El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  Master Minus shared Eisenberg's relief. His own fortunes were bound to his superior's, and while he could be very useful to the Führer even if the clockwork-town proved a failure, it was doubtful Hitler would remember that while in the full flower of his wrath. He allowed himself a soft chuckle at the Generaloberst's little joke. "In that case, we are back on schedule. I'll be taking a little time away from my interrogations tomorrow to catalogue reactions to the wedding. I'll need six or eight of the workers delivered to me for study by late evening."

  "Ah yes, the interrogations. One in particular, I imagine." Eisenberg's voice was genial, but there was an edge to it. "If he does not break, kill him. After the wedding tomorrow I want to see him either on a leash or in a coffin."

  "My dear Generaloberst, the man is already broken. My wonderful Drehkreuz has done more than a hundred advanced robots ever could have. Even if Der Zinnsoldat had been successful, it could only have crushed his body. My creation has shattered his very soul."

  There was a pause before the General spoke again. "Take no chances with him. If he should show even a flicker of resistance... bring me his heart." Master Minus heard a soft click as Eisenberg hung up his end of the line.

  Master Minus leant back, and smiled, taking in a deep breath of the yellow mist that swirled around his head. The wonderful tang of it filled him, made him eager to begin the day's work. He smiled, running his withered tongue over his yellowed teeth, and rose to greet his newest charge.

  El Sombra still wore his mask.

  Master Minus approached the prisoner, casting an eye over the selection of tools he had prepared for use. This one would no doubt prove difficult... had the battle not already been won.

  The old man grinned as he looked into the opening eyes of his captive.

  "Welcome, El Sombra. Welcome to the Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Psychological Warfare

  "We are in an age, Mein Herr, where creativity is forced to find new means of expression.

  "Look at the world. In the theatres of London, we see slum children elevated to the status of theatrical players and writers, men like Stamp and Micklewhite debasing the stage in their bawdy attempts to accurately reproduce the squalor and misery of the boarding house and the kitchen sink. In Russia, the Kinema becomes the stomping-ground of the subhuman, with vampires slathered in greasepaint so they may be captured for the camera sinking their fangs into innocent young girls. Werewolves and the risen dead trained to jump through hoops for the amusement of braying, indolent, popcorn fed simpletons. In the Jew held dystopia of New York, the deviant Warhol enamoured the gallerias with infinite reflections of soup cans. Soup cans! They call National Socialism evil, but by God we don't deify packaging.

  "What does that leave? Novels by dilettantes about drug addicts, music broken and crushed into three minute chunks for easier digestion, fashion chasing its own tail through a sea of signifiers and shock value. What is left? What medium is there for the artist to explore? The animals have taken the flag of civilisation and they have wiped their ugly bottoms with it. They have been shown the shining canvas that unites creation with Creator and they have torn it to shreds! How is the true man to seek the path of art? How are we to know the mind of God?

  "I will tell you, my friend, that there is only one medium remaining with which to create true and lasting art, and that is torture. Torture is all we have left.

  "Don't you agree? Which reminds me, how is my Mexican? Adequate?

  "Not talking? Well, I can hardly blame you for that. You were badly beaten. Scalded. Bones were broken. I certainly understand if you don't feel like conversing at present, Mein Herr, but never fear. I shall do the talking for both of us.

  "All you have to do is breathe."

  The voice scuttled and clicked across the stonework, a beetle voice for the beetle man. He was old and withered and bent but still possessed of a terrible potency, unless that was simply the gas. Yellow taint in the air and in his lungs, whispering hideous things in the depths of his mind... how long had the masked man been there, chained to a great iron 'X', hanging, naked and spread-eagled for inspection?

  How long had those glittering tools waited to be used?

  Scalpels and spurs, barbed wire, a metal ball that separated with the turn of a screw into ever widening segments, to tear and split the orifices of the captive. Soft, wrinkled fingers stroking over sun baked flesh, measuring places to cut, caressing, cupping and gently squeezing with the practiced, shameless ease of a doctor. Or a father at Christmas, smiling and proud, taking his time, waiting to carve.

