The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  He stood still, letting a wall of silence form around him. In it, he heard a voice whispering once more.

  Yes…

  His brother Matthi’s voice. He tilted his head, straining to catch every word.

  Now you’ll see. I’ll show you… I’ll show you everything

  …

  He nodded slowly. He had waited for this, his birthright, for so long. Another time had begun.

  Flames roared higher, engulfing the asylum and its empty world. He reached down and picked up the bag of black leather and started walking, following the others’ trail into the forest.

  ***

  Moonlight broke through the bare trees, scattering like coins across the ground. He had come to a place where the silence was outside him. The eyes of the night creatures, owls and woken ravens, and the creatures that hid among the twisting roots, watched him without fright. They knew as well.

  Pavli turned his head, listening. The others were nearby, concealed – for the moment – by the darkness. Ritter and the guards, making their way to some imagined safety. The clashing sounds of war had died away, the retreating army having either made its own escape or been annihilated by the advancing forces. Pavli’s nostrils flared, catching a trace of death stench, the smell of flesh burned and blackened, of bowels torn open by sudden metal. The quiet would make it more difficult for the others, to keep from blundering into the front lines. He would have to be careful, to avoid revealing himself to them; it wasn’t time for that yet. That was what his brother Matthi had told him, as he had fled the burning asylum. The guards would be on edge, raising their weapons against the slightest sound they heard around themselves; a few isolated shots had already rang out, close to him. They were not far away. They would be in reach…

  He knelt down, setting the bag of black leather in front of him. Then undid the buckle, drawing the strap out from beneath the handle, and pushed the bag open.

  Yes…

  His brother’s voice no louder than before. The words breathed at his ear.

  That’s right…

  He lifted out the skin, taking the empty wrists in his hands and raising the glove-like hands to the height of his own shoulders. The translucent substance unfolded, the torso straightening from the cramped space. The skin was lighter now, most of the preserving chemicals having leaked through the bag’s stitching. It was still damp to the touch, clinging to Pavli’s own wrists and forearms. He stood up, carrying it with him, until it was completely revealed, a naked ghost, the tattooed wounds drawn stark upon the pale silkiness. His brother’s face lolled forward, cheek against the place where his breastbone had raised two shallow curves.

  The skin lay along the ground, a shadow reversed in a photo negative. Pavli stepped back from it. Matthi had told him what he had to do next.

  Beneath the trees, he found the fallen branches he needed, one taller than himself, the other a little wider than his shoulders. With a strip torn from his shirt, he bound them into a crucifix. He used the jagged point of one of the branches to dig a hole in the frozen ground, deep enough to hold the cross up when he scraped a mound of dirt and pebbles around its base.

  He hung his brother’s skin upon the cross. The forearms dangled from the ends of the horizontal branch, the motion of the night air spreading the empty hands in a gesture of benediction. The hollow legs twisted and caught against the rough bark below. Matthi’s face was held upright by the wood that could be seen behind the holes of mouth and eyes.

  Pavli stood before the cross, his eyes raised to meet his brother’s gaze. He closed his own eyes and listened.

  Everything… I promised I would tell you everything…

  A raven passed beneath the moon. He felt its shadow upon his brow. Around him, in the forest’s silence, the small animals, the toads and winter-starved mice, crept out to watch.

  His brother’s hand touched his, the silken fingers soft upon his still-mortal flesh. For a moment, one that didn’t end, as he kept himself unseeing, it was as if his brother had stepped down from the cross, freed himself of it, skin filled with a radiant flesh, bones of diamond light.

  This is how… Matthi’s voice spoke stronger at his ear. These are the secrets…

  He stepped closer, his brother’s arms folding softly around his shoulders. He didn’t know if it was his hand or his brother’s, that parted his shirt, bared his chest.

  Here. Fingertips touched his unmarked ribs. And here. They traced unseen wounds upon his wrists.

