Three weeks later and he’s in the engine room of U-293. It’s night, and they’re ploughing across the surface five miles off Long Island, USA, on a special patrol. By day they submerge and the engine room grows unbearably hot. He’s convinced he can smell the body parts, but his colleagues tell him to stop being so grisly, to go and shower properly if he can smell stuff. The refrigeration is working fine, they tell him. Dummkopf Dummkorff.
They drop off the sabotage team at midnight and return to deep waters. Three hours later, he hears Rathke’s sharp voice stabbing the thick air inside the submarine. A cutter has picked up U-293 on its radar and is in pursuit. Rathke orders that the engines are killed. The propeller slows. The sub begins to sink. There is a slight jarring as the snout of the craft lands in the soft sand on the Atlantic seabed. Korff is no longer worried because he’s into the drill, the routine that was hammered into him during weeks of hard training in the Baltic Sea. At the precise moment: he anticipated that he would be immersed in fear, fear didn’t come into it. He had no time to be scared. His brothers were depending on him and he must not let them down.
Now the call for silence. All systems dead. The sonar’s ghostly calling is all they can hear. Death is in the water.
‘It’s only a patrol craft,’ whispers Rathke. ‘We wait. If the captain is inexperienced, we might try climbing to periscope depth and use torpedoes. If not, then we are still prepared. Yes?’ His eyes scour every one of his men, searching for steel.
Korff has dreamed of this moment a thousand times. At such times, he imagines the hull of the U-boat to be invisible and the black, woven silk of the sea presses against him. There is a shark in the water and Jens knows that it has his smell in its blood. The shark has been seeking him for many years, as many years as Korff has been alive. He imagines that he and the shark came into being at the same point in time.
An explosion. The waves from the blast gently rock the U-boat. Werner Rathke’s face swings into him, heavily shaded by the reluctant emergency lighting. His lips have vanished, spittle clings like invisible limpets to his teeth. ‘Remember,’ he says, and his voice is sour with adrenalin, ‘not on the first charge. We have to risk a few explosions.’
Before Korff can nod his head, the captain is creeping back to his station. The reek of men who know that a hull breach will end their lives in an unimaginably terrible way pervades the craft. The chambers might be pressurised, but Korff has a headache that squeezes the tender meat behind his eyes until black motes swim across his vision. He stands by the ballast-tank release valves and though the sweat stings his eyes, he does not blink. He watches his captain as though he were a spirit that his gaze codifies.
Another three depth charges detonate each one closer than the last. The fifth explosion sends men sprawling.
‘Now!’ Rathke calls and Korff yanks the valve open and sends the soup of bodies, the limbs and guts of men who had dismembered each other on a Caen battlefield, streaming to the surface.
No more depth charges fall. Soon, they hear the engines of the cutter diminishing. When they can hear the ship no more, Rathke orders their return to Brest.
Once he had fought with his wheelchair and taken it over the threshold into the garden (in one crazed moment, I actually felt myself instinctively reach out to help him) I hurried from the flat but once again paused by the photographs, drawn by the power of their history and the benign smiles that flirted with insanity.
One photograph in particular struck me as odd and it took me a few seconds to understand why. Jens Korff was standing next to an older man, their body language making it obvious that they disliked each other. Both were bleakly regarding the camera. I say that, though only one of them, Korff, had eyes. The other’s had been scratched from the print with a sharp instrument. I quickly slid the photograph from its frame and stuffed it in my pocket. It wasn’t on Korff’s sightline; presumably it would be a while before he missed it. On the back of the photograph, written in pencil, was the name I had expected to see: Werner Rathke.
Natalie brought me back from the brink. All we did was sit by the river and eat bagels and cream cheese, read a couple of magazines, hold hands - but it was enough. Later I drove her home and she held on to me at the front door as if I was going away for a long time. I fought it, but I couldn’t help thinking of Korff, of whether he had a sweetheart in some German port who had kissed him goodbye and hugged him tightly before he went into the water with his comrades.
‘Come in,’ she said, finally. She was warm and she smelled of apples. Under the streetlamp, her pulse trapped and released shadow in the hollow of her throat.
‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got stuff I need to do tonight.’
‘Stuff?’ she said, smiling, but there was a stiffness to her voice that wasn’t there before.
‘Yeah. I promised I’d design a new letterhead template for a guy at work. It’s no big deal - it’ll only take me half an hour - but I’ve never been asked to do anything like that before and it might be good for me. The guy who asked me doesn’t know a computer from a box of crackers.’ I was amazed at the fluency of the lie, and disgusted at myself at the way she took it in. She smiled, more naturally, and kissed me for a long time on the mouth.
I said, ‘Look, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?’ And a wave and another smile and she was gone, the door snicking shut behind her. I waited till I saw the hall light go off before moving away. My guts felt as though they’d been packed with ice.
I couldn’t have gone through with it, as much as I yearned for her spread out before me, wanting me. She was in my head all the way home, her naked body reaching up from a blanket, her skin bathed in pale fire from the bleached streetlamps outside her window. But I couldn’t have done it when Korff was so deeply embedded in my thoughts.
There are no roses on a sailor’s grave.
