The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  ***

  The broken metal of the roof creaked as the night wind pried at it. Von Behren glanced up at the noise, then drew his jacket tighter about himself. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “There is a military curfew in this area – and patrols.”

  “Then we should work fast.” Pavli kicked aside a few pieces of brick and settled the legs of the camera tripod on the studio’s floor. “It will only take a few moments.”

  “Just about as long as it takes for a Russian soldier to put bullets through our skulls.” He sighed and shook his head. “What is it that she wants, anyway?”

  “The same that you do. To finish the film.”

  “I had no idea she even cared about that.”

  “But you do, Herr von Behren. Der Rote Jager is your film. All that Marte can do is play the part you gave her. To the end.” With a bit of rag, Pavli wiped the camera lens clean. “The last scene.”

  “If only.” At any moment, von Behren knew, there would be footsteps outside, and guttural Slavic voices. “From what I’ve been able to see, none of this ever ends. It just goes on and on.” He glanced toward the battered scenery, the painted castle stones, barely visible in the shadows. “I shouldn’t have let you drag me here.”

  “I didn’t have to drag you.” Pavli turned away from the camera and showed a thin smile. “I couldn’t have kept you away.”

  That was true. I’m an idiot, thought the director. Madness within madness. The world was in ruins all about them – what better than to film some scrap of legend from the Middle Ages? The red hunter had seized its prey in the forest of the city’s streets, had placed its skinning knife to the throats of those who had thought they could outrun their fates. Von Behren knew he could hardly escape his own; he had to be here.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this over with. Is she ready?”

  Pavli nodded. “We found one of the gowns. It will do.”

  “And petrol?”

  “Enough.”

  He supposed that if one dug around in the rubble long enough, one could find anything. Pavli had located a generator that had been used for outdoor shoots; von Behren watched as the cameraman sloshed the fuel dregs from several metal canisters into its tank. It took several attempts for Pavli to start it up, then the chugging rumble broke the empty studio’s silence.

  “ Schei? -” Von Behren cringed at the noise. “That will bring every Russian from here to Moscow around.”

  Pavli appeared unconcerned. He looked through the camera’s eyepiece as he turned it toward the pool of light that had unfolded against the mock stones. A single light, rigged to a dangling iron rail; it brought the shadows in its beam to razor sharpness.

  “Yes,” whispered von Behren. His breath caught in his throat. Suddenly, he didn’t care if a entire battalion of Russian soldiers was outside. The illusion was perfect; it was real. Just as he had seen it, on the screen within his own thoughts and dreams. Light and shadow. The final scene, the last glimpse of another world, that never ended. “Bring it closer.”

  He didn’t need to look through the camera, to see what it saw, even as Pavli adjusted the lens. “That’s fine.” He called out her name: “Marte…”

  She stepped forward from the shadows. The hem of the white gown floated luminous above the stage’s rubble-strewn floor. Von Behren had to close his eyes for a moment; time and loss had made her that much more beautiful. To gaze upon her would blind the unwary, as though the moon and its attendant stars had been revealed for the first time. The blind would see; darkened theatres would be temples. And he who showed the rapt, grieving audiences this face – he would be immortal as well. Von Behren leaned the side of his face close to the camera, making its eye his own.

  “Hold.” He laid his hand upon Pavli’s shoulder. “Just hold.”

  No need to tell the cameraman. He saw as well.

  She turned her annihilating gaze straight toward them. The hearts of men would shatter, knowing how they had failed her, as they had failed the ones sitting beside them in the dark. Who wept at small graves, the freshly turned earth sifting through their empty hands…

  All that was in her gaze.

  “Hold…”

  Marte turned away from the camera. To profile; her golden hair, which would be pure light on film, on the screen, drifted against her throat as she reached up and loosened it. Silently, she looked before her, seeing nothing but her own memories. Her fingertips moved downward, pushing aside the gown’s thin substance, baring her white shoulders.

  He watched. And saw all that happened next. Light and shadow.

