Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

“‘It’s not enough,’ he said. ‘I still hear this little voice inside, telling me that things are wrong.’

  “‘That’s the Devil’s voice,’ I told him. ‘The Devil’s just trying to steal you away from us, your family. We’re your family now, Malcolm. You have to trust in Jesus—he’ll take care of you. You mustn’t listen to the devils and demons trying to keep you away from faith.’

  “He looked like he might hit me! ‘Don’t be angry, Malcolm,’ I said. ‘Anger is a sin. You don’t want to end up in Hell, do you, Malcolm? The angry people—they’ll all end up in Hell, burning for all of eternity.’”

  In the corner, Falstaff was increasingly emotional. “But I wasn’t alone, as it turns out. I was going in just as another fellow was leaving. He had a loaf of bread and a couple of cans of tuna in his arms. I figured that must be the last of it, otherwise he’d be carrying more.

  “He was a young guy, but a big guy. But he looked scared. A big muscular fellow like that, and he looked frightened. I suppose it was the stakes. He needed that food.”

  Lenin, too, appeared increasingly upset. “I told Malcolm, ‘at least now you’re a part of something. But you have to do the right things if you’re going to stay part of this group. You can’t be selfish—you have to give of yourself, you have to help us meet our goals. You have to be a good example to the others. We all do. If you fail, then you leave. God sets a certain standard you have to strive to meet. It’s a job, just like any other job, and when you disappoint your boss he makes you leave, right?’

  “I could tell he wanted to confess, but I’m not a priest, and besides that isn’t part of my beliefs. He didn’t say anything. I guess he thought that was the end of the conversation. Later on I heard that he was seeing other people, that there were people waiting for him a couple of blocks away, and he’d go there after the Bible meetings. So one night I followed him. A couple of blocks, then three. And I saw something that greatly disturbed me.

  “In the distance there were these men, at least I thought they were men, their shapes distorted, blocky bodies and oh-so-skinny legs, and heads like what you get if you twisted up one corner of a handkerchief. He went right up to them, and then they all turned and walked away. I have to say I had no idea what to make of that.”

  Falstaff had lowered his voice. Daniel had to lean in more closely in order to hear. “‘Just let me pass, okay?’ this big fellow said to me. ‘I have a wife and three small kids at home. I need this food. No trouble, just let me pass.’ He was desperate.”

  “We all had relationships outside the group. Well, I didn’t, but most of them did. But I encouraged them not to let their kids play with the children of nonmembers. And I always asked in detail about the acquaintances of those attending the Bible study. We had to make sure those relationships didn’t disrupt the group, otherwise we’d have to say goodbye to those relationships, however painful it might be. Oh, God understands pain. Pain is God’s currency.

  “Sometimes to get right with God you just have to hide yourself away from the world. Sometimes there’s no other way.

  “But I was thinking that what Malcolm was doing outside the church was more than just having other relationships. Those people he met up with, those distorted shapes, well, they had a sinister aspect to them. After thinking on it I became pretty frightened. I came to the conclusion that Malcolm was also part of some other church, some church that had nothing to do with God. Maybe that sounds far-fetched, but I could come to no other conclusion based on the evidence.”

  Somewhere beneath their feet the werewolf howled again, desperate to get out of his incarceration, forever trapped in his own head. The residents shifted uneasily on their feet, on their bunks. Both men paused in telling their stories. Falstaff was the first to resume his tale, and in that way some of the men became aware that he’d been speaking, telling his own story off to the side. Some grumbled over his rudeness. But others wandered over to see what he had to say.

  “He could have pulverized me if he’d wanted to, a big young guy like that. He could have killed me. But that little bit of food might have been scattered and lost in the process.He couldn’t take the chance.

  “I kept thinking about all those little, petty battles you get into in your life, you know? Obsessive, nasty little conflicts when the stakes are nothing, just nothing at all. A better position at work, school competitions, winning some random argument with friends. I used to act quite badly in those situations. The smaller the issue the worse I behaved.

  “But here the stakes were important. It was one of the few times in my life the stakes were vital.”

  “The argument broke out before the next Bible study meeting. I don’t know how it started—I hadn’t yet arrived. Some of the regulars, the ones who always got there early, they said that Malcolm had gone back to his old habits. Blaspheming. ‘Backsliding’ is the word one of them kept using. I’d taught them that word. All I’d ever wanted was to encourage them along their path toward Heaven, whatever Heaven might be for them.”

  “Here the stakes were absolute, probably more important for this man, because he had kids. But I’m embarrassed to say that his plea for his family didn’t sway me in the least. I told the man sure, go ahead, take the food. ‘Go feed your children,’ I said. And when he turned his back I hit him over the head with a board, shattered it over his skull. I picked the food off the floor and ran away with it.”

  “Malcolm was on the floor writhing. I don’t know which one of them hit him, if more than one hit him, or what they hit him with. But he was delirious. He was spitting. He was cursing us all and he was cursing the Lord. I honestly thought he was possessed. I honestly did. I made them all back away from him. I made them create a circle of safety around his struggling, distorted body.”

