A Mountain Walked, page 60
“That son of bitches is keeping all your furniture?” he’d repeated, amazed, after Corin told him why he didn’t need a moving van.
“It’s his furniture too. Besides … we got it on credit, mainly his, so he made all the design decisions based on whatever was playing that week on TLC, because he’s got shitty taste. So I don’t really want most of it, anyway.”
“And those grapes were sour, right?”
“Screw you, Aesop.”
“Who?”
The detritus of five whole years, packed haphazardly into six pathetic boxes of crap. Janos took four stacked on top of one another, high enough that he had to negotiate up the stairs by feel; Corin trailed behind, one under either arm, trying to balance his weight so the vertigo wouldn’t hit him quite so hard with every shifting step.
As Janos heaved his load down next to Hardrada’s former door, rummaging in his pocket for the key, Corin caught a brief sight of what looked like a man peering down at them from one more floor up—roof access only, he thought Ms. Le had said. Maybe he’d been sunbathing, come down to find out what all the stomping and puffing was about.
Tiny string of flashbulb screen-grabs going off, before the guy ducked back out of range: Young(-ish). White (very). Blond hair, ruffled straight up. Little round glasses, gone blank as silver coins with reflected light. Possibly even cute, though Corin wasn’t really in much shape to give a clear verdict on that one, given he was trying hard not to hurl.
Then the lock—shiny-new, just like the jamb and a few of the hinges Zappolino’s buddy had managed to dislodge—clicked open and Janos stood back up, briskly wiping his hands. Grabbed the topmost box and shoved the door open with one hip, like some crazy Hungarian parody of good manners.
“There we go,” he said. “All yours, youngblood.”
“Home sweet crime-scene,” Corin agreed.
Place hadn’t changed much—slightly less dusty, perhaps. But all of Hardrada’s crap was still in roughly the same place, from what little Corin remembered of that night, though someone (Ms. Le again, probably) had disposed of the Professor’s bedding, scoured out his fridge, and pulled the living-room blinds back up. She’d also stuck a big bunch of Mac’s Milk chrysanthemums in a chipped mug and arranged them in the middle of the kitchen table, as if that was supposed to help.
As it turned out, Janos had brought along some booze with which to christen the place, a huge-ass bottle of no-name vodka that tasted a bit too much like the potatoes it came from to be worth mixing incautiously with Corin’s heavy meds. Five pills a day keep the seizures away: that was the theory, anyhow. Corin couldn’t really say one way or the other, so far, but he wasn’t looking to take any chances.
His no-booze resolutions fell off pretty quick, though, once the boxes were put away, and the psychic stench of dead-man’s clutter started making his nose sting.
Midnight found them poking around in the kitchen, trying to decide which cans looked least suspect. Janos tripped over the sill coming in, and found himself abruptly eye-to-eye with a weirdly burnt-looking stain. “Have to sand that,” he observed. “What was it, slag … solder? He was welding in here, maybe?”
“Who welds in their apartment?”
“Some people for fun, as a hobby-amusement. Or work.”
“I don’t think he was that kind of professor, Janos.”
It occurred to Corin that he didn’t know what it was, exactly, that Hardrada had studied, or taught. Or anything much about him, really, aside from the fact that he could hit like a buffalo, and had even worse taste than Peter when it came to papering his walls.
A fresh twist of nausea, and Corin raised his head to realize they’d somehow ended up on the living-room couch together, a good ten feet away. Beside him, Janos was half-sprawled in a way that took up far too much room for comfort, his sweaty big-man smell alone enough to render Corin simultaneously horny and sad. Stupid: he didn’t even like Janos, most of the time—or hadn’t, until he’d abruptly become one of the few things he had left. Was this what the rest of his life would be reckoned in? A series of ever-diminishing returns?
Seeking distraction, Corin made himself squint over at the stain again, hard, and remembered—
“No, wait: That was his blood.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“Sure, but it was—I remember. It was all, like … white, and smoking.”
