‘Bugger,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re so bloody close, I can touch it.’
Sarah shrugged. ‘Nobody said this was going to be easy.’ With a last glance at the tracing she returned to the journal. She’d been reading for fifteen minutes while Jamie continued to stare in frustration at the drawing when she suddenly stiffened.
‘Idiot.’
Jamie turned to her. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not your fault.’
‘I mean you. Why didn’t you show me this damned book earlier? Walter Brohm may have been a great scientist, but he was a lousy poet. Listen to this: Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’
‘You’re right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s rotten.’
‘You are an idiot. Where Goethe met his demon. Don’t you know who Goethe is?’
‘Some kind of German writer, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’ Her voice was dangerously patient as she handed him the journal. ‘He also wrote a version of the Faust legend. Remember Faust? In Faust’s footsteps?’
Jamie winced. ‘You’re right, I’m an idiot. But what does the rest of it mean? Witches and water and beyond a veil. It’s just gibberish.’
‘One step at a time, lover boy. First we need to find where Goethe met his demon.’ She began a search on the laptop, while Jamie retrieved the Tragicall History from his rucksack.
‘According to Marlowe, Faustus met the devil’s representative in a place called Wittenberg, which . . .’ he exchanged the book for the road atlas they’d used to cross-check the escape map ‘. . . is here, about a hundred miles to the north-west. We could be there in about three hours.’
‘Uhuh, but we’d probably be going in the wrong direction. Remember, this isn’t about Faustus, it’s about Goethe. Goethe based his Faust on Marlowe’s play. His demon is the same Mephistopholes who visited Faustus in the original and gave him twenty-four years of access to absolute power in exchange for his soul. But if I remember rightly the two stories are very different. Marlowe’s Faustus began by wanting to do good, but Mephistopholes ensured he wasted his opportunity. Goethe’s is a much deeper and more complex tale. They only have one thing in common. Nothing good can come of doing deals with the devil.’
‘I’ll remember that. OK, it’s interesting, but where does it take us?’
‘Precisely nowhere,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t find anything about Goethe meeting up with Mephistopholes. What we need is a really good biography. I doubt if the hotel will have one.’
‘No, but there’ll be a library in town . . . I think one of us should stay here and keep checking online, while the other finds the book.’
‘I’m the one who graduated summa cum laude. I’ll take the library,’ she said grandly. ‘You can stay here with the laptop, but no peeping at my Facebook page.’
He opened his mouth to say something, but she put a finger to his lips. ‘I know. I’ll take care.’
* * *
It was three hours before she reappeared. ‘Remind me never, ever to volunteer again. When I got there, this greasy librarian looked down his nose at a pesky foreigner speaking lousy German, but after I asked him for books about Goethe he couldn’t get enough of me. I’d get started on one, then he’d come along with another. Have you seen the size of German biographies? I could have built a cabin. He started talking and boy that guy could talk. Goethe and politics, Goethe and philosophy, Goethe and religion. When he got to Goethe and sex, I was outa there.’
Jamie waited patiently, familiar enough with her now to know she was toying with him. ‘But?’
She grinned. ‘But I got it. Walter Brohm was a little cavalier with the facts. Goethe never actually met Mephistopholes, but he decided to write Faust after a scary encounter in the mist on a big ol’ hill somewhere in the Harz Mountains.’
‘The Brocken?’
‘Now how did you know that?’
‘Because I found a version of the Faust play on the internet. The Harz Mountains were where Mephistopholes took Faust to see the devil. Listen to this: The witches hie to the Brocken top, yellow the stubble and green the crop.’
‘Avoid the witches’ trail, huh.’
‘I think we should pack.’
She looked at him a certain way and he felt something melt inside.
‘I have another idea.’
XXIX
SEX, WHEN YOU’RE new to each other, can sometimes be awkward. It all gets hot and heavy a little too quickly and unless you’re a proper Casanova, no one’s quite sure what to do precisely when. The result is that you spend so much time wondering if the other party is having a good time that you don’t have a good time yourself. It wasn’t like that at all.
