Through the Eye of Time (20 page)

This is madness, she thought, and the word in her mind made her sweat coldly. It was overwork, nervous strain, the combined effect of the two – a dozen reasons to explain it away. The project had demanded too much of her time, that was it; bound to be psychologically unhealthy, she told herself with prim firmness.

Pouline looked through the transparent panel into the laboratory and somebody or something was obscuring the lights. It was an outline, marked by winking patterns of red, green, orange, magenta—

She stopped breathing. Was it him? Had he materialized from the machine, risen like an evil wraith from the germanium circuitry and was now made flesh, bone, brain and spirit, standing out there in the flickering laboratory? It wasn't possible, she was hallucinating, he wasn't really there, only in her mind, and as she thought this the shadow moved across the lights and came towards the door of the office.

It was some time later that she discovered she had drawn blood from the palms of her hands, the pressure of her fists forcing the nails into the flesh. The actual moment when he
entered the office was a frozen splinter of eternity, and even when the light revealed his face and she saw who it was her blank disbelief held her in a state of suspension; then the air flooded from her lungs and her body relaxed.

*

His face, Pouline noticed, seemed oddly luminous in the dim light: translucent almost.

‘I didn't expect anyone to be there, least of all you.' A sudden rush of blood made her cheeks glow with heat.

‘You have a morbid fascination for sitting alone in the dark.'

‘Is it morbid? I don't see why.'

‘The spirits might haunt you.'

‘I don't believe in such things.'

He went to the panel and looked through into the laboratory. Without turning his head he said, ‘I wish I could be that certain.'

‘Certain of what?'

‘Anything at all.'

Pouline laughed nervously. ‘I was under the impression that Myth Technologists knew all the answers.'

‘It isn't the task of the Myth Technologist to provide the answers; only to ask the questions.'

‘How modest of you.'

‘Not me,' Queghan said, turning. ‘That was a quote from Johann Karve's manual for fledgling mythographers,
The Hidden Universe.'

‘I thought mythographers were born, not made.'

‘Yes indeed. But we need guidance. We need to be taught how to use our gift.'

‘Is it a gift?' Pouline asked curiously. And then, ‘I'm not even sure what it is you're able to do. It's never been properly explained to me.'

‘Didn't I explain it to you?'

‘When?'

She watched his face, holding her breath.

‘Have you forgotten?'

‘I don't know.' She was confused. A misplaced memory nagged at her. ‘When?'

‘That night.'

Pouline stared at him.

‘You have forgotten.'

‘I'm not sure; but you seem to remember it.'

‘I do indeed.'

‘That's the second time you've used the word “indeed”.'

‘Now you're thinking like a mythographer.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Picking up unconsidered trifles and trying to make something of them.'

‘Is that what mythographers do?' she asked gravely, a small puzzled frown on her face.

‘Part of it. We're not interested in the set-pieces of life, only in the margins, the things that in the jargon “aggregate by mutual indifference”.'

‘You mean there's no connection between them?'

‘No causal connection,' Queghan amended.

He sat down in the chair across the desk from her. Pouline thought it strange that although his face was in darkness she could see every feature clearly delineated, as though illuminated from within. He said:

‘The fatal thing is to concentrate on the events; rather we ignore them and gradually they form into an acausal pattern which we can detect and interpret.'

‘Can anyone detect them?'

‘They can and do, though most people brush them aside as “just another coincidence”. They don't see any special significance in an apparently unrelated sequence of events – but that's because they're looking for a causal connection which fits in with their everyday experience. Mythic events, by their very nature, don't obey the rules we impose on objective reality. If I were to tell you that the reason you have brown eyes is due to the fact that Léon Steele finds them attractive you'd find it difficult to accept.'

‘Impossible,' Pouline deGrenier said. ‘The fact of my having brown eyes precedes the fact of Léon Steele finding them attractive by some thirty years.'

‘What has time to do with it? We're dealing with acausality, not horology. You're thinking of events in terms of everyday
experience: it's quite feasible that something might happen tomorrow which affects your behaviour last week.'

He was smiling at her so that Pouline felt like a child having something simple explained to it which it failed to grasp, and even as she was thinking this a light seemed to go on in a dim dusty corner of her mind. She said, ‘That's why you set such great store by probability … you never state definitely that an event has or will take place, only the probable likelihood of it taking place—'

‘And the most important concept of all,' Queghan said softly, ‘is that the incidence of probability can never be resolved. It is, by definition, an unknown and unknowable quantity, for ever in a state of uncertainty. Everything in the universe, from a subatomic particle upwards, exists within a certain tolerance, a vague shadowy area which marks the boundary of knowledge. It is the limit to what we can ever know.'