“You’re drunk, youngblood.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re—drunker. Much drunker. So get the fuck out of my apartment already, asshole, so I can sleep.”
“Get the freak out, you mean.”
“Either does me just fine, man.”
At the door, Janos suddenly enfolded him, bruising his ribs. “I never cared you were gay, you know,” he said, muffled, into the top of Corin’s head.
“Um, thanks, Janos—I never cared you were straight. I mean … you are straight, right?”
Janos laughed. “Bet your ass. Don’t worry, youngblood: plenty of twinks in the sea. You find somebody—somebody smart, sexy. Good for you.”
“Okay, thanks again.”
“Next time go ugly, remember! Is all the difference.”
“Yeah, I’ll make sure to do that.”
***
The first dream came later that night. He sat in an indefinitely sized room, surrounded by an equally indefinite number of people. In front of him was a roll of coarse paper, spooling outwards into darkness; he saw his left hand steady it, holding the immediate surface flat, while his right used reed and ink to scribe it with words he couldn’t read—strokes, dots, dashes, all darting downwards from a single uppermost line. There was a soothing rhythm to the work, the soft shapes of syllables forming on his tongue, releasing themselves silently against his palate again and again. His eyes and wrists burnt, pleasantly.
But then he looked down just in time to watch the pen go in a direction he hadn’t willed it to, and felt the words choke in his mouth. A series of hard scratches, angled so sharply that what emerged looked impenetrable, a knot of lines. A squatting spider. A crab’s track in wet sand, printed only to be washed away, then reappear whole, perfect. Impossible to reproduce, since he never remembered how many strokes, in what directions, or what order …
… and yet, there it was: there. And there. And there again.
The lines silvered grey from black, paper dimming grey from buff, until the whole thing turned itself out, went negative and shining: hot, smoking white on absolute black, impenetrable as stone. With all the lamps guttering out and flickering to nothing in a cold wind, as he realized he could actually read it now, after all—whether he wanted to, or not—
great
great is
great is the
great is the power
great is the power of
great is the power of the
[A]
***
Around one the next afternoon, Corin woke to a phone call from Ms. Le, and found out his alarm must have been screaming for at least an hour. An hour after that, abject but (at least) freshly showered, he hit the Academica’s basement laundry room, where he fed his clothes into the machine furthest from the door and waited for the two pills he’d just chugged to take effect—head down, mouth dry, temples pounding.
Same old same old, as of barely three weeks. And getting old, at that.
A slow, gummy blink, half his usual speed, and the young man from the roof was by his side, simply standing. No apparent reason to be there, aside from the pleasure of watching Corin blush—and that spark, that spark, more immediate than he’d ever felt it before, so sharp he almost mistook it for more pain. Like a stomach-punch, triggering the oh-so-primitive urge to flight, fuck or—
(fight)
“Uh, hey. Corin.”
“Leif.”
Blond, yeah—Swedish stock. Like Hardrada.
“I just moved in,” Corin continued, unnecessarily. “Number 15.”
“Yes.”
“Did you … I guess you might’ve known him, right? Professor Hardrada? I mean, sorry, if you did.”
Leif gave him an uninterpretable glance, lens-shielded, under white-bleached brows. “He lived here a long time,” he said, at last. “And yes, I knew him. Quite well.”
How well? Corin wondered. Admitting, out loud: “I don’t even know what he specialized in.”
There was a brief hint of an accent coloring Leif’s speech, far more ghostly than Janos’s occasional dropped connector or weird grammatical patterns. “Oh, history mixed with anthropology, mainly—Nazi pseudo-archaeology was his area of expertise. He’d written books.”
“Indiana Jones stuff, huh?”
“Slightly less intense, but … yes, somewhat.”
“Maybe you could tell me more about it, sometime.”
“Maybe.”
They both looked straight at each other, then—eye to eye, both equally blue. And because Leif smiled first, Corin didn’t have to.