I woke up with those words in my mind and recoiled from them in the dark. I could hear voices in the living room: Roz and a stranger, laughing, chinking glasses. I could hear Toby snoring next door. Penny would still be out, working at the hospital. I wasn’t particularly close to my flatmates, but they were all I had. Natalie was on my side too, that was beyond question, yet I felt more alone than at any other point in my life. I pulled the duvet up around my face and tried to gauge how much night was left by staring at the square of dark in the window. I had not gone directly home the previous night. I had caught a late Tube to St James’s Park and walked through the sleeping cobbled street market of Strutton Ground, past the Channel 4 TV building on Horseferry Road, lit up like a glass sculpture, and into Elverton Street, not knowing what I intended to do until I reached the front door. There was a light on in the living room and I could hear the television, see its subtle flicker of colour and light against the ceiling through the crack in the curtains. I could hear something else too. A banging noise, like a chef flattening cuts of veal with a rolling pin, coming deeper from within the flat. I raised my fist three times to knock on the door and failed three times to go through with it.
I was about to run back to the Underground, see if I could catch the last Tube, when he lifted the letterbox flap and said: ‘I knew you were here today, Seth.’
I froze. Night shifted above the rooftops like the twist of currents in deep water.
‘Won’t you come in?’ he asked. A thick, yeasty smell accompanied his words into the street.
‘I really shouldn’t—’ I began, as the door opened. I felt the flat’s interior heat envelop me.
‘No,’ he said, and I heard the creak of his wheelchair as he moved back inside, leaving me to lock up behind him. ‘You really shouldn’t.’
‘I want you to tell me about her,’ he said. The Mauser was on the table by his chair, its barrel pointing my way. It hadn’t been loaded before, so maybe it wasn’t now. But why have it out if it wasn’t loaded? I hated the way he thought he could control me so easily. I hated even more the fact that I didn’t have any fight in me, perhaps because he was s
o old, a loose bundle of bones thrown in a chair. How did you fight against that?
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I said.
‘Of course there is,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair and licking his lips. When he smiled, heavy ivory-coloured teeth sloped back from his mouth. It was a smile the complete opposite of Natalie’s. I didn’t want to return it. I wanted it in a box, buried in six feet of soil. ‘She’s a real looker. She has a nice … smile. A smile that reminds me of my own sweetheart. Astonishing, the similarities. A smile you could fall into. A smile to make you believe in God.’
‘How would you know that?’
‘I get around,’ he said, rubbing his hands over the top of his wheels. ‘Vroom, vroom.’ He looked at the gun and then looked at me. ‘So tell me about her. What’s she like, to talk to, I mean?’
‘She’s fine,’ I said, as icily as I could manage. ‘We get on well.’
‘It won’t last, you know.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe not. But I’m having fun in the meantime. Can I go now?’
‘What were you doing here today? Why were you hiding in my kitchen?’
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. ‘I was concerned,’ I said, at last, knowing that the colour in my face would tell him I was lying, but he was touched.
‘I could give you a key,’ he said. ‘After tomorrow, well, then you can come and go as you please. I could do with a little help around the home. And I’d pay you. After tomorrow.’
‘What’s happening tomorrow?’ I asked.
He said, ‘I’m saying goodbye to an old friend.’
!He let me go after that. If he noticed the photograph on his wall was missing, he didn’t mention it. At the door, he stopped me.
‘I had someone, once. Alice, her name was.’
‘I know,’ I said, pointing at his tattoo.
His hand went to it, covering the blue letters as if I had somehow intruded on his privacy, or hers.
‘She died while I was at sea,’ he said. ‘I found out later that my superior on that ship - I told you about him - he had been having an affair with my girl. I say affair … but he brutalised her. Raped her. She never said a word to me. She was scared I would be banished to some concentration camp or other if I confronted him. She killed herself, hanged herself from the rafters in the attic with the lacing from a corset she wore when she first went with him. In her letter to me she explained everything.’
I was closing the door behind me when he said something that tightened my chest, as if I’d tried to squeeze into a jacket that was two sizes too small for me.
‘He lives around here, Rathke. How’s that for a coincidence?’
I must have dropped off staring at the night through that window with its peeling paint and condensation, even though I believed I might never sleep again, because I woke up with a headache, and a need to find Werner Rathke that consumed me like the keenest hunger. I considered calling the police, but I could imagine how they’d react when I told them about a geriatric invalid trundling off to mete out some justice after fifty years.
He lives around here.
When I got into the office I hit the phone books and found him pretty much immediately, but when I called there was no answer. He lived a matter of a few minutes’ walk away. I had to go.
Perkin’s Rents was a little road connecting Great Peter Street to Victoria Street. The windows of countless apartments were studded into its walls. I found the right door and rang the bell - a scrap of paper with the initials WR pencilled on to it had been Sellotaped above the corresponding number of Rathke’s flat - and when there was no response I rang Rathke’s neighbour, who buzzed me in without asking what it was I wanted. There was a small lift, but it didn’t work when I jabbed the call button. Instead I pushed the timer switch for the stairwell lights and trudged up, trying to ignore the smell of piss and overcooked vegetables. Meals-on-Wheels cartons were piled up outside many of the doors. On one landing I had to step over an unopened bag of mush that was rotted lettuce leaves and a splintered bicycle pump. I got to Rathke’s flat just as the light clicked off. The timer switch up here didn’t work so I knocked at the door, wondering how many clues I would need before I realised he wasn’t in, or was in but very dead.
