The Night Lies Bleeding, page 24
part #5 of Craw Series
Von Knobelsdorff had stood so close to her as she suffered that it had hampered Max’s movements. He recalled his elbow knocking against von Knobelsdorff’s chest as he used the saw. What he did remember was the woman’s voice as he’d started doing what he had to do.
‘Against thee. What thou do is against thee.’
Max didn’t understand the words because they weren’t uttered in his language. They weren’t uttered in any language the old woman understood either, though she framed the words perfectly. It was an incantation brought back from the Egyptian wilderness by Peseshet, priestess of Set, god of the desert, famine and destruction. A jackal-headed man had taught the words to her in her meditations and starvations, she said. It had been handed down the generations, daughter to daughter, until it had reached the old woman.
The gypsy had said she could do no magic. Who can say, though, what magic is? It hovers at the edge of the day to day like light reflected from water, like something seen from the corner of the eye but vanquished by the full gaze. So she could no more do it than she could do a dream, do love, do hate.
‘Is that noise normal?’ von Knobelsdorff had said. Even he seemed to find the woman’s words discomfiting.
‘Quite normal, eh, Max?’ said Haussmann, with a chummy wink.
Max just went on sawing, blank and distant. From somewhere not too far away in the castle, another saw joined in, in a hellish duet. The EEG machine squealed and scratched. The noise dominated his senses, draining sight, banishing taste and smell. Only feeling, that vibration in his arm, remained clear. He was hoping to work quickly, to kill the woman before her suffering became too great. The point of the experiment, however, was to keep her alive.
Baila Brono Aljenicato – the old woman had a name – looked up at him through her bloodied eyes. All she had said so far was an incantation. The psychologist Jung might have argued that it had the power of an ancient archetype, that it referred to the deep stories and ideas buried in humanity’s collective psyche and – though neither the utterer nor the listeners knew its meaning – it had some power on the subconscious of those who heard it, and he might have been right. But it was only a prelude.
She uttered a curse, a proper curse, one that had been marinated in fifty centuries of hatreds and resentments, that had festered beneath ill-treatment, exclusion and pogrom, and that had been allowed crawling into the light of day perhaps ten times in all those years.
Craw, who was the victim of a curse himself, might even have been able to tell the experimenters where it came from, given enough thought on the subject. They, of course, would only have been interested in how to do it, which is a different thing entirely. There is no ‘how to’ with a curse. In fact, wanting to curse someone normally guarantees that it will fail. The curse comes out only when you’re trying to hold it in. To fly out, then, it needs the pressure of restraint. Curses have a habit of exacting a price on those that make them, and no one who didn’t hate as deeply as it is possible to hate would ever be willing to pay it. But Baila Brono Aljenicato, whose children and grandchildren had been taken to the camp with her, and who had seen enough horrors for ten of her long lifetimes, was willing to continue suffering long after she was dead, as long as her enemies were suffering with her.
She struggled against herself, though; she tried to bite down what was rising in her throat, but the hate in her was so overwhelming that she feared more to hold it in than to let it go. A loathing, primordial and deep and utterly unstoppable, burst from her like pus from a boil.
To Max, the language of the priestesses of the Typhonic Beast sounded like something being shredded, some grinding machine breaking itself apart on a loose cog. He assumed it was just the effects of the agonies the woman was suffering. Was this the sound of magic? Was there any power in what the woman said? Who knows? The kind of people who inspire others to curse them are very often those whose lives are heading for ruin anyway. So it would never be clear if all that followed was a result of the curse, or if the curse was simply a marker on the path of a man’s collapse.
Had he been able to understand what she was saying, Max may actually have taken it for a blessing. In fact, it was the worst curse humanity had managed in all the millennia of trying.
‘May you find what you are looking for,’ she said.
24 An Artist in Residence
The door opened on to a cramped hallway. The house bore all the signs of disuse – no carpet on the floor, only scraps of newspaper. There was very little light, but Craw’s eyes needed hardly any. He breathed in. There were two people inside: Arindon and one other. Then he noticed another note in the smell. No. There were more than two people. There were others, too, encased in a sediment of fear – sweat, blood, piss and shit. They, though, were not alive.