  Pavli stood half-naked in the forest’s cold and silence, listening to his brother’s voice. There would be things he must do, a great task; that would come. He stood and received his heritage, that which had been denied him, the faith of the Lazarenes.

  ***

  He woke from a new dreaming. One in which he had never been before.

  The birds of the night had shouted in triumph, far above the forest. He had heard them wheeling against the sky, their black wings blotting out the stars. Even before his brother had finished speaking to him, before he had felt the soft, empty hands clasp around his neck, drawing him toward his brother’s face, as though for the kiss of peace.

  Pavli sat up from the ground, feeling its wetness beneath his palms. Grey morning light sifted through the trees. He shivered in his nakedness, the cold drawing ice through the centers of his bones, his jaw trembling uncontrollably. He looked to one side and saw someone else still sleeping, body sprawled across a mound of rotting-black leaves; farther away, under a thicket of close-knit twigs was another one.

  He stood up, crystals of ice stinging his bare feet. With his arms tight around himself for warmth, he looked down at the nearest sleeper. It was one of the guards; he could recognize the SS uniform. Or what was left of it – the trousers and jacket had been slashed to ribbons. Blood had soaked through the ragged edges of cloth, spreading in a pool beneath the shoulders and the backs of the legs. The chest and abdomen was exposed, revealing the diagonal wound, pink coils of viscera loosened beneath the shattered ribcage. The stilled heart had been cut nearly in two, a red fist now spread open.

  The other guard’s throat had been slashed, deep enough to show the hard knots of spine below the trachea. His eyes were still open, registering shock; Pavli looked down at him, remembering the same face, the same expression, from his dreaming. The guard had looked over his shoulder and had screamed, trying to raise his rifle, but it had been too late.

  There were others scattered through the forest; Pavli could see them now, as the dawn spread more light. One sat with its back to a tree, hands mired in the blood collected in its lap. Another curled in fetal position around a useless rifle; its eyes were filled with wonder, as though it had seen a miracle in the moment of its death.

  Pavli wondered if any of the guards had managed to escape. It didn’t seem likely to him; the forest’s silence told him that he and the smaller creatures were the only things left alive in it. He looked down at himself. His own chest and arms were smeared with blood, a red hieroglyphic roughened with dirt and broken twigs. He brushed away as much as he could, his fingertips dragging against the sticky markings.

  The marks of his feet in the snow patches led him back to the cross he’d made. His brother Matthi’s skin was no longer draped upon it; that lay a few feet before it, the arms carefully outspread, the empty face gazing up at the clouded sky. Its chest and hands were daubed with red as well. The voice that spoke at Pavli’s ear had been a thing of the night, now silent in the first shadows of day.

  Threads of blood spiraled around the upright branch of the cross. Impaled at the top was the head of Herr Doktor Ritter, the wooden end thrust up through the gaping throat. The eyes had been torn out, the sockets weeping red into the mouth dangling open. A few yards away was the rest of the corpse, lines across the ground showing where it had been dragged from elsewhere.

  Bright metal glittered at the base of the cross. Pavli bent down and picked up an ornate knife; he recognized it as Ritter’s dagger, that he had kept on
his desk at the asylum. Of all the things there, he had taken this, the ceremonial emblem of his membership in the SS. Pavli rubbed a finger along the words inscribed on the blade. Meine Ehre hei?t Treue. His fingertip came away marked with blood still wet.

  He found his clothes and the black leather bag farther away. A streamlet of melted snow trickled nearby; he broke the ice covering it and washed himself, the cold tightening his flesh.

  He debated throwing away Ritter’s dagger, but finally tucked it inside his shirt, snugged against the waistband of his trousers. Alone, and with far to go, he might have need of it. He knelt down with the bag beside his brother’s skin; he carefully folded the silken matter and placed it inside, then drew the strap through the buckle. There had been no possibility of his leaving this part of his brother behind, with the profane corpses lying among the trees.

