Knife Fight and Other Struggles (39 page)

“We do not get to the beer hall—not right away,” said Gottlieb.

“No,” said the doctor. “That would have been difficult.”

“We leave the way we came: back to the beer garden. But now . . . there are more men outside. They are dressed in the same coloured shirt as the men we left below. They are standing in a row near the gate to the street. Seeing them like this makes sense. They are S.A.”

“Storm troopers.”

“Storm troopers. One of them steps forward. He is very tall. He demands to know where we came from.

“We tell him that we were pissing. In the cellar? he asks, and I shrug, drunkenly enough to convince him. But he is not finished with us, this one.

“‘There is a revolution taking place,’ he says. ‘Inside, we have Herr Kahr. He is even now acceding to our Fuhrer’s demands. The government will change. Things will improve for some. Others will get what is coming to them. You had better be ready for that. Now: who are you for?’

“‘Germany,’ I say.

“‘Clever answer. That can mean anything.’ He stands close enough to smell us. ‘All right, clever fellows. Tell us your names.’

The doctor leaned forward. He wanted to prompt Gottlieb: what does his mysterious lover say? But he knew better: drawing a sliver hastily simply embeds it more deeply.

A smile twitches across Gottlieb’s face—oddly shaped, almost tentative, yet one of the few he’d spared the doctor since arriving.

“I tell him: ‘I am Harker. This is my friend Orlok. We are just here for a drink.’”

The doctor finished Gottlieb’s session without the metronome—but the Dictaphone continued to spin. Gottlieb had laughed so hard at his own joke that the trance was broken for the day.

They spoke about the session, and the doctor allowed Gottlieb to talk about the things he believed he had learned from it and thereby generate his own theories. This filled the remainder of the cylinder. Gottlieb spoke at some length about the nature of his homosexual proclivities, and although it irritated the doctor after a time, he held his annoyance in check. So far as it concerned Gottlieb, his homosexuality was a symptom of a disease of the mind, for which he sought cure here. And the doctor had given Gottlieb no indication that matters stood any other way.

So Gottlieb theorized that his homosexual attractions were a manifestation of the violence in his life, and finally concluded: “Had my father and uncle not beaten me so, I might have forgotten the sweet curve of Manfred’s arse. And then . . . well there was the War  . . . and that night at Munich, where we killed the six storm troopers! It has cemented my erotic fixation, yes?”

“You said three,” said the doctor. “Three storm troopers.”

“Three? Oh yes, of course.”

“Were there others that night?”

Gottlieb shook his head firmly. “I meant to say three,” he said.

“And you know that those three were storm troopers how precisely?”

Gottlieb shrugged. “They wore the same coloured clothing. And storm troopers surrounded the beer hall that night, while Herr Hitler riled up the crowd within.”

“What did you think of Hitler?”

“Hitler? I’d seen him speak before. This night . . . he was very loud. Almost shrill. Ugly little man. Hard to look away from, though.”

“And your friend? What was his name?”

“Oh, he never cared for Hitler. He thought Hitler was a liar. One night, after things had settled down and they’d put Hitler and his Nazis behind bars . . . he told me that he would like to fuck the lies out of Hitler, and would if he got the chance.”

“Like he fucked the lies out of you?” asked the doctor.

Gottlieb appeared to study his hand, frowning at the slight webbing between his fingers as he held it to the light of the window.

“He never properly fucked those out of me, doctor. He went off long before that could happen.”

“And you do not know where he went?”

“It was a sudden departure.”

“Of course.”

The doctor cleared his throat, and tried one last time for the day. He put it to Gottlieb, directly.

“You know,” he said, “it is interesting that for such an impression that this man left upon you, you cannot summon his name to your lips. Can you tell me his name, please?”

Gottlieb’s fingers bent, then closed into a fist, casting a shadow across his face.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” he said.

Daylight lingered over the grounds of the estate for some hours after Herr Gottlieb left the doctor’s rooms. The doctor himself did not linger there long after. It was a beautiful summer’s day in the valley where the estate stood, and the doctor thought to himself that he would not waste it, brooding over this troublesome patient.

He splashed water on his chest, beneath his arms, closed up his lavatory and then shut his office, and crossed the hall to the front steps. The outside air was cool, but welcome after the oppressiveness of the office, of his session with poor, broken Gottlieb.

As he walked, he passed Anna, her long blonde hair tied in braids that fell halfway down her naked back. She waved as he passed.

“Where is Heidi?” he asked, and she shrugged.

“I will meet up with her at supper,” she lisped. “Will we see you at dinner, Herr Doctor Bergstrom?”

He patted his bare stomach. “I must watch my belly. But I will be there if you are.”

She smiled—then glanced below his belly, and looked away from what she saw there. Now the doctor shrugged. Anna was a very healthy girl, despite her speech impediment, and she would soon become accustomed to all that her beauty inspired.

“We will see each other later, then, doctor,” she said and hurried off.

As he watched her retreating backside, the doctor wondered whether Gottlieb would ever consider that one the way he contemplated Manfred’s boyish rump. That was certainly Gottlieb’s hope—that he could undo his nature, as though it were simply a neurosis, and take a wife with something approaching enthusiasm. The doctor remained a skeptic.

