The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  She tucked her wheat-blond hair up into a stern chignon, then dabbed two circles of rouge on her cheeks. Lipstick was too great an indulgence, and drew the wrong kind of attention, she’d learned. She needed to look presentable to keep her position, but more or less invisible otherwise. It would come in handy when she needed it most.

  Fully composed, she grabbed her identification badge, the one stamped with the swastika and laurel wreath, and called goodbye to her mother as she slipped out the front door.

  It was only a short walk to work, but the early autumn air carried the scent of something dangerous in it, something smoky. Not the smell of burning leaves—too early—or the sharp, too-sweet stench wafting off of Niederhagen KZ. Something darker lurked in that scent, blowing in from the west like bad luck. It sent an uneasy trill down Ilse’s back and quickened her step.

  Ilse reached the entrance and flashed her identification at each successive tier of guards. Crossed the drawbridge, newly repaired, its stone masonry scrubbed raw. Entered the castle with its freshly exposed face, like a healthy spa peel in Switzerland. Gathered her overstarched lab coat and gloves from her locker and pulled them on. Then clicked her way toward Dr. Kreutzer’s laboratory with a secret smile.

  Ilse was always smiling in secret, because Ilse, unlike the earnest, sour-faced Nazis around her, was a spy.

  She didn’t like to dwell on it—didn’t want it to seem like she was bragging—but Ilse had infiltrated the very highest echelons of the Schutzstaffel’s administration at Wewelsburg. She assisted Kreutzer with his research and coordinated information across countless other departments, keeping the cogs of the SS turning properly.

  For now, for now.

  What the SS didn’t see beyond Ilse’s cool façade was the catalog she was building inside her head, the one she knew would someday aid the resisters in tearing it all down, stone by stone. Knowing this role she was soon to play—as soon as she figured out how—made each banal horror a little more bearable, made each cruelty she assisted in a little less cruel. Someday, she would do the right thing and turn over everything she knew. Someday, her trap would be sprung.

  Once she knew what trap to set, that was. But that could all come later.

  “Ilse, darling. You’re just in time.” Herr Kreutzer was waiting for her at the entrance to the laboratories. “We have a new arrival to assess.”

  Ilse’s stomach curdled, knowing the sort of deliveries the Herr Doktor usually took, but she offered a polite nod.

  “If it proves to be what I think it is, then we must move forward quickly. Come, let’s find out.”

  Kreutzer pressed a hand to the small of her back, lower than was really necessary, to guide her toward an examination room. But Ilse kept her smile firmly in place. She’d grown up dreaming of a life on the silver screen, her face three stories tall as she played the Valkyrie, the mistress, the schemer, the star. Unfortunately, the war had rather limited the roles available to her. If the good National Socialist secretary was what she had to play to undermine the Third Reich, if that was what it took to stop all this tasteless, maudlin nationalism, this useless, isolationist paranoia, well, she was open to performing in a select intimate venue to further the resisters’ cause.

  This is not the way things are meant to be, her mother’s friends whispered over the years, as their country shifted around them, becoming more and more garish like the German Expressionist set pieces of the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They kept saying it, that it was abnormal, but if that were so, then why did they all seem to inhabit the asylum while the abnormal ones, the Caligaris, ruled over them? It was all too normal, the true essence of Völkisch to be tyrannical, hateful, warring. Ilse accepted her abnormality. She would use it to her advantage.

  For though she’d never known a different life, she couldn’t help but feel nauseated by it. The pang deep in her chest when her neighbors and friends threw rocks at the Jews as they were taken away. The embarrassment that forced her to avert her eyes when someone picked a fight with an elderly yellow-starred woman on the streetcar. The shame down in her marrow every time the news broadcasts crowed over another swath of London destroyed, another nation trampled over.

  Yes. This was the way to win the war—not with outright disobedience, violence, and discord. Ilse would win the war by standing up straight, doing her job, but knowing, deep down, the righteousness of her purpose. In her heart, she knew she didn’t mean it when she went along with the Nazis’ plans. She was good. She could be goodness in the dark.