  Something more weightless than silk, more colorless than air, brighter than star and knifeblade. That was not skin, but for a moment held the shape of the naked body from which it had risen. As though it were smoke; or what was left after smoke had drifted into the night sky.

  He watched, as the camera watched. He saw what it saw.

  “Closer…”

  Pavli reached up and adjusted the lens, a fraction of an inch.

  Silk and smoke, tracing upward into the darkness, out of the single light’s gaze – such a thing had not been in the script. But that will work, thought von Behren. Better than anything he could have devised.

  This was why Pavli had brought him here. To see this, to make it part of his film. His masterpiece.

  Her masterpiece. This moment when she become nothing but light. That drifted upward, luminous, weightless. Casting no shadow, to mingle with the other shadows close about her.

  He watched as her hand drew softly down to the hollow of her throat. Parting the silk that clung to her white breast for only a moment, as though she were discarding another gown from her body. A gown that no night wind caught, but which drifted away from her, tangling with the other strands that had already been laid upon the darkness.

  He knew already how the scene would end. The only way it could.

  Silk and smoke. Light and shadow. Until nothing was left. Her hand had already reached her heart, a pale thing that trembled. For only a moment, before it unlocked itself and leapt slowly upward, mingling and disappearing with all that still bore some fragment of her image.

  “Pull back…”

  The camera saw it all. Light and shadow…

  TWENTY-SIX

  “ Herr Wise – I have something for you.”

  Pavli watched as von Behren reached inside the duffel bag he had carried for him across the city’s ruins, and then inside this room.

  “Something,” continued the director, “I believe you might want.”

  “What, a souvenir?” Wise looked up from the papers spread out before him. Not on a real table, but a door taken from the rubble heap across the street, the bricks and plaster that had once been a stylish block of flats here in Berlin, then laid across two stacks of empty ammo canisters. The yellow papers looked like telegrams; Pavli remembered hearing the American producer say something about a sackful having finally caught up with him, and that while the war might be over, the task of running a film studio in faraway Hollywood still went on. “Thanks, but I’ve already got enough to remember this place by.”

  The duffel bag was just about empty, only one thing in it, flat and round. Von Behren drew the metal object out, stepped away from Pavli, and laid it down in front of Wise. He stood back, folding the stiff grey-green canvas in his hands.

  “This some kind of a joke?” With one finger, Wise prodded the film canister as though it might have been some kind of bomb. Battered and dented, wide enough to cover the papers on the desk – a streak of something that might have been rust discolored the lid. “Movies, I’ve got already. Back at home. That’s what we do there, remember?”

  “It’s what’s left,” said Wise quietly. “Of her.”

  Wise’s hand froze, one finger touching the ridged edge of the film canister. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Marte.” The single word, the name, was all that von Behren needed to speak.

  Wise rose from his chai
r, hand flat on the film canister. “Where is she?”

  “Someplace… I couldn’t follow. Nobody can,” said von Behren. But we filmed her -” The director pointed behind himself, toward Pavli. “We did what Marte wanted us to do.”

  “Filmed her doing what?”

  “The last scene. Of the film. My film.”

  “That Red Hunter thing? Or whatever the hell it’s called -”

  “ Der Rote Jager.” Wise nodded. “Yes. We finished it. At least we can say that much.”

  “How? The studio’s in ruins -”

  Von Behren gave a small shrug. “We managed.”

  “Huh. I seem to have underestimated you.” Wise seemed genuinely impressed. “Is it any good?”

  To Pavli, that seemed so unimportant. There were other things that he himself might have told the American producer, of what had happened, and what von Behren had seen as the camera had clicked away, its lens carefully wiped clean of dust and ashes and focused on the woman in the empty, broken soundstage. A little of the medieval scenery had survived the bombings, enough to suggest the final ruin of those who set their hearts against their own fate. That pursued them, relentless. The dark forests filled the streets of the city…

  “I don’t know,” said Wise. “I haven’t seen it.”

