Troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, beyond. For all she knew, it was aimed at another dimension altogether.
“This isn’t what we thought it would be,” she told Yahav.
She hadn’t explained why Claude wasn’t with her, and they hadn’t yet asked. They knew how to read faces well enough, and divined that it couldn’t be good.
This room where Dr. Portner had labored was the size of a small gym—originally intended as a training facility, she surmised. The five men helping him were younger by many years, Aryan and athletic-looking. She could see them on skis, in bobsleds, firing precision rifles in the biathlon. Maybe they’d come across as cold and standoffish, like competitors protective of their training secrets. Or maybe they’d been friendly, to throw off suspicion. Either way, in their Nordic sweaters and tracksuits, they must have blended.
Now they were all dead. They lay where they fell, and not even death had wiped the surprise from their faces. Yahav’s team stood among their kills as if to safeguard the bodies from rising again, the first soldiers of a Fourth Reich.
And Portner? Not only had he been taken alive, he didn’t appear to have been shot, at least not with standard bullets. A rubber round, maybe. One of the Israelis was carrying a stubby firearm with a widemouthed barrel.
Dr. Portner was seated in a chair turned away from what looked like a communal dining table, where dirty plates mingled with file boxes and notebooks, enough to keep HPL analysts busy for months. His hands were behind his back, and each ankle was lashed to a leg of the chair.
“If he speaks English, he’s chosen not to, just to be a manyak about it.” Yahav motioned one of his team to come forward, a tall fellow with a dense beard and shoulders like medicine balls. “Hillel will translate.”
From his seat, Dr. Portner watched them, back and forth, calm, his eyes giving away nothing more than idle curiosity. He was the same man from the photo, with another twenty years added, and he wore them well. No doubt they were better years than the ones left to the prisoners who’d survived him. His face was more squared off, his hair was lighter, almost certainly bleached, and the scar was exactly the same.
“What’s going to happen to him after tonight?” she asked Yahav.
“We take him back like we did Adolf Eichmann. His crimes are documented. Forty-eight hours from now, his fate will belong to bureaucrats.”
“Will he be accessible later, is what I’m really asking. For more questions, if the need comes up. You hanged Eichmann.”
Yahav gave a little laugh that sounded more like a cough. “I’m a delivery man. I can’t promise you anything. All I can advise you to do is get as much as you can, now, while you can.”
“Right,” she said, then looked Portner in his cold blue eyes. “If you want to put me in my place, this sounds like the only chance for bragging you’ll have. Make the most of it, Herr Doktor.”
Hillel relayed it in German and it coaxed a grin from their prisoner, an expression she’d have found warmer on a skull.
When she asked how long he’d been working with the Olde Fellowes, Portner sagged, as if the question bored him. He didn’t know, he said. Who counts years when you’re doing work you believe in?
Had he developed a method for safely thawing out the victims of his tests? This made him laugh. Why would he care about such a useless thing? They were not for him, anyway. They were never for his research. They were incidental.
The two of them danced around the obvious awhile, as Luna gleaned what she could while Portner seemed unsure of how much she actually knew. Until, at last, she came out with it:
“I know what you’re really doing here.” She pointed out the window. “I saw it, up there. I’m not the first either. Two weeks ago, someone thought she’d seen the Abominable Snowman. That must have been the only thing she could think of, but the difference is, I have a pretty good idea of what I saw. I already know what it’s called.”
As he translated, Hillel began to look increasingly uncertain about what he was in the middle of.
“The Wind-Walker,” she said. “The Wendigo.”
Portner grew testy, spat out some contemptuous retort. She recognized the word untermenschen, and figured it couldn’t have been kind.
“It doesn’t make sense, what he’s saying now,” Hillel told her.
“It may make sense to me. Go ahead.”
“He says he only recognizes the name Ithaqua. And perhaps the God of the Cold White Silence, but that this is really more of a title. All other names are ignorant labels applied by various breeds of subhumans.”
Dr. Portner appeared to understand English well enough to know he was being translated accurately. He craned his neck forward to look her straight on, with pitiless scrutiny—the tan of her skin, the black of her hair, the hazel of her eyes—and the loathing was as plain as the scar on his face.
“Mud people,” he said, his enunciation slow and exaggerated.
He sat back again, smug, seeming to want her to hit him, give him the victory of revealing herself as the baser, impulse-driven creature he must have believed her to be. And she wanted to. To prove herself to men like that, she’s had to become twice as lethal as any one of them . . . and yes, she wanted to be that woman, to be worthy of being shot first.
“You’ve ended up a long way from where you started,” she said instead, staring at the enigma he’d developed. Portner seemed susceptible to flattery, if it wasn’t too obvious. “From a close-range weapon that did the crudest kind of damage, to . . . what would you even call it now?”
That made him stop and think awhile, as if research, labor, and luck had led him to something he had yet to categorize.
“Eine Brücke,” he said in time, as though he had astounded no one more than himself. “Ich würde es eine Brücke nennen.”
A bridge. I would call it a bridge.
And the more the quiet seconds passed, the colder she felt, even inside her parka.
Eine Brücke.
Innsbruck.
