The Angel Maker

by Brijs, Stefan

  ‘I have been expecting you,’ said Victor before Rex had a chance to say a word. The doctor unlocked the gate and flung it open. Rex saw that something had changed about his former colleague’s appearance. His hair and his beard. His unkempt red hair, especially, struck him. It was almost down to his shoulders.

  ‘I know why you have come,’ said Victor. ‘You have come to betray me.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Rex stared at him in astonishment, but the doctor avoided his gaze.

  ‘You have come to betray me,’ he repeated. ‘You will return with a great mob and then you will betray me.’

  There was no menace in his voice, but Rex felt his anxiety rise. Victor had always had a peculiar way of behaving, but the way he stood there, swaying slightly, his head bowed, one hand pressed to his side, the other hand clawing the air - Rex had never seen him act this way before.

  ‘They don’t understand me,’ Victor went on. ‘They don’t believe in me. Do you still believe in me?’

  Rex decided the best thing was not to answer him. He didn’t want to provoke him. But Victor wasn’t waiting for an answer. He went on stonily, ‘They mustn’t lock me up. They must not. If they lock me up, I will not be able to fulfil my task. I have a mission.’

  ‘Victor, perhaps—’

  Victor whipped his arm up into the air and pointed his forefinger at Rex menacingly.

  ‘You will betray me!’ he said, raising his voice. ‘You will be the one! But woe unto him who betrays me, he shall wish that he had never been born. You will hang, don’t you know? You will hang for this!’

  Rex, flinching, took a step back. For just a second his eyes met Victor’s. The gaze was empty, like that of a blind man. Rex took another step backwards. The outstretched arm came down; Victor began tugging at the bottom of his shirt tail.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you! You still won’t believe me,’ he said, pulling his shirt out of his trousers, higher and higher, until his chalk-white, hollow stomach was exposed.

  Rex shook his head.

  ‘Do you want to see? Then will you believe it?’ cried Victor. He pulled his shirt up another notch. There was a laceration in his side almost ten centimetres wide. ‘Do you want to feel it? Then will you believe?’

  Victor brought his hand dramatically to the wound and stuck two, three fingers inside the gash. He began to pull - no, he tore it open.

  Averting his gaze, Rex tried to back off a little more, as inconspicuously as he could. He was starting to feel seriously nauseated and his head began to spin. Then he turned on his heels and darted to his car. He yanked open the door, got in and jammed the key into the ignition. He glanced over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, but Victor was still standing at the gate, his fingers plunged deep inside the wound.

  He stopped the car at the three borders, because he felt as if he was going to be sick.

  The voice. The words. The wound. The fingers inside that wound. And on top of it all, the stifling heat. The nausea. It was all too much for Rex. He stopped the car and threw up. Gradually the sick feeling began to pass. But Victor’s voice wouldn’t stop ringing in his ears.

  You have come to betray me. You will return with a great mob and you will betray me. You are going to betray me.

  The ravings of a lunatic. Rex had no idea where Victor had got that idea from, or who might have put the thought into his head.

  You will hang for it!

  That threat was even more worrying. The more he thought about it, the more those words began to feel like a real noose around his neck. He interpreted them to mean that Victor would drag him down with him. Victor would try to deny his own responsibility and fob it all off on Rex. He would say that Rex Cremer had known what he was doing and never tried to stop him; had encouraged him, even. And, besides, Rex had set the whole ball rolling, on 9 April 1979. And he would show them the proof. Black on white, dated, in his handwriting:

  You have certainly beaten God at his own game.

  Tormented by such thoughts, Rex Cremer paced round the summit of Mount Vaalserberg. He walked to the three borders. Then to the highest point in the Netherlands. Back to the three borders. He paced around the marker. Netherlands. Germany. Belgium. Nowhere could he find peace.

  Finally he headed over to the fenced-off building site. Peering down, he could just glimpse the bottom, at least ten metres down. The four cement pylons with their metal stakes seemed to have been thrust up from the earth’s core with diabolical force, as if trying to reach for something. He stood there for several minutes staring into the pit, his fingers threaded through the chain-link fence.

