by John Meaney
There was a double meaning there: he also wanted Roger to keep quiet about the prisoner, and the storming darkness that dominated the prisoner’s cell. How telling that story could damage Dad, well, that was unclear.
‘So, both of you, Carl and Roger. It’s been wonderful. Have a relaxing stay. Really.’
Max clapped his hands, and reality spun.
Roger and Dad were standing on a platinum-inlaid balcony, amid floating dining-tables, surrounded by chatter and soft chamber music. Mum and Laura looked up from their meal.
‘Hello, you two. You found each other.’
‘Er, yes,’ said Dad.
‘And what have you been up to?’
‘Sightseeing,’ said Roger.
Mum stared at them for an extra second, then turned to Laura, who was frowning.
‘The men in my life are back,’ said Mum. ‘I guess we’ve a holiday to begin.’
Their farewells were cooler than their greeting, and Roger wondered what had gone wrong. Then he saw momentary disdain on Laura’s features - looking at Dad - and believed he understood.
‘Interesting city,’ Roger said, ‘but disappointing people. Some aren’t nearly as bright as our friends on Fulgor. Actually, some are pretty dumb.’
Mum and Dad were smiling as they all three turned their backs on Laura. In front of them, beyond the balcony, stretched the infinite length of Borges Boulevard, gleaming with its promise to carry them past wonders; while off to one side was the complex elegance of the Logos Library, housing its endlessly branching stacks and corridors, where polished shelves were filled with infocrystals that glowed, hinting at limitless knowledge strong enough to disperse the shadows of ignorance.
EIGHTEEN
EARTH, 1927 AD
There are no ghosts. Graveyards contain crumbling bones, some mouldering meat, and well-fed beetles. Hallucinations are a brain malfunction caused by false triggering of the circuits that recognize faces, bodies, human and animal movement.
It was only the cold that made her shiver, crouched inside the cemetery at night.
That, and the memory of Erik propped up in bed, his one good eye trained on her, the other side of his face a suppurating purple mess. Perhaps getting out of the family house was more to do with escaping her brother’s condition than seeking out the enemy.
From beyond the low stone wall came the sounds of men gathering, their voices a murmur, rising then falling as they went indoors, to a school hall that in the brightness of morning would be filled with children, singing their prayers and taking in the headmaster’s instructions, afterwards to create not so much essays and equations as their own coalescing minds. A school should be a place of hope.
It was her third evening back in Berlin; and already things seemed changed. Before she went to Zürich, no one had held political meetings of this type, and certainly not in her old school. But now, when she peeped from behind a headstone, she saw men in military-style shirts that looked grey under moonlight.
Where they ushered the ordinary men in suits inside, illumination fell on them, highlighting the scarlet armbands, like fresh blood against tan soil.
Knowing her way round, she left the cemetery via the far corner, and came to the school buildings from the rear, crossing the playground - it seemed so much smaller now - to reach the canteen. She used slow pressure on the doorknob, checking it was locked. No way in.
The windows were latticed with handles, unlike the casement windows in houses. Inside were catches, used to hold the window in place when open, and as locks when shut. But despite moonlight shining solidly on the glass, she could see that one of the catches inside was raised.
And when she tried it, the window opened far more quietly than expected.
Wishing she had paid more attention to athletic endeavours, she dragged herself up over the sill, catching her knee and possibly cutting it, biting back the pain in silence. From out in the corridor, she heard men’s voices passing.
‘Is he here?’
‘In the building, yes. Can’t you tell?’
‘Well I can feel the—’
Then they were gone, distance muffling the words.
Moving in a half crouch, she reached the inner door, turned the knob with constant tension, and slipped out into the corridor. Her shoes were quiet on the parquet flooring as she moved to the old staircase, paused to get her balance, and then went up, keeping to the outer edge of the tread where it was unlikely to creak.
Up and up she went, until she reached the old music room. Here she had expected potential trouble; but again the door was unlocked. Inside, music stands were like skeletons at attention, and she moved slowly to avoid clashing against them.
The sounds of murmuring seemed to come through the floor now.
At the end of the room, the other door was standing open, leading to darkness, to the old loft used for props and costumes. Inside would be clutter she could not see; but if she tripped over, then in the hall below several hundred pairs of eyes would turn to the ceiling, wondering at the noise.
She remembered The Barber of Seville, everyone speaking their lines in hard-accented French; and Goethe’s Faust, the school’s shining triumph, at least in the period of her last few years in this place. And she remembered how privileged she had been to arrange the stage lighting, playing with filters and rheostats during rehearsals until she had the timing and the atmosphere just right.
