Hymn (24 page)

They walked through the kitchen and out to the back of the house. The sun had just set, and the sky was the colour of pasqueflowers, high and clear. Kathleen suddenly reached out for Lloyd's hand. Slim fingers, soft warm skin. Lloyd felt something that he hadn't felt for years, not even with Celia. A sense of being responsible. A sense that a woman was depending on him to make things work out right. In high school, he had once dated a thin grey-eyed girl called Jane who had made him feel like that. Jane had probably married a real-estate agent or one of those used-car salesmen who scream at you on television.

Otto unlocked the back door of the garage, pushed it open, and switched on the overhead light. ‘Go ahead! Look! Hier schlaft die Zukunft!'

Lloyd peered inside. The huge garage had been built with whitewashed cinder block walls, and a low whitewashed ceiling. In the far corner stood a solid and well-used workbench, with rows of drillbits and wrenches, a professional vice, and a car battery-charger. But there were no cars here, not one. Every available inch of floor-space was taken up by grey-faced bodies, lying down, dead or sleeping. Every one of them wore impenetrably dark sunglasses, and every one of them had a heavy grey blanket drawn up to the neck. It looked like a morgue for dead sun-worshippers, rather than a sanctum for people who were desperate enough to want to live for ever.

There was a heated smell in the air, like a communal sauna, or singeing wool, and the temperature was way up above normal. Lloyd noticed a small thermostat on the wall which was registering into the red.

‘Salamanders,' Otto announced. ‘Smoke and soul, combined. Eighty of them, so far.'

Kathleen, in a voice as pale and as transparent as a glass of water, said, ‘Oh, God, Lloyd. That's him. That's Michael. That one there, close to the wall. That's Michael, I swear it. Oh, God.'

She started forward, but Otto held her arm and restrained her. ‘Believe me, Mrs Kerwin, you will be doing yourself no favours if you wake him up. At the moment, he is not the man you knew. Only when he has undergone the Transformation will you recognize him again, and then you can keep him for ever.'

‘Can't I even talk to him? Let him know that I'm here?'

Otto gave her the tiniest dismissive shake of his head. ‘He is too volatile. He could be quite calm, when he sees you. But on the other hand, he could explode. He might feel resentful. He might feel angry. You never know. But the point is that he could burn you. He could burn everybody around him, too. I can't risk a fire in this garage, not with all of the Salamanders here. Well, it doesn't bear thinking about, does it, Mr Denman? There's Celia, too, can you see her? There, by the door.'

Kathleen twisted her arm free of his fingers. ‘I want to look at him, that's all. He's my husband.'

‘Very well,' Otto agreed. ‘But if you disturb him, and wake him, then do not blame me for what happens. I have worked too many years for this to allow some hysterical hausfrau to destroy it.'

Kathleen stepped carefully between the grey-blanketed bodies until she reached the far side of the garage. She stood over the wrapped-up body of a white-faced man, her hand clasped over her mouth, her eyes glistening with tears.

‘She has no need to cry,' Otto told Lloyd. ‘Michael will live for ever, long after she has gone. It is he who should be crying for her.'

Lloyd couldn't keep his eyes off Celia. She looked so grey. She looked so waxy. She looked so dead.

‘When they're transformed . . .' he asked Otto. ‘What kind of life are they going to be able to lead?'

‘Very different, in some way. Very ordinary, in others.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means, Mr Denman, that what you are looking at here is the beginning of the master race. These people, and many like them, will recreate that ideal world which we tried to establish during the war, but failed. They are all people of pure blood, of great talent, and of high intelligence.

‘When they are transformed, they will able to do anything they please, because simply by touch they will be able to generate enormous natural power. If they are angered, they will be able to burn anything they please, and anyone they please. They will be invulnerable.'

‘So Celia could set fire to me, if I annoyed her?'

Otto laughed. ‘She could burn you to a cinder, my friend! But we don't want her to do that. We want you to be married, and to have children together.'

‘She'll be able to have children?'

‘Oh, yes,' Otto nodded. ‘She certainly will. In fact, we encourage it. The future belongs to the young ones, yes? The special children . . . half-human, half-fire.'