  ‘Don’t jump, mister!’ he suddenly heard someone yell.

  Startled, he looked round. A man walked by, laughing.

  The man’s voice had jolted him out of his reverie. Of course he wouldn’t jump. The thought had never even occurred to him. He’d merely been thinking about what he should do next. Whether he should go home, and wait passively for what came next - as was his wont. To wait patiently - only this time it would be until they came for him. And even if he denied everything a thousand times, they still would not believe him. He too would not be believed. Misunderstood. Just like Victor.

  Or should he go back to Wolfheim? Should he try once more to bring Victor to his senses? Perhaps it wasn’t that terrible. Perhaps the thing he feared the most hadn’t actually happened.

  He left the building site and walked back to his car. He had to do something. Waiting was no longer an option. He had to try to persuade Victor to seek help, and he had to find out how the children were faring. He couldn’t just leave them to their fate. He couldn’t do that any longer.

  So Rex tried to pull himself together and buck up his courage as he started the car and slowly began the drive back down the Route des Trois Bornes, down to the bottom, under the bridge, into the village, up to the house.

  The gate was still open, and the front door too. Victor had vanished. Rex got out of the car and looked round. The village square was deserted. The pavements empty. He glanced at his watch. It was 12.15.

  It was still stiflingly hot. Clouds had started forming, obscuring the sun, but that only made it feel even more oppressive.

  You will come back with a great mob. You will betray me.

  He had indeed come back; Victor was right about that. But he was alone. And he had not come to betray him. He had come to help him.

  Cautiously he walked up the path to the front door and went in. It stank to high heaven. The stench took his breath away. Clapping his hand over his nose and mouth, he looked round. The front hall was deserted but one of the doors was open: the door to the office.

  Besides the stench, there were also the flies - everywhere he looked. Bluebottles. There was something rotting in here. That was where flies laid their eggs: in rotting meat, so that when the eggs hatched, the larvae would have something to eat. The thought came to him in a flash as he stepped into the office. But it too was empty. Behind the desk another door stood open, as if showing the way. It might be a trap.

  He sidled over to the door, one hand over his nose, the other swatting at the squadrons of flies zooming about his head. For a split second he thought he would find Victor in the room. Alive, or dead. The latter might be best.

  But Victor wasn’t in there. And yet he was. Three times over, in fact. V1. V2. V3. That was how the first, second and third glass jars were labelled.

  They were barely children any longer. He saw that when he got closer up. They seemed to have reverted to the foetal stage. So skinny. So tiny. So bald. And the way they were curled up, just like a foetus in the womb. As if Victor had left them to stiffen in that position before preserving them in formaldehyde.

  It was a terrible shock, which only grew when he saw the dates written on the labels. Three different dates: 13 May 1989. 17 May 1989. 16 May 1989.

  He was too late.

  His nausea returned. But at the same time he felt the urge to smash open the glass jars. Not to release the chi
ldren, but to destroy them. To erase the harm and the shame. To obliterate all traces of it. Quickly. He took a step forward and stretched out his hands.

  Then he spotted . . . her.

  She was lying on the floor, half under the table. As he lunged forward, the movement caused the flies crawling on and inside her corpse to take flight in their thousands, like a lid suddenly being lifted off a pan. She was lying on her back, and although he could not recall her face clearly, since he’d seen her only once, he knew that it was her. She was naked from the waist up, and even though there was a second laceration that was quite a bit larger, the first wound he noticed was the smaller one. His eyes moved down from her face to her chest, where there was a cut, no bigger than the breadth of a thumb, but that cut was so exact, so surgically exact, that he knew that that one thrust, there in that spot, right by the breastbone, had dealt the death blow. She must have died within seconds. And so he realised that the other, much larger wound, had been made later. It followed the line of an older scar neatly, right along the incision. And he knew at once that Victor must have removed something from that stomach - the very thing, in fact, that was being redeposited in there by the flies, the hundreds and thousands of swarming bluebottles, laying their eggs in the putrefying womb in order to hatch new flies.

