by Rex Baron
“I'd wager that in the past, when you crossed one of us on the street selling flowers or asking for alms, you never dreamed that one day the idea of joining us would be considered a welcome opportunity.” The blind man's roar resounded, filling the room with a dark insulting mirth that caused Lexi's heart to harden.
“I accept your offer,” she said coolly, “and such as it is, I shall welcome it as a kindness.”
Chapter Twelve
Border Crossing
The bedraggled caravan of three mud-caked automobiles and a van approached the border crossing into France just after nightfall.
Lexi sat nervously wedged between Raphael and Myrna, the woman she had first seen nursing her baby in the corner of the cellar apartment. She scrutinized their faces for any sign of the anxiety she felt as they approached the border but found none. The stuffiness of the car and the weight of her heavy woolen coat, tightly wrapped at her throat, made her want to scream, but she had been warned by the blind man to be inconspicuous, to remove all jewelry and makeup and cover her body.
“Let Myrna do her job,” he had said with a confident smile.
Lexi shot a quick glance at the young mother who cheerfully bounced her baby on her lap. In sharp contrast to her own appearance, she was dressed as a temptress, painted with a rouged mouth and nails lacquered to accentuate her long talon-like fingers. Her wrists were weighted down with bangles of silver and gold, and the large metal parrots that dangled from her ears rattled with the slightest movement of her head. She was dressed as a decoy to attract the attention of the soldiers away from Lexi. She looked every inch of what their expectations of a Gypsy actress and singer might be. Her hair was piled on her head in glamorous curls and the tight-fitting bodice of her dress showed just enough of her breasts, swollen with mother’s milk, to guarantee a stamped visa at the crossing.
The blind man rode in the van at the back of the procession, along with the musicians and their instruments, the stringed bouzoukis, tambourines and drums they used in their show. Two minutes from the checkpoint, lively music could be heard coming from inside the van.
The blind man had learned to play on the contempt he knew the officials had for his people. The Germans had come to expect an obsequious smile from those they considered an inferior race, and a show of enthusiasm and unctuous charm from those who had learned to be pleasing for a few coins. Above all, they had to appear to be harmless, nothing more than a band of shiftless wanderers making their living by begging a few Reichsmarks in exchange for the simple amusement they could provide.
The musicians exited the van as they reached the gate, their voices raised in song above the music they played.
Myrna shed her overcoat, and without comment, handed her wide-eyed baby to Lexi, then pulled the neckline of her blouse down to bare her shoulders. She stepped from the car into the bracing night air and danced alongside the caravan, waving to the armed soldier who stood up ahead at the crossing gate.
The blind man was led to the front of the caravan by two of his followers. The proud man whom Lexi had met now limped and contorted his body with each step. Like a pitiful hunchback, he played the fool for the benefit of the guards.
The soldiers mocked him as he made a show of awkwardly bending down to pick up the visa papers he had intentionally let fall from his hand, and laughed at his halting speech as he suffered to explain with a swollen tongue that he was taking his troupe into France to entertain.
One of the soldiers, armed with a rifle, patrolled the perimeter of each auto, inspecting its contents and confiscating the little baubles and bits of food that had been strategically placed for him to find.
It was an old routine for both sides. The soldiers made the most rudimentary show of efficiency for the sake of order, and the Gypsies, in return, brightened their evening with sweet biscuits and the welcome disruption of a bawdy song or two.
The soldier, making his rounds, stopped beside the car where Lexi and Raphael waited. He poked his head inside and shone an electric torch into their faces. Frightened by the intrusion of the harsh shaft of light, the baby in Lexi's arms let out a sustained wail. Lexi covered its little face with her hand and glowered at the soldier.
“Why aren't you out here dancing with your friend?” he asked Lexi, as he pointed to Myrna up ahead at the crossing station. She had entered the hut of the border control guards and allowed herself to be fondled as she laughed along with the excited Germans.
Sensing Lexi's panic, Raphael leaned his face into the blinding beacon of light and answered the soldier's question for her.
“We have the little one here, and yet another on the way,” he said with a studied expression of stupidity clouding his features.
“You people are like rabbits,” the soldier answered from behind the light. “I see you keep the pretty ones for amusement and the others for breeding.” He laughed loudly at what he perceived to be a joke. Raphael nodded his head like an idiot and grinned.
The soldier asked if they had anything to declare.
“Nothing to speak of,” Raphael said, holding up a bottle of wine as a conspicuous offering. The soldier confiscated it without reply and waved the car through the gate.
The raucous peels of Myrna's laughter reverberated down the line of cars from the guardhouse a few meters away.
Lexi realized she had been clutching Raphael's hand during the entire interrogation. The side door of the car opened and Myrna entered. Pulling her blouse up to cover her shoulders, she shuddered from the cold and from disgust.
“Rikono, dogs,” she muttered, as she pulled on her overcoat and snatched the baby from Lexi's arms. “I could kill them and cut off their filthy hands.”
Raphael gently placed his hand on Myrna's shoulder as a silent gesture of gratitude for what she had done.
