Astronomy (12 page)

She ran her finger along the serrated edge of the impression. Something poked from the wall—a coarse, grayish-brown hair. As she plucked it out, the phone connected. She asked for Carl Leder.

A voice at the other end said, “Fräulein Berne? Herr Leder is most anxious to meet with you.”

“Excuse me?”
Fräulein Berne.
Nobody had called her that since Berlin. “Who is this? What have you done to Leder?”

“This very afternoon, the object of his life’s work entertained him in his cell for fifty-three interesting and informative minutes. He wishes to share this experience with you.”

She tried out a name from her past. “Is that you, Nietzsche?”

A brief pause. “You need to come down immediately, Fräulein Berne.”

She had to aim the handset to hang up the receiver. Her face must have been white; Charley asked her what was wrong.

“Leder is dead,” she managed. “I just talked to one of Malmagden’s creatures.” Something was drumming in her ears. She thought it was blood at first, but no, it was a memory. It was the crash of Russian rockets.

A louder crash—something shattered in the basement. They looked at each other. Neither of them had considered the possibility that anyone might still be here.

They listened a moment. Yes, whispering. They heard somebody giggle, somebody hush him up.

She followed Charley across the kitchen. He pulled out his .45 and kicked open the cellar door. The metallic smell of fresh blood filled her nostrils. Susan spotted strips of something shiny and pink hanging loose over a rafter. Flesh? No. She couldn’t believe that. But whatever it was, there was no denying it had been pulled from some bloody mass lying on the floor. Susan had this crazy impression of a rump roast disassembled with a hacksaw. She knew that couldn’t be right. She raised her eyes toward a pool of light in the corner of the basement.

There, left as sort of a reminder, were Dale Bogen’s pants. Susan put her finger to her lips.
Not a sound,
she swore to herself.
Later, maybe. Not now.

Charley went for the pants. Susan knew he wasn’t being careful, but she wasn’t going to let him go alone. She swung her Walther around as they descended. The room was dark. She couldn’t tell if she heard anything or not.

Sinister laughter erupted so close to her ear she jumped. The darkness at her side materialized into a toothy grin, cadmium-colored eyes.

She swung out her pistol, but something caught her arm in the dark. The Walther was peeled out of her fingers.

“You have come down to enjoy your friend along with us.” The voice slipped around the fricatives in a way that suggested some problem with the palate.

Shrieve had swung around, but a muscular shadow lunged out from behind and clamped his arms at his sides. He strained to pull his gun arm up, to shoot Susan’s attacker, but its free arc was shallow by just a few, maddening degrees. Another creature stepped forward out of the shadows, watching Charley with evident amusement.

“You made an example of the wrong person,” Charley said, looking from one to the other. “This kid was in Europe maybe two months. He knew nothing of you.”

More laughter—these were Malmagden’s personal guard from Berlin. They had found her at last. Three of them were here. The fourth would be coming back from the mental hospital, where he had killed Leder.

“Your friend is not here as an example,” said the one in the middle. “You shall be the examples. You shall be the warning to all who would involve themselves in our business.”

“This one,” explained the creature who held Susan from behind, “we are simply making ready for use.” Susan heard the voluptuous wetness of lips smacked. A large head came to rest on her shoulder. She forced herself to look down at him. Yellow eyes rolled up to meet hers. The stink of rotten meat filled the wet night air.

“As for you, you shall be envied by all the poor people of this vanquished nation. They go hungry tonight. You both shall feast.”

The one in the middle passed into the shadows and then reappeared with a pair of bolt cutters, which it snapped suggestively at the air. Susan searched the floor for a rock or a chunk of concrete. She had vowed in Berlin that she would not die a soldier’s death. Not like the soldiers she had seen in Berlin.

She looked up to find the bolt cutter handles being placed into her hands.

“What looks good?” A huge gray hand extended toward Charley Shrieve with inviting languor. She was thrust forward a step and let go. “Go ahead. Picks something delicious.”

“Fuck you.” She hoped she wasn’t crying.

“You choose, or we choose for you.”

She lunged for him, and—surprise—caught hold of his fingers. She closed her eyes and brought the handles together till she felt a crunch of bone, heard a scream.

