Volk

by David Nickle

  The crack of the rifle fire was unmistakable as they mounted the stairs to the ground floor. It was coming from a sitting room off to one side of the stairs. Jason was there, crouched below a windowsill . . . rifle aimed outside . . . firing off shot after shot, pausing to reload. He hadn’t noticed Ruth and Annie as they peered through the crack in the door, so Ruth announced them and said they were alone.

  “I’ve killed five,” said Jason. “Five shots, five down.”

  “Well that’s something,” said Ruth under her breath, and then more loudly: “Albert Zimmermann’s gone. I’ve got Annie here with me. What should we do?”

  Jason dug into the box of ammunition for more bullets.

  “Huh,” he said, and reloaded with a brisk efficiency. Outside, came more rifle fire, and a windowpane shattered above Jason’s head. Jason levelled the rifle, chambered a round and pulled the trigger. He repeated three more times, even as another windowpane shattered.

  “Ruth,” said Annie, and Ruth turned. Annie was pointing at the front door. The handle was turning. And it was opening on a slow sliver of light.

  Ruth raised up the shotgun and took aim. She didn’t shoot. She had hope, dim hope, that it might be Albert, come to rescue them. But the figure, silhouetted against the light, wore a cap of the sort that Ruth recalled from Munich. He had a pistol, and started to raise it. He wasn’t Albert.

  The recoil as she fired was nearly enough to knock her off her feet, and the shot went high and to the right. But it was enough. The door swung wide, and he fell to the ground, and his pistol clattered to the floor. Annie stepped forward and scooped it up and raised it in both hands to aim outside, firing again. She stepped back into cover.

  “There are a lot of them,” said Annie.

  Ruth moved against the doorjamb and leaned around to peer out.

  There were a lot of them. More than Ruth could count at a glance—spread across the meadow, some crouching, some popping up to shoot. At least a score of them. Probably more.

  “Jason,” said Ruth, “there are too many.”

  “There are a lot,” said Jason. “Didn’t expect them so soon. Orlok . . . I thought we had at least two days for them to gather. Damn, damn. You have to get out of here, Ruth.”

  “Out where?”

  “The back door,” said Jason. “Damn. I hoped Zimmermann’d be here. The truck. You remember where the truck is?”

  “Yes.”

  He was finishing loading, and he popped up again and fired three shots quickly out the window. “Take the truck out back. Pile in the two of you. You got to go to the valley,” he said, “through the pass. Zimmermann knows the way, it’d be better if he was along. But it’s not too hard to find. There’s an old road. Out the back of the farm. Bumpy. But you got to drive fast, because they’ll be on your tail. You got to get through the pass.”

  “The pass?”

  “Right. You’ll meet up with Doc Waggoner,” said Jason. “That Société of his. You’ll get to see how dead that Juke is. And with any luck . . .”

  “You know the way, Jason.” Ruth stepped forward. “You drive.”

  Jason shook his head. “I have this to do,” he said.

  “You’ll die,” said Annie. “There’s too many.”

  “There’s not,” he said, and he looked at Ruth. It was likely only for an instant. But his eyes flashed, and the light of the day caught him in a way that seemed to glow. It made a halo about his hair, and he smiled, in a way that Ruth had not seen . . . not since he had stepped into the dark cellar at Eliada . . .

  “You know, Ruth,” he said. “You’ve always known.”

  Ruth stepped close to Annie, and reached for the pistol she’d taken. She handed it over and took the shotgun from Ruth.

  “I have,” said Ruth, and before Jason could say anything else, she chambered a round and aimed the Luger at his foot.

  She wasn’t as good at this as Jason, not even as good as he’d been those years ago when he’d done it for her. Ruth had to fire three times, hitting the floor with all three, before the fourth bullet finally hit flesh.

  Five

  It was a cold morning at the farm, and colder in the mountain pass.

  Even once the sun had been up for some time, the road was still in shadow of the steep slopes to either side, and the tall pines blocked out more light still, and more heat. But Andrew Waggoner was bathed in sweat, under his double-filtered gas mask and his body coverings . . . under the weight of the pack.

