Volk

by David Nickle

  There, next to the nearest chimney, were the tops of six great trunks, leaned and lashed together to form an apex of a narrow pyramid.

  Jason lowered the camera and looked with his own eyes and swore out loud.

  There it was, just as it appeared in the photo they’d shown him. The teepee was right there—stripped of furs—huge tree trunks, felled and propped up against one another in the grasses behind this chateau, as it must have been all along.

  Jason stood up and looked back at the cistern, on the opposite side of the house. Had he seen something moving there again? He didn’t know—and on a level knew that he couldn’t tell. The camera slipped from his grip and landed with a disturbing cracking sound on the rocky ground.

  He was in the presence of a Juke . . . the drug of that thing was working through him, making him see things that weren’t there . . . or miss things that were.

  Nothing moved by the cistern, but as Jason looked back along the building he saw that the back door to the kitchen now stood swinging on its hinges.

  Had it been open before? Maybe it had. Maybe Jason had missed that just as he’d missed the giant structure. He dug his thumb into the burn on his neck, until the pain brought tears to his eyes, which he would not allow to look away from the house, the door, the thing alongside it. None of it faded, as it might if it were some hallucination—if it were a concoction of the Juke here, and that led Jason to conclude that the things he’d seen here before, the things he hadn’t seen . . . those were the illusion. This was what was real.

  He started to a sharp retort—coming from behind him, again and again.

  It was clapping. Hands clapping.

  Five

  The fellow behind Jason was taller than he by nearly a head, and wider across the shoulder by a hand or more. Black hair that had grown too long hung in a curling shock over one eye; the other, blue as the sky, jittered up and down Jason, marking him. His beard was young, maybe a week’s worth, and was lighter than his hair and his single eyebrow. His teeth were straight and white and grinning in the way of a picked-clean skull.

  He wore no shirt, but his trousers were held up by suspenders slung tight over a scarred chest covered in bestial fur.

  Jason’s hand strayed into his pocket and his fingers closed around the handle of the Luger. The giant of a man looked at Jason’s hand in the pocket and then his face and laughed and shook his head. With surprising speed, reached for Jason’s pack—with its map and compass, its hatchet and its bayonet—and lifted the whole thing to one shoulder.

  “Put it down,” said Jason in German.

  The man tilted his head, as though he hadn’t understood. All right, thought Jason to himself. He slid the weapon from the coat pocket and lifted it to train it on the giant. He didn’t quite get it into firing position before he worked it out—that he wasn’t holding a Luger at all. He was clutching a piece of kindling—a dry piece of pine tree, bent a little bit like a pistol might be, like a child might imagine a pistol might be.

  He tossed it away—to the bare ground, where the remnants of a camp might still be found, but far scanter than he had seen: no blankets, no kit, no sack.

  Jason half imagined that the whole thing behind him—the teepee, the house, the whole valley—might just have been another hallucination, a fever dream.

  “What is that, little brother?”

  The man reached toward Jason, and with one immense hand grasped at Jason’s face. Jason pulled back just far enough that the fingers closed an inch from the top of his nose. He frowned, and grabbed again, and this time had hold of Jason’s jaw, squeezing hard enough to force Jason’s mouth open.

  Jason grabbed his forearm, tried to pull it away, but it was no good. He was too strong, and with a turn of his wrist, forced Jason’s head to one side. The pack dropped to the ground beside him as he brought his other hand up, and a finger to Jason’s throat, as he studied it.

  “Burns,” he said, and pressed his finger into the tender flesh beneath Jason’s jaw. The pressure was only slight, but it sent spikes of pain deep, through the inside of his ear. Jason jerked hard enough to break the hold, and also pull muscles in his jaw to create a new kind of pain.

