Revolution (9 page)

I didn’t look
back.

Every kneipe
was a basement, every floor inside was potholed with craters and ripped lino. I
squeezed my way through der nacht auf der untoten and staggered into each
gantry in turn.

Boats, quays,
harbors, marinas I had to remind myself. This is Hanseatic country with canals
as big as the Grand Canyon and ships as big as the Taj Mahal.

The city was
an industry on the waves and I was bobbing along on its rapids in a little
rubber dingy that bashed me around every twisted bend.

I had one
point on a map, one dead kid to find alive, seven million suspects, and nothing
was happening until I came to the place without windows.

It had no
name.

It had no
sign.

It looked
like a red brick mausoleum with one big door that was thick with black paint.
And it was in the kid’s notebook.

"One,
two, three, here goes."

You’d think I
was getting ready to be launched on the back of a doodlebug into outer space.

I reached
out, bit my lip and held my breath.

I touched the
door. And when I didn’t drop dead I pushed it open wide.

Optics
glittered at me like chrome lasers. It was the same with the mirrors. I stepped
inside, let go of the hatch, and heard the only emergency exit squeeze itself
shut behind me with a click.

I strolled up
to the bar as an orchestra of zithers sliced through a squeezebox mentality.

I gave my
best shot at not falling flat on my face as I swayed under a glitter-ball
revolving in a haze of cigar smoke trapped at the ceiling.

Did I need a
beer?

And before
the barman could jabber on about which one I wanted, I pointed at bottles
leaning together on the sagging shelf behind him. I kept saying ja ja ja louder
and louder until his long creepy fingers touched the one that glowed at me the
brightest. And when he did, the glow died.

Not a good
sign.

He popped the
cap with a Coke opener chained to his belt and dumped the foaming bottle in
front of me. He marked the placemat, and I took it, and the beer, with me and
slid off to the cover of a dark corner.

The patrons
were either barefaced skinheads, or they were handle-bar mustached, hairy and
full of last week’s sweat. Their voices yelled and fell and dulled the more I
drank.

Is there
lightning in here or is it me? I thought.

I turned to
see the tail end of a greatcoat sweep through the crowd and vanish under the
mezzanine at the back. A mezzanine where biceps flexed and leathered crotches
bulged through the gaps in the balustrade. 

There was be
a full on light explosion from nowhere, and a flicker that echoed into nothing
before I could find the source.

I was packing
my Polaroid sunglasses but I would have looked obvious if I’d put them on.

I thought I was
being intelligent.

Flash.
Flicker.

What the hell
was that?

The light was
so bright it bleached the flesh around me to bone-white translucent.

No one else
seemed to notice but every time the flash hit, my head gave a thud.

I decided to
leave.

Not by front
ways but by back alleyways.

Eyes crawled
over me as I pushed my way through the crowd. I crept into shadows and around
baffle-boards hiding a snooker hall at the back of the bar. And with no one
there but me the voices behind me faded to nothing.

I reached out
to walls that were pushing in at me on either side. They were soft and warm
like pulsating guts and sweat dripped off of them.

I clumped
down wooden steps, my feet slipping.

There was a
stink of burning wires and rancid butter, and it was thick.

I stopped for
a second and heard slow waves suck at the bottom step.

Something
glinted down there and it felt like mucus was oozing over my boots.

Deciding it
was time for the torch, I took it out and flicked on the beam to see that the
steps had disappeared into thick black stuff.

"Bruder,"
a voice said.

I squinted at
liquid tar from here to eternity.

The thing
rose in a big bubble of black. Only it wasn’t a bubble. It was a head.

When the
torch beam bounced off of it a mouth opened, the eyes opened, and it looked
right at me. The whole thing was surrounded by a snot-green halo.

"Bruder,"
it said again.

It rose up
more dripping crude oil.

The fumes
were overpowering and my head reeled.

"Komm zu
uns," it said.

And I wanted
to. I really did.

It waded toward
me, its legs sucking up and down through the tar.

Its hands
reached out and a dense streamer of green snaked out of them, then fanned wide
like a big mouth, and sucked at my face.

"Du
kommst wir gerade rechts mein kleiner bruder."

I took a step
into the sludge. My legs gave way. It would have been so easy.

I saw the
walls tilt back and the oil tilt up at my face.

I was falling
for a tar baby.

Mr. Pink my
shirt designer won’t be too happy I thought when the collar of my shirt ripped.

The buttons
popped and flew off like shrapnel. From forward to back something had grabbed
me by the scruff of the neck.

"Idiot!"
the voice said.

Hands grabbed
me under my arms, but I didn’t protest. I couldn’t. Why should I? It felt too
good, too easy.

Before I knew
it I was outside lying on the cobbles.

My head was
allowed to rest back and I opened my eyes. Eyes looked back down at me and
close.  

"Hi,"
I grinned.

The face
pulled away and I was yanked back onto my feet.

"Halt!"

So they did
and me too.

I recognized
the face. The hair was different, shorter. But the face was the same. He had
something in his hand. It didn’t look nice.

Then I could
hear the Bren guns; see the bullet tracers, their orange lines firing through
the night.

"Er
verstehe nicht," said one of the guys holding me up by the armpits.

