Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  Kathleen took hold of his hand and squeezed it. ‘Come on, Lloyd,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve got God on our side.’

  Lloyd gave her a tightly drawn smile, and tried to look as if he believed it.

  As nine o’clock drew near, the doors of the auditorium were closed, and Lloyd noticed that a security guard stood by each. Maybe the invited audience thought they had been posted there to keep out gatecrashers, but Lloyd was pretty damned sure that they were intended to keep the invited audience from getting out.

  Gradually the lights were dimmed, and the hubbub of conversation died down. There was a breathless moment when a thousand and one people sat in complete silence, and then the curtains parted and Otto stepped out, in white tie and tailcoat, prissily tugging at his shirt-cuffs. There was a smattering of applause across the stalls, although it was obvious that nobody in the audience knew who Otto was.

  He lifted his hand for quiet, and then he said, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You have all received from me a personal invitation to this gala evening of Wagnerian opera. You were selected because each of you has attended several classical concerts in the past five years, and because most of you are very successful at what you do.’

  ‘I am hoping that tonight we will form amongst ourselves an exclusive and special society of those who are devoted to the works of Richard Wagner and the fundamental principles which inspired his music. But more of that later.’

  ‘What I have to tell you is that what you are about to witness is not what you thought you were going to witness . . . not a collection of works by various composers, paying tribute to Richard Wagner. What you are going to witness is a complete and previously unknown opera by Richard Wagner, his last.’

  A low roaring of excitement and surprise went through the audience. Even the orchestra turned to each other in amazement. Celia must have given them scores which appeared to be several unconnected pieces, but which in fact made up the entire opera, cunningly disassembled.

  Willard Bright, the conductor, stood up and said something to Otto which Lloyd couldn’t hear. But Otto simply smiled and said, ‘You have rehearsed it, ja? You know how to play it? You will be magnificent!’

  The conductor consulted with his orchestra for a moment, but none of them appeared to have any objections. In fact most of them looked eager to start playing.

  ‘Here then,’ said Otto, ‘is Richard Wagner’s lost masterpiece Junius. It tells the story of a Bavarian burgomaster who made a pact with the powers of darkness in return for immortality . . . how he was misunderstood by his fellow citizens and sacrificed . . . but how he triumphed over death, and how glory and brilliance came out of that darkness, and forged an empire the like of which had never been seen before, but which will rise again!’

  Immediately, the orchestra broke into a thunderous overture, wilder and more powerful than any Wagner that Lloyd had heard before. The music was primitive, sweeping, unbridled, like a hurricane blowing through the theatre. Already overwhelmed by Otto’s compliments, and by the fact that they were going to hear the premier performance of a long-lost opera, the audience sat enthralled.

  For most of the overture, the auditorium was plunged into complete darkness, but then the curtains were drawn back, and the kettle-drums set up a rolling, reverberating, primitive rhythm, and a hundred-strong chorus, all dressed in black and carrying lighted torches, sang a deep, dirgelike repetitive chant.

  Who has been trading with His Satanic Majesty?

  Who has been offering his very soul for sale?

  Who has turned his back on the Lord His God?

  In spite of his fear, in spite of his hatred of Otto, Lloyd found the opera hugely moving and disturbing. It had all the elements of a Nazi rally . . . darkness, torches, flags, symbols . . . and chants of triumph that swelled like the ocean at night.

  Turning around, he could see that the rest of the audience were transfixed by it, too. It had drummed up their deepest terrors, it had stirred up all of their suppressed prejudices. It had given their hatreds a musical voice.

  At the end of the first act, the orchestra finished with a deafening finale of horns and drums, through which the chorus chanted ‘Glory! Purity! Power and strength!’ over and over and over again, until Lloyd could hear some of the audience chanting it with them.

  ‘Glory! Purity! Power! Strength!’

  God, thought Lloyd. How easy it was to start it all over again.

