The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  Ritter placed the tips of his fingers together. “Previous investigators into the Lazarene mysteries have speculated that the essential corpus of the faith predates Christianity…”

  He listened and didn’t listen to the doctor’s voice, the familiar words. There was some comfort to be found in seeing that others, the guards, suffered in ways similar to his own. The lack of true sleep, the immersion into non-time. The soldiers listened to their illicit radio, not to Herr Goebbels’ lies, but to the broadcasts of the Americans and the other armies cutting their way across Europe. They listened though they knew that the words were meant to erode their morale, hollow the courage from their chests; they listened because they knew it was the truth from that other world, the world in which time moved and was real. The world that would swallow this one… someday. Matthi had promised him that.

  “One researcher into the myths theorized that the Lazarene religious practices dated back to the neolithic shamans. The snake-like shedding of the skin, the indefinite prolonging of human life – these were characterized in certain records as being techniques of both great antiquity and great danger. The skin was characterized as being part of the soul. To remove it, layer by layer, was to become progressively less human; to become a thing without a soul…”

  The voice droned on, far away. Pavli preferred to think about the guard, one of the younger ones, barely older than himself, who had broken from his suffering. Who had run away, into the forest beyond the fences topped with barbed wire. And had been caught and dragged back to the former hospital; his SS uniform had been torn by brambles, the dirt on his cheeks muddied by his frightened tears. Pavli had watched from the window overlooking the courtyard as Ritter had slapped the boy across the face while two other guards had held him upright between them. The doctor had then placed the muzzle of a pistol over the boy’s heart and fired. The shot ringing out had snapped all the assembled guards’ heads back, a little piece of the war they’d heard approaching on their radio had leapt out of the charred hole in the breast of the boy’s uniform, leapt out and slapped them like the flat of Ritter’s hand. The ones on either side had dropped the corpse between them, a bundle of rags with a boy’s face still registering bewilderment and the beginning of an understanding that could never be put into words.

  “Is it the actual, physical skin that the Lazarene beliefs refer to? Or some other, less material substance? Or some combination, a muddling-together of matter and spirit? This is what we must determine…”

  The SS uniform had been stripped from the boy’s body, but not more than that. The white form had been dragged, with no frightened resistance this time, out to the newest pit that had been dug in a clearing of the forest, and thrown in with the red things lying tangled together there.

  “It is at this point that the figure of Christ enters the Lazarene mythos.” Ritter gazed up at the ceiling for a moment before continuing. “Not the pale, ambiguous miracle-worker of the Catholic and various Protestant churches, but a teacher of a specific knowledge. It is unclear whether the Lazarene Christ was one historical personage or a school devoted to the ancient mysteries. That is not important, however. The Lazaranology claims that their Christ, the true Christ, discovered the means of taming the dangerous, soul-destroying practice of shedding the human skin. A spiritual technology was developed that became the rituals of the Lazarene faith; the most visible manifestation of this is the tattooed stigmata that the individuals receive as part of their initiation into adulthood. It is claimed that these marks are not just reminders of Christ’s suffering, but are instrumental in controlling the undesired effects of the skin-shedding. Though there is seemingly no limit to the number of times one of the Lazarenes might undergo this process, the faith requires the members to accept their own eventual deaths, though in the cases of certain of the Lazarene Community’s spiritual elders, this may be after lifetimes measured in centuries.”

  Ritter cleared his throat after taking another sip from the glass, as though it contained nothing more than water. “The nature of the Lazarene rituals demands a great cohesiveness in the community. Though the shedding of the skin, and thus the indefinite extension of human life, may be performed without assistance by an individual well-versed in the technique, the controlling rituals must be administered by others. Thus, a Lazarene unwilling to accept his or her death might turn apostate and flee the group, practicing the shedding of the skin on an individual basis – but only at the cost of that person’s soul. Without the controlling rituals given to the Lazarenes by their Christ, the individual suffers the inevitable spiritual degeneration, the loss of one’s human nature.” Ritter nodded slowly. “This is, perhaps, the origin of various folk legends regarding the existence of evil and immortal creatures, both male and female, in human form.”

