Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  Avram had no easy answer. ‘You consented to it.’

  ‘Of course. I talk to so few people these days. The guards are superstitious about me.’

  Avram could understand that. Across the table, he could feel Kessler’s strength. He remembered the old uniform, so familiar in the thirties. The light-brown body-stocking, with black trunks, boots and cloak. A black swastika in the red circle on the chest. He’d grinned down from a hundred propaganda posters like an Aryan demi-god, strode through the walkways of Metropolis as Siegfried reborn with X-ray eyes.

  He felt he owed Kessler an explanation. ‘You’re the last.’

  Kessler’s mouth flashed amusement. ‘Am I? What about Ivan the Terrible?’

  ‘A guard. Just a geriatric thug. Barely worth the bullet it’d take to finish him.’

  ‘“Barely worth the bullet”. I heard things like that so many times, Avram. And what of the Führer? I understand he could be regrown from tissue samples. In ’45, Mengele…’

  Avram laughed. ‘There’s no tissue left, Kessler. I burned Mengele’s jungle paradise. The skin-scraps he had were of dubious provenance.’

  ‘I understand genetic patterns can be reproduced exactly. I try to follow science, you know. If you keep an ear out, you pick things up. In Japan, they’re doing fascinating work.’

  ‘Not my field.’

  ‘Of course. You’re an atom man. You should have stayed with Rotwang. The Master Engineer needed your input. He could have overcome his distaste with your racial origins if you’d given him a few good suggestions. Without you, the K-Bomb was ultimately a dead end.’

  ‘So?’

  Kessler laughed. ‘You are right. So what? It’s hard to remember how excited you all were in the fifties about the remains of my home planet. Anything radioactive was highly stimulating to the Americans. To the Russians too.’

  Avram couldn’t believe this man was older than him. But, as a child, he had seen the brown streak in the skies, had watched the newsreels, had read the breathless reports in the Tages Welt.

  ‘If things had been otherwise, I might have been Russian,’ Kessler said. ‘The Soviet Union is the largest country on the planet. If you threw a dart at a map of the world, you’d most likely hit it. Strange to think what it’d have been like if my little dart had missed Bavaria. Of course, I’d have been superfluous. The USSR already had its “man of steel”. Maybe my dart should have struck the wheat fields of Kansas, or the jungles of Africa. I could have done worse than be raised by apes.’

  ‘You admit, then, that you are him?’

  Kessler took off his glasses, showing clear blue eyes. ‘Has there ever really been any doubt?’

  ‘Not when you didn’t grow old.’

  ‘Do you want me to prove myself? You have a lump of coal for me to squeeze?’

  It hit Avram that this young-seeming man, conversing in unaccented German, was hardly even human. If Hitler hadn’t got in the way, humanity might have found a champion in him. Or learned more of the stars than Willy Ley imagined.

  ‘Why weren’t you in the army? In some SS elite division?’

  ‘Curt Kessler was – what is the American expression? – 4F. A weakling who wouldn’t be accepted, even in the last days when dotards and children were being slapped in uniform and tossed against the juggernaut. I believe I did my best for my Führer.’

  ‘You were curiously inactive during the war.’

  Kessler shrugged. ‘I admit my great days were behind me. The thirties were my time. Then, there seemed to be struggles worth fighting, enemies worth besting.’

  ‘Only “seemed to be”?’

  ‘It was long ago. Do you remember my enemies? Dr Mabuse? His criminal empire was like a spider’s web. The Führer himself asked me to root it out and destroy it. He poisoned young Germans with drugs and spiritualism. Was I wrong to persecute him? And the others? Graf von Orlok, the nosferatu? Dr Caligari, and his somnambulist killers? The child-slayer they called “M”? Stephen Orlac, the pianist with the murderer’s hands.’

  Avram remembered, the names bringing back Tages Welt headlines. Most of the stories had borne the Curt Kessler byline. Everyone had wondered how the reporter knew so many details. Germany’s criminals had been symptomatic creatures then, twisted and stunted in soul and body, almost an embodiment of the national sickness. And Kessler, no less than the straight-limbed blonds trotted out as exemplars of National Socialism, made the pop-eyed, needle-fingered, crook-backed fiends seem like walking piles of filth. As a child, Avram’s nightmares had been of the whistling “M” and taloned nosferatu, not handsome tattooists and smart-uniformed bureaucrats. It was possible for a whole country to be wrong.

