Wilhelm sat down, lit a cigarette, and said, “Uli, please show me what you painted last night.”
Uli stopped preparing pigments and stood completely still. He exhaled loudly, not out of exasperation, but because he was holding his breath. His voice was not fearful, per se, but extraordinarily cautious.
“May I ask why last night’s painting interests you, brother?”
“It’s important, Uli. You’re not mad, unless I’m mad, too.”
“You’re close enough to hear the angel’s voice. If you stay, the angel may make requirements of you as well.”
“To atone for my sins?”
“Yes.”
Uli stood up and walked over to the canvasses stacked against a wall. He went straight to a particular one and handed it to him. It took Wilhelm’s breath away.
“The angel came to me last night with a different voice, one I’ve never heard before, and hope to never hear again.”
The painting was what Wilhelm feared it would be. It was a montage of the horrors in the dream from earlier today, even though it was painted last night.
His grandfather stood on the eternal stone plain, a lone ghost in front of this house over there. The black clouds formed tentacles weaving into an amalgamation of Ava’s bones and the symbol, the three circles inside a triangle. Wilhelm didn’t scream, but a cry caught in his throat.
Uli took a step back, not wanting to receive a beating for what he had painted, for what he had been forced to paint.
Wilhelm held the canvas, his facial expressions like a sundial shifting from anger to fear, to confusion and dismay.
Uli called to him from a safe distance across the room. “Wilhelm, Wilhelm, snap out of it! Talk to me, Wilhelm!”
Finally, Wilhelm did snap out of it. He placed the painting next to his chair, not wanting to see it ever again. “That was my dream today. The second time I’ve dreamed of that place, of that house…”
Uli answered softly, “Time is different there.”
“You painted this last night… and I dreamed this today.”
Uli nodded. “Something did happen, and the angel told me its echoes, held them to my ear like… hearing the surf in a seashell…”
“Do you know what happened? What event’s echoes you were hearing?”
Uli shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette. “No, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. But I know that this time it was very different. The angel’s voice… was very different. It’s like we are moving towards something. The angel said that he can hear the stars being aligned, some force moving them. Something is happening that is not supposed to happen, gaining strength, the ripples moving forwards and backwards in time like the ripples on the surface of a pond… after something has fallen in… or gotten out.”
Wilhelm shared a few more moments with his brother, smoked a couple of cigarettes. Uli was decrepit and pathetic, but in this moment, in the sharing of this burden, they were brothers again. He drank his red wine, and Uli his laudanum, but Wilhelm didn’t judge him. He knew now he couldn’t comprehend the pain his brother had experienced. They were bad people, consumed of a selfishness that rotted them to the core, but an eleventh hour reprieve seemed to have been granted them. The price of that reprieve would probably be their lives. A calm and a peace settled over them. Once a man receives his sentence, at least he knows. For them, they did not know the time, but the sincere belief that it was close was palpable.
But the calm didn’t last. The demon, or angel, as Uli referred to it, would not be put off. He was a demanding master, and he would have his steed.
Uli abruptly stood up, breaking their reverie. His body moved in ugly jerky bursts as it was walked over to the canvas, brushes, and palette. For the moment, his mouth was still his own, and he painfully forced out. “I am sorry, Wilhelm, but it is time. I must paint now.”
“Is there anything I can do, Uli?”
“Just leave. It’s bad enough for me; I don’t want you to see this.”
Wilhelm stared for a moment longer and knew instinctively; Uli’s painting was chained by some infernal link to Carsten’s activities.
He would be out in his little study right now.
Wilhelm stealthily closed the back door leading out into the garden. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he gasped. Everything was lit by a purple phosphorescence emanating from the material of every single thing. It was unnatural, it was wrong, and it was beautiful all at the same time. A breeze ruffled his hair as he stood viewing the garden like a blind man who had just been granted his vision. He knew this was unnatural. He knew he was seeing this only because he had spent time on the other side in his dreams.
