Dark to Mortal Eyes

by Eric Wilson

  Scooter lifted a shoulder. “Not bad. Not exactly my thing but not bad.”

  “Scoot.”

  “No harm done.” John winked at his wife and set his oboe back in its case. “A little resentment’s to be expected, considering I whipped him at eightball.”

  Scooter fired back. “Home court advantage. Ya got lucky.”

  “Rematch in the morning.”

  “Better say your prayers, big guy.”

  Kris and John exchanged a subtle glance that set Josee to wondering, then Kris dropped a marker between the pages of her book. “Do either of you play an instrument?” she wanted to know.

  “Me?” Scooter coughed. “I play the radio in the keys of loud and louder.”

  “And loudest,” Josee said. “In his shop, he cranks it till the trailer shakes.”

  “Tell ’em what you can play, Josee. Give it up now, no holdin’ out.”

  “Cork it.” She focused on her pad.

  “Do we have another musician among us?” Kris unfolded her legs and sat up on the lounge. “Aha, I had a feeling you were hiding some God-given talents.”

  “Count your blessings. You should be thanking him I don’t have a violin nearby. My parents signed me up for lessons when I was in middle school. Played three years, just long enough to realize I knew squat. Haven’t touched one in ages.”

  “Yeah, what’s up with that, babe? Lettin’ it go to waste—that’s what you’re doin’.”

  “Music’s a tremendous thing,” John concurred. “Has the power to touch us on many levels. According to Vince—Sergeant Turney—you two’ve had quite an ordeal the past few days, dealing with forces beyond your control.”

  Scooter shot Josee a look. She poked her tongue at him through her cheek.

  “Music,” John said, “has an innate ability to break into that realm.”

  “So go the rumors.”

  “What’ve you heard, Scooter?”

  “Pink Floyd and a little acid can do wonders. Know that one firsthand. You ever been to OMSI’s laser-light show? What a trip, man. Far out.” He flashed the peace sign to enhance the hippie lingo.

  John chuckled. “Not quite what I meant, but you obviously know what I’m talking about. That’s one way of tapping into the realm of the spirit. Although some try to divide physical and spiritual, it’s not easily done. Like Kris’s friendship cake. You mix up the ingredients and bake them, and then it’s nearly impossible to separate them. They are one.”

  “So,” Scooter scoffed, “we got a buncha little fruitcakes runnin’ around.”

  “Friendship cakes. That was the analogy.”

  “My bad.”

  John laughed. “Sore loser. Should’ve banked that last shot instead of trying to slip it by the seven.”

  “You shouldn’t have been wiggling your thumb near the pocket. Threw me off.”

  “Boys, boys.” Kris held up a hand. “The testosterone’s getting thick in here.”

  John waved his sheet music as a sign of a truce. He and Scooter smiled at each other. Then he said, “We do need to be careful when we encounter this other realm. A battle rages. Not all that we encounter will be pleasant.”

  “Scoot, doesn’t that sound like something Sierra would say?” Josee felt a need to understand. “This friend of ours says that when she’s been, you know, doing drugs, she’s seen demons and ghosts, the Grim Reaper, some way-out-there sort of stuff.”

  “Nah, she just says that for attention.”

  “But some of the guys in your gaming group, they’ve said the same thing.”

  Kris nodded. “Doesn’t surprise me in the least, Josee. Imagine the spiritual realm as a house. If you jump over the back wall, you’re bound to land in the proverbial doo-doo, whereas the front door ushers you in with a welcoming light, a holy light.”

  Scooter flicked his fingers against the recliner’s arm. “Here it comes.”

  “Let’s hear her out.”

  “The truth is,” Kris said, “many sorts of spiritual trespassing have been devised. Most of them are readily available, but none of them without repercussions.”

  “In both realms,” John underlined.

  “There’re many paths to God. That’s what I think.”

  “Sure, Scooter,” John said, “Kris and I won’t argue that. But once those paths lead you to his destination, you still have to knock on the door. Jesus alone claimed to be that door, and that’s where people balk. They want God on their own terms.”

  “Hey, whatever works for you.”

