“Dr Pretorius has made a long study of teratology,” Ransom said, tapping a jar where something like a finny snake curled. The man gave off an odour compounded of whisky fumes and stale cigar smoke.
Cochrane picked up a human skull; a grisly tail of vertebrae was still attached, the bottommost cut in a ragged line.
“Ah, now that is the skull of the inestimable Dr Dee,” Ransom said. “Dr Pretorius likes to keep reminders of his past adventures.”
Cochrane knew that he should stay calm, stay cool, now that the promise of five hundred years of life was within his grasp, but Pretorius’s presumption at holding him hostage, and Ransom’s bland affability, rubbed him the wrong way. The whole setup made him deeply uneasy. Rationally, he knew that this was just a show; instinctively, the place gave him the creeps, and his mind kept returning to the plaintive cries, the long white fingers, of whoever had been locked under that grill.
He said to Ransom, “Are you part of Pretorius’s little game?”
Ransom blinked owlishly in the dim electric light. “It’s no game, Larry. Dr Pretorius is deadly serious.”
“So am I. I know enough about him to have him hanged in Tel Aviv. It would make a great show trial. The Israelis couldn’t get Magall or Mengele, but your boss is the next best thing. What’s it like, working for an ex-Nazi? Were you in the war, Ransom? How do you square that?”
“I was a navigator for a Lancaster bomber. Dr Pretorius was a prisoner in a death camp.”
“He was working for Ilsa Magall. The Destroying Angel.”
“Let him tell his story, Larry. He really does want to have his history told, but your threats upset him.”
“Yeah? Tough shit. He’s so upset he kidnapped me.”
“You’re his guest.” Ransom cocked his head; a moment later a gong sounded distantly. “Dinner, I believe.”
When Cochrane returned to his bungalow an hour later, replete with swordfish and half a bottle of ’81 Chardonnay (he and Ransom had served themselves from a catering trolley; there was no sign of any servants), he found his computer on the desk, plugged into a modem whose cable sneaked out of a window. A moment later, Cochrane was talking to Howie Zaslow on the phone; a few minutes after that, his computer was decoding the first graphics files and loading them into the picture viewing programme.
A bunch of facsimiles of typed letters in German, on note-paper headed with the S S death-head, the s’s replaced with the infamous double lightning flash, Pretorius’s name underlined a dozen times. A photograph in blurry greys of Dr Pretorius, looking scarcely younger than he did now, stiffly shaking hands with a woman in black SS uniform in front of tangles of barbed wire. Reproductions of pages from laboratory notebooks: columns of figures in cramped copperplate, each page stamped with the death’s head.
While Cochrane’s bubblejet printer was busy, Zaslow told him, “I checked the number tattooed on the wrist of the man in the photograph. It’s the same as the one given to Dr Pretorius at Treblinka in 1941. The photograph was taken a year later, at Auschwitz-Birkenau; he was there under the name of Loew. There’s more background on the other stuff I sent you earlier, too. That guy in the daguerreotype next to Pretorius is Brunel, the Victorian engineer; the machine is supposedly some kind of deep-boring device they developed. I got into the records of the Royal Geographic Society, too. A Dr Pretorius accompanied Professor Challenger on an expedition along the Orinoco. Around about 1890.”
“Forget all the old shit. It’s the Nazi stuff that will clinch this.”
Zaslow said, sounding hurt, “It’s important to get the whole story if it’s what Pretorius wants.”
“Fuck what Pretorius wants. It’s what I want that counts.”
After a brief pause, Zaslow said, sounding more distant than ever, “I found out about that name you asked about.”
“Go ahead.”
“Astorath is the name of a demon. In fact, he’s one of the Dukes of Hell. He’s supposed to manifest himself as a beautiful angel astride a dragon, with a viper in his hand. It seems that the Church gave him a sex change, by the way. Originally he was a she. Astarte, the Indo-European goddess of creation and destruction. Athtar to the Egyptians. Astroarche, in Aramaic. The morning star of Heaven, Queen of the Stars who ruled over all of the dead whose spirits could be seen as stars. In short, he’s big juju. If Pretorius – ”
Cochrane laughed. “I forget that you’re an egghead, just like Pretorius. Believe me, this mystic bullshit is just another smokescreen. Stay cool, Howie. I’ll see you get what’s coming to you.”