  But von Behren had told him what the camera had seen. Of Marte undoing the belt knotted around her waist, so that she could then reach up and slide the gown free of her shoulders, so it could fall about her feet, a pool of glistening silk…

  “What, you needed a projector or something there?” Wise frowned in puzzlement. “But… you filmed it…”

  Pavli kept his silence. When he closed his eyes, he could see what had happened, the scene in the studio, as the director had just spoken of it. Marte touching the skin beneath her breast, and another silken layer coming loose at her fingertip. That drifted free, a weightless and translucent pennant; then more, tatters of a substance finer and deeper than skin, warmed by her slowing pulse…

  “Then we can watch it right now. There’s a projector out in the truck; we can get it set up -” Wise’s voice halted in mid-sentence, as he picked up the film canister and felt its weight in his hands.

  Pavli opened his eyes again. The scene played out to its final frames. The silken fragments, all that was left, caught by the wind through the studio’s crumbling walls, and carried like spider threads out to the night. Dispersing like mist, so that even that last little bit was gone. The camera turned to the empty gown on the stage’s floor, where the woman had stood. Gone now; the night wind fluttered the delicate cloth, then stilled itself…

  “This some kind of a joke?”

  He saw now Wise’s anger-reddened face.

  “A joke…” Von Behren nodded. “Yes, perhaps it is.”

  Pavli watched as Herr Wise pried the film canister apart and its two empty sections fell open on the desk.

  “Everything is,” said von Behren.

  “There’s nothing here.” The American’s gaze was murderous as he looked back up. “You didn’t film anything, did you?”

  “ Das stimmt. That is correct.” The director nodded. “There was no film in the camera. It was… unnecessary.”

  Pavli still didn’t know if von Behren had been aware, when it happened, of the subterfuge he had committed. Sometimes he thought that the director must have known – how could he not have? – that no one other than the two of them would see his masterpiece’s final scene. And that would be enough.

  And perhaps Marte had known as well. He had already thought of that. And that it wouldn’t have mattered to her, either. The scene would be played out, and the movie finished. The camera had witnessed it, and that would be the end. No lights would come up in the theatre, the audience hurrying away into the night…

  “Why the hell did you do that?”

  Neither said anything. He should know, thought Pavli. It was there to see, not in von Behren’s haunted gaze, but in his own, peaceful and silent at last. I have her now, Pavli told himself. Safe from all the world. Locked in memory, where none could touch her.

  “I don’t know,” said von Behren, after the empty moment had passed. “Why do people do anything?”

  “Get out of here.” Wise swept the empty metal clattering to the floor. “You’re just in my way now. I need to go find her.”

  “You won’t.” Von Behren wadded the duffel bag tighter in his hands. “She’s gone. Where nothing more can happen to her…”

  “What?”

  Pavli spoke. “You don’t need to go looking for her,” he said quietly. “You already have what’s left of her. Go home, Herr Wise. You can watch the film you do have of her. The one that was sent to you before the war. And there was another, nicht wahr? That you made with her. You can watch those forever. Those were the only real part of her, anyway. All the rest…” Pavli shrugged. “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Get out.” Wise had gone pale, his voice taut and trembling. “Just get out.”

  “Very well.” Von Behren tossed the duffel bag onto the floor. “Please – take care of yourself. Nothing that happened was any fault of yours. Of anyone’s.”

  They left the American where he sat in the little room, the empty film canister before him.

  Von Behren looked over at the one beside him. “Are you all right, Pavli?”

  “Yes. Of course.” He managed to smile. “ Alles in ordnung. Everything is as it should be.”

  “And then what?” Von Behren studied him. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.” A shrug. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Yes… you’re right.” He gazed down the street of ruins. “Everyone is gone, sooner or later.”

  “No -” Pavli spoke up, his voice no more than a whisper. “ Niemals -” He shook his head. “Never. They might leave… but they are not gone.”

  The director stopped and raised a hand to shield his eyes. The sun was so bright that it banished every shadow, at least while the cameras rolled.

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