by Ken Asamatsu
But there’s no time, so I shall get to the point.
I, William Wynn Westcott, am Jack the Ripper.
But I hope to make it clear that this was not done out of some pathological hatred of women of loose morals, or some righteous desire to cleanse the world of prostitutes. My goal was something else entirely.
If you could but see He who commanded me in this—The Dweller, The Faceless God, Nyarlathotep—you would understand just how delicate a magical ritual this was!
You know, when I think on it, this course was fixed when I received a coded message from the Secret Chief Anna Sprengler along with the late Robert Woodman in August of 1887.
To tell the truth, I received instruction in many rites and concepts I have yet to teach you in my coded correspondence with Frau Sprengel of the German Order of the Golden Dawn headquarters.
I was not trying to keep them for myself; rather, I found some of the things I received from the true Secret Chief Sprengel to be rather dubious. As my late colleague Woodman wrote,
“From time to time, an unknown black hand slips into the clean white hand of the magicians and brings with it wicked knowledge and skills that are not of this world.”
And now I think we have proof of that!
I have two letters that have not been made public. The first is for ritual A, and the other for ritual H.
Ritual A: A for Adonis. A for Aegis. A for Abyss.
This ritual is intended to summon forth Will to Life from Qliphoth, the realm of the dark, to draw out the Water of Confusion, and to give the new life the goal of imposing an “iron order” upon the world.
Ritual H: H for Hecate. H for Helmet. H for Hell.
This ritual involves the sacrifice of a fifth victim, a beautiful, petite, black-haired young Jewish woman, which will give the coming life its form. The age of the sacrifice, in this case twenty-five years old, will indicate the age at which the coming Adonis will achieve enlightenment.
And the reason we chose someone who could speak French is so that the coming Adonis would one day conquer the hated French.
Thus, I had hoped to keep you from unnecessary worry.
I presume Meyrink’s odd little note, born of his sudden adoption of Buddhism, has put a fright into you—but rest assured! There is no danger of the SRIA putting me on trial.
For you see, I have sown the seeds of a new order, one that will save the Christian world, overtaken as it is by depravity, rampant Mammonism, and obsession with the worldly. History will remember me as a savior!
I created. And I did so from nothing, from the void. If I had worked with what exists, tried to shape a hero according to a plan, it would have been bogged down by unrealistic theory, and the Adonis we need would never have come to life.
I created as the artist creates: from will alone.
We magicians must help the hidden, but massive, power sleeping in our Germanic blood to mature and come forth!
And for that cause, what does it matter how much filthy Jewish blood I spill?!
Heil, Nyarlathotep!
Forgive me: I still have not yet fully flung off the veil.
But you have nothing to worry about. I banished Nyarlathotep in poor Mary Kelly’s apartment. That faceless god and Jack the Ripper will never plague London again.
I removed the veil and closed the Gate.
And the seed of the hero has been returned to the Germanic soil where he shall be born.
He will come to this world, have no fear, but not here in England. No, it will be across the sea—in Germany, or Switzerland, or Austria, for I undertook this great work of creation for all the Germanic peoples.
Well, I think that was all I intended to write.
Once you’ve read this letter, it will burn up on the spot, and the spell I have cast upon it will ensure that you two will forget all about it—what it says, or indeed that you read it at all.
So be at peace. I wish the both of you a quiet rest this evening.
Sincerely,
your true friend,
W. W. Westcott
Record of Birth
Father: Alois Hitler
Mother: Clara
Date of Birth: April 20th, 1889
Name: Adolf
A Feast for the Children of the Night
Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make!
—Dracula (Bela Lugosi)
Universal Pictures, Dracula (1931)
One night I happened to spend a night in a Transylvanian village. The family I was staying with barred the door with a heavy beam to keep vampires out. When I said that vampires were not a problem of the modern world, no one believed a word no matter how I argued. In fact, when I searched for anyone who did not believe this ancient superstition, I found only two in the whole village: the priest, and the author himself.
—Bernard Newman, Danger Spots of Europe (R. Hale Limited, 1938)
I Fog of Death
Fog.
Blue as the ocean depths, cloudy as watered absinthe, and heavy as a theater curtain. Twisting, eddying, writhing fog.
Fog filled the windshield and side windows alike. The half-track truck hauling a Gebirgschutz 36 7.5cm mountain gun not three meters in front of them was completely hidden from view.
Unbelievable. Not even the headlights on our latest Opel Blitz trucks can cut through it.
Leutnant Hjalmar Weil frowned as he stared into the thick fog veiling everything around the truck.
“I thought this famous Romanian fog was a fall and winter thing? It’s just the end of June! Scheisswetter!”
He heard one of his men jeering from the covered bed of the truck.
No surprise, that. They’d gotten lost somehow in the hurry to get out of the fog, and had to backtrack along the narrow mountain roads. Weil himself was as painfully eager as any of them to rendezvous with their assigned unit—Army Group South Ukraine, a mixed unit of German and Romanian forces supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
The men are angry about more than just getting lost, too, thought the leutnant, as he looked back at the bed. Suddenly his nose was filled with a foul stench, enough to make him cough. The stench of the grave, the stench of ditches stagnant for years. This damned fog! Why does it stink so?
