Red Snow (2017), page 15
“I am,” she said in a voice that scarcely left her tattered lips, “the stuff of nightmares. I am the scarecrow glimpsed at twilight, and the empty gaze of a charnel-house corpse. If you look at me and do not feel fear, then you are already dead. But let me tell you this—terrible though I am, there is nothing I have done in my long twilight which compares with the deeds I have witnessed today. No, you are not monsters. You may think you are, but you aren’t. The monster is the idea, the theory, the belief, that cares more for itself than it does for life.
“When, citizens, did you last laugh simply because you felt like laughing? When did you hug your children? When did you last look up and smile at the sun, or touch a leaf? If you had done any of these things, you would know that life is far too precious to be wasted on some unattainable goal…”
An incredible thing had started to happen to Sibylla as she spoke. Her presence had strengthened, and the vision of what she was began to change. The drooling rents in her cheeks melded. Her scorched and blackened flesh began to reform. She raised her body, straightened her shoulders. Her ghastly eyes cleared to their full, green, glorious dark. Even the impression of her hair began to reform like spun gold. Moment by moment, miracle by miracle, she was falling back through time and his portraits of her.
During all of this, the Chief Prosecutor had remained silent. Now, he stepped forward.
“This creature—”
“No!” Sibylla interrupted him, her voice powerful now. “Not me, Roland. But you. You and all your ilk.” She glared at the judges, the delegates, the guards. “Do you really think, citizens, that you are in control of your lives? Or is it not still the lawyers, the bookkeepers, the bankers, the merchants who pull all the strings? That, and such men as this…” As she gestured towards his son, Ezekiel saw that even the fingers of her left hand were whole. “Who talk with the loudest voices in bars, and never pay their way, and barge to the front of queues, and pour scorn across everything but their own self-regard. Not the nobles. No. And not even the clergy—at least not the kind who baptised your children or came to your mother’s deathbed, although we all know there were plenty who will not. But the men who bow, and smile, and leave long rooms walking backwards, and talk behind their hands, and are mean to their servants and curse children for playing outside in the street. These are the men you are still expected to bow down to. These are the new, small gods who suck the life from this country.”
Now, as Sibylla spoke, voices were being raised in acclamation and acknowledgment.
“Leave this place, all of you. And let these poor prisoners go. A storm is raging across France, and there is little any of us can do to stop it, but at least we can put an end to the killing for today. Leave now. All of you! Go back to what remains of your lives and your homes…”
People were murmuring, turning, exchanging embarrassed glances. Even some of the judges began to rise from their seats. Then, Roland Morel raised his voice and beat his staff.
“Citizens!” Much as a dog might turn when it hears its name, they all looked towards him. “Have you forgotten all you hold sacred, for the sake of a few words from some lying monstrosity?” He raised his staff, then gestured to the guards. “Kill it! Kill it now!”
After all this questioning and uncertainty, Ezekiel saw how this order cleared the confusion from these men’s simple faces. The nearest of the guards, grinning now, or at least grimacing, stepped forward. As he lunged towards Sibylla with the point of his pike, she moved too quickly to be seen, grabbled the shaft and twisted it up. The man found his arms being twisted as well. There was a tearing crack as one and then the other broke. By the time he began to fall, still grinning or grimacing and not fully realising what had happened, his nearest colleague somehow had a cutlass jutting from his throat. Another guard, flopping forward and attempting to hold in the slippery spill of his belly, gave an astonished groan.
“I told you all to leave,” Sibylla said as the nearest guards began to back away from her. Others, though, perhaps those more used to the horrors of battle, attempted to block her path. One dropped whimpering in a pool of blood. Another, in a blur of black and metal, seemed to cast aside both his legs and slump down on their stumps. Weapons fell. Bodies were cast aside like bloody puppets. Everywhere, there were screams and cries of alarm. Citizens were clambering over each other now in their hurry to get to this Temple of Reason as the one-sided battle continued, and still their Chief Prosecutor was shouting for them to fight, stay, destroy this thing. But now he was ignored.
