Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

One night after the guards had taken some of the girls into their quarters, we opened the tunnel and three of us entered it. I was in the lead when our control slipped and the tunnel began to constrict. I started to turn back, and the next I knew I was standing under the sky, surrounded by windowless buildings. Warehouses, I think. The street was deserted, and I had no idea where I was. In a panic, I ran down the street and soon I heard the sounds of traffic. I turned a corner and stopped short. A broad avenue lined with gray buildings—all decorated with carved eagles—led away from where I stood and terminated in front of an enormous building of black stone. I recognized it at once from pictures we had been shown—Hitler’s Citadel.

Though I was still very afraid, perhaps even more so, I realized that I had learned two things of importance. First, that no matter through what otherworldly medium it stretched, the tunnel also negotiated a worldly distance. Second, I understood that the portrait painted of the world by our masters was more or less accurate. We had never been sure of this, despite having been visited by Disciples and other of Hitler’s creatures, their purpose being to frighten us into compliance.

I only stood a few minutes in that place, yet I’ll never be able to forget it. No description could convey its air of menace, its oppressiveness. The avenue was thronged with people, all—like our guards—shorter and less attractive than I and my siblings, all standing stock-still, silent, and gazing at the Citadel. A procession of electric cars was passing through their midst, blowing horns, apparently to celebrate a triumph, because no one was obstructing their path. Several Disciples were prowling the fringes of the crowd, and overhead a huge winged shape was flying. It was no aircraft; its wings beat, and it swooped and soared like a live thing. Yet it must have been forty or fifty feet long. I couldn’t make out what it was; it kept close to the sun, and therefore was always partly in silhouette. (I should mention that although the sun was at meridian, the sky was a deep blue such as I have come to associate with the late-afternoon skies of this world, and the sun itself was tinged with red, its globe well defined—I think it may have been farther along the path to dwarfism than the sun of this world.) All these elements contributed to the menace of the scene, but the dominant force was the Citadel. Unlike the other buildings, no carvings adorned it. No screaming eagles, no symbols of terror and war. It was a construct of simple curves and straight lines; but that simplicity implied an animal sleekness, communicated a sense of great power under restraint, and I had the feeling that at any moment the building might come alive and devour everyone within its reach. It seemed to give its darkness to the air.

I approached a man standing nearby and asked what was going on. He looked at me askance, then checked around to see if anyone was watching us. “Haven’t you heard?” he said.

“I’ve been away,” I told him.

This, I could see, struck him as peculiar, but he accepted the fact and said, “They thought he was coming back to life, but it was a false alarm. Now they’re offering sacrifices.”

The procession of cars had reached the steps of the Citadel, and from them emerged a number of people with their hands bound behind their backs, and a lesser number of very large men, who began shoving them up the steps toward the main doors. Those doors swung open, and from the depths of the Citadel issued a kind of growling music overlaid with fanfares of trumpets. A reddish glow—feeble at first, then brightening to a blaze—shone from within. The light and the music set my heart racing. I backed away, and as I did, I thought I saw a face forming in the midst of that red glow. Hitler’s face, I believe. But I didn’t wait to validate this. I ran, ran as hard as I could back to the street behind the warehouses, and there, to my relief, I discovered that the tunnel had once again been opened.

I leaned back, trying to compare what I had read with my knowledge of the twins. Those instances of silent communication. Telepathy? Alise’s endocrinal control. Their habit of turning lamps on to burn away the night—could this be some residual behavior left over from cave life? Tom had mentioned that the lights had never been completely extinguished, merely dimmed. Was this all an elaborate fantasy he had concocted to obscure their pitiful reality? I was certain this was the case with Alise’s testimony; but whatever, I found that I was no longer angry at the twins, that they had been elevated in my thoughts from nuisance to mystery. Looking back, I can see that my new attitude was every bit as discriminatory as my previous one. I felt for them an adolescent avidity such as I might have exhibited toward a strange pet. They were neat, weird, with the freakish appeal of Venus’s-flytraps and sea monkeys. Nobody else had one like them, and having them to myself made me feel superior. I would discover what sort of tricks they could perform, takes notes on their peculiarities, and then, eventually growing bored, I’d move along to a more consuming interest. Though I was intelligent enough to understand that this attitude was—in its indulgence and lack of concern for others—typically ugly-American, I saw no harm in adopting it. Why, they might even benefit from my attention.

At that moment I heard voices outside. I skimmed the notebook toward the others on the floor and affected nonchalance. The door opened; they entered and froze upon seeing me. “Hi,” I said. “Door was open, so I waited for you here. What you been up to?”

Tom’s eyes flicked to the notebooks, and Alise said, “We’ve been walking.”

“Yeah?” I said this with great good cheer, as if pleased that they had been taking exercise. “Too bad I didn’t get back earlier. I could have gone with you.”

“Why are you back?” asked Tom, gathering the notebooks. I didn’t want to let on about the loss of my job, thinking that the subterfuge would give me a means of keeping track of them. “Some screw-up on the set,” I told him. “They had to put off filming. What say we go into town?”

From that point on, no question I asked them was casual; I was always testing, probing, trying to ferret out some of their truth.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tom. “I thought I’d have a swim.”

I took a mental note: why do subjects exhibit avoidance of town? For an instant I had an unpleasant vision of myself, a teenage monster gloating over his two gifted white mice, but this was overborne by my delight in the puzzle they presented. “Yeah,” I said breezily. “A swim would be nice.”

That night making love with Alise was a whole new experience. I wasn’t merely screwing; I was exploring the unknown, penetrating mystery. Watching her pale, passionless face, I imagined the brain behind it to be a strange glowing jewel, with facets instead of convolutions. National Enquirer headlines flashed through my head. NAZI MUTANTS ALIVE IN SPAIN. AMERICAN TEEN UNCOVERS HITLER’S SECRET PLOT. Of course there would be no such publicity. Even if Tom’s story was true—and I was far from certain that it was—I had no intention of betraying them. I wasn’t that big a jerk.

For the next month I maintained the illusion that I was still employed by the film company and left home each morning at dawn; but rather than catching the bus into Malaga, I would hide between the houses, and as soon as Tom and Alise went off on one of their walks (they always walked west along the beach, vanishing behind a rocky point), I would sneak into Tom’s house and continue investigating the notebooks. The more I read, the more firmly I believed the story. There was a flatness to the narrative tone that reminded me of a man I had heard speaking about the concentration camps, dully recounting atrocities, staring into space, as if the things he said were putting him into a trance. For example: