“I don’t understand.”
“No, of course not,” said Lehmann, “but you will. I had you brought here today because I am going to offer you something that no one else alive in this world can offer. I will offer you your life. And I will offer the lives of your daughters and your grandson. Your son-in-law, alas, is not part of that bargain. He has already gone off to one of the other camps and by now is compost in a field.”
Karoutchi flinched and gagged.
“You can still save the rest of your family, my friend,” said Lehman. “All you need to do is answer three questions. You must answer them truthfully and you must answer them completely. And, you must answer them now.”
Karoutchi blinked tears from his eyes and in that moment he knew that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that he would not do to save his children. Nothing.
“Ask your questions,” he said, his voice hoarse and unrecognizable.
Lehman smiled like a happy child and turned to the commandant. “You see? I told you that he would cooperate without you indulging yourself in anything gaudy or messy. Subtlety has not become extinct.”
Dannecker scowled. “If you are satisfied with his answers, then by all means take him and go. His sluts of daughters, too. I’ll be happy to be rid of their stink.”
Lehmann turned back to Karoutchi. “Ignore him, my friend. He is a barbarian. We are scientists and therefore more evolved.”
“What are your questions?” croaked Karoutchi. “What do you need to know so I can keep my family safe?”
The old man leaned closer and smiled. “There are three things I need to know. Answer them in any order, yes?”
Karoutchi nodded.
“First, have you ever heard of the Thule-Gesellschaft?” asked the old scientist, “Second, have you ever heard of La Bèstia de Gavaudan? And third—and this is most important of all—to what lengths would you be willing to go to save your daughters and grandson?”
-2-
Les Égouts de Paris (The Sewers of Paris)
August 20, 1943
Franks looked up and saw three of them on the stone walkway. Big men, if they were men at all. They carried no rifles—only fools fired guns in the methane-rich sewers—but they had Mauser K98 bayonets in their gloved hands.
“There it is,” said the tallest of the three.
It, not him. It was supposed to be an insult.
Franks was quietly amused. He had an M1918 trench knife that had brass knuckles fitted to the handle. It was a piece-of-shit knife, with a blade that would probably snap if he did anything more than stab; but the knuckle-dusters were fun. He liked those, even if his thick fingers barely fit through the holes. Franks showed the knife. Not as a threat, more as a half salute and half promise. With his other hand, he gave them a small come-on flip of his fingers.
They came.
The broadest of the three had shoulders like a gorilla and a face like a gargoyle, and he growled like a mastiff as he leapt down into the water to try and take Franks through sheer force. The third man, thinner and wiry, jumped after, dodging to one side, using his companion’s bulk as a shield for a low, vicious attack to Franks’ groin.
That was the plan, and they moved with the oiled ease and confidence of a pair of killers long practiced in the maneuver. Most opponents would try to back away or—if they had more balls than brains—would cut right and attempt to engage the smaller man. But the wiry Nazi was the better fighter of the two, and Franks knew it.
So he went right at the gargoyle-faced German, slapping the stabbing arm aside with such force that it pivoted the man in midair, turning him sharply toward his companion and blocking the sneak attack. Franks simultaneously slammed the brass knuckles into the big man’s face, crunching bone, putting all of his own considerable mass into the savage blow. The impetus of the killer’s leap and the raw power of Franks’ punch was sharply concentrated into the unbreakable rings of the knuckle-duster and shattered more than teeth. The big man’s head snapped backward and there was a huge, wet crack as his vertebrae blew apart inside his hairy hide.
Franks shoved the dying man hard against the slender fighter, using the mass to drive the wiry man into the water. Then Franks darted out a foot and caught the third attacker in the meat of the front of his thigh as he tried to use the confusion of the fight to conceal a blindside attack. That kick had the same effect as if the third killer had walked into a closed garden gate. His lower half jolted to a stop and the bulk of his upper body bent abruptly forward. Franks grabbed the man by the ears and jerked his hands back and down with such sudden, tearing force that both ears ripped loose in a spray of blood. Franks grinned and flung the ears in the man’s pain-twisted face and followed up with a punch to the Adam’s apple with his other hand. Franks had his body set against the slimy concrete beneath the foul water and he pivoted with knees and hips, waist and shoulders, creating so much torque that he crushed the hyoid bone and the trachea, and pulped muscles and meat all the way to the knobbed bones at the back of the neck. The killer reeled back, fingers tearing at his throat as he tried to drag in a thimbleful of air through crushed junk. His eyes bulged and his face went red and then purple and black. Franks could have finished him off, carved off a sliver of mercy. But…fuck it. Instead he turned to the other men, drew his knife, and made damn sure they were as dead as their leader.
Silence reclaimed the tunnel except for the soft lap of sewer water against the walls a persistent slow, heavy drip somewhere out of sight.
Franks sneered at the corpses as he cleaned the blade and knuckles of his knife, slid it into its sheath, unzipped, and took a long piss on the corpses.
Then suddenly Franks was falling.
Falling.
Falling…
The sewer seemed to reel and spin around him and the foul water rushed up to smash him in the face.