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the window to his right was slightly open. The crack was letting the fog leak in.
As he was rolling it up, another voice came from the truck bed.
“Where the devil are we, anyway?”
“Stop your complaining! We were with the main force when we came through Borgo Pass, north of Bistriţa. We’ve got to be almost through the Carpathians.”
The men fell to arguing amongst themselves.
“Someone seems to think we’re almost through the Carpathians. Is he right?” the leutnant asked the driver, Corporal Neyer, as he made sure the window was tightly closed.
“Oh, uh... If we are, there should be something to show it, like a marker or miliarium or something,” Corporal Neyer said, his voice trembling.
“Miliarium? What’s that?”
“They’re stone monuments left from when the Romans ruled the area. They left them to mark boundaries or as milestones. I think some people call them cairns now.”
“You certainly seem to know a lot about this stuff, Corporal.”
Leutnant Weil stared at the corporal, still only twenty-four or twenty-five years old, with suspicion.
“I... I studied some Roman history before I left university,” the corporal said.
“Hmmm. Well then, if we find a village along the way, I’ll expect you to interpret. I hear that these Romanians can still understand Latin.” The leutnant snorted and looked ahead. The dark fog continued to obscure the world.
“Interpret? But, sir... I only understand a bit of Latin.
.. Speaking it is—” Corporal Neyer was cut off mid-excuse when a massive gray beast ran in front of the truck, from right to left.
“Wha—?!” The leutnant jumped up in his seat out of sheer reflex.
There was a brief pause, and then the fog all around the truck—ahead and behind, right and left—was filled with the howling of dogs.
The volume was so great that the truck’s tightly closed windows began to vibrate with the sound.
“Wild dogs!”
“Those are wolves!”
The men’s panicked voices rang out, punctuated by the sound of rifle shots. Here and there in the fog he could see pairs of greenish-yellow lights floating and dancing like fireflies.
Those are no fireflies. It’s the end of June. We are so high in the Carpathians, could it be... ? the leutnant thought—and then a shrill screech cut through from the truck bed.
“Werewolves! They’re werewolves!”
It was like a signal.
Suddenly, he heard the canvas being ripped from the top of the bed, letting the fog swirl in, as submachine guns and rifles fired indiscriminately.
Orange tracers ripped through the blue-gray fog and were swallowed by it. The yellow points of light bounded up and down, waved left and right as if to make a mockery of them.
At the same time, the bestial howling grew more distinct and seemed to pierce directly through Leutnant Weil’s ears into his head. And yet, the howls now seemed less like those of wild dogs, or of wolves.... Even werewolves.
They sounded like jackals, laughing in mockery of humanity.
Don’t be a fool. How could jackals be running wild in Romania? It’s the sound of wild dogs, you’re just confused. The leutnant tried to convince himself, his eyes squeezed shut. Calm down. Grab hold of your senses!
The jackal laughs began changing again, little by little, until they sounded like the hoarse singing of old women. He thought he could even make out the words to the song.
“What is that?” The leutnant spat, coughing dryly.
The fog had crept in again, despite the tightly closed windows. It was wrapping around the leutnant and the corporal. It brought with it an irresistible sleepiness.
As the world went out of focus, those glowing eyes of wolves or jackals or whatever nameless beasts they were closed in. They were in front of the windshield. Outside the windows. Then women’s voices. Not old now. Young. The soldiers stopped shooting, entranced by the voices. They were probably falling all over each other, like Weil and Neyer, like the three men in the truck pulling the mountain gun.
For some reason, the words of the women’s song flowed into the leutnant’s fading consciousness along with the music.
Wolves, o wolves,
Why do you howl so?
Do you sing home our lord Țepeș,
Or is it blood you hunger for?
What was that? Who is this Țepeș? The leutnant struggled to raise his head. Through the windshield, he saw the face of a woman looking down, hanging upside down from the roof of the cab—the sight put him in mind of nothing so much as a great bat.
Her hair was gray, and face as wrinkled and ugly as a mummy’s. Her lidless eyes glowed crimson. The phantasm curled back its lips to reveal purple gums sprouting two long, pointed fangs.
“What are you? Lamia, or medusa or hydra? Was zum Teufel bist du?!”
The leutnant shouted the last with all his strength and ripped his Walther P38 from its holster—then fell into unconsciousness with it gripped in his hand.
II The Village at the Foot of the Cliff
Bells.
The furious ringing of church bells. The fluttering of a flock of pigeons startled into the sky by the sound. The voices of people like the chirping of sparrows. And then the light of the setting sun shining on his face.
Leutnant Weil, awakening as from a horrible nightmare, raised his head. He was attacked all at once by an agonizing headache and burning throat.
What the.... What happened? Have I been unconscious for so long?