There was a coat in the hall. He touched it, drank in its psychic residue. Longing, despair, frustration and envy seemed to drip from it.
Craw walked down the hallway, not bothering to tread carefully under the noise of the blitz. To his left was a doorway. He looked into a room. Even to his eyes the room was dark. The shutters had been put up with the blackout in mind and the only light came in obliquely from the front door, which he had not closed behind him. Craw suddenly remembered he’d taken the lighter from Jacques. He took it from his pocket and sparked the flame into life. He could see the room was clearly the business part of the former artist’s supplies shop. There were shelves stacked with papers and paints and there was a counter. Clearly it hadn’t been used as a shop very recently, because a large desk with a drawing board on it had been placed in the public area. Someone was using it as a studio.
An explosion near the house seemed to shake it to its foundations and, for a second, Craw had the sensation of being at sea, like when a boat unexpectedly strikes a sandbank. He went into the room and looked about him.
The room was disordered, with the remains of dinners and half-drunk cups of tea lying around on the floor, along with papers, discarded bills, an umbrella, cardboard boxes, old paintbrushes in jam jars. Craw shivered, with the revulsion of his centuries of fastidiousness. The emotion came back to him as if muffled. Operating in his conventional human reality was possible but difficult for him, a sensation like listening to music underwater – some aspects quieted, some oddly amplified.
His wolf nature was rising up in him and the smells of the night were livid in his mind. They seemed to unlock a hoard of memories inside him. He saw cities burning in his mind, heard the laughter of girls, recalled Yale and Cambridge in the smell of chalk. Everything in the world now related directly to him. He was the beast, the creature that relates only to himself, and the odours of the night pulled colours from his mind – the bright shields of his kinsmen, gold, nights that blazed with fire and days in the blinding ice. It was as if all that he had done and seen was rising up in him as the final expression of his dying humanity, just as the buildings around him blazed red and green in their own moment of change. Tomorrow, they would be something else.
Craw went to the drawing board. There was nothing on it, but next to it was a sketch pad. In the flickering light of the lighter he could just make out, on the cover, a thumb print. It was difficult to see what colour the print was, but he didn’t need to see. He could smell. It was blood, reeking of excitement. He opened the book.
Sketches of the reveelede, read a title page.
Craw gave a start as he leafed through the book. There were ten or fifteen illustrations of the pebble that Balby had showed him, but this time, the area around the hand was not scratched away. He could see clearly now that the hand was torn and bloody at the wrist and around it were the jaws of a wolf.
A word sprang up in his mind, a word Arindon had used. ‘Brother.’
Craw let the flame of the lighter die and leant forward on the desk in darkness. His hand touched something cold and metal beneath the drawing board. He pressed the lighter again and looked to see what it was. It was a wood plane. He took it out and held it in front of him. The odour of blood and stress seeped from it, though there was as much stress on the handle as there was on the blade of the plane.
A normal human being might have been able to smell the putrefying Mr Arindon by now. To Craw his presence was enormous, almost tangible, like the gaze of a million bats falling on the back of your neck in a sightless cave. Craw did not turn to face Arindon when he sensed him in the doorway behind him. He instinctively wanted his opponent to commit himself. Arindon did not disappoint, springing across the floor at Craw’s back. He was slightly taken aback by the man’s speed, but managed to turn quickly enough to surprise Arindon and strike at his weapon arm, breaking the wrist and causing the shard of the Moonsword to go clattering to the floor. Craw deliberately didn’t try to stop Arindon’s movement, but allowed his charge to continue on to a firm head-butt.
Arindon collapsed to the floor and then Craw was at his throat, Arindon kicking and spitting and turning to throw him off. Craw fought for control of Arindon and of himself. He couldn’t afford to kill this man, but he ached to do so. Arindon shoved his desperate fingers into Craw’s face to fight him off, but Craw bit at them, taking a ring finger off at the knuckle.
