“No problem is too great for the might of the Reich.”
Talbot was mumbling and twitching at his collar when Krespka again bellowed, “For God’s sake tell him, or we will be here all day.”
The furrowed glances of the irritated officers darted and glassily slanted at the now-passive members of the Timber Guild as Talbot gave them a potted history of the Vorrh’s mythology and its “factual” influence on the industrial economy of the city. When he finished there was the kind of silence that gives the ears the ability to hear the mind ringing. After some minutes the senior officer, Sturmbannführer Heinrich Keital, stood up and growled. The other uniforms stood to attention and started to leave the room. Pathetically, Talbot called towards their retreating backs.
“If there is anything else we can do, we will all be happy to help.” He darted a fleeting glance at Krespka when he said “we.”
Keital stopped and turned on his polished heels.
“You and these other old women will stop telling each other stories to frighten children and build us the track we demand. You will begin tomorrow.”
He then left the room; the sound of him and his colleagues laughing on the stairs was loud.
The guild members were all staring at Talbot.
“I will send a telegram to our people in Germany tomorrow,” he said.
“Tonight,” said Krespka.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The quiet, and indeed invisible to one, Meta continued her daily chores. It gave a centre to her being now that a large part of the previous one had been removed. She laundered and cooked. She cleaned and tidied Kühler Brunnen and those who dwelt there.
The fearless Meta took a long time before she searched for the gun. She knew the others would have hidden it away to spare her feelings and she silently thanked them for their consideration. But it was a valuable tool and not an enemy. It had not been responsible for her father’s death. It had been those creatures who fled below and their Kin in the warehouse. The gun would help her tally them. She chose with great precision to not ask her brother or mistress where they had put it. She wanted to find it herself. It was hers and its discovery would make that more so.
Every remnant of Ishmael had been stuffed into his leather satchel, the one that Nebsuel had taken from the Lohr house. It was lurking in the disused dumbwaiter in the old kitchen. Meta took everything to her little room high in the house, close to the singing wires. She emptied it out on the floor and placed each object in a line. Some things she did not understand but most were like prettier versions of her own or her mother’s possessions. She found the boxes of bullets and the curved loading strip. The Mannlicher was still locked back in its empty position. When she lifted its heavy but perfect balance, no fear was there. No flashback to Mutter’s death. The sleek animal wanted to be forgiven and to work in her hands again. She took the long teeth of the bullets out of their snug nest and held the gums of the feeding strip, questioning their relationship. She pulled and pushed the levers of the gun until it jumped back into its original form, nearly snatching itself out of her hand. After an hour she finally shot a hole in the floor and understood how the machine worked.
The meniscus of the well had only been cherished or carefully ignored. Meta’s decision to use it as target practice was unique and consoling. Nobody heard the shots outside and the water spilled and spat in pain, the Mannlicher proving its perfection. Inside the well chamber the shots boomed and sent justifying echoes into the entire house, trembling the attic wires with distaste. Ghertrude and Thaddeus just looked at each other and said nothing. This was external to their concerns. It was Meta’s business. And she was tempering herself to meet anything in the brooding warehouse of her violation.
“I am going to get Rowena,” she thought. “I know where she is and nothing will stop me bringing her home.”
* * *
—
Meta was grinding her teeth before she even entered the small door in the looming entrance of the warehouse. She had found the keys hanging in the stables. They were now in her small white sweating fist; in the other was the Mannlicher. Over her shoulder was Ishmael’s satchel, no longer the smooth elegant sleeve but a packed and bursting bag with some of the stitching already torn. She kicked the door shut behind her with no intention of creeping about, and the beam of blinding light that had come in with her was nailed back behind the iron-braced shuddering wood. She was here and she wanted it announced.
She listened for sounds. Sounds of movement, life. Sounds of her despoiler, the thing responsible for her father’s death, the stealer of Rowena. Where else would she be taken, who else would take her? Meta listened for her enemy and the enemy of her world. Nothing moved. The building held its breath. How could they keep a child so silent, conceal it so deeply beneath their malice?
“Rowena, Rowena, I have come for you.”