  The man’s face did not alter in Jason’s brief agony—as it would have, if this were a Juke illusion. He was solidly real. Jason’s sudden movement had taken him by surprise, and he stumbled back, foot tangled in the strap of Jason’s pack. Jason ducked and moved behind him, grabbed hold of the other strap, and yanked hard enough to knock him to the ground . . . as well, with enough force to tear at the cut he’d made on his arm. Jason howled, at the same time as the man shouted at the impact of his shoulder on the rock.

  Jason kept going, half-running toward the steep slope of the ridge here, clutching the pack to his chest as he first ran and then tumbled, then righted himself and finally found himself at the base—at the rear of the chateau—which was no longer deserted.

  A woman, slender and pale, stood in the kitchen doorway, her blonde hair tangling in thick curls over her naked shoulders, watching him as he righted himself and looked back at her. It wasn’t only her shoulders that were naked. She wore shoes, and socks that had bunched at her ankles, but that was all.

  She smiled a little tentatively, as Jason looked away, and up the slope to its empty summit. Was the man standing there? Was it the stump of a tree? Jason turned the pack over so he might withdraw the bayonet.

  The woman must have moved very swiftly, for it seemed just an instant later that he felt her hand on his shoulder.

  “Allons-y,” she whispered, and tugged gently at his shirt. She pointed to the half-open doorway to the chateau. “Rapidement.”

  They hurried through the door at the back of the chateau and through a short hallway into a long room that might have at one point been a dining hall, but was now empty. She stopped in a square of light from one of the three windows along the wall.

  Her body had a form that made Jason think of an animal. There was no softness to it, nothing pampered . . . a certain wary readiness. Her hips were narrow and muscular, as were her thighs, covered in downy fuzz that caught the sunlight like flecks of gold. Her pubic hair was darker, as was the hair that cascaded down her shoulders and half-covered the ropy tendons in her slender throat. She had small breasts that clung to her ribs like emptied change purses. Her face seemed deflated too, her eyes deep and sad over sharp cheekbones and jaw—incongruously voluptuous lips set in what might’ve been a permanent sulk. She had a smell that reminded Jason of the trenches.

  There were high-backed dining chairs arrayed along the wall and she motioned for Jason to sit down. Jason didn’t want to, but he did set his pack down on one. He hung onto the bayonet, but he didn’t hold it in a way that’d frighten the woman.

  “Who are you?” Jason asked in French.

  She told him to call her Catherine. “I am not certain it is my true name,” she said, “but it will simplify matters to say so.”

  “How can you not be certain?” asked Jason. “Of your own name?”

  She half-smiled and tapped her forehead. “I forget many things,” she said. “When I came here the doctor tried many names to call me, and Catherine . . . it seemed to strike a chord, you know?”

  So the woman—Catherine—was an amnesiac? All right, Jason thought. When he was in hospital in England during the war, he’d met more than one fellow who couldn’t recall his name, and probably one or two who weren’t lying about it.

  “And what about your name?”

  “Jason,” he said.

  “You sound more certain than I,” she said, and showed a glimpse of a smile.

  They regarded one another in the uneven light of this room. Catherine looked at Jason steadily—something Jason couldn’t reciprocate. He found his eyes flitting to the exits—there were two of them—and the windows, which looked out on a view that between trees led down slope, toward the mouth of the pass.

  She stepped nearer, moving into shadow as she did so.
/>   “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We are all reborn here, no?”

  “Of course—bien sûr,” said Jason, remembering himself. “Why—pourquoi—why do you say reborn?” Catherine merely smiled, as though Jason should know full well why she said that. But Jason’s mind was racing.

  He did have a pretty good idea why she’d said reborn: she was under the influence, as were so many at Eliada in the end, of the Juke. She was looking at him and all around—likely seeing cherubs in those shafts of light, and when she looked outside those windows, Jason bet she saw Elysian fields. At the back of her ear, she’d be hearing songs that no one else did, and while those songs might’ve come from nowhere better than her own imagination—she would understand them as the clarion voice of God. Of a God. Telling her what to do next . . .