  By the close of the first act, the audience was in a frenzy of excitement. They rose from their seats and gave the opera company a standing ovation that roared on and on and seemed to rise rather than diminish. The second act started with a long, quiet passage set in the twilit mountains of Bavaria. The scenery was dimly blue and luminous, and the voice of the leading soprano, Eloïs Steiger, seemed to slide through it with a coldness that Lloyd could feel in his bones.

  I have seen with my own eyes

  Dead men walking in the streets

  Dead men tapping at the children’s windows

  Not speaking, not calling

  But waiting for me at every corner

  Gradually the aria became another chant, a low throbbing chant that put Lloyd in mind of a galley-drum, or the beat to which a Viking longboat might have been rowed. He had the unsettling feeling that this was the prelude to the Fire Ritual, the magical chant which prepared a would-be Salamander for the flames.

  He was right. The mountains of Bavaria moved away to reveal a barbarians’ encampment, and in the centre of the encampment a monstrous bonfire blazed. The effect had been achieved with flickering lights and shreds of flying tissue-paper, but the stage technicians had achieved the right degree of lurid, mesmerizing light. The chorus appeared, and began a chant which underlay everything sung by Eloïs Steiger, and by Robert Kupka, the baritone who was playing the sorcerous burgomaster Johann Junius.

  Lloyd looked along the chorus. They wore grey monklike habits, and their faces were partially concealed in shadow. But he was sure that he recognized Celia, fourth from the left, and he nudged Kathleen and whispered, ‘Can you see Mike there? Somewhere in the chorus.’

  Kathleen picked up the opera-glasses from the seat in front of her, and carefully scrutinized the stage. ‘There . . .’ she said at last. ‘I think that’s him . . . the tall one just behind the fire.’

  They both watched the remainder of the second act in dread and curiosity. Lloyd checked his watch and there were only forty minutes remaining until midnight. Forty minutes to complete the last act of Wagner’s opera, and the first act of the master race.

  As the fire scene came to a drumming, low-key ending, Lloyd leaned across and signalled to Franklin that it was time for him to go. Franklin nodded, and as the audience rose for the last interval, he and Tony Express disappeared into the crowds.

  Although the audience were allowed through to the Civic Theater bars for champagne cocktails, Lloyd noticed that all the street exits were closed and guarded. He and Kathleen stood in a corner saying nothing to each other, but listening to the chatter all around them.

  ‘. . . says something you could never say in print without somebody branding you a bigot . . .’

  ‘. . . it’s loud, for sure, and very Germanic. But what music! Do you realize what a privilege it is, to hear that music for the very first time . . .’

  ‘. . . makes me feel strange—like I’ve heard it before, but I can’t think where . . .’

  ‘. . . music’s been dominated by blacks and Jews for so long, people have forgotten what real pure classical music sounds like . . .’

  Lloyd took Kathleen’s hand and together they walked back to the auditorium and sat down.

  ‘Did you hear them?’ said Kathleen. ‘It’s happening already.’

  ‘I know,’ Lloyd agreed. ‘The Third Reich, all over again. And here, in Southern California.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Kat
hleen told him.

  He leaned across and kissed her. ‘Do you want to know something?’ he told her. ‘Me too.’

  There was feverish excitement as the audience returned to the theatre for the final act. Somehow a rumour had circulated that the last aria was magnificent beyond belief, that tonight was going to be legendary in world opera for decades to come. ‘The night that Junius was performed in public for the first time . . . The night that Eloïs Steiger reached a fortissimo A-natural above high C that had the audience screaming in denial that such a sound could exist.’

  Lloyd recognized the rumour for what it was: propaganda. A way of stirring up more excitement in an audience that was already tired and excited and ready for almost anything.

  The curtains drew back, revealing a megalithic Aryan city, under a threatening sky. Lightning flickered and thunder crashed. Horns bayed in unison. Then the chorus marched diagonally right and left across the stage, wearing breastplates and heavy helmets, and carrying spears.

  ‘We march toward the future . . .

