“Because I am the one who made the breach.”
THIRTY
None of it was true. Not the Wall, not the tunnel, not Karen. They didn’t exist; they had never existed. Figments of a rotting imagination. Ghosts of a world that had never been. It all had to be a lie, because if any of it was true, Jim feared he would go mad. Or worse. There were always worse things than madness.
“Good morning,” the major said. Jim hadn’t heard him enter. A moment ago he would have sworn an oath on his mother’s blood that there wasn’t even a door he could have entered through. “I trust you slept well.”
Put sleep on the list. Another hallucination. Another fancy. It certainly wasn’t real, not for Jim, not with his thoughts rattling in his head like a machine gun.
The major was looking at him. He could feel it even though he still couldn’t make out the man’s face. His eyes. His damned empty eyes.
“I was hoping you might be more willing to talk this morning,” the major said.
Jim suddenly found himself thinking of Bill. Why was he thinking about him? It seemed important, but just beyond his reach. Something Bill had told him? What was it? But the thought slipped away and refused to resurface.
“It isn’t morning,” Jim said.
“What’s that?”
Jim felt his mouth twitching and words coming out. “It isn’t morning. And it isn’t afternoon or evening, either. They don’t exist. None of this does. You don’t exist and neither do I.”
Then the major was gone. The desk, the room, the bone-white walls, all gone. He saw a door, but a different one: green with a burnished brass knob and a hand-painted sign hanging from a nail. He was walking toward it, reaching for the knob, pushing the door. (What did the sign say?) Smells reaching him as he stepped in. A roast in the oven. Biscuits. There’d be mashed potatoes too; he knew, like he knew his own name, that there’d be potatoes and gravy (the sign the sign the sign). And those giant green beans they bought at the market over the weekend: the one that just opened down on Walnut Avenue. Worth every penny. Now a voice calling out from the kitchen, calling for him, calling his name, calling him to dinner. He knew the voice, of course he knew the voice, like he knew his own name (like he knew what was on the sign), like he knew himself. Walking forward across the thick carpet, following his nose, following his ears, following his heart (off a cliff) into the kitchen where she waited, dressed in pink, hands lost in oven mitts as she materialized the pot roast like magic. It was her. Of course it was. Her name was on the sign. Like his name was. The Fletchers. That’s what it said. Him and her. She and he. Together. Taking off the mitts, reaching for him, the glint of the diamond on her finger, in her eyes, reaching for him, her husband, just like he always wanted, her hair tied up behind her neck like his mother used to do, dinner ready when he got home, dinner and a smile and a kiss. Feeling her red lips on his cheek, on his mouth, skin on skin, a moan, smell of cotton and salt, heat building between them (the Fletchers) until there is nothing between them, there is just him and her and his name and the green door.
“Mr. Fletcher?” The major, the desk, the walls. All back. All closing in on him. “Are you alright? We lost you there for a moment.”
“What . . . what is happening to me?”
“What did you see?”
“The door,” Jim said, speaking because another instant of silence would destroy him. “I saw a door and a house. I went inside and . . . she was there.”
“Miss O’Neil?”
“I don’t . . . what is happening to me?”
“You can’t blame yourself, Mr. Fletcher,” the major said. “It is the magic. Her magic. It is still in your system, still working in your head.”
“No,” Jim said, shaking his aching head. “Karen didn’t . . . she wouldn’t . . .”
“I know this is difficult, but it is time to stop. It is time to be honest with me. It is time to accept what is happening before it is too late.”
Jim felt anger rising like bile. He forced his eyes up into the blur of the major’s indistinct face, despite the pain. “Why should I trust you?” he said. “You sound American, but for all I know you’re as Red as Lenin. I trust Karen. I trust her. You? I don’t even know you.”
The major paused for a moment. Not just motionless, not just quiet; he was two-dimensional, a still-life painting of an army officer. Jim wanted to reach out and touch him, see if he could punch through the canvas, but then the major suddenly stood.
“Come with me, Agent Fletcher,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”
The request came as such a surprise to Jim that he was on his feet and moving toward the door before he had time to understand what was being said. Go out of the room? That made no sense; there was nothing outside the room, certainly no green doors or pot-roast-scented kitchens or inviting red lips.
They stepped out of the blanched white room into a blanched white hallway. Jim was amazed his legs even worked; it felt like he’d been sitting in that chair for weeks, months, all time.
“I understand your reluctance to trust me,” the major was saying as he directed Jim down the hallway. “It is only wise in your position. But we are out of time for such things. I am the only one who can help you, and the sooner you believe that, the sooner we can see about setting things right.”
The major stopped him in front of a blank stretch of wall. No, not blank; there was a window with the blinds drawn closed. Jim wanted to run. Flee. Never in his life had he been afraid of something like he was of whatever waited behind those blinds. It was madness waiting for him, madness of one form or another, like Russian roulette with every chamber loaded; didn’t matter which bullet you landed on, they were all going to scatter your brains.
“I’m not sure—” Jim’s voice started to say.
