Volk

by David Nickle

  “That is in the innermost circle of fencing,” said Deutsch as they looked at it.

  “Where we are?”

  Deutsch shook his head. “Two fences separate this part of the bunker from that place. The German researchers imagined that might be sufficient.”

  There was a lengthy account of the day that photo was taken, when the first of the Hitler-Jugend were introduced to the mature Juke in its enclosure. It was messily typewritten by someone clearly not used to operating a typewriter, in English. It went into great detail, including medical profiles of each of the youth: fifteen boys, twelve girls, ages ranged between fourteen and nineteen. All the picture of health and fitness.

  Andrew read it through.

  He read other things, in German, and in French . . . dissection reports, transcripts from the stack of Dictaphone cylinders that were stacked in a corner. Inventories. There was another section, devoted to the mystery of Orlok. This was entirely in German, and much of it contained in those cylinders. Andrew did ask about playing those, but Deutsch suggested that there might be something else that Andrew might be more interested in seeing first.

  Andrew’s leg ached as he got up from his long time seated at the table, but not enough to bother him. He followed Deutsch out of the archive, down another corridor, and another staircase, through a room that had been set up as a bunkroom. Three men were there, including among them the little one who’d been studying in the archives. He was lying on a lower bunk, reading a paper-bound book by the light of a kerosene lamp that hung from the bedframe. He noted Andrew’s passing with a wave.

  They continued through the room and down a flight of metal stairs, also lit by kerosene lamps, and through a room where generators chugged and the smell of engine oil hung . . . and then, through a wide set of steel doors, which opened into another room, cement-floored. It was long and narrow, with a high ceiling. One wall was a row of glass windows. Light flickered through these windows, illuminating the four men who sat at benches pressed up against the wall. Two were taking notes—a third, speaking softly into a small microphone, wired to a Dictaphone recorder.

  “Have a look,” said Deutsch, and motioned to one of the windows, and the chair in front of it.

  Andrew approached, and sat as Deutsch moved the chair for him. Andrew leaned forward, and peered through the glass. He blinked and rubbed his eyes and looked again.

  “Bonjour, Docteur Waggoner,” she said, and he said, “Bonjour, Madame Pierrepoint.” And behind the glass, she reached into her handbag, and produced a cigarette and a lighter.

  “You are the Juke,” said Andrew, and Madame Pierrepoint looked to one side, and looked back with a wan smile, and she nodded, because of course she was the Juke. The surviving Juke, that Deutsch and his people were cultivating, and hiding, somehow, from Orlok and his flock. He leaned back and spoke to Deutsch.

  “What do you see,” he said, “when you’re looking through that glass?”

  Deutsch asked him what he meant.

  “Describe the specimen,” he said.

  “Ah. Very well. It is bipedal, roughly one hundred and twenty centimetres when standing. It has hair, all over its body, very thin and light—like the hair on the skull of an infant human. Its head, however, resembles to me more that of an elderly man . . . Its eyes are black. All pupil it appears, although dissection reports indicate that . . .”

  “I read the report,” said Andrew. “This is a Stage Two Juke.”

  “Indeed it is. But that is not what you are seeing, is it?”

  “It’s not,” said Andrew.

  “Fascinating.”

  “It’s a woman. I know her.”

  “Ah ha. A mistress?”

  “A patient. Lucille Pierrepoint.” Andrew described Madame Pierrepoint’s ailment, and the surgery and its complications. Deutsch gathered another chair and sat down beside Andrew.

  “A mistress . . . a patient that you nearly lost . . . that you may indeed have lost, for you left her side and cannot say . . . Either way, the feelings conjured by the memory might be very similar. Guilt. Remorse. Fear. All, aligned to the imperatives of the parasite.”

  “I am not a parasite.”

  Madame Pierrepoint drew deep from her cigarette and crossed one leg over the other. She was seated on a wooden stool, high enough that her feet could not touch the ground, so her heel was hitched over the brace. She exhaled a halo of smoke and continued.