  “Well, Jesus was either delusional, deceitful, or deity. Take your pick.”

  Josee added another touch to her sketchbook. She could feel a chill emanating from the friend beside her. She wanted to say more, to hear more, but his tension weighed upon her. Hon, what’s going on here? You’re scaring me. Sure, this was Scooter sitting behind her, but he wasn’t himself. Something had changed. Something had him under its spell—I’m not alone … They came with me—and it was warring for expression on his face. He looked like a man in conflict.

  Like a man who hated what he was about to do.

  24

  Games of Chance

  Drawing nostalgic warmth from his father’s handwriting, Marsh chased the story through the frail, tattered pages. He reminded himself to breathe as he plunged into each section. These were the words and thoughts of Chauncey Addison—a man he cherished but had never known.

  The excitement fizzled as First Lieutenant Addison’s war history came to light.

  How much has my mother read of this?

  From training at Camp Adair north of Corvallis, to harrowing accounts of battle, to grisly descriptions of Nazi prison camps and experiments discovered in process, the lieutenant pinpointed events and individuals that had shaped him throughout the conflict. He wrote of a beautiful young woman, a German in her teens, who had coaxed him into providing her a ticket to freedom … and much more.

  As the war wound down and year’s end drew nigh, I found myself conducting interviews at an internment camp, at Kransberg Castle outside Frankfurt. This camp was one of three for German POWs who claimed military or scientific expertise. Like poker players, these prisoners played their hands in hopes of finding pardon and a ticket into the US war machine. Indeed, to snub their skills was to pass them freely to the Russians. That was unacceptable!

  Tabun, sarin—most of the Nazi gases were pesticide derivatives applied to human subjects, Jews primarily. With my training in winemaking and its corollary of pesticides, I interviewed those claiming to be Hitler’s chemical warfare experts and weeded out those who, under pretenses, hoped to escape the judgments of Nuremberg.

  Called “Operation Paperclip,” our task was to identify and recruit the Nazi men and women who might benefit us in our opposition of the Communists who now loomed on our horizon. A forerunner in our efforts, Werner von Braun would go on as a catalyst in the American rocket program. And so it was that, in our striving for the “balance of peace,” we plundered German mines and castles, recovering over 500 tons of military secrets and weapons research—much of which lies in a Virginia warehouse to this day. But I digress. Perhaps I shrink from the details of my own part in the drama.

  My interviews took place in a cold castle room with a lone table and chairs. There, on a sunny October day that stands firmly in my memory, I encountered Gertrude Ubelhaar, the daughter of a Bavarian chemist. Trudi. She preferred the shortened name, and I obliged her. A striking young woman and a prisoner no less! To an able-bodied man, Trudi was no easy creature to ignore, and I had been without female affection for the three years in which combat had been my taskmaster. I take no pride in my subsequent choices; indeed, I suspect they are at the root of that which now overtakes me.

  Marsh rubbed the back of his neck, thrashing at the surface of this deep lake of facts. Stay afloat and hold on, he instructed himself. File this under too-deep-to-dive and you-must-first-adjust-to-the-cold. But as he read on, the cold only got colder.

 
Alone, on foreign soil, I found physical and emotional solace in the arms of this eighteen-year-old woman. A means of personal survival, I told myself. Oh, the heart is a deceitful thing!

  Trudi, too, had been ravaged by the war. Honored for her beauty and pure Aryan blood, she submitted herself to der Führer’s cause by enlisting in the Nazi breeding program. Her duty: to birth offspring for the purification of the Fatherland. Yet, when she proved barren, she suffered for it at the hands of the SS men who had been her lovers. They violated her. They taunted her about her infertility as they continued their domination of her.

  Most horrific of all, her biochemist father did nothing. Turning his head and thus toeing the party line, Doktor Ubelhaar said nary a word. He buried his nose in formulas and binary experiments, quietly carrying on with his abominable work. His silence, however, produced disturbing results. He fell victim to an accident. Officially, his death was attributed to the bite of an African boomslang, a species of snake he often milked for experimentation with its potent hemotoxins. Unofficially, he had been murdered.

