The Night Sheriff, page 5
But it quickly became apparent that these were a different breed of German than those we had seen in the last war. Much more grim and efficient, and a lot less tolerant of interference by the locals, and that was saying something.
They had obviously studied the notes those military types had taken years ago, so when the area again became a hotbed of rather unnerving and effective partisan activity, they were easily able to deduce the center of that activity. But whereas we had assumed that they would go around us, as they had learned to do twenty years before, this time they decided to eliminate us. One of the differences between a war fought for economic reasons and one fought for ideological ones, I suppose.
The initial artillery barrage had started just as I was forced to retire to my hidden cavern by the dawn. Now, I am not entirely unaware of my surroundings, even at the height of the day, and thus in my dreaming, I felt the earth shake. The barrage continued right up until the first of the Panzers crested the roads up to the town and opened fire. Behind them came almost a thousand foot soldiers, all determined to take no prisoners.
Mr. Mortimer later told me that my people accounted for themselves very well, and that the German losses were very high. I don’t know. He might have just been trying to make me feel better. But no matter how well they fought, the Germans had tanks and we did not. The outcome was inevitable. Within six hours, everyone in the town had been hunted down, and every building had been blasted into rubble. The army then left a token force and marched off with the sure knowledge of a job well done, and a message sent. The remaining troops then cleared a space in the town square, set up some perimeter guards, settled in, and began to search to discover the secret behind our little village’s ability to strike at them so effectively.
At the first blush of dusk, they found it. Or rather, I found them.
I’m not proud of what I did to those men. Pride should accompany a sense of accomplishment. What I did was purely for revenge, a motive that I had always publicly discouraged, as, in a small town, I had seen that it can so easily lead to a never-ending cycle of tit for tat that poisons generations. Well, there would certainly be no chance of that here.
I ignored the sentries and started with the men who were off duty, most of whom were engaged in that time-honored soldier’s hobby—casual looting.
The first one was a grizzled Sergeant, who had no doubt served in the army during the Great War. He was rummaging through the remains of the merchant Zîpốtskhin’s once palatial abode and showed his experience by confining his efforts to small items, such as cash and jewelry. I let him scream for an unnervingly long time, and when his compatriots arrived, they found his mouth filled with coins and his eyes replaced with a pair of emeralds that the Lady Zîpốtskhin had been quite proud of.
The next was a rather officious-looking young fellow dressed in a black uniform examining the town records. This was the first time that I encountered a member of the Schutzstaffel, the elite organization within the German army that was responsible for a large percentage of the German atrocities. Today most people just know them as the SS. I knew nothing about them at this point, and so I must confess that I killed him much too quickly. An error I would never repeat, especially after I took the time to examine the man’s essence. But the red of his viscera looked very striking against that black and silver uniform, and I was quite pleased with the effect it had on those who discovered him.
The rest of the night proceeded along a similar vein, punctuated with a few highlights, such as when I got a sentry to gun down one of his fellows, or when I prevented a sensitive young man from killing himself. No easy way out for him. I regard life as something rather precious, and the way he was begging for it by the end did my heart good.
Oh, and I fed well. By the end of the evening, I was so bloated with their fears that when I finally confronted their leader, as he made his last desperate stand huddled in the remains of the little church, I was able to project the combined fears of his own men, who had relied on and believed in him, into his heart even as I stripped his life away. I honestly believe that I may have scarred his soul so badly that it will never reincarnate, which is all to the good, in my opinion.
But, when it was finished, I saw that all I had really done was sully the ground of my beloved village with yet another score of mangled corpses. Then I realized that there was no one left to care. Everyone I knew was still gone. This was something I had gotten used to, over the centuries, but this time, another generation carrying their blood and memory would not be rising to take their place.
The Grumbly Witch had arrived in my little village at last, and I had been unable to stop her.
I found myself sitting on the edge of the fountain in the town square, staring at the dismembered head of Demeter, the statue that had, for over five hundred years, been standing demurely at the center of said fountain. I was remembering the day it been installed, a gift by the merchant Ǩrếmetḳin, who had had the thing hauled here all the way from Rome itself. There had been a festival to celebrate its unveiling, and the local girls had secretly sewn up outfits influenced by Demeter’s rather skimpy toga and had appeared in them to perform a final dance number. The effect, when worn by actual people, was nothing short of scandalous. But Ǩrếmetḳin loved it, and even Father Ɵrkësṕatstḯn, that old reprobate, had only pretended to be outraged, and every one of those girls was married to a well-connected young man before first snow. Demeter, or variations thereof, became a popular name in those parts for three generations.
But there would be no more generations, and the fountain was in ruins. The water was spreading out over the slate and ceramic tiles of the town square, puddling around the bodies and flowing into the craters that marred the ground.
So I was sitting on that fountain, fastidiously cleaning my claws with a German bayonet, and idly wondering if I would actually bother to seek shelter before the sun rose.
Now you may be wondering how this tale of old-world death and destruction leads to my living several thousand miles away in an amusement park. That connection was made now, on this, the worst day of my life, when I met a man who did not exist: Mortimer Zenon.
