by Sean Wallace
“Yes.” Stein got up. “Sir, we have to get out of here. There’s no way we can destroy It. I know we have weapons, explosives, but—we’d never get close enough. You saw what happened with Kroll, and Reiniger . . . ”
“Yes, I did, Stein. I saw.”
Stein backed towards the “chapel” door. “We have to get out, sir. Inform the colonel. We have the notes. Get him to—to bring—I don’t know, we need artillery to destroy that thing, or bombers, or—”
Rolf turned and fired, emptying most of the Schmeisser’s magazine in a single burst that picked Stein up and flung him back against the wall. Blood flowered out across the wood paneling. The youngster stared back at Rolf in utter shock, then slid to the ground and was still.
Rolf stumbled back, flinging the submachine gun away from him. On the “chapel” floor, Stein’s body twitched a couple of times, then was still.
And the high, shrill chittering rose in the air.
Once I was a man.
I believed that humankind was glorious, not some infection on the Earth. I believed that we had a purpose and a destiny. That we were great and noble and worthwhile. I believed that the good in us was stronger than . . . the other.
And then I fought in Russia.
It was ugly, brutal fighting. Friends died. I took lives, ended them with cruelty and brutality. But though vile, that was comprehensible; they were soldiers and so were we. It was comprehensible.
Until that day in the woods.
I was separated from my unit, along with several others. We tried to find our way back to German lines, and to avoid the Russians, for we knew by now we could expect no mercy from the Ivans should they take us; only a bullet, and that if we were lucky.
By the time I reached the woods, I was the only one left alive, and I was in despair. I had a pistol I had taken from a dead officer. I’d already resolved to save a bullet for myself, should the situation become hopeless; better that than starvation or capture by the Russians.
I heard the shots as I entered the woods. I froze, hid behind a tree, waited. Then, listening closely, I heard voices. They were speaking in German. They were laughing. Laughing? And all the while, the shots kept ringing out, one after the other.
I got to my feet and went through the woods, till at last I reached a clearing.
They had been forced to dig a hole. Men, women, children. Jews, I suppose. Or just Russians. Undesirables. Untermenschen. They had been forced to dig a deep hole. Around them were men in black uniforms. Einsatzkommandos: special squads. They pointed rifles and machine pistols at the untermenschen to keep them back. Three einsatzkommandos stood at the pit’s edge, holding pistols. Each would make a villager sit on the pit’s edge in front of them, then point the gun at the back of their heads and fire. And the men, the women, the children, tumbled one by one into the pit.
The last to die was a little fair-haired boy of about four. He didn’t cry or scream. He just didn’t understand. Couldn’t comprehend what had happened around him, what had become of his familiar little world.
The einsatzkommandos laughed and smoked, and one of them pointed his gun at the child’s head.
In the second before the shot was fired, the child’s bewildered eyes met mine.
After that, the einsatzkommandos spotted me. They fed me, gave me cigarettes, helped me find my way back to my unit.
I broke bread with these men.
They showed me pictures of their mothers and fathers, their wives and children. Their sweethearts at home, like my Hannah. My Hannah who perhaps at that moment was being killed by men such as these. Men such as me. By men.
I believed that humankind was glorious, not some infection on the Earth.
Once I was a man.
Now I am nothing.
Rolf walked back down the stone tunnel, through the cold embrace of the clinging air.
In his head, the chittering rose: higher, higher, ever higher. He knew what it was now. Whose voice. Whose claws, seeking to gain access to whatever he might have in lieu of a soul.
Its great, heaving bulk rose before him. Its misshapen head stared down at him.
It was sealed inside the hill to protect It . . . To protect It? What did It need protecting from?
He knew now, of course. Just as he knew what those black, glistening patches on Its hide were. Not new, un-guessed-at orifices of the thing, but simply and solely patches of rot and decay.