But tonight, even through the floorboards, she could tell the ambience was very different.
There were several tiny gaps between the boards, one of the reasons that the loft remained in darkness during performances. Now, on hands and knees, she edged toward a sliver of light.
Near another such gap, she imagined a momentary reflection, a glittering eye - but then it was gone; and even if there was a rat, it could not be as big as her. Then there was only shadow once more.
As she lowered her face to the hole, she could see a portion of the stage, and a small figure from above: combed-over hair, brush moustache, and an aura she could feel from here.
Words were once magic, Herr Doktor Freud had written, giving them power.
Since her encounter with the man she had sought out his books. They formed a strange counterpoint to her studies of electromagnetism, optics and mechanics: so definite in their tone, so lacking in mathematical structure or empirical proof; and yet insightful, at least in parts.
It took a few moments to tune in to the speech rising from below, and to understand why her unconscious mind had delivered up those words from Freud.
‘—those times, the true folk were warriors in misty forests, gathered up by the Death Choosers, Odinn’s Valkyries, if we fell in battle.’ His words held a thrumming resonance, an unexpected power. ‘Since then, our magnificence and bravery have ebbed away beneath the deceptions of secret Jewry, the illusions created by bourgeois curs who fail to understand the subhuman nature of their unnatural masters, the Jesus-killers who—’
The voice rose and fell like oceanic waves, like the feelings of the crowd, washing back and forth, rushing, compelling. And through the gap she could see—
Impossible.
—twisting shards of black light, of shining darkness that—
Some hysterical illusion.
—writhed and revolved around the pasty, sweat-soaked man gesticulating below.
She shifted, pushing her eye socket against the hole, careless of splinters, trying to see more. And then she did.
A mirage could not occur inside a school hall. An hallucination could manifest only in the mind’s eye, not in reality. There was no explanation for this vision.
‘—will advance along Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, in triumph. When the homeland is cleansed of bipedal vermin who differ from humans by their stink, then we grasp our—’
His words conjured up dark forest and mist, hard warriors with cloaks and spears, a bridge of shining light; and the vision was there, in moving colour below her, floating above the heads of a spellb
ound audience.
While the man onstage walked amid rotating darkness, inherently unnatural, revolting and malevolent. None of this was rational. All of it was real.
What can I do?
She pulled back, and again she noticed the glittering of an eye across the loft; but this time she also made out a kneeling figure, thin and sharp-chinned, holding forefinger to lips.
From below came: ‘—till we have wiped them out, scoured the world of Jews, and through strength, gained freedom once more!’
A great roar ascended from the enthralled mob, for that was what they were.
It was another hour before the frenzy dissipated, the speaker disappearing first amid a phalanx of brown-shirt-clad men, and finally the others leaving, their words buzzing, no doubt continuing to see some remembered resonance of the vision that had been conjured above their heads, without their conscious knowledge, laid down inside their unconscious minds.
Her limbs felt like fluttering moths, her body vibrating beyond her control.
There was a different kind of dark movement, a shadow within shadow that meant the other watcher was crawling towards her. She started to back away, but her foot touched something, a box, and she stopped.
‘Wait,’ came a man’s whisper. ‘Just another minute.’
‘They’ll lock up everywhere when they leave.’
‘Not everywhere.’
So the unlocked window had not been random convenience, but part of a deliberate plan, considerably more organized than her attempt. If the world was filled with good people - those who would be appalled by tonight’s meeting - then perhaps this man was one of them.
He drew closer, a thin man wrapped in a heavy, too-big overcoat.
‘I’m Dmitri Shtemenko,’ he whispered. ‘Who are you?’
‘Gavriela Wolf.’
‘So, come on.’
He led the way along a route she probably knew far better: music room, staircase, the downstairs corridor. Yet he must have prepared, for he navigated through dark areas without hesitation. They exited via the canteen window, Dmitri moving well but without athleticism.
Then he stopped, for there was a group of men around the corner where he was intending to go. Gavriela pinched his sleeve, tugged, and pointed towards the graveyard. She headed for the low wall, followed by Dmitri.
As they slipped through the opening in the wall, they straightened up - and stopped.
Two men were pissing on a grave; another was buttoning up, already finished. He was the one who noticed first Gavriela, then Dmitri, and gave a sonorous burp.
‘You’re skulking like Jews,’ he called out.
‘Who are you calling a—?’ One of the two men paused in urinating. ‘Oh.’
‘Are they really Jews?’ said the other.
‘They look like it to me.’