The dignity of absence cringed under Meta’s call.
“Rowena, call to me!”
Everything listened carefully again. Meta stalked forward, swinging the muzzle of the pistol before her. She decided to work from the top down, to search every inch of this vast cavernous building. She scurried up the broad stairs, the ancient bowed wood booming under her hard-shod little feet. She was panting slightly when she reached the utmost hall, the scene of her defilement. The dusty sky was blinding and expansive in the window of the roof light. No rain shadow snakes today. Heat and dryness stifled the air. She looked around her, listening carefully, expecting to glimpse the blue mist and whirring cogs. She stalked all the corridors of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. She examined every part of the room, tapping on the numbered and labelled crates.
341. CUTTLEFISH. SEPIIDAE. SPECIMENS, DISSECTIONS, ARTIFACTS. INK & RECIPES.
It sounded half empty and distant.
342. SAND. GRANULAR VARIATIONS. ORIGINS & GEOLOGICAL SAMPLES.
It sounded solid and heavy.
And so it went until she found the door. It was just after 496 and 497. CAMOUFLAGE & MIMICRY. Examples of natural deception. Appropriate, she thought, without any sense of irony or consideration that her aberrant foe might possess a sense of humour. The door was hidden inside its own blandness and the neutrality of the wall that housed it. There was no handle or keyhole and it was the only door on the entire floor. Meta put down Ishmael’s lopsided satchel and withdrew the stocky crowbar. She looked around the room again before putting the pistol down between her feet. She tried to wedge the dented blade of the iron into the hairline gap of the doorjamb. It would not penetrate. She tried again and again with growing frustration until, enraged, she drew her arm back and swung the iron at the centre of the door with a petulant squawk. The resounding blow sprung the door open and a cool, soothing breeze came from its interior. A spiral stone stair was on the other side. Meta exchanged the iron for the pistol and used its sight to look above and below. The breeze came from the roof with a smear of light. Below was silence and dark. The barrel of the stair seemed much older than the rest of the building. The roughhewn stone looked as if it belonged to another century. The rest of the warehouse must have been built onto it, she thought, like a body growing on an ancient spine, function cladding the nerves. She stepped away, deciding to investigate it only after she had seen everything else. She walked under the roasting skylight and down the wide stairs to the next floor, again reading and touching the crates. Then she stopped dead in her tracks. At the end of the third aisle a huge crate had been opened, its sides leaning askew against the others.
“Come out,” she called, more to hear the firmness of her own voice saturating the space than to get a response. Nothing moved or came back. The case was much bigger than she was and she crept passed its separated sides, the nails still fresh and gleaming along the edges. Her nose was level with its stencilled label as she squeezed past. It said:
1017. EUPHONIA. A GIFT FOR MISTRESS MUTTER.
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Meta stared at it in disbelief, or rather in the sudden belief of the impossible. She dragged her eyes away and stepped forward. Adjacent to the end of the aisle stood an ornate piece of furniture. Its long table form had elegant but sturdy legs with gilding that also covered the carved swags of twisting foliage that graced the table’s sides. Growing out of the tabletop was a mechanism that looked like a gutted or dissected piano, its skeletal remnant elegantly engineered for another purpose. Poised on that was a frame or part of a varnished wooden cage with a large set of leather bellows hanging inside it.
But that is not what Meta pointed the quivering gun at. The long black barrel wobbled its aim at the white, sneering face that floated in the middle of the frame, peering out with a supercilious and aloof indifference. Its white snootiness was amplified by the glossy hanging ringlets of its nineteenth-century wig. It was immobile and androgynous. Meta looked into its dead glass eyes through the sights of the Mannlicher and walked forward. Up close she could see that it was little more than a papier-mâché mask with slim mahogany and brass supports and levers on its blank side. These were there to strengthen it and articulate the eyes and a small part of the mouth. She touched its apathetic hardness and laughed at her own moment of fear. She walked around the table, touching the mechanism and marvelling at its intricacy. She pressed one of the sixteen ivory keys set out like a piano and a small movement passed thought the machine. A piano stool sat nearby, a note pinned to its plushly upholstered seat. It said: Lever A is us. Lever B is you. Lever C is her.