Kathleen came back across the garage. Her face was very pale.

‘You, too, Mrs Kerwin,' smiled Otto. ‘All the children you wish!'

‘By the end of nineteen forty-three I was quite sure that I had found what I was looking for,' Otto told them, as they sat in the living-room with Asbach brandy and cigars. The air was thick with blue flat-smelling smoke. The room was growing cold. With theatrical inappropriateness, Otto was trying to play the genial host, sitting in his huge 1930s' armchair with his leg swinging, smoking and drinking relentlessly and telling them all about the heyday of the National Socialist party. ‘What times we had in Berlin! Unter den Linden, at night, in nineteen thirty-six! We shall never see times like that again!'

Kathleen was exhausted, and sat with her head bowed, saying nothing. Lloyd was tired, too, but he wanted to hear Otto out. He sipped his brandy to keep himself awake, and he glanced from time to time at Helmwige, who was so bored with what Otto was saying that she was finishing the crossword in the San Diego Tribune, sniffing and talking to herself.

Otto said, ‘I had heard of an ancient ritual chant which could change a burning human into a Salamander, but although I searched through thousands of books, I could not find it! At Ohrdruf concentration camp, with Helmwige's assistance, I tried seven hundred different Norse and Hebrew prayers, burning a Jew each time in order to test the prayer's effectiveness, sometimes sixty or seventy Jews a day! Years went by, thousands were burned, but still to no avail. Not one of them survived, not one of them became a Salamander!

‘However in March, nineteen forty-three, an old rabbi came to my office and asked me why I was burning these people. I explained that I was looking for the secret chant which could give a man immortality by fire. He begged me to stop burning people. He said that he would try to find out for me what the chant was, if only I would stop burning people. Well, what kind of an offer was that? I was a German officer and the experiment had been personally ordered by the Führer, and I said no.

‘Eventually, however, this same rabbi returned to me. He said that the word had been sent throughout the camps, and that there was a young Jewish music professor at Flossenburg who could tell me everything that I wanted to know.'

He offered Lloyd more brandy, but Lloyd held his hand over his glass. He found it disturbing enough having to share a room with Otto, without having to accept his hospitality, too.

Otto said, ‘The young professor had made a special study of Wagner and the origins of Wagner's music. He had heard that Wagner was supposed to have been interested in basing an opera on the Norse fire-burial chants, but he wasn't convinced that Wagner had ever written it. Apparently, the chants had been lost in the eighth century, during the Viking Migration period. The Book of Salamander, the runic book in which all the chants were contained, was sent by sea from Tollund to England, but it was sunk in a winter storm. However, the wreck must have been washed up on the northern coast of Germany, and the book salvaged. It reappeared in Bavaria, in the seventeenth century.

‘By a very circuitous route, and after many dubious transactions, it had come into the possession of the Bürgermeister of Bamberg, Johann Junius. Junius had long been fascinated by alchemy and by the secrets of eternal life. He translated the Norse runes, and began experimenting by setting fire to live cats and dogs. The story goes that eventually he succeeded in creating an unkillable cat.

‘However, Junius was spied on by his neighbours. He was arrested and taken before the courts, and accused of witchery. He was tortured with thumb screws and leg vices and the strappado, and in the end, of course, he confessed. Anything to escape further pain! He was burned at the stake, and apparently he shrieked and sang while the flames devoured him. Perhaps the good witch-finders of Bamberg managed to kill, perhaps they didn't. But the story has it that Junius was seen many weeks afterward in various towns in Bavaria, looking pale and strange.'

Lloyd said nothing. He found it almost impossible to speak to a man who had calmly confessed that he had burned thousands of innocent people for the sake of a mystical theory, no matter how earth-shattering that mystical theory might be. It hadn't been worth a single one of those lives. Not one. But who remembered those lives today?

Otto said, ‘The Book of Salamander and all of Junius' notes were locked up in the Rathaus in Bamberg for two hundred years. But somebody found them, we don't know who. It could have been a plague doctor called Gunther Hammer, or an astrologer known only as Stange. Whoever it was, he must have been a fanatical devotee of Richard Wagner, because in November, 1882, he sent it immediately to Wagner with a long unsigned letter pleading that Wagner use it to achieve immortality.

