The Best of Lucius Shepard (11 page)

That
night I went to sleep while she was off visiting Tom. I tried to station myself
on the extreme edge of the bed, leaving her enough room to be comfortable; but
by the time she returned I had rolled onto the center of the mattress, and when
she slipped in beside me, turning on her side, her thin buttocks nipped
spoon-style by my groin, I came drowsily awake and realized that my erection
was butting between her legs. Once again physical contact with her caused a
sharpening of my senses, and due to the intimacy of the contact my desire, too,
was sharpened. I could no more have stopped myself than I could have stopped
breathing. Gently, as gently as though she were the truest of trueloves— and,
indeed, I felt that sort of tenderness toward her—I began moving against her,
thrusting more and more forcefully until I had eased partway inside. All this
time she had made no sound, no comment, but now she cocked her leg back over my
hip, wriggled closer, and let me penetrate her fully.

It
had been a month since Anne had left, and I was undeniably horny; but not even
this could explain the fervor of my performance that night. I lost track of how
many times we made love. And yet we never exchanged endearments, never spoke or
in any way acknowledged one another as lovers. Though Alise’s breath quickened,
her face remained set in that characteristic deadpan, and I wasn’t sure if she
was deriving pleasure from the act or simply providing a service, paying rent.
It didn’t matter. I was having enough fun for both of us. The last thing I
recall is that she had mounted me, female superior, her skin glowing ghost-pale
in the dawn light, single-scoop breasts barely jiggling; her charcoal eyes were
fixed on the wall, as if she saw there an important destination toward which
she was galloping me posthaste.

*
* * *

My romance with Alise—this, and
the fact that she and Tom had taken to smoking vast amounts of kef and
wandering the beach glassy-eyed, thus emulating the behavior of the other
expatriates—had more or less the desired effect upon everyone...everyone except
Richard Shockley. He accosted me on my way to work one morning and told me in
no uncertain terms that if I knew what was good for me, I should break all ties
with the twins. I had about three inches and thirty pounds on him, and—for
reasons I will shortly explain—I was in an irascible mood; I gave him a push
and asked him to keep out of my business or suffer the consequences.

“You
stupid punk!” he said, but backed away.

“Punk?”
I laughed—laughter has always been for me a spark to fuel rage—and followed
him. “Come on, Rich. You can work up a better insult than that. A verbal guy
like you. Come on! Give me a reason to get really crazy.”

We
were standing in one of the dusty streets back of the beach, not far from a
bakery, a little shop with dozens of loaves of bread laid neatly in the window,
and at that moment a member of the Guardia Civil poked his head out the door.
He was munching a sweet roll, watching us with casual interest: a short,
swarthy man, wearing an olive green uniform with fancy epaulets, an automatic
rifle slung over his shoulder, and sporting one of those goofy patent-leather
hats. Shockley blanched at the sight, wheeled around, and walked away. I was
about to walk away myself, but the guardsman beckoned. With a sinking feeling
in the pit of my stomach, I went over to him.

“Cobarde,”
he said, gesturing at Shockley.

My
Spanish was poor, but I knew that word:
coward.
“Yeah,” I said. “In
ingles,
cobarde
means chickenshit.”

“Cheek-sheet,”
he said; then, more forcefully: “Cheek-sheet!”

He
asked me to teach him some more English; he wanted to know all the curse words.
His name was Francisco, he had fierce bad breath, and he seemed genuinely
friendly. But I knew damn well that he was most likely trying to recruit me as
an informant. He talked about his family in Seville, his girlfriend, how
beautiful it was in Spain. I smiled, kept repeating.
“Si, si,”
and was
very relieved when he had to go off on his rounds.