The world—his world—went black.
Absolutely black.
And into that black, Franks fell and fell and fell.
-3-
Margeride Mountains of Lozère
Massif Central, France
April 20, 1943
“Did it work?”
Noah Karoutchi stood looking down at the little rabbi. He had remained silent for hours while the rabbi worked, watching as the man dug in the dirt, scooping it up from the floor of the shed, shaping it, patting it firm, muttering prayers throughout. The others in the shed—all of them thin, all of them looking like the pale ghosts of the men they had been—watched with him. Except for the prayer and the sound of wet hands on mud, there had been no sound at all. Outside, the rain fell as heavily as before but the thunder was fading as if the giants of the weather were giving up and walking away into the night.
The rabbi did not answer. Not at first. He kept working, kept praying.
Karoutchi licked his dry lips and felt his heart hammer in his chest. His head ached from tension. From dread. From the certain knowledge of what would happen to him, to all of them, if the soldiers discovered that they were no longer in their bunks. It would not take them long to discover the tunnel beneath the privy, or to follow it the thirty yards to this disused shed. Discovery was inevitable. The other scientists who had made similar tunnels had each been discovered. The bodies of their families still hung from the walls, and the heads of the scientists were slowly rotting away at the head of the mess hall tables: a grim and terrible warning.
The threat, though, had not worked as the Nazis had intended. Instead of cowing the prisoners, it made them more ferocious, more determined to escape. More inventive. More daring.
Daring in so many ways.
The tunnel had been Kinski’s idea, and the Polish anatomist had begun digging before their small cabal had been fully formed. The others—Brunner, Kaplan, Hagermann, and Shulte—had all contributed ideas and done much of the manual layers, giving up hours of precious sleep to labor in their pit. The shed had been Karoutchi’s suggestion. He had planned to use it to store food, extra clo
thes, and some makeshift weapons the cabal had made when the soldiers thought they were designing scientific instruments.
It was the rabbi—a frail shell of the robust professor of zoology—who suggested an alternative to armed escape.
“We are not strong enough,” he told the cabal when they all met in the dark on a winter night late last year. “We are not fighters and we are not enough. The Thule have too many soldiers here, and they have the dogs.”
At the use of that word Karoutchi shuddered. They all did. Dogs was the closest word that could be used to describe the things that roamed the no-man’s-land between the double row of heavy chain-link fence. The guards in the tall watchtowers kept one set of guns trained on the prison yard and another set on those dogs.
“We have a bold plan,” the rabbi continued, “and we have made such fine weapons. Clubs and crude spears, two small knives. That is what we will use to fight our way past fifty guards and those six creatures we have made for Herr Doktor Lehman? Do you think that this is how we will save ourselves and our families? Do you think that men such as we, armed with weapons such as that, will triumph over the foot soldiers of the devil and those hellhounds? Are we to believe that we could triumph over that cursed thing we have been laboring over these last two years? That abomination? Will we escape it? Even if we got past the hounds and the soldiers and made it to the forest, do you believe that we can outrun it and not be hunted down and torn apart by the thing we made? Tell me, my friends, is that what you believe?”
“It is our only hope,” said Shulte. “Why else are we digging this godforsaken tunnel?”
Which is when the rabbi smiled. The man was old and sad and nearly broken, but in that moment, in that dark hour in the pit, Karoutchi could see a ghost of the vibrant man again. And perhaps something more. A dangerous man. Not a man to use his fists, or even a scientist wielding knowledge. No, this was another kind of power altogether.
The rabbi had looked at each man in turn, fixing them with a penetrating stare. “Tell me, my friends, have you ever heard of the legend of the golem?”
There had been laughter…at first. Disbelief and mockery…at first.
Now, as April rains fell in endless sheets, the cabal stood together in the shadows of the shed and watched the rabbi fashion a man out of mud and clay and his own bitter tears.
-4-
Les Égouts de Paris (The Sewers of Paris)
August 20, 1943
Franks dreamed of being dead.
He understood death. He had courted the cold witch, had held her close, been her lover and her slave and ultimately her friend. During the long years of his life, he had offered up a lot of souls to the queen of the pit.
Now he slept in her icy white arms and was lost in a dream of his own death. It was not something Franks often fretted over and which he never feared. Mortality sat only lightly on him and was better suited to other kinds of men—to actual men. Franks knew that his inclusion in that brotherhood was tentative and uneasy. He was okay with that. Being regarded as a human being was an occasional convenience but it wasn’t something he needed.
He did not want to be dead, though. Not a dead man or a dead thing.
Except that in his dreads his heart did not beat, his chest did not rise and fall with breath, his limbs were heavy and cold and still. He was a corpse.
No.
As his dreaming mind reached out to sense the nature of his body, he realized that this was not death. Not exactly.
He was nothing.
No flesh. No bone.
Nothing.
Except…
He felt something. A touch. Hands on him. On his arms and legs. Palms running over his chest. Fingers pressing at the contours of his face.
And a voice.
Faint. Muttering. No…praying.
Not in French, though. Nor German.
