by Kim Newman
Spotted Water whimpered, fearing for her boys. Even the infant girl was too frightened to cry.
Hawk That Settles backed away. Two Dogs Dying’s mad smile filled the sky. Behind twig circles, his eyes were large. Around him were pale spirit people, their faces like bone. They wore shirts of fire and rainbow. Their feet were trapped in thick white moccasins like fungus tied with twine.
His foot touched a patch of ground that snapped. He looked and saw a depression that had been covered over. It was full of objects that clinked and swished: sparkling thin round pebbles, flimsy oblong leaves. Trinkets suitable only for ornamenting young women.
‘Get away,’ Two Dogs Dying said. He advanced. In his hand was a spear upon which were impaled hunks of meat and chunks of vegetable.
‘Two Dogs, you need help.’
‘Get away,’ his brother said, evenly. ‘You who have pleasured with your mother…’
‘Yes of course, in the manhood ritual…’
‘…stand away from my riches.’
Hawk That Settles moved away from the trap. Like a snake, Two Dogs Dying was on it, covering over his useless hoard.
He looked up at Hawk That Settles and, voice like death, spat, ‘This is mine!’
* * *
‘Mine?’ Sky Buffalo repeated.
‘As if things were his alone, like a part of his spirit. As if he were the People all by himself, and all the things of the People were his… his possessions.’
The shaman clucked.
‘The next day, Crow Foot and Rock Garden went out to the burial ground to see the madness of Two Dogs Dying for themselves. On his return, Crow Foot took White Cloud for himself and built his own lodge beside Two Dogs Dying’s. Others have joined them.’
Sky Buffalo groaned.
‘Each night, more leave the lodges of the People and join the madness of Two Dogs Dying.’
* * *
That night, as he slept in the men’s lodge, Hawk That Settles was visited by Angry Bear. The dead man spoke of the Pale Spirit People and of how they filled the Ghost Lands with Moving Lodges and BeBeCues and Wide Stone Paths. Angry Bear told of hunting grounds like huge lodges where game was already killed and smoked, stacked for women – not hunters, women! – to pick like fruit from a tree. Of dark caves where children were fixed to boxes that buzzed and flashed lights and sapped their spirits in battles without honour. Of piles of oblong leaves for which the Pale Spirit People cut each other to pieces with knives that had moving edges. Of boxes that sang, that danced, that told stories, that held fires, that lied. If a man of the People were to take his pleasure with a woman of the Pale Spirits, her brothers would use moving knives on him for all that they were unable themselves to give pleasure. The spirits of the People were outnumbered by the Pale Spirits as trees outnumber deer.
When he woke, Hawk That Settles told his dream to Sky Buffalo, who nodded wisely, repeating the occasional word, clucking that things were as bad as he had feared.
* * *
The remaining men of the People listened as Sky Buffalo spoke, nodding at his wisdom. Some fathers muttered that things had not been as they should be since the shaman removed himself to the lodge of his dying, and that the young would do well to remember the strengths of the old. Hawk That Settles, remembering Two Dogs Dying’s mad song, kept quiet.
‘The Pale Spirits are insects,’ the shaman said, holding the singing circle like the hair of an enemy. ‘Once let into your lodge, they breed and infest. Worse even than the Other People, they are a sickness to be cut out. We must pity them, for they are mad, not truly evil, but we must not let our sorrow at their sad condition stay us from making war.’
‘How can we make war on spirits?’ Rock Garden asked.
‘We cannot,’ Sky Buffalo said, ‘for spirits are strong. But these are not true spirits, merely ghosts. Spirits endure, flowing like a river or the wind, but ghosts simply pretend things are as if they were alive. The strength of the True People is in our spirits, but the strength of the pale people is in their things.’
‘Things?’ Hawk That Settles asked, feeling like a shaman.
‘The things they delude themselves are theirs. They waste strength on getting and keeping things which cannot be got and kept. They try to swallow sunlight with their throats and keep water in their hands. Their men have only one father, their women only one man. They are many, but they do not act as the People but as many Other Peoples.’