“A bridge to where, exactly?”
With a look of disdain, he told her she should’ve known without having to ask. He clammed up for a minute, then relented. Another world, he said. Another world, in another place, in the fold between what the fools believed was all there was to see.
“But you couldn’t keep the bridge open long enough, could you? And now you never will,” she said, maybe the one thing with the power to wound him. He stewed in it—what might have been if he’d had another day, another week, another month.
She leaned down to look him in the face, inches away, matching his disdain with all the contempt of her own she could summon. “Your bridge closed by a bunch of mud people, that’s got to hurt.”
He made a show of seeming less concerned than he should’ve been, and had Hillel tell her that he had friends, with arms long enough to reach into the deepest Jew prison.
“The Olde Fellowes?” she asked, but he was done talking.
And so, again . . .
Eine Brücke. Innsbruck.
As she stepped away from him, the questions came anew: What had truly brought Dr. Gerhardt Portner here, here, to these mountains, this cold, this sky . . . and was there more behind the name bestowed upon this Alpine city than history had recorded? Something for the League to look into, another day.
Whether she would be a part of such an inquiry . . . she couldn’t say she liked her chances at the moment. Come back from your first assignment without your partner? That was all the reason Hoover would need to throw her on the scrap heap as a failed experiment, cast her out in exile to join the ghost of Alaska P. Davidson.
I’m sorry, she thought back through the years, on the verge of a prayer to the dead. I wanted to do you so much prouder than this.
There would be time enough to fret about her career later. To dwell on it now would be selfish, even though there was nothing she could do for Claude tonight. Mounting an effective search would be many hours away.
As Yahav and his
team began the cleanup after their raid, Luna figured she could put the hours to use, as well. There would be no sleep tonight, and anything was better than sitting at a window, staring out at the frozen steeps, wondering where Claude lay.
She dug into the records Dr. Portner had accumulated and tried to get an overview of what was here, impose her own order on their system of organization. Not easy when she didn’t read the language, but she could at least discern text from numerical data, and most of it was dated, going back to 1951. Summaries, reports, calculations, charts.
Photos too. No trouble making sense of those. She had seen these damaged people before. Not the same people, but the same suffering, the same terrible wounds, the same appropriation of innocents as the lowest form of test animals.
It was after midnight when she found them, near the bottom of a stack, slipped into one more file folder among many, as if they were just another pair of routine documents. The prints themselves were undated, but the typewritten papers around them were from eight years earlier. Their colors looked washed out to begin with, and had since started to fade.
The first photo showed a man, naked and unwashed, not as emaciated as the test subjects of wartime, but his misery was the equal of any of them. Arms outstretched, he stood manacled to a stone wall. By the look of his face, he was alive, but in his final moments, subject to pain of such a magnitude he was beyond comprehending anything that was happening.
Just as well.
His midsection had been blasted with layers of frost that were themselves in the process of being ruptured, pierced from within by a single, enormous claw, as dark and keratinous as an animal hoof, jutting through his ribs in a flurry of ice crystals.
In the second photo, his head sagged farther down, while the claw, two-feet-long in the first, was already starting to withdraw.
It must have begun here.
The dimensional bridge had first been glimpsed here.
It took the search team, with dogs and helicopter support, most of the morning, but they located Claude by midday. He was higher up than any of the prior victims, on a gentle sloping outcrop near a meandering belt of evergreens. They got her to the site early, before anyone did anything more.
She’d earned some professional courtesy here, and intended to leverage it. The gendarmerie were relieved the situation had been resolved, and cleanly. There were no inconvenient bodies in the Olympic Village, the Israelis were gone, and nobody wanted it to get out what Innsbruck had been used for.
By now there was only a roomful of evidence waiting to be broken down and transported back to the States . . . and Agent Claude LeGoff.
Leave him where he is, Luna had requested. I take full responsibility. If he’s dead, what’s the rush? If he isn’t, you’ve already lost the four ahead of him, you can’t be eager to kill another one.
She got her way, then got them to outfit her with what she needed to settle in and wait in the snow and the cold thin air: a dome tent for mountaineers, a catalytic heater with extra fuel, a sleeping bag and lantern, a few days of rations.
Throughout the rest of that day, and all through the next, she stayed with him. Even though a city sprawled across the valley floor, with castle and cathedral, and they were within sight of cable cars ferrying skiers up the slopes, it still felt as if they were the only people on Earth. Up here, there were no other human voices to hear, just the ancient sounds of the wind through the trees, and the soft thump of snow falling from their branches.
It gave her time to think.
Claude lay untouched and unmoving, part of the landscape now, a form of hibernating life in a chrysalis of snow. Had anyone in Innsbruck thought to leave one of these unfortunate souls in place, to see what might happen? Of course not. This was civilization, still. Bodies were to be recovered. Life was to be saved, and life always meant warmth.
Here, anyway. But there were other worlds, weren’t there? Other realms, the vast unseen between the folds of what was seen, in which life was free to behave very differently.
This frozen sojourn did more than give her time to think. It gave her space to remember . . . even the things she was supposed to be ashamed of, because they had come from a beaten people. Mud people, as some would call them.
