Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  Otto smiled. ‘Ach so, Mr Denman. You learn quickly. Because—until it has unequivocally been shown to be true—who could you convince to burn themselves alive but those who know that they are terminally ill?’

  ‘Like Marianna, with her breast cancer?’ asked Lloyd.

  Otto nodded. ‘And your husband, Mrs Kerwin. He was suffering from a brain tumour which would have killed him within six or seven months.’

  ‘So that was why he was so depressed after his medical,’ said Kathleen, shocked.

  ‘Dr Kranz referred him directly to me,’ said Otto. ‘In South California, there is a whole network of doctors of German background who refer their terminal patients directly to me. Because, what choice do these people have? To die a mundane death, having achieved nothing at all? Or to become immortal, and to change the whole course of human history? That is why they agree to burn themselves alive. That is why they agree to become Salamanders.’

  ‘But Celia wasn’t sick,’ Lloyd protested. ‘She never even caught a cold.’

  Otto laughed. ‘They always say, don’t they, that the husband is the last to find out! Or, in your case, the husband-to-be. Your beloved Celia was very sick, Mr Denman. The only thing was that she was desperate that you didn’t find out. You would have insisted that she go for treatment. She would never have had the opportunity to do what she did. Where could she have found petrol and matches, in a clinic? Or at home, under your watchful eye?’

  ‘What was wrong with her?’ asked Lloyd, his mouth as dry as a torn-open kapok mattress.

  Otto turned away for a moment, as if he hadn’t heard, but then he turned back and said, ‘Multiple sclerosis. Gradual wasting, gradual loss of muscular control, inevitable early death.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You killed her!’

  ‘Do you want to see Dr Warburg’s records? I have them all in my files. You’re not a doctor of course, but perhaps you noticed that when you stroked the soles of her feet, her great toe bent upwards, and her toes spread apart? That’s the Babinski sign. In normal people, when you stroke the soles of their feet, the toes bend downwards.’

  Otto couldn’t have said anything more telling. Lloyd could clearly remember stroking her feet one night when they were making love, and noticing the way her toes spread out. ‘How do you do that?’ he had asked her. ‘I can’t do that!’

  She had smiled and kissed him, and said, ‘I hope you never find out.’

  Lloyd was shaken. ‘She had multiple sclerosis? And that was for sure?’

  ‘That was for sure,’ Otto replied. ‘She could never have given you the children you wanted, she could never have been anything else but an invalid wife. Your married life together would have been a tragedy.’

  ‘So she burned herself? She turned herself into one of these—what do you call them—Salamanders?’

  ‘That is correct. That is what she is now. But when we hold our Transformation Ceremony at the summer solstice, she will become flesh, or flesh of a kind. Fire transformed into life. You will have her back, Mr Denman, never fear—and with the threat of illness erased for ever!’

  Lloyd said, ‘All of those people on the bus? Were they sick, too?’

  ‘Every one of them. Some had years to live, some no more than weeks. But they had all decided that the way of the Salamander was the way for them, and they were prepared to suffer the pain of burning in the hope of the life everlasting.

  ‘They had faith, Mr Denman. They were like Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, who defied King Nebuchadnezzar and stepped into the burning fiery furnace. In fact, there is historical evidence that the Babylonians in the sixth century before Christ had a ritual which was very similar to the Salamander ritual.’

  Lloyd asked tautly, ‘Why did Celia burn herself alone, when everybody else was burned together on the bus?’

  ‘Celia was impulsive, Mr Denman. You know how impulsive she was. We were driving her back downtown after our last meeting when she suddenly said, “Now, let’s do it now.”

  ‘I argued with her. I asked her if she was sure. But she insisted. She wanted to do it immediately.’

  ‘And you let her,’ Lloyd said, his voice as dull as a ‘53 nickel.

  Otto’s hand was spread flat on the table. His fingernails were ridged and chalky. ‘I had no choice, Mr Denman. It takes so much for a person to build up the confidence to set fire to themselves. How do you express it? They have to be “on a high”. At that moment, driving along Rosecrans Avenue, Celia reached that peak. She had to burn herself then and there, or else she may never have done it. We stopped at the petrol station and bought a jerrycan and five gallons of petrol, and the rest you know.’

