K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“Come on.” She jerked him upright and tugged him stumbling behind her. “Now!” He dangled on tiptoe like a puppet. “You wanted to go with the others, didn’t you? What’s wrong?”

He looked behind him at the small form only partially concealed by the bushes. “My brother -”

“Never mind him.” She had looked behind as well, toward the eastern sky. She had seen something there, or thought she had. A trace of fire against the banks of clouds, that might have been lightning but wasn’t. If there was a low rumble – she strained to make it out – it would have been artillery shells rather than thunder. Had the fighting come that much closer? There was no time to waste. “Come along.”

On the other side of the hill, she saw the refugees far ahead. She hurried, pulling the child into a trot behind her. The other one was already gone from sight, hidden by the rise of the rutted path.

She had done what was necessary, Liesel told herself. She had saved this one. The valuable one, the one that would repay her for all the trouble she had taken on his behalf. She squeezed the child’s hand tight, to make sure she didn’t lose him in the gathering dusk.

“This is the last one. The very last.” Under his breath, the Scharfuhrer muttered, “Thank God for that.”

The last was spoken too low for Herr Doktor Ritter to catch, but Pavli heard it. The Scharfuhrer stood only a few feet away, between the tripod-mounted camera equipment and the door to the surgery, fingering the pistol slung from his belt of black leather. It was the first time any of the guards had brought a weapon into this antiseptic sanctum; he kept glancing at the open doorway, trying to catch a glimpse of the window beyond Ritter’s office.

Pavli knew why the Scharfuhrer and all the others were so nervous. They had stopped huddling around their forbidden radio and had turned up its volume so that the British and American voices spilled through the silent corridors of the asylum. The voices spoke in German, spoke of the things the soldiers could already tell by sniffing the wind or looking into each other’s anxious eyes. The collapse of the Reich, the armies surging forward from all sides, the tightening noose. There were no longer any protests that the voices on the radio were lying, attempting to demoralize their enemy. The guards and the other SS men, with no means of defending this obscure post other than the rifles and pistols they carried and a solitary machine gun in the gate tower, were beyond demoralization. The asylum lay in the path of whatever final push would be made toward Berlin’s southeastern underbelly; the treads of the Russian tanks would roll over their corpses without even stopping.

That was why they had turned the radio louder, Pavli figured; to get his attention, Herr Doktor Ritter’s. Their commanding officer, the only one who could give the order to leave the asylum, to scurry behind the defensive lines circling the distant city. Perhaps there they would be able to survive long enough for the generals and the Fuhrer himself to come to their senses and sue for peace. It was just a matter of time…

Ritter sorted through the sharp-edged tools in the tray beside the dissection table. He examined the scalpels with particular care, testing their bright metal against his thumb. Pavli watched him, the familiar ritual, the small actions outside of time. How could the Scharfuhrer and the other guards ever penetrate that world, the same one they were trapped in here, with their urgent warnings? Ritter had locked himself into this infinite room where nothing mattered beyond its walls, beyond the fences topped with barbed wire. Not all the other world’s armies combined could break in upon him. Nothing mattered but the research, the sharp bits of metal in the tray, the soft and still-warm flesh upon the table. The incisions along the forearm and down the center of the breastbone, at which he had become so skilled, it was like a silken garment being unfastened – Pavli, watching through the camera’s viewfinder, was always surprised to see blood welling up from such gentle wounds. And then afterward, when the procedure was completed, and there was only a raw red thing in the shape of a human being on the table, its skin and peaceful, empty face floating in the basin of preserving chemicals – that surprised him as well, that there were two dead things where there had been only one before. The Lazarene ghost did not rise up like smoke and clasp its transparent arms around Ritter’s neck, whisper its blessing to him, tell the secret of how to become one of them, the birthright of knowing that Pavli had been denied. All of them remained mute and flaccid, the blue words of Christ’s stigmata upon the papery wrists and torso still indecipherable. The guards fretted, listening for the approach of armies, while Herr Doktor Ritter carefully filled in another page in his journal.

“Bring him in.” Ritter turned and nodded toward the Scharfuhrer. “We are all in order here.”

The last one… Pavli, behind his cameras without film, wondered what had been meant by that. It implied the passage of time, a coming to an end. And that was impossible. How could this end, while Herr Doktor Ritter’s hand could still reach down and pick up a scalpel and hold it up to catch the light? The dormitories on the floors below, with their barred windows and rows of cots, had all grown silent, the muttering or crying voices melting away to whispers and then to silence. But still the guards had each day brought up another Lazarene, a man or a woman – there hadn’t been another child since the onset of winter – each held with arms pinioned behind so Ritter could insert the needle between the ribs and inject the standard 20 cc of phenol. Even before the body had finished struggling, it would have been stripped naked and lifted onto the table. And always another one, the next day and the day after, another for Pavli to pretend to catch on film, the transformation to a wet, red thing. Ritter hardly glanced anymore at the old stills and reels of film that Pavli showed him, only nodded his approval before opening the first of the night’s bottles and beginning his rambling, disjointed lecture. Pavli would drink and let the words drift over him, a voice of non-time…

A scuffle in the surgery’s doorway broke into his slow thoughts. He took his eye away from the viewfinder and looked behind him. Two of the guards had a struggling Lazarene male between them, his arms twisted into the small of his back; the man was young and strong enough to slam one guard against the door with a sudden thrust of his shoulder. The other guard swung a fist across the Lazarene’s face, stunning him, blood spattering from his nose to his ear. The Lazarene sagged between the guards, though he was still conscious; drops of red spotted the white-tiled floor as his head lolled forward. Pavli could see who the man was now. It was his brother Matthi.

“Over here.” Ritter already had the hypodermic in his hand; he set the vial of yellowish pink liquid next to the tray. “While you have him quieted down.”

“No -” The one word from Pavli’s mouth echoed off the surgery’s hard surfaces. The last one – he knew what that meant now. He stepped from behind the cine camera and laid his hand on the doctor’s forearm. “Don’t – you promised -”

Ritter looked at him in astonishment, as much as if one of the devices, a tripod or the table on which the tray of instruments rested, had suddenly addressed him. “‘Promised?’ What are you talking about?”

The thoughts tumbled inside Pavli’s head, making it hard to put together any more words. “My brother… you promised that you would never… you would never touch him…”

“Get away!” The Scharfuhrer raised his arm, palm outward to push Pavli back from the dissection table.