  “The masks, Ilse.” Kreutzer held out a hand expectantly as they reached his laboratory’s outer chamber. Ilse handed one over before strapping hers on, as well. Too often, the masks meant they would be conducting autopsies. But Kreutzer’s research was so strange, so wide-ranging, it was useless for her to make any guesses.

  They entered the room, where a metal crate rested on the examining table, roughly six feet in length. Ilse steeled her stomach as Kreutzer unfastened the crate.

  “Oh,” she said, sucking in her breath as she took in the corpse. It was almost completely black, as if burnt, but rather than being charred and ashy, it was . . . slimy. The closer she looked, the more certain she became that the thing in the crate had never been a person at all. Not just because of its eerie, burgundy-black skin, but also its overabundance of joints. Too many knees and elbows. Too many talons jutting from the backs of heels and palms.

  If Ilse hadn’t known Dr. Kreutzer, if she had not been working with him for over a year now, she might have grown ill at the sight. She might have screamed or fainted. But she was the sane one, the secret mole within Caligari’s asylum. She was the only one who could expose Kreutzer, and in time, make things right.

  “Fascinating,” Kreutzer murmured, his smile scalpel-sharp. “Yes. Though I admit I am envious I was not the one to manage it first.”

  “Manage what, Herr Doktor?”

  “To open a rift stable enough to permit these creatures to slip through.” He snapped his gloves into place. “Decades of research, but the best I have managed is a trickle of energy. So many wasted trials . . .”

  She’d seen only glimpses of the doctor’s trials—people ushered into operating theaters, then reemerging with a hollow look in their eyes and ink in their veins. If they emerged alive at all.

  Ilse had tried to read the doctor’s papers about this shadow world, the Schattenland, but they put her to sleep every time. Prattling on and on about energy, blood offerings, some Italian idiot who spoke with angels or devils or whatever nonsense. It wasn’t becoming for a man of science like Dr. Kreutzer. But he had been so methodical in his experiments thus far. Perhaps it was all leading somewhere after all—and she would be the one to witness it, to report it to the Resistance. A magnificent prize.

  “We will need to work quickly. Once I have mastered the process, we must use the book very soon, to ensure we are in control. Not whoever is responsible for . . . for this.”

  “D-do we have everything that is required?” Ilse asked. With shaking fingers, she fumbled her gloves on, and hoped he did not see.

  “Near enough to it.” Kreutzer held out his hand for a scalpel, which Ilse hurried to provide. “Summon Herr Černik, then. It is time.”

  “But what is it?” Ilse asked before she could stop herself. She flinched as he made the first incision—the wet, squelching noise thick all around her.

  Kreutzer’s eyes crinkled through the lenses of his mask.

  “It is as he promised.” He peeled back flesh to expose deeply corded sinew. “The key to the Third Reich’s conquest.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LIAM

  After Phillip gave him some sleeping pills, Liam lost track of what were dreams and what was reality. The film strips turned into black vines that slithered across the floor and coiled around his limbs. Daniel’s soft lips shushed him as he changed the dressing on Liam’s shoulder wit
h nimble musician’s fingers. Pitr’s mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, hand stretched forward as blackness surrounded him.

  Maybe it was neither dream nor waking. Maybe the behemoth in the shadow world had finally caught him, and was mirroring all his fears and failings as it waited for him to break. Maybe the faceless figures in the chamber room had caught him at last, and it was time for him to be judged.

  “Daniel,” he whispered once, or thought he did, reaching out to that dour face. “Please don’t go.”

  Daniel gave him no answer. Maybe it was just the sleeping pills talking, sleep grasping for him again with bloody arms and too many memories. Maybe Daniel wasn’t there at all.

  Liam’s mind tumbled downward, the past tugging him back.

  After he and Pitr had embarked on their research, the end of the semester came all too soon, and Pitr went back to Czechoslovakia for the summer while Liam continued their work. They parted on uncertain terms at the end of spring. Pitr promised he’d keep researching while he was in “the old country,” as he put it, with a heavy roll of his eyes. He was going to show Liam’s diagrams to other researchers he’d been corresponding with while Liam tinkered around with frequencies, wavelengths in his lab.