  We will make war on decadence and sloth

  Like a black wind we will storm through the world’

  The music grew louder and louder, the chorus shrilled and roared. Lloyd peered at his watch and saw that there were only a few minutes to go before midnight, the critical moment of Transformation. The chorus were gathering in a semicircle, holding hands, and chanting ‘Storm! Storm! Storm! Storm!’

  Eloïs Steiger moved centre-stage, wearing a huge black cape and a black horned helmet. Several of the audience stood up in awe, and nobody attempted to make them sit down again. Drums rolled, thunder shook the auditorium.

  ‘Now is the moment of our Transformation!’ she sang, in a voice as powerful as a gale. ‘Now is the moment when men become gods!’

  ‘Storm! Storm! Storm! Storm!’ chanted the chorus, raising their joined hands with every chant.

  Women were shrieking in the audience. Some of the men were stamping their feet in time to the chant of the chorus, others stood with their mouths open in disbelief as Elöis Steiger reached the final measures of the opera. The orchestra swept them all along like survivors clinging to a life-raft.

  ‘Now is the moment of our triumph! Now is the moment when all will fall before us!’

  Eloïs hung for a moment on the penultimate E-flat. The orchestra was suddenly silent, the audience hushed. Lightning danced in the painted sky, and there was a suppressed buzzing of electrical contacts, but that was all. Kathleen clutched Lloyd’s hand, although neither of them were really sure what they were expecting.

  It was then that they heard a sound that didn’t sound like a human voice at all. It sounded like some uninvented, unimaginable instrument. A shiver of dread ran through the audience that they would only hear this once in their lives, and this was the moment.

  The sound broadened and widened and swelled and rose. Eloïs Steiger flung wide her arms and threw back her head, and in that rippling black cloak she uttered an A-natural that filled the theatre like an atomic explosion, dazzling and deafening, wider and wider and louder and louder until Lloyd felt that the whole auditorium would collapse on top of them.

  But there was more to come. At the instant the note died—in that stunned hiatus before an audience usually roars its approval—the chorus threw back their cloaks and revealed themselves naked, gleaming with the grey metallic skin of Salamanders. They raised their joined hands, and shouted together, ‘Glory! Purity! Power!’

  The entire theatre shook. Pieces of plaster dropped from the ceiling, and a battery of spotlights fell on to the stage and smashed. Somebody screamed, ‘Earthquake!’ and a moan of terror went through the audience. But then they immediately saw that it wasn’t an earthquake. It was the power that was rippling through the chorus, a sullen crimson light that throbbed from one to the other, through their arms, through their hands, until all of them were glowing the colour of red-hot coals.

  The audience stood and stared at them in bewilderment, but Lloyd and Kathleen knew what was happening. Their volatile bodies of smoke and spirit were being transformed by the most ancient of pagan powers into something which resembled human flesh—the flesh of the gods. These were going to be the parents of the master race.

  Gradually, the light died and the smoke drifted away. The audience were left in stupefied silence. Some of the women were sobbing. They didn’t understand that the enormous emotions stirred up by the opera hadn’t been for their benefit, but for the benefit of Otto’s Salamanders. They were left aroused, excited, but completely disoriented, unable to understand what they had witnessed.

  ‘Now,’ Lloyd muttered. ‘Now, Franklin—the Hymn, for God’s sake! The Hymn!’

  But no Hymn came. Instead, the curtains slowly and silently descended, and Otto reappeared on the stage, his hands raised in a call for calm.

  ‘Sit, please, sit,’ he said, and the audience gradually sat. He waited until they were completely quiet, and then he said, ‘You will not know what it is that you have seen, not yet. It was a Transformation, of fire into flesh, of insubstantial souls into immortal beings who can walk this earth as gods.

  ‘You too can be gods like they are. In fact, that is why I chose you. All of you here can take part in the ritual of fire, and become leaders of men such as the world has never known.’

  Nobody spoke. Nobody challenged him. Nobody knew what to say.

  ‘You are not aware of it,’ Otto continued, ‘but the ritual chant in the first act prepared all of you for what is going to happen now. You will survive it—as the men and women of my chorus survived it—to be transformed, when the time is right, into glorious creatures such as they.’

