Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  His trousers were blazing, his shirt was almost completely burned off his back. Nylon was fused into skin, man-made fibre into man, until it was impossible even to separate them again. His shoes fell away from his feet in burning chunks, then the soles of his feet were torn off, with two sharp ripping noises, as his skin was fused to the blacktop.

  He heard his breath coming in huge, Channel-swimmer’s roars. He saw the road ahead of him, juggled in his vision like the view through a hand-held camera. He saw the eucalyptus trees swaying, although he couldn’t hear them rustle. He saw his Buick, parked and ready for him, ready to take him away. He smelled fire, and smoke, and some indescribable odour that was himself, burning.

  ‘You . . . Kraut . . . bastard . . . you . . . won’t . . .’

  He reached his car, tugged open the driver’s door with fingers that seemed to be dripping flesh.

  Won’t . . . burn . . . me . . . you . . .

  His coat was gone, his shirt was gone. His torso was a mass of reddened flesh, on which small well-fed flames still licked. But he still had his car keys, embedded in his skin. With fingers that were tipped with nothing but bone, he prized the keys out of the blistered layers, pulling even more skin after them. He screamed in despair more than in pain.

  ‘You won’t burn me you bastard!’ he shouted. He rammed the key into the Buick’s ignition and the end of the key penetrated the palm of his hand, wedging itself right between his finger-bones. Still shouting, still blazing, he turned his hand so that the engine started, yanked the parking-brake, and skidded away from the side of the road in a blizzard of eucalyptus leaves and a cloud of dust. A Mexican gardener was raking the lawns of the house on the opposite side of Paseo Delicias. He turned around in horror as Sergeant Houk’s Buick slewed past him, tyres shrieking like a chorus from Tannhäuser, with a man on fire in the driver’s seat. The gardener dropped to his knees and crossed himself.

  Swerving the Buick around the next bend, Sergeant Houk knew that it was over. His legs were still alight, his scalp was tightening and shrivelling like a bathing-cap. The pain was already so intense that he didn’t know whether he could still feel it or not. It was like being eaten, rather than burned.

  Ahead of him, up the winding hill of Paseo Delicias, he could see a huge blue-and-white truck toiling. Genuine GM Auto Parts.

  Thank you, God, he thought to himself. So you have forgiven me, after all.

  Behind the next embankment, he saw the top of the truck approaching. He pressed his foot as far down on the accelerator as he could, and wildly steered the Buick on to the lefthand side of the road.

  He saw lemon trees passing, like trees in a dream. He saw rocks, bushes, fragments of sky, everything floating past him so gently and so normally, with the rocking motion of a carousel. He remembered the carousel at Disneyland, when he was a kid, floating up and down, up and down. But his tyres were still singing their merciless chorus, somewhere on the edge of his consciousness. Fearful and loud thy rage is! Like a storm-wind you come!

  He opened his mouth to say something, but then his entire windshield was filled with the massive chrome radiator grille of the oncoming truck.

  The Buick hit the truck at a closing speed of over seventy miles an hour. Its front end dived under the truck’s front bumper, and the entire car vanished underneath the truck as if it had never existed. The truck driver didn’t have the time to blow his horn.

  Only a second afterward, however, the Buick’s gas tank detonated with a sound like a huge and distant door slamming. The truck’s body was blown apart in the middle, and a lethal hail of automobile parts was sprayed in all directions. A Caprice crankshaft was driven right through the back of the driver’s cab, right through the back of his seat, and with a terrible and decisive crunch, right through his lower back. A spare Oldsmobile hub-cap sang through the air with the alien certainty of a flying-saucer, and sliced the head from the Mexican gardener who had witnessed Sergeant Houk’s blazing ride down the hill. He stood headless with his sickle in his hand, as if, headless, he was unable to decide whether to fall over or not.

  Then he dropped to the ground and began to irrigate the marigolds with a thick and glutinous stream of blood.

  It was almost ten seconds before the last echoes of the explosion came back from the distant mountain, and the last fragments of shattered automobile parts came ringing down from the sky.