  El Sombra breathed in, and felt something intangible at the core of him begin to pitch and roll and begin to tear apart. Master Minus continued to speak.

  "Where were we?

  "Ah yes. We were discussing torture and its relationship to art. To appreciate the connection, we must first disconnect the concept of torture from the tiresome notions of morality so often attached to its practice.

  "In the chapbooks, the films and the junk novels devoured in their hundreds by the general public, torture is only practiced by the morally corrupt. If this was a scene from a pulp novelette, doubtless I would be cast in the role of the villain. My intention to torture you would signify to the reader that I was the blackest, most evil creature to inhabit the face of the planet. Their sympathies would be drawn to you. They would be... excuse me a moment, I need to make sure this blade is sharp enough to cut bone... They would be on your side. They would weep for your tragic death.

  "But let us now assume that this is a different kind of novelette altogether. This one is based on the gritty events of the real world. It has a title designed to rouse the male ego, perhaps Hostile Zone or Spectre Force. It is about agents of the government dealing with terrorists determined to undermine their very way of life.

  "Here we are again, on the page, at the torture scene. But now you are a merciless killer, responsible for the deaths of dozens of government troops who are working to bring order to a troubled region. You are a terrorist whose goal is to destabilise everything the government has built here. I do not know who else is operating in your network. I have no idea of what plans your people may even now be carrying out. Allowing you to keep your secrets could result in the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands. You will not see reason. You will not talk. And here I stand.

  "I am willing to do whatever it takes to wrest your secrets from you. I am willing to dirty my own hands, to sacrifice my own moral high ground, in order to save the lives of the innocent. Now the reader is with me. He respects my integrity, my courage, my unwillingness to play by rules written by liberals and politicians. And there is a part of him - no small part - that wants to see me prove my masculinity by dominating the cowardly villain in front of me.

  "And so, with a simple shift of perspective, you become the villain, and I the hero. And torture, that most morally corrupt of practices, becomes right and proper, a thing of justice, the beloved tool of the righteous and benevolent.

  "Torture, Mein Herr, is neither good nor evil in the final analysis. It simply is.

  "Allow me to demonstrate."

  The blade was a tanto, an antique Japanese dagger. It had not drawn blood since the late fifteenth century, but the razor edge was still keen and quite capable of cutting through flesh as easily as butter. The old man held it reverentially, testing its edge as he spoke, then gently dipping it in a bowl of vinegar, to maximise the pain of the wounds. Stepping forward, he ran one fingernail over the chest of the chained man, selecting a spot just over the heart. The cuts were slow. Deliberate. Methodical.

  There were seventeen in all, small, deep cuts into the flesh. It was only on the thirteenth cut that El Sombra even gritted his teeth. By the fifteenth, he allowed a sound to slip - something halfway between a grunt and a snarl.

  At the seventeenth cut, he cried out, and his head fell forward.

  The old man washed the cut with a sponge dipped in vinegar, admi
ring the effect. The scars, once healed, would display the Japanese kanji 'kage', meaning shadow. A nice touch, the old man thought. After all, he didn't intend to leave the chained man his face. How would his new masters recognise him without the proper identification?

  He chuckled, the sound of a thousand beetles skittering over a sheet of glass. And then he began to speak again.

  "So. We have established that torture is a concept outside the realm of morality, to be classed as right or wrong depending on who wields the reins of power. If it makes you feel better, we can use a different word. Interrogation, perhaps, or questioning.

  "Or art.

  "After all, an artist is one who shapes a particular medium to suit him, whether it is as a statement or merely for aesthetic pleasure. That medium might be stone, or clay, or porcelain. It might be canvas or celluloid, words on a page or actors on a stage. But the artist shapes the medium and recreates it to his wishes with the tools at hand.