  Unspoken but heavy between them was the question of what they were. Liam yearned to belong to Pitr, for Pitr to belong to him. But Pitr still held him at arm’s length, a secret for the library’s darkened corners. He understood why. He just wished Pitr wanted more, too.

  Liam’s third year at Princeton was going to be the hardest yet. He was on track to finish his bachelor’s degree by the next spring, just short of his eighteenth birthday, but among his studies, his mother, his many jobs, and his new project with Pitr (and Pitr himself), he barely had a moment to breathe. He brought dinner home for his mother and kept their room tidy so the landlady wouldn’t complain, but it was too much penance for his lapsed Catholic sensibilities to bear. His mother would stare at him from her good eye, her face, her silence, her everything a screaming indictment of his failure. He hadn’t been able to stop his father. He hadn’t been able to protect her. As far as Liam was concerned, he might as well have wielded the tire iron itself.

  There had to be a way to keep it from ever happening again.

  But the summer semester drew to a close with no significant breakthrough, no answers, no nothing—and he could no longer ignore the world on fire around him. America was not yet in the war, but they’d heard the sirens blaring. They’d seen the ships of refugees hovering at their shore, only to be turned away—America is full, New York’s English and Irish and Dutch families claimed.

  It was all so useless, and there was nothing Liam could do to change it. Men like his father, with their red armbands and translated copies of Mein Kampf, were everywhere, angrier than ever about immigrants, Communists, heathens. Liam joined a student protest when Lindbergh and his America First goons came to campus, and shouted against the xenophobic monsters until his voice burned out, but it was as useless as sending a signal from inside a Faraday cage. No one cared. Nothing would change.

  There had to be a way.

  Liam tried to temper his excitement over his and Pitr’s research, eager to have something to show when Pitr returned, but all through his summer classes, he found himself shoving formulas around like building blocks in want of a cornerstone. What was the key to opening up those neighboring realms? Based on energy observations, he was sure frequencies were involved—he needed to find the right vibration, the gap in waves. Professor Einstein spoke of bending space to cross distances and time, but that said nothing about worlds that existed parallel to their own. If they were two pages of a book pressed together, then there had to be some seam, some sentence that ran across them both.

  Then fall came, and when the term started up again, Liam spied Pitr across campus a few times, but always with his friends, his sharp gaze scraping over Liam like he wasn’t there—except for that once, that tantalizing day, when it was apologetic, hungry, wistful. That one time was enough to keep Liam’s hope alive, a flickering ember hidden away.

  He kept working nights at the library through the fall. Afternoons. Early mornings, too. He knew where Pitr lived, but if he showed up uninvited, he would never be forgiven. He knew too well the sting of Pitr’s disapproval, a deliberate absence that pierced him through.

  Finally, a shadow fell across the circulation desk, and Liam looked up from his lab notes to find Pitr watching him with a curiosity, a sorrow, that lodged Liam’s heart high in his throat.

  “We’re having a small gathering tonight.” Pitr gave him a scrap of paper with the address for the house he rented with two other history students. “You should come by.”

  “I—I’m working tonight,” Liam stammered, but Pitr was already gone.

  Bitter November wind rushed down the street as Liam made his way there straight from his late shift, the sounds of other campus parties fading into the distance. The porch light was out; the curtains pulled shut. Liam knocked, and the door eased open onto a poorly lit foyer. As he stepped inside, sounds wafted over him; somewhere, a radio played The Adventures of the Thin Man, complete with dire organ chords.

  Pitr shuffled out into the corridor clutching a mostly empty bottle of potato vodka. “There you are.” He was backlit, his features ghoulish, but they softened as he reached out and trailed his fingers against Liam’s cheek. “Most people have already gone home.”

  His accent had gotten thicker during his time back in Europe. Liam wondered what it had been like there, if the specter of war hovered over everything, or if like everything else in Pitr’s life, it was easily brushed aside and ignored.

  “Sorry,” Liam murmured, leaning into Pitr’s touch. This was what he’d craved all along—this closeness between them, unafraid and full and bright. “I had to work—”

  “Come.”