  “That is a fundamental error you have made throughout your life in my company. I forgive you. But you are wrong, Andrew. I showed you Paris. I elevated your soul. I made you good. That is not what a parasite does.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s speaking,” said Andrew. “She’s speaking.”

  “And what is she saying?”

  Andrew looked at Deutsch. He was leaning forward, nearer the glass than Andrew, and sweat was beading on his brow.

  Andrew considered an instant, then looked back at Madame Pierrepoint.

  “I have taken nothing from you,” she said. “I have only ever given.”

  “It’s not clear,” said Andrew. “I don’t know what she’s saying. I need to listen.” He drew a breath.

  “I need to go inside,” he said.

  Madame Pierrepoint waited while Deutsch brought the protective suit for Andrew. It was a sort of gas mask, but with a specific filter that was big enough to require a small suitcase, and it was attached to an oilcloth set of coveralls that fastened to boots and gloves made of rubber. He and two others assisted Andrew in dressing, while a fourth researcher—a small dark-eyed woman who introduced herself as Olga—donned her own suit.

  “I need to go in alone,” Andrew protested. Deutsch didn’t like it. But finally, he agreed, on the condition that Olga would wait near the door and go inside at the first sign of trouble. And so Olga accompanied Andrew through another door that opened outdoors, on a small wooded gully, shaded by the western mountains and a stand of pine trees against the late afternoon sun. Olga pointed down slope, to a bunker wall and a doorway, next to the brook that fed into the wall through a steel grate, and when they stepped down to it, she produced a key and unlocked the door. Andrew stepped through. He tried to close the door behind him, but Olga shook her masked head. There was no discussion on this.

  Andrew turned from her and moved deeper into the huge chamber.

  It was vast—larger in volume than Andrew could apprehend, because lights were all trained on a single spot: a platform reached by gangways, near the glass through which he had just observed the Juke. The platform, he could tell, was really more of a pier; beyond it was a pool of water, fed by that brook.

  Madame Pierrepoint stood on that platform, still smoking but having abandoned the stool. She waved at Andrew, and beckoned him closer.

  “I don’t think that’s right, when you say you took nothing from me,” said Andrew.

  “Ah, you have been thinking about it.”

  Andrew raised his bad arm. “This has never healed.”

  “And that injury ruined you for surgery. Evermore.” She nodded, then abruptly shook her head. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “You inspired the men who did it.”

  “Only in igniting their bestial nature. I frightened them.” She looked at him. “I did not frighten you.”

  “You terrified me,” said Andrew.

  “Not enough that you went off to hang someone.” She reached into her handbag and removed a cigarette case. She opened it and offered one to Andrew.

  “It wasn’t you who terrified me,” said Andrew. “The Juke that did that is dead. And as far as I can tell, it could not speak. Any more than you can.”

  “Have a cigarette,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s bad for my wind.”

  “You would know.” She took a cigarette for herself, and lit it from the tip of the one she was nearly finished. “If I cannot speak, then why are you answering?”

  “I am hearing a voice.”

&nbs
p; “And you believe that the voice is not mine. Perhaps your own? An aural hallucination. Madness?” Madame Pierrepoint’s face vanished behind a haze of exhaled smoke, and when it cleared it was the face of another. Elongate. An ancient, black-eyed thing that bent above a spindled caricature of human form.

  “I elevated you,” said the Juke, in perfect English. “And so you have remained.” Its mouth widened, into an encompassing grin.

  “Elevated. Oracular.”

  Andrew started to speak, but the creature waved a sinuous appendage and interrupted.

  “It is not a lie. You saw Heaven in me, the golden city . . . the Dauphin . . . and it has never left you. You could not drive it away. Pain. Narcotic. A splash of cold river water, or that . . . bestial injury that you coddle.”

  “That’s how I remain myself,” said Andrew.

  “Yourself.” The Juke bent forward, its neck seeming to extend, as though it were engorging. “What would you have done, with only yourself?”

