K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

Ritter cleared his throat after taking another sip from the glass, as though it contained nothing more than water. “The nature of the Lazarene rituals demands a great cohesiveness in the community. Though the shedding of the skin, and thus the indefinite extension of human life, may be performed without assistance by an individual well-versed in the technique, the controlling rituals must be administered by others. Thus, a Lazarene unwilling to accept his or her death might turn apostate and flee the group, practicing the shedding of the skin on an individual basis – but only at the cost of that person’s soul. Without the controlling rituals given to the Lazarenes by their Christ, the individual suffers the inevitable spiritual degeneration, the loss of one’s human nature.” Ritter nodded slowly. “This is, perhaps, the origin of various folk legends regarding the existence of evil and immortal creatures, both male and female, in human form.”

He believes, thought Pavli. There had never been any question about it. Here in these rooms, Ritter’s office and the surgical laboratory, the smallest of all the worlds where no time moved – a religion of the doctor’s own making was practiced. Herr Doktor Ritter’s faith, the rituals performed with his glittering scalpels and the tweezerlike forceps that gently and with infinite patience pulled the delicate skins away from the flesh beneath. Until where there had been one human form on the narrow table, there was then two, a red thing seeping blood into the cloth beneath it, and an empty skin floating in the shallow basin that Ritter’s assistant had prepared. The face could still be discerned, a man’s or a woman’s or a child’s, a mask with no eyes behind the two holes, no tongue inside the larger opening beneath. Hands like translucent gloves at the end of the hollow arms, long incisions running from the tops of the ribcage to the palms. Breasts and genitals, soft empty things, soaking in the chemical bath that would preserve the thin tissue, keep it pliable and safe from decay, a silken thing that Herr Doktor Ritter could add to the others in his collection. That he could take out and study, bending over it with a jeweler’s loupe set in one eye, noting the subtle variations of the tattooed wounds still visible on what had been the abdomen and the wrists…

Pavli felt suddenly nauseous, the alcohol rising up his throat, a choking sourness at the back of his tongue. He shouldn’t have thought of these things, remembered; the solace of being drunk had been burned away by them. He could feel again his cracked rib, the broken tooth in his jaw, the ache of his bruised flesh; for a moment, he felt himself falling to the wooden planks of the dormitory floor, curling into a ball under the blows and kicks from the Lazarene men. From beneath the arm shielding his face, he had been just able to see their faces twisting with rage, nostrils flaring at the smell of blood they caught from him. And farther back, against the wall of the spinning room, his brother Matthi, struggling against the others that restrained him, kept him from coming to Pavli’s aid. The Lazarene men, the ones who were left of their number, had continued pouring their revenge out on Pavli, their fists like rocks tumbling down a mountainside. The toe of a boot had lifted him up for a moment, before he had collapsed to the floor again; that had been the impact that had broken his rib. The lance of pain had blinded him; through a red haze he had seen the guards, alerted by the shouts, rush into the dormitory and pull aside the Lazarenes before they had been able to kill him. Their shouts, not his; he had stayed silent the whole time, though the words had filled his mouth. He had wanted to cry out that it was their fault, they had spurned him, cast him aside, refused to make him one of their own, a bearer of the secrets they shared among themselves. They had only themselves to blame if he had let the doctor have his way, make him into an accomplice, the camera as much an instrument of murder as the scalpel in Ritter’s hand. The thin blade lifted the skin away from the flesh, looking for the secret of life, and the lens peered into the wound, finding only death.

“What we must determine…” Ritter slouched lower in his chair. “We must not rest until we find… until we…” His slurring voice could barely crawl across his tongue. “Until…” His hand knocked over the empty bottle. He gazed stupidly at it rolling off the edge of the desk and thumping on the floor.

Until what? The words were loud inside Pavli’s head, words that were even harder to hold back than his accusation against his fellow Lazarenes. You fool – he wanted to reach over the desk and slap the older man’s face, snap him awake from his alcoholic fog. The drink in Pavli’s veins had turned to fire. He could have stood up and towered over the doctor, sodden head drooping over the scribbled pages of his research journal, reached down and snatched the book from Ritter’s hands, flung it against the office’s wall. A fool, an idiot, to think that his scalpels could find that for which he searched. There was no way to make them tell, to force the Lazarenes to reveal their secrets. Neither their living tongues or their mute corpses spoke of these things – Pavli could testify to that.

The foolish doctor had thought he could raise ghosts through surgery, set free the wavering forms that drifted in the night sky, the murmuring voices, the sleeping faces of memories and dreams, the thin, insubstantial fragments of the deaths the Lazarenes had discarded. Perhaps Ritter had thought he could capture them like smoke in a bottle; pull the cork and drink of them, death in his mouth making him as immortal as the alcohol in his gut had made him wise. The lecture he gave to the eager medical students he imagined before him would be his triumph and vindication; his words would ring out louder and more compelling than those of the Fuhrer; he’d rip open his SS officer’s uniform and stand before them in pale, radiant nakedness, the emblems of Christ’s passion writhing under one arm and over both wrists, the visible sign of his hard-won immortality. The students’ mouths would gape as wide as those of the red, wet faces in the forest’s pit, as he would split open his own skin, fingers tugging inside his breastbone, and step forward reborn. A ghost with his face would slide its empty hands across the ceiling of the lecture hall…

“It’s dangerous to know such things…” Ritter’s voice moved even more slowly, a blind man fumbling at the doors inside his skull. “There are reasons that the Lazarenes, when they could be found, were persecuted over the centuries. Their faith… they believe that Christ Himself was murdered by the Roman authorities for imparting the secret of the controlling rituals. The shroud that was found in the tomb three days after the Crucifixion was in fact His skin, the final mortal part of Him left after the spirit had departed…”

It had only been from Ritter that Pavli had heard that story. His brother Matthi had never spoken of such things.

“Once there might have been whole tribes who shared the Lazarene knowledge, entire cities that other so-called Christians reviled as dens of heresy… their stones were pulled one from the other… mounded corpses put to the torch…”

Pavli could close his eyes and see that, the flames and the black smoke. As easily as closing his eyes and seeing in memory the pit dug in the forest clearing, the raw-fleshed bodies that had been hauled there by the guards, the fire leaping up with the toss of a burning rag. The guards had stepped back with the empty petrol containers in their hands, raising arms to shield their faces from the sudden wash of heat, or turning away to gag and then vomit, spines hunched and guts rebelling against the smell too much like charred bacon.