  "In this case, the medium is your flesh and soul, which have been given to me to reshape according to my will. The tools I use are laid out before you, scalpels and skewers, vices and clamps, one hundred little gadgets that I have collected over the years, each one serving a specific purpose in sculpting you to meet the needs of my superiors. But these are crude tools at best. What is the pain of cut flesh compared to the agony of knowing that you murdered your only friend? What is the ache of a broken rib compared to the ache in your heart when you remember how you ate and drank with him, how you shared his home and hospitality, and then drove your blade through his heart because you just couldn't be bothered to save him?

  "Breathe in, my friend. Breathe it in deep. You'll come very quickly to understand, I think.

  "That is the true purpose of this torture - of this art. To open your eyes. You must learn to see things as I do. I am not doing this to you as punishment. I am doing this to bring you your salvation, to rehabilitate you, to make you understand your place in the scheme of things. When I am done with you... when you have breathed in your fill of these wondrous airs of humiliation and despair... you will see that the way of the Ultimate Reich is the way forward for humanity.

  "And you will see it of your own accord."

  And then the chained man began to laugh.

  Softly at first, then louder, the sound rolling through the quiet, cold room like the skeletons of winter leaves in a chill and bitter wind. It was not a laugh of joy, or of hope, or of strength, or of anything associated with sunlight and clean air. It was a laugh that belonged in these dank and fetid conditions, a snide chuckle, a sneering, contemptuous snicker. A laugh like a thousand beetles marching across a sheet of glass.

  It was a sound that would have been sickeningly familiar to anyone who had once been a guest of the Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts. The old man started back, looking at the features of his chained captive, breathing in sharply as the handsome face of the terrorist became foreign and strange, warped by the noise emanating from it. He recognised the sound too, recognised the dry, hollow chuckle. And it chilled him.

  The chained man turned his head, as though on aged bones, and smiled, a dry and sinister grin. And then he spoke. And the voice that came from his throat did not belong to El Sombra at all.

  The chained man spoke with Master Minus' voice.

  "Very good. Very well done. You're almost there now, my friend.

  "Tell me, how did it feel to make the incisions? Was it stimulating to carve helpless flesh as though it were meat in a butcher's shop window? Did the experience make you feel in control? Dominant? Like a true man? Very good, Mein Herr. Very, very good.

  "You even spout my doctrine as though it were your own. We've really made some marvellous progress in the last few hours. I think we might put you to work as a soldier when we're done..."

  The old man stepped back, straightening as he breathed in deep. He could taste the tang in the air, the yellow mist that coiled around his head. He looked towards the mirror, at the aged face, the lines and wrinkles and deep canyon-folds etched into the flesh.

  For some reason, he did not recognise his own eyes.

  "Poor El Sombra. Poor hero, poor monster. You still haven't learned the true meaning of shame, have you? After all you've done...

  "I told you that I wanted to make you understand how things truly are. How can you understand stretched on a rack? How can you see the truth when your eyes are blinded by pain and shame and the depths of your despair? It is not enough to understand helplessness and suffering - you must know the savage joy that comes with inflicting these things upon others.

  "In order to truly be brought to our way of thinking, you must know what it is to be the torturer."

  The old man's hands shook, and he turned towards the chained man for a moment with a look of helpless terror. Then he summoned his authority - the authority of the torturer - and attempted to force words from his throat to overtake the dry, whispering insinuations that emanated from the man on the rack.

  The chained man's smile froze him in his tracks. It promised terrible cruelty, a mephistophilean love of manipulation, and the eyes sparkled with fire from the depths of Hell itself. The old man sucked in another breath scented with sickly yellow and looked desperately away, to find himself staring once again at the mirror, at the face that was surely not his own...

  "That's right, Mein Herr. You are the torturer. The self-made hero, El Sombra, finds himself reborn into the body of the villain, Master Minus - or is it the other way around? Is the despised terrorist now finding a new lease of life as a noble hero of the Ultimate Reich?