  Standing up, he held the bag close to his chest. In the distance, he could hear the faint noises of machinery, the rumbling of tanks and heavy artillery vehicles. He had no way of knowing to which army they might belong. If the battle began again, it would sweep over him like a fiery tide, crushing him beneath its treads. He would have to hurry, reach some kind of sanctuary before the earth split open once more.

  His exhausted brain could think only of the way back to Berlin, the narrow roads by which the trucks had brought the Lazarenes to the asylum so long ago. If he could reach the city, there would be places he could hide, the curtains drawn over the windows of the bedroom he had shared with Matthi, the cellar of his uncle’s house, the alleys twisting around themselves, where he could elude any pursuers…

  There was nowhere else to go.

  Pavli wished his brother would speak to him again, tell him what to do, as Matthi had told him during the long dreaming night that had just ended. But he couldn’t wait for another night to come. The images of that dreaming – the shadows of ravens, the terrified faces of the guards before the blood was made to leap from their throats – tangled inside his skull. There had been another, whose face had been impossible to see beneath a darkened hood, a figure striding through the forest, implacable in the stalking of its prey. He tried to remember, but that was all, only that glimpse as he had fallen beneath the heavy sky.

  His legs ached with the temptation to lie down, to curl next to the crucifix with the blind head staked above. To sleep, and wait, to let his dreaming unravel itself and become a memory he could grasp. But there was no time for that.

  The bag of black leather, with its silken weight inside, dangled from his hand as he started walking toward home.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “This is impossible, Herr von Behren. We cannot shoot in these conditions.”

  He looked up from the pages of the script. His hands trembled with fatigue; he had to force his grip tighter, to keep the papers with his own typed words from slipping away and scattering at his feet. The assistant director’s accusing, impatient glare met his own red-rimmed gaze.

  “Oh?” Von Behren rested his elbows on the wooden arms of the folding chair. He received the impression that the young man standing there blamed him for everything that happened. “And why is that?”

  The assistant director stared at him in disbelief. “Are you mad?” He shouted to make himself heard above the sounds that battered the studio’s walls. “The Russians are outside the city!” His hands lifted, shaking in agitation. “It’s not a matter of weeks or days now – it will be only hours before they’re in the streets!”

  “Yes… yes, of course…” Von Behren slowly nodded. He found the other’s voice more exhausting than all the bombs and artillery shells. How could the fellow raise his voice so? His own lungs were silted with ash, from the breathing of the smoke that darkened the Berlin air. When he could sleep, curling up on a pile of mildewed stage curtains that served as a bed for all the actors and crew, he would awake panting, his heart as loud as the explosions that strode among the burning buildings. The littlest of his actresses, a skinny creature of barely fifteen years, had crept into his arms, whimpering with fright, and he had rocked her until dawn, kissing her on the top of her head and telling her that everything would be all right. That was why he had not left to go to his own flat for… he couldn’t remember how long it had been. For all he knew, his flat, with his shelves of books and desk piled with unfinished scripts, all his memories, no longer existed. That district had taken a pounding from the American night bombers; he had been able to see the flames mounting up from outside the studio, the fire spreading from one building to the next, smoke roiling through the beams of the flak searchlights. He hadn’t even sent one of his assistants to check whether his flat had survived. It didn’t matter; he belonged here, with the ones who had come – it seemed so odd – to depend upon him. In the morning, after a particularly bad night, their hands would shake as they sipped at cups of ersatz coffee, their eyes dark-rimmed from lack of sleep. And they would turn and look at him, waiting for his instructions on what to do next, to flee or carry on with the filming of Der Rote Jager.

  “ Herr von Behren – are you listening to me?”