  Otto turned away from the living-room window, and gave Helmwige a thin smile. ‘It makes me impatient, you know, to show them who will be the masters next.’

  ‘You should take more care,’ Helmwige replied, in a voice which was meant to show him that she was deeply unimpressed.

  ‘You heard what he said. Nobody knew that he was coming here, neither his superiors nor his colleagues. He came because our friend Herr Denman told him where to come. Herr Denman has an unpleasantly inquisitive turn of mind, you know, and the fact that we are keeping Celia here is obviously not enough to keep him from hounding us.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Helmwige, flatly. ‘You’re not thinking of burning him, are you?’

  ‘Of course not. Our future lies with men like Herr Denman. Good stock! Good fathers! Heaven knows that we are going to need all that we can get. But . . . he is not behaving himself. I am going to be obliged to bring him here, and keep him out of harm’s way until der Umgestaltung, the Transformation. Then he can burn. But not before. You remember what der Führer always said to me. “Otto,” he always said to me, “the search for purity will take the lives of many martyrs. But we must seek purity first and last. Die Reinheit zuerst, die Reinheit letzt. Die Reinheit is alles.”’

  Helmwige drew her silk bathrobe even more tightly around her, and stalked across to the far side of the living-room. The young naked man was still chained there, sitting cross-legged now, his face etched extremely sharp and pale against the southern California sunlight, every hard well-exercised muscle clearly defined. Helmwige stood over him for a long time, apparently admiring him, yet obviously despising him at the same time.

  ‘The master race,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What a pathetic specimen.’

  Otto came and stood beside her, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. ‘I suppose I have to agree. But then it was difficult for so many of those doctors to make such a leap of the mind. Mengele, what an idiot! And even the best of them, the very finest, Bloss and Hauer and von Harn, they could never understand that the master race was not just a question of genealogy, not just a question of breeding, but a question of the elements, too. The old, unquestioned power of the earth. That is what makes a master race.’

  Helmwige ran her red-clawed hand through the young man’s hair. ‘Still, you know, I like him.’

  ‘You like him!’ Otto sneered. ‘He is nothing more than a failed experiment! A racial dead-end! My God, if der Führer hadn’t made me promise, I would have destroyed him years ago, yes, and his father before him, and his father before him.’

  ‘But you did promise,’ Helmwige reminded him.

  Otto walked across to the curved 1930s’ cocktail cabinet, found a bottle of schnapps, and poured himself a drink. ‘Yes, I did promise,’ he agreed. ‘And look at the result. A creature with perfect physique. Perfect body, perfect eyesight, perfect hearing. Pity his IQ is slightly below room-temperature.’

  Helmwige continued to stroke the young man’s blond, flat-cropped hair. He didn’t lift his eyes to her once, didn’t smile, didn’t scowl, didn’t acknowledge her at all, except when she began to run the very edges of her fingernails down the back of his neck, through those fine tiny almost-invisible hairs. Then his penis gradually swelled and uncurled, not fully erect, but visibly enlarged and thickened.

  ‘Helmwige,’ Otto admonished her, with a flatness in his voice which betrayed the fact that he was neither jealous nor interested. To him, the young man had less value than a laboratory chimpanzee. He was simpl
y a nuisance, who had to be fed and exercised and accommodated. If Helmwige hadn’t adored him so much, he probably would have set him alight years ago. That big fat prick would have burned like an altar candle.

  Helmwige ran her fingernails all the way down the young man’s knobbly spine. Then she traced the clearly developed lines of his deltoids, his teres minor and teres major, his latissimus dorsi. His chains clanked slightly as she stroked his shoulders, and his penis swelled even larger, until the foreskin gradually rolled back of its own accord, revealing the bare plum-like glans, with its high distinctive ridge, and its deeply cleft opening.

  ‘You should have given him a name,’ said Helmwige. ‘How can anybody exist without a name?’

  Otto sipped a little schnapps; ran a thin tongue-tip across thinner lips. ‘He doesn’t need a name.’

  ‘How can he live, without a name?’ Helmwige protested. They had been through this same argument more times than Otto could count.