In our isolated village, we had never heard of the American Bartholomew Zenon, the beloved showman and animation pioneer who, through a rare combination of utopian ideals, artistic vision, and a cutthroat business acumen that took no prisoners, would build a company unlike any ever before seen on Earth.
The aforementioned Mr. Mortimer was the third Zenon brother. Many people have been surprised to learn that there was a second Zenon brother, Mr. Raphael Zenon. I shall go into more detail about him later.
All of that said, the aforementioned third brother, Mr. Mortimer, achieved his anonymity honestly, by working very hard at removing any trace of himself from the general records. This was a lot easier to do back in the early 1930s, when everything officially written about your average person was inscribed upon less than a ream of paper, which was scattered piecemeal throughout the world in assorted dusty file cabinets.
To this day, I cannot understand why Mr. Mortimer dared to approach me, especially after everything he had seen. But approach he did. I looked up, and there he was, a nondescript-looking fellow with mouse-brown hair, wearing an outfit that in those tumultuous days would be noted and immediately forgotten anywhere between here and Tirana. His hands were where I could see them, and he had divested himself of any weapons, which, when I saw him putting them back from where he had carefully stashed them, must have taken him no small amount of time.
When he spoke, it was obvious that whoever had tutored him in our language had been one of those republicans that had backed the failed coup against our glorious Queen about thirty years ago. They were all from the more industrialized lowlands and tended to pronounce V as B, and then wondered why everyone else laughed at them. I’d heard that the survivors had emigrated to America en masse.
“Salutations, my good fellow,” he said. “Please don’t kill me; I am not with these people.” I could read that he was terrified, to be sure, but more important, I found no trace of guilt (astonishing, considering what I learned of him later), and so I merely stared at him, and listened to him talk. “I am from America,” he said, pointing somewhere towards the West.
I considered this. “I didn’t know the Americans were involved in the fighting.” I thought some more. “And, if you are an American, shouldn’t you to be wearing a bigger hat?” I held my hands about a yard apart. “A Cow Boy hat. I’ve seen pictures.”
He paused, and then shrugged. “I had to leave it at home, along with my horse. I don’t want the Germans to know that anyone from America is here.”
Mr. Mortimer was—well, I guess you’d have to call him a spy, of sorts. He was never fond of that particular label but was always loath to choose another. Today people are accustomed to thinking that there are secret levels of clandestine operations that never make their way into a government’s official budgets, but in the first third of the twentieth century, this was a new idea, and as his brother was a pioneer in the field of entertainment, so Mr. Mortimer was a pioneer in covert operations.
“May I sit?” he asked. Silently I indicated a spot on the fountain wall, and, unhesitatingly, he settled in beside me. Together we regarded the carnage in the square. Eventually, he began to speak. “While my country is not yet in this war, my superiors are convinced that we soon will be. I have been sent to see what it is that we will be fighting against.” He poked a German with his foot. “And I must say that we are all rather distressed at just how good the German army is.”
He glanced at me. “So when the German High Command labels this area as a particularly worrying one because of its surprisingly long history of successful resistance to outside invasion, I was bery interested.” He sighed and leaned on his knees. “I was already on my way here when I learned that the Germans were about to attack.” He looked directly at me. “I tried to get here in time to warn you, but they have clamped down on civilian travel, and …” He made a weak gesture. “I am so sorry.”
I could tell he was sincere. Actually I could always tell whenever he was being honest, which was a great source of vexation to him. But whenever he got mad, I pointed out that it was due to this ability that he was still alive. That always annoyed him as well.
He then stood up and faced me. “When our people first crawled out of the Great Mountain, the First King, Tak, stayed behind …”
I stared up at him in astonishment as I realized that he was beginning the traditional bereavement ceremony that our village used at the death of a family member. It was then that I cried, something I had not done for centuries, as I realized that this town, which had contained every earthly remnant of my family, as well as all of the other families that I had adopted as mine, that I had looked over and protected, tended and nurtured, had been exterminated, root and branch, and that there was no longer anyone on Earth that I could count on not to recoil from me and what I was. I cried for them, and for myself. Who, I wondered, would keep me in touch with the remains of my all-too-fragile humanity?
Suddenly I felt arms around me, clasping me tightly. It was Mr. Mortimer, who had finished the oration, and had actually sat beside me and enfolded me in the traditionally accepted “Hug of Death” while I wept, like a stoic uncle holding a child who has seen his family taken from him. Even as I cried, I marveled. We were not really a very demonstrative people, to the point where flagrant public hand-holding between spouses had been the subject of thunderous sermons from the pulpit. No one had willingly touched me for centuries, and with a shock that redoubled my sobs, I realized how much I had missed it. The touch of other people, in tenderness, in sport, in anger—simply as an acknowledgement that you are another person—is such an essential part of being human that you do not think of it. When it is absent, you do not realize what it is that you are missing, even as its lack is felt. And then, suddenly, to have this basic need unexpectedly filled so selflessly, regardless of the risk involved (and Mr. Mortimer must have known how insanely dangerous a thing this was to do), was overwhelming.