He set off through the orchards, which would lead to the river bank, where the others here might be found, doing their afternoon calisthenics. And having contemplated that happy prospect, he turned his mind away again from Gottlieb, and pondered his true patient, if one could call such as he a patient. . . .

The doctor smiled to himself and shook his head fast, as though to dislodge something that had fixed itself there.

He could not call that one a patient. He had never laid eyes upon him. The doctor could list what he knew of him, on one of those index cards they used in America.

He was a huge man. Brown haired. A single eyebrow. Very ugly. But muscular. And fearless. With fantastical charisma. But he was a man with no name or identity yet—not one the doctor could decode, until he could break through with Gottlieb, and the amnesiac French girl, and perhaps some others as his associates in Belgium might uncover. For the time being, the doctor had nothing with which to find him . . . next to nothing, beyond that description and what was almost certainly his phylum:

Übermensch.

(To be continued in
Volk
, available 2016 from
ChiZine Publications)

“Looker” first appeared in
Chilling Tales
, edited by Michael Kelly, 2011

“The Exorcist: A Love Story” is original to this collection

“The Radejastians” first appeared in
Tesseracts Thirteen
, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell, 2009

“The Summer Worms” first appeared in
Northern Frights 3
, edited by Don Hutchison, 1995

“Knife Fight” first appeared in
Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories
, edited by Claude Lalumière and Camille Alexa, 2013

“Basements” first appeared in
Tesseracts Fourteen
, edited by Brett Alexander Savory and John Robert Colombo, 2010

“Wylde’s Kingdom” first appeared in
Tesseracts Twelve
, edited by Claude Lalumière, 2008

“Love Means Forever” first appeared in
On Spec
, 1996

“Oops” first appeared in
No More Potlucks
#10, 2010

“The Nothing Book of the Dead” is original to this collection

“Drakeela Must Die” first appeared in
Valkyrie Magazine
, 1996

“Black Hen à la Ford” first appeared in
Chilling Tales 2
, edited by Michael Kelly, 2013

“Orlok” is original to this collection

In the acknowledgements to
Monstrous Affections
, my first story collection, I thanked my parents Olga Nickle and Lawrence Nickle for their general, if sometimes bemused support of my writing habit. I want to repeat those thanks, and expand on them a little as pertains to my dad Lawrence.

Last year, eighty-three years old, his health took a turn for the worse, and just days into this year he gave it up and died (I would say he passed away, or left us, or something else implying an immortal soul that might live beyond the flesh, but that would have offended him, inveterate atheist that he was. And in case he was wrong about that, I don’t want to take any chances in having a pissed-off ghost peering over my shoulder). I’ve dedicated
Knife Fight
to him in memory, but not just in memory. This is the last round of fiction I have to publish that was written while he was alive, and therefore infused with his ongoing influence and support. Lawrence spent his life as an artist, one of the last plein-air painters in Canada. From his graduation from the Ontario College of Art in the 1950s to his death, I don’t think he earned a penny from anything other than painting pictures and teaching others what he knew. I’ve followed his example by a bit of a stretch—I’ve not earned anything since graduating Ryerson that didn’t involve putting words to paper or telling others how I thought they should do it. As we got older, my dad and I would tell each other how we thought the other should write stories or paint pictures respectively—but money never changed hands, so we kept it pure that way. I’ll miss him.

I want to thank my partner and fiancée Madeline Ashby for her ongoing support. She’s a hell of a writer and a hell of a partner, and as had Lawrence in his time, also doesn’t charge for her excellent writing advice.

This is a story collection, and a lot of these stories have had life thanks to the encouragement and acceptance of some excellent and open-minded editors. Don Hutchison, Michael Kelly, Claude Lalumière, Camille Alexa, Brett Savory, John Robert Colombo, Liz Holliday, Nancy Kilpatrick, David Morrell, Ellen Datlow, and the crew at
On Spec Magazine
all share some credit and also blame for the stories that are reprinted here.

ChiZine Publications co-proprietors Brett Savory, and also Sandra Kasturi, share credit and blame for the new stories—of which there are two (three if you count that last bait-and-switch we pulled with the
Volk
prologue, “Orlok”). Both of them also added some previously absent polish to the reprinted stories. Peter Watts contributed not only the introduction, but also the rare scientifically accurate portions of “Wylde’s Kingdom” (no one who knows Watts should be surprised that he is the go-to guy for giant squid lore). Erik Mohr’s cover, as has been the case for five books of mine now, makes the whole thing look better than it has any right to, and hopefully has helped sway your purchasing decision in my favour.

The members of the Cecil Street Irregulars writers workshop and the annual science fiction writing retreat/workshop at Gibraltar Point have my gratitude for their input into these stories and others besides.

And as always, I’m indebted to Monica Pacheco who’s ably represented me for many years now through Ann McDermid & Associates in Toronto.

I would also thank Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, had he any direct influence on the title story in this collection. As he did not, I think it best to simply wish him well.