  ‘All he has to do is to live,’ he retorted. ‘A name is unnecessary. A dog may understand English, but you don’t buy books, even for the cleverest dog.’

  Helmwige stroked the young man’s buttocks, and the sides of his thighs. Then she said to him, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Turn over, you can be the cleverest dog.’

  With a scraping and jangling of chains, the young man turned over until he was on all fours. He remained exquisitely handsome. His back beautifully curved, his thigh muscles taut. But he remained silent, too, and willing to obey.

  ‘Now, look at him,’ grinned Helmwige. ‘Should I take him for a walk, on the end of a leash?’

  ‘He will probably kill you one day,’ Otto remarked, draining his schnapps and immediately pouring himself another.

  ‘Oh, he won’t kill me. He loves me. He adores me! I am the only one who treats him to what he likes!’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ Otto told her. ‘You humiliate him. Even a masochist has his pride, you know.’ He patted his shorts, and said, ‘Where are my cigarettes?’

  ‘On the table,’ Helmwige replied.

  ‘Those are Marlboro. You know that I smoke only Ernte 23.’

  Helmwige laughed, without humour. ‘You smoke detectives, too, and all kinds of people!’

  Otto snapped, ‘Leave that boy alone! Go and find my cigarettes!’

  ‘Oh, find your own cigarettes,’ Helmwige replied. ‘Just look at this.’

  She spread apart the young man’s buttock with her long red fingernails. Then, with the kind of taunting smile in her eyes that she knew Otto would find infuriating, she licked her index finger, and plunged it without hesitation into the knotted muscular rose of the young man’s bottom. He flinched, uttered a low gasp, but accepted her sharp-nailed finger without complaint.

  ‘I suppose you were worse at Ohrdruf,’ Otto commented.

  ‘Everybody was worse at Ohrdruf. Guards, prisoners, everybody. The prisoners were as much to blame as we were. They brought it upon themselves. Have you ever experienced a race of people with such a death wish! How can a murderer be a murderer without a victim? In every murder, my dear Otto, the victim is an accomplice.’

  Slowly, she withdrew her finger. Then she cupped the young man’s testicles in her hand, and squeezed them, and massaged them, over and over, until they bulged between her fingers.

  Otto looked away. ‘You are appalling, my dear. You always were. I suppose your only redeeming feature is your complete disregard for human life, including your own.’

  ‘Turn over,’ Helmwige commanded the young man, and silently, he did so. Helmwige grasped the huge veined shaft of his penis in both hands, and rubbed it up and down, looking intently and questioningly into his eyes as she did so.

  ‘How does that feel, then?’ she asked him. ‘Do you like it? Do you hate it? You don’t really know, do you? What a vegetable!’

  Now the head of his penis was gleaming and slick. Helmwige rubbed him harder and quicker. A faint flush of colour appeared on his perfect cheekbones; his stomach muscles tensed; and he closed his eyes. If possible, his penis appeared to grow even larger, and the opening gaped like a huge fish gasping for air.

  ‘Now,’ ordered Helmwige, with unexpected softness, and bent her head forward. Her mouth enclosed the head of his penis just as he shuddered, and ejaculated. She waited with her braided head bent forward in his lap for almost half a minute, and before she finally sat up, she pulled back the foreskin as far as it would go, and gave his shining skin one last definitive lick.

  She stood up, and approached Otto with shining lips. The young man remained where he was, his head still bowed, his penis shrinking.

  ‘Don’t you know what a tribute I pay you, Otto?’ Helmwige teased him. Otto flinched and turned away, his thin fingers tightening on his schnapps glass.

  ‘Otto—you are always the true master. Look what I have done for you! Mengele produced his so-called master race, and I have simply swallowed it!’

  Otto refused to look at her. A few moments passed, the road outside was chaotic with sirens. Helmwige said, ‘What is death, Otto? Where does it begin, where does it end? Supposing your mother had swallowed your father’s sperm, on the night when you were due to be conceived? She would have killed you! You would have died, and been digested, and floated out to the Baltic, the tiniest atom in a whole universe of atoms.’

  ‘Helmwige,’ said Otto at last, still averting his face. ‘If you touch that young man again, I will burn him to death in front of you. And that is my warning.’