  He was doing better than some of the others for all that. He worried the most about Kurtzweiller, the oldest among them, the least fit. Twice, Kurtzweiller had pulled the gas mask off, let out a visible puff of air and drew it in again. Andrew kept a close eye on him after the first time, which happened at the foot of the pass. He also kept a watch on Dominic, although not for fear he’d expose himself to the mountain air. Dominic was fit—closer to the age of a man that those gas masks had been designed to protect in the trenches of the war. So he was able to get enough wind through the two filters that he could keep a steady pace.

  Trouble was, Dominic’s pace was too steady. He pulled well ahead of all of them, with a nervous energy that made Andrew think he was trying to escape.

  “Bergstrom’s the only one,” he reminded Dominic when he caught up with him, “who knows this route. Stay close.”

  Dominic apologized. His eyes behind the goggles weren’t all that contrite, though, and Andrew understood the impulse.

  “There had been a time that we did not dare go through this pass,” said Bergstrom, as he slipped on his own mask—a simpler face mask that did not cover the entire head—and they set out in the pre-dawn after that first night in the farmhouse. “Men were losing themselves. And even wearing protection . . . the youth who were in the valley would not let one escape. That is why we needed Jason to go in. Now . . . well, now you are here.”

  At its narrowest, the pass was nearly a gorge, with rocks climbing high and straight—and here, Dominic could not be restrained. Although he was carrying one of the heavier packs, he ran straight ahead. Lewis strode purposefully after him. Andrew stayed alongside Bergstrom, who was keeping an eye on Kurtzweiller bringing up the rear. At least there was no losing them. The gorge was a straight line forward and back.

  And when it finally opened up, the sightlines were clear.

  And that was the moment that Andrew first thought of it: to rip the mask off himself, dig into his bag for some wasp-sting venom, just so he could see the view more clearly.

  The valley was deep and green, falling away before them and rising up again beyond to a row of peaks that this time climbed higher than the treeline—high enough in the distance, that some were capped with snow. Before that, woodland lay patched with brilliant alpine grass—patched further with gold of turning leaves. Directly below, Andrew could make out what he thought were rows of trees—possibly the orchards that were supposedly a part of the estate here. There peeked from this snatches of still blue waters. Dominic and Lewis were not far off, holding their hips and gazing at the place, which if Andrew had succumbed to temptation and removed his mask, he might have thought were some vision of imagined paradise.

  Bergstrom touched his arm, and when he had his attention pointed Andrew to the right, along a road a little further up slope.

  “There,” said Bergstrom, pointing more emphatically and more specifically, toward a break in the trees where at first all Andrew could see was the peaked roofs, the stone walls of the chateau climbing over the trees, and . . . something else . . . “There is your Juke.”

  An exultation.

  That is how the gentlemen of the Société de la biologie transcendantale would finally apprehend their first extended encounter with the Juke.

  Even Manfred Kurtzweiller, wheezing behind his mask, did not tarry long when Bergstrom pointed out the huge tripod from which the Juke was suspended, poking just above the highest peak of the chateau. They ran like schoolboys along the roadway as it crossed the
slope of the valley—as they circled the massive chateau, where Johannes Bergstrom had once practised his psychoanalytic methods amid the firm, smooth Aryan flesh of Hitler’s youth.

  Bergstrom in fact made a note of precisely this as they circled the building, and came upon the space of ground where the carcass hung.

  “This is a cathedral of the mind, of the soul!” he cried, tearing his mask from his face as they stood before the Juke. “And the flesh!”

  Thinking back on that moment only a short time later, Andrew would understand that Bergstrom had come upon a mania, not so different from the one his brother Nils had exhibited back at Eliada, suckling juvenile Jukes. Johannes seemed to recognize that himself an instant later, and he shrugged.

  As they stood before the great, dangling carcass then, for the first time, Andrew was of a more forgiving frame of mind.

  “How long has it been there? Dead, I mean?” asked Andrew.

  “Months,” said Bergstrom. “Four. Or so.”

  “There’s very little sign of decay,” said Lewis.