Jamie was astonished at the emotions Sarah stirred in him; a raw carnality he’d never experienced before, allied to a profound tenderness that couldn’t be far short of what he presumed was love. Her lips tasted somewhere between sweet cinnamon and heather honey and her skin was as soft and downy to the touch as his imagination had told him it would be. They had been sharing kisses for a few minutes when she drew in a deep breath, her eyes opened wide and her body gave a long shudder.
‘No,’ she said, loosening her grip on him.
Inwardly Jamie groaned. Christ, what had he done wrong?
‘Not like this. Like this.’ Her fingers flew to the buttons on her black cotton shirt and with remarkable speed they were undone and the shirt thrown aside. As he watched with his heart pounding somewhere in his throat, her hands reached behind her and with a single movement her bra was gone. She stood before him for a second, allowing his eyes to feast on her body and his mouth felt as if it was filled with sand. The clothes she wore had camouflaged the full wonder of her breasts, which were heavy and rounded for such a slim figure, with small dark nipples engorged to the size of ripe blackcurrants. Her eyes were wild and amused and inviting all at the same time. He moved towards her.
‘Wait!’
Now her hands were at her belt, and the button of her black jeans. She bent and slipped them over her hips, sliding one leg down at a time and kicking them off. Her underwear was black and silky and he wondered if she’d been prepared for this to happen and cursed himself for not making it happen sooner. Now she teased him, half turning while she slid them down her long legs so that it wasn’t until she turned back that he had a view of her sex, which was blush and swollen and partially hidden by a thin line of sparse dark down. She stood before him, hands hanging loose, hips thrust forward as if she was offering herself. He found he could barely breathe. Again he moved, tugging at his shirt, but she shook her head and glided across the silk map and the tracing paper, which crinkled beneath her feet with each step. She wrapped herself around him, like a beautiful python coiling itself around its prey, and drew him to the floor on top of her.
‘All in good time,’ she whispered hoarsely.
He was never quite certain what came off when, but it happened after a prolonged period when the eroticism of his fully clothed body against her nakedness drove him almost to the brink of violence. His hands were able to rove at will over her nakedness, while hers teased at his shirt and his jeans, now plucking at a button, now moving a zip half an inch downwards. At one point she moved away from him and he noticed the raw red mark where his belt buckle had forced itself into the taut flesh of her stomach. It was an age before she allowed him to reach down and stroke her, but when he did it was like touching molten fire.
He had his revenge when they finally came together. Now it was he who controlled the rhythm, taking her to the brink, then back again; first slow, then fast, then faster still, inspiring an earthy profanity he wouldn’t have believed could come from that sweet mouth. When they arrived together at that moment of mindless oblivion it seemed entirely natural. Her eyes rolled into her head and her lips clamped on his and she began to buck and heave beneath him until he was driven to an equal, stallioned frenzy and their frantic
cries mingled.
Afterwards, they lay entangled for a few minutes, still touching and stroking, whispering the endearments and compliments that are the expected aftermath of love in the afternoon, before the ludicrousness of lying naked on a hardwood floor when there was an alternative available struck them and they moved to the bed.
The second time was even better.
When Jamie opened his eyes, he could tell by the fading light that it was still only early evening. He turned to find her on one elbow looking down at him, pert breast peeping out from under the bedcover like an interested spectator. She smiled demurely.
‘Now we should pack.’