  Lloyd didn’t know what to say. Celia had summoned up the courage to burn, Celia had summoned up the courage to change her life, Celia had summoned up the courage to become immortal. But she hadn’t confided in him, her husband-to-be. Hadn’t said a word. He didn’t know who had failed whom. Maybe he had failed Celia, because he hadn’t recognized that she was sick. Maybe Celia had failed him, because she hadn’t trusted him to help her.

  He could have nursed her, he could have taken care of her. But maybe she hadn’t wanted nursing. Maybe she hadn’t wanted him to take care of her. Maybe she had wanted what she had always wanted. Independence, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, no matter what.

  Helmwige came into the room, bearing a huge cut-glass bowl filled with aggressively pink trifle.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ Otto told her. ‘We can have that later. Let me show Mr Denman the Salamanders who are awaiting the solstice with the same impatience that he is.’

  ‘Your pride will be the death of you one day,’ Helmwige replied.

  ‘And your insolence will see you burn!’ Otto rapped back.

  Helmwige bared her teeth at him. ‘Remember which one of us is immortal, Otto. I shan’t be laying any flowers on your grave.’

  Otto pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he told Lloyd and Kathleen, and led the way out of the dining-room. They hesitated for a moment, glancing at Helmwige, but Helmwige was already spooning a vast triangular cliff of bright pink trifle on to her plate, and she didn’t seem to be interested in what they were doing at all.

  They walked through the kitchen and out to the back of the house. The sun had just set, and the sky was the colour of pasqueflowers, high and clear. Kathleen suddenly reached out for Lloyd’s hand. Slim fingers, soft warm skin. Lloyd felt something that he hadn’t felt for years, not even with Celia. A sense of being responsible. A sense that a woman was depending on him to make things work out right. In high school, he had once dated a thin grey-eyed girl called Jane who had made him feel like that. Jane had probably married a real-estate agent or one of those used-car salesmen who scream at you on television.

  Otto unlocked the back door of the garage, pushed it open, and switched on the overhead light. ‘Go ahead! Look! Hier schlaft die Zukunft!’

  Lloyd peered inside. The huge garage had been built with whitewashed cinder block walls, and a low whitewashed ceiling. In the far corner stood a solid and well-used workbench, with rows of drillbits and wrenches, a professional vice, and a car battery-charger. But there were no cars here, not one. Every available inch of floor-space was taken up by grey-faced bodies, lying down, dead or sleeping. Every one of them wore impenetrably dark sunglasses, and every one of them had a heavy grey blanket drawn up to the neck. It looked like a morgue for dead sun-worshippers, rather than a sanctum for people who were desperate enough to want to live for ever.

  There was a heated smell in the air, like a communal sauna, or singeing wool, and the temperature was way up above normal. Lloyd noticed a small thermostat on the wall which was registering into the red.

  ‘Salamanders,’ Otto announced. ‘Smoke and soul, combined. Eighty of them, so far.’

  Kathleen, in a voice as pale and as transparent as a glass of wat
er, said, ‘Oh, God, Lloyd. That’s him. That’s Michael. That one there, close to the wall. That’s Michael, I swear it. Oh, God.’

  She started forward, but Otto held her arm and restrained her. ‘Believe me, Mrs Kerwin, you will be doing yourself no favours if you wake him up. At the moment, he is not the man you knew. Only when he has undergone the Transformation will you recognize him again, and then you can keep him for ever.’

  ‘Can’t I even talk to him? Let him know that I’m here?’

  Otto gave her the tiniest dismissive shake of his head. ‘He is too volatile. He could be quite calm, when he sees you. But on the other hand, he could explode. He might feel resentful. He might feel angry. You never know. But the point is that he could burn you. He could burn everybody around him, too. I can’t risk a fire in this garage, not with all of the Salamanders here. Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it, Mr Denman? There’s Celia, too, can you see her? There, by the door.’

  Kathleen twisted her arm free of his fingers. ‘I want to look at him, that’s all. He’s my husband.’