  Andrew and Dominic looked at Lewis. “It’s covered in flies,” said Dominic.

  It was so. The carcass dangled from ties on the tall tripod made of tree trunks, stripped down . . . tied here and there with winding rope, and swarms of fat flies hung around it in clouds . . . crawling on the flesh, or the surfaces of the creature if it weren’t precisely flesh . . . such that it seemed to move itself, as a living colony of insects. It was hard to see detail through the goggles of the gas mask—but to Andrew’s eye it seemed to writhe like a living thing itself, a great, torn sheet that was as big as a circus tent.

  “It’s a thing of beauty,” Andrew whispered, and Bergstrom, the only one among them so far unmasked, looked at him and nodded reverently.

  As the day grew longer, the Société de la biologie transcendantale went to work. Dr. Lewis unpacked the Leica, loaded it up and commenced photography . . . circling the creature, drawing in close where parts of it dangled near the ground, waving away flies to photograph an orifice or a torn, hardened membrane. Dominic and Kurtzweiller brought out sample jars, and saws and shears, and collected samples where the creature hung low . . . and later, higher up, as high as Dominic could climb on the tree branches.

  Andrew’s inquiry was more circumspect. He produced a notebook from his bag, and spent perhaps an hour simply circling the assembly—recording observations about its size—and at times, recollections such as they were of the living thing that he had seen in Eliada, for that instant before he and Annie fled the mill and stepped into the Kootenai.

  He spent some time very near—particularly, near to what he determined was one of the thing’s mouths. The Juke he had seen in Eliada had many of them . . . how many? No reliable way to tell, even applying the accrued wisdom of the Decameron system. But this one had just three that Andrew could count, and another five appendages that had suffered amputation.

  He came near to one, dangling not more than five feet off the ground, and delicately touched its edges. It was circular, like a lamprey eel’s, as he remembered . . . perhaps twenty inches in diameter. He wore gloves, but it had, as he could tell, a texture near to rawhide—slightly less flexible than cartilage. He lifted it, so that he could look inside.

  The gas mask confounded him in this . . . its lenses fogged with his own exertions. He could see, and touch what seemed like teeth . . . sharp needles, like the claws of a housecat, running in what at first he thought was two rows but then determined might be a single one, spiralled. He reached further in, and encountered what seemed to be a sphincter, barely large enough to admit a finger . . . certainly not a thumb.

  He removed the gas mask, but not before taking other precautions: one of the remaining shots of adrenaline, followed for good measure by a drop of wasp venom, administered near the elbow of his half-crippled arm.

  He thought he might have screamed. At that point, the gentlemen of the Société all stopped in their own inquiries and regarded him quietly, like giant, curious insects in their paraphernalia. But he waved them off—and gathered himself from the ground, to return to the carcass, to that necrotizing maw.

  Now Andrew found another familiarity: a perfume that he had not smelled so strongly since . . . the Thorn farm, when he operated on Ruth Harper? No. Sooner than that. He recalled the cabin, where the insensate Lou-Ellen Tavish rested, thick with a Juke . . . still alive before Andrew took a knife to her, and in trying to save her, hastened her death. Then, he hadn’t thought of that smell as a perfume, but now—he wondered how he could have thought of it as anything else? Even in death, a floral sweetness issued from the maw. Andrew wondered, were it not for the pain, his racing heart—would this scent draw him to the lie of Heaven again, as it had before?

  Andrew made a thin smile. It was a good thing, he thought, that he wasn’t a praying man. He gathered his notebook and, from his doctor’s bag, calipers, scalpels, and other instruments of dissection—and meticulously, marked down his observations and measurements, drawing diagrams as necessary.

  He only slowed when the sun began to set, and Bergstrom suggested they all go inside for a meal, and to meet the others.

  Six

  “Wer sind diese Männer?”

  “They are biologists,” said Bergstrom.

  They were all standing in the front hall of the chateau . . . Berg-strom in their midst . . . On the stairs, a tall man with a mild, notably triangular face, wavy brown hair combed to the side. Andrew didn’t recognize him but Kurtzweiller did. “Hermann Muckermann.” Kurtzweiller whispered it, his voice muffled further by the filters. “We meet at last,” he added.