What did It need protecting from? The air itself. The air of an Earth that was poison to It and all Its kind. That was why Its masters had left, gone into hiding or hibernation, or wherever they were now. Sealed in the hill, It had been protected. But now It had been poisoned, and now It was dying.
And now he understood what It needed.
“They died because you can get into men’s minds,” he said to It. “But you don’t just want to visit, do you? You’re looking for a new home. But they won’t let you. Barriers in the mind. Families. Faith. Loved ones. Something.”
It vast, gusty breathing filled the cavern.
“But I,” said Rolf. “I am different.”
Its bulk shifted, and he opened his arms to receive.
Christmas 1946
“Koenig?”
Rolf stopped, turned slowly to face his questioner.
A square in Berlin; gaunt, ruined buildings raised stark against the night sky. Snow drifting relentlessly down. Two lovers strolled back and forth across the square, arm in arm, and an off-key discordant choir of carollers regaled three American soldiers, hoping for food and drink as a reward for pleasing their audience: Stille nacht, heilige nacht . . .
The older man limped forward, using a stick. He was bald on top, his remaining hair white. He was thin, the flesh slack on his bones. Sick.
“It is you,” he said. “Hauptmann Rolf Koenig, of—”
“Quiet,” said Rolf.
The older man fell silent.
Rolf studied him. “You’re the colonel from the Widerstand,” he said. “The one who recruited me for the Schwartzberg mission.”
“That’s right. Schmidt. Colonel Anton Schmidt.” Schmidt gazed at Rolf through the falling snow with watery blue eyes. “You were listed as missing, presumed dead after the Schwartzberg mission,” he said. “Mind you, a lot of people were. A lot of explosives seemed to have been used. Far more than you and your men had with you, or should have been available at the camp.”
Rolf simply smiled and shrugged.
“Where have you been all this time?”
“Is that really any business of yours?”
Schmidt stepped closer. “Don’t get clever with me, Koenig—”
“Or what?” Rolf’s smile stayed on his lips, but left his eyes. Schmidt blinked, wavered; a thin hand clutched at his chest. He stumbled back, looked around for help at the two or three passersby crossing the square, the carolers, still singing away.
“They can’t see you,” said Rolf. “Or rather, they can’t see us.”
Schmidt swayed, choked, fell to his knees.
“And they won’t, until much later,” Rolf said pleasantly. “Long after your heart has died, and I’m long gone from here. I’m rarely seen unless I wish to be. As I did with you, tonight. Tying up loose ends, you might say.”
Schmidt’s face was engorged, almost purple.
“I have much to do,” said Rolf. “And now I have decades, even centuries, to do it in, while freely moving among your kind. A world to change. A way to open.” He chuckled. “You should be grateful, really, colonel. I’ve ensured you won’t have to see it.”
With a last strangled noise, Schmidt rolled on to his back and lay still.
Rolf took a last look around the square—at the lovers, arm in arm, the American soldiers and the carol singers, all carrying on, oblivious—then, smiling, crossed the square and went out onto the main road. In the crowds and the fast-falling snow, even if anyone could have seen him, soon he would have been only a nondescript blur. And then nothing. Nothing at all.
<
br /> The Lighthouse Keeper of Kurohaka Island
Kane Gilmour
The gray light of the morning merged with the steel color of the waves, giving Shinobi the feeling he was being tossed around in the air. He stood at the bow of the freighter, his young hands gripping the rail tightly—he’d been told and he remembered, “one hand for yourself and one hand for the ship, at all times”—and he peered into the murky shades of concrete that filled the sky and the sea. He couldn’t determine where one began and the other ended.
Thick fog shrouded everything, and his one thought over and over was to wonder where all the brilliant blue had gone. From his home in Wakkanai, at the northern tip of Japan, the sea was always blue, even on stormy days. But here, in the no man’s land twenty miles northeast of Hokkaido, everything looked hostile to the boy. But then, everything in the world now looked that way.