Some of the young men laughed. Sky Buffalo smiled, showing his few teeth, his eyes sharp.
‘This is one of their things,’ he said, holding up the singing circle. ‘See how pleasing it is to the eye. Yet it cannot be eaten, it cannot harm an enemy, it cannot cut through the bark of a tree. This is not a true spirit object, this is merely a thing.’
He threw the thing into the fire. It melted like ice, colours joining the smoke and passing up through the hole in the roof.
‘The Pale People have put their spirit in their things. Every time one of their things is destroyed, their spirit leaks away. And their things have no true existence. They are the ghosts of those who have never been born.’
‘How can we save Two Dogs Dying and the others?’
‘Find the objects they have hidden, the things found or made in imitation of the spirit objects, and destroy them. As they are broken, so the Pale Ghosts grow weak.’
* * *
Together, by night, the men went to the burial ground. Some were struck helpless with fear to see what had been made of it and could go no further, but Sky Buffalo was resolute. He decreed the sham lodges be torn down and burned, and the men of the People set to work with fire and spears.
Hawk That Settles saw the Pale Spirits, watching impassively. Most lodges were affairs of reed and sticks, flimsily built and already tattered by rains and winds. The men sang war songs as they destroyed things. The men who had joined Two Dogs Dying stood by and watched as their lodges came apart, some joining their brothers in pulling down the things they had made. There were shrill noises in the air, but Sky Buffalo told the People to take no notice of them. They were ghost noises and could harm no one.
Two Dogs Dying came out of his lodge and watched, making no effort to save the other lodges. He stood behind his barrier, a strange branch in his hands, singing a song of small dogs and windows and tails. He wrenched his branch, and fire exploded from one end, opening a red wound in Rock Garden’s leg.
Sky Buffalo decreed the branch be taken from Two Dogs Dying and thrown into the river.
‘You’ll take my fire branch from me only by wrenching it from my cold, dead fingers,’ Two Dogs Dying shouted as his fire branch was taken away from him and thrown in the river.
The men fell upon the lodge of the Custodian, hauling its timbers apart and scattering them.
Two Dogs Dying shouted strange words and was held down. ‘Believers in communal property… poorly educated men of dark skin colour…’
Hawk That Settles dug through the soft earth of the lodge and hauled out a white box with a grey ice face which sprang to life, containing tiny people and many fires. He looked into it as he would look into the eyes of a snake, fascinated but resolute, fearful yet aware of its beauty. The box sang the song of an unskilled hunter unable to feed his people, whose arrow unloosed black water from the earth and whose new lodge was built in hills of plenitude. With a gathering of the strength of his arms and a scream that came from his stomach, he hurled the box high, between trees, and heard it splash into the waters of the river to be borne away and dashed to pieces on the rocky bed.
They found many strange things – some that Angry Bear had spoken of in his dream – and all were destroyed by fire or water as Sky Buffalo sang the True Song of the People over them.
Two Dogs Dying cried like a baby as he was rescued from the constricting skins. Hawk That Settles used a knifepoint to pick apart the stitches that fixed the torturous things to his brother’s body, trying to draw as little blood as possible.
Spotted Water, torn from her leather and properly exposed, snatched the twigs from Two Dogs Dying’s face and snapped them to fragments. When this was done, the Custodian lay exhausted.
The men of the People backed away from their fallen brother. Sky Buffalo stood over Two Dogs Dying, examining him. Hair would grow again, Hawk That Settles supposed, and a breechclout could easily be found. Two Dogs Dying tried to sit up, but collapsed. Dazed, he sang to himself. It was one of the songs of the People. His spirit had returned, dispelling the influence of the Pale Ghosts.
‘There are things in the earth here,’ Sky Buffalo said, ‘like seeds. They come from the Ghost Lands. We must not trouble them, lest they sprout flowers of sickness. This was caused by tampering with spirit objects.’
‘Must we find another burial ground?’ Hawk That Settles asked.