  ‘They’re all gone,’ Kessler said, ‘but they’ll never go away really. I understand Mabuse’s nightclub is due to reopen. The Westerners who’ve been flooding in since the wall came down like to remember the decadent days. They have the order of history wrong, and associate the cabarets with us, forgetting that we were pure in mind and body, that we closed down the pornographic spectacles. They’ll have their doom rock rather than jazz, but the rot will creep back. Mabuse was like the hydra. I’d think he was dead or hopelessly mad, but he’d always come back, always with new deviltry. Perhaps he’ll return again. They never found the body.’

  ‘And if he returns, will others come back?’

  Kessler shrugged again, huge shoulders straining his fatigues. ‘You were right. Adolf Hitler is dead, National Socialism with him. You don’t need X-ray vision to see that.’

  Avram knew Kessler could never get tired as he had got tired, but he wondered whether this man of steel was truly world-weary. Forty-five years of knowing everything and doing nothing could be as brutally ache-making as the infirmities visited upon any other old man.

  ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

  Kessler was amused by the new tack. ‘Caligari always used to harp on about that, too. He was a strange kind of medieval Freudian, I suppose, digging into men’s minds in search of power. He wanted to get me into his asylum, and pick me apart. We are shaped by our early lives, of course. But there’s more to it than that. Believe me, I should know. I have a unique perspective.’

  ‘There are no new questions for us, Kessler. We must always turn back to the old ones.’

  ‘Very well, it’s your hour. You have so few left, and I have so many. If you want old stories, I shall give you them. You know about my real parents. Everybody does. I wish I could say I remember my birthplace but I can’t, any more than anyone remembers the first days of their life. The dart was my father’s semen, the Earth my mother’s womb. I was conceived when the dart ejaculated me into the forest. That is my first memory, the overwhelming of my senses. I could hear, see, smell and taste everything. Birds miles away, blades of grass close to, icy streams running, a wolf’s dung attracting flies. I screamed. That was my first reaction to this Earth. My screams brought people to me.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Johann and Marte. They lived in the woods just outside Kleinberg. Berchtesgaden was barely an arrow’s-reach away.’

  ‘How were you raised?’

  ‘There was a war. Johann and Marte had lost four true sons. So they kept the baby they found.’

  ‘When did you realise you were different?’

  ‘When my father beat me and I felt nothing. I knew then I was privileged. Later, when I joined the Party, I felt much the same. Sometimes, I would ask to be beaten, to show I could withstand it. There were those among us too glad to oblige me. I wore out whips with my back.’

  ‘You left Kleinberg as a young man?’

  ‘Everyone wanted to go to the big city. Metropolis was the world of the future. We would put a woman on the moon one day soon, and robots would do all our work. There would be floating platforms in the seas for refuelling aeroplanes, a transatlantic tunnel linking continents. It was a glorious vision. We were obsessed not with where we were going, but with how fast we would get there.’

 
‘You – I mean, Curt – you became a reporter?’

  ‘Poor, fumbling Curt. What a big oaf he was. I miss him very much. Reporters could be heroes in the thirties. I was on the Tages Welt when Per Weiss made it a Party paper. It’s hard to remember when it was a struggle, when the Mabuses and the Orloks were in control and we were the revolutionaries. That was when it became exciting, when we knew we could make a difference.’

  ‘When did you start…’

  ‘My other career? An accident. Johann always tried to make me ashamed of what I was, insisted I keep myself hidden. That was the reason for the eyeglasses, for the fumbling idiocy. But M was at large, and I knew – knew with my eyes and ears – who he was. I could not catch him as Curt Kessler and the police would not listen to me, so the man inside came out.’

  The man named M had been turned over to the police, eventually. There had been little left of him. He had spent the rest of his life in Caligari’s asylum, in the cell next to the often-vacant room they reserved for Dr Mabuse. He never killed again, and he would have been unable to rape even if the opportunity arose.