***
Great is the power of the [Anasazi]! Praised be the power of our caustic blood, our legacy from those who cast us down from purest Darkness into impure flesh: the Old Silent Ones Who Went Before, our long-fled makers and betrayers, who we will pursue to the very rim of Being.
Praised be the power of that poisoned inheritance, which inscribes signs of our coming glory upon our bodies with the caustic brush of divinity! In each new incarnation, we bear with pride the pain that is our lot and exaltation—proof of killing fire caged by skin and turned back on itself, searing us from the inside out, just us as our own presence sears the universe around us.
Bow down, or flee, or stand and struggle: it matters little. Though, all things considered, we much prefer to be fought.
And to fight.
***
In 1935, the Ahnenerbe Organization—commonly known as Deutsches Ahnenerbe – Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte (German Ancestry – Research Society for Ancient Intellectual History)—became attached to Hitler’s Reichsführer-SS, under the administrative command of Heinrich Himmler, who had no official training in archaeology but was well-known for his interest in mysticism. He charged the Ahnenerbe with putting together a vision of prehistory that would demonstrate the pre-eminent position occupied by the Germans and their Germanic predecessors since the beginning of civilization. “A nation lives happily in the present and the future so long as it is aware of its past and the greatness of its ancestors,” he claimed, and it was the Ahnenerbe’s stated goal to study the ideas and achievements of the “Indo-Germanic” people, bring those research findings to life, and present them to the German people, with an eye towards encouraging every German to get involved in the organization.
By 1937, the Ahnenerbe had grown from a vaguely occult-minded boys’ club composed of amateur enthusiasts into the primary instrument of Nazi archaeological propaganda, subsuming smaller organizations and filling its ranks with “investigators” whose ranks included people like Herman Weirt, who spent the core years of his career attempting to prove that Northern Europe was the cradle of Western Civilization. Although some real archaeologists with extreme views joined up, mainly to gain high-ranking party official status, the group had consistent problems finding trained scientists willing to work on its projects, which were therefore often run mainly by scholars from various branches of the humanities—committed, but far more interested in metaphor than solid research. The group’s archaeology-as-religion bent is best illustrated by such open-air displays of Germanic idolatry as its discovery of the Sachsenhain, a site where 4500 Saxons were allegedly executed as a punishment for Widukind’s uprising against Charlemagne; instead of literally digging deeper, the Ahnenerbe was content to present it as an idealized shrine, a place that should be considered sacred to the Germanic people because it highlighted its genetically innate readiness for self-sacrifice.
In 1936 the Ahnenerbe mounted an expedition to Sweden, with the object of examining rock-art which it had already concluded was “proto-Germanic.” It was there that a young history student named Hans Hardrada joined the dig, so distinguishing himself through his willingness to work hard and swallow the organization’s mythology that when they left, they took him with them.
Hardrada, now a full member, went along when the Ahnenerbe sent an expedition to Tibet in 1938 that was meant to prove Aryan superiority by confirming the Vril theory, a Hollow Earth/lost Aryan super-race scenario derived from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s science-fantasy novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. The project’s leaders correlated Bulwer-Lytton’s vision of the subterranean Aryan-derived “Vril-ya,” able to channel unbearable energies through their bodies, with both the Tibetan Buddhist mental obstacle-removing practice of Dzogchen Chöd and local legends of the Chud, a supernally powerful and peaceful tribe supposedly driven underground by their barbarian neighbours, where they were assumed to have constructed massive cities beneath the earth that might be entered only through secret passages carefully kept hidden from any outsider’s eyes.
As Hardrada and his fellow-travelers retraced much the same path used by various Chinese emperors to access the Immortals of the Kun Lun Mountains, they were driven off-track by bad weather into the Shara-gol valley, where they literally stumbled upon the Rigden Jye-Po monastery. The monks, knowing no better, let them in, treated their wounds, and allowed them to stay while recuperating. And when the charmingly curious Hardrada began to ask them questions about their guiding purpose—the prayer-rolls, subconscious communication with the Immortals, that recurrent, potentially dangerous symbol—they answered willingly, innocently, with great and (in retrospect) somewhat foolish detail.…
***
Twelve days, and counting
***
Leif had a wide-strewn constellation of freckles distributed all across his left side, outlining the area where saddlebags might eventually replace the firm, smooth oblique abdominals currently descending into an equally firm, smooth hip and thigh. His pubes were as white as his brows, and fair as he was, he tended far more to gooseflesh than blush, even at the moment of crisis.
