fallen away, leaving him and Ritter in a space bound by the glow of the desk lamp. At the center was the jar with the child’s eyes inside, turning and gazing upon them in wordless judgment.

  “Do I frighten you with such wild talk? My apologies.” The alcohol made Ritter clumsy; his hand knocked over his empty glass, and he watched it roll off the desk’s edge and fall to the floor. “You must understand, Iosefni… there is no one else to whom I can speak of these things. Not of how they really are. I’ve managed to convince Himmler of their importance, so we won’t be bothered by that butchering clown in Auschwitz again. But Himmler – he’s a simpleminded mystic, always listening for voices from beyond. He can’t tell the difference between what I’m doing and all his collection of ancient runes and horoscopes; it’s all the same to him. The entire Ahnenerbe is that way; there’s no one who understands. But you, my invaluable photographer…” Ritter leaned forward, head lowered to the level of his shoulders, his face heavy with drink. “ You understand… because you and I are so much alike…”

  “What…” Pavli’s tongue thickened in his mouth. “What do you mean?”

  “We are both so close… to knowing.” Ritter spread his hands against the desktop, to keep himself from falling forward and knocking over the jar. “I have spent the better part of my life studying the Lazarene Community. Everything that could be learned, from the outside. The history, the legends, the lies. And you, Iosefni… you were born in it. You are of the Lazarene blood. Yet neither one of us knows. The secrets… the truth. Mysteries.”

  The other man’s words sobered Pavli. He felt a touch of fear, as though he had been walking in a dark forest and had spotted, far off among the dense, moss-covered shapes, another shape, one that moved and then disappeared. “Perhaps…” Pavli spoke carefully, treading in silence, waiting to see if that distant figure would show itself again. “Perhaps there is nothing to know. Perhaps it’s all just… nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You show a commendable loyalty to your brethren.” A lopsided smile twisted Ritter’s face. “But you can’t fool me. My study of the Lazarenes extends to you as well, Iosefni. I can sense how you feel. How you look at the other ones, the words – or the lack of them – that pass between you and the rest. How it must feel to have been cheated that way… to have had the great pearl of knowing snatched away from you…”

  He spotted the figure in the darkness again, closer. “They did that… they did it to protect me.” He stopped himself from saying the words from you.

  “Yes… of course they would say that. Your brother would tell you that, wouldn’t he? Even if – let us say – even if they weren’t concerned about you at all. About what happens to you. Perhaps they’re just concerned about their precious secrets. The secrets of their faith. And if they thought that you were weak… that you couldn’t be trusted with those secrets… that you could be made to tell them… to me, let us say…” Ritter raised an eyebrow as his smile widened. “Then that’s different, isn’t it? From what they told you.”

  He could almost see its face. “But… that’s not true. It’s not. My brother didn’t lie to me.”

  “Very good.” Ritter nodded appreciatively. “I should have expected as much from you. This loyalty. Just like the rest of your tribe, you are a tough nut to crack, Iosefni. Come -” He stood up, grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself. “I have something else to show you.”

  Pavli followed the doctor into the rooms behind the office. He had only caught glimpses of these before, through the doors opening, then swinging shut. Now he found himself surrounded by the white-tiled walls, the air itself smelling of disinfectant, the odor of asylums. Ritter turned on the lights, the sudden glare dazzling Pavli. He could just make out a narrow, chrome-legged table in the middle of the room, with a small tray next to it, filled with what at first seemed to be kitchen cutlery. When he blinked away his tears, he could see that the glistening objects were surgical tools.

  “I had an airplane sent down there, to pick up the remains.” Ritter leaned over the table, parting a small cloth-wrapped bundle. “I didn’t want that fool Mengele to have any souvenirs to add to his collection. They brought the jar back – and this.” He gestured to Pavli. “Come and see.”

  He stood at the edge of the table as Ritter folded back the last bit of cloth. A naked child, only a year or two old, lay
there as though sleeping. On its side, legs drawn up – its skin seemed white as porcelain, touched with pink at the center of the little fist tucked against its cheek and in the creases of its elbows and knees. Beneath the fall of blonde hair across its brow, marks had been made around one closed eye with a grease pencil.

  “Pretty little thing.” Ritter stroked a fingertip along one of the small corpse’s eyebrows. “A waste, really.”

  Pavli wished that he were dreaming. That it were possible to be dreaming.

  Ritter’s hand gently moved the fragile arm, exposing the underside of the wrist. “Unmarked, of course; as is to be expected in one so young. That’s what makes you so unusual, Iosefni – that you came of age and yet didn’t receive the ritual tattooing. So you are Lazarene and yet somehow not.”

  He remained silent. There was too little oxygen underneath the cloying asylum smell for him to breathe and speak.

  “I wonder…” Ritter drew his hand over the small breastbone. “I wonder how much more you know than I do. I wonder if you’ve seen the things that I have only heard about. The old stories about the Lazarenes… the secret that Christ or the Devil whispered into a pale gypsy’s ear…”

  The figure in the dark forest stepped closer. Pavli could almost see the face beneath the hood made of ragged animal pelts. “I don’t know… I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

  “Yes, you have; you have seen it.” The drunken slurring had ebbed from Ritter’s voice, replaced by a taut ferocity. A fingernail drew a red line down the center of the dead child’s abdomen. “You’ve seen the skin part like a suit of old clothes and the reborn life emerging. Like a snake wriggling free, like a chrysalis being torn open by the moth inside -”

  “No…” Pavli shook his head. “I didn’t…” The white-tiled room and Ritter’s piercing gaze blurred in his sight. He saw instead the vision he had stolen, the figure surrounded by the elders of his blood, luminous silk peeling away from the youth’s arms and chest, his nakedness wrapped in a drifting smoke that bore the image of his face.