  Andrew didn’t answer, and the Juke set two arm-like appendages on the platform, so it hunkered on all fours. Now its face shifted, and it appeared as Molinare . . . as Dominic . . . as Jason Thistledown . . .

  And finally, as Doctor Hermann Muckermann.

  “You pursued the higher path, all your life past the day that we met. Even when those around you failed . . . and fell toward the bestial. Jason. Ruth. Even Annie.”

  “Annie didn’t fail.”

  The Juke swept nearer Andrew, so near its wide black eyes filled his vision.

  “Even Annie,” it said, as it embraced him, “but not you, Andrew. You have asked the question, whether you know it or not.”

  “The question?”

  “This: What would God want of you?” it said, as its eyes became as a pit—a familiar and alluring darkness.

  “Whether God is me or your own private dream,” it said, as Andrew began his tumbling ascent into it, “might the answer not be the same?”

  Nine

  The chateau had twelve bedrooms: eight on the second floor, another four on the top floor. Dominic Villart was in one of the four, with Hermann Muckermann, who was, he suspected, dying. Dominic thought he himself might be also, but if he was he would be dying more slowly; he had pulled one of the gas masks from the trunk over his head and fastened it properly before the horrors started. His throat burned and his eyes stung and that was that. Muckermann had resorted to a handkerchief over his mouth, and was coughing and weeping and choking before Dominic found him in the ballroom. Dominic took hold of him and moved him up the stairs, to this bedroom that faced away from the hillside . . . where he hoped the air might be clearer. It was a hard climb. Twice, Muckermann fell to his knees, and one of those times he retched bile down his shirt. But finally he was able to stumble to the bedroom, and fasten the door shut. He coughed and spat, and gasped on the bed where he lay. When he could speak, he demanded that Dominic give him his mask.

  Dominic refused.

  “If I remove this, I may soon be as badly off as you,” he said. “And you are not strong enough to breathe through this filter. See, you can barely draw a breath. This old mask would suffocate you.”

  Muckermann glared at Dominic. “I can’t even see if you are joking behind those goggles,” he said.

  “I am not joking,” said Dominic and then repeated himself, because it was also hard for Muckermann to hear him through the filters. In some ways, the old Jesuit reminded Dominic of Giorgio Molinare. Not as a lover; his two encounters with Muckermann since arriving were very different from Giorgio, who had been a decade older at least and had used that time to learn a certain languid generosity that Muckermann definitively lacked.

  But they both carried with them an alluring air of wisdom, and they both presented, at least in Dominic’s presence, a kind of hunger . . . a neediness of flesh and spirit. Perhaps that was what had persuaded Dominic to respond to Muckermann’s advances. He was a poor lover and if they spent much more time together, would likely develop to be a bad friend.

  But of course they would not spend much more time. They would not make love again, and their friendship now was as good and as bad as it would ever become.

  Muckermann fell into a coughing fit, raised his arm to Dominic as though he wanted to say something, then fell to coughing again. Dominic lifted his feet from the floor and lay him down in the bed, and hushed him. When he continued to cough, Dominic thought about leaving him. The attackers would soon be entering the chateau, if they hadn’t already. Wheezing old Muckermann would give Dominic away to anyone who stumbled by, whether they were looking for him or not.

  He didn’t want to turn his back on him though. Two days before, he’d let Andrew Waggoner out of his sight—they all had—and he’d vanished more thoroughly than even Ozzie Hayward and Le Noir Qui Danse had from Stuttgart . . . to the tune of the same song, as Dominic thought of it. Dominic had lost himself there too . . . but only himself, climbing the stairs with Muckermann that first moment.

  So Dominic stayed, and Muckermann’s coughing did give up their hiding spot. Dominic had locked the door with the skeleton key that hung by the wardrobe, and that bought him a moment as the handle rattled—enough time to pick up a chair from the other corner, hold it in front of him as the doorframe shook with one impact, and then another, and then cracked open.

  “Herr Orlok!” exclaimed Muckermann.