Finally, with the place empty but for corpses and the moaning injured, Sibylla strode back up the bright central aisle to where Ezekiel squatted, her footsteps leaving a red, wet trail.
“I am sorry,” she muttered as she stood before him. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.” She’d lost her cape, her hair was clotted, and her body was covered in blood. More than ever now, she looked like some terrible priestess. But strong though she seemed, he saw her grimacing and wavering as the apostle-filled windows blazed down, and knew that whatever strength she’d summoned couldn’t last.
“By all that’s holy…!”
Roland had forced open the gate of the rood screen, and was backing away from Sibylla toward the high altar beyond. Slowly, but somehow knowing that his own destiny also lay here, Ezekiel followed into a space where the priests had once raised their wine-filled chalices, and the mosaic-domed space still rang with the echo of lost prayers.
“In the name of Our Lord…! By all the blessed saints…!”
Roland had raised his staff and was making clumsy signs of the cross in his sudden change of belief. He clambered up the steps of the high altar, and then stood swaying on the marble dais itself.
“Get away from me, you devil!”
Sibylla strode on. Was she angry? Was it vengeance she sought? Did she feel such human emotions at all? What she really seemed, Ezekiel thought, as the long aisles of the choir appeared to fall away from them, was tired.
“Go back to Hell, where you belong!” Roland cried as she stood before him at the altar, then he raised his silver staff and leapt down on her, driving it hard through her chest.
Sibylla staggered. A dark stream of blood jetted from her mouth, splattering across gold, gemstones, and richly engraved wood. But then she took a step forward, pushing Roland back against the altar and driving the staff even deeper through her body as she took him in her arms and her jaws swept back and forth, rending and tearing, until all sounds creased but for the patter of blood.
“Sibylla?”
Ezekiel tumbled up the altar steps, drew out the staff’s silver spike, and laid her down on the white marble as his son’s head, dangling from his neck by a few threads of gristle, looked on. He pushed back her hair, thumbed the blood from her lips. She felt unbelievably light and impossibly cold before, in a small shudder, everything was gone. He raised his head to howl in this empty house of God, then put his lips to the wound between her breasts, and drank deep and long.
And that was all.
Dealing with the Dead
1
A ragged and demented figure was detained by the Strasbourg authorities down by the Rhine near the city wastedumps, in the industrial area known as Fontville. Tall, cadaverously thin, and impossibly cold, he was said to have been living off rats and the corpses of the many horses which had been dumped there in the wake of the war, and spoke in garbled, antique French, or what sounded like English, although the phrasing was almost as odd. Clearly some kind of revenant, and also an addict, he ranged the hospital he was taken to in search of poisons, and should have died from ingesting the arsenic he stole from the garden store, but huddled instead in the cellars and raved at people to leave him alone. Some of the physicians with an interest in insanity, or who’d read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, thought he might make an interesting subject for study, which seemed to distress him almost as much as exposure to the sun. But he was clearly intelligent in his lucid passages, and claimed to be an American, and to have access to money, if only the necessary telegrams of confirmation could be sent back to New York.
He was released into the care of a US-funded charity, and checks were made, and he was confirmed to be one Karl Haupmann, and a doctor of medicine as well. Obviously some problem with the birthdate, but that was settled with a few strokes of a pen. Passage, then, back to New York, with a fresh passport, and lying on a bunk in the belly of a thrumming steamer with a good supply of heroin, thanks to the funds which had grown in an old account.
The Statue of Liberty still came as a surprise to him, though, and the Jersey Shore was nothing but factories and smoke. And as for Manhattan… Karl Haupmann crossed the gangplank. Showed his papers. Wondered at the scale of the buildings and the sudden shortness of the women’s hair. Many of them were eating, or smoking, or openly putting on their makeup in the street, and looked like beautiful boys. Or perhaps they were. And this traffic—the reek of it, and the noise. Long, slow-moving rows of automobiles directed from tall towers at intersections by whistle-blowing cops. Hey, buddy, what the hell… Dodging tramcars and bicycles. Tripping over kerbs. Stumbling into people who shrank back from this cringing yet wild-seeming man. But here, at last, was the strung-out washing of the Bowery, still loomed over by the creaking, rattling, reassuring shadows of the El.