Despite
Shockley’s attitude, the rest of the expatriates began to accept the twins,
lumping us together as weirdos of the most perverted sort, yet explicable in
our weirdness. From Don Washington I learned that Tom, Alise, and I were
thought to be involved in a ménage à trois, and when I attempted to deny this,
he said it was no big thing. He did ask, however, what I saw in Alise; I gave
some high-school reply about it all being the same in the dark, but in truth I
had no answer to his question. Since Alise had moved in, my life had assumed a
distinct pattern. Each morning I would hurry off to Malaga to work on the movie
set; each night I would return home and enter into brainless rut with Alise. I
found this confusing. Separated from Alise, I felt only mild pity for her, yet
her proximity would drive me into a lustful frenzy. I lost interest in writing,
in Spain, in everything except Alise’s undernourished body. I slept hardly at
all, my temper worsened, and I began to wonder if she were a witch and had
ensorcelled me. Often I would come home to discover her and Tom sitting stoned on
my porch, the floor littered with sketches of those circuitlike designs
(actually they less resembled circuits than a kind of mechanistic vegetation).
I asked once what they were. “A game,” replied Alise, and distracted me with a
caress.

Two
weeks after she moved in, I shouted at the assistant director of the movie (he
had been instructing me on how to throw a wineskin with the proper degree of
adulation as the English actor-matador paraded in triumph around the bullring)
and was fired. After being hustled off the set, I vowed to get rid of Alise,
whom I blamed for all my troubles. But when I arrived home, she was nowhere to
be seen. I stumped over to Tom’s house and pounded on the door. It swung open,
and I peeked inside. Empty. Half a dozen notebooks were scattered on the floor.
Curiosity overrode my anger. I stepped in and picked up a notebook.

The
front cover was decorated with a hand-drawn swastika, and while it is not
uncommon to find swastikas on notebook covers—they make for entertaining
doodling—the sight of this one gave me a chill. I leafed through the pages,
noticing that though the entries were in English, there were occasional words
and phrases in German, these having question marks beside them; then I went
back and read the first entry.

The Führer had been
dead three days, and still no one had ventured into the office where he had
been exposed to the poisoned blooms, although a servant had crawled along the
ledge to the window and returned with the news that the corpse was stiffened in
its leather tunic, its cheeks bristling with a dead man’s growth, and strings
of desiccated blood were hanging from its chin. But as we well remembered his
habit of reviving the dead for a final bout of torture, we were afraid that he
might have set an igniter in his cells to ensure rebirth, and so we waited
while the wine in his goblet turned to vinegar and then to a murky gas that hid
him from our view. Nothing had changed. The garden of hydrophobic roses
fertilized with his blood continued to lash and slather, and the hieroglyphs of
his shadow selves could be seen patrolling the streets....

The
entry went on in like fashion for several pages, depicting a magical-seeming
Third Reich, ruled by a dead or moribund Hitler, policed by shadow men known
collectively as The Disciples, and populated by a terrified citizenry. All the
entries were similar in character, but in the margins were brief notations,
most having to do with either Tom’s or Alise’s physical state, and one passage
in particular caught my eye:

Alise’s control of
her endocrine system continues to outpace mine. Could this simply be a product
of male and female differences? It seems likely, since we have all else in
common.

Endocrine?
Didn’t that have something to do with glands and secretions? And if so,
couldn’t this be a clue to Alise’s seductive powers? I wished that old Mrs.
Adkins (General Science, fifth period) had been more persevering with me. I
picked up another notebook. No swastika on the cover, but on the foreleaf was
written: “Tom and Alise, ‘born’ 12 March 1944.” The entire notebook contained a
single entry, apparently autobiographical, and after checking out the window to
see if the twins were in sight, I sat down to read it.

Five
pages later I had become convinced that Tom was either seriously crazy or that
he and Alise were the subjects of an insane Nazi experiment.. .or both. The
word
clone
was not then in my vocabulary, but this was exactly what Tom
claimed that he and Alise were. They, he said, along with eighteen others, had
been grown from a single cell (donor unknown), part of an attempt to speed up
development of a true Master Race. A successful attempt, according to him, for
not only were the twenty possessed of supernormal physical and mental
abilities, but they were stronger and more handsome than the run of humanity:
this seemed to me wish fulfillment, pure and simple, and other elements of the
story—for example, the continuation of an exotic Third Reich past 1945—seemed
delusion. But upon reading further, learning that they had been sequestered in
a cave for almost twenty years, being educated by scientific personnel, I
realized that Tom and Alise could have been told these things and have assumed
their truth. One could easily make a case for some portion of the Reich having
survived the war.

