K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

“It’s all right. I’ll take care of this.” Ritter smiled as he turned back toward Pavli. “I’m afraid our good photographer has gotten confused. Perhaps it was something you dreamed.” He tilted his head, the smile even more kindly now. “You dreamed I promised you something… and now you think that was real. Is that it?”

For a moment, Pavli wondered if he were dreaming now. The surgery seemed to fold in on itself, a space too small to breathe in, with Ritter’s smile at its center. “No -” He shook his head. Beyond Ritter, he could see Matthi raising his bloodied face, his dazed eyes looking toward him. “You did promise… I remember…” Ritter must have gone mad, that was the only explanation. Pavli saw that he believed what he had said.

“How could I promise something like that?” Ritter’s voice stayed patient. “I’ve told you – I’ve told you so many times – that each one is important. I need every one of them. For my research.” The voice curled inside Pavli’s ear, as though he and Ritter were the only ones in the room. “How can we find out otherwise? What we need to know… their secrets… everything. That was what I promised you. That you and I… together… we’d find out.”

The words spun inside Pavli’s head. He couldn’t remember which were true and which were Ritter’s lies. What Ritter had promised him… and what he had imagined, dreamed, what he wanted to have been true.

Matthi hung suspended between the two guards, the blood twisting a line around his throat. The blow had taken the fight out of him, made him see – as the others had seen before him – how useless it was to struggle.

The last one… thank God…

A wordless shouting rose inside Pavli’s skull. It must have been true, Ritter must have promised him; why else would he have spared Matthi until now? Until all the other Lazarenes had been taken, their skins and stigmata separated from the wet red things inside. Until there was none of them left, none at all; only the last of them, the last of the Lazarenes. His brother Matthi, the one Ritter had promised to him -

A promise that Ritter was breaking now. All along, Ritter had been lying to him, so he would make no protest, would go on doing his work behind the cameras and in the darkroom.

Or else he had dreamed it, imagined it. Ritter could never have promised anything like that. Pavli had just wanted it to be that way.

He didn’t care anymore which was true. There were more lying words coming out of Ritter’s mouth, but he didn’t hear them. The doctor smiled and led him away from the dissection table, back to his position behind the cine camera tripod. Even as Ritter was doing that, Pavli saw that he had gestured to the guards; they lifted Matthi higher between them and dragged him forward.

Pavli cried out his brother’s name. With both fists doubled together, he struck Ritter across the chest, hard enough to stagger the doctor back. Ritter’s fall, arms flailing behind in an effort to catch his balance, toppled the stand beside the table; the scalpels and other instruments clattered across the floor as Ritter’s shoulder struck the white tiles. Pavli had already hurled himself past Ritter, his fingers clawing toward the arms and faces of the guards, to pry their grasp away from his brother -

He didn’t reach them. Something caught him by one ankle, bringing him down hard upon his chest and hands. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. He rolled onto his side, vision blurring, and could make out Ritter behind him, the doctor’s hand locked upon his foot and shin. At the same moment, the Scharfuhrer kicked him in the head, the point of the glossy boot hitting just above his ear. The surgery, that had shrunk so small, now exploded, the walls rushing outward, the floor giving way beneath him. Above, he could see the Scharfuhrer landing another kick, into the side of someone with his face. Herr Doktor Ritter, now standing up and straightening his white laboratory coat, watched for a moment, then gestured to the other guards. Pavli saw his brother Matthi, the shirt torn away to reveal the tattooed wound, and the hypodermic in Ritter’s hand. Then a third kick seemed to separate Pavli’s head from his body. It rolled into darkness where nothing more could be seen.

Thunder… it sounded like thunder. As if time had broken open, the pent-up days spilling out, the first rainclouds of spring mounting on the horizon. Pavli could even feel the heat against his face and chest, as though the sunlight were pressed its weight upon him.

“Where are they?” A voice shouted, close enough that he felt across his cheek. “The other photographs, the films… where have you hidden them?”

Why were they shouting at Matthi like that? Pavli could see the figure held up between the guards, the legs bent limp and dangling, head slumped forward. And why had they brought him from the surgery into the darkroom? It didn’t make any sense – Matthi wouldn’t know anything about what happened here.

The Scharfuhrer grabbed the figure’s hair, pulling the head back. Pavli saw that it wasn’t Matthi’s face, and at the same moment, realized that what he could see were two reflections of his own bruised and bleeding face, caught in the black mirrors at the center of the Scharfuhrer ’s eyes. There was no Matthi in the darkroom; he was the one held up now by the guards’ hands, the Scharfuhrer gripping his hair.

A fire burned in one of the darkroom’s deep basins; the heat Pavli felt against his skin came from there. Black, acrid smoke billowed upward and spread across the ceiling as one of the guards dumped more photograph prints and negatives into the flames. Loops of cine film spilled over the basin’s edge like nesting snakes, the heat twisting them into spirals as though they had come alive.

The thunder sounded in the distance outside the asylum. Pavli heard it for only a moment before the Scharfuhrer slapped him across the face. “Where are the other photos?”

Pavli shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t know what you mean…”

“Liar!” The Scharfuhrer brandished a book in front of Pavli’s eyes; he recognized it as Ritter’s leather-bound research journal. “Every procedure the doctor performed is noted; you photographed every one – and now we can find less than half of what should be here!” He twisted Pavli’s head to one side. “Why are you hiding them? You think the Americans will be interested in them, don’t you? A neat little bundle of evidence to show your liberators, proof of what was being done here!” Fury reddened the Scharfuhrer ’s face. “All the better to hang us with – that’s what you want, isn’t it!” He landed another blow across Pavli’s jaw, then bent down and scooped up the journal he had dropped at his feet. He threw the book into the basin fire. “Search everywhere,” he ordered the other guards. “Anything you find is to be burned.”

The guards let go of Pavli. He sprawled on the darkroom floor, unable to stand, his vision a blur of red and the dancing black that threatened to swallow him again. It’s not thunder – he lay still, hoping the guards would forget about him, step over him as if he weren’t even there. The distant booming that came from outside the asylum, the rumbling in the ground that shook the walls – he’d realized what the sounds were. Not thunder, but the roaring of great weapons, the vomiting forth of the shells and bombs that tore open the earth like a giant’s hand. They’re here. Time had started again, had broken into the asylum’s timeless world. That was why the Scharfuhrer and all the others were so agitated. The war itself had arrived on their doorstep.

He could hear glass shattering, could smell the photographic chemicals splashing onto the floor. His eyes could focus enough when he opened them, to see a guard sweeping the butt of his rifle along the shelves that lined the darkroom. The others had flung open the cabinets, gathering up the contents in their arms and dumping them into the basin. The fire sank under each new load, then burst upward again, ashes laced with sparks. Smoke had covered the room’s ceiling, low enough to roll out the open doorway into the corridor.