‘No, Endamon, no, no, Vali.’
The name Vali seemed to shiver like a cymbal in his mind. His last transformation had jarred so much in his head that he no longer thought of himself by that name. It was as if the shattered pieces of his mind were reassembling. He was seeing things that had been locked away to him for centuries. He saw his own face in front of him, but weathered and aged.
‘No, Endamon, no, Vali, no, Jehan, no, Loys!’
These names were his too, he knew.
Arindon writhed underneath him, but to no use. Craw had him by the throat and was choking the life from him. He could not contain himself. This time the wolf spoke as if from within him. It was as if he could feel its muzzle protruding from his own face.
Finyshhe himme, sir, slake mye thyrstss.
Craw was no longer human, not even animal, just a hunger encased in flesh. He sank his teeth into Arindon’s arm, tearing away a gob of meat.
Then there was a mild thump below his shoulder blade and a warm, wet feeling began to spread down his back. Craw felt dizzy as one of his lungs filled with blood. He gave a final squeeze on Arindon’s neck and then let go, turning to see a completely naked man clasping the metal shard in a cloth he was using as an improvised handle. Craw felt stunned, unable to act. The man stabbed the Moonsword into him again, this time into the solar plexus.
Craw became detached from reality, suddenly fascinated by the appearance of his attacker. The man was smeared in a red and grey pigment that picked out patterns of raised flesh on his body. Why had Craw not realised before? Why hadn’t he seen? The colouration made it so obvious. The marks on the body were meant to represent an animal’s fur. Those on the man’s face, picked out in black, white and red, were monstrous jaws. Craw nearly laughed.
In front of him was a werewolf, or someone trying to become one. His senses swam as he thought of the irony of dying at the hands of such a creature. He waited for unconsciousness, but unconsciousness didn’t come, just a sort of paralysis.
The painted man kicked Craw hard in the guts and Craw fell forward onto the floor. Craw looked up into the blackened eyes of the carnival creature above him.
The man spoke:
‘When the Gods saw that the Wolf was bound fully, they took the chain that was wed to the fetter, and which is called “Thin”, and passed it through a great rock – it is called “Scream” – and stuck the rock deep down into the earth. Then they took a great stone and drove it yet deeper into the earth and used that stone for a fastening-pin. The Wolf gaped horribly, and thrashed and strove to bite them; they thrust into his mouth a certain sword: the hilt caught in his lower jaw, and the point in the upper; that is his gag. He howls hideously, and drool runs out of his mouth: that is the river called Ván. “Hope”; there he lies till the Twilight of the Gods.’
A stick of bombs fell very close, turning the roof of the house into the skin of a gigantic drum.
‘The All-father is here, come to offer his sacrifice to the fates and end this war!’ said the man. ‘He is here! Bind him!’
Arindon, seemingly oblivious to the pain of his injuries, took a pair of heavy handcuffs from the shelf behind the counter and secured Craw’s arms behind his back. Craw felt cut off from his power of movement. All he could focus on was that shard of metal protruding from his chest.
He felt himself pulled to his feet. He was shoved forward into the hall, which flickered with the light of the burning city. Then he was kicked down the stairs into a basement.
He looked up. About the room, hung like deflated balloons, were human faces, stripped from the bone. There were three fleshless corpses on the floor of the room, stinking, discarded like a scholar might discard the notes that had led to some dead end of thought. The walls of the basement were covered with runes smeared out in blood. Craw read them: Transformation, Strength, Hail. Hail, the thing between fire and ice, the rune of betweens. And there too, like an N with a line through it, was the Wolfsangel rune. Placed with its bars horizontally, it meant ‘wolf trap’. Upright, as it was, it meant something else: ‘Werewolf’.
Craw felt something go over his head. It was a noose. The rope tightened about his neck and he was pulled forward face down. Then he was rolled on to his back. Arindon’s ragged smile was above him, tying the rope to some stake in the floor. His feet were secured and he felt a weight on his chest, but it was no weight, just that shard of sword stuck in him.
