K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

The figure in the dark forest stepped closer. Pavli could almost see the face beneath the hood made of ragged animal pelts. “I don’t know… I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“Yes, you have; you have seen it.” The drunken slurring had ebbed from Ritter’s voice, replaced by a taut ferocity. A fingernail drew a red line down the center of the dead child’s abdomen. “You’ve seen the skin part like a suit of old clothes and the reborn life emerging. Like a snake wriggling free, like a chrysalis being torn open by the moth inside -”

“No…” Pavli shook his head. “I didn’t…” The white-tiled room and Ritter’s piercing gaze blurred in his sight. He saw instead the vision he had stolen, the figure surrounded by the elders of his blood, luminous silk peeling away from the youth’s arms and chest, his nakedness wrapped in a drifting smoke that bore the image of his face.

And then another memory. Of his own brother Matthi, drawing the same transparent substance away from the freshly tattooed markings on his wrists. And Matthi whirling around when he’d suddenly felt that he was being watched, his face angry, shouting at Pavli that he shouldn’t have seen those things, it wasn’t the time yet for him to know.

“Don’t lie to me – you’ve seen it -”

“No!” Pavli turned away from the table, reaching for the handle of the room’s door. “I didn’t! I didn’t see anything!”

Ritter’s voice called after him as he ran from the office into the corridor beyond. “You will see it, Iosefni – I promise you that. Together we…”

He couldn’t hear any more. He clapped his hands to his ears, blocking out everything. In the storage area behind the darkroom, he threw himself upon the cot, burying his face in the rough blanket. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the ghosts, the things of silk and smoke and memory, still battered his sight with their soft hands.

Even when he fell into exhausted sleep. Even then, in his dreaming.

Toward noon, one of Herr Doktor Ritter’s assistants gave Pavli his instructions.

“Set up the photographic equipment in the dissection room.” The assistant wore a white laboratory coat and a cold lack of expression. “You know where that is, I assume.”

Pavli turned away from the trays on the workbench and nodded. “Why?” The feeling of dread, that had been with him all morning, tightened in his stomach. “What’s happening there?”

The assistant’s glance turned harsher. “That’s not for you to ask. Just get your things there, and be quick about it.”

Ritter, also garbed in white, glanced up at Pavli as he came into the room behind the office. “There at the corner of the table should do fine.” His voice revealed no emotion. Whatever had been set loose during the night had once again been brought under leash. He turned his attention back to the object upon the table.

It wasn’t the dead child lying there – that much Pavli could tell. That was what he had been expecting. He lifted the tripod from his shoulder and set it in position. An adult’s bare feet, so much rawer and bonier than the child’s had been, protruded from beneath the sheet stretched over the body’s face. He took the lens cap off the camera and began adjusting its focus.

“Raise it as high as you can,” directed Ritter. “I want as much of an overhead angle as possible.” He turned back to conferring with his assistant.

Pavli watched over the top of the camera as the sheet was pulled back from the naked form. A woman then, or what had been one, now reduced to an object without sex. That was all right; he could control the sick, light-headed feeling he’d brought with him into the room.

The assistant finished marking the body, the black lines to direct the scalpel cuts. He straightened up and turned toward the chrome tray, from which Ritter was already selecting his tools. Pavli could see the dead woman’s face then.

“Is there something the matter?” Ritter’s cold voice cut through the nausea that distorted Pavli’s vision. “This is a simple enough task. If you are too squeamish for it, then perhaps I will be forced to find a replacement for you.”

“No… no, I’m all right.” Pavli tightened his grip on the tripod, to keep his balance. “I’m sorry. I’ll try… I’ll do my best. Please…”

Ritter and his assistant regarded him. Then both men turned and leaned over the body of the woman. The mother of the twin children, the woman who had accosted Pavli, screaming for him to tell her what had happened to her babies. As Ritter made the first incision between her breasts, his assistant leaned forward, watching with clinical interest.

The camera’s shutter clicked as Pavli pressed the trigger button. That was the first photograph; he closed his eyes and took another…

In the evening, when Pavli brought the new prints to Ritter’s office, the doctor spread them out upon his desk. He studied them for a moment, then looked up at Pavli.

“You needn’t harbor such suspicions.” Ritter smiled, pleased at his ability to tell what Pavli was thinking. “The woman’s death was at her own hands. She hung herself after receiving the news of what happened to her children. Perhaps we should have been more cognizant of the extent of her grief and taken greater precautions, watched her more carefully. But we are limited in our resources here, and such unfortunate incidents are bound to happen.” He straightened the edges of the photographs lying before him. “Though I do not abide such waste as that in which some of my colleagues indulge, nevertheless I must take advantage of any opportunities for my research.” He looked up at Pavli. “Does that disturb you?”

“No -” Pavli shook his head. “Whatever you wish, sir.”

Ritter nodded. “Exactly so.” He picked up a magnifying glass and leaned over the desktop, the better to study the details of the eviscerated carcass. In the last of the series of photographs, the images were no longer recognizably human. “You should think, Iosefni, upon those matters we spoke of last night. We have much work ahead of us. And… there is not much time.” His voice sank to a murmur. “There is never enough time…”

“May I go now?”

“Yes, yes,” said Ritter irritably. “Leave me.”

Resting on his cot in the darkroom’s storage area, Pavli wondered why Ritter bothered lying to him at all. The photographs had caught clearly enough the imprint of a man’s hands circling the woman’s neck. Her death had been written in the blood pressed beneath the surface of her skin. Why lie about it, when there was nothing that could be done? Such was the nature of this world. It wasn’t up to him.

He rolled onto his side, using his forearm for a pillow. Only a little effort was required to set aside the images of the woman and what was finally left of her. Beyond that was darkness and sleep.

As he fell, he could just hear the echo of Ritter’s words.

Much work to be done…

And little time.

Pavli looked on as the doctor washed the blood from his hands. At the basin on one side of his office, Ritter carefully scrubbed his palms and his long, delicate-seeming fingers beneath the trickle of water from the tap. He paid great attention to the task, bending his head close to examine his nails.

The smell of soap drifted to where Pavli sat on the wooden stool near the desk. He turned away, nauseated. The alcohol that Ritter poured out and set before him always made his gut queasy. To begin with. Not much later, a few minutes, the warmth would spread up his throat, a numbness that was not pleasant so much as necessary. Blurring the images caught by the camera inside his skull, so that the things he had seen in the tile-walled surgical laboratory behind the office, were harder to discern. They could even be forgotten, if only for a moment.