  Falstaff was actually crying. “I didn’t even bother to see if the man was okay. I was hungry. If he hadn’t looked scared, and especially if he hadn’t mentioned his family I would have let it go, I would have walked away. He was just too damn big, you know? But he showed me his weakness. He made me take the risk.”

  “I thumbed through my Bible. Proverbs 20:30,” Lenin proclaimed. “‘The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly,’ I read to them aloud.

  “‘And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten.’

  “‘Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools.’ Again from Proverbs. I didn’t see the stick until too late. I think it might have been a broken-off broom handle. Or a mop handle, not that there’s any difference. But I didn’t see it. I was too busy thumbing through my Bible, and finding the verses I’d found before, the ones about punishment.”

  Some of the men surrounding Falstaff commiserated, some of them said they might have done the same thing. The others kept quiet, maybe because they didn’t approve or maybe because now they were frightened of him, of what he could do, or perhaps, as with Daniel, they were wondering which world and which time he was actually talking about.

  “‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.’ Proverbs is just full of punishment. And advice for those who feel they need to dish it out.

  “‘Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.’ And Malcolm was crying then, although weakly.

  “I just stared at the one holding the stick. He was one of the newer members of the group. To tell the truth I couldn’t even remember his name. The stick had all these red stains on it. And there was red stain on the man’s hand gripping the stick. I was telling myself he’d gotten into some paint, that he’d made a mess.

  “‘If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee,’ he said. ‘That’s from Matthew, ain’t it?’

  “But I was thinking that was a poor choice of verse. It wasn’t apropos. They hadn’t cut Malcolm—they’d only beaten him.” Lenin looked around at the
residents still listening. “And then the roaches brought me here. Tell me now this isn’t my punishment. Tell me this isn’t Hell.”

  11

  SHE HAS OVERSLEPT and she is going to be late for school.

  This one didn’t feel like all the others, and almost immediately Daniel knew that something had gone wrong.

  He floated through a windy place, unmoored, the gusts battering and pushing him at random intervals, although it wasn’t his body, exactly, that was being pushed—he had no sense of his body. It was his mind, or rather, some complex of desires and fears and memories, some cluster of roots and nerves driven along the cold streams of time, surrounded by the voices of the lost, all those who had drowned in history never to be remembered.

  She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.

  There must have been a short in the system, a break in the connection between who he was and the dead whom the scientists had sent him to occupy, some sort of guesstimation of how that person used to be. Instead of a well-insulated trip directly into another life,he’d gone off floating through pools of personality, random bits of lives cut short, meaningless squibbles of biography.

  She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.

  He became aware of intimations of language, staccato rhythms and harsh vowels, not fluid like French, but simply meant to communicate, to say a thing and then leave it lying there on the table for all to see. They were the thoughts and dreams of German children, he realized, Jews and non-Jews alike struggling to make sense and stave away fear. Somehow they’d captured that, recorded that, extrapolated that, and perhaps not knowing what else to do with it the roaches had just left it lying around in their data banks, for atmosphere or insulation. It was during the war and that anxious time preceding it, that terrible war when all the rules changed.

  She has overslept and she is going to be late for school. Her father is in a panic and is now speaking harshly to her, something he almost never does.

  “Lazy, foolish girl, what is wrong with you? You’ve slept late again and now the entire family must pay!” And then he slaps her across the face. But she doesn’t cry out. She is too busy examining his face, trying to decide if this is some imposter who has taken her father’s place.

  Her mother comes in and roughly strips her out of her bedclothes. Then her mother tries to dress her in her school uniform, but she is struggling, trying to explain to her mother that this is the wrong uniform—it is completely different from the one she is supposed to wear. But her mother speaks a different language from her and cannot understand. “Dakka dakka dakka,” her mother says. “Dakka dakka dakka.”

  Her parents drag her into the school and up the stairs to her classroom. They stand in the doorway waiting for her to find her seat. The other students stare at her in her strange uniform. She says hello to several of her friends but they pretend they don’t know her. She is sure it is her strange uniform that is the problem and she tries to take it off.

  “Wicked girl!” the schoolmaster shouts. “Only a sad whore takes off all her clothes!” In the doorway her parents cry out in shame.

  She stops undressing, because of course the schoolmaster must be correct. She remembers that she is wearing nothing under the uniform.

  Another girl is sitting in her assigned seat wearing the proper uniform. She doesn’t bother to ask her, but she knows she also has her name.

  “Sit down! Sit down!” her father shouts from the doorway. “You have to find your place!” Her mother weeps and wrings her hands.

  It is no use. There are no empty seats, and no one will get up to offer her one. She leaves the classroom in despair and walks out of the school with her parents.

  Her family returns to their neighborhood, but when she starts up the walk to their home her father stops her. “It’s no use,” he says. “Now there’s no place for us here.”

  “No, Father. It will be all right,” she says, but when she knocks on the door to their home a stranger answers. The rest of his family soon gathers behind him, gazing angrily at her.

  “There must be some mistake,” she tells them. “My family and I live here.”