  It might also be telling her what to see. Was she even aware of her own nakedness? Jason wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she thought herself to be fully clothed, in a gown . . . to think that this empty dining hall was filled with chirping fairies, tables covered in rich foods. Who knew what she saw even when she looked at Jason. She was inhabiting a lie of unimaginable scope.

  And at that, Jason made up his mind: he, at least, wasn’t going to add to those lies. There was no point.

  “Listen, Catherine—écoutez. I am here to look in on this place. Dr. Bergstrom and the Germans who used to be in charge here want to know what is going on. They asked me just to take some photographs and look at comings and goings. I met a fellow in the mountains. . . .”

  “We are in the mountains now. What fellow?”

  “Very tall and strong. He was only half-naked.”

  “Only half.” Catherine smiled. “He look in you?” she said, now in English.

  “I guess he did,” said Jason, and when Catherine looked puzzled, he just nodded. “Your English is as good as my French, I see.”

  Her grin widened and she measured a tiny invisible thing between thumb and forefinger. “A little better.” She extended her hand so that he might take it. When she spoke again, she was back to French. “They do not speak English much here so I do not practise. You have met Orlok. Better to stay indoors for the afternoon. Come.”

  It was likely that the chateau here in the valley had been built by the same hands that made the farmhouse where Bergstrom and Aguillard were holed up. But the money was all in here. Catherine led him deeper inside, along a tall, wood-trimmed corridor flanked by carved doors, lit by candles set into iron wall-brackets. Jason tried to imagine the fellow that might live here, and could not help but think of Garrison Harper—the long dead lumber baron of Eliada—and his house there. When Jason walked those halls he was still a boy, and they’d seemed like a magical castle. Harper might have felt comfortable in this place, but he’d be outclassed.

  “How is Dr. Bergstrom?” asked Catherine as they made their way.

  “He’s nervous,” said Jason. “This thing got bigger than he wished, I think. He’s been sending men in to see how big a mess he made. You see those men?”

  “Men? Oh yes. Some men.”

  “Are they here?”

  “No.”

  “You know where they are?”

  They stopped beneath an archway, which led into a larger room with tall windows and whitewashed walls. Sunlight flooded across thick wooden floorboards, descending in columns through the dusty air. Jason could hear conversation coming from there. Catherine put a finger to her lips, and touched his chest. Jason took that to mean that he should keep quiet and stay put, so he nodded as she strode into the room.

  As she did, a shadow appeared on the floor, and Catherine turned to it. She indicated back to where Jason was, whispered something that might have been in German. The shadow answered back, and she beckoned Jason come forward.

  He stepped into a great hall. A staircase swept up from either side of the passageway, and the ceiling rose more than twenty feet above their heads. The conversation stopped as he emerged, and Jason could not see the source of the shadow either, which had vanished itself. Furniture was scattered about—as though it had just been delivered, but not arranged. There were three wing-backed chairs, facing away from one another, a long dark wooden table near tall doors that likely opened out of doors . . . a chaise longue, under one of the windows. Someone was reclined on it, knees tucked forward, covered in what looked like a blanket, or maybe a rug.

  Jason peered up the stairs. Maybe the conversation had been coming from up there? There was a gallery at the top, and it was dark, so maybe . . .

  “Hello.”

  The figure on the chaise longue had sat up and was getting to his feet—the blanket still wrapped over his shoulders.

  “Markus!” called Catherine, and in German: “Another has come to look at us!”

  Markus stood, a little unsteadily. He was a small man, maybe a head shorter than Jason, and although difficult to tell under the blanket, he seemed to Jason to be quite frail. Certainly, there was a timidity to the way he moved and held himself. He had a thin beard, and his hair, receding from his brow, hung long to his shoulders.

  “Hello,” said Jason. “I do not want to make trouble.”

  “You are not wearing a uniform,” Markus observed. “Not as the others did. You sound foreign.”

  “He is English,” said Catherine, and Jason nodded. That was close enough.

  “What have you got in that pack?”

  “Just my kit,” said Jason.