Cochrane put down the phone, waited a few heartbeats, then dialed the number for which he’d paid ten thousand dollars. “Time to get to work,” he told the man at the other end. “My assistant has outlived his usefulness.”
He put down the phone. He didn’t feel a thing. Zaslow a mayfly voice buzzing in his ear. This was not a secret to be shared with those not worthy. He wondered if there were many others like Dr Pretorius, if there was a secret cabal of immortals. A dream he’d been enjoying, this past week. Becoming a Master of the Universe. Learning the real secrets. Power. Life was power. The dead sure as shit didn’t have any.
That was when Cochrane realized that there was gunfire somewhere in the grounds.
It was dark now. Holding the 9mm automatic inside his jacket pocket, Cochrane navigated the garden by the reflected glow of the floodlights which lit the sheer walls of the house. Out in the darkness beyond the house was the distant sound, like popcorn kernels snapping, of automatic gunfire, unmistakable to any resident of Los Angeles.
A jeep was parked on the other side of the ha-ha: the searchlight on its cab roof caught in its beam something human-sized running crookedly towards a clump of trees a couple of hundred yards downhill. The creature turned to the light, raised its arms above its head, and yelled hoarsely. Cochrane, a hundred yards away, stepped back. The thing’s face was the muzzle of a beast, its mouth full of crooked fangs. A man on the load bed of the jeep took aim. Two spaced shots: the creature dropped, kicked, and was still. The jeep’s motor started and it spun away downhill.
Behind Cochrane, Ransom said, “You should have waited for me, Larry. We’re having a bit of a cull. A few of the experimental animals escaped.”
Cochrane thought of long white fingers probing through the grill. His heart was beating quickly; the beast’s human cry had shocked him. He said, “What kind of experimental animals?”
“Monkeys, mostly. A few chimpanzees and orang-utan. No more than the usual kind of specimens, you know.”
The thing that Cochrane had seen shot down was no ape or monkey. And the fingers at the grating . . .
“Come this way,” Ransom said. “Dr Pretorius is waiting.”
The lights of the greenhouse had been reduced to a muted moonlight glow, but the wet heat was no less stifling than it had been that afternoon. As before, Dr Pretorius sat in his wheelchair with a glass and a bottle of gin on the table beside him. He was hunched inside his blankets and shawls, but there was a quick eagerness in his voice.
“You must know now that I need you, Mr Cochrane. I need you to tell the truth about me. My name must not be forgotten.”
“I believe you’re what you claim to be. That’s not the problem. But you lied about your association with Magall. Let me help you. Otherwise, well, frankly, Dr Pretorius, you could be in real deep shit.”
Dr Pretorius didn’t answer at once. He poured a measure of gin into the glass, sipped it, and smacked his lips. “My one little vice,” he said. “You have the documents, and you believe you have me. But I was not even an assistant, Mr Cochrane. She saw me as an animal with certain talents that were useful to her project.”
“Talents which included torturing prisoners in experiments. You’re guilty of war crimes, Pretorius.”
Dr Pretorius looked amused. “Is that the best you can do? Shame on you, Mr Cochrane. Oh, the torture was real enough, but my part in it was an invention, a cover story which the Americans used to hide t
heir discovery of what Magall really wanted. She wanted to create a race of killing machines, soldiers without fear, with perfect obedience. She learned of my reputation. I did what I was told, which is no doubt what you will tell me the camp kommandos also said. But I was not a kommando; I was a prisoner, a musselman who wished only to avoid selektion. Magall supplied the parts; I supplied the knowledge. How hungry she was to learn! But her plans became crazier and crazier, and most of her creations were too deformed for their hearts to support them, even when we used two or three in one body. Only one, a monster she called Boris, lived, and it was so tormented that it killed several female prisoners, and then Ilsa Magall herself, before the guards managed to shoot it down. How disappointed Astorath must have been at that setback! Through me, he thought to challenge God, but always it was the same story. Moreau was killed by the beastmen who discovered he was not God; Jekyll became his own creature, and so destroyed himself; poor Victor followed his creature into the wastelands.”