  "How many have you tortured today, Master Minus? I saw the glee in your eyes while you delved and hacked and sawed. I heard the whispered words you spoke, almost lovingly, into the ear of that father of three, the one you warmed up with. You've done well in your new role. It's hard to believe the heroic El Sombra ever existed... although now I think of it, he was always fond of tearing his enemies apart with that sharp sword of his, wasn't he? I suppose Master Minus was always there, just waiting to get out. In many ways, this must be a dream come true for you..."

  "It isn't true."

  The old man was shocked to hear the voice come from his mouth. Was that the soft-spoken rasp of Master Minus? Had those words been spoken by the man who had studied the works of Freud and Jung in the forbidden libraries of the Reichstag, who had had long discussions with Adolf Hitler - not the frail flesh portrayed in the destroyed statue, but the towering majesty of the true Führer - on the nature of the self? Or was this a cracked and pale imitation?

  He swallowed and spoke again, hoping against all hope that this time the voice would sound more like Master Minus, less youthful, less... less Mexican. But deep down, as he tasted the yellow poison on his tongue and felt it unlocking the dizzying, vertiginous trapdoors of his soul, he knew that the voice of Master Minus was the voice that came from the man who hung in chains with blood trickling slowly over his belly and a familiar smile lighting up his face.

  He closed his eyes, listening to his own words echoing hollowly.

  "It isn't true..."

  "Oh yes it is.

  "Look in the mirror, Master Minus. Look at the rubber face hanging loosely over your own. Feel the way your back aches and strains from being stooped over in an imitation of age. Here is the truth, El Sombra. You've been Master Minus for hours. Perhaps this was who you always were.

  "If the conditions are right, then a cheap theatrical mask is all that stands between the noble hero and the torturer. Take off the mask, El Sombra. Let yourself see how far you have fallen."

  The old man, who suddenly felt neither old nor a man, raised his hands, fingertips touching the aged, wrinkled face with the unfamiliar eyes. Could he fool himself that his fingertips travelled across soft, worn flesh, lined with years of service? Or was he feeling sterile plastic, soft, loose latex? He shuddered, the motion travelling up his spine, his hands shivering and twitching as he tugged ...

  "Take off the mask."
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  ... and the old, wrinkled, false face was torn away, coming off in long strips, pulled away bit by bit to reveal another face underneath. His eyes were wide, unblinking, unable to close as he stared at the face underneath, the face that had been there all the time.

  Behind him, the thin beetle-voice spoke once more.

  And this is what it said:

  "APRIL FOOL! QuiÈn es el hombre? QuiÈn es el hombre? I'm the hombre! I'm the hombre! Now all I need are some pants."

  El Sombra grinned down from the vertical rack at Master Minus, slumped on his knees in front of the blood spattered mirror, staring without eyelids at the remains of his face. He had succeeded in tearing all of the flesh from it, and all that remained were a few scraps of muscle clinging to a crimson, bloodstained skull, with two grotesque eyeballs gazing mercilessly at their own reflection. El Sombra smiled and did the voice, again while he made another attempt to work his left hand free of the shackle that held it in place.

  "Creatures of the night... what music... they make... I vant to suck your blooood... yeah, you keep looking, amigo. Intense shame boosted by mind-warping drugs, hey? That's very original, I wouldn't know what that's like at all... ah, these bastard cuffs!" He was babbling, a result of the endorphin rush from the intense pain and the thrill of victory. The yellow mist coursing through his veins - the mist Master Minus relied on so heavily - had been counterbalanced by the Trichocereus Validus already in his system, the desert cactus that had destroyed and rebuilt his mind. But while El Sombra was in a stronger position than the torturer realised, Master Minus was weaker than he knew, far too used to the easy victories the mist brought him, not realising that his own exposure to it made him ripe for psychological attack. The old man had spent years claiming that he was immune to the yellow mist, but nobody had ever been in a position to test that claim - until now.