He understood what Uli had meant when he said, “Time is different there.”
He looked up into the sky, and his breath was taken away a second time. The sky was a perfect limitless black, full of stars clearer than he had ever seen. But the stars were all wrong. Alien constellations filled the sky. It was as if this world’s veil was lifted and another world was visible. He knew, he just knew, as if by a primal instinct, that this sky was the sky from the world of the eternal stone plain. This was the sky on the other side of the jet-black clouds that turned into tentacles.
He stopped himself; he could not allow his mind to go there.
Wilhelm walked through the garden, taking in the alien beauty, knowing this was the last time he would ever witness such a thing. He walked the length of it, slowing down as he approached the old servants’ quarters.
He could see the stream of light emerging from underneath the door. Shadows moved across the beam of light. He got closer and listened intently. The heavy wooden door blocked out almost all sound, but after a moment he recognized Carsten’s voice shouting rhythmically. Wilhelm knew it would be Latin, and as he crept closer his suspicion was confirmed.
When Carsten was very young, Wilhelm showed him that peeking through a keyhole could show things he could never imagine. Now, Wilhelm was in store for an understanding he couldn’t conceive. He peered through into Carsten’s small study. He saw the three circles inside a triangle drawn on the floor, but this time the entire thing was inside a larger circle, and every surface in the outer circle and triangle was covered with a flowing script of shapes and forms, letters in some alphabet from another time, far removed.
It must have taken days. Wilhelm did not understand how it was done, unless Carsten had Ava working without rest.
It was drawn on the floor in a white powder. Wilhelm recognized it as the powder Carsten focused on during the first ritual that Wilhelm had spied on. It seemed that tonight’s ceremony might be the culmination of quite a bit of work and preparation.
Again, the sleeping and naked Ava was inside one of the circles, this time to the far left of where Wilhelm was observing.
Carsten was even further to the left, outside of the outer circle. He was squatting down, petting the small dog from earlier. Carsten was wearing black robes like those worn by a Dominican monk.
Carsten held a bottle of ether and poured it onto a small hand towel. With a quick motion, he put the towel over the dog’s face and held it there. The dog thrashed, but lost all strength in a matter of seconds. He continued holding the towel over the dog’s nose after it stopped moving. He felt for a heartbeat, then applied more ether to the towel and gave it another long, smothering dose. When he felt for a heartbeat the second time, he appeared satisfied.
Wilhelm was awestruck at his brother’s coldhearted determination. The girl that loved him was visibly drugged inside some kind of magical system of circles, and he had just killed a dog as though it was the sort of task that he did every day.
But Wilhelm’s time to be taken aback by Carsten’s ruthlessness was cut short. Carsten placed the dead dog on a silver tray and walked carefully through the array of symbols on the floor and placed the dog in the circle to the far right of Wilhelm’s vantage point.
Carsten raised his hands above his head and waved them up and down
, back and forth in a sinuous pattern. He began to chant, this time in strings of syllables that were not Latin. It was unlike any language that Wilhelm recognized. It was vulgar and guttural, glottal and foul, some words more grunts than words.
The chanting was a cycle of these terms that Carsten repeated over and over, faster and faster. The effect was jarring; it actually hurt the ears on some level to hear. But something was happening.
The air around the little house seemed to thicken, feeling hot and humid, and smelling rotten, like being very close to a dead animal. All the hairs on Wilhelm’s body stood up and he felt as if he was going to faint and vomit.
He turned his head to look at the garden behind him. There was a ripple, a slow motion wave passing through the air. In front of the ripple, the garden was bathed in the unearthly purple radiance. It was unnerving, but beautiful in its alien splendor. Behind the wave it was a completely different story. The part that was behind the wave was red, blood red.