I do not know how long we sat there, but when at last I looked up, the fingers of the dawn were beginning to touch the top of the mountains. I felt remarkably better.
I took a deep breath. “I will not kill you.”
Mr. Mortimer visibly relaxed. “I am bery glad to hear it.” He took a deep breath. “Would you like a job?” And thus began my time working with Mr. Mortimer as an unofficial “consultant” for the Americans.
I found my time with Mr. Mortimer to be eye-opening, to say the least. As I’d said, I’d never traveled much. After my last attempt, I had settled into my life in the village, and had taken comfort from its habits, rhythms, and rituals that I had learned to know, day after day, year after year, century after century.
The first time we arrived in an actual city, Mr. Mortimer was positively embarrassed. He said I gawped like a country bumpkin, and he had to steer me around with a firm grip under my arm like the exasperated parent of an oversized, addlepated child. I can believe it. I was completely overwhelmed. Oh, not by the things around me, even up in our isolated little town we had seen several auto-mobile machines grinding and stinking and looking very fine as they passed through, and while the height of the buildings was quite alarming, I always had the memory of my beloved mountains to measure them against.
No, what gobsmacked me were the people. Vast, never-ending, rolling crowds of people that filled the streets and the markets—even after midnight! And they were all strangers! A thousand different skin colors! Outlandish ways of dress! A roaring wall of undecipherable languages—and the emotions! An unchecked seething ocean of emotions, containing everything the human mind is capable of experiencing, flowing out at full strength. I have found that when two people do not share a common language, they allow their emotions greater expression, as these can often convey essential messages that mere words cannot. I was buffeted from every direction, and it was a stew well larded with assorted fears. Not just the usual pedestrian fears one finds in any large gathering but fears that were exotic to me—fears of crowds, of strangers, of being discovered, of not being found; fears about the future, the past, of strange languages or music or false idols or unclean food; about what they had done, or failed to do, about what would happen to them, or what they would be forced to do.
Imagine you’ve eaten nothing but your own home cooking for a hundred years, and then you are force-fed a scrumptious buffet of exotic, foreign delicacies. You quickly become aware that you should taper off a bit, or better yet, sit back with a charcoal biscuit and a cool cloth over one’s eyes, but viscerally—oh my goodness! Tastes you’ve never experienced! Subtle nuances on old fears that you had thought well explored that reveal delightful new complexities making you appreciate them afresh! Toothsome, sweet, and delivered to you guilt free!
By the time we lurched into our hotel, I thought I was going to die. As soon as we entered our room, I collapsed onto the bed just long enough to regurgitate a pool of half-digested dreads. It was with a rather ill grace, I thought, that Mr. Mortimer managed to haul me up and stuff me into a lovely cedar-scented wardrobe from which I did not emerge for three days. An inauspicious beginning, to be sure.
After that, Mr. Mortimer and I spent a great deal of time just talking, interspersed with frequent nocturnal excursions. He wanted to know what I could and could not do, and what could and could not harm me. Not knowing what I am was certainly a bit of a problem, but it was a fascinating experience, and I learned many things about myself, such as when I discovered that I could hide inside a person’s shadow, something I had been completely unaware of. It would prove very handy in the years to come.
Our first practical exercise took place in a small, out-of-the-way town in Silesia. It had been a part of the German Empire since the 1700s, but after a rather extended period of political back and forth, it had wound up a part of Poland in the 1920s. Naturally, Germany now wanted it back. Why, you may ask, would anyone care? Well, if you did bother to ask, you would hear an awful lot about ethnic tradition, and historical precedent, and natural geographic boundaries. Hardly anyone would deign to mention the plethora of gold, silver, copper, and coal mines located beneath all of that national pride.
When we first appeared, on a rather stormy night, we were just another pair of refugees from a rather unfortunate town upriver who, like many others, were displaced by the war. We found local work as night laborers, but despite Mr. Mortimer’s quite excellent grasp of the language, and papers that convinced the authorities, the locals held us a distance. Possibly because they were aware that we were not from where we said we were, or possibly because they found me too disturbing. What can I say? I was still learning how to hide that I wasn’t human. Overall, I think I did a rather good job. Unfortunately, I must concede that I made a particularly strange and unnerving human, and thus our problem. This was unacceptable, as we had arranged to meet with some locals, but everyone steered clear of us. We argued about the best way to circumvent this problem but were not able to come to a satisfying consensus.
Eventually, Mr. Mortimer decided to spend a boisterous evening in the local drinking establishment attempting to cultivate some bon homme.
I decided to be a bit more proactive. I waited until midnight, used my abilities to surreptitiously collect the four most hated German officers, arranged their corpses together in rather embarrassing positions, snuffed out the gas lamps—my first use of this particular trick—and then joined Mr. Mortimer. The small, timed explosive device he had taught me how to use worked perfectly, drawing the attention of the town’s firefighters without disturbing my tableaux. After the initial uproar, the German authorities said remarkably little about the whole thing, and all of a sudden, everyone wanted to be our friend, if only because our alibis were so ironclad. Things proceeded remarkably smoothly after that.
