Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  He didn’t. “Now you’re trapped,” he said, coming around the corner and blocking the entire width of the passage.

  “Boy, you’re really new at this, aren’t you?” I dodged sideways through another wall. I found myself in a room full of corpses.

  The morgue that served Brut Adler was only set up to accommodate up to four cadavers at a time. Current events had forced the staff to stack bodies on the tables and the floor like so much firewood. As I picked my way through the constricted maze of dead flesh, I fancied I could hear vague stirrings from within some of the piles. If I hung around long enough maybe the dead would reanimate like the neighbors back home.

  Considering these guys’ resumes, that was probably the last thing that I wanted.

  There were two doors in this room, one to my left, one straight ahead. I headed for that one as Mengele burst through the wall behind me. His cord was slowing him up a bit; it dragged at him like an ectoplasmic leash made out of garden hose. I pushed through the door without opening it and found myself out in a main corridor.

  This part of the downstairs area looked familiar. If memory served, the stairs leading up were another sixty some yards on down, past where the curve of that corridor placed them beyond my line of sight.

  I took two long strides and then skidded to a stop as Mengele popped out ahead of me. Damn! His learning curve for astral maneuvering was considerably shorter than mine! Worse, he was anticipating my moves!

  “Anywhere you can go, I can follow,” he taunted. “What is more—as my physical body grows stronger and younger, this intangible form seems to grow stronger and faster!”

  In the meantime, my psychic batteries were running down. There were no ectoplasmic jumper cables connecting me to any kind of an external power source. I was cut off from rendezvousing with Wendigo upstairs and, even if they found their way down here in time, there were no guarantees as to what any of them could see or do while we were in our present state.

  A swarm of butterflies came fluttering around the distant curve of the corridor as if responding to my silent question.

  Mengele had his back to them but must have noticed something change in my face—this guy didn’t miss a thing. He turned and took a step back as they flapped and spiraled toward us. Then he shrugged and turned back to me.

  “Insects?” he asked. “You storm my citadel with insects?” He shook his head. “Not that it would have made any real difference but I might have seen the logic in bees or wasps. Maybe spiders . . .”

  “Spiders aren’t insects,” I said.

  “I know spiders are not insects! They are arachnids! I am not stupid!” He swung his arm out to gesture behind him. “Butterflies . . . butterflies are stupid!”

  I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Maybe nothing. But I took a step back anyway. “The Aztecs didn’t think so.”

  “What?”

  “The Aztecs. Native Americans. Inhabited Mexico from the north to the central region, flourished around the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.”

  “Extinct savages!”

  “Funny, I would have expected a little more professional courtesy. Even respect. The Aztecs developed a high culture and civilization while your Hohenstaufens were in political freefall and your Habsburgs were kicking and pulling each other’s hair over the dynastic toy box. The Aztec high holy days made your Triumph of the Will look like Waiting for Godot.”

  Mengele jumped: a butterfly had just fluttered by, grazing his ear.

  “Anyway, the Aztecs—who were self-styled experts on the subject of death, by the way—believed that the Danaus plexippus—that’s the monarch butterflies for the taxonomy challenged”—another flew through his shoulder and he grabbed his upper arm as if stung—“were actually the souls of the dead. More specifically, dead children.”

  The butterflies were starting to swarm him and he began to scream as they darted about, dipping in and out of his translucent form.

  “That’s funny,” I said, though there was nothing remotely funny to be found here, “they’re butterflies. Even if they were bees or wasps or spiders—who aren’t insects but arachnids, by the way—they couldn’t hurt a noncorporeal being. Could they?”

  “They burn! Burn!” he shrieked, swatting at them with his hands. It was worse than ineffective: his hands passed through his orange-winged assailants with no resistance but his palms began to bubble with psychic blisters.

  “So, even though this wasn’t a part of the plan, I’m betting that you’re suffering psychic feedback from the memories of your victims.”

  “What? What?”