‘Richard Wagner had begun to fall ill in the last year of his life. Bad heart, you understand. In the letter, Hammer or Stange wrote to him, “Play these melodies, O Master, and you will live for ever.” Wagner was deeply impressed by the Norse chants. They were so barbarisch, so powerful! But he completely misunderstood his well-wisher's intentions. He thought that he was being exhorted to turn the chants into an opera, so that he would achieve everlasting fame. It simply didn't occur to him that he could actually live for ever.

‘At Flossenburg concentration camp, the young Jewish music professor told me that in his view the existence of the opera Junius was only a myth, and that it was quite probable that Wagner had never written it. But now I had a scent to follow! With five historians to assist me, I discovered from the private diaries of Wagner's friends that he had been working on a new opera in the last year of his life which he jokingly referred to as his Wikingsgesangbuch. He took it with him to Venice and he was still working on it when he died.

‘Unfortunately, when Wagner died, neither the opera nor the Book of Salamander was found amongst his possessions. For a long time, I thought that I had reached a dead-end, and that the young music professor was right about the opera being nothing but a story. But in a moment of inspiration, I discovered the name of the doctor and of the priest who had attended Wagner on his deathbed. The priest was Father Xavier Montini, a Jesuit, and a famous scholar on the subject of pagan ritual.

‘Now I used my logic, Mr Denman! My powers of deduction; and also my lifelong suspicion of Jesuits! I deduced that when Father Xavier Montini saw what Wagner had been working on, he became alarmed, and smuggled the Book of Salamander and the unfinished opera out of Wagner's house, and hid them. After all, isn't immortality supposed to be the exclusive territory of God Almighty? His unique selling point? The priest didn't want that challenged by some pre-Christian mumbo-jumbo from Jutland!

‘Mussolini's military staff gave us all the co-operation we needed to comb Venice looking for the opera and the book. In the end, after three months, we found them, bricked into the cellar wall of a house that had belonged to one of Father Xavier Montini's friends. We were sad to discover that the cellar had flooded four or five times since the book had been concealed there, and that most of the original runes in the Book of Salamander had been obscured by damp. But the opera had been carefully wrapped in oilskin, and was almost as fresh and as bright as the day that Wagner had laid down his pen.

‘We had in our hands the means to create the master race of which Hitler had always dreamed, a race of pureblooded immortals who would rule the world with force and wisdom.'

‘So what stopped you?' asked Lloyd.

Otto's eyes followed a blowfly as it droned across the room, and the tip of his tongue ran across his lips. ‘Wagner had taken many liberties with the original chants. He hadn't understood their importance, you see, and he had made many changes, for the sake of his opera. It was necessary for musical experts to work through the opera, note by note, in comparison, with Wagner's diaries, and with what we had managed to salvage from the Book of Salamander, in order to recreate the original ritual music.

‘Otherwise, our dream would have been totgeboren, you understand? Born dead.'

He stood up. He swayed a little, as if the Asbach brandy had made him drunk. He seemed taller than before, a giant ash-grey stick-insect. Thin and tall and long-legged. Lloyd watched him with apprehension. He walked over to the window where the blowfly was furiously bizzling against the glass.

‘Our work was still not complete when the Russians entered Berlin. I was in the Führerbunker with Hitler and those who remained. Goebbels, Bormann, and the rest. On Hitler's instructions, I was still working with Helmwige on the opera. We burned alive two young volunteers from the Hitler Youth, without success. They simply died in terrible pain. Then on the night of April 29, with the Russians only hours away from us, Helmwige volunteered to be burned. Hitler's chauffeur Erich Hempka went to fetch two hundred litres of petrol, and two SS men dug a sandy pit in the Chancellery garden.'

He paused for a second, then scooped the blowfly into his hand. He held it up, and Lloyd could hear it furiously buzzing.

‘We chanted the ritual chant, and then we drenched Helmwige with petrol and she set fire to herself with a lighted rag. She said nothing. Didn't scream, didn't protest. At last the fire-chants had worked. Her smoke and her soul arose, and although her body remained, her spiritual essence became a Salamander, a creature of fire and spirit. It was amazing to watch. Hitler witnessed it for himself, and he was in tears.