  “Why are they wearing masks?”

  “They insist, Mein Herr. They have been examining—”

  “I know what they have been doing,” said Muckermann. “We have been watching from the music room. All day. They do not need the masks.” He pointed at Andrew. “Their Neger wasn’t wearing one.”

  Andrew was wearing his now—the adrenaline injection had worn off almost immediately, and the wasp venom’s effect had long ago devolved from pain to a dull itch—but it wasn’t tightly fastened, and he shrugged it off now.

  “Pleased to oblige,” he said in English.

  “Doctor Hermann Muckermann. This is Doctor Andrew Waggoner,” said Bergstrom. “He was in Eliada.”

  Muckermann nodded slowly, looking at Andrew as though he wasn’t quite prepared to believe it was he. Kurtzweiller took off his mask next, and at that, Muckermann turned immediately to him. He smiled hesitantly, raised a finger as though trying to remember, and Bergstrom obliged: “Doctor Manfred Kurtzweiller.”

  “We have met,” said Muckermann. “A long time ago. And you sought me out in Berlin, not long ago . . . did you not?”

  Kurtzweiller said that he may have.

  “Well. Good. Now we are both here. And we can sit down for a meal.”

  Muckermann led the Société through a hall, a set of long, empty rooms and finally into what might have once been a respectably sized ballroom.

  But it had been stripped of finery. The windows were high, and bare. The curtains had been ripped down, and rods dangled askew. There were glass doors leading out onto a patio, and past there, a view that contained the entire valley—dark again in the twilight, but the distant peaks were now lit golden with the setting sun. Next to that door, there was a small table with a hand-wound phonograph player atop it. Behind them was another staircase, sweeping to an upper gallery.

  And in the middle, there was a long table, with chairs that didn’t match one another surrounding it. In the middle of the table were three ceramic jugs, and a covered silver platter. It was set for seven.

  “Sit!” commanded Muckermann, opening his arms and raising them high, and looked at Andrew. “Even you, Neger Waggoner! Even you!”

  Andrew didn’t let himself rise to it. He thanked Muckermann for his hospitality, and after setting down his pack with the rest of them, next to the stairs, took a seat next to B
ergstrom.

  “Did you know about him?” he asked quietly, and Bergstrom said he didn’t.

  “I only knew about Plaut,” he said.

  “Plaut?”

  “You will see,” said Bergstrom mysteriously.

  “You are surprised,” said Muckermann, as though he had overheard, “Doctor Bergstrom?”

  “I did not expect you here, it is true,” said Bergstrom. “I thought you had done with this project.”

  “Well,” said Muckermann, “in that you were wrong.”

  “I did not know you had come,” said Bergstrom.

  “Perhaps Herr Orlok does not tell you everything.” Muckermann took his seat at the head of the table. He lifted one of the pitchers, and poured from it into the goblet set next to his plate, and indicated that the rest of them should also do so. Dominic reached for one nearest him and poured for Lewis, then Kurtzweiller, and then Andrew. When Bergstrom had poured his, Muckermann raised his glass in a toast and Andrew followed, then sipped. It was water.

  “Do you enjoy our wine?” asked Muckermann.

  “It is water,” said Kurtzweiller, and Muckermann shook his head.

  “Were you to have come here without those masks . . . were you to have engaged your faith . . . you would taste the grape. You are faithless, Manfred.” He narrowed his eyes. “As you were when we knew each other. In Berlin, before the War.”

  Andrew looked at Kurtzweiller, who lowered his eyes sheepishly.

  “May as well tell,” said Kurtzweiller. “Herr Muckermann and I are acquainted from our youth. We attended certain meetings.”

  “Certain meetings?”

  “The Germanenorden,” he said. “It was a curiosity in my youth.”

  Andrew nodded. “We’ve all had those,” he said.

  “I did not stay long with them.” Kurtzweiller repeated himself in German.

  “Nor did I,” said Muckermann. “Of course I had my other faith. My Catholicism. But that was not for you, Manfred.”