  “The plan was to get some help in covering up your swastikas. Didn’t know they’d show up as butterflies. Or that they’d bring the pain. Think of it as a little Vulcan mind meld—a whole lotta little mind melds—with a whole bunch of your victims.”

  “Butterflies!” he screeched, staggering down the hall toward me.

  I backpedaled and the monarchs stayed with him. “Not just butterflies, Joe; spirits of the dead. A lot of spirits of the dead! We didn’t have much time to round up an army who’d be willing to abandon the peace and grace of their eternal rest. Much less get involved with unpleasant earthly matters and distasteful people like yourself. Under the circumstances, there was just one place to go: Oswiecim.”

  “Oswiecim?”

  “Well, more properly the fields of Brzezinka, Birkenau, the largest cemetery in the world. Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war—their ashes form a very deep substrate of the soil, there—as you should well know. Your Nazi masters thought to rewrite history and, failing that, to burn and bury the evidence. Well, you know the old saying: ‘Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?’ Well, God sorts, Herr Doktor! Sooner or later He gets around to it. No task is left undone on the eternal time clock. All rivers run to the sea. Every dog has his day. All birds come home to roost. The same goes for butterflies.”

  He staggered about like a man on fire, the orange wings wreathing his wispy form in a semblance of mock flame. “It hurts!” he gasped. “Hurts so bad!”

  “I can’t begin to imagine,” I said. “But then, I wasn’t there. You were, though. I’ll bet a trip down memory lane through the mind of one of your victims is as painful as if it actually happened to you. So, I’ll bet a dozen trips are unendurable. Or are they? What about a hundred? A thousand?”

  With a shriek of mindless agony, he lunged toward me. I stepped back and passed through a wall into another room. A familiar room. I kept moving. Past the stainless steel tables, past the shelves along the walls with their profusion of bottles, containers, and cases. Past the cabinets. Past the countertops with instruments and tools. Past the sinks. I stopped by the display case as Mengele came through the wall after me.

  The butterflies did not come with him. Their physical bodies were stopped by the physical wall that was no barrier to our ectoplasmic flesh.

  It took him a few moments to shake off the effects of the assaults on his mind and memory. Slowly, however, he seemed to gather himself while I wondered if I was smart to be staying and not running. I couldn’t run forever so it made sense to make a stand wherever I might find allies. I just hoped my instincts were trustworthy in this case.

  “So much for your butterfly brigade,” he panted, drawing himself back up to stand erect.

  I shook my head. “You think that’s it? You can cheat fate with a flimsy wall, a closed door?”

  He smiled and gave a ghost of a shrug. “I’m in here. They’re out there.”

  “’Death is here and Death is there, Death is busy everywhere,’” I mocked, “’All around, within, beneath, Above is Death—’”

  “’—and we are Death!’ Do you think to frighten me by quoting Shelley?”

  I shook my head. “You can’t stay in here forever.”

  “I don’t intend to. After I deal with you—” He paused and cocked his head. “What was that?”

  I knew what it was—or had a pretty good idea—b
ecause I had been in this room before. Perhaps he had, too, but not without the protective insulation of flesh and blood and skin and bone.

  There was a vague suggestion of haze in the air, like the taint of a recently extinguished cigarette. As the sound of weeping became more audible, the air thickened and took on a blue tinge. Light began to spill forth from the display case where the treble rows of craniums stared down in ghastly judgment. As the light grew in intensity, the illumination from the skulls shaded more toward green than blue, however.

  “The dead down here aren’t the same as the dead out there, I’m betting.”

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded, his voice rising to overmatch the increasing volume of the chorus erupting around us. The wails that had sounded like frightened children on my last visit now sounded angry.

  “I’m talking about spirits that have had their resting places consecrated and blessed,” I said. “Who have had the prayers of millions to tuck them into their long eternity. Who are visited daily by mourners and well-wishers from around the world and new generations with each passing year, assuring them that they are remembered and will never be forgotten.

