George Chesbro - The Beasts Of Valhalla

"Nobody," Loge answered in a voice that trembled slightly.

Garth punched the shield with his fist. "Damn it, don't you think we have the right to know?!"

"Yes," Loge murmured in a voice that was almost inaudible. "And I want you to know."

"So tell us, already!" I said, thoroughly exasperated.

"Soon."

"Why not now?"

"First, there's something you must see. I believe it will explain many things-my need for the isolation in which you find me, the things I think about in that isolation. Then you will understand Project Valhalla."

Again, Garth punched the shield. His face was flushed a deep, brick red. "Let's get one thing straight between us, you fucking screwball. You don't need us any longer, do you?"

"For experimentation and knowledge, no," Loge replied evenly.

"Then for what?" I asked quickly.

"Soon, Dr. Frederickson."

Garth stepped back from the shield, took a deep breath, and slowly relaxed his fists. "If you don't need us, why are we still alive? Why bother bringing us here in the first place?"

"All your questions will be answered soon, Garth. I promise you."

"Go to hell, you fucking Nazi," Garth said, and spat at the glass. "Shit, even the rest of the Nazis couldn't have thought this one up-it took the biggest Nazi of all."

Loge's face, distorted by Garth's spittle on the Plexiglas, contorted in pain; Garth's words had cut him deeply. He wiped tears from his eyes, looked down at me. "You like people, don't you?"

"Yes," I answered softly. "But I like them the way they are."

Loge nodded absently, then turned and slowly walked away down the long corridor.

We didn't see Loge for the rest of the day, and he didn't come in the morning. We tried shouting into the intercom in the living room, but it seemed to be dead. We tried shouting at the walls, where we assumed microphones must be hidden, but got no response and no Loge. We even tried shouting up at the recessed television cameras in all the rooms, but there was still no response.

We were just sitting down to a lunch Garth had prepared when the lights in the apartment went out. A few moments later we heard the haunting, E-flat opening chords of Das Rheingold; the sound filled the apartment and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, vibrating in our bones as well as our ears.

Suddenly there was a glow, then a flicker at the entrance to the living room. We rose, walked into the other room-and came to a dead stop.

Standing, we didn't move for close to three hours.

Like the shield in the Treasure Room, the Plexiglas sealing off the living room could reflect images, which in this case were being rear-projected from the media room beyond. What we were watching was a series of slides and short film clips, a visual presentation precisely edited in rhythms that matched the music in the introductory opera in Wagner's Ring cycle.

One brief series of slides showed a soldier snatching an infant from its mother's arms, then bashing the baby's head against a brick wall.

Another series showed a soldier disemboweling a pregnant woman.

These images passed before our eyes even before the thirty-six E-flat opening bars of Das Rheingold were over, and were followed by other, similar images throughout the length of the opera. As horrible as were these opening sequences, the ones that followed were just as horrible, and had the same emotional impact. Although each sequence was brief, some images consisting only of the flash of a single slide, not a single image or sequence of images was ever repeated in the three hours.

None had to be. The record of human cruelty, even when presented in snippets, was easily long enough to stretch through Das Rheingold.

And beyond.

Each day for the next three days, beginning at precisely one o'clock in the afternoon, another opera in the cycle was presented, each with its own accompanying slide and film show. During this time I-and Garth, too, I believed-came to understand what heretofore had been only a vaguely bemusing puzzlement when practiced or described by other people: religion and religious experience.

Siegmund Loge was our high priest, and he was baptizing us in an ocean of feeling inside ourselves deeper than we had ever imagined.

After Die Walkiire we began to fast. And we continued our fast.

Also, we were silent for these four days… not only during each opera and its accompanying visual presentation, but afterwards, like monks in retreat.

Tens, hundreds of thousands of slides and film clips flashed through the seventeen-and-a-half-hour length of the Ring cycle. Loge, the Nobel laureate, was also revealed to us now as a consummate artist as well as an ultrabrilliant scientist. By precisely matching these images of unspeakable and indescribable horror to Wagner's masterpiece, the vast opus of a Nazi sympathizer, Loge had found a way to speak of the unspeakable and describe the indescribable; what he had done was to construct a kind of spiritual submersible, comprised of music and light, that took us to the very bottom of the ocean of evil that stains the shores of the human heart.

The onslaught of horror was so terrible that finally, with music as a catalyst, it transcended horror; it created in us a feeling of profound sadness that I realized, with a suddenness that literally took my breath away, was a reflection, the tender and merciful grace, of my own goodness, the air supply that kept me from drowning in what I was seeing.

So our decency, too, Loge showed us, though the horror of the images never stopped. Whatever feelings Garth and I had ever felt stir in us were nothing, mere breezes on the skin of the soul, compared to what we were feeling now; Siegmund Loge was working on our souls' skin with a tattooer's needle of notes and colors.

How Siegmund Loge had lived for more than eighty years with this pain weighing on his soul without being crushed by it, I couldn't imagine, and I realized, with shame, what a very shallow human being I was compared to this very great and very sad and very compassionate old man. I believed that Garth felt the same.

Mr. Lippitt had told me I'd be impressed by Siegmund Loge. I was impressed. And I knew that whatever happened next, a sea change had taken place in my soul by the time the last sweet and haunting notes of Gotterdammerung had faded away.

Garth and I would never forget what we had experienced in this room, and we would never be the same.

At precisely one o'clock in the afternoon on the day after Gotterdammerung, Siegmund Loge came to us. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying recently, but his voice was steady, if soft, when he spoke.

"I've spent almost my entire lifetime compiling that-since I was seventeen. It was completed, the last pictures matched to the last bars of the music, only recently-in the morning of the day you were found. This is the first time I've experienced it as a whole, and so it's an experience we've shared together." He took a deep breath, and his voice trembled slightly when he continued. "Please tell me what you think."

"I couldn't find any fucking popcorn in the kitchen, Loge," Garth said evenly. "What good are movies without popcorn?"

Loge's face was stony as he stared intently at Garth. The muscles in his jaw began to twitch, and emotions-clear as the images in the vast montage he had assembled-passed across his eyes: bewilderment, shock, hurt, grief-rage. "How dare you make such a remark?!" he shouted at Garth, pounding the shield with his fist. "You have no right to do what you're doing! I've been watching you for the past four days, and I've seen your reactions! I know how my work affected you! I've seen you both sobbing, and I've seen you sitting in silence, lost in grief! I've watched the two of you tossing in your sleep! The three of us have felt the same! Don't you dare deny your pain to me! It's our common bond!"