Chris Holm - The Big Reap

The gesture made me sick. It was more than he deserved. I turned away, only to have him call to me. Seems he mistook my anger for politeness. As if I were allowing them their quiet moment of affection, rather than seething at them for it.

“ Joseph ,” he said, “ Kommen Sie, bitte !” I looked up at him once more to suss out the meaning behind his words, and found him beckoning for me to enter. Hesitant and trembling, I acquiesced.

“ Joseph, was ist los ?” he asked. I blinked in response. I had no idea what to say to him. Turns out, I didn’t have to say anything. I was saved the trouble when the small device at the corner of his desk began to move.

It was a strange looking device, two crossed sticks atop a spindle such that they sat parallel to the desk’s surface, with cups at each stick’s end to catch the wind and spin the crossed bits clockwise. Only there was no air current in the room to speak of, and anyway, the device wasn’t spinning clockwise, it was spinning counterclockwise — ever faster as I approached.

I had no idea what it meant, but evidently, Hitler did. He slid back from his desk so fast, his chair toppled, and with a barked order, had both his guards train their rifles at me.

“ Mein Gott ,” he muttered to himself, “ war Mengele richtig !” And then, to me, “ Das Passwort .”

I said nothing, instead putting my hands up like some busted movie bank-robber. The strange wind machine — an anemometer, my brain uselessly supplied — continued to pick up speed, spinning so fast its cups blurred, and riffled the papers on his desk.

“ Das Passwort, Joseph — jetzt !”

I shook my head. Couldn’t figure a way out. The anemometer spun so fast it began to shake.

“ Jetzt !”

The anemometer toppled. When its spinning rotor hit the desk, it flew apart in a crazed scatter of debris.

“I don’t know your fucking password!” I shouted, clenching shut my eyes in anticipation of the shots to come. But the shots did not come. Hitler stilled them with a hand on each barrel, lowering them away from me.

“Aaah,” he said. “American.” The word was heavily accented, but nonetheless in English. No small feat, for a man not thought to speak it. “Tell me,” he said, his words halting and heavily accented, “is Joseph still in there?”

“Yeah,” I answered, over Goebbels’ insistent cries in the back of his own mind. “He’s still here.”

“Good,” he said. It sounded more like goot . “Mengele said that someone like you would come. That is why he constructed for me this machine.” Vat eesss vye he contructed for me zees machink . “Und insisted on using passwords. I thought him a fool. It would seem that he is not.”

With a smirk, he gave the guards an order in rapid-fire German. From what little I could glean, it seemed the plan was to knock my ass out and keep me in the brig until I could talk German again.

The guards approached me. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. A rifle-butt to Goebbels’ temple, and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Then the two guards slung their rifles over their shoulders and each grabbed one of Goebbels’ arms, dragging him from the room.

It mattered not to me. In fact, I was kinda glad they knocked him out. If they hadn’t, he mighta ratted on me.

But, unconscious as he was, he couldn’t. Nor could this Mengele’s magic anemometer, now in pieces on the floor. So, Goebbels and the guards gone, I crossed the room and closed the door, wearing the flesh of Hitler’s new bride, Eva Braun.

“Collector!”

Lips like summer peaches against my own, warm and sweet. Fingers caressing my bare chest. My eyes opened to slits, eyelashes crosshatching the scene before me as I struggled to raise my head. Lustrous curls of fire-red hair that smelled of vanilla and musk cascaded down across my field of vision. Through the gorgeous locks, which tickled as they dragged across my naked skin, I caught a glimpse of wine-colored nails leaving half-moon imprints on my pectoral muscles. Felt the pressure of the palm attached to them against my breastbone, a steady rhythm.

A fella could get used to this, I thought.

Then my chest seized and I doubled over, expelling a chum-bucket’s worth of murky, bilious water from my lungs and stomach both. That part was somewhat less erotic.

My lungs’ contents purged, consciousness began to return in dribs and drabs as blessed oxygen suffused my cells with its glorious, life-sustaining whateverness. (Seriously, I sometimes feel like I shoulda paid more attention in biology — if for no other reason than the stranger aspects of it seem to play a very real, and very squicky, role in my everyday existence.) Much to my surprise, I was not in Guam, but in the cave beneath Grigori’s castle keep, a cave in which I’d been certain I was going to expire.

I racked my brain, remembered crushing Ricou’s soul with my bare hand, remembered his bear-trap jaw not letting go even in death. Remembered too his weight pulling me down down down into the cold, black depths.

Then a taste like summer peaches. And then right back to the here and now.

I looked around, slick hair splashing water to and fro as I did. My clothes were sodden, my shirt undone. Buttons scattered on the rock ledge all around me; the stone was splotched dark where I lay, and dusty brown everywhere else. Not the one nearest my point of entry through the cemetery, but the other; the one framed out by the pointed arch. Though as I looked across the chunky fish-stew water of the underground lake, its surface pocked with sickly bits of bobbing gore and pale white flesh, I realized the dock onto which the cemetery tunnel opened was likewise framed. How I could see so far with no obvious source of illumination, I had no idea.

Then, as I cast my gaze about, I saw Lilith’s silhouette — framed in a corona of light of her own making, which rendered her as obscure as an eclipse — and I realized it was she who saved me, and it was she who lit my way.

“What… why…”

“That thing you killed,” she said, looking fresh and dry despite the fact she’d not only just pulled me from the murky water, but resuscitated me as well, “was somehow tied to Grigori’s occlusion spell. It was not Grigori, was it?”

“No,” I said, my voice hoarse, my punctured trachea aching from the strain of speaking, “that wasn’t Grigori. It was Ricou.”

Lilith smiled in triumph, and a hint of something else as well. I don’t know why, but it looked to me like relief. “Ricou,” she said. “Of course . That’s why he was funneling money into Chile, Bolivia, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. He was looking for his brother. He was trying to keep us from getting to him first.”

“Guess we showed him,” I said, wincing as I ran my hand across the crescent of bite-marks that curved from my right clavicle down to my armpit.

“Indeed,” she said, arching an eyebrow at the mess that was me.

“So the occlusion spell…” I prompted.

“…lifted once you killed Ricou,” she said.

“Why? Why wouldn’t Grigori keep this place hidden?”

Lilith frowned a frown that coulda won awards. “Perhaps he did not anticipate Ricou would be so easilydispatched. Or perhaps he simply did not intend to return, and needed a physical anchor onto which to transfer the spell. Who am I to speculate as to the peculiarities of his magicks?”

I shook my head. Doing so hurt. “Dunno. Seems fishy. Doesn’t track.”

“I think that’s you you’re smelling,” she said, her perfect nose crinkling. “Tell me, Collector, did you kill Ricou by crawling inside him and then burrowing your way back out?”