“Victor?”
“A student of mine. He was both worse and better than me. It was when the magic really began to die. No longer did we rely on spells, but merely upon electricity. Oh, there were a few holdouts who attempted a bastard marriage of alchemy and science. Poor mad West for instance, or the charlatan Robert Cornish. But magic was already dead, killed by Victor and those like him, cold clear-eyed men without an ounce of romance or passion in their souls.”
“I suppose this would be at Ingolstadt.”
Dr Pretorius shrugged. “I remember so little of the affair, to tell the truth. I had discovered the delights of gin and opium. Most of the eighteenth century is a blur to me.”
“How many monsters are you responsible for?” Cochrane was thinking of the thing he had seen gunned down. He was wondering if there were any more. His 9mm pistol made a comforting weight in his jacket pocket.
“Monsters? You might call them that, I suppose. Ah, but my dear, exquisite King and Queen, my poor, shy creatures . . . these were not monsters. It is the process that creates such things that is monstrous. Science is a corrupting force because it allows power to be wielded by those who do not understand it. Do you know how your recorder there works, or how to fix your computer? Of course not. In my salad days, as a necromancer, I had to make all the tools of my Art myself. It was more than a precaution; it ensured that I was fully engaged in the Great Work. Nowadays, amateurs who have skimmed the works of Crowley call up demons they cannot control, and are devoured. Quite right too! And so with those who misuse science without understanding it.
“Victor may have been my best and brightest student; he at least studied Paracelus and Albertus Magnus and knew that there was more to the working of the world than reductive rules unpicked by parsimonious experiment. Yet he failed. They all failed, and not because they reached too far. No, it was because they dared not reach far enough.”
“These creatures of yours – ”
“I like to keep in my hand, nothing more. An old man’s hobby, and outdated besides. The little ambition behind my little surgical dabblings is as nothing to the overweening pride of those who would render new creatures by meddling with DNA. They would erase one gene, rewrite others, mix genes from different creatures, and yet they are like painters obsessively reworking a tiny patch of a vast picture they can never comprehend. Listen – ”
Cochrane said after a moment’s silence. “I don’t hear anything.”
“He’s watching us, and how little he understands. A nice metaphor. But you understand, Mr Cochrane. You will tell my story. This nonsense about my time in the camp, it is only a negotiating ploy. I understand that. But I have given you the story anyway. You can tell it all. In fact, I insist that you do.”
Cochrane took out his pistol. “Fuck your story. I want your secret. I want to be like you, and live forever. If you think I’m going to sell it to some glossy for a flat fee you’re out of your mind.”
Dr Pretorius’s eyes did not leave Cochrane’s face. “Or you will shoot me? Then you will not leave my property alive. Already you have meddled. I know it was you who set my poor innocent children free, but I forgive you and I will give you my secret, much good it will do you.”
“I’ll want more than that. I’ll want to be certain it works. You’re running away because you’re a fraud who can no longer hide the truth that your cures don’t work. There is only one thing you have that’s valuable, and I want it.”
“Of course, of course. You are a very modern man, Mr Cochrane. You believe that science can accomplish everything it can dream of. How Astorath would laugh to see in you his victory! For he has won. Science has grown in power beyond his wildest dreams. God is dead, or if not, he soon might be. Cosmologists abolish him from the universe, and set up a secular dream of evolution towards godhead, yet they understand only the first layer of reality, and think there are no more than that. But although my demon has triumphed, he shall not have me. I shall cheat him – ah, how sweet! – I shall cheat him by the instrument of his victory.”
Cochrane stuck the pistol right in the old fool’s face. “The secret.”
