The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  “Joseph!”

  His head swam with the images of another’s memory, the deaths of the golden-haired children, as he heard Marte scream the single name. He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the center of the room, looking wildly about herself, as though she expected an answer to the shout still echoing in the bunker. She burst into tears as he placed his arm around her shoulders.

  “He was here -” She struck a weak fist against Pavli’s chest. “He knows, he’s the only one who can tell me -”

  Marte was still weeping as he led up into the cold night air, still thick with smoke but breathable. She slipped from his grasp and knelt beside the drunken soldier.

  “Where is he?” She pulled the man toward her by the front of his uniform. His head lolled back, eyelids fluttering open. “Where is Reichsminister Goebbels? Where did he go -”

  The soldier laughed. “He went nowhere, Fraulein. The bastard’s still here.” He reached for Pavli’s hand. “Help me up. I’ll show you.”

  Leaning his weight on Pavli, the soldier hobbled with his wounded leg dragging behind. “This way.” He nodded toward the corner of the rough concrete structure.

  They had come around the other side when they had entered the remains of the Chancellery garden; if they had gone by this side, they would have stumbled across the two corpses to which the soldier brought them.

  “There – you see?” The soldier’s rank breath was right against Pavli’s face. “He wanted to go the same way – they both did, him and his stuck-up wife – the same way the Fuhrer did. We burned that bastard yesterday, broke up what was left with a shovel handle, and then we scattered the ashes all around, so the Ivans wouldn’t be able to get their hands on any piece of him. So of course your precious Reichsminister Goebbels would have to have the same thing, wouldn’t he?” The soldier’s voice sharpened with scorn. “Burn ’em up, soon as he and his wife had killed themselves, those were his orders. But we’d already used most of the cans of petrol on his boss – it takes a lot of fuel to get to ashes. And there wasn’t time to stand around watching these two burn. Just doused ’em and threw the match, and then everybody was gone. Everybody but me.” The soldier’s weight sagged against Pavli; he had to catch himself to keep from falling. “I had to smell ’em all this time, ’til the flames died out.” He spat on the ground. “Made me sick, it did -” His head wobbled, and Pavli let him slip unconscious onto the ground.

  More of the clouds parted, letting through enough moonlight to show the two charred bodies. They lay on their backs, one barely recognizable as a woman, the golden hair gone, blackened bone visible through the scalp. Pavli could even see where a bullet had cracked open the skull close to the burnt scrap of ear cartilage. The other corpse, though its skin had turned dark as a piece of bacon that had fallen from the skillet into the fire, was still recognizable as the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Gauleiter and defender of Berlin. Goebbels’ mouth was drawn open in a silent grimace, his eyesockets scorched hollow. Scraps of his dress uniform’s collar and sleeves were still in place above the sunken chest.

  Marte dropped to her knees. “Joseph -” She shouted the living’s name into the face of the dead. She placed both hands against the protruding knobs of the corpse’s shoulders, looking for a reply that could never come. “ Joseph! ”

  The burnt smell thickened in Pavli’s nostrils, suffocating him. He felt Marte grab his hand, saw a hysterical angel tugging him down beside her.

  “You -” Both her hands gripped his forearm, her fingers clawing in desperation. “You can bring him back! You have to – so he can tell me where my son is!”

  He shook his head. “No… I can’t. It’s impossible.” He stepped back, trying to pull Marte away from the blackened object before her. “Don’t you see? He’s dead, there’s nothing left to bring back -”

  “Try! You must try!” Her hands stayed locked upon his arm. “I was dead… I was… and then… you did that…” She glanced down at Goebbels’ sightless visage. “Even for a moment… a few seconds, anything… that’s all it would take…”

  “All right -” His will left him, sapped away by the angel’s tear-wet face and her pleading words. How could he refuse her, when her mere image had kept him alive for so long at the asylum? He sank down beside her. “I’ll try.”

  He had no knife with him; Ritter’s SS dagger had been left behind on the floor of the shelter. But none was needed. With his thumbnail, he broke a line through the charred undersides of the corpse’s wrists, then along the ribs of the exposed torso. Flakes of black ash clung to his hand; he shook them away before going any further.

  Again, he heard his brother’s voice whispering at his ear, the pale thing upon the makeshift crucifix imparting the secrets of the Lazarene faith. A sacrament to be administered to the dying, not to the dead. To take the skin of death away…

  But here there was no skin, no life inside the husk of ash and cinder. This was sacrilege; he knew that even as he obeyed the angel’s command and set his palms beneath the withered form’s shoulderblades. He drew his hands apart, away from the spine, feeling a crumbling, mortal substance peel away and gather against his fingertips.

  His brother had given him his inheritance, given him the power to take away death, bestow life. He closed his eyes and let the sacrament move inside his arms, down to his own unscarred wrists. Without Christ’s stigmata, the emblems of sacrifice that had brought the ancient craft into the light; darkness welled up inside his head, pushing away all thought, even the memory of his own name…

  The weight against his hands shifted. He heard something tearing, like fire-blackened paper.