  He believes, thought Pavli. There had never been any question about it. Here in these rooms, Ritter’s office and the surgical laboratory, the smallest of all the worlds where no time moved – a religion of the doctor’s own making was practiced. Herr Doktor Ritter’s faith, the rituals performed with his glittering scalpels and the tweezerlike forceps that gently and with infinite patience pulled the delicate skins away from the flesh beneath. Until where there had been one human form on the narrow table, there was then two, a red thing seeping blood into the cloth beneath it, and an empty skin floating in the shallow basin that Ritter’s assistant had prepared. The face could still be discerned, a man’s or a woman’s or a child’s, a mask with no eyes behind the two holes, no tongue inside the larger opening beneath. Hands like translucent gloves at the end of the hollow arms, long incisions running from the tops of the ribcage to the palms. Breasts and genitals, soft empty things, soaking in the chemical bath that would preserve the thin tissue, keep it pliable and safe from decay, a silken thing that Herr Doktor Ritter could add to the others in his collection. That he could take out and study, bending over it with a jeweler’s loupe set in one eye, noting the subtle variations of the tattooed wounds still visible on what had been the abdomen and the wrists…

  Pavli felt suddenly nauseous, the alcohol rising up his throat, a choking sourness at the back of his tongue. He shouldn’t have thought of these things, remembered; the solace of being drunk had been burned away by them. He could feel again his cracked rib, the broken tooth in his jaw, the ache of his bruised flesh; for a moment, he felt himself falling to the wooden planks of the dormitory floor, curling into a ball under the blows and kicks from the Lazarene men. From beneath the arm shielding his face, he had been just able to see their faces twisting with rage, nostrils flaring at the smell of blood they caught from him. And farther back, against the wall of the spinning room, his brother Matthi, struggling against the others that restrained him, kept him from coming to Pavli’s aid. The Lazarene men, the ones who were left of their number, had continued pouring their revenge out on Pavli, their fists like rocks tumbling down a mountainside. The toe of a boot had lifted him up for a moment, before he had collapsed to the floor again; that had been the impact that had broken his rib. The lance of pain had blinded him; through a red haze he had seen the guards, alerted by the shouts, rush into the dormitory and pull aside the Lazarenes before they had been able to kill him. Their shouts, not his; he had stayed silent the whole time, though the words had filled his mouth. He had wanted to cry out that it was their fault, they had spurned him, cast him aside, refused to make him one of their own, a bearer of the secrets they shared among themselves. They had only themselves to blame if he had let the doctor have his way, make him into an accomplice, the camera as much an instrument of murder as the scalpel in Ritter’s hand. The thin blade lifted the skin away from the flesh, looking for the secret of life, and the lens peered into the wound, finding only death.

  “What we must determine…” Ritter slouched lower in his chair. “We must not rest until we find… until we…” His slurring voice could barely crawl across his tongue. “Until…” His hand knocked over the empty bottle. He gazed stupidly at it rolling
off the edge of the desk and thumping on the floor.

  Until what? The words were loud inside Pavli’s head, words that were even harder to hold back than his accusation against his fellow Lazarenes. You fool – he wanted to reach over the desk and slap the older man’s face, snap him awake from his alcoholic fog. The drink in Pavli’s veins had turned to fire. He could have stood up and towered over the doctor, sodden head drooping over the scribbled pages of his research journal, reached down and snatched the book from Ritter’s hands, flung it against the office’s wall. A fool, an idiot, to think that his scalpels could find that for which he searched. There was no way to make them tell, to force the Lazarenes to reveal their secrets. Neither their living tongues or their mute corpses spoke of these things – Pavli could testify to that.