  ‘Why the uniform?’

  Kessler smiled again, teeth gleaming ivory. ‘We all loved uniforms, then. All Germans did. The cloak might have been excessive, but those were excessive times. Theatre commissionaires looked like field marshals. I was at the rallies, flying in with my torch, standing behind the Führer, making the speeches Luise wrote for me. All men want to be heroes.’

  ‘You were a Party member? A Nazi?’

  ‘Yes. Even before I came to Metropolis. We prided ourselves in Bavaria on seeing the future well before the decadents of the cities.’

  ‘They say it was the woman who brought you into the Party?’

  ‘Luise? No, if anything, she followed me. The real me, that is. Not Curt. She always despised Curt Kessler.’

  ‘Was that difficult for you?’

  ‘It was impossible,’ Kessler smiled. ‘Poor Luise. She was born to be a heroine, Avram. She might not have been blonde, but she had everything else. The eyes, the face, the limbs, the hips. She was born to make babies for the Führer. Goebbels was fond of her. She wrote many of his scripts before she began broadcasting herself. She was our Valkyrie then, an inspiration to the nation. She committed suicide in 1945. When the Russians were coming. Like many German women.’

  ‘Luise Lang would have faced a war crimes tribunal.’

  ‘True. Her other Aryan quality was that she wasn’t very bright. She was too silly to refuse the corruptions that came with privilege. She didn’t mean any of the things she did, because she never thought them through.’

  ‘Unlike you?’

  ‘By then, I was thinking too much. We stopped speaking during the war. I could foresee thousands of differing futures, and was not inclined to do anything to make any of them come to pass. Göring asked me to forestall the Allies in Normandy, you know.’

  ‘Your failure to comply was extensively documented at your own trial.’

  ‘I could have done it. I could have changed the course of history. But I didn’t.’

  Avram applauded, slowly.

  ‘You are right to be cynical, Avram. It’s easier to do nothing than to change history. You could have given Truman the K-Bomb, but you went ghost-hunting in Paraguay.’

  ‘I’m not like you,’ he said, surprised by his own vehemence.

  ‘No one is.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure.’

  Kessler looked surprised. ‘There’ve been other visitors? No, of course not. I’d have known. I scan the skies. Sometimes things move, but galaxies away. There were no other darts, no tests with dogs or little girls. Since Professor Ten Brinken passed away, no one has even tried to duplicate me as a homunculus. That, I admit, was a battle. The distorted, bottle-grown image of me wore me out more than any of the others. More than Mackie Messer’s green knives, more than Nosferatu’s rat hordes, more even than Ten Brinken’s artificial whore Alraune.’

  Ten Brinken had been second only to Rotwang as the premier scientific genius of Metropolis. Either could have been the equal of Einstein if they had had the heart to go with their minds.

  ‘I am reminded more and more of the twenties and thirties,’ Kessler said. ‘I understand they want to get the underground factories working again. Microchip technology could revive Rotwang’s robots. Vorsprung durch technik, as they say. The future is finally arriving. Fifty years too late.’

  ‘You could be released to see it.’

  The suggestion gave the prisoner pause. ‘These glowing walls don’t keep me in, Avram, they keep you out. I need my shell. I couldn’t soar into the air any more. A missile would stop me as an arrow downs a hawk. The little men who rule the world wouldn’t like me as competition.’

  Avram had no doubt this man could make the world his own. If he chose to lead instead of follow.

  ‘I’ve seen swastikas in this city,’ Avram said. ‘I’ve heard Germans say Hitler was right about the Jewish problem. I’ve seen Israelis invoke Hitler’s holocaust to excuse their own exterminations. The world could be ready for you again.’

  ‘Strength, Purity and the Aryan Way?’

  ‘It could happen again.’

  Kessler shook his head. ‘No one eats worms twice, Avram. I was at the torchlight processions, and the pogroms. I wrestled the nosferatu beyond the sunrise, and I saw shopkeepers machine-gunned by storm troopers. I was at Berchtesgaden, and Auschwitz. I lost my taste for National Socialism when the stench of ovens was all I could smell. Even if I went to China or Saturn, I could still taste the human smoke. I surrendered, remember? To Eisenhower personally. And I’ve shut myself up here. Buried myself. Even the human race has learned its lesson.’