  “Joseph…”

  Her whisper brought Pavli’s eyes open. He looked down at what he held, saw the corpse’s chest swell, a white angle of breastbone protruding through the charred flesh, vertebrae cracking as the spine arched into a bow.

  Marte reached past him, trying to touch the corpse’s face. A spark moved inside the blind sockets; the lipless mouth opened wider, the black tongue thrusting against the splintered teeth. A hissing sound came from deep inside the throat. Pavli watched as its left hand rose, brushing against his own chest, the fingers like a withered tree branch as they tightened into claws, struggling to touch the hand of the woman above.

  The hissing changed, the remains of lips and tongue pressing against each other, to form a single word.

  Her name…

  She screamed and pushed Pavli away from the corpse; she screamed the dead man’s name as he fell back, twisting onto his side.

  “Joseph!” She gathered the corpse into her arms, her face close to its sharp-edged mask. “Tell me… tell me where he is… my baby…”

  On his hands and knees, Pavli saw the last ember die in the hollows of its skull. The hissing noise stopped, the clawing hand frozen an inch from touching her.

  The last of its death; he knew that. He got to his feet and stood behind Marte, reaching down to pull her away from the lifeless form. “Don’t… it’s no use…”

  She knew it as well. The corpse slid from her hands. It lay with the one hand still raised, the fingers curved toward the palm, the thing it had desired now beyond its grasp.

  With his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright, Pavli turned and looked behind himself. In the distance, he heard the sound of artillery fire. In a few seconds, the ground beneath them would tremble and split open beneath the force of the bombardment. And after that, a matter of hours, the Russian soldiers would stream across the ruins of their enemy’s capital.

  “Come.” He guided her out of the rubble-strewn garden, toward the narrow passage that opened onto the broken streets. “I think I remember the way.” He wondered if they would be able to reach the shelter before the last tide of the war surged over them.

  It didn’t matter. The angel wept against his neck as he led her through the dark.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Herr Wise found him poking through the ruins of the studio.
I must look so shabby to him – von Behren’s coat was grey with dust from crumbling plaster and concrete. As the American picked his way over the slabs of broken walls and fire-twisted window frames, he spotted the director through the open doorway of one of the still-standing buildings, prodding the debris with the point of his cane, then bending down and picking up some small glittering object.

  “Ah, Herr Wise -” Von Behren turned and smiled, as if caught in some mildly embarrassing folly. He held up a framing viewfinder, the enameled metal scratched, but the lens still intact. Its glass shone in the sunlight piercing the soundstage’s damaged roof. “You see? Who knows how many more treasures are waiting here to be discovered?”

  He had his reasons for being in a good mood. Wise had been with him the day before, when the film salvaged from the studio’s underground storage vault had been screened, for the first time since the end of the fighting in Berlin. Wise had commandeered an editing suite over at the UFA complex in Babelsberg, at the edge of the city, just for that purpose. All the reels that had been shot of Der Rote Jager, his work in progress, had survived in good enough shape to be used. The artillery shells that had hit the studio during the last days of the battle for the city – he had told Wise about getting the actors and crew out to the nearest shelter – had buried the vault in layers of brick and plaster, keeping the fires away from the irreplaceable celluloid. Von Behren’s cameraman had died there, skull and spine broken by the walls collapsing just moments after he had secured the film canisters; that sacrifice had been the somber edge to the director’s relief at finding the film intact.

  “You must excuse me.” Von Behren made a formal nod of his head. “I keep forgetting your exalted rank – I see you always as when we were in Hollywood. Is it a colonel you are now? Or general?”

  Wise smiled at the joke. “Hardly. Believe me, it’s not going to be much longer for this get-up.” He brushed his hand across the front of his uniform. “My head’s already a civilian. When we get back to the States, I’m planting myself behind my studio desk for good.”

  “Oh?” Von Behren raised an eyebrow. “When we get back? What do you mean?”

  “That’s why I came out here. Got some more good news for you.” Wise took off his cap and wiped his brow. Summer had made the rubble-filled streets hot and even dustier, the humid air buzzing with midges breeding in the craters filled with stagnant water. Outside, the studio’s wreckage made a mound of broken concrete high enough to climb upon and look down the surrounding streets. A few blocks away, a line of Trummerfrauen, ragged figures with their hair covered in kerchiefs, shuffled bricks from one woman’s hands to another’s, slowly clearing one of the bombsites. “I’ve been pulling some pretty big strings in Washington on your behalf. But then, those people owe me a lot of favors for all the fund-raising I did during the war.”

  Only a small lie, thought von Behren. He knew that the American film producer’s favors weren’t being called in for his sake, but for Marte Helle’s.

  “Everything’s settled,” continued Wise. “We got the okay to ship you out of here. Final stop on your itinerary will be Los Angeles.”

  “Indeed.” Von Behren watched the point of his cane knock aside a few more bits of plaster. “And will I be unaccompanied on this voyage?”