The trees, the flowers, the pavestones, all gave off a sick, hateful, red glow. Finally, the wave hit Wilhelm, and as it passed through him, he doubled over in despair, nausea, torment, and hopelessness. Wilhelm could have spent a lifetime trying to understand, trying to forget what he saw in his mind for that single second, but Carsten had stopped his bestial chant. Wilhelm whirled around from facing the garden and put his eye back up to the keyhole.
Carsten was breathing hard with the exertion of the invocation, but was still standing straight up—and so was Ava. She stood in the circle she had slept in; she was naked, she was beautiful, but she was a monster.
Her face was a mix of a hyena’s leer and the malevolent fury of the cornered wolf. The veins stuck out all over her body and her respiration was huge, exaggerated. She looked like she would easily have the strength of a very large man. And her sole focus in the universe was Carsten.
Carsten spoke what sounded like a formal greeting to the she-wolf Ava. The Ava-thing barked back, in the same language, a string of insults and bloody-minded threats. The voice was horrid, very deep, far too deep for the vocal chords of Ava’s body. Even for a grown man, it would be painful, and nearly impossible to speak that low and that loud.
Wilhelm was too terrified to move. His breath was shallow, fast, his eyes held open for long, painful periods between blinks. He wasn’t even capable of questioning what he was seeing. It was too much for his mind to process, and it was happening too fast. The stream of terrible truths unfolded like an explosion.
Carsten did not appear frightened. He appeared to be more nervous than anything else, like a young man who has studied long and hard for an oral exam. Carsten began a reply to the Ava-thing, then realized he had the phrasing wrong in the horrible language and started over.
The creature spat back a scream of indignant rage at Carsten, then tried to leap at him and realized it could not move its feet. It looked back to Carsten with a cold and calculating fury and let out what sounded like a cross between a question and a threat.
Carsten nodded and took a deep breath, then slowly and carefully began what sounded like a formal request to the thing. The Ava-creature looked at Carsten with ugly skepticism, then took its right hand fingernails up to its left forearm and stabbed them into the wrist, then pulled the wound open. Blood poured out.
Carsten screamed, “No!”
The Ava-thing let out a howl of triumph and took its right hand to tear out Ava’s own throat when Carsten shouted a command and the creature’s arms shot straight down to her sides, held by invisible bonds. The thing looked down to its bound hands and back to Carsten, amused by this setback, but the bloodlust in its expression never wavered.
Carsten spoke to it in the language, respectfully, repeating his formal tone of request. The thing laughed at him.
Carsten began repeating the request, but it opened its mouth and a stream of mist emerged from it. This cloud made a low buzzing noise. The cloud dropped down to the floor and over to the dead dog.
The effect was instantaneous. The dog started squirming, writhing, it legs jerking spasmodically, unsure of their own function. Its mouth opened and closed and a terrified scream emerged. It was the most piteous sound that Wilhelm had ever heard. It did not know who it was or where it was or why it was there, but it knew it was not supposed to be there. What it was experiencing was the inversion of the laws of nature, the laws of life and death.
It wiggled to its belly as the coordination came back to its limbs. It began to bark, and the barking changed from terror to fury. Its eyes focused on Carsten. It knew the one responsible for this condition. It knew that person was Carsten and that its one purpose in life was to kill him.
The Ava-thing threw back its head and screamed in laughter. The dog was wobbly, but gaining its bearings by the second. It began to put one foot in front of another, but stopped when it got to the edge of the circle. It walked in circles inside the circle and Wilhelm saw Carsten breathe a sigh of relief; it was bound by the circle.
Then the Ava-thing screamed something to the dog. It looked up with a blank look then down at the powder the circle was made of. Then it took one paw and broke a hole in the circle.
The little dog shot across the room and took Carsten down by the legs. Carsten snared the furious, unnaturally strong dog in the robes and pulled out the long dagger Wilhelm had seen when spying on Carsten for the first time.
Carsten struggled out of the robe but kept it wrapped around the dog’s head. He stabbed the dagger repeatedly through the taut fabric. It went straight through the fabric and into the dog’s open mouth, bursting from the back of its head.