  Otto raised both his hands to his temples. There was a low murmur of bewilderment, but so far nobody had dared to speak up.

  ‘My God,’ Lloyd whispered to Kathleen. ‘We have to get out of here! Do you see what he’s going to do?’

  ‘What? What is it?’ asked Kathleen, still bemused by the climax of the opera.

  ‘Salamanders!’ Lloyd hissed at her. ‘He’s chosen this audience to be Salamanders! This is his master race! He’s going to burn the whole goddamned theatre!’

  At the instant he spoke, there was a shrill scream of surprise from the back row of the stalls. Lloyd turned, and saw that a man’s head had caught alight, and was furiously burning. The woman next to him was trying to flap at the flames with her fur stole, but then she burst into flame, too. One by one, with alarming speed, like a lighted taper running along a row of candles, the whole row of people were ignited, and then the next row, and then the next.

  ‘Out!’ Lloyd yelled at Kathleen, and pushed her along to the end of the row to the exit. A security guard was standing in the way, but he looked as shocked by the fires as they were, and Lloyd shouldered him to one side and kicked open the exit before he had time to stop them. He twisted around, and shouted, ‘Hey!’ but then the front rows detonated into flame, and he was caught in a roaring fireball of superheated air which took off his face as if it were a plastic Hallowe’en mask.

  Lloyd and Kathleen ran along the corridor, until they reached a door marked Offices: Private. The door was locked, but Lloyd gave it three violent kicks, and it fell flat into the drab carpet-tiled office beyond. On the opposite side of the office was a door which obviously led backstage.

  ‘Come on,’ Lloyd urged Kathleen. ‘We have to play that hymn!’

  They ran along another long corridor, up a flight of stairs, and then they pushed open a swing door and found themselves in the gloom at the back of the stage, among flats and props and cardboard trees and gold-painted thrones and coils of rope. There was nobody around, so they stepped cautiously behind the scenery, looking for the hi-fi console.

  ‘Listen,’ said Kathleen, holding his hand. ‘You can hear the fire alarms.’

  Lloyd paused, and listened. ‘Sure. But no screaming. Have you n
oticed that? Nobody’s screaming. They’re not even fighting to get out.’

  They could smell smoke and heat and the unmistakable barbecue stench of charred human flesh, but apart from the distant alarms the quiet was uncanny. They crept forward behind the Bavarian mountains, and suddenly found themselves front stage, only partially concealed by what were supposed to be alder-trees.

  On the stage, the chorus now stood in a circle, still naked, but no longer greyish-skinned, the way they had been before. They had eyes, too, like Helmwige’s; pale and glistening and unnaturally calm, the eyes of people who will never have to fear for their lives. Otto stood outside the circle, still facing the auditorium.

  The theatre was the most grisly sight that Lloyd had ever seen. Through a dense veil of human smoke, he could see that all thousand and one guests had burned, and that they were lolling in their seats, still smoking. Raw grins stretched over burned teeth. Jewels had melted into charred necks. Everywhere Lloyd looked, bodies sat stiff and blackened. Here and there, a toupee still burned with a guttering flame, or a patent purse flared.

  Lloyd had never understood how a Salamander was formed, but now he saw it for himself, over and over again. It was silent, and it was quite uncanny. He had seen many supernatural occurrences over the past week, but nothing as strange as this.

  A thick-set man lay slumped in his seat in the front row. The smoke rose from his burned body, and seemed to twist and thicken above his head. As it drifted higher and higher toward the ceiling, it gradually took on a human shape, and reached a point where it started to sink again, until it had reached the floor. The ritual chant had mixed smoke with the rising soul, so that the soul couldn’t leave the earth’s gravity, so that it was denied its place in heaven.

  At the back of the smoky auditorium, more and more Salamanders fell soft as quilts from the air, and gathered together in silence, mute witnesses to their own burned bodies.

  Otto turned back to his chorus in triumph, his yellow eyes wide.

  ‘It has begun!’ he cried. ‘It has begun! Now for the greatest transformation of all!’