A grenade
exploded in a doorway and boots scraped through the carnage of smoke and
bricks.

The explosion
brought me around. Everyone dove for cover. Without support I crashed to my
knees.

In the
confusion I scrambled for the nearest corner. And there went that flashy
flicker light again, bright and white.

The guy with
the gun, with the face I thought I knew, lurched for me. My heels shot out and
kicked out Thumper style. His head shot back on impact and the gun flew out of
his hand.

I clawed out
for it, but when I did there was acceleration in the pit of my gut. The next
thing I knew was the sound of feet hammering down the steps in the cellar to
me. I was sprawled, legs akimbo, with gun in hand. I looked up at them, then down
to that well of an oil place. There was nothing there now but crates of beer
and barrels of Bremen.

One of the
guys hunkered down and looked me in the eyes. Reaching out he took the gun from
me as easy as taking a popgun from a kid.

"Pay-null-acht
Luger," he said to someone, but not me. And did I care anyhow?

He stuffed
the gun into his pocket and dragged me to my feet.

No one said
anything until they had me in the street.

"Sind
Sie, okay?"

"Huh?"

"Go
home, Bruder," another said.

They walked
away and left me there with a torn collar, torn off buttons, busted knees and
ruined chinos.

No cops, no
nothing, I staggered back to the hotel and crashed down on the bed.

#

I knocked at
the front door. No one answered. I knocked harder until the glass broke.

I stepped
over splinters and made my way into the front room. There was nothing there.
The father who had claimed he wasn’t a father wasn’t there either. It looked as
though no one had been living there in years.

I made my way
to the mother’s house. It was the same thing; nothing and no one there, no
pictures, no passports, no cups, and no coffee.

Three guys
were dead and one more nearly so, me.

#

I searched
through the archives.

Hamburg 1943.

I flicked
through pictures of destruction, faces of the dead and the dying, and the burnt
beyond recognition.

Bremer Reihe.

Thule
Orientals in green gloves chanting mantras to a machine in some basement under
fire. And there were six others standing in the shadows behind them.

Some people
just don’t know when to die.

I hit print
and the print slithered out like a dried up tongue.

The picture
was grainy, but there he was, sitting in some sleazy little kneipe with two
young guys on one side of him, one on the other with five shot glasses up
front. Someone was missing.

Take a guess.

I looked at
their faces. I looked at his. They all looked like him, they all looked like
her. And I could just tell who was holding the Brownie camera taking the black
and whites

Five glasses
and four guys and all of them were waiting for the Prodigal son to return.

I took the
print back home with me. I looked at my face in the mirror.

If I didn’t
know any better I would have said I was looking at my own father or maybe my
brother from a different time. An older twin if that was possible; one who didn’t
age.

Something had
happened back then; something beyond desperation.

"He’s
not mine," he’d said. "Neurologists checked him out," she’d
said.

A big lie, a
radio wave from the past to rein me in, something to get me close to where that
machine had been, to get me back, to prove to them that the thing actually
worked; the right guy in the wrong time to help them all escape from the horror
they had created.

It was dark.
I poured a vodka straight. The phone rang. I picked it up.

"Yeah?"

But no one
talked; just another dead end.

Einstein.
Relativity. Tesla. The Egg of Columbus. The Torsion Tensor Effect. And the
Wenceslas mine.

Und
Schutzstaffel
,
SS General Dr Ing Hans Kammler.

Mein Vater.

I looked at
his pinched face, his eyes. Black and white didn’t do their evil justice. I
just hoped that at least the heels of my boots had.

They had put
me in that machine along with my brothers after I had taken that picture. Alles
mein brüder und mich, and now everyone was after me for the sins of my father.
Me, the problem paperclip still being sucked back to that magnetron from the
past; the aftereffect

Now their
mansions were empty. No traces, no signs, no mother or father to be seen. There
never had been, not in this time. That was all they needed though. Their machine
was still stuck back there with enough power to reach out with their bait and
drag me back into their trap. Enough to have me sucked back and let them know
it was safe; me, their own son, their test rat, the only rat who had survived.
If I had made it to here and gone back there then maybe they would have been
brave enough to use it to save their own skins.

And destroy
the planet.

The good guys
guarding that cellar, where it had all happened in the first place, had saved
me. The bad guys were still stuck back there where they belonged. But if they
had seeped back through with their influence once, then they could sniff me out
again. So I packed the few things I owned and slung a rucksack over my back.

It was time
to move on. Stay long enough anywhere, and they’d home in on me again.

I took one
last look at my reflection. I put on the shades and the light dimmed. I saw my
father’s face smile behind me in the mirror. I reached up and yanked down on
the light cord and made him disappear back to hell where he belonged.

I walked out
the door, into the night, and down the street, and I didn’t look back.

Maybe I’m a
ghost, I thought. So I kicked a pebble. It skittered away. When a fox showed
its face I stamped my foot and it ran away.

So far so
good.

A drape twitched
in a window as I walked under a streetlight and then it dropped back.

The whole
thing had been a set up, a smoke and mirrors job, a phantasm. I was real all
right, and they weren’t; not in this time.

But I needed
somewhere new, a place with nothing but night and an infinite sky, with a
brushwood perimeter of hemlock to block out the merging dimensions.