  The foolish doctor had thought he could raise ghosts through surgery, set free the wavering forms that drifted in the night sky, the murmuring voices, the sleeping faces of memories and dreams, the thin, insubstantial fragments of the deaths the Lazarenes had discarded. Perhaps Ritter had thought he could capture them like smoke in a bottle; pull the cork and drink of them, death in his mouth making him as immortal as the alcohol in his gut had made him wise. The lecture he gave to the eager medical students he imagined before him would be his triumph and vindication; his words would ring out louder and more compelling than those of the Fuhrer; he’d rip open his SS officer’s uniform and stand before them in pale, radiant nakedness, the emblems of Christ’s passion writhing under one arm and over both wrists, the visible sign of his hard-won immortality. The students’ mouths would gape as wide as those of the red, wet faces in the forest’s pit, as he would split open his own skin, fingers tugging inside his breastbone, and step forward reborn. A ghost with his face would slide its empty hands across the ceiling of the lecture hall…

  “It’s dangerous to know such things…” Ritter’s voice moved even more slowly, a blind man fumbling at the doors inside his skull. “There are reasons that the Lazarenes, when they could be found, were persecuted over the centuries. Their faith… they believe that Christ Himself was murdered by the Roman authorities for imparting the secret of the controlling rituals. The shroud that was found in the tomb three days after the Crucifixion was in fact His skin, the final mortal part of Him left after the spirit had departed…”

  It had only been from Ritter that Pavli had heard that story. His brother Matthi had never spoken of such things.

  “Once there might have been whole tribes who shared the Lazarene knowledge, entire cities that other so-called Christians reviled as dens of heresy… their stones were pulled one from the other… mounded corpses put to the torch…”

  Pavli could close his eyes and see that, the flames and the black smoke. As easily as closing his eyes and seeing in memory the pit dug in the forest clearing, the raw-fleshed bodies that had been hauled there by the guards, the fire leaping up with the toss of a burning rag. The guards had stepped back with the empty petrol containers in their hands, raising arms to shield their faces from the sudden wash of heat, or turning away to gag and then vomit, spines hunched and guts rebelling against the smell too much like charred bacon.

  They had made him help carry the bodies to the pit. Those who had once been his brethren. That was why he had gone to the dormitory of the Lazarene men. He had wanted to see his brother, to talk with Matthi, but he had known that the stink of the burning was still upon him, the mark of the black angel’s hand, the angel that had mounted across the forest’s tangled sky like a shroud. That stink, and the smell of the blood and chemicals from the surgery. The men had been surprised by his coming among them; the guards had let him past and he had closed the door behind himself. In the darkness, the first part of the night, he had felt their eyes turn toward him, the gaze of the few scattered among now so many empty beds. Then the men had fallen upon him, as his brother had shouted and tried to reach him, to stop them from killing him in their wrath. And he had said nothing, he had accepted their blows and kicks. There had been no words in his mouth, no accusation against them. He had known, as he had tumbled into unconsciousness, that this was the absolution he had come to the dormitory to find.

  Matthi had come to him before dawn. As Pavli had lain on the cot in the darkroom, he had heard his name whispered. He had opened his eyes as best he could – the left one was swollen nearly shut from the beating – then winced when Matthi had touched his brow. “I’m sorry,” Matthi had said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

  It didn’t matter. Pavli had wondered if he were dreaming – how had his brother gotten out of the Lazarene dormitory? Then he had seen, through the darkroom’s open doorway, one of the guards nervously keeping watch down the corridor. Several of the SS men had begun doing such little services for their captives, currying favor with those who might soon be their accusers.

  “You’ll be all right.” Kneeling beside the cot, Matthi had drawn the thin blanket under Pavli’s chin. “Just rest.” He had leaned closer, his voice soft and urgent. “Listen. It won’t be much longer. It can’t be. Things are happening, great things – out there.” He hand nodded toward the corridor’s window. The hard, cold moonlight of winter slipped through the bars. “Then it will be all over.”