  “Food? Medicine?”

  Jason nodded.

  Markus stepped gingerly around the table and past the chairs. As he moved, Jason could see that he was just as naked as Catherine under the blanket. He was also thin, to a degree that seemed evidence of starvation. Jason set the pack down on the floor and opened it up.

  “What do you need?” he asked. “Food?”

  “Let me see,” said Markus and knelt beside Jason to examine the pack. Jason caught a whiff from him—a similar smell to the one that Catherine gave off.

  Jason reached in to help and pulled out the pack of rations—little tins of meat. Markus took one of them and studied it, squinting at the stamp on its lid. He didn’t open it.

  “Is that all there is?” asked Markus.

  Jason nodded. “I am not to be here for very long, so there is not much food. Do you not have food here?”

  “Very little,” said Catherine. “What there is . . .”

  “It is spoken for,” said Markus.

  “You have to feed it, right? The—”

  “There are many hungry mouths,” said Markus, interrupting.

  Jason didn’t need to finish his question: he thought he understood. If these folk were caring for a Juke, then all the edibles would be going there, to feed the beast as it grew larger and more voracious—while they happily starved near to death. Jason could smell it on him, now: not the battlefield, but a smell like apples, stale wine.

  “Well, you both eat these,” said Jason. “I am not hungry.”

  He pulled open the tops of two cans of meat, one for Markus and one for Catherine. They both exchanged a look and took the tins. Catherine sniffed at hers, but Markus was less timid; he reached in with two fingers and scooped out the awful grey-pink meat, and shoved it into his mouth. Catherine saw what he did and mimicked it. As Markus set into his food, the blanket slipped off him immodestly, and he crouched naked on the floor.

  Jason could not look away.

  Markus was emaciated—horrifically so. His shoulders were bones with scarcely more than skin covering them—his arms slender as tree branches—his back and flanks a xylophone of ribs. Jason could barely credit that the man was alive, except by the noisy slurping and gulping as he dug into the tin of meat. Catherine was thin, possibly suffering from similar privations—but not like this one. Markus was barely human.

  Enough, he thought, and moved away to the base of the stairs that swung up in a grand curve to the gallery up high. There was a crest, presumably a family crest, affixed to the place
where they met overtop the archway through which Jason had come. The crest showed two mythical beasts—lions with wings, and knights’ helmets in place of their heads, astride what looked like a serpent, and holding something between them . . . a circular object, maybe meant to be a sphere. Maybe meant to be the sun? The moon? The world itself?

  He couldn’t really tell what it was, because it had been defaced. In the middle of the circle, someone had taken a knife or a chisel and carved what looked to Jason like a crude Nazi Party swastika.

  Jason slipped Aguillard’s cigarette case from his pocket, opened it and pulled one out between his teeth. He lit it with a flick. The smell of the tobacco blunted the stink of this place, and as Jason drew the smoke into his lungs he thought that more smoke might be better: putting the torch to this house would be a cleansing act—as good as dropping the Cave Germ amid the men and women made fools by the Juke in Eliada.

  “Do not wander far.”

  Jason turned. Markus was standing now, smiling horribly through the grease that smeared his chin. His blanket was forgotten on the floor behind him, empty tin still clutched in one hand.

  Jason shrugged and pointed at the coat of arms.

  “I was just admiring the handiwork.”

  Markus looked and nodded, then turned his gaze back to Jason.

  “The swastika,” he said. “It used to be everywhere here. On big banners hung from balconies! Now it is just bits of graffiti here and there.”

  Markus drew closer to Jason. The smell of pork fat was mingling with Markus’s own particular stink. Jason took a couple of steps back up the stairs, and Markus motioned no with a finger, shook his head. The tin clattered to the floor and he raised his other hand, made a beckoning motion.

  Jason backed up two more steps, and held up his hand.

  “Could you keep your distance please?”

  Markus’s smile grew. He didn’t look away. But he stood his ground.