  How, one may ask, do I have knowledge of these matters? During an interview with me, Trudi confessed her guilt. Without first warning the Doktor, she had released the snakes in his lab. Her patriotic father had betrayed her trust, abandoned her to the abuse of the SS. She left it to the gods to decide his fate.

  On the sofa, Marsh let the words sink in. The tempest pounded away outside, the sounds of surf and wind and thunder tearing through his mother’s house. He was a seasick man on a lurching ship. The weather confirmed the queasy knot in his stomach. When his cell phone rang, he let it forward to voice mail while he read on.

  Appalled as I was, the story of Trudi Ubelhaar’s trampled trust bound me to her in unholy obligation. Her father had turned his back. So had her Fatherland. She explained how she had been found guilty by association, imprisoned at Kransberg Castle for her affiliation with the godforsaken breeding program. The injustice was obvious. Thereafter, she and I met in utmost confidentiality, joined by a loneliness and heartache that fueled our desire. Conditions in the camp were poor, and among the US troops that stood guard, anti-German tensions ran high. Our trysts were fraught with risk.

  Then I came upon a means to assist her. The Pentagon, without President Truman’s endorsement, would soon begin shipping validated Nazi recruits to American soil, listing them as cargo to avoid the violation of international agreements. At its apex, Operation Paperclip would house and employ hundreds of Germans at government facilities around the United States, tapping them for knowledge and deadly expertise. Of these “assets,” many had been involved directly in the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish people.

  Based on Trudi’s respectable knowledge of chemistry—she was quite the understudy to her father—I marked her file “no derogatory information,” and, one among many, she was transported across the sea as part of this operation. This, I thought, would be the bittersweet conclusion to a relationship rooted in betrayal. I was a married man. Already I wondered how I could return to my young bride with joy.

  Marsh huffed in disbelief. Did Virginia know about this? Of course she did. The weight of lies and disloyalty dragged him beneath the surface and flooded his lungs. He read on. Took gulps between paragraphs.

  Though Trudi’s arrival was without fanfare, it caught me unawares. In the cold of November 1945, she arrived by ship upon Oregon shores. At the expense of the US Army, she was to be housed in Benton County, Washington, and employed at a chemical facility across the Oregon border. With minimal fuss, however, she worked herself into the good graces of an army doctor and had her papers altered so that a train dropped her instead at Camp Adair in Benton County, Oregon. My very own backyard.

  The error would soon be corrected, but taking advantage, she sent the doctor to inform me of her arrival. She demanded a rendezvous. Having made it clear while still in Germany that our relationship was cordially concluded, I was loath to accommodate her. Yet, in fear that she might thus break our oath of silence and threaten my marriage, I proceeded against my better judgment. A harmless compromise, it seemed. With the perspective of the past at my side, I see now that I should’ve heeded the lightkeeper’s warnings. A crusty ol’ man such as he? He was there on the night she arrived. He saw things. But I scorned his words, to my own detriment.

  In short order, Trudi petitioned me to renew our bond and went so far as to promise she would deliver to me a child. This, in light of her treatment at the hands of the SS, was beyond her physical ability to fulfill, and I convinced her that she must find a new life here in America.

  Though slow to accept this, she eventually vowed to maintain our secrets and, in an act of good faith and “as a parting gift of love,” gave me a single canister appropriated from the shipment of her father’s top secret chemical supplies. As a pesticide, she insisted, it would rid my property of undesirable insects and ensure success in my winemaking ventures. Cognizant of the remarkable results produced by these pesticides in the vineyards of Germany’s Rhone Valley, long before Hitler’s henchmen decided to try them on human “vermin,” I had secretly hoped for such an opportunity. Trudi, to alleviate any remaining concerns, explained that the contents of this canister were essentially harmless. It was a binary weapon, created to maximize the boomslang venom’s effect when mixed with a chemical accelerant. But it was inert. To further my hopes at Addison Ridge, I accepted the gift.