  Helmwige smiled. ‘Why should I worry, Otto? You can frighten many, many people, but you can’t frighten me. In any case, why should I care, when you plan to burn the whole world.’

  Sixteen

  Lloyd was pouring himself another cup of Kathleen’s espresso when he saw the Mercedes pull up outside. After a moment, Otto climbed out, closely followed by Helmwige, but by nobody else. They came up to the front door, and rang the bell. Tom said, ‘It’s okay, I’ll get it!’

  Lloyd called, ‘No! Leave it! Don’t answer it!’

  Kathleen was halfway down the stairs. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Lloyd strode quickly to the stairs and took her arm. ‘It’s them again. Otto and that woman.’

  ‘They’ve come back? What do you think they want?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it might be better if you kept Lucy and Tom well out of the way.’

  The doorbell rang again. They could see Otto’s distorted shape through the window. Otto had already begun to inspire in Lloyd a kind of nagging dread, like waking up in the night with the fear that he might have cancer. Kathleen said, ‘All right, just to be safe. Tom . . . Auntie Lucy’s upstairs, why don’t you take her another cup of coffee?’

  When Tom had carefully carried the cup upstairs, Lloyd went to the door and opened it. Otto was standing on the step in his old-fashioned grey suit and his wide-brimmed hat, smiling coldly in the sunshine, while Helmwige stood a short distance away, dressed in a black Spandex miniskirt and a leather jacket which looked as if it had once belonged to Judge Dredd.

  ‘What do you want now?’ Lloyd asked Otto, tautly.

  Otto peered into the house as if he were inspecting it for dry-rot. ‘You don’t mind if we come in?’

  ‘Yes, I very much do mind if you come in. What do you want?’

  Otto’s roaming eyes settled on a crane fly that was trembling on the side of the doorway in the warm morning breeze. ‘You gave me your word, Mr Denman, that you would tell nobody about us.’

  ‘I’ve kept it.’

  ‘Oh? Then perhaps you can explain a visit we received this morning from three police officers, inquiring if we knew you. A very unpleasant visit, I might add. A visit that ended in a most regrettable tragedy.’

  ‘Tragedy?’ queried Lloyd. He was aware that his left eyelid was involuntarily fluttering. He was e
xhausted, he was stressed, and most of all he was terrified of what Otto might take into his head to do to them.

  ‘There was a fire, and an automobile accident,’ Otto explained, his eyes still fixed on the crane fly. ‘As I said, most regrettable. But we all know that police work has its risks.’

  ‘A fire? You burned Sergeant Houk?’

  ‘Was that his name? You shouldn’t have told him where to find us, you know. That was a great mistake.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him anything.’

  Otto’s eyes sloped toward Lloyd, and he gave him a thin lazy grin. ‘Oh, come now, Mr Denman. Do you take me for a Dummkopf?’

  ‘Christ, you’re insane,’ Lloyd breathed at him.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Otto replied. ‘In all the world, I am probably the only man who is in a state of complete mental balance.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Lloyd repeated.

  ‘I want you, Mr Denman, and I want Mrs Kerwin.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Lloyd hated him so much at that moment he could have seized him by the neck and throttled him. But as if she could sense the sudden surge in Lloyd’s hostility, Helmwige stepped forward and stood close to Otto’s shoulder, with an expression of threatening disinterest. Lloyd had seen the same expression on the faces of security guards at rock concerts. They’ll break your back or they won’t break your back, it’s up to you. But they’ll do it if necessary.

  ‘Mr Denman,’ Otto explained, ‘the summer solstice is next Wednesday. Then our Transformation Ceremony will be complete. I will no longer have to worry if inquisitive people disrupt our preparations. But until that time, I must ask that you and Mrs Kerwin stay as my guests, in order not to spread undue alarm about us, amongst people who may not be friendly.’

  ‘You expect anybody to be friendly to you, the way you’re acting?’ Lloyd demanded.

  ‘I expect only to be left undisturbed,’ Otto replied.

  ‘Well, if you think we’re going to stay with you, you’re crazy.’