  It was an order, not a request. Liam’s heart flipped over, and he took Pitr’s hand. He’d follow Pitr anywhere.

  They passed the living room, where a bow-tied boy snored on the couch, drink in hand. The upstairs was completely dark, but Pitr knew his way around, steering Liam into his bedroom. Heavy shadows loomed around them: a dresser, a bookcase, a four-poster bed that crowded out everything else. Only a distant streetlight offered any hint of the shapes around them.

  “I—I think I found something,” Liam started, oddly nervous. He had to say something powerful, something that would hold Pitr’s exacting attention. “A frequency that might relate to the other world.” He was elated to be back in Pitr’s presence, brought to his home, no less. But as Pitr latched the door shut behind them, panic clawed at Liam—what if he was no longer enough?

  “Shh.” Pitr set the bottle down on his dresser and brought his massive paws to the buttons at Liam’s collar. “Not now.”

  “But I thought you—”

  Pitr quieted him with a kiss, stringent with alcohol and weighing heavy against Liam’s mouth. Liam froze for a moment. He shouldn’t give in to him, not yet. Not after the months that had passed with no word from him, not so much as a hint that Pitr remembered he existed. But he didn’t last long. Pitr was here, Pitr wanted him still, had missed him, even, in his own way. It felt so good, so soothing to be wanted that Liam no longer cared that he was a secret to be hidden away.

  But there was something new, mechanical in Pitr’s movements, the reflexive way he kissed Liam, the possessive way he pulled him into bed. It was like a thin sheet of ice lay between them that Liam was desperately trying to break through, while Pitr sat impassive on the other side. Maybe it had always been this way, and Liam had just forgotten. Maybe he’d never been anything more to Pitr than he was right now: lean, tormented, precocious, and completely out of his depth.

  It was worth it. Liam melted for him all over again, and the world beyond the cramped room crumbled into dust.

  Afterward, Liam tried curling around
him, kissing his shoulder and the thick cords of his neck, but Pitr didn’t respond. Liam opened his mouth, breath hitching. What could he say? What would keep Pitr here with him, make him want the same something more that Liam craved? All he could think to blurt out were confessions of love, but he feared that would only drive Pitr further away.

  When he looked again, Pitr was asleep.

  Liam slipped out of bed, heart pounding. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and little details of the cramped room jumped out at him as he fumbled for his clothes. A box of Slovakian candy, empty wrappers piled beside it. Books on medieval hygiene and illuminated manuscripts. A stack of moth-eaten sweaters that stank of must from months in storage. A leather notebook jammed with loose scraps of paper, its cover bent and cracked in half, underneath a jar of pomade.

  Liam glanced back to make sure Pitr was still asleep, then he eased the notebook free.

  The first page looked like a bibliography scrawled in shorthand. Lots of words Liam didn’t recognize, cloaked in the háčeks and čárkas of Hungarian, Polish, Czech. A few Latin words slipped out, though, amidst those sharp knives: just enough for Liam to follow.

  Then came the sketches. Stone monoliths and buildings that matched no style Liam had ever seen before. A poorly drawn figure: Was it supposed to be a man? Its face was too long, its eyes lost inside deep vertical folds of skin. Liam’s fingers skidded over the sharp pen marks that had rendered it, and an uneasy shudder rippled through him.

  A folded note was wedged into the next page, warped from moisture and heavy use. Liam unfolded it to find it written in German. The letterhead was for a Dr. Jozef Kreutzer. Liam’s frown deepened: the return address was a military posting in Łódź, inside occupied Poland.

  At the time, Liam’s German was perfunctory at best, so he could only skim the surface. Something about a book, Porta ad Tenebras, that had been confiscated by the German army but that Kreutzer was trying to track down. The key to wrenching open the gates. It details Sicarelli’s meeting with the beings on the other side, my research tells me. How he built the first bridge. It might prove valuable later, Kreutzer said—but first their basic theories had to be confirmed. My experiments continue apace, but we need more. Has your colleague found the frequency yet?