But the old legends still could matter, couldn’t they? Tales passed down the centuries by men who’d looked like her grandfather, told and retold around fires, to warn of the perils that could befall unwary travelers in the great woodlands of the north.
Ittakka, or Ithaqua. The Wind-Walker. The Wendigo.
She’d heard them too, hadn’t she, long ago, listening with a child’s ears? Such tales were meant to do more than frighten—she saw that now. They instructed you how to respond when life strayed beyond the boundaries of what seemed possible.
And wasn’t there one about a fur-clad trapper, found by hunters, encased in a chunk of blue ice? He couldn’t move, but his eyes implored them for help. Maybe so, or maybe the tale had grown in the telling. Regardless, the prescription was the same: Leave him. It is his egg now, and he will chip his way out in time, and the people are safely south of him.
Such a lonely, desolate existence on the outside of the egg.
Hell, in most legends, was hot. But for those who knew, it was cold and white.
Daily, she would sit with Claude for as long as she could endure it, then retreat into the tent to warm herself, until she could go back out again. As the sun swung from one end of the valley to the other, and day stacked upon day, her durations under the open sky grew longer, as she grew acclimated to the cold. It occurred to her that time might pass differently inside that icy shroud.
Still, she loved him. Still, she missed what could’ve been, but vowed not to cry, because she remained warm on the inside, and the tears would only freeze on her cheeks.
When he emerged, at last, she missed it, because it happened in the frozen indigo night. She knew only that when she unzipped the tent at dawn of the fourth morning, he was waiting, sitting on the snow surrounded by the tufts and fragments of his shell. Like those before him, his pallor was pale beyond that of the dead, a smooth and chalky white, with a ghostly kiss of lavender-blue. She found something beautiful in it, the unmarred purity of it. The only thing she couldn’t get past was less apparent, but more unnerving. He breathed, but there was no cloud to it, curling in the frozen air.
Yet it was Claude, unmistakably Claude, and if he stared with longing at the tent, it could only have been because that was where she was. To go inside would kill him.
“I missed you,” she said. “I always missed you.”
And to embrace him the way she wanted? That would kill her. The cold radiated from him as from a pillar of stone left to stand through the darkest months of a polar night.
“Where have you been?” she asked, and he knew exactly what she meant.
“Caught between two worlds. This part of me, still here. The rest of me, where he comes from. The God of the Cold White Silence. He would’ve taken all of me there, if there’d been time.”
Claude’s voice, she was dismayed to hear, was the most changed thing about him, a dry and airy buzz that he had to force out bit by bit.
“That’s what infuriates him the most. He gets so little time.”
Claude told her of his dreams, how for what felt like years he had drifted through a wasteland so cold and barren it made the Siberian tundra look as fertile as the Amazon. Borea, he thought it was called, a planet where none of the stars were familiar and the moons were many, and even the mountains were made of ice, like frozen waves sculpted sharp and alien by the howling winds.
Yet, even here there was life, however unwilling.
“The people he steals . . . they’re building a city for him. Out of stone. It’s all they have to work with. But it’s not out of love,” he said. “What else have they got to do?”
The sky was clear, and as the sun rose down the valley, it reflected from the snow in a million glittering points. Claude looked at i
t with what she realized was fear—if not for today, for the future.
“I don’t want him to find me again,” he said. “I don’t want to go with him.”
“He won’t be coming back here. We stopped that.”
No consolation. “He’ll get through again somewhere, someday. They always do.”
Gradually, because things crawled slowly in the snow, Luna began to grasp the grotesque unfairness of it all, that even as cold as it was now, this was no place for him to linger. One day soon the valley would be green, and Claude was no longer fit to live where flowers might bloom.
North, then. There was only north. There was only the Great White Silence, and the god that always found its way back in time. He would risk much, just to endure. But it would be as vast as it was cold, and maybe he still knew how to hide, like the boy he’d once been, spying on the spies.
“I wish we had it all back.” She pictured him sleeping on that wretched couch in their room at the lodge. More frame than cushion. So many times she’d been a word away from telling him to come to his senses, to come to her. “Just one night.”
“Just one night,” he said, then looked at the tent, as if a part of him yearned to go inside, to face the warmth and be done with it. Five minutes, and he could be beyond any frozen hell.
But he chose differently, life and its less certain paths, as he turned from the tent to the peaks of the Nordkette.
From the outcropping, she watched all morning as he picked his way down the mountainside, to the gentler slopes below, until he was lost to the haze and the winter mists, a vanishing speck in the distance.
Thule. He was bound for Thule.
She waited until he was truly gone before she broke the Silence.
THREE
The Window of Erich Zann
SHE ARRIVED, LIKE SO many, on a Greyhound bus.
Also as with many, she had little clue where to go, no idea how to find a home. Until the moment when she first glimpsed the iconic Golden Gate Bridge looming in the sun-warmed fog, it hadn’t properly occurred to her that this was going to be an issue. Sure, she’d need somewhere to sleep, and wash, but the city would provide, right? Everything she needed was waiting there for her, for them—manifest destiny reinvented for the first generation to realize they were a generation, a harbor from which to set off for parts unknown.
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 12