Hebrew?
Yes, thought Franks and he concentrated to be able to understand the words. It was definitely Hebrew, but an older form of it. Ancient. The words ran together like mumbled prayers, but they were not the right prayers. These were not prayers of deliverance from the evils of the world, or for the blessing of a birth, or even for the burial of the dead. No, and although his body was dead, Franks felt a shudder pass through him because the voice spoke a prayer that was long forgotten, long forbidden.
A prayer of consecration and invocation.
The praying voice called to God and begged forgiveness in the same breath. It pleaded for help and apologized for sins.
Another shudder swept through Franks’ body, and he realized that he felt it twice…at the same time and yet in two different bodies.
Wait…
Two?
His mind rebelled at that, dismissing it as stupid, impossible, absurd. His body was there in the cold, foul water in the sewers beneath Paris, surrounded by the corpses of the men he had just killed.
So why did he know with absolute clarity that he was also on the floor of a shed in the mountains far from here, surrounded by living men, and touched by one man who knelt and prayed? Franks could not make sense of it.
And yet he was sure he was in both places.
Just as he was sure he was dead in both places. In each reality his body was a lifeless hulk and inhuman mass that had been forged into something approximating man-shape.
The prayers filled his head.
Shudders continued to ripple through him.
Then deep inside his chest, buried down at the core of who—or what—he was, Franks felt something new. A spark. A tiny flash of electrical current.
A heartbeat.
Franks opened his eyes. There was light.
There was light. There were faces—pale, dark-eyed, haunted, terrified—staring down at him. A circle of emaciated men in dirty, striped, prison clothes. One man—the only one who wore a beard—knelt beside him. He was older than the rest, his face covered with old scars and new bruises. Without knowing how he knew it, Franks was certain this was the man who had been praying.
This was the man who had called him back from the land of the dead.
Franks tried to speak but he had no voice. He raised a hand to grab the man, needing and wanting to shake answers out of him. But the hand that rose into view was not his own. It was not a hand of flesh and blood. It was the same size as his own, the same shape, but it was made of mud.
-5-
Margeride Mountains of Lozère
Massif Central, France
April 20, 1943
They huddled together, all of them except the rabbi, pressed back against the far wall of the shed. Their eyes were filled with mad lights, with a terror that stole from them any possibility of coherent speech.
Franks could understand that. He was pretty goddamn spooked himself. Even him. Even after all that he had seen and all that he knew about the world. The shadows and the things that moved in them. The darkness in his own soul. Franks was not a deeply emotional man, not an expressive one, but he was philosophical in his way. The world was bigger, older, darker, and more complicated than most of the people who lived on it knew. It was stranger than the stories told around campfires, and more magical than what was alluded to in old poems.
Case in point.
He sat cross-legged on the floor like some barbarian chieftain, heavy arms resting on knees, chin sunk low as he listened to what the rabbi told him. All of that was true but it was also an illusion of some kind. His own body was floating in a river of shit and piss, probably being nibbled on by rats, hundreds of miles from this chateau in the mountains.
The body he wore now was not his own, but it was familiar. A golem, a creature made from the dirt, shaped like a man, with life breathed into him with equal measures of reverence, despair, desperation, and hatred. No one—not even the rabbi—offered an apology. The world was burning and “please” and “thank you” carried as little weight as “I’m sorry.”
“This is about a fucking dog?” grumbled Franks. His new voice—now t
hat it, like he, had awakened—was a bass rumble. It was frightening. Franks liked it. It was the only thing he liked, but it was something.
“It’s not a dog,” said the rabbi.
“You just said it was.”
The rabbi looked uncertain and turned to one of the silent men. “Karoutchi, you understand it better than I do.”
The man named Karoutchi said nothing. Sweat ran down his face in crooked lines and he clearly did not want to say anything. Franks pointed a muddy finger at him.
“You,” he growled. “Talk.”
Karoutchi shook his head.
“Don’t make me ask again,” said Franks. “I am not having a good day and you guys are way up on my shit list. Talk while you still have teeth.”
“Please, Karoutchi,” begged the rabbi. “Tell him.”
When the man still hesitated, the rabbi turned back to Franks.
“They are terrified.”
“No shit. This is what? A Nazi prison camp?”
“Worse,” said the rabbi. “This is hell.”
“Since when do Jews believe in Hell?”
“Since the Thule Society proved to us that it exists,” said Karoutchi, speaking for the first time.
Franks looked at him. “The Thule Society?”
“Y-yes. You have heard of them?”
“Yeah,” said Franks. “And they have heard of me.” He chuckled. It was not a nice sound, even to his own ears. The rabbi and his companions flinched to hear it. Fair enough. Franks raised his hands. “You assholes took a big damn risk to sneak out here and work some magic to try and raise a golem. Well, here’s the news, boys—you did. Just not the way you expected. You see, I’m not some earth spirit you conjured. This body is, but not me. What you idiots managed to do was somehow pull my spirit into this mud-man form. I’m not happy about that, and I’d better hear that you can put me back in my own body very damn soon.”
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