  “But here . . .” My arm swept the autopsy tables and instrument trays with their ghastly collections of flensing knives, bone saws, and tools whose jaws, blades, and teeth were starting to glow with an emerald radiance that hurt my transdimensional vision. “ . . . what peace can come to those who perished in pain and horror and, most terribly, anonymity? To be forgotten? To lurk through eternal darkness, forever alone and unknown? No one prays for your soul. No one acknowledges that you lived or that your life had value. Your dust and ashes forever sealed in iron and stone, unable to return to the soil, unable to be reborn in the blades of grass or a flower, to feel the cool baptism of rain or follow the smiling warmth of the sun.”

  “Bah! Dead is dead!”

  “And yet, here we stand, all ghostly, while you cower and cringe from a bunch of butterflies out in the hallway.”

  He lunged at me and screamed. That scream was echoed a hundredfold and sickly green light burst from the cabinet with such intensity that I was momentarily blinded. I heard the crystalline cacophony of shattered glass and suddenly the chorus of screaming doubled and trebled in volume. I was knocked back and vaguely felt the shadow of another wall pass through me. About the time I realized I was in the furnace room, Mengele was through the door and pressing his astral hands to my own silvery throat. We stumbled backwards and, had we been solid, we would have slammed up against the iron behemoth that served double duty in providing heat for a portion of Brut Adler and disposal for unwanted biological material.

  Instead we kept going and found ourselves struggling waist-deep in flames!

  Knowing where we were probably gave me a slight psychological advantage: I pried his fingers away from my neck and grinned in his uncertain face. “Welcome to Hell, Doctor! Don’t worry about your luggage; you’re on express check-in.”

  He stepped back and looked around like a frightened child. But the effect didn’t last for long. How could it? The flames didn’t burn us. The iron walls of the great furnace were well illuminated from the inside, showing every weld, every rivet, the venting high above.

  He laughed. Bent over and tried to scoop an armful of flames into his embrace. “Do you see, Cséjthe? Do you see why the Master Race has discarded the childish fairytales of Heaven and Hell? There is no God! Only gods among men! The gods who have learned to evolve beyond the petty cattle morals of lesser societies!” The flames dropped in intensity. Instead of licking at our waists they barely reached our knees, now. “Poor Cséjthe, trusting in a higher power that isn’t there or doesn’t care. Do you know what Marx said?”

  “Say the secret word and win a hundred Reichmarks?”

  “That men are the apes of a cold God,” he snarled as I watched a swirl of ashes rise up from the grating behind his feet. “So many of the unwashed masses are no more than beasts. You, at least, come close to thinking like a man. But you are still an animal. You and all the other apes who think they are men and will always be disappointed that, when your God finally does appear, he is someone like me!”

  The swirl of ashes had risen above our heads forming a gray canopy that thickened and opened like a swaying, hooded cobra.

  “Yeah?” I took two steps back and leaned against the inner wall of the furnace but willed myself to remain inside. “Well, welcome to the Monkey House!”

  The flames had died all the way down to our ankles but now their color Doppler-shifted from orange to green as if someone had set fire to a huge spool of copper wire beneath our feet. The flames began to rise, again.

  “Ah!” Mengele looked down in shock and surprise. “What?”

  Tongues of teal licked up his legs, reaching his thighs, and he began to shriek again. He ran for the nearest wall. A thick coating of ash slid up to form an inner coat of gray. He rebounded instead of ghosting through and fell down into the fire. He reappeared almost immediately but his silvery visage was marred with gray and black weals as if his ectoplasmic form was physically burned by the green flames.

  “Cséjthe! Help me!” he cried, stretching an arm wreathed in greenish gasses toward me.

  “You really must be mad,” I said.

  He began to scream and curse, then. But not for long. The ashy canopy that had unfolded gray-and-black wings above and over us now swooped down and narrowed like the fine grains of sand falling through an hourglass. Pinching into a tight stream, they spun a seething cable the color of filthy silk and poured into Mengele’s open mouth, choking off his profanities. The weight of the ashes forced him back down into the heart of the conflagration.