The bloody paw came back-handed across her cheek. It knocked her into the grasp of his companion.

The “philosopher” studied his bereft hand disconsolately. He nodded to the one at her back, which took her arm. It leaned back its head, mouth pulled wide till she saw the gleam of curved, pointed incisors. The skin along her forearm tingled.

A new laughter filled the dank air. All stood still as a shadow detached itself from the lesser darkness at the top of the stair.

“Schopenhauer.” The voice was cultured and soft, with none of the bumptious enthusiasm she remembered in Plötzensee Prison. “As always, you think of your belly instead of your duty.”

One of the creatures muttered the name in surprise—“Malmagden.”

Susan felt her arm released. Apparently Malmagden went beyond their mission parameters.

“Stürmbannführer,” the one raised his bloody paw in greeting. “We heard you were alive and at large. Come over here. We are just about to serve up a couple of Allied agents to one another.”

Susan remembered her Walther, which Schopenhauer—the one that held her upper arm—no doubt had behind his back. Shrieve seemed to be looking behind her. Maybe he could even see it.

“See here,” it hissed wetly. “We’ve got a pretty one for you. Come and see.” Had Malmagden’s creatures seen him driven around in the Plymouth? Or had things been strained between them for a lot longer than that?

“I am acquainted with the young woman. Thank you.” Malmagden smiled at her. “Do you see?” He gestured toward the thing in front of her. “These creatures were my personal guard. I was feared among all the officers of the Zentralbund for making their acquaintance. Only one man afforded himself the luxury of my enmity. And I am settling my affairs with Herr Kriene presently.”

Malmagden turned his smile toward the nearest of his ghouls. He ambled down the stairs till he stood dwarfed in the creature’s shadow. “Hegel,” he said, and reached up to put his hands to its forehead. He might have been an anxious father, checking a fever in his little boy.

Hegel smiled uncertainly at his partners. Ghouls’ riddles, Susan guessed. Full of rough little surprises.

Malmagden leaned forward and Hegel bowed to catch his whisper: “You’re dead.”

The crimson eyes lit up as if candles burned down behind them. Hegel screamed and clutched its head between its elbows. Its eyes melted out of their sockets.

Schopenhauer thrust Susan away; she spun to see him pull out the Walther, but the beast was panicking. The draw was messy.

She lunged and hacked at the hairy wrist with the edge of her palm, right where the nerve would have run through the arm of a man.

The gun bounced off the concrete slab. Susan scooped it off the ground just as Schopenhauer clamped his hand on her throat.

She fired blindly. The creature collapsed to its knees, screaming. She fired again and hit something crucial. The thing flopped over on its back.

The one named Kant did not wait on the outcome of the fight. It stiff-armed Charley Shrieve into the corner and scrabbled to the stairs. Susan stepped forward and steadied a bead on the shadow in the door.

Malmagden put a hand to her wrist.

“
Bitte
.” He was almost courtly as he pressed her gun down.

She saw his lips curling around words she couldn’t quite make out. His fingers twined into figures that reminded her of things she couldn’t quite place.

The monster froze. Its arms strained to reach its head, as if to scratch an itch behind its eyes. Flames exploded from the roof of its skull. It sank into a smoldering heap.

The stench of burning brains and hair filled the basement. Charley and Susan ran out to the kitchen.

She put a bullet into the thing’s ear, just for safety’s sake. It didn’t even shake. She looked a little closer and realized she was wasting ammunition. The hair was gone from the skull, the top of which had burned away. She looked down into an empty brain cavity, lit by the dull light coming through vacant eye sockets.

“I have gained certain skills, certain powers over the mongrel races.” Malmagden looked aside from the mess on the kitchen floor. He adjusted his sleeves, put his cuff links right. He seemed almost embarrassed at the wide-eyed looks on their faces.

“You wish to defend yourselves from ones such as these, it is child’s play. I recommend
Cultes des Goules
of Comte d’Erloette. Or perhaps the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of Von Junzt. That is a thorough text. Written in a somewhat ripe hand, if you catch my meaning, but well-intentioned and detailed.”

“They wanted to kill you,” she said.