  He stood up, laying the script, with its notations on camera angles and lighting in the margins, on the chair behind him. “I heard you. God knows I should be deaf by now, with all this racket, but I’m not.” He pushed his way past and strode out to the middle of the studio space. He clapped his hands once for attention, though he knew he didn’t need to. All eyes turned toward him, those of the crew behind the lights and cameras, the carpenters and painters repairing the damage to the scenery flats that had been knocked over by the shockwaves, and the actors, already in costume and ready to take their marks. The shooting schedule, after so many delays, had last come round to the script’s grand banquet scene. Heavy, medieval-looking tables were laden with the clever imitations of food that the propmakers had cobbled together from colored plaster and modeling clay. “Please, everyone – I have an announcement to make.”

  The actors appeared surreal against the machinery of filming, a confusion of time and place; the men in their doublets and hose, chains of faux gold brightened with glycerine around their necks, dangling barbaric emblems of rank, the women’s long gowns heavy with intricate embroidery, their hair upswept and laced with the beads that would photograph as strands of pearls. Outside the studio, the twentieth century collapsed in flame and ruin, while this little bubble of the middle ages shivered with each blow.

  “I have been advised -” He glanced sidelong at the assistant director for a moment. “That the world is coming to an end.” No one smiled; he was merely stating the obvious. “I can assure you that it makes little difference to me. But I am willing to concede that there may be those among you would feel more comfortable, or perhaps even safer, in one of the underground shelters our thoughtful Reich has provided for the citizens of Berlin. If so, I would suggest that you leave now and make your way there, while there is still light to see by. Your doing so will, I am sure, greatly oblige the Russian army that presently knocks upon our gates; you will have conveniently buried yourselves and thus saved them the trouble.” Von Behren clasped his hands together and looked across the faces watching him. With exquisite dramatic timing, a distant volley of artillery fire sounded, followed by a rapid sequence of explosions, the last of which shook dust down from the studio’s overhead beams. The little actress – he felt so sorry for her – bit her lip to hold back her frightened tears, averting her face so none of the others would see. “Well? Those of you who do wish to leave should do so as a group; I would imagine your chances would be better that way.”

  The actors and crew glanced around at each other. After a few moments of silence, the chief grip stepped forward. “ Herr von Behren -” The man hadn’t shaved or washed in the last several days; his overalls were stained with black grease. “We have enough petrol to keep the generators going for eight, possibly up to ten hours. If we take down the canvas from the skylights, we might be able to shoot by daylight for an additional four to six hours – i
f we get started right away.” He looked at the others for support, then back to the director. “We’re wasting time, Herr von Behren.”

  “Very well. You’re right, of course.” The show of loyalty touched his heart, though he knew at the same time it would have been easier if they had all leapt up and rushed outside, hurrying to the nearest shelters. Now he would be forced to show as much courage as they had, to carry them all upon his shoulders. He turned to the assistant director. “You’re free to go, of course. I would understand.”

  The assistant director, arms folded across his chest, looked sullen. “There’s someone else whose decision you should ask. We won’t be able to accomplish much if she decides to leave.”

  Von Behren knew that accomplishing anything at all was not the issue. Under these circumstances, if they produced even a few minutes of usable film, that would be a miracle. Der Rote Jager was a long way from being completed; there were weeks, if not months, of primary shooting to be done on it. Who knew if there would be one brick sitting on top of another in Berlin, this time tomorrow? The Fuhrer and his remaining staff, those too blindly faithful or stupid to have flown to refuges in the west, had already been sequestered for months deep inside the earth, in the fortified bunker beneath the Chancellery yard. Even the Gauleiter of Berlin, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was there with his wife Magda and their blond children, awaiting the end. Goebbels had long ago ordered all the theatres closed, part of his dedicating the Reich to total war. Even if they were to complete the film of Der Rote Jager, there would be no place to show it, other than a private screening for the Reichsminister himself, the images flickering against the concrete wall of his cramped, stale-smelling burrow. Perhaps that was what Goebbels wanted; the equipment and the supplies, more valuable than money, had kept on arriving at the studio, so von Behren and his crew could continue with the filming. Or else they had been forgotten about, and the Reich’s machinery had carried on with the orders it already had been given, a captainless train bound to iron tracks, hurtling toward its fiery destination.