7 May 1945 It just came across on the radio. The war is OVER. The Germans have agreed to surrender unconditionally. It will not come into effect until tomorrow night but everyone agrees the fighting is finished. Strangely, the mood among the men is sombre. After a moment of celebration everyone went silent, almost crushed by the unreality of it. This has been our life, this constant fear, days and weeks without proper rest, and the tension that eats you from the inside like a cancer. To have fought for so long and seen so many friends die and to have survived? It scarcely seems believable. Despite the fact we’ve known it was coming, our minds are having difficulty accepting that there isn’t another battle to fight or another man to kill. We’ve been living on benzedrine pills and hot tea for two weeks, averaging about two hours’ sleep a night. For the past few days I’ve been able to feel the fractures developing in my brain. Little fault lines cracking through the thin membranes, as if someone has stepped on a sheet of ice. But I can’t give in now. The war may be over, but I still have a mission to complete. Tonight I watched the distant mountains turn smoke blue in the twilight, then fade to pale silver before transforming into insubstantial wraiths which finally vanished entirely, like soldiers marching into cannon smoke. I experienced a strange, dizzying, unnatural sense of lightness and it was only later that I realized what it was. For the first time in five years I can close my eyes without wondering whether I will be alive to open them in the morning. The sun will rise, the mountains will return, the guns will be silent.
XXX
STARTING EARLY NEXT morning, they retraced their route fifty miles due north to Kassel, a sprawling district capital on the Fulda River that owed its startling modernity to the fact that it had been wiped off the map by Allied bombers in 1943. When they arrived in the city centre, the shops were just opening and the streets lay empty apart from a few early-bird office workers and the street cleaners without whom no German dawn is complete. Sarah bought a few basics to replace the clothes and toiletries they’d been forced to leave behind in Paderborn, while Jamie watched her from a distance until he was satisfied she wasn’t being followed. Still, he had an uneasy feeling. Someone like Frederick would undoubtedly have contacts in the Bundespolizei. Their little hired Toyota was as anonymous as any car on the road, but it could only be a matter of time before someone noticed it. Sarah had suggested abandoning the Japanese compact in Fulda, and he’d considered it. But the car would have had to be replaced by something else and if the opposition were looking for it, they’d also be checking the hire firms. On balance, it was better to stay below the radar for as long as they could.
From Kassel the road took them on a long sweeping curve through Gottingen and Gleboldehausen, until about another hour into the journey they could see the Harz Mountains on the horizon.
‘They look kinda pretty,’ Sarah said, when they were about twenty miles from their destination, the spa town of Braunlage. Jamie saw she was right, from a distance and in the golden light of the afternoon sun, the mountains appeared benign and unthreatening, their sharp edges dulled by the spruce, oak and beech that cloaked their flanks. But by now he knew differently.
‘If you imagine a sliding scale of mountain ranges and the Himalayas is ten, then the Harz is probably less than one. The Brocken is the highest peak, but it’s only eleven hundred metres, and the land mass is about equivalent to England’s Lake District. But what these hills lack in scale, they more than make up for in atmosphere. Goethe didn’t set Faust here by accident. This is a land of forest and bog, witches and devils, mist and mystery; a place where anything can happen. Heinrich Heine described the mountains as “so Germanically stoical, so understanding, so tolerant”, but it’s doubtful whether the concentration camp prisoners who were held there until nineteen forty-five or the East Germans who were shot attempting to cross the Iron Curtain death zone that cut through those hills would have agreed.’
‘My, we are poetic today.’ She said it with a smile. ‘Any particular reason for that?’
He grinned at her. Last night, they had proved to their mutual satisfaction that the previous afternoon had been no fluke. He looked back with a mixture of weary delight and awed wonder at what they had created. A coupling of the soul as well as the body, a ferocious contest of will as they attempted to outdo each other in imagination and intensity . . . He forced himself to concentrate on the road.
‘All I was saying was that they may look pretty, but they are actually pretty bloody dangerous. The terrain is what you might call fractured. Craggy gorges and deep, steep-sided lakes. The place is honey-combed with caves and pits. It’s also probably the wettest place in Germany.’
‘You make it sound so welcoming.’