Malmagden indicated the stack of books on the floor. “I suspect that is what they were after. Me, I was merely a target of opportunity.”

“The hell’s going on here. They worked for you.” Jesus Christ, she thought, they
killed
for him.

Malmagden sighed. This was a subject that caused him some personal pain. “You see the power of hate?” Malmagden held out his hand. “We were all of us allies a short time ago, united by our hatred of race contamination and the exaltation of the inferior. Jürgen Kriene and myself, we would have bargained with the ravenous hunger of the void to save the Aryan race, using our very souls as currency. But you see?” He indicated the smoldering corpses around them. “Emotions easily given are cheaply held.”

“You guys had a falling out.”

“We were always more rivals than friends.” Malmagden might have been lamenting this fact. “Now that Kriene is so close to the culmination of the Undertaking, he is sending my personal guard out to tidy up—stealing your Black Books, killing his rivals, ensuring that no one has the resources to stop him.”

“So,” she said, “they’re close to the end.”

“Very close.”

Shrieve toed the nearest monster disconsolately. “They could have told us where this is being carried out,” he said.

“Perhaps they have told us,” Malmagden suggested. “If they were here to steal your library, they will have already planned a means of escape, yes? My guard and their people can travel through dreams. That is something that bears a great deal of explanation, perhaps best left for another time. However, they cannot carry books that way. They must have had another means of escape.”

He pulled the light cord hanging by the stair. The cellar went instantly black.

There—down in the far corner, a phosphorescence emerged. It shaped itself into a pair of diagrams as they descended the stairs.

“Do you recognize the image?”

Shrieve nodded. “It’s the Angle Web we saw in the warehouses on Münterstrasse. How do we go through? Where does it lead?”

Malmagden had the formula to go through, he informed them. It was a common Zentralbund spell. As to where it went? That was problematic. Malmagden had used it going through Angle Webs between Berlin and the laboratories to the south. As he seemed to think of the places this particular Web might go, he wiped his palms on his jacket.

“It doesn’t matter,” Susan said. “Wherever it leads, we have to follow it. We’re out of options.”

“Don’t you wish to call your Naval Intelligence first?”

“Do we have time?”

Malmagden frowned. “How much time will they need to investigate this?”

“Never mind,” Susan answered for both of them. “They’ll take two hours just getting over here. We don’t have time.” She saw the look of worry in Shrieve’s eyes. She laughed. “What does it matter? We’ll probably be dead tomorrow one way or another.”

Shrieve could think of nothing to say to that.

There was some question as to who would go through the Angle Web first. No one knew what awaited them on the other side. Maybe they were walking into Spook Central, a roomful of red-eyed Epicureans waiting around their end of this Web just to see who popped out.

Charley went through first. Seeing as how he had never traveled this way before, Susan watched him as he spoke the spells and made the signs of Voor and Kish, waiting to stop him before he ended up in a mountain somewhere.

As Charley Shrieve disappeared, she put Malmagden into the Web. Malmagden smiled. “I save your life, yet you still mistrust me to follow after you?” He shook his head. He was hurt.

“Humor me.”

“If you care nothing for my continued good will, then at least consider this: You send me through first, you will be truly and utterly alone. Have you thought what might happen if you run into difficulty?”

“Difficulty?” Susan had a sudden memory—the pressure of an unwholesome membrane against her flesh. She looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘difficulty’?”

Malmagden looked away awkwardly. “This transportation system developed by my colleague Herr Leder may be on the verge of collapse. Indeed, lately it has tried to kill me on more than one occasion.”

She wanted to play dumb, just to see what he’d say.
Kill you? How?
But there was no need. She could tell how—just by the way Malmagden hunched his shoulders together, the wary gaze he turned toward the walls.

Suddenly, all the roles they had enacted between themselves—wartime adversaries, host and guest, prisoner and guard—were collapsed into a single shared experience.

Malmagden smiled grimly. “You have been through the Web lately. You know what I am talking about.”

“I thought I must have done something wrong,” she admitted.

“You did nothing wrong.” Malmagden laughed uneasily. “You are alive. You are sane. I have associates who have not fared so well.”