  “No, no,” the father of the strange family tells her. “It is you who has made the mistake, Jew.”

  They wander all night looking for a new place to live. Finally there is nothing more to do than to go to another neighborhood which was recently destroyed by fire. After much searching they finally find one wall still standing, and a soot-covered door in the middle of it.

  She can feel her family standing behind her, anxiously waiting as she pushes and pushes on the edge of the door.

  Finally it swings open, but there is nothing on the other side but wind and a distant light. “That’s all right,” she tells them. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. One by one they follow her in.

  Abruptly Daniel felt himself snatched, pushed along so quickly and so far from any previous context he had no chance to gather himself. He had an odd notion of something failing, falling back and lost in the crevices between years, and then he’d landed.

  Initially Daniel thought he might be playing a German schoolmaster this time, as in this mind’s idle play the most prevalent themes were discipline and pedagogy. Or perhaps he was a kind of administrator, as this was a mind filled with statistics, movements, logistics.

  Die Weisen Könige wurden von einer Vereinigung von Asen abstammen und Vanir.

  And a touch of madness, or at least a deep eccentricity. Irminenschaft. Wiligut had explained to Heinrich in meticulous detail how the Bible had been Germanic in its original state, how that ancient German god Krist had been stolen by the Christians for their own purposes. Wiligut claimed that German culture reached back at least as far as 228,000 BC, an idea that thrilled him and confirmed his own notions of the profound antiquity of the Aryan race.

  It was simply undeniable that the inhabitants of Atlantis were Aryans who had descended from the heavens and settled on the continent. After the deluge they established a mythical city in a subterranean world below Tibet somewhere in the Himalayas.

  This consciousness was flooded with these visions of color and light and dramatic gestures. The mouth became brutally dry as his excitement grew. It was the physical response to imaginative wonder typical of adolescent boys.

  He had carefully filed notes from Wiligut elaborating on this buried city. He’d received the relevant letter in March, so it would be there. He could not recall the time the letter had been delivered into his hands, but that information would be noted on the front. And such a letter was significant enough that there should be a corresponding entry in his diary from that time.

  In his diary he had precisely recorded everything he’d ever given anyone, how long he’d slept on any particular day, when he bathed, how many plums he ate, how many soldiers had been killed so far in this great war.

  All they needed was additional proof, substantial evidence from more expeditions like the one he’d sent to Tibet. It was crucial to have something to show the Führer, something that would persuade him, and perhaps renew his hopes.

  The Führer had not been the same of late. But Heinrich had hopes that this insidious deterioration in their savior would reverse itself. If not, perhaps they could persuade him to take a quieter role. Of course Heinrich was torn—his loyalty was pure—surely Hitler was ordained by the Karma of the Germanic world to lead them! Hitler was one of those brilliant figures who always appeared in Germany when it had reached a final crisis in body, mind, and soul.

  But he could not bear the thought of anything lessening the reputation of their deliverer, even the Führer’s own actions.

  Heinrich hoped he might persuade the Führer to see both the Germanic far past and far future as the endless unbroken stream that HeinrichHimmler—reincarnation of that pre-Christian Saxon, Henry the Fowler—had seen for himself.

  “Pardon, Herr Reichsführer. Are you ill?”

  In that ancient time there had been three suns
and the Earth had been inhabited by giants, dwarfs, and the other creatures of legend. Truly there had been gods walking the earth in those days, and there would be again. He knew he was no god, but with the right breeding, the correct policies carried through by his SS, some day there would be.

  “Reichsführer? Should I summon your doctor?”

  Heinrich gazed up at the handsome blond officer and smiled faintly. He wondered if the man had fathered children. Perhaps the children, too, would be gloriously blond and handsome. If a man like that had multiple partners he might father many, many Aryan children. Heinrich would have a friendly chat with him after the speech was over. “Thank you for your concern. Dr. Kersten is in Sweden, I’m afraid. Felix cannot help me today. My stomach is bothering me, but I will be fine without his help, I assure you. I simply need a few minutes to collect my thoughts. Has the podium been inspected?” The Poznan town hall had not been his first choice for the speech—he had some security concerns. But it would do.

  “Ja, Herr Reichsführer. Twice.”

  “Then inspect it again.”

  He should never have permitted Felix to go to Sweden. He needed him here. His belly had been much worse the past few days, and Felix’s massages were the only thing that brought him relief.

  An unpleasant beer smell was in the room. Beer upset his stomach. There also seemed to be... a corpse smell. He did not know how else to describe it.

  He picked up his handwritten notes off the table beside him. They were terse and informational, but they arranged themselves in his head into a kind of formula, an architecture, a prescription. He had his list of attendees—33 Obergruppenführers, 51 Gruppenführers, and eight Brigadeführers from key areas of the SS. He would acknowledge the setbacks—to do otherwise would be to undermine their trust. Then he would build their confidence, he would remind them of the inferiority of their enemies, get them to recommit themselves to the challenges ahead. He had not yet decided if he would address that other issue. It was a delicate matter, an unpleasant bit of housekeeping. But these were good men whose consciences needed to be salved.