The shaman rattled his medicine bag. ‘No, we must fill this one up with our dead, sons upon sons. We must sing the songs of their dying so their spirits seed the earth, make this place a part of the Ghost Lands. Our spirits must stand here close as blades of grass on the plain. The Pale People are weak and can be driven from this place as we have thrown their things into the fire or the river. If we resist their madness, their seeds will never sprout. This is the burial ground of the People and always has been so. Nothing else has ever been here and nothing must ever come here as long as the grass grows, the river runs and the sun crosses the sky.’
Hawk That Settles supposed that after this they would have to take Sky Buffalo back into the men’s lodge.
ÜBERMENSCH!
ON THE WAY from the aeroport, the cab driver asked him if he had ever been to Metropolis before.
‘I was born here,’ Avram said, German unfamiliar in his mouth. So many years of English in America, then Hebrew in Israel. In the last forty years, he’d used Portuguese more than his native tongue. He had never been a German in his heart, no more than he was now an Israeli. That was one thing Hitler, and his grandparents, had been right about.
He had been – he was – a Jew.
This was not the Metropolis he remembered. Gleaming skyscrapers still rose to the clouds, aircars flitting awkwardly between them, but on this grey early spring day, their facades were shabby, uncleaned. The robotrix on traffic duty outside the aeroport had been limping, dysfunctional, sparks pouring from her burnished copper thigh. Standing on the tarmac, Avram had realised that the pounding in the ground was stilled. The subterranean factories and power plants had been destroyed or shut down during the war.
‘That’s where the wall was,’ the driver said as they passed a hundred yards of wasteland which ran through the city of the future as if one of Mr Reagan’s orbital lasers had accidentally cut a swath across Germany. The satellite weapons were just so much more junk now, Avram supposed. The world that needed the orbital laser was gone.
Just like the world which needed his crusade.
Perhaps, after today, he could spend his remaining years playing chess with a death-diminished circle of old friends, then die from the strain of playing competitive video games with his quick-fingered grandchildren.
‘That used to be East Metropolis,’ the driver said.
Avram tried to superimpose the city of his memory on these faceless streets. So much of Metropolis was post-war construction, now dilapidated. The cafes and gymnasia of his youth were twice forgotten. There wasn’t a McDonald’s on every corner yet, but that would come. A boarded-up shack near the wall, once a security checkpoint, was covered in graffiti. Amid the anti-Russian, pro-democracy slogans, Avram saw a tiny red swastika. He had been seeing posters for the forthcoming elections, and could not help but remember who had taken office the last time a united Germany held a democratic election.
He thanked the driver, explaining, ‘I just wanted to see where it was.’
‘Where now, sir?’
Avram got the words out, ‘Spandau Prison.’
The man clammed up, and Avram felt guilty. The driver was a child, born and raised with the now never-to-be-germinated seeds of World War Three. Avram’s crusade was just an embarrassing old reminder. When these people talked about the bad old days, they meant when the city was divided by concrete. Not when it was the shining flame of fascism.
The prison was ahead, a black medieval castle among plain concrete block buildings. The force field shone faintly emerald. Apparently the effect was more noticeable from outer space. John Glenn had mentioned it, a fog lantern in the cloud cover over Europe.
The cab could go no further than the perimeter, but he was expected. From the main gate, he was escorted by a young officer – an American – from the Allied detachment that had guarded the man in the fortress for forty-five years.
Avram thought of the Allies, FDR embracing Uncle Joe at Yalta. Old allies, and now – thanks to the baldpate with the blotch – allies anew. If old alliances were being resumed, old evils – old enmities – could stir too.
Captain Siegel called himself Jewish, and babbled sincere admiration. ‘As a child, you were my hero, sir. That’s why I’m here. When you caught Eichmann, Mengele, the Red Skull…’
‘Don’t trust heroes, young man,’ he said, hating the pomposity in his voice, ‘that’s the lesson of this green lantern.’
Siegel was shut up, like the cab driver had been. Avram was instantly sorry, but could not apologise. He wondered when he had turned into his old professor, too scholarly to care for his pupils’ feelings, too unbending to see the value of ignorant enthusiasm.