  ‘Very well,’ Otto agreed. ‘But if you disturb him, and wake him, then do not blame me for what happens. I have worked too many years for this to allow some hysterical hausfrau to destroy it.’

  Kathleen stepped carefully between the grey-blanketed bodies until she reached the far side of the garage. She stood over the wrapped-up body of a white-faced man, her hand clasped over her mouth, her eyes glistening with tears.

  ‘She has no need to cry,’ Otto told Lloyd. ‘Michael will live for ever, long after she has gone. It is he who should be crying for her.’

  Lloyd couldn’t keep his eyes off Celia. She looked so grey. She looked so waxy. She looked so dead.

  ‘When they’re transformed . . .’ he asked Otto. ‘What kind of life are they going to be able to lead?’

  ‘Very different, in some way. Very ordinary, in others.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, Mr Denman, that what you are looking at here is the beginning of the master race. These people, and many like them, will recreate that ideal world which we tried to establish during the war, but failed. They are all people of pure blood, of great talent, and of high intelligence.

  ‘When they are transformed, they will able to do anything they please, because simply by touch they will be able to generate enormous natural power. If they are angered, they will be able to burn anything they please, and anyone they please. They will be invulnerable.’

  ‘So Celia could set fire to me, if I annoyed her?’

  Otto laughed. ‘She could burn you to a cinder, my friend! But we don’t want her to do that. We want you to be married, and to have children together.’

  ‘She’ll be able to have children?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Otto nodded. ‘She certainly will. In fact, we encourage it. The future belongs to the young ones, yes? The special children . . . half-human, half-fire.’

  Kathleen came back across the garage. Her face was very pale.

  ‘You, too, Mrs Kerwin,’ smiled Otto. ‘All the children you wish!’

  Seventeen

  ‘By the end of nineteen forty-three I was quite sure that I had found what I was looking for,’ Otto told them, as they sat in the living-room with Asbach brandy and cigars. The air was thick with blue flat-smelling smoke. The room was growing cold. With theatrical inappropriateness, Otto was trying to play the genial host, sitting in his huge 1930s’ armchair with his leg swinging, smoking and drinking relentlessly and telling them all about the heyday of the National Socialist party. ‘What times we had in Berlin! Unter den Linden, at night, in nineteen thirty-six! We shall never see times like that again!’

  Kathleen was exhausted, and sat with her head bowed, saying nothing. Lloyd was tired, too, but he wanted to hear Otto out. He sipped his brandy to keep himself awake, and he glanced from time to time at Helmwige, who was so bored with what Otto was saying that she was finishing the crossword in the San Diego Tribune, sniffing and talking to herself.

  Otto said, ‘I had heard of an ancient ritual chant which could change a burning human into a Salamander, but although I searched through thousands of books, I could not find it! At Ohrdruf concentration camp, with Helmwige’s assistance, I tried seven hundred different Norse and Hebrew prayers, burning a Jew each time in order to test the prayer’s effectiveness, sometimes sixty or seventy Jews a day! Years went by, thousands were burned, but still to no avail. Not one of them survived, not one of them became a Salamander!

  ‘However in March, nineteen forty-three, an old rabbi came to my office and asked me why I was burning these people. I explained that I was looking for the secret chant which could give a man immortality by fire. He begged me to stop burning people. He said that he would try to find out for me what the chant was, if only I would stop burning people. Well, what kind of an offer was that? I was a German officer and the experiment had been personally ordered by the Führer, and I said no.

  ‘Eventually, however, this same rabbi returned to me. He said that the word had been sent throughout the camps, and that there was a young Jewish music professor at Flossenburg who could tell me everything that I wanted to know.’

  He offered Lloyd more brandy, but Lloyd held his hand over his glass. He found it disturbing enough having to share a room with Otto, without having to accept his hospitality, too.