This thrust would have killed any living thing, but the dog was completely unfazed. It kept up its assault and forced him outside of the circle.
The Ava-thing roared and jumped on top of Carsten.
Wilhelm felt a blow to the back of his head. He fell to the ground, dazed. He saw Karl throwing open the door and tackle the feral and shrieking Ava, while the dog continued its assault.
Carsten shouted a single term, and the Ava-thing went silent.
He heard what sounded like Karl hitting the dog repeatedly with a shovel and Ava sobbing in a drugged hysteria.
***
Wilhelm didn’t know how long he lay there in front of the open door of Carsten’s little study. He heard Carsten and Karl speaking in rapid, serious tones. Ava stopped sobbing and passed out.
Wilhelm was weak and dazed. The blow to the back of his head had been expertly applied. He began crawling back to the house. After he made it about fifteen feet, he vomited, over and over.
Then he slowly, shakily, got to his feet and walked back through the garden to the house. The garden was no longer a luminous alien landscape. It was the same garden he had grown up with. The sky was no longer full of strange constellations. They were the same stars that he had seen all of his life.
He staggered through the house. He walked to Uli’s room; feeling that he could tell Uli what he had seen. Maybe, just maybe, Uli would understand.
But Uli was never going to understand anything again. What had happened tonight, and the cacophony it had created in that world on the other side, the world that he painted, had simply pushed Uli too far.
Uli was hanging from a rope.
On the easel was Uli’s last painting: a close up of Ava’s face twisted into that of an insane animal.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Wilhelm Ernst sat in the same bar in Paris where he had decided to return to Munich to get away from his life. He looked at the mirror behind the bar and saw tear-stricken eyes staring back at him. He was glad he was one of the only people in the bar. He looked terrible.
Before he left, the shame about his life was becoming too much to bear, but the odd thing was the loss and remorse he felt now. He felt responsible, somehow, for Uli. He felt he had failed, that some action he had left undone could have prevented the suicide.
At the funeral, his father sat in stony silence, more stunned than anything
else. His sisters seemed like they would have left if they could have gotten away with it.
But Wilhelm, mighty Wilhelm Ernst? He blubbered like a baby, and he didn’t know why.
Even Carsten was surprised at the level of his remorse. He asked questions, trying to understand why Wilhelm felt this huge loss. He didn’t press the point, but was very curious about how he characterized his loss, almost an academic interest.
Wilhelm looked in the mirror and saw that he was crying.
What in the hell had gotten into him?
Wilhelm wiped away the tears and reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette. He lit one, and inhaled deeply. He looked back at himself in the mirror and shook his head. His mental state wasn’t good and he knew it. He put his cigarette case back in his pocket and felt something else. It was an envelope, folded in half, with “Carsten Ernst” written on it. It was in his own handwriting.
Wilhelm looked at himself again, this time with a shock bordering on panic. Adrenaline pumped unbidden into his veins. He caught his breath. What was that all about? Why on earth was he reacting like this? He had written a letter to his brother, but was so drunk that he forgot it entirely?
He tore open the letter and scanned it. It was definitely his handwriting. It didn’t look as if he’d written it drunk; the penmanship was just fine. If he had written this while drunk, it would be scrawled all over the paper, but here it was in neat and orderly rows. How on earth could he have forgotten this? He wasn’t interested at this point in the contents of the letter, but he read it just to make sure:
My Dear Brother Carsten,
First and foremost, my brother, I want you to know that I harbor no ill will towards you. I want you to understand that I am so very proud of you.
I think that perhaps I must explain to you why I am proud of you. Doubtless you know that I have lived a life pursuing shallow and small goals. I have lived only for myself. I am a drunk, and have squandered my family’s fortune in a manner that has brought shame to myself, our father, and our mother who gave birth to us. Out of all of us, you alone have maintained integrity, honor, and humility.
The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God Page 12