  “Gift.” In German, it means “poison.” I should’ve taken note. Blinded as I was by the flattery of lurid memories, I pressed forward with my vineyard aspirations. Perhaps, I reasoned, this was an opportunity to pursue the dreams I believed I had lost during the war. Perhaps it was a gift from above, honoring my return to my wife by marriage, for, indeed, Virginia remains the woman I love, and I harbor deep regrets for my indiscretions. Imagine my relief when she became heavy with child. I assumed that my sins had been pardoned and the heavens once more were smiling down.

  Two factors swayed my thoughts in the opposite direction. The first was the loss of our firstborn son. From the waiting room, I detected a flurry of activity that did not bode well, but I was unable to determine the cause until a nurse was dispatched to inform me of the news: Our son had died with the umbilical cord about his neck. A burden beyond comprehension! Virginia took it hard, and I suffered beneath the burden of guilt. I was paying for my sins. I suppose I always will.

  Mesmerized, Marsh turned a brittle page and continued.

  The second factor, and one I fear is related to my own blind ambition, is my declining health. Despite the doctor’s attempts to placate Virginia, I know something is inexplicably wrong. As I compare my symptoms with the records of Doktor Ubelhaar’s chemical experiments, I realize that his daughter has vindicated herself upon me in much the same manner she killed her own father. The pesticide Trudi presented was nothing less than the poisonous mixture her father had used upon Jewish subjects, wherein, from the glass-confined safety of his laboratory, he chronicled their internal bleeding and eye-bulging pain, their diarrheic writhing and delusional screams. Now, in a diluted state, the poison allows Trudi to watch me die a slow and painful death. The details of this infirmity are not ones to be committed to paper, but I must make their source known—for my wife’s sake and for the sake of the grandchildren that may come someday from the loins of our newborn son, Marshall Ray.

  Trudi Ubelhaar—at the time of this writing, a chemist and consultant on payroll at the Umatilla Army Depot—has insidiously destroyed my life. She is a woman racked by hate and motivated by her delusions of grandeur at the helm of the Third Reich. She told me many times of her personal meeting with Adolf Hitler at her initiation into the breeding program, how his hand tarried in her then-seventeen-year-old palm, how he said she would be vital to the Reich’s success.

  I presumed these to be the mumblings of a star-struck young woman. Oh, how wrong I was! She fancies herself a chosen vessel, an agent commissioned to carry on the madness that Hitler himself was unab
le to complete. She longs to mete out judgment on the masses by way of her father’s stolen formula. I suspect, even, that she may have had a hand in its genesis.

  According to the papers confiscated from Doktor Ubelhaar’s laboratories, this poison, designated Gift 12, created a curious pattern during the experimentation period lasting from the early thirties to the end of the war: In mice and in the few surviving Jews, it skipped generations, inflicting itself upon one while remaining dormant in the other. In the documented second-generation cases, the subjects generally survived with debilitating blood and circulation anomalies. I fear my own grandchildren will be similarly handicapped.

  To visit this accursed affliction upon me, via the canister, was not enough. Trudi also threatened Virginia’s life. Who knows what other contemptible plots nest in that tainted soul of hers? I must act, but what recourse do I have? To expose Trudi Ubelhaar is to expose my own infidelities, my own betrayals before country and kin. No, that is not permissible! Instead, to save my wife’s life, I’ve parried Trudi’s threats with a game of my own.

  Taking advantage of my clearance at the chemical depot, I exchanged the only remaining vials of her father’s experimental accelerant with vials of harmless organic solutions. The actual venom vials now rest in an undisclosed safe-deposit box, and Trudi understands that her only hope of laying hands on them is linked directly to Virginia’s continued health. A bribe, yes, to protect my wife.

  But what could I offer in exchange for Trudi’s restraint? Perforce, I divulged that the seed of my offspring alone will have access to the vials she covets. Instructions at the bank allow Marshall’s firstborn and no other to open the safe-deposit box—with its enclosed poison. Only this firstborn will bring Trudi her opportunity to wreak the widespread havoc that burns like a fire in her breast. My hope is that she will not live long enough to see this through. Or—forgive me!—that my afflicted grandchild will not survive to provide Trudi her opportunity. For what choice do I have? Do I lose my wife, whom I love? Or my grandchild, yet unknown to me? I am sowing the evil of my ways. This game of chance, oh, it has become a curse to all involved!