He didn’t reply. After the encounter with Frederick and his fascist friends in Wewelsburg the best he could hope for was no welcome at all. They covered the last twenty miles on winding, narrow roads through a tree-blanketed wilderness. If Walter Brohm had wanted to hide something, then this was the perfect place. Jamie had chosen Braunlage because it was the closest town to the mountain, but he had no idea what would greet them there.
‘It looks like an Alpine ski resort, only without the Alps. I kinda like it. Reminds me of Colorado in the summer.’ Sarah studied her surroundings as they entered the town, a sprawling community that flowed like a red-roofed glacier down the valley. It had a manufactured tourist prettiness that Jamie guessed would be more inviting in the winter. The websites said it was predominantly a ski resort, but also a popular summer destination for hikers.
He spotted a shop where they could purchase walking gear. An ominous mass of dark cloud piling up on the eastern horizon meant two good quality anoraks and decent hiking boots were going to be essential. They’d also be able to buy a large-scale map of the area that he’d compare with the silk drawing. Still, he had a feeling tomorrow was going to be a long, tough day. The only consolation was that he couldn’t spend it in better company.
They booked into a gabled hotel on the main square and kitted themselves out from the outdoors shop at an eye-watering price which reminded Jamie just how badly the pound was doing against the euro. Europe, and Germany in particular, seemed to have weathered the banking crisis much better than Britain. The thought prompted an image of his dwindling bank balance and he reminded himself to check for progress in the sale of his grandfather’s house. Braunlage seemed benign and unthreatening and it would be easy to forget Frederick and his sinister friends had ever existed. But as he sat at a restaurant overlooking the artificial lake in the town centre, Jamie’s eyes never stopped searching for potential threats among the multi-coloured weatherproof jackets.
It wasn’t easy. A tall man on the far side of the square seemed to be staring at them until his face lit up and he walked forward to meet a woman with two young children. Did the danger come from the four hikers who walked with the straight backs and measured stride of the military? Or was it more likely to be from the couple at the next table who seemed to take a little too much interest in what Sarah was ordering? Eventually, he forced himself to relax and concentrated on his food.
When they’d finished their meal they spread the walking map out on the table. Jamie pointed to the approximate centre. ‘Here’s the Brocken. Remind me what the journal said.’
‘Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail, below the water y
ou will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’ As Sarah recited Walter Brohm’s riddle her finger traced a red line that meandered horizontally across the map with the Brocken at its centre. ‘I thought finding the Witches’ Trail would be the most difficult part, but it’s the biggest thing on this map. A whole network of hiking trails through the Harz. Look, there must be sixty miles of it. That’s a lot of ground to cover. Too much.’
‘Maybe we don’t have to cover it. Excuse me.’ He called to a passing waiter, a young man in a white shirt and dark trousers. ‘We were thinking of doing some walking around the Brocken. If we wanted to bypass the Witches’ Trail what would be the best route to take?’
‘That would depend on how far you wanted to go and what you wanted to see, sir.’
Jamie was stumped for an answer, but Sarah cut in. ‘Somewhere scenic with lots of water. A lake or a river.’
The young man laughed. ‘Then that is simple. Here.’ He put his finger on the map at a point west of the mountain and conveniently just north of the town. A thin ribbon of bright blue amongst the green and the grey of the mountains. ‘It’s a popular walk for people who want to branch off the main trail and take in Braunlage. The Oderteich and the Oder gorge. Lake and river.’
Sarah turned to Jamie with a wry grin. ‘Did you pack your swimsuit?’
When they returned to the hotel more than one pair of eyes watched them cross the square.
At ten the next morning they were gazing across the glittering expanse of the Oderteich lake. The guidebook said the dam where they stood had been built three hundred years earlier to create a reservoir for the area’s mining industry. Now it powered a hydro-eletric scheme. The reservoir was close to one mile long and perhaps two hundred paces wide. For once, it was Jamie who chewed his lip. Sarah leaned against the wall, dejection written plain on her face.
The Doomsday Testament Page 17