‘Go away.’ The voice was almost too low to detect, but I heard it. I heard the fear that drove it too.
‘Mr Rathke?’ I called, bending to push in the flaps of the letterbox.
‘Leave me alone. Just go. Go to hell.’
‘Herr Rathke,’ I persisted. ‘I need to speak to you. I know someone you know. I think you’re in danger.’
I was expecting anything: curses, more requests to get out, a demand to know who I was and what danger I thought he was in. I didn’t expect him to start laughing.
‘I’m in danger?’ he said. ‘Me? Me?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Were you aware that Jens Korff—’
The door swung open. It was open long enough for me to tell that here was a man close to death, older than Jens Korff, more frail too, although he could manage to walk. The flat behind him was like a smeared palette of browns. The door was open just long enough for him to say, ‘It’s my wife who is, who was, in danger. He has no interest in killing me. He understands the true meaning of pain. Pain isn’t physical.’ He leaned into me, his face in shadow, his white hair like ice on fire. ‘Pain like this, it lasts a lifetime.’
Then I was alone on the landing. I heard a squeak, and the sound of wood splintering. From above, the lift doors clunked shut and the gears began to grind into action. The lift proper sank into view, its opaque windows concealing something stunted and pink, like an organ suspended in milky preservation fluid. It turned its face to me, but I couldn’t make out any features, beyond the shadow of deep creases scoring it all over.
I hurried down the darkened stairwell, but slipped on the bag of salad and landed heavily on my back. For a minute or so I lay there, pain ricocheting around my spine and legs, the wind knocked from me. It would be the ultimate irony, I thought, if I were to end up an invalid. But gradually movement came back to my numb legs and I was able to lever myself upright. The door downstairs had long since slammed shut. There was nobody on the street when I glanced out of the window. At street level I checked the lift entrance. Two grooves had split the frame, at around the height that a couple of wheels on a wheelchair might be.
I didn’t go back to work. I mooched about the street market on Strutton Ground, looking at the cut-price toiletries and CDs and the demonstration of a magic sponge that could clean any stain, ‘Guaran-bleedin-teed, ladies and gentlemen!’ At the end of the cobbled thoroughfare a flash of sunlight on a steel rim jerked my head upright, but it was just the wheel arch of a taxi as it performed a tight U-turn in the road. I wandered up to the main drag anyway and crossed the road. I thought I might head up to the pub on Dartmouth Street for a pint because I certainly didn’t want to go back to the office. I passed New Scotland Yard and was aiming to nip over Tothill Street when I saw the puddle. Or rather, the tracks made by the thin wheels that had passed through it.
I followed them. And when they ran out, on Birdcage Walk, I didn’t need to follow them any more, because I could see him, struggling to get on to the pavement. I didn’t help him this time. I waited until he’d done it himself and then sauntered into St James’s Park, keeping thirty or forty yards behind him.
He crossed the footbridge and steered left. And stopped. I waited on the bridge to see what he was going to do next, but he just sat there, next to the fence surrounding the lake, while the geese and the ducks tried to work out whether he was there to feed them or just take in the view.
After ten minutes, he checked the walkways around him, but there was nobody in sight. Then he removed his blanket and stood up.
I had been expecting something like that for so long, it wasn’t a shock to me. I just shook my head at his temerity. He was carrying something in a clear polythene bag. Stepping gingerly over the fence, he approache
d the lake and knelt by its edge. My view was obscured by a clump of reeds, but I could see that he’d dumped the bag there when he stood up again. Then back over the fence and into his wheelchair, rearranging that tired old Tartan blanket over his knees. He was about to carry on along the path, in the direction of Buckingham Palace, but he remained for a moment, looking back at the reeds. Eventually he trundled away.
There were thirty or forty bags, I found, nestled in the water, deep into the reeds where the birds couldn’t get at them. The first one I pulled out contained a hank of hair still attached to a portion of greenish scalp. The second one was filled with bloody teeth. The third was a hard knot of meat I tried not to recognise. I didn’t look at any more. I went back to the office to call the police.
But I didn’t make it back. I know I should have gone straight to a phone, but I needed a drink so I went to the pub and sank a Hoftneister and a double Jack. When I came out I knew I had to hear his version first, before it ended up in the newspapers. When I got to Elverton Street, his door was open.
He was lying on the floor of his flat, the pristine cream of his carpet turned into a Pollock by however many litres of blood had sprayed out of his head. I couldn’t believe he was still alive, not with the top of his skull sheared off like a boiled egg. A cushion next to him was smouldering where he had used it to muffle the explosion. His leg was twitching; piss had darkened his beige slacks with a strip that ran from his crotch to his calf. His eyes were all over the place, thank God, because I don’t know what I would have done if he’d focused on me. I leaned over him and he gripped my wrist with appalling strength.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 37