  I am no voyeur when it comes to suffering and death but part of me wanted to stay and watch.

  The flames had no effect on me and I remained untouched by a single flake of ash or soot. I knew in my heart of hearts that there was no escape for Mengele this time: he was in the hands of a jury, a jury of very special Threshers who would not release him until every little scrap was shredded, consumed, and obliterated so that his like might never again walk the earth in this form or any other. I could leave and trust them to take this particular threat from this world and, quite possibly, from the next.

  Still, it only seemed right that someone bear witness.

  That the monster who had done so many terrible things in secret, have someone who could return from these dark, anonymous rooms and testify to his final disposition. Not for his sake but for all of the victims that the world would never know about.

  It would have been fitting.

  Perhaps I would have risked my own flesh to spend the extra moments. I dared not risk Deirdre, however. I flew from the Hellish judgment in that great iron furnace and rushed back toward the outer corridor and the stairs leading upwards.

  * * *

  It was over before I got there.

  Wendigo had already freed my physical body from the restraints so she had to hold me back once I’d slid back in and got all systems back up and running.

  “They are all dead,” she told me as the slender Indian maiden helped the guy in the hospital gown totter down the hallway. “We made sure there were no survivors. No one will carry any part of the nightmare forth from this place.”

  “There were women and children—”

  “Everything dies here!” she insisted, her sweet face morphing into skeletal planes and hollows for the briefest of moments. “The dream of this madman will be forgotten! The Ohdow who know the ways of the earth and stone say it is but a small matter to cause the mountain to fall in upon itself. We will bury the evil here and it shall remain hidden from the Race of Man as long as the Spirit Guardians may endure.”

  “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Shelley’s Ozymandias. ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’” I bow
ed my head. “What about Deirdre?”

  “I am sorry, Cséjthe. I am taking you to where they kept her body but I must warn you that we were too late. It is not a pretty sight . . .”

  It felt, in that moment, as though the Ohdow had begun their work prematurely: the world seemed to cave in. I stumbled after her, legs numb, mind numb, heart numb, unable to speak until we reached the bloody operating theater where Theresa Kellerman had hoped to replace Deirdre’s head with her own.

  The Wendigo had a vast capacity for understatement.

  The rescue had come too late.

  And it wasn’t pretty at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I wanted to sleep for a week. I didn’t even get a full day.

  The sun was up when Wendigo leapt from the shattered top of Mount Adler so I was wrapped in blankets and carried, papoose fashion, for the return trip to New York. She was loaded down with twice the weight she’d flown out with but I managed to convince her to bring along one large, metal suitcase. If there was Nazi gold stashed in a vault somewhere I hadn’t seen it but what was in the valise was far more precious than Rhineland gold or Argentine diamonds or anything convertible to legal tender.

  Needless to say, the suffocating but frail shielding of bedclothes and the buffeting of high-altitude flight without the amenities of a pressurized cabin or adjustable seat, made the several hours’ journey somewhere between uncomfortable and harrowing. Fortunately I was exhausted, in mind if not in body, and I spent half the journey drowsing between a series of restless catnaps, clutching the metal valise to my chest. The only REM state I achieved, however, was with my eyes wide open.

  We arrived a few hours before sunset and I roused enough to help Wendy smuggle our additional baggage past the security checkpoints and down into the heart of the Gotham demesne under Central Park.

  Getting into my quarters might have been a little tricky as I didn’t have my key with me but Wendy went all windwalker and zipped through the keyhole like an errant breeze. A moment later she was opening the door from the other side and I staggered across the threshold with my terrible burden. I looked for Suki but the guest bedrooms were empty. Only after I gave up and staggered into my own quarters did I find her curled up in my own bed and wrapped around my king-sized pillow in a pose that was most unvampiric.