Dr Pretorius said calmly, “You are as bad as the scientists. You have your poor servant supply you with knowledge, but you are not interested in knowledge for its own sake; you are interested in what you can do with it. It is a very old sin; Astorath merely provided a new context for it. The truth is that I have told you the truth. In my library, amongst the incunabula, there is a Book of Hours by the Master of Bruges. A keepsake from an old love, in London. In the book is a parchment. I doubt that you can read Latin, but I expect that you can find someone to do it for you. Your poor assistant that you wanted killed, perhaps. Oh yes, we were listening in to your conversations on the telephone.”
Cochrane said, “You’ll tell the truth. Enough bullshit.”
“Ah, but it is the truth.”
“Then you did sign a pact with the Devil?”
Dr Pretorius smiled. His teeth were small and black, like watermelon seeds. “With a devil. It was more than five hundred years ago, but still I remember how scared I was. I was in my youth then, full of piss and hot air like most young men; it was almost as a joke that I called him forth.
“Certainly I did not believe it possible, but that, of course, is how Astorath’s kind snare souls. Luckily, I had performed the ceremony correctly, and I was protected, or he would have eaten me there and then, for my presumption. He gave me the usual deal. Long life and knowledge beyond the dreams of mortal men, in return for my soul when I died.
“Cunningly, or so I thought in my youthful pride, I stipulated that I should age but five years in one century, supposing it as near to immortality as not. It was not, of course, but I have plans to thwart Astorath, and I do not mean by recantation, the way by which moral cowards are allowed to sneak into Heaven, for despite their sins, their recantations spite Hell. You don’t believe me, of course. Well, I am certain that I could call up Astorath for you, should you want it, but I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“He’d have to talk to my agent first.”
“Among the creatures you set free was my familiar. No doubt it was he who seduced you into the act. I can show you – ”
Cochrane, shaking with a surge of adrenalin, could hardly keep the pistol centred on Dr Pretorius’s face. “The secret. The real secret. No more lies.”
“My master is a servant of the father of lies. You deal in lies made from facts. Where shall we begin?”
“With the fact that I’ll kill you for the truth. You know I’m capable of it.”
“Of course. Listen. Listen.” Dr Pretorius lifted his head and, with a hand like a bird’s clawed foot, cast back a corner of his crocheted shawl, and cupped his large, veined, almost transparent ear.
This time Cochrane did hear something. A leafy rustle, a stealthy progress through the thickets of greenery that surrounded them. He turned, expecting to see Ransom, and yelled and jumped to his feet, sending his cane chair toppling, firing a
lmost without thought as Dr Pretorius shouted:
“No!”
It was a lucky shot. The noise echoed amongst the high ironwork of the greenhouse as the creature fell back. It was a white-skinned ape with a scant covering of ginger hair, its head that of panther, its tongue long and forked, questing the air as it gasped out its last breath in a bower of crushed palmetto fronds. Its human hands clutched a blood red blossom to its broad chest; its legs kicked, quivered; heels armed with cockspurs gouged concrete. Its yellow eyes fixed on Cochrane’s, then gazed past him.
“It is so easy to kill,” Dr Pretorius said, sounding tired. “Your assistant, for instance, how badly you would have rewarded him. But we warned him, and he will write my story if you will not. Put down that pistol, Mr Cochrane. You have had your chance.”
With a sudden crashing, two burly guards pushed through the screen of cycads and ferns. One bent to the body of the dead creature; the other started to wheel Dr Pretorius away. Cochrane waved the automatic, but the guard carrying the body of the dead creature blocked his path. It was the hunchback giant from the gate. His craggy face was a patchwork of scars. What had he once been – bull, gorilla?
“Save your ammunition,” Dr Pretorius called out. “You will need all of it to save yourself. Go now, and you may escape with your life.”
The giant guard leered into Cochrane’s face; the stench of his breath nearly knocked him down.
Cochrane ran in the other direction, bursting out of the greenhouse just in time to see the limousine pull away from the front of the spotlit house. He chased after it, but it sped around a curve and rattled over the cattle grid. Its red taillights dwindled downslope in the night.
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