  Otto said, ‘The young professor had made a special study of Wagner and the origins of Wagner’s music. He had heard that Wagner was supposed to have been interested in basing an opera on the Norse fire-burial chants, but he wasn’t convinced that Wagner had ever written it. Apparently, the chants had been lost in the eighth century, during the Viking Migration period. The Book of Salamander, the runic book in which all the chants were contained, was sent by sea from Tollund to England, but it was sunk in a winter storm. However, the wreck must have been washed up on the northern coast of Germany, and the book salvaged. It reappeared in Bavaria, in the seventeenth century.

  ‘By a very circuitous route, and after many dubious transactions, it had come into the possession of the Bürgermeister of Bamberg, Johann Junius. Junius had long been fascinated by alchemy and by the secrets of eternal life. He translated the Norse runes, and began experimenting by setting fire to live cats and dogs. The story goes that eventually he succeeded in creating an unkillable cat.

  ‘However, Junius was spied on by his neighbours. He was arrested and taken before the courts, and accused of witchery. He was tortured with thumb screws and leg vices and the strappado, and in the end, of course, he confessed. Anything to escape further pain! He was burned at the stake, and apparently he shrieked and sang while the flames devoured him. Perhaps the good witch-finders of Bamberg managed to kill, perhaps they didn’t. But the story has it that Junius was seen many weeks afterward in various towns in Bavaria, looking pale and strange.’

  Lloyd said nothing. He found it almost impossible to speak to a man who had calmly confessed that he had burned thousands of innocent people for the sake of a mystical theory, no matter how earth-shattering that mystical theory might be. It hadn’t been worth a single one of those lives. Not one. But who remembered those lives today?

  Otto said, ‘The Book of Salamander and all of Junius’ notes were locked up in the Rathaus in Bamberg for two hundred years. But somebody found them, we don’t know who. It could have been a plague doctor called Gunther Hammer, or an astrologer known only as Stange. Whoever it was, he must have been a fanatical devotee of Richard Wagner, because in November, 1882, he sent it immediately to Wagner with a long unsigned letter pleading that Wagner use it to achieve immortality.

  ‘Richard Wagner had begun to fall ill in the last year of his life. Bad heart, you understand. In the letter, Hammer or Stange wrote to him, “Play these melodies, O Master, and you will live for ever.” Wagner was deeply impressed by the Norse chants. They were so barbarisch,
so powerful! But he completely misunderstood his well-wisher’s intentions. He thought that he was being exhorted to turn the chants into an opera, so that he would achieve everlasting fame. It simply didn’t occur to him that he could actually live for ever.

  ‘At Flossenburg concentration camp, the young Jewish music professor told me that in his view the existence of the opera Junius was only a myth, and that it was quite probable that Wagner had never written it. But now I had a scent to follow! With five historians to assist me, I discovered from the private diaries of Wagner’s friends that he had been working on a new opera in the last year of his life which he jokingly referred to as his Wikingsgesangbuch. He took it with him to Venice and he was still working on it when he died.

  ‘Unfortunately, when Wagner died, neither the opera nor the Book of Salamander was found amongst his possessions. For a long time, I thought that I had reached a dead-end, and that the young music professor was right about the opera being nothing but a story. But in a moment of inspiration, I discovered the name of the doctor and of the priest who had attended Wagner on his deathbed. The priest was Father Xavier Montini, a Jesuit, and a famous scholar on the subject of pagan ritual.

  ‘Now I used my logic, Mr Denman! My powers of deduction; and also my lifelong suspicion of Jesuits! I deduced that when Father Xavier Montini saw what Wagner had been working on, he became alarmed, and smuggled the Book of Salamander and the unfinished opera out of Wagner’s house, and hid them. After all, isn’t immortality supposed to be the exclusive territory of God Almighty? His unique selling point? The priest didn’t want that challenged by some pre-Christian mumbo-jumbo from Jutland!

  ‘Mussolini’s military staff gave us all the co-operation we needed to comb Venice looking for the opera and the book. In the end, after three months, we found them, bricked into the cellar wall of a house that had belonged to one of Father Xavier Montini’s friends. We were sad to discover that the cellar had flooded four or five times since the book had been concealed there, and that most of the original runes in the Book of Salamander had been obscured by damp. But the opera had been carefully wrapped in oilskin, and was almost as fresh and as bright as the day that Wagner had laid down his pen.