“Shinobi,” he heard his father’s abrupt voice from behind him. Mindful to keep one hand on the damp railing, as the massive freighter bounced in the invisible troughs of the cold waves, he turned to see his father approaching him from the starboard side of the ship. “Come inside. We are nearly there.”
Shinobi walked along the railing, moving hand-over-hand lest some rogue wave slap the big ship and send him headlong into a never-ending drop through the gray moisture. “Almost where, Father? I’ve checked the maps. There’s nothing here.”
His father, a stern man named Jiro, remained quiet until Shinobi reached him along the rail, skirting the massive multi-colored metal containers that filled the center of the ship’s broad foredeck. When Shinobi looked up at his father, he realized the man was not simply waiting for him or being his typical quiet self, but rather he was peering intently past the bow of the ship and into the gloom.
Shinobi knew to stay still and be quiet. His father was either deep in thought or looking for something in the fog. The man would speak when he was ready to, and not before. With nothing else to do, besides hold the railing, Shinobi studied his father’s face. He quickly determined that the man was actually looking for something in the thick mist that shrouded the ship. He was just about to turn, when his father spoke.
“There,” the man pointed past the bow, “Kurohaka Island.”
Shinobi turned and momentarily let his hand drop from the railing in surprise. In a part of the Sea of Okhotsk he knew to be empty of any spit of land, a jagged dark shape was rising from the sea and the fog. The island looked to have strange curving towers near the center, and rough rocky shores at the edges. Finally, his eyes sought out what he was looking for—the lighthouse. It was on the end of the island, on a high rocky promontory, but its lifesaving light was absent, and its white paint made little difference in the thick fluffy coating of whitish gray that filled the air. The spire could barely be seen in all the mist.
Shinobi’s father was a lighthouse keeper in the region, being paid by the governments of both Japan and Russia to ride whatever available ships were in the area, and to frequently visit and maintain the ramshackle lighthouses on the islands scattered around Hokkaido and the giant lobster-claw tips of Sakhalin, around the Gulf of Patience. Shinobi had traveled with his father to Rebun Island and Rishiri Island. He had even gone on one memorable camping trip with his father to the abandoned Russian island of Moneron, northwest of the Soya Straight. He had listened attentively to his father’s few descriptions of his work on the lights. Shinobi was meant to take over his father’s work some day, first apprenticing in two years’ time, when he turned fifteen. He had studied hard in school, and paid special attention to the nautical maps in the library and around the house. He knew the names of every jagged rocky islet in the area, but he had never heard of Kurohaka Island.
True, his attention of late had not been on maps or studying. Instead he had been seeing things, and hoping he wasn’t losing his sanity. But he had kept that information hidden from his father.
“Kurohaka?” he asked.
His father nodded grimly. “A dark place, but still part of the job. Let’s go in.”
Shinobi followed his father back to the ship’s forecastle, wondering at the name of the island. Kurohaka. Black tomb. He wondered if sailors had named it that because it was such a rocky shoreline. Many times islands were given fearsome names to warn sailors off the reefs. But the name might actually stem from a true tomb.
He wondered who was buried there.
Or, considering what he had been seeing lately—what might be buried there.
The freighter had lowered them in a small speedboat with winches from the high sides of the rusting gunwales. Once in the choppy water, they had made quick time to the dark island, and his father expertly navigated them past some treacherous headlands and into a tiny sheltered lagoon. Any boat larger than their speedboat would not have made it into the small inlet. They pulled the boat up to a concrete pier that jutted an absurd four feet into the water from the wet rocky land. The lagoon looked to Shinobi to be a popped volcanic bubble more than a sandy beach. The shoreline was all dark rock, but at least here it was smooth.
Shinobi helped his father tie up the small boat to the two rusted metal cleats sunk into the concrete pier’s rough surface and carry their gear ashore. When he turned to the gray sea, he could watch the freighter moving away into the distance. A different boat would swing by in two days to collect them.
“How can this island be here, Father?”