  Pavli sat close to the edge of Ritter’s desk, his hand upon an empty glass, and remembered what his brother had whispered to him in that night. How strange, that his brother still believed that time could move again. That it had not been killed, taken apart by the doctor’s scalpel, the same as those who had slept in the now-empty beds.

  His brother’s voice had touched his ear. “You must hold out just a little while longer. The Americans or the British or the Russians – one of those will reach here soon, and then the war will be over for us. We’ll be free.”

  Silly Matthi – Pavli smiled to himself. Matthi believed the things that happened in that world beyond the barbed-wire fence – the armies whose advance was noted on the guards’ hidden radio – all that could somehow come inside this little world. How could they? Those things happened in time, and here there was no time.

  “We must survive…” His brother’s whisper, even softer in his memory. “Soon… any day now… it’ll be all over. And we’ll still be alive. Pavli…” A hand had prodded the shoulder beneath the blankets. “Do you hear me?”

  Yes… He hunched forward in the chair by Ritter’s desk, listening. “Yes…” He had turned his bloodied head upon the cot, his cheek against his brother’s palm.

  “You must do whatever it takes,” had said Matthi. “To survive. You understand that, don’t you? The others… they’ll understand someday. There’s so few of us left now…”

  Perhaps there would be only the two of them left, at the end. After all the others, the Lazarene men, the women and the children, after they all had been brought, one by one, up to the surgery. And after what was left of them had been taken away. After the red things in the forest pit had been set alight and the black smoke had spread across the sky. Ritter knew that Pavli and Matthi were brothers, the closest possible blood; he knew all things like that, they were written down in another one of his black-bound notebooks. Perhaps that would be Pavli’s reward for his faithful service to Ritter, for his working with the cameras in the surgery and later with the film in the darkroom. Ritter would spare Pavli’s brother, and the two of them, he and Matthi, would walk out the gate of the fences topped with barbed wire. That would be in the spring that would follow this endless winter. When time stepped across the land again…

  “There is no time.”

  The remembrance of Pavli’s brother whispering to him in the night now slipped away, the same as Matthi stepping back into the darkness and returning to the Lazarene dormitory. Pavli raised his head and gazed at the man on the other side of the desk. The doctor had drunk too much and it hadn’t helped.

  “No time,” mumbled Ritter again. His face seemed even older and more leaden. “No time to waste… if we are going to find out… everything…”
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br />   You poor fool, thought Pavli. The doctor still didn’t understand, didn’t realize how mired in non-time he was. Months ago – or had it been years? – Pavli had pried open the last crate that had been delivered to the darkroom and had found, not cartons and reels of blank film, ready to be used, but rubble and bricks wrapped in crumpled newspapers. He’d examined the crate more closely and had seen the marks of where it had been opened and re-nailed, the contents looted somewhere between the Agfa factory and the asylum. The black market in the cities devoured everything. That had presented Pavli with a dilemma: what use would Ritter have for a photographer with an empty camera?

  “No time…”

  For the last two months, long after his stock of film had been exhausted, Pavli had gone on recording the sessions in the surgical laboratory – or pretending to; first with no film for the stills, then none in the chattering cine camera. Pavli had offered up for Ritter’s inspection prints made from old negatives, segments of film that had been made at the beginning of the doctor’s research. The dissection of one corpse looked much like another; Pavli varied the old photographs and reels of film he showed to the doctor, being careful to match the pictures of a previous male subject to the latest one, and female to female, one child to another of roughly the same age. Ritter had suspected nothing – by now his obsessions had locked around him. He gave only a cursory glance to Pavli’s work, late at night in this office, then returned to the collection of skins, each with the Lazarene tattoos at the wrists and along the larger thoracic sections. The empty human forms floated in their basins of preserving chemicals or, the process completed, lay folded like strange, pale banners in the surgery’s neatly labelled cabinets. Only Ritter’s loving touch gave them any life, as he lifted the thin tissues closer to his gaze.