The house just stood there. Its shutters undrawn, its windows still intact, and the back door ground open into shunned darkness just as before. Karl, is that you? The stale air of memory like a long inheld breath.
2
The same old desk still waited in the same study with the cracked leather chair beside it, and the same dust lingered amid the echoes along the corridors, but the greyed face that loomed from the darkening mirror was no longer merely his own.
Once, there had been a man called Ezekiel Morel, a réparateur in God’s great city of Strasbourg, who’d looked out from the window of his workroom as the chimneys smoked and the storks danced, and dreamed simple dreams, hoped simple hopes. Then, a creature called Sibylla had arrived with the twilight, and a whole life had gone by quicker than falling, toward a dark full stop of slaughter, and the non-life that lay beyond.
Blood-seeker, soul-feeder, shape-changer, lycanthrope, vampire, loup garou, and succubae. There were words in every tongue, wrapped in cobwebs of superstition and prayer, for what Ezekiel Morel had become. He was the glance averted. He was the black of a blink. But not just the blood—no. Leering old face at the edges of everything, he rejoiced in the sour sigh, in the pleading release, and what did any of it matter, now Sibylla and everything else he’d once held sacred was lost? Breaking and re-breaking his fingers and prowling the edges of battle, following a crimson trail as some fool called Napoleon marched his armies across Europe, for there was never enough death.
But before that, and now, there was something else. A face unseen in that darkly opulent carriage. A sly, knowing withdrawal. A man who was not a man who’d dwelled in a palace beside the Rhine known as Fontville, and before that in a castle called Skala in the kingdom of Polska, or Poland, where something even worse had existed and still lingered as a shadow in the cellars below. And before even that, there had been the quiet village of Esbarun beneath the flanks of the Pahar Mountains, with its dark-breathing cave and those half-hieroglyphs in a hidden clearing, and another Sibylla its acolyte, oracle, and priestess, whom this figure, this creature, had somehow betrayed…
Age piled on age, myth upon mystery. And, just as he, Karl Haupmann, had returned to this house in the Bowery, the thing of a man who’d once been Ezekiel Morel had been drawn toward this so-called New World. Right here amid the old newspapers and shipping pages of his father’s old office, there were records of a vessel, the Tola, en route from Hamburg via Brest, which had beached on Morris Island near Charleston in 1821 with most of the crew drowned, but its few survivors telling of some ancient, blood-sucking stowaway with claws for hands. He could still almost hear the crashes and groans as the vessel keeled and broke apart on the rocks. Could taste the blood and the bilge.
Then, seated for days at the long tables in New York’s Main Public Library, he could follow a roughly northward progression of records and half-memories, year after year, and death upon death. Towns, cities, and rural backwaters. The Smoky Mountains, and Maryland—then a slave state where almost every kind of life came cheap. The face at the window. The body exhumed. Rumours, exorcisms, and unlikely tales. Pottersville and Allentown. Parsippany and Paterson and the South Mountain Reservation, and then even Hackensack. So close he could see the growing skyline of New York, and hear the calling clamour of its voices. Then, once again, came the boom of guns and drums, and the march of armies, until everything narrowed, and there was a misted field in the Carolinas with easy pickings to be had among the nearly dead. Stop, in the name of the US Army! A voice, a presence, to be fled into a dark strand of trees, where Karl Haupmann and Ezekiel Morel tussled beside an iron-staved trench, and forever knew the other’s face.
He looked up along the brass reading lamps with a start. It was late. A dim hum of New York traffic and the bang of distant doors echoed in the Rose Reading Room, although he noticed as he gathered up his pens that another late reader was still seated at her desk. As people often did, she caught the chill of his attention, and looked up. A girl barely into her teens, mosey-haired and raggedly dressed, but something about the exchange, and the Sibylla green of her eyes, caught him before she finally turned with an angry flounce and snapped shut her book.