Meta sat on the stool, the note in her hand. Her knee banged into something under the table-like structure. It was a long treadle bar that passed through its middle of the under space and connected upwards to the bulk of the bellows. She liked this machine, knew it to be safe. Its beautiful matter-of-fact perfection was in total opposition to the treacherous uncanniness that hovered crudely in everything else around her. She put her foot on the long pedal and found the brass lever engraved B. She slid it forward and pushed her foot down; the bellows wrinkled and compressed, sending a leathery breath through the entire mechanism. At its full extent she relaxed her leg muscles and the pedal rose up on powerful springs, the bellows sucking in a dry lungful of waiting air. Soon she acquired the exact pressure and rhythm for a constant flow. She ran the fingers of her right hand over the sixteen ivory keys and gripped the raised separate seventeenth key in her left. Cautiously she tested their functions.
“Ioooutnuuugaarrr” spun from the white-faced mask, its stiff jaw gaping in the process. It was the voice of a ghost, her ghost. Her own voice, ghosted. She stopped as goose bumps dappled her pale arms and excitement wriggled up her spine. She pumped and played again, testing each note and articulating them by changing the shape of the artificial glottis with the sliding seventeenth key. The plan of this instrument was to copy the human organs of speech, the several parts being worked by strings and levers instead of tendons and muscles.
“Ioooodooyoo,” the ghosted voice hissed and yodelled as she filled with tingled excitement.
After an hour or more she had stopped looking behind her and was totally concentrated on bending the voice and finding the right pauses and pressures. She had a great affinity with this instrument, and it was warming and responding to her touch and need.
“Oo loook at meee, at meee,” it sang in a voice that sounded like it came from a tomb. Its unnatural resonance had no relationship to healthy communication. More and more words came, sentences were sung through the still floors, the contents of some of the cases vibrating in sympathy. After a while she stopped and looked at the brass levers with engraved letters. She pulled back the B one she had been using and slid the A one forward. She then played the same sequence of notes and articulations. The voice that issued forth made her shiver and brought bile to her mouth. She stopped before it reached the end of the last word, a half breath swilling in the wheezing bellows. The voice of them was horrible, a ghost that you never wanted to hear. But it had been heard by the warehouse, the cases holding its resonance in their multiple dimensions. The place was waking. Meta pulled the A key back and was about to insert the one that sounded like her, but her hand, driven by curiosity, pushed the C key into place. She pumped the pedal again, closed her eyes, and played the same articulation as before. The “her” voice was very young, uncertain, and high; it made Meta want to cry. But that was not good enough; neither was the designated “her.” Nor any of the other catalogues or descriptions that these monsters intended to imprison her or the child in. Her fingers flew across the keyboard and the levers. She quickly worked to find the slippery vowels for her purpose, not theirs.
“Ru en naa, roou en na, row en nar,” said the thin dead face.
Meta was playing faster and faster and the name was being called out with growing emphasis, meeting its echo returning from the far corners of the no-longer-inert building.
“She cannot leave,” said another voice on the same floor. It spoke like them. Meta grabbed the gun and stood up, waiting for the attack.
“She cannot leave,” it said again, and this time she had it placed. It was coming from the opposite end of the shelved hall in the east corner. She was standing in the west corner. Without a moment of doubt she scurried in a fast looping, skiing motion down the central aisle until she almost reached its end. The crates were smaller here and she stood beneath a stacked tower of four of them as they gave out a desiccated pungent odour through the dry warm wood.
1614–1618 DISPERSAL: LARGE SEED HEADS. OCCIDENT / ORIENT / AMERICAS / OTHER.
She peered around the stack’s corner and was amazed to see another instrument, identical to the one she had just left. No one or thing was near it. She slunk along the shelves to get closer, the gun nibbling the charge in the air. She moved to the seat and looked at the keys. The lever A was engaged. A rueful impish compulsion made her pull it out and replace it with her own voice in B. She smiled at the conceit until the voice sang out: “She cannot leave and you must go.”
