K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

No… it was the true Christ, whispered Pavli to himself. He still believed the little scraps of faith he had gleaned from his brother. A few coins of the inheritance that had been stolen from him. It was He who taught us.

Ritter nodded, as though he had heard a respected colleague’s differing opinion. “The Lazarenes, of course, maintain otherwise. They regard themselves as the only bearers of Christ’s actual gospel. The secret of eternal life. The kingdom of God inside the human breast.” He shrugged, taking his hand from the glass to make a dismissive gesture. “But that is all mysticism. Of no…” He looked momentarily confused, words eluding him. “Of no value. For we are men of science. Nicht wahr?”

Pavli looked up. “If you say so, Herr Doktor.” The man was drunk; he could see it in the sweating face, the tongue that seemed to have swollen up too large for the other’s mouth. That, too, was time repeating itself. “Whatever you say.” He helped himself to more from the bottle on the desk; this was the point at which Ritter no longer noticed things like that.

“A certain body of knowledge has accrued over the years… the Lazaranology, if you will…” The lecture to the imagined audience continued. Though now Ritter’s voice seemed to be moving through the incantations of a religious service. “I am not the first to investigate these matters… though I have the great fortune of being in a time and place where the truth may be at last determined. The Ahnenerbe has given me its blessing, placed these resources at my disposal. Every resource… including the human one…” His face darkened, brooding. “Himmler and the others… all the leaders of the SS… none of them can tell the difference between what I’m doing and their own pet theories. The fat little chicken farmer thinks vegetarianism and mumbling over old runes is as important as this work.” Contempt curdled in Ritter’s voice. “That charlatan Mengele sends them a Jew’s head pickled in a jar, and they’re happy. They add it to their silly museum of such things and think it’s all very scientific.” He snorted in disgust. “No matter. As long as they leave me alone… as long as I have been given what I require…”

Pavli knew what the doctor meant. What a strange world this was – the small one behind the fences topped with barbed wire – where all these people, the people of his blood, could be given to someone like Herr Doktor Ritter. As something merely required, like the crates of film that arrived from the Agfa labs or the Zeiss lenses wrapped in tissue paper, so that Pavli could carry on with the work he did with the cameras.

There had been changes, though. Ritter had asked if he had any experience with cine cameras, the kind with which motion pictures were made, and he had answered yes, a little. The doctor had smiled and told Pavli that he knew he was lying. But that it didn’t matter; Ritter had already arranged for a Wehrmacht technician to come and show Pavli how to work the clever machine. The instruction had taken no more than a week, but that had been enough. Now Herr Doktor Ritter had films of his surgical procedures to study, as well as the shots that Pavli took with the still camera he had used before.

“No matter…” The bottle on the desk was now only a third full. Ritter set his glass back down. “We shall proceed under these circumstances.” His head wobbled a bit as he looked at Pavli for confirmation.

“Yes, Herr Doktor.” A ritual. “As you say…” He longed more than ever to lay his head down, or slip from the chair and curl up on the floor, knees close to his chest, forearms hiding his face from the glare of the electric light over Ritter’s desk; burrowing toward the anesthesia of sleep. Though sometimes it seemed like there was no such thing as sleep here – how could there be, when time itself didn’t really exist? Just a wearying round of bad dreams, visions of the things he had seen through the cameras’ viewfinders, sights that woke him trembling and sweating on the narrow cot.

Ritter placed the tips of his fingers together. “Previous investigators into the Lazarene mysteries have speculated that the essential corpus of the faith predates Christianity…”

He listened and didn’t listen to the doctor’s voice, the familiar words. There was some comfort to be found in seeing that others, the guards, suffered in ways similar to his own. The lack of true sleep, the immersion into non-time. The soldiers listened to their illicit radio, not to Herr Goebbels’ lies, but to the broadcasts of the Americans and the other armies cutting their way across Europe. They listened though they knew that the words were meant to erode their morale, hollow the courage from their chests; they listened because they knew it was the truth from that other world, the world in which time moved and was real. The world that would swallow this one… someday. Matthi had promised him that.

“One researcher into the myths theorized that the Lazarene religious practices dated back to the neolithic shamans. The snake-like shedding of the skin, the indefinite prolonging of human life – these were characterized in certain records as being techniques of both great antiquity and great danger. The skin was characterized as being part of the soul. To remove it, layer by layer, was to become progressively less human; to become a thing without a soul…”

The voice droned on, far away. Pavli preferred to think about the guard, one of the younger ones, barely older than himself, who had broken from his suffering. Who had run away, into the forest beyond the fences topped with barbed wire. And had been caught and dragged back to the former hospital; his SS uniform had been torn by brambles, the dirt on his cheeks muddied by his frightened tears. Pavli had watched from the window overlooking the courtyard as Ritter had slapped the boy across the face while two other guards had held him upright between them. The doctor had then placed the muzzle of a pistol over the boy’s heart and fired. The shot ringing out had snapped all the assembled guards’ heads back, a little piece of the war they’d heard approaching on their radio had leapt out of the charred hole in the breast of the boy’s uniform, leapt out and slapped them like the flat of Ritter’s hand. The ones on either side had dropped the corpse between them, a bundle of rags with a boy’s face still registering bewilderment and the beginning of an understanding that could never be put into words.

“Is it the actual, physical skin that the Lazarene beliefs refer to? Or some other, less material substance? Or some combination, a muddling-together of matter and spirit? This is what we must determine…”

The SS uniform had been stripped from the boy’s body, but not more than that. The white form had been dragged, with no frightened resistance this time, out to the newest pit that had been dug in a clearing of the forest, and thrown in with the red things lying tangled together there.

“It is at this point that the figure of Christ enters the Lazarene mythos.” Ritter gazed up at the ceiling for a moment before continuing. “Not the pale, ambiguous miracle-worker of the Catholic and various Protestant churches, but a teacher of a specific knowledge. It is unclear whether the Lazarene Christ was one historical personage or a school devoted to the ancient mysteries. That is not important, however. The Lazaranology claims that their Christ, the true Christ, discovered the means of taming the dangerous, soul-destroying practice of shedding the human skin. A spiritual technology was developed that became the rituals of the Lazarene faith; the most visible manifestation of this is the tattooed stigmata that the individuals receive as part of their initiation into adulthood. It is claimed that these marks are not just reminders of Christ’s suffering, but are instrumental in controlling the undesired effects of the skin-shedding. Though there is seemingly no limit to the number of times one of the Lazarenes might undergo this process, the faith requires the members to accept their own eventual deaths, though in the cases of certain of the Lazarene Community’s spiritual elders, this may be after lifetimes measured in centuries.”