3
Ziggurat buildings crowded out the sky in a roar of jackhammer traffic. The churches empty, and all the old, decent tunes long gone, and raucous music tumbling from every basement bar, speakeasy, jump-joint, soda parlour, and temperance café as the Volstead Act spectacularly failed. Men in suits as sharp as their smiles. Women in clattering necklaces, plunging necklines and ever-shorter skirts. No hope and no modesty and no love left in this godless city.
Yet they were all so stubbornly happy. So doggedly merry. So very hard to keep up with too. No use, either, trying to fall back on Karl Haupmann’s fading credentials as a doctor; the Harrison Act had made possession of heroin illegal even for medical purposes. For a while there were druggists who’d kept stockpiles. Then even that supply gave out.
The best product by far was the pharmaceutical grade which came in, black market, from countries where heroin was still legal such Bulgaria, Britain, and Japan. Second best, a long way second, was what was concocted in clandestine, combustible laboratories here in the US. But hard to judge by reputations and appearances alone. Bottles could be tampered with, labels changed, and the white powder cut with anything from talcum powder to building cement.
Prowling, night after night, the rag-edges of the city. Clambering stairways beneath the crackle of old syringes, to stand on tarpaper roofs with the jewelled lights of the city spread all about amid verminous mattresses and the bodies of the lost and the near-dead. Mewls and whimpers and averted gazes. They, the so-called junkies who often collected refuse to finance their habit, came to know Karl Haupmann, and almost thought of him as one of their own. Is that you? He demanded answers. Wanted to know what they truly saw. Sometimes, it seemed as if that sly figure from the carriage in Strasbourg was just ahead of him, spreading dark welcoming arms. But everything always faded as he stumbled on.
For the sake of some kind of pretence of sustenance, he scraped up food from the rusted bins down in the kitchen in his house in the Bowery. Cold coffee, weevil-dotted semolina, old porridge, gritted flour, or tinned stuff that had lost its label and taste, which he’d bear back to his shuttered study on an old, cracked cornflower-pattern plate, and then sit waiting for the day to fade, and for the easing wings of his next syringe.
He stared down at the cornflower plate. He’d bought it with his mother, back when the accents along the Bowery were different, and the butchers still hung fresh-caught Harlem rabbits on hooks outside their stores, and there was no El. Oh my, Karl, does not the pattern of blue flowers on the plate in that little shop look wonderful? Then home to a house filled with echoes, and Mother’s laugh and the croak of her accent caught somewhere deep in her throat.
Then it was evening, with Mother sitting at one end of the long table and Father at the other, and Mother making polite plate-and-spoon noises as the long, dark silences rolled along the corridors, and the muffled shouts of the kids came from outside. “Kike” meant “Jew.” But the Haupmanns didn’t have hats and beards, or dress like crows. Didn’t even go to church on Sundays either, when the rest of the Bowery fell almost quiet.
Much better to be up in the vast, tented ship of Mother’s bed, reading A Thousand and One Nights. Or creeping out together from the house like escapees from the sultan’s dungeons to stroll the battlements of Croton Reservoir. And is it not wonderful, Karl, for us to be up here, and you holding my hand as if you are mein galan… my beau?
Mysteries within mysteries. Worlds within worlds. All whispered, shared. A secret? Yes so many secrets. Unfolding her hands from the place it seemed wrong to call her belly, where a little brother or sister was growing. An idea far stranger than any of Scheherazade’s tales. A brother, a sister, a playmate, a spiderweb constellation of hopes, until something in Mother’s room began making low, bovine bellows, and buckets sloshed up and down the stairs. Then Cook rushed past with red stains on her apron, and something like a skinned rabbit clutched in a towel. And that, it seemed, was all.
Then, late at night, a voice that couldn’t be Mother’s began shrieking words that didn’t even belong out on the street, and, next morning, a whistling carpenter put up heavy shutters at her windows, and a new lock on her door. Study, especially Latin, was a reassurance because of the way it all fitted so neatly together. As was math. Diagrams, as well, in a book about horses and dogs, which revealed them to be very like rabbits, at least when stripped of their fur and flesh.