“I think you need to see this,” the major said and opened the blinds.
What did Jim expect? The snowcapped skyline of Moscow? An ice-gray Siberian gulag? The endless void that we all stare into in the moment of our death?
What he saw instead were drab brown buildings, lush green fields, and unmarked black roads upon which marched blocks of young men in tan. He knew it at once, knew which bullet the hammer had landed on. Fort Bragg, in the good ol’ US of A. An American military base. No Soviet conspiracy could fabricate that bright Carolina sky. It was time, he knew. Time to face the music (and the firing squad).
“Alright, Major,” he said. His cheeks felt wet. “Let’s talk.”
* * *
• • •
When his fingers dropped the pocket watch, the colonel immediately reached up to his nose. The bleeding was significant this time. This subject was strong. The American fought with an admirable will, though he could not know what he was truly fighting against. It did not matter. They all broke in time, but time was something he had precious little to spare.
Leonid was at his side, pressing a handkerchief into his hand. He took it and held it against the flow. Magic was a high-priced whore; he knew that well. The headaches, the nosebleeds, the tremors in his fingers. You could not rewrite the rules of men’s minds without spilling a great deal of ink, but that was why he had been sent. That was why he had been born.
“Did it work?” Leonid asked.
The American was slumped over in his chair, his whole body slick with sweat. The colonel’s ears still rang from his screams. They always screamed, though they did not realize it. It was an animal reflex, the only part of them that knew what was really happening, the only part that understood the true depth of the violation.
“Yes,” he said. “He is prepared.”
He heard footsteps behind him: Kirill, returned from his task at last.
The bleeding stopped, so he tossed the rag aside and stood on unsteady legs. It was getting harder, or more likely, he was getting weaker. Age was the one demon no one could outrun. He knew this, had seen it
work its terror on those who came before. But with the throb in his temple and the ache in his joints, he wondered how he had let the blasted thing sneak up on him.
“They are ready for you,” Kirill said.
I doubt that, he thought. “Then let us welcome them.”
The magicians waited in a musty room guarded by filing cabinets standing in ranks like soldiers. He wondered what delicate secrets were locked away here, if one had the time to sift the wheat from the chaff. In a way, that was exactly what he was about to do. He needed to know what caliber of men he had at his disposal.
When he entered, the magicians tensed as if preparing for a blow. This was bittersweet. It was important that they fear him if he was to make them do their duty, yet if they had come bearing good news there would be no reason to fear. A pity then.
“I will not keep you long,” he said. He spoke quietly, forcing them to move closer to hear him. “I can sense that you still have much work to do.”
They exchanged nervous, uncertain glances. Men without a leader. A sad sight.
“I do not need to tell you that things in the city are deteriorating. You can hear the mob yourself. If it comes to war over Berlin before your work is done . . .” He let those words hang over them like the noose at the gallows. “Moscow would be immeasurably displeased. And steps would need to be taken to vent this displeasure.”
They swallowed hard. Some loosened their collars. Perspiration dabbled their brows, despite the late autumn chill.
Kirill, slouched in a corner of the room, snickered. He was barely watching the others, instead focusing on a large silver coin he was flicking higher and higher into the air, catching it each time with a meaty thwack on his palm. The magicians did their best to ignore him entirely.
At last, one of them stepped forward. “Comrade Colonel,” he began, his quavering hands clasped tight in front of him, “we are doing our best. But Erwin took all our research with him when he . . . when he . . .”
“Betrayed us to the West?” the colonel finished.
“Yes,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “His . . . departure has set us back considerably. We are months away . . . from even returning to where we were before . . . he left. I wish we could provide Moscow with better news, but . . .” The man stopped there. He looked like a spent shell casing, the bullet long fired.
The colonel sighed. He’d been afraid it would come to this. “Kirill?” he said.
The young man sighed and pushed himself off the wall. He caught the coin that was spinning madly in midflight and approached the magician who had come with excuses instead of results. Kirill stopped only a foot or so from the man and smiled. It was an unsettlingly childlike expression. The magician wiped the sweat from his forehead and glanced at the colonel and then back to Kirill, who was now holding up the coin.
“I am a magician too,” Kirill said in almost passable German. “I would like to show you a special spell. One of my own devising. Would you believe me if I said I could make this coin vanish?”
“Comrade Colonel,” the magician said, trying to look past Kirill, “I do not—”
Kirill flipped the coin one last time, caught it, whispered a few words in a forgotten tongue, and thrust his fist through the magician’s chest. He pulled it back instantly, wary of the instability of incorporeal magic beyond a few moments.
“What did you—” the magician struggled to say, eyes huge with shock.
Kirill smiled and opened his fist. It was empty. “No more coin.”
The magician clutched at his chest, his face red as blood. His mouth gaped open, but only pained choking sounds escaped. His legs seemed to melt under him and he fell, fingers hooked into claws, face twisted with pain and dying rage.
There was silence then. The other magicians did not even look at their comrade on the cold concrete floor. They did not have to look, because they knew what they would see. They would see themselves. Kirill’s demonstration had been effective, so the colonel chose to ignore how pleased he looked watching his victim twitch on the cold floor.