  Avram understood how out of date the man of tomorrow’s understanding was. ‘You’re an old man, Kessler. Like me. Only old men remember. In America, seventy-five per cent of high school children don’t know Russia and the United States fought on the same side in the Second World War. The lesson has faded. Germany is whole again, and Germans are grumbling about the Jews, the gypsies, the Japanese even. It’s not just Germany. In Hungary, in Russia, in the Moslem countries, in America and Britain, in Israel, I see the same things happening. There’s a terrible glamour to it. And you’re that glamour. The children who chalk swastikas don’t know what the symbol means. They don’t remember the swastika from the flag, but from your chest. They make television mini-series about you.’

  Kessler sat back, still as a steel statue. He could not read minds, but he could understand.

  ‘When I was a boy, a little Jewish boy in Metropolis, I too looked up at the skies. I didn’t know you hated me because of my religion, because of the religion my parents practised no more than I did. I wore a black blanket as a cloak, and wished I could fly, wished I could outrace a streamlined train, wished I could catch Mackie Messer. Do you remember the golem?’

  Kessler did. ‘Your rabbi Judah ben Bezalel raised the creature from clay in Prague, then brought it to Metropolis to kill the Führer. I smashed it.’

  The echo of that blow still sounded in Avram’s head.

  ‘I saw you do it. I cheered you, and my playmates beat me. The golem was the monster, and you were the hero. Later, I learned different.’

  He rolled up his shirtsleeve, to show the tattoo.

  ‘I had already seen that,’ Kessler said, tapping his eyes. ‘I can see through clothing. It was always an amusing pastime. It was useful at the cabarets. I saw the singer, Lola…’

  ‘After you killed the golem,’ Avram continued, ‘all the children took fragments of the clay. They became our totems. And the brownshirts came into the Jewish quarter and burned us out. They were looking for monsters, and found only us. My parents, my sisters, my friends. They’re all dead. You had gone on to Nuremberg, to present Hitler with the scroll you snatched from the monster’s chest.’

  ‘I won’t insult you by apologising.’

  Avram’s heart was beating twice its normal pace. Kessler looke
d concerned for him. He could look into another’s chest, of course.

  ‘There’s nothing I could do to make reparation. Your family is dead, but so is my whole planet. I have to live with the guilt. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘But you are here, and as long as you remain, you’re a living swastika. The fools out there who don’t remember raise your image high, venerate you. I know you’ve been offered freedom by the Allies on six separate occasions. You could have flown out of here if you’d consented to topple Chairman Mao or Saddam Hussein, or become a living weather satellite, flitting here and there to avert floods and hurricanes. Some say the world needs its heroes. I say they’re wrong.’

  Kessler sat still for a long time, then finally admitted, ‘As do I.’

  Avram took the heavy metal slug from his cigarette case, and set it on the table between them.

  ‘I’ve had this since I was at Oak Ridge. You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff Rotwang collected, even before they found a way to synthesise it. The shell is lead.’

  The prisoner played with his glasses. His face was too open, too honest. His thoughts were never guarded. Sometimes, for all his intelligence, he could seem simple-minded.

  ‘You can bite through lead,’ Avram said.

  ‘Bullets can’t hurt me,’ Kessler replied, a little of the old spark in his eyes.

  ‘So you have a way out.’

  Kessler picked up the slug, and rolled it in his hand.

  ‘Without you in the world, maybe the fire won’t start again.’

  ‘But maybe it will. It started without me last time.’

  ‘I admit that. That’s why it’s your decision, Curt.’

  Kessler nodded, and popped the slug into his mouth. It distended his cheek like a boiled sweet.

  ‘Was I really your hero?’

  Avram nodded. ‘You were.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kessler said, biting through the lead, swallowing.

  He did not fade away to mist like the nosferatu, nor fragment into shards like the golem. He did not even grow old and wither to a skeleton. He just died.