Lexi rode in silence, her stomach still churning with fear. The palms of her hands were white where the perspiration had eroded away the vegetable dye with which they had darkened her skin. She stared at the lines in her hand, made prominent by the residue of the tint, like a fortune-teller trying to read the future.
The future might only bring misfortune, as Uncle Jacob had promised. She could not help but wonder where he was at this moment and fear for what had become of Michael. For her, the future held a slim ration of hope. She had escaped from Germany and Helen. She was in France. She was free.
Chapter Thirteen
Munich
Helen lay naked inside a circle drawn on the floor, her arms and legs rigidly outstretched to form the points of a star within its circumference. She had awakened from sleep before dawn and set about preparing the space of her drawing room for the casting of the spell of wax. She had carefully consulted her ephemeris to determine the correct day and time when the planets and their divinities would be most receptive to her wishes, discovering that since the objective was to create disincarnate spirits of war, the spell must be dedicated to the god Mars, set on a Tuesday at the hour of six in the morning. She had bathed herself in rainwater, gathered at night in a blind sky, without the presence of the moon.
Now she lay stretched out like the spokes of a human wheel, concentrating to draw the energy she required into the vortex of her solar plexus. She felt the muscles of her diaphragm tighten and visualized a beam of red light radiating upward from her lower abdomen. Off to one side stood a small vat of liquid wax, distilled from the candles purloined from Clara Schultz's funeral, and the glass vial containing the semen, surreptitiously extracted from the S.S. soldiers. Helen lay there until she heard the clock strike six, then began the incantation.
“I conjure the power by virtue of the four elements, the four winds and the four directions of nature, which I strain to grasp in my outstretched hands and trod upon with my feet, that I may have dominion over them, in the name of the angel Zamael and the gods of the winds and earth, and all the elementals therein. I invoke said spirits of war to embody these creatures of wax. Infuse them with the power and might of the ages and
consecrate their being to have just dominion over all, in the name of EXTABOR, HETABOR, SITTACIBOR, ADONAI, ONZO, ZOMEN, ZADES, ASMODAL…”
The litany of names continued as the clock ticked away precious seconds. Helen had only the space of an hour to complete not only the invocation of the spirits, but to do the work of molding the soft warm wax into countless little worm-like shapes, her homunculi, her little soldiers of death.
The room filled with the presence for which she had offered up her prayer. A high-pitched hum accompanied by the crackle of ozone in the air, and the faint smell of sulfur told her that the moment to begin her work had arrived. Without delay, she leapt from the awkward prostrate position and set about pouring the consecrated vial of human seed into the liquid wax. Taking her ceremonial knife, she jabbed three times into the mixture and chanted the words:
“Wax, warm, molten and seen in form, dissolved with flames to be new born, on wings of smoke through air takes flight, reshaped in thought for power and might.”
Hurriedly, she dipped her fingers into the wax and rolled the pliable substance across her palms into thin wands, which she broke into tiny segments no bigger than the nail of her little finger. The work continued until nearly all of what was in the pot had been shaped into miniature beings and sprinkled with the consecrated water of life.
She was muttering the last words of the dismissal of demons as the clock struck seven, and the spell was bound and completed.
Wearily, she rose from the protection of the now powerless circle and wrapped her nakedness in a dressing gown. As she tiptoed barefoot across the cold marble floor to the kitchen to make coffee, she wondered what Kurt would say. His astral army meant so much to him, and yet, the High Command of the Reich had ordered him to hold back on the unleashing of the astral forces. It was premature, they had said, and might risk the destruction of valuable allies and property that might be useful to the New Order.
“They are fools to wait. All will be lost if they wait too long,” Kurt had told her.
But nonetheless, in spite of his reasoning, he had acquiesced to their demands. He had expressly told her to hold off in her ritual until he deemed the time appropriate. Yet, she had gone against his wishes in creating the molten seeds for the new Army. There was an inner voice that told her to proceed, a sinister, nagging voice of precognition that warned her to be ready, that the time would come swiftly, within a moment’s notice, and that they must be prepared. She had ignored Kurt’s command that she wait… not out of defiance, but because she loved him, and she knew that when the time to act exploded on them without warning, she would be ready… and he would be grateful.
Chapter Fourteen
England, 1944
Lexi turned her body against the gust of wind and braced the large parcel wrapped in brown paper with the flank of her thigh. The package fought the strength of the wind and tugged at the cords that Lexi held fast, like the lead of a great awkward kite. A second gust blew up, taking her hat off her head and forcing her to grasp at the air as she watched it sail away like a low flying bluebird, lost between the narrow row of neat little shops and houses that made up the center of town.
Her fox terrier bounded away in pursuit, thrilled at the opportunity to run and bay loudly, exercising his age-old right as a creature of the hunt to cast off the bonds of domesticity for a welcome moment and race for his prey.
“Winston, come back here! You wicked dog,” she called.
She hobbled after him, still balancing the large flat parcel that fought her with every step. Her hair blew across her face, covering her eyes as she drew herself and the brown paper makeshift sail into the safe harbor of the doorway of a nearby shop. She propped the parcel against the wall and occupied herself with straightening her hair when she heard a woman's voice behind her.