Craw let out a gasp and felt something sharp being thrust into his mouth. When he tried to close his mouth again, he couldn’t. Something like a nail or a pin had been wedged between his palate and his bottom jaw, keeping his mouth open.
‘He is present,’ said the painted man. ‘In this destruction, he is present. Begin.’
Arindon let out a torn chant in the Norse of Craw’s people.
I know I hung on a wind-torn tree
nine long nights,
Wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
then I fell back from there.
Craw tried to cough as the noose tightened about his neck. The painted man looked down at him.
‘I shall tickle his heart.’ He reached forward and took the protruding end of the Moonsword shard and agitated it.
Craw felt as if he was going to vomit. Things were becoming clear to him, illusions peeling away. He could tell that, whatever this strange painted individual had achieved in the past, he was achieving nothing now. He was in the middle of a magical ceremony but no magic was there. The man facing him wasn’t a sorcerer but a murderous fool. And yet, something strange was beginning to happen to him. From far away, beneath the bombs, he thought he heard a woman’s voice singing.
25 The Well
Mrs Daecher had lost her necklace, she told Max when she met him in a corridor. It was quite a valuable thing – a single ruby set in silver – but it also had sentimental value for her, because her husband had bought it for her to celebrate his induction into the SS. She was mystified as to where it had gone because it had not left her rooms. They were serviced by Witness cleaners who were noted for their honesty. She left the door open during the day because it never occurred to her to lock it. Who in the SS was dishonourable enough to spend time opportunistically checking whose door was open and whose wasn’t?
Mrs Cullen, too, had lost some jewellery – a beautiful diamond eternity ring that she thought had cost her husband a year’s wages, but had cost him only some bread and water, as he was in the envied position of senior administrator at Sachsenhausen. She had gone to buy dresses in Paderborn with Mrs Voller, and somehow it had become lost while she was trying them on. There had been quite a hunt for it but nothing had been discovered.
Then there was Mrs Braun’s Tiffany bracelet. She had left her house in the camp to go to dinner with the Haussmanns in the castle, but when she arrived it was missing. She’d asked Mrs Voller if she had seen it, because she had bumped into her in the courtyard as she got out of the staff car. They’d chatted briefly and arranged to meet to play tennis. Had she dropped it then? Mrs Voller didn’t think so.
Max sat eating his dinner opposite his splendidly adorned wife. She had bought a beautiful pale blue evening dress with lace at the shoulders, and she wore her hair tied in a knot at the top. A diamond bracelet sparkled on her right wrist, the wristwatch on her left, and at her throat was the blood ruby, catching the candlelight like a deep wine. She was unearthly beautiful, he thought.
‘Was von Knobelsdorff pleased with you?’ she asked.
Max bit into a potato. His appetite had been disturbed at lunch but now, at dinner, he was very hungry. He couldn’t muster the energy to reply to his wife.
‘Was von Knobelsdorff pleased? Can we get rid of this crocodile? It’s a grotesque circumstance to have to live like this.’
‘Von Knobelsdorff is grotesque. He is a lunatic,’ said Max.
‘I’m sure you exaggerate.’
Max looked at his wife and, instead of cherishing and loving her beauty and her kindness, for the first time in his life it felt like an affront, a sick joke that it should exist in such a world of barbarity. He wanted to smash it.
‘Today, on the Senior Storm Command Leader’s instructions, I tortured to death a pleasant old gypsy lady. In the next weeks we will locate family pairs. In some experiments we will not tell, say, a brother that we are killing his sister, in some we will. We will assess the reactions and the sharpness of any psychic phenomena produced. There will be no psychic phenomena, because there are no psychic phenomena. In the meantime, von Knobelsdorff will be in the north tower with eleven other lunatics, meditating around the severed head of an SS colleague in order to put themselves in contact with forces unspecified, unknown and non-existent. Do you want more wine?’