They lay together in what was now Corin’s bed, spooned in a loose sixty-nine, with their heads cushioned on each other’s inner thighs and the best bits well within easy reach. Corin’s skull swam with what would have normally been a pleasant post-orgasmic lassitude—but the click-sssh of tinnitus was never far away, even now, joined by a faint choir of blood-borne bells, and he didn’t want to shut his eyes, for fear that the bed would begin to lurch and spin like a misaligned roundabout. So he swallowed hard instead, and made himself ask:
“So Hans Hardrada was, what—Professor Hardrada’s—”
“Grandfather. He was sent to the Front near the end of the War, during the collapse, when the Ahnenerbe no longer had any sort of value for the Reich. Left for dead after an incursion into Allied territory, he deserted, fell back on his Swedish citizenship, eventually immigrated to Canada.”
“This was after Tibet, though.”
“Oh yes, long after. Though the expedition as a whole was considered a failure overall, many—like Hans Hardrada—returned with souvenirs.”
“The box.”
“Exactly. Finding it was what spurred Hardrada’s interest in the Ahnenerbe—the knowledge that his family history had been touched by this thing, poisoned by it.”
Corin snorted. “Sounds more like the other way ’round. I mean—the monks didn’t just let him walk off with it, right?”
“No. They objected, strenuously—but it was a very remote monastery, after all, and they were pacifists. Whereas the Ahnenerbe were the SS in scientific drag.”
One more time, Corin wondered how Leif could know all this information. Did Hardrada talk about it in class? In bed?
“You ever see this mysterious box for yourself?”
“A few times, certainly. He kept it in his office, until he was encouraged to take early retirement.”
“I sort of thought most academics wouldn’t want to be associated with somebody who thought Ghosts of Mars was a documentary.”
Leif turned slightly, fixing Corin with a blankly penetrating look. “I don’t know what that is,” he said. Corin genuinely couldn’t tell if he was joking, or whether he cared enough to find out, either way.
“Come here,” he said, and Leif did.
***
They went out around nine, just in time to hit the LCBO before it closed. Leif used a bottle of Jaegermeister and a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s Fireball mix to make shots he called “Dead Nazis,” and they knocked enough of them back that they soon ran out of clean cups and glasses. Later, with no cable and Corin’s vision starting to gutter like a candle-flame, they decided to defer yet one more bout of fooling around until after they’d found this freaking box of Hardrada’s.
The search started with all the normal places—drawers, kitchen cabinets, closets, under the sink—before branching wider: behind the bookcases, inside the icebox, under the bed. They went around stamping on floorboards, doing a stumbling, ass-grabby trepak all up and down, till Ms. Le called up to ask whether or not Corin needed help with something.
“No, sorry,” he said, through the chain. “It’s nothing big. Just, um … moving furniture.”
“Are you sure, Mister Vogt? I have your friend—Mister Osht?—on speed-dial.”
And you think I don’t? Corin wanted to snap back. But: “That won’t be necessary, thanks—these pills, y’know, they just, um … make me forget what I’m doing, sometimes. I’m really sorry,” he repeated again, the taste of it mealy in his mouth, like wormy flour.
“All right. Sleep well, Mister Vogt.”
“You too,” he called, as she stepped away. Then turned back to where he thought he’d left Leif, only to find him—
—not gone, thankfully; not simply vanished outright, like some drugged-and-drunken sexual fantasy that’d managed to pilot him down to the Beer Shop and back with its thumbs dug deep in his lizard-brain, running him like a Wii. Instead, Leif was standing inside that cramped hall closet, staring up.