  Rex took it all in in three seconds. In those same three seconds he felt the earth opening up under his feet and dragging him down into the abyss. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t, because of the nausea. His stomach was on fire, as if it too was seething with thousands of flies trying to come out.

  He threw up for the second time that day. He was bawling, too - for the first time in years. He felt like someone who has succumbed to a moment of insanity, and then realises what he’s done. As if he had done it all himself. The children in the jars. The woman on the floor. He was the one who had done it. He didn’t give Victor Hoppe a moment’s thought. He looked, and he saw only what he had done. He let it all sink in, as if to punish himself. And as he stared, sobbing all the while like a little kid, it occurred to him that what he was looking at must never be seen by anyone else. That the only way to reverse all of this was to erase it completely. All of it.

  Then he did what he had wanted to do from the start. He twisted the lid off the first jar and poured out the contents. Over the woman. All of it. The formaldehyde, and with the formaldehyde, the corpse, which landed whence it had come. The flies flew up in a black, seething mass, only to settle down immediately, driven by their instinctive urge to procreate.

  His urge too was instinctive. He was doing this for his own survival. He was conscious of it; and yet not quite conscious. Everything he did was deliberately thought out, yet largely unconscious in its execution.

  The contents of the second and third jars followed those of the first. The children were being returned to the womb, as foetuses. He saved some of the formaldehyde in the third jar and used it to dribble a liquid trail to the doorway. Then he went back for some more chemicals, which he sprinkled all around the room. He knew that that quantity of chemicals, in that combination, was more than enough to wipe all of it from the face of the earth.

  And all this time, as he was busy with these preparations, he never once wondered where Victor was, nor if he was close by. It didn’t matter.

  Even as he performed his final deed, which was to erase everything and blow it sky-high, he wasn’t thinking of Victor. He was only thinking of himself. As he had always done, in fact.

  11

  The days when the villagers of Wolfheim used to make the pilgrimage to La Chapelle on foot were long gone. These days even the heavy statue of St Rita, which six men used to carry in procession on their shoulders, was left behind in the church, and the marching band, once twenty musicians and twenty instruments strong, had shrunk to just a drum and a tuba. The one annual tradition that was still kept, however, was the parish committee’s selection of a deserving burgher to carry the church standard in the procession of the Stations of the Cross. On Sunday, 21 May 1989, that honour had been reserved for Lothar Weber. He had been chosen because people felt he needed something to cheer him up after the loss of his son. At first he had turned it down, since he hadn’t really done anything to deserve it, but his wife had said, ‘Lothar, just do it. Gunther would be proud of you.’

  And so he did it for Gunther; for, if truth be told, Lothar didn’t really like being the centre of attention.

  First, at eleven o’clock, they celebrated Holy Mass. Father Kaisergruber asked St Rita to watch over the village and its inhabitants over the coming year, and protect it from the sort of calamity that had struck some of its inhabitants these past few months. The priest did not mention any names, but Lothar knew that he meant his family, amongst others. He took Vera’s hand in his, and kept it there for the entire service.

  After Mass they drove to La Chapelle in a long motorcade. Almost every one of Wolfheim’s two hundred-odd burghers was in attendance, and as they assembled at the Calvary gate, people kept coming over to Lothar and patting him on the back to wish him good luck. It made him feel quite moved, actually.

  At twelve o’clock on the dot everyone was in position and the pilgrimage was ready to start. Father Kaisergruber, carrying a large silver cross on a pole, was in front, and right behind him came Lothar Weber with the church standard, embroidered with the name of their village and a likeness of St Rita. Jacob Weinstein and Florent Keuning, each carrying a votive candle, fell in behind. The rest of the villagers formed two long lines, the eldest in front. Josef Zimmermann and some of the other elderly were in wheelchairs. Bringing up the rear was the two-man band: Jacques Meekers on tuba and René Moresnet with the marching drum.