‘Helmwige and I escaped from the Führerbunker along with Martin Bormann, and we were helped by SS officers to obtain International Red Cross passports, and to make our way to America. We arrived in New Orleans in time for the summer solstice, and we were able to complete the ritual in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel. Helmwige then became what she is today. A living example of the master race.'

Otto held his fist close to his ear, so that he could hear the blowfly's desperate struggles. He smiled in anticipation of the tiny treat that he was going to give himself.

‘What about Hitler?' asked Lloyd. ‘If he saw what happened to Helmwige . . . didn't he want to try it for himself?'

Otto gave a non-committal shrug. ‘The Führer was, of course, deeply impressed with what I had achieved. I was immediately put in charge of all genetic and racial experiments, including those of Mengele and von Harn. Not that it counted for much, of course. By that time, the Russians had already reached Potsdamer Platz, and the Reich was obviously at an end.

‘Hitler told me to leave Berlin with Helmwige and with a young Aryan boy whom Mengele had bred . . . the father of the young man who acts as our servant now.'

‘But Hitler didn't take to the idea of setting fire to himself?' Lloyd persisted.

Otto turned and stared at him narrowly, although the curved shadow from the mock-parchment lampshade made it difficult for Lloyd to see his face.

Otto said nothing for a while. Then he looked away. ‘What happened to the Führer will always remain a secret,' he said.

‘Did you turn him into a Salamander?'

Otto shook his head. ‘Ich weiß nicht. If the Führer went through the ritual, he did after I left the Führerbunker. Helmwige and I and the boy escaped from Berlin in the early hours of April 30th. Later that same day, Hitler's body was burned, yes, that is a matter of historical record. But the historical record does not say whether he was alive when he was burned, or whether he was already dead. He was supposed to have shot himself in the mouth, but when they carried his body out of his room, his head was covered with a blanket, so that none of the eye-witnesses could tell for certain.'

‘But if he did go through the ritual . . .?'

Otto shrugged. ‘If he did go through the ritual, then the probability is that he is still alive. But where . . . who knows?'

He opened his hand, and lifted out the blowfly by one leg. He picked off its wings with the concentration of a man picking the stalk off a raisin. Then he popped it quickly on to his tongue, and held it in his mouth for a moment, so that he could feel it vibrating against his cheeks. He sucked, and swallowed. ‘Helmwige,' he said, ‘switch on the television.' The conversation appeared to have ended.

They watched 21 Jump Street for a while. Then Otto switched over to the eight o'clock news. Lloyd looked at Kathleen but there was nothing that either of them could do. Otto watched a long item about crack dealing in San Diego schools, frowning and muttering to himself. Then the news turned to the accidental death of San Diego Detective Sergeant Houk, and the disappearance of Detective Gable and Deputy Bredero.

‘Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable were assisting State police in their investigation of the death by burning of thirteen men and women in the Anza Borrego State Park . . . While Sergeant Houk's death appears to have been an automobile accident, state and metropolitan police are still unable to account for the complete disappearance of Detective Gable and Deputy Bredero . . . Deputy Bredero's patrol car was found abandoned at the Five Flags shopping centre close to Highway I–5, with no fingerprints on it apart from his own . . .'

‘You're very thorough,' Lloyd remarked.

‘I had a scientific training,' said Otto. ‘Besides, what we are doing here is too important to allow any margin for mistakes.'

‘You don't think the police are going to track you down?'

Otto used his thumbnail to pick something black from between his teeth. ‘You are talking to someone who escaped from Berlin on the very last day of Hitler's Reich,' he said. ‘You are talking to a man who discovered an opera which had been hidden for sixty years, and who was able to revive a mystic ritual which had been lost for eleven centuries. Now . . . I have work to do, letters to write. I would appreciate it if you and Mrs Kerwin would retire to your rooms. And, please, make no attempts to leave the house. Our young man had been instructed to use physical force if necessary, to keep you here, and you have seen for yourself what I can do.'