  Orlok stepped through the door. He had taken gas too, but the evidence of it was more difficult to discern. His lids were swollen, and he snuffled loudly, and his shoulders were bent, and he steadied himself on the doorframe as he came in. But he walked, and moved quickly enough when he did. He was entirely in possession, it seemed, of himself.

  “Herr Muckermann,” said Orlok, stepping past Dominic to the bedside. “Your friends have betrayed you.”

  “What friends?”

  “Herr Goebbels. Herr Hitler. Their Nazis. They have come for us, and left you alone to die a weakling, an old man.” Orlok laughed, and then coughed. “After everything you have done for them. They poison us like we are vermin. You also.”

  Now Muckermann coughed. But not just once—again and again and again, so hard that he shook the bedframe. He tried to catch the sputum with a fold of the sheet, and his eyes shut tight, and it seemed to Dominic that he was also sobbing.

  Orlok looked to the door, which hung half open onto the hall, and then out the window, which showed a view of the valley. And he seemed to make up his mind. He took Muckermann’s head by the ears, and twisted it quickly, as though it might snap. Muckermann whimpered, and reached forward to grasp at Orlok’s shirt—push him away. Orlok coughed, and that turned into a low growl, and he tried to twist again, and at that, Dominic understood what Orlok was attempting. He lifted the chair and swung it at Orlok’s back. It hit hard in the middle. Orlok half-turned and let go of Muckermann’s head, and seemed to see Dominic for the first time. He grabbed the leg of the chair and twisted it from Dominic’s grip. He flung it to one side, and pointed.

  “Give me that mask.”

  Dominic made for the door, but the chair was in the way, and Orlok was quick enough. One arm snaked under his arm and took hold of the opposite shoulder, and Dominic’s feet left the floor as Orlok lifted him from behind. With his free hand, Orlok grabbed the mask by the filter and tried to yank it off. But it was well fastened, and Dominic felt his own neck twisting as the straps tightened.

  Orlok saw it wouldn’t work, so flung Dominic to the floor and knelt over him.

  “Take the mask off. Give it to me.”

  Dominic obeyed this time, not just from the order . . . but survival. Orlok had driven the wind from him, and the filter on the mask wouldn’t let him breathe . . . He felt as though he were drowning, and gasped when the mask came away. Orlok snatched it for himself, and drew it over his own head as he stood. He kicked Dominic once more in the ribs then turned back to Muckermann.

  “Bitte,” said Muckermann, and as he pulled a pillow from behind Mucke
rmann’s head, Orlok answered: “Nein.”

  At length, Dominic stood. This time, he did not lift the chair, but stepped quietly around it. He looked back at the bed—Orlok’s immense form blocking out any view of Muckermann, but his feet, which twitched feebly—then turned, and stepped into the empty hallway. He sniffed, seeing if he might find any hint of the gas that had filled the lower floors. If there was any, it was thin this high. Or it might have simply been overpowered, by that other perfume.

  One way or another, Dominic decided, he would have to get to higher ground now that Orlok had robbed him of his mask. Somewhere on this floor, he knew, there was a stair to a turret tower. And so it was that Dominic Villart turned his back on Hermann Muckermann, and set about saving himself by finding it.

  The thump-thumping of the Nazi phosgene gas bombardment slowed and then stopped. Jason thought at first they might just have run out—or maybe figured that enough was enough. But it wasn’t just that. The Volk had found them. It was hard to see that . . . you had to know how to look a certain way to see Orlok’s people, and even then, they were easy to miss. The S.A. squads missed most of them as they emerged from trees or simply clambered up the rock face. The one in good view of the tower were simply overwhelmed—as a nude boy, his flesh livid with the effects of the gas, threw the launcher down the slope along with its operator. While the other two occupied themselves with him, two others, who one might have mistaken for birds, came from above. One took a rifle that had been set aside, chambered a round, and shot one of the S.A. men in the neck. Jason did not see what happened to the third squad member, but when he looked, the man was slumped on the rock, his mask torn away, and the Volk were gone again.