It came from the other euphonia. Her instrument, the one that had been assigned to her. Something had changed places with her. Ran parallel with her. Changing ends and the lever there, altering the voice. A great outrage took hold of her common sense and toyed with it like a cat does a mouse. She felt duped, cheated, and robbed. How dangerous those little snags of pride that once let in will peck away at all worthy achievement and substantial knowledge with an eyeless ferocity defined only by their own momentum. The flock that harried Meta made her blind to the game that she had entered until the game told her in a benediction of spite: “We grow tired of your intrusion, play your farewells.”
She wanted to shoot it, them, the “we” that was speaking from the other machine, but the bullets would not rend sound like it did flesh, like they did her father. The return of those bloody bullets suddenly scared the flock of snags away and she was back with her icy vengeance at the keyboard of the instrument before her.
“I groow tired ovyour yoo, bring Ruwena to me,” Meta played.
“She will never leave, be gone.”
“Bwing her or I wolldestroy yoo awl.”
There was a pause while both of the artificial voices settled between the rows of crates. A pause where the machines remained pumped, their swollen leather lungs separated by rivalry and thousands of night-boxed objects and explanations. During the pause Meta opened the bulging satchel and purposefully placed its contents on all the nonoperational parts of the euphonia’s tabled surface. She then took out a stumpy candle and placed it on an island of screwed-up paper. She lit its thick wick. She put it on the nearest of the six Kilner jars that she had taken from her mother’s larder. The six sweetly sealed containers that normally glowed with jam or chimed with pickle now only slunk, stinking and clear with petrol. She unscrewed the farthest jar and let its scent tease the now-distant flame. The Mannlicher sat next to the keyboard.
The
exchanges now changed into something like a conversation, the words and questions, the threats and answers calling back and forth as the sun lolled across the sky and the shadows inside dragged themselves between the huge heated spaces that separated the talking furniture. Occasionally, between the gaps, Meta would tiptoe along the aisles to see if she could get a glimpse of the other player, but never with any success and never without the gun in her hand, vaguely wavering back at the jars as she craned her head to see nothing.
Meta was beginning to believe that Rowena was dead. Who or whatever was operating the machine refused to mention the child without its sounding like a specimen or a used commodity. What would she tell Ghertrude? Then out of the blue it said, “We will show you the child, but I will speak for it and it must not be touched.”
Meta agreed, and after another moment of silence a slight shuffling and a faint, high-pitched squeaking could be heard somewhere in the middle of the stacks, equidistant to the speakers.
Someone was approaching.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Nebsuel knew that Gotfrid Droisch was complicit in Sholeh’s death. The answer was simple, fierce, and impatient: Droisch and all things Droischish were to be erased. The insult and blasphemy of this man and his true-blood wife were a stain. The job of cleansing was given to the Travesty: a notable, fierce, and trusted person living in the city where such attributes were rare. Nebsuel would send him a message to explain the vileness of the transgression, and he would make his own decision about the punishment. He was to be trusted because it was known that his sense of retribution and chastisement was equivalent to theirs. Some said greater, if such a thing could be believed.
The Travesty, whose astonishing beauty was hidden beneath a hood that covered his entire body. A single piece of perfect silken cloth dropped over him, from the crown of his head to his corkscrewed ankles, eyeholes cut into the cloth, like a pantomime ghost. A wide-brimmed hat put on over it to keep it all in place. He stood in a beautiful night, in a street outside the skinners’ house. The stars were extraordinary and the air perfumed with jasmine and stillness. Even the wretched silhouette of this shunned house seemed to glow against the rich celestial darkness, and the scent that seeped from inside this dwelling was contoured to something rare, like an exotic musk. Nebsuel had told him of the blasphemies that had been committed here, in his beloved Essenwald, and the consequence that they carried. The news of it had made his wrath force his splendour to the breaking point. He had known of the rumours before the crime, but he’d had no idea that the slaying of Sholeh had been the responsibility of the ugly couple that now slept here, sweetly, in their wicked bed.
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