  Lothar felt a shudder go up his spine as Father Kaisergruber lifted the pole with the cross high in the air, which was the sign for the procession to begin. At the rear Jacques Meekers and René Moresnet began playing ‘You have called us, Lord’, as the rest of the parishioners started reciting the Our Father. The muttering of so many voices sounded to the standard bearer like the buzzing of a swarm of bees.

  It was sweltering hot that afternoon, but the sun was already hidden behind looming clouds. The weather forecast had predicted a thunderstorm by nightfall.

  When the procession drew to a halt at the first station, ‘Jesus condemned to death’, the beads of sweat were starting to drip down Lothar’s face. The banner was heavier than he’d expected and his Sunday suit was much too warm for this hot weather. But he did not own any other suit. It was the same suit he had worn at Gunther’s funeral.

  ‘We worship Thee, O Christ, and praise Thee,’ said Father Kaisergruber. The music had stopped.

  ‘Because by thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world,’ chorused the villagers.

  ‘My Jesus, I know that it was not only Pilate who condemned You to death,’ the priest began to read from a prayer book, ‘but my sins too have caused thy death . . .’

  Lothar’s thoughts began to wander. He thought about his son Gunther, but also about that other son, the one who was coming, and who was supposed to look like Gunther. He still had his doubts. Just as in these past few months he’d never been able to come to terms with the fact that he was no longer a father, he now found it impossible to believe he would soon be a father again. His wife seemed to be feeling something already. He had seen her run her hand over her stomach when she was getting dressed, the way she used to do when she was expecting Gunther. According to Dr Hoppe, the embryos that had been transferred that morning would still have to implant themselves in the uterus in order for the pregnancy to take, but Lothar was almost certain that it had already happened. Maybe it would even be twins, or triplets. But even that thought didn’t yet invoke any paternal feeling in him. It would come, he supposed. He hoped.

  The dull beat of the drum roused the standard bearer from his musings. The procession started up again. The villagers had already started mumbling the Our Father again. Lothar looked up at the sky, where grey clouds were accumula
ting. It didn’t look as if the thunderstorm was going to wait for nightfall.

  At the eighth station, ‘Jesus comforts the weeping women’, he finally caught sight of his wife. He had tried to find her in the throng several times before, with no luck. She was staring dreamily into space and again he saw her putting her hand on her stomach. Oh yes, she was pregnant all right.

  ‘Give me the strength,’ he heard Father Kaisergruber read, ‘to forget my own grief so that I may comfort others.’

  Well put, he thought, and when his wife happened to look his way at that very moment, he felt a shudder go up his spine for the second time that afternoon. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Then she gave him a curt nod, as if to say he was doing great, and that gave him the strength to march on with pride, his back straight and his nose in the air, as if suddenly the church standard didn’t weigh a thing.

  Forty-five minutes later the procession arrived at the eleventh station: ‘Jesus is crucified’. Lothar stared at the relief sculpture. Even though the figures were carved of white stone and were relatively small, they seemed very lifelike. It was almost as if they were just taking a break, before springing into action. The emotion in the faces, especially, was strikingly real. The haughty judges, the grieving women, the dutiful workmen wielding hammers, and, finally, Jesus himself, stoically allowing himself to be nailed to the cross.

  ‘Patiently didst Thou bear this suffering,’ read the priest.

  Lothar tried to find his wife again, but did not spot her this time. He would see her later, presumably, when they arrived at the clearing in front of the twelfth station. That was always a wonderful moment - not only because the procession was nearly finished, but also because it was such an impressive sight, every time. After walking the eleven stations along a narrow, winding path, hemmed in by towering trees, you suddenly came into this enormous, wide open space. It was truly as if the heavens had parted and great shafts of light came pouring down on you. Lothar also found the twelfth station’s statues awe-inspiring. Those seven life-size figures on the hill, with Jesus on the cross in the middle, and the two murderers on his left and right hand. Those statues too were lifelike; as real as flesh and blood. They seemed so real that he always found himself wondering how long they’d be able to stick it out up there on that cross.