Finished, the two men shook themselves off, still facing her. A part of Gavriela noted with interest what she was seeing; an unimportant part for now.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s my . . . husband. We just wanted some time alone, not in my mother’s house, you know?’
‘Ah.’
‘Right. We should have some of that, shouldn’t we? Pretty, pretty.’
Dmitri moved beside her, shifting inside the overcoat. Perhaps he had urinated or soiled himself. Maybe Gavriela would do the same, as soon as the fear hit home. Right now she was struggling with the concept that this was real, even more than the insane visions earlier.
I’m going to die here.
Somehow it was all wrong, an aberration, a crack in the rules of reality. The three men were advancing, two not bothering to button their flies, all the easier for what they had in mind. The first man, big and bulky, had picked up a spade from somewhere.
Help me!
In her mind it was a scream, filled with the energy of horror, not to the God she did not believe in, but to someone else.
Roger, help me!
And then the night became strange.
‘What? Where in realspace is this?’
The figure was translucent, clad in black with eyes to match, and she knew the face, remembered him from dreams; but she was not the only one to see him now.
‘Help us,’ Gavriela said to him.
‘How?’
But he already had, causing the three attackers to stop, the big man tripping on something - a pile of soil beside an empty grave - and then Dmitri leaped forward, hands flashing downward then cutting curves through the air, making figure-eights; and then the second man was done as well, before Gavriela had processed what was happening.
The last attacker stopped, half turned, and began to run; but silver moonlight flowed through the air and then there was a thunk, a sound straight from the butcher’s shop when a housewife orders a prime cut; and then the man crumbled.
Dmitri walked forward, stood on the corpse’s back, and yanked his blade free from the neck. He wiped the blade, along with its twin in his other hand, on the dead man’s coat; then he tucked his hands inside his overcoat and the weapons were gone.
The jet-eyed apparition looked appalled.
‘You’re one of—’
Then he rippled apart and was gone.
All she could do was take this Dmitri home: whether for his protection or her own, she could not tell. Outside the front door, he took her sleeve as she had taken his earlier.
‘Do me a favour, Fräulein Wolf. Call me Jürgen, all right? Jürgen Schäffer-Braun.’
‘You said your name was Dmitri.’
‘It is in fact, but I’ve no idea why I told you.’ His voice slowed, his Hochdeutsch becoming crisper. ‘The truth and my identification papers have little in common.’
At that point she realized that his voice had evinced a trace accent earlier, under stress.
‘You’re a Bolshevik?’
‘I’m no friend of bastards like the Sturmabteilung, for sure.’
‘The who?’
‘Never mind. Are you going to knock? Or do you have a key?’
‘Tell me.’
‘You met three of their about-to-be recruits in the graveyard. The SA. Once they join up they get those stylish brown shirts.’
‘Oh. Them.’
‘What I don’t know is why they stopped dead.’
‘You didn’t see the—’
‘See what?’
‘I mean, you didn’t see anything either. I thought they caught sight of a ghost. That is, from the way they acted.’
‘Hmm. Well, are you going to knock, Fräulein?’
‘As it happens, I do have a key.’
They went inside. She did not trust him; but he should not be wandering the streets alone, not tonight.
But after what he did . . . With the knives . . .
His overcoat should have been spattered with arterial blood, but it appeared unmarked save for an ordinary grease stain near the hem. Had she imagined the knife fight, too?
No. It happened.
She had witnessed murder, but it seemed unreal.
‘Father, this is, er, Jürgen. He helped me earlier.’
‘Helped you?’
‘It is not entirely safe, sir,’ said Dmitri. ‘But she was only a little lost.’
‘Come in.’ Father’s gaze slid towards Mother, then to the ceiling, in the direction of Erik’s room where he still lay injured. ‘We’ll have some cognac.’
If he had his own opinion about how likely Gavriela was to be lost in her hometown, he would voice it later, not now.
‘That would be marvellous, sir.’
In the front parlour, everyone gathered, including the lovely Ilse, Erik’s fiancée who seemed perfect for him. Gavriela felt she had gained a sister.
Tonight’s discussion was comfortingly domestic - about the current prosperity, which Dmitri (still calling himself Jürgen) claimed was due to Anglo-American loans propping up the German economy, loans which could always be called in; while Father agreed about the international agreements but not about the likelihood o
f their ever failing.
None of it seemed to have anything to do with a world of graveyards and apparitions, orators surrounded by impossible darkness, reified visions taking root in men’s minds, or three dead bodies lying in the night.
‘Everyone,’ said Dmitri finally, ‘I’m so very pleased to make your acquaintance, but I must be gone. Thank you so very much.’