He opened the passenger side door while he grumbled to himself, and when he did the cab flooded with sunlight and fresh air, driving out the stagnant stink of men. When he lurched out of the cab, he heard the voices of men and women rise in shock. They spoke a language like sparrow song, and he understood not a word of it.
“You all .... Where are we? What village is this?” the leutnant shouted into the air, and waved his Walther P38.
Before him was a crowd of men dressed in embroidered felt vests and women in smocked blouses and white cotton skirts. A few old men in fezzes and old women in shawls pointed at him, shouting about something or other. All of them shared the same shocked look.
“Does anyone here speak German? Is this Romanian territory? Or Hungarian? Surely we haven’t entered Soviet territory? Can’t anyone here talk sense?!”
The leutnant grew dizzy as he shouted and reached out a hand to steady himself against the truck. When he did so, he glimpsed the half-track stopped a few dozen meters away.
It was a Daimler-Benz truck conversion, with tank-style tracks replacing the back wheels, and behind it was the model 36 7.5 cm mountain gun. The three soldiers in the cab were fast asleep, as he and the corporal had been.
“Move. Get out of the way!” The leutnant stumbled through the narrow, crowded mountain road toward the half-track.
He furrowed his brows at the sight of the truck’s half-open windows.
How could they stand the terrible stink of that fog last night?
He was still mulling that over when he got to the window and looked through. One man was sitting in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel. The other two were sitting in the back. None of them showed any signs of coming around.
“Hey, you pigs. Wake up!” the leutnant shouted in a rage, and he ran around to the driver’s side, thinking to bring the man around with a good slap. Then he’d beat some life into the other two, as well, to teach them not to fall asleep at their posts.
The leutnant’s plan was soon put to rest, however.
When he jerked open the door, the driver fell to the side, his upper body hanging lifelessly from the cab.
“What the devil?!” The leutnant leapt back, his eyes bulging from his head.
His eyes took in a flurry of details all at once: the man’s face, twisted in a rictus of terror—the pale, nearly translucent skin—the purple, swollen tongue sticking from his mouth—the two small puncture wounds on the side of his throat... .
He turned away and looked over the two men in back. Both had the same two holes in their necks.
Leutnant Weil raised his gun into the air and pulled the trigger.
The gunshot thundered over the mountains.
The men and women thronging the road screamed and began scattering like baby spiders from a broken egg sac.
“Bring me the village mayor or the priest! Right this minute! I can see that this village harbors anti-German elements. Anyone found cooperating with or aiding saboteurs will be considered an enemy and executed on the spot!” he screamed, livid with rage.
However, deep inside him, a voice whispered,
Why so angry, Hjalmar? There’s no proof whatsoever that anyone in the village killed those men. It could have been those wild dog werewolf things, or that bat monster you saw.
Indeed, he could not answer why. However, the almost visceral revulsion welling from within his soul overwhelmed the tiny voice of reason.
“Damn you all! Writhing maggots, shoving your weakness in our faces, begging for compassion from your betters! You... you... Jews!”
The leutnant spat, and in his rage decided to kill the first person his eyes landed on: a girl of about three, standing some twenty meters in front of him.
Almost immediately, though, the hand holding the pistol was pushed down.
“Please, stop! Romania is an ally. And historically speaking, these people are descended from the Romans. They aren’t Jewish.”
It was Corporal Neyer, the man’s voice firm for once. The gunshot had wakened him.
“Hmph. I guess you’re right. Yes. I guess I’m... just tired. I wonder what’s come over me? What was that?” the Leutnant muttered to himself, and for some reason looked up at the sky, which was cut off by a sheer cliff. When his gaze reached the top, about seventy meters up, he could see a castle hunching there. A set of steep stairs ran down the face of the cliff toward the outskirts of the village.
The leutnant was convinced that in one of the distant hall’s speck-sized windows he could see a pale face, and he felt a chill envelop him.
And suddenly my rage fades away... .
The leutnant holstered his gun and an embarrassed look appeared on his face.
The girl he had been aiming at was scooped up in her mother’s trembling arms and rushed off inside a stuccoed house nearby.
He soon realized that the villagers had vanished from the street and had been replaced by a crowd of uniformed German soldiers.
“Corporal, please let these people know that they are in no danger if they cooperate.”
The corporal did as ordered and called out something in a loud voice. Naturally, it was in Latin, not Romanian.
After a short time, the doors and windows of the houses began to crack open, and startled eyes peered out from them.
“Bring out the village mayor. We want to contact the nearest German or Romanian military base. Then we would like to bury our three dead soldiers. And we will need provisions and quarters for fourteen men. We also need a place to park the truck and half-track.... And if possible, fuel, and someone who speaks German.”
The leutnant peppered the corporal with demands, his hands on his hips. He began to walk away from the half-track. The corporal continued to interpret.
The soldiers watched Weil approach, and rushed to form a line. There were twelve all together, and all had red, bleary eyes. They moved like men just waking from a deep slumber, slow and ill tempered.