Jiro Yashida hefted his pack and began walking up the rocks, toward the interior of the island. He spoke over his shoulder to his son in short bursts. “You know the maps. Think of the shapes. A long chain of islands connects Hokkaido to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. And Wakkanai points at the western tip of Sakhalin. Is it really so surprising to you that an island lies midway between Hokkaido and the eastern tip of Sakhalin?”
Shinobi considered his father’s logic, and found that geologically, the location of the island made perfect sense. “No. I understand, but the island does not appear on the maps.”
“Many don’t,” was all his father said.
They turned left and followed a coastal trail up along the rocks, twisting and turning through switchbacks, until the base of the white lighthouse was visible overhead. Their path, keeping so close to the shore as it did, kept the rest of the island hidden from Shinobi’s view, even as the fog began to lift. What little he could see was dark brown and black rock, most of it volcanic, and fitting with his initial assumptions about the geology of the island. Shinobi was not fond of math at school, but when Earth sciences came into things, he paid strict attention.
With the base of the lighthouse just thirty feet overhead now, their path narrowed, and they needed to rely on the artificial railings made of thick heavy chains. They had been bolted into the side of the rock and painted in so many layers of heavy black paint, that even when Shinobi could see the outer layers had chipped, all he could see in the remaining holes on the links were more and more layers underneath.
Shinobi watched where his father stepped, and how the man moved his hands along the chains, as if they were the railing on the freighter—one hand for the ship—and he did the same. They were nearly at the top of the path, which would bring them right to the door of the lighthouse, when his father spoke.
“When did you plan on telling me? Or did you think you should keep it to yourself forever?”
The man didn’t pause in his ascent, nor did he look back at his son.
Shinobi knew what his father was talking about, of course. There was just the one thing he had kept from his father in his whole thirteen years.
His father was talking about the monsters.
Shinobi could see them, and no one else could.
He stayed quiet, thinking how best to answer the question, as his father made it to the top of the climb and lowered his pack to the ground, just outside the door to the lighthouse. Finally, as Shinobi neared his father and the pack, he spoke, while removing his own heavy pack.
“Have I done somethin
g wrong, Father?” Shinobi hung his head as he spoke.
His father reached down and tenderly lifted Shinobi’s chin, so he was looking his father in the eyes. “You have done nothing wrong, Shino.”
“How could you have known?” the boy asked, his eyes beginning to water.
His father quickly turned, allowing him to save face, as a tear sprang from the corner of his young eye and ran down his round cheek. The man worked a large brass key into the lock on the lighthouse door, and entered. Shinobi followed.
“The haunted look in your eyes, son. I had the same look, when I first saw the creatures.”
That his father knew about the monsters was a surprise to Shinobi. That his father had seen them, as well, filled the boy with a relief he hadn’t known he needed. He followed his father up the twisting iron staircase. The lighthouse was close to a hundred feet in height—Shinobi could tell by counting the stairs as they ascended in silence. He wanted to ask his father more, but he knew the man would tell him when he was ready. Probably at the top of the tower, since speaking while ascending the steep steps would require an excess of oxygen, and Jiro Yashida was a practical man of economy. Shinobi hoped to be as sensible when he was an adult.
As his father came close to the lantern section of the tower, a good twenty steps ahead of Shinobi on the cast iron stairs, he began speaking again, but softly. “Every first-born child between the ages of thirteen and eighteen has the sight, Shino. But only first-borns. Your brother, Naro, will never be able to see the beasts, as you do. Unless you were to die before he grows to adulthood. Most teens lose their vision as adulthood approaches, but in our family, we are unusual. We retain the sight as adults. I still see the creatures today, son.”
The man stepped up off the stairs and into the service room of the lantern. Then he ascended a straight ladder to the optic section of the tower. Shinobi hurried after him, as the man stepped off the ladder and opened the door from the optic room to the gallery around the tower’s top. Wind rushed into the structure and flooded down toward Shinobi. It was cold and, of course, he could smell the briny aroma of the sea, but there was something else on the wind. Something old, like dust.