“It is important that you understand that I believe what he just told me,” the colonel said to those who remained. “I understand the impact of the loss of Herr Ehle on this project. But it changes nothing. It is irrelevant. Only progress is relevant.” He hoped his message was clear. He did not think he could deliver it any more plainly.
One of the magicians spoke. He was a thick man with a stomach that strained the buttons of his shirt and a mouth full of small, square teeth. “We will get it done, Comrade Colonel,” he said, jowls quivering. “I promise you.”
Ah, at last the glimmer of an opportunist. Germans were supposed to be conquerors, after all. Perhaps all the men of ambition had not died in warfires or abandoned the cause for the West. “I will hold you to that promise,” the colonel said.
THIRTY-ONE
“It was you?” Karen was aware that she was speaking, but that was only to buy her brain time to process a reaction. Panic? Fear? Curiosity? Excitement? She felt them all tingling across her skin like a static charge. “The breach in the Wall . . . you did that?”
Ehle, for his part, appeared calm. His hands were still and his eyes downcast. “Yes,” he answered. “And I would like to tell you why.”
“I’m listening,” Karen said, “and unless you want me to invite Arthur down here, I’d better like the answer.”
Ehle exhaled, readying himself for the plunge, and then began to speak. “The end of the war was unpleasant for Germany. I do not say this to gain your sympathies but to explain decisions that were made. Our armies were crumbling and our enemies were out for blood. For us, it appeared to be the end of all things.
“When faced with oblivion, some men will cower and wait for the end. Others decide that if the world is going to burn, they will strike the match. Our illustrious Führer was among the latter. It was his direct order that if we were faced with an Allied victory, we would leave nothing behind for them to conquer. Bridges, buildings, roads—everything was to be destroyed before we let it fall into the enemies’ hands. He would rather turn Germany to ash than let it be occupied by the heathen he had so nearly defeated. That was when I lost all hope for Germany: I knew we were going to lose the war, but when I read Hitler’s decree I knew we had lost ourselves.”
War had never made much sense to Karen, but such needless destruction seemed insane, and she told Ehle so.
“Insanity,” Ehle said. “Yes, that describes it well. It was a time of madmen.” Ehle’s face twisted, as though he had a terrible taste in his mouth. “Hitler was no magician, but he had woven a spell over German minds nevertheless. He had no shortage of sociopaths and sycophants willing to follow him into the abyss, and chief among them was the head of the Reich’s magicians, Reichsleiter Martin Voelker.”
Karen nodded. “I know that name. We read about him at St. Cyprian’s. He was an influential magician before the war. He died during the siege of Berlin, right?”
Ehle smiled sadly. “Influential, yes. Martin was the greatest magician of our age. In another, more benevolent world, his innate talents might have changed magic as we know it, opened up new frontiers, or solved the deep mysteries of our craft. In this world, however, his ability was a tragic failure of fate, as he became a devout Nazi,” he said, adding, “and an utter bastard.”
Ehle spoke of Voelker not as a figure of history, but someone he knew. Karen said nothing, but felt the muscles in her shoulders tighten. She wanted to reach for her locus, but kept her hands at her sides. What sort of man was acquainted with the Reich’s chief magician? And what sort of person was she, standing here seeking help from such a man?
He continued. “Voelker was not content with just following the letter of Hitler’s order; instead he embraced the spirit. Why leave only ruin when instead you could leave nothing at all? Mankind had their chance to submit to the will of the Reich. Sinc
e they had chosen otherwise, he was going to make them pay for their mistake. And he had the means to do so.”
He leaned forward. “Everything I have said thus far is just history,” he said softly, but with steel in his voice. “What I would say next is what they do not want you to know.”
Karen swallowed. Try as she might, she couldn’t quiet the voice of her father in her head, decrying that damned kraut magic. Maybe he hadn’t been completely wrong. “Tell me,” Karen said.
“When the German army sacked London in 1940, Voelker dispatched one of his most trusted assistants to obtain a particular artifact from the rubble. That man spared nothing in his search. Beatings, torture, murder: any atrocity was acceptable. Only his prize mattered. Eventually history would come to call this man ‘the Butcher of London.’ Sadly, he was successful in his task and returned to his master with the item in question: a book.”
He lifted a book from her desk and ran a finger down its spine. “So much harm from such a simple thing. Perhaps Hitler was right to burn books by the thousands when one like this was in the world.”
Karen snatched the book from Ehle’s hand. “So if some knowledge is dangerous, all knowledge should be sacrificed?” She put it down, out of his reach. “Is that how you Nazis justified destroying words you didn’t agree with?”
Ehle studied her for a moment. What did he make of what he saw? She stared back, but felt a chill looking into his careful eyes.
“I spoke too broadly,” he said, averting his eyes at last. “But perhaps you should reserve judgment until you know more of the book in question. It had no author, no title. Rather, what name it possessed came from its opening words: Concerning that which must never be . . .
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