Probably, it had started with the tattoo on his arm. The bland clerk with the bodkin was the face that, more than any other, stayed with him as the image of National Socialism. These days, almost all young men looked like the tattooist to Avram. The cab driver had, and now so did Captain Siegel. So did most of the guards who patrolled the corridors and grounds of this prison.
Not since Napoleon had a single prisoner warranted such careful attention.
‘Jerome,’ Siegel said, summoning a sergeant. ‘Show Mr Blumenthal your rifle.’
The soldier held out his weapon for inspection. Avram knew little about guns, but saw this was out of the ordinary, with its bulky breech and surprisingly slender barrel. A green LED in the stock showed it was fully charged.
‘The beam-gun is just for him,’ Siegel said.
‘Ahh, the green stuff.’
Siegel smiled. ‘Yes, the green stuff. I’m not a scientist…’
‘Neither am I, any more.’
‘It has something to do with the element’s instability. The weapon directs particles. Even a glancing hit would kill him in a flash.’
Avram remembered Rotwang – one of ‘our’ Germans in the fifties – toiling over the cyclotron, trying to wrestle free the secrets of the extraterrestrial element. Rotwang, with his metal hand and shock of hair, was dead of leukaemia, another man of tomorrow raging against his imprisonment in yesterday.
Jerome took the rifle back, and resumed his post.
‘There’ve been no escape attempts,’ Avram commented.
‘There couldn’t be.’
Avram nearly laughed. ‘He surrendered, Captain. Green stuff or not, this place couldn’t hold him if he wanted to leave.’
Siegel – born when the prisoner had already been in his cell twenty years – was shocked. ‘Mr Blumenthal, careful…’
Avram realised what it was that frightened the boy in uniform, what made every soldier in this place nervous twenty-four hours a day.
‘He can hear us, can’t he? Even through the lead shields?’
Siegel nodded minutely, as if he were the prisoner, trying to pass an unseen signal to a comrade in the exercise yard.
‘You live with the knowledge all your life,’ Avram said, tapping his temple, ‘but you never think what it means. That’s science, Captain. Taking knowledge you’ve always had, and thinking what it means…’
After the war, he had been at Oak Ridge, working with the green stuff. Then the crusade called him away. Others had fathe
red the K-Bomb. Teller and Rotwang built bigger and better Doomsday Devices – while Oppie went into internal exile and the Rosenbergs to the electric chair – thrusting into a future so bright you could only look at it through protective goggles. Meanwhile, Avram Blumenthal had been cleaning up the last garbage of the past. So many names, so many Nazis. He had spent more time in Paraguay and Brazil than in New York and Tel Aviv.
But it had been worth it. His tattoo would not stop hurting until the last of the monsters was gone. If monsters they were.
‘Through here, sir,’ Siegel said, ushering him into a bare office. There was a desk, with chairs either side of it. ‘You have one hour.’
‘That should be enough. Thank you.’
Siegel left the room. Even after so short a time on his legs, Avram felt better sitting down. Nobody lives forever.
Almost nobody.
When they brought him in, he filled the room. His chest was a solid slab under his prison fatigues, and the jaw was an iron horseshoe. Not the faintest trace of grey in his blue-black hair, the kiss-curl still a jaunty comma. The horn-rimmed glasses couldn’t disguise him.
Avram did not get up.
‘Curt Kessler?’ he asked, redundantly.
Grinning, the prisoner sat down. ‘You thought perhaps they had the wrong man all these years.’
‘No,’ he admitted, fussing with the cigarette case, taking out one of his strong roll-ups. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Can’t hurt me. I used to warn the children against tobacco, though.’
Avram lit up, and sucked bitter smoke into his lungs. The habit couldn’t hurt him either, not any more.
‘Avram the Avenger,’ Kessler said, not without admiration. ‘I was wondering when they’d let you get to see me.’
‘My request has been in for many years, but with the changes…’
The changes did not need to be explained.
‘I confess,’ Kessler said, ‘I’ve no idea why you wanted this interview.’