I
was about to put down the notebook when I noticed several loose sheets of paper
stuck in the rear; I pulled them out and unfolded them. The first appeared to
be a map of part of a city, with a large central square labeled “Citadel,” and
the rest were covered in a neat script that— after reading a paragraph or two—I
deduced to be Alise’s.

Tom says that since
I’m the only one ever to leave the caves (before we all finally left them, that
is), I should set down my experiences. He seems to think that having even a
horrid past is preferable to having none, and insists that we should document
it as well as we can. For myself I would like to forget the past, but I’ll
write down what I remember to satisfy his compulsiveness.

When we were first
experimenting with the tunnel, we knew nothing more about it than that it was a
metaphysical construct of some sort. Our control of it was poor, and we had no
idea how far it reached or through what medium it penetrated. Nor had we
explored it to any great extent. It was terrifying. The only constant was that
it was always dark, with fuzzy different-colored lights shining at what seemed
tremendous distances away. Often you would feel disembodied, and sometimes your
body was painfully real, subject to odd twinges and shocks. Sometimes it was
hard to move—like walking through black glue, and other times it was as if the
darkness were a frictionless substance that squeezed you along faster than you
wanted to go. Horrible afterimages materialized and vanished on all
sides—monsters, animals, things to which I couldn’t put a name. We were almost
as frightened of the tunnel as we were of our masters. Almost.

One night after the
guards had taken some of the girls into their quarters, we opened the tunnel
and three of us entered it. I was in the lead when our control slipped and the
tunnel began to constrict. I started to turn back, and the next I knew I was standing
under the sky, surrounded by window-less buildings. Warehouses, I think. The
street was deserted, and I had no idea where I was. In a panic, I ran down the
street and soon I heard the sounds of traffic. I turned a corner and stopped
short. A broad avenue lined with gray buildings—all decorated with carved
eagles—led away from where I stood and terminated in front of an enormous
building of black stone. I recognized it at once from pictures we had been
shown—Hitler’s Citadel.

Though I was still
very afraid, perhaps even more so, I realized that I had learned two things of
importance. First, that no matter through what otherworldly medium it
stretched, the tunnel also negotiated a worldly distance. Second, I understood
that the portrait painted of the world by our masters was more or less
accurate. We had never been sure of this, despite having been visited by
Disciples and other of Hitler’s creatures, their purpose being to frighten us
into compliance.

I only stood a few
minutes in that place, yet I’ll never be able to forget it. No description
could convey its air of menace, its oppressiveness. The avenue was thronged
with people, all—like our guards—shorter and less attractive than I and my
siblings, all standing stock-still, silent, and gazing at the Citadel. A
procession of electric cars was passing through their midst, blowing horns,
apparently to celebrate a triumph, because no one was obstructing their path.
Several Disciples were prowling the fringes of the crowd, and overhead a huge
winged shape was flying. It was no aircraft; its wings beat, and it swooped and
soared like a live thing. Yet it must have been forty or fifty feet long. I
couldn’t make out what it was; it kept close to the sun, and therefore was
always partly in silhouette. (I should mention that although the sun was at
meridian, the sky was a deep blue such as I have come to associate with the
late-afternoon skies of this world, and the sun itself was tinged with red, its
globe well defined—I think it may have been farther along the path to dwarfism
than the sun of this world.) All these elements contributed to the menace of
the scene, but the dominant force was the Citadel. Unlike the other buildings,
no carvings adorned it. No screaming eagles, no symbols of terror and war. It was
a construct of simple curves and straight lines; but that simplicity implied an
animal sleekness, communicated a sense of great power under restraint, and I
had the feeling that at any moment the building might come alive and devour
everyone within its reach. It seemed to give its darkness to the air.