“Gracious, you look as if you crossed the Atlantic on foot.”
Lexi turned to see a handsome woman in a tweed suit, offering a steadying hand and a kind smile. Lexi took the hairpins from her mouth and answered.
“I hadn't expected the wind to be so blustery. It nearly took my head off as well as my hat.”
“I always wear a tightly tied scarf when the weather is this contrary,” the woman said. “It's not as attractive as a hat, but then, with the war and all, who is going to see me? All the men are off somewhere, abandoning us poor left-behinds to be as dowdy as we please with impunity.”
The woman laughed as she moved aside to allow a shopper to enter the butcher shop through the crowded passage.
“We seem to be holding up the war here,” she said, jostling to one side as the disinterested woman turned on her heels and squeezed past them again. “I can't blame her,” Lexi's new acquaintance said with a sigh. “There is nothing to buy. All the meat is gone, except for a dubious little sausage that looks as if it might have been someone's dog at last tea time.”
Lexi jumped to attention and pulled herself away from the conversation.
“My dog. I almost forgot about my dog. He's run off, and I haven't the time to look for him. Lord, what a morning,” Lexi sighed, pushing a scrap of the parcel's shredded wrapping back into place, only to have it fall away the moment she removed her hand, revealing the light crackled surface of a richly colored oil painting.
“I see you've got a bit of damage on your hands there, my dear,” the woman said, eyeing the tattered parcel.
“Yes. I had intended that it be shipped out for delivery this morning, but as it is, that's out of the question,” Lexi explained.
“It doesn't look as if there's any harm done. It's only a bit of torn paper, nothing that a bit of Sellotape couldn't put right in a jiffy.”
The woman examined the extent of the damage, but Lexi pushed between her and the painting, grasping it firmly by the edges. She stepped into the street and looked about for her dog.
“Winston.” She called the dog's name again and again, but the adventurous little creature did not respond.
“This won't do at all,” the woman said. “Let me see if I can be of any assistance.” She stepped into the street beside Lexi and made a high-pitched whistle with her lips. The sound started like the shrill scream of a boiling teakettle, then accelerated in pitch to higher and higher levels. Lexi watched in wonder as the veins on the woman's neck strained with each higher octave. She continued to issue the sound, accelerating the pitch, until it was nothing more than an inaudible sensation of numbness in her head.
The woman's face grew red and her eyes rolled back toward heaven, giving the impression of a martyred saint lost in a state of transcendental communication.
Winston raced from an alleyway, the proud predator, carrying the crushed felt hat in his mouth.
Lexi bent down and took the dilapidated trophy from her little pet and patted his head. She looked up at her companion, who stood smiling in her friendly way.
“I learned a bit about sound levels in my travels,” she said, by way of casual explanation. “There are different pitches of sounds around us all the time, some we can hear and others that only animals can hear... animals and angels of course.”
Lexi's mouth dropped open in dismay. Her companion took her arm, like a school girlfriend, and guided her and the package down the street. Winston strutted alongside, still in his moment of glory. He raised his paws as he walked like a show dog, confident that all eyes were on him.
“The little fellow doesn't seem any the worse for it. I expect he doesn't even realize he was lost,” the tweed-wearing woman said pleasantly. “After all, one has to know where one is and where one intends to be, in order to be lost in the first place.”
Lexi nodded her head at the simple reasoning, still unable to fathom what she had just seen. Her face wore a stunned expression that caused her friend to pat her hand in a comforting way and laugh aloud.
“Gracious, my dear, I'm afraid I've startled you. But it's all very simple. Let me take you to my flat around the corner, where you may repair the wind's assault on your parcel, and I'll
tell you about how the cathedrals in France are built to emanate different pitches of sound to affect the levels of devotion of the faithful pilgrim. But I’m forgetting myself… how silly of me not to introduce myself. My name is Ellen Auriel.”
• • •
Miss Auriel lifted the hand-embroidered cozy from the teapot and poured two cups.
“One thing I'll never understand about the English is the restorative powers they attribute to a simple cup of tea. I admit I find it baffling, but I have taken up the practice of administering it to myself and anyone handy, at least three times a day. I'm sure these English believe that the war could be won, if only they could get Twinings to go into the business of making bombs.”
Lexi sat on a hooked rug, putting right the ravaged brown paper wrapper with a spool of tape and a ball of twine. Winston lay asleep at her side.
“Then you're not English?” Lexi asked puzzled. “I thought from your speech and the way you dress...”
“Bless you, no,” Ellen broke in with a chuckle. “I've been here long enough, nearly twenty years now. But to the locals I'm still a foreigner, an American, who came here on holiday and overstayed her welcome.”
“I'm sure no one thinks that,” Lexi reassured her.
“Probably not. Like most everyone here in a small village like this, I have my purpose. Like the butcher or the greengrocer, I have a title. I'm the librarian and local historical expert of sorts. Actually, I came here to study the astrological significance of the Long Man of Wilmington, a monolithic man nearly two hundred and thirty feet tall carved in the Chalk Downs of south Sussex.”
The woman in tweed sipped her tea and smiled down at her guest, as if she were speaking to a child at play on the floor.