  “Of course not. We talked about this already, Ernst. It’ll be you and Marte and this kid you told me about -”

  “Pavli.” The director nodded. “Yes, that will be absolutely necessary. I doubt if Marte would consent to go, otherwise. She relies on him a great deal. As distantly related as they are – some type of cousins, I understand – they are the only family each of them has left now. They spend long hours in conversation with each other; things that I suppose are not to be shared with me.” Von Behren voice turned wistful for a moment. “No matter. Young Iosefni has proved himself valuable to me as well. Did I tell you we started shooting again, with him as my new cameraman? Extraordinary – he seems to have had experience with cine equipment, but he won’t tell me from where. His father or his uncle – somebody – ran a photographer’s studio; that’s all I’ve been able to find out.” A shrug. “He picked up quickly the few things I was able to show him, but his eye for angles and lighting – that is a gift. He should do well at your studio in Hollywood.”

  “That’s fine. Happy to give him a chance. Since it’ll be a while before there’s any more filming going on around here.”

  “I suppose that’s true, Herr Wise.” It would have been easier if his old studio, plus his crew and actors, had all wound up in the American or British zones. Getting anything done through the Russian headquarters was nearly impossible; truckloads and freight cars full of loot, everything from factory machines to a shiny brass mountain of marching band instruments, were already heading eastward, never to be seen again – not to mention any human resources the Russians thought might be of value to them. “But it seems a shame. I realize that is callous of me, but I almost feel as if the destruction we see around us -” He gestured toward the empty windows and fire-blackened buildings nearby. “It is as if I had designed it all myself, the most elaborate set a filmmaker could ever devise. You recall, in the last pages of the script, how the land is cursed for the sins of its noblemen? The red hunter exacts a terrible retribution. What better way to show that than to point our camera toward these photogenic ruins that have been provided for us? Really, Herr Wise, there are sections of the city where one would hardly know they were still part of the twentieth century.”

  Such would be easily believed by the American producer; Wise had no doubt seen as much for himself. Since Wise’s arrival in Berlin on the coattails of the U.S. Army, after the Russian artillery had at last gone silent, there would have been plenty of time to tour the devastated areas, the streets that still stank of corpses not yet dug out from the rubble. Long before now, von Behren had grown sick of the war and its aftermath; he could barely wait for the day when he’d step off the the train at Union Station and walk out underneath the palm trees and caressing sunshine. The reports were already circulating through the Military Government offices about how many deaths from cold and starvation were likely when winter rolled across Europe; the sites where the mass graves would be dug had already been marked on the Occupation maps. He was planning on being well away before that grim time came.

  “Guess you’ll be glad to get out of here.”

  “How soon?” He asked the most important question. “Before we leave?”

  Wise shrugged. “Might be a few weeks yet. I tried, but I couldn’t arrange a flight out for us. There’s a limit to what I can do. We’ll have to wait until there’s a ship sailing out of Marseilles, see if we can squeeze onto that.”

  “It is perhaps for the best.” Von Behren lifted the viewfinder to his eye and sighted through it. “A shame that my film will remain unfinished. Wouldn’t that have been an excellent item to bring back with us to Hollywood? A print of the rough cut of Der Rote Jager.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Wise scanned across the ruins, then turned his gaze back to him. “There are always other movies to make. As long as you’ve got your talent lined up.” He frowned. “Actually, that’s why I came looking for you. I was thinking Marte might have been here.”

  “Ah, yes. Our leading lady.” Von Behren smiled again. “I’m afraid I can’t help you at the moment. She and her cousin, young Iosefni, disappeared this morning on one of their mysterious errands.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Why should they tell me anything?” He shrugged. “But you have no reason to fear. Pawli is quite devoted to her. What harm could come to them now?”

  Wise nodded, though his expression remained troubled. Von Behren could tell what the man was thinking. Mysterious was indeed the word for Marte Helle now, even more so than before. Her quiet beauty was even more evident, but in a way that had somehow touched a cold hand to his heart when he had seen her again. Perhaps something had formed inside her, like ice, where there had onl
y been emptiness before. That was to be expected, he supposed; no one could walk through the war and come out unchanged. He hadn’t.

  There was one physical change in Marte that von Behren had pointed out to Herr Wise, the director’s hand gesturing toward the image on the screen. Her eyes, that had both been blue before. Something had happened, as in old stories of a person’s hair turning white in one day. Now her eyes were like those of her distant relation, one still blue, the other transformed to golden-brown. As if a mask had been stripped away, revealing the true face, the cold, level gaze beneath…

  In black-and-white, the change was noticeable only in extreme close-up, and he had already made plans to work around those, using outtakes from the reels he’d shot before. When Der Rote Jager was completed, it would be unlikely that anyone in the audience would be able to tell what had happened.

  Small details; Wise had shrugged them off. “You better have a talk with her,” the American said now. “This city’s still hardly the safest place in the world in which to go wandering off. And if you’re going to have your things pulled together before the ship sails – all of you – you’d better get busy.”

  “Yes, yes; of course.” Von Behren slipped the viewfinder into his pocket. “She has already made a promise to me about that. I expect she will keep it.”

  Herr Wise left him still poking through the studio rubble. As he watched the American thread his way through the wreckage in the streets, he tried to push Marte’s face out of his thoughts.