‘Everything?'

‘Every single thing. Events at the subnuclear level or on a cosmological scale. Spacetime, history, the past, the future, even relationships between people. Morality, ethics, the whole bag of tricks.'

‘Everything is constantly relative,' Pouline said.

‘Or relatively constant.'

‘And ultimately unknowable.'

‘With absolute Godlike certainty, yes.'

It might have been an omen, a presentiment – for Pouline deGrenier suddenly experienced a keen and disturbing sense of
déjà vu
. She had lived through this before. This conversation had already taken place in some distant past – a dreamscape shrouded in ambiguity like the images in a distorting mirror. One of the images steadied and sharpened: the form and likeness of Léon Steele, and Pouline thought, Not with him. I couldn't. I didn't …

She could remember approaching the desk, this desk, and picking up the receiver and selecting the code … and then the image shivered and it was as though there were two Pouline deGreniers going their separate ways, two people in different shifting worlds which seemed to overlap like a series of transparent overlays one on top of the other.

Could I have been in two places at once? she wondered. And if Léon was one of my lovers, who was the other?

‘We can never know anything for certain,' Queghan said. ‘The ultimate mystery remains.'

‘I now understand why Myth Technology is regarded as a metaphysical science.' She looked across the desk at Queghan and knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that just below his left collar-bone there was a mark. She had traced its imprint with the tips of her fingers: a shallow pale indentation in the shape of a Q. But how was this possible?

‘It is strange, isn't it?'

‘What?' she said, her heart lurching in her chest.

‘What you are thinking.'

Fear made her voice cold and impersonal. ‘Do you know what I'm thinking?'

His hand went up to his left shoulder and he tapped the spot with his long delicate fingers. She could see through them: they were translucent: she could see the shapes of the bones inside.

‘What's happening?' she said aghast. ‘What's wrong with you?'

When Queghan smiled she could see the skull underneath.

‘Mythographers do more than interpret the meaning of coincidences and wait for events to aggregate by mutual indifference. We are blessed – some might say cursed – with the gift of mythic projection.'

‘I don't know what—'

‘I think you do.'

‘No!' she said, refusing to listen, to accept. But she did know what he meant, the knowledge was full-born in her mind. It was a revelation, precise in every detail. ‘Is this a dream?' she asked. ‘Is it really happening?'

‘Do you believe it's happening?' Inside his skull she could see the shadowy bulky mass of the brain. The living brain inside the skull.

The palms of her hands were sticky with sweat and blood. ‘If it is really happening I must be going mad, and if it isn't I must be mad already.'

Queghan raised his hand, a hand that had the substance of
gossamer, to indicate the room in which they sat. ‘Look around you.'

Pouline turned and saw blank grey walls of concrete, shiny with condensation. The low ceiling was a solid slab of masonry with a caged bulb in the centre and the desk in front of her was a rough wooden table with papers scattered over it. There were no windows and just a single metal door painted green, the rivets protruding sufficiently to throw elongated shadows down to the floor. The floor too was concrete, gritty underfoot, and she could smell the chill decaying dampness of an underground tomb. There was no sound except her own breathing, the uneven flutter of air in her nostrils and the internal sounds inside her eardrums as the blood swished and gurgled through her body.

‘What is this place?' she asked in a whisper.

‘I think we should have to call it …' he was practically transparent now ‘ …a region of probability.'

Yet it was real to her, it was too real. Pouline could feel the damp and cold entering into her pores. And the odour of stale air and decay and sweating concrete filled her mouth and nose. There was evil here too, palpable and overpowering. She shivered involuntarily and closed her eyes. This was what he had meant by mythic projection – the ability to place an image inside her head and force her to see and feel and smell its reality. Did it exist? And where was it? Was she actually and literally here, enclosed within concrete walls and slabs of masonry?

‘Am I really here?' she asked him. ‘Am I?'

There was a sharp cracking sound close to her left ear and Pouline opened her eyes to see Léon Steele standing anxiously over her, pulling at his fingers. He stopped guiltily when her eyes focused on him.

‘Are you all right? Can I get you something?'

‘Where's Queghan?'

Léon glanced round the office. ‘I don't know. Is he here?'

Of course he wasn't: the chair was empty.

Berlin, April 1945

These are dark days. As Schwerin von Krosigk remarked to me only yesterday: ‘All this week there has been nothing but a succession of Job's messengers. How will it end? How
can
it end?'

Living down here, hidden away from the daylight and fresh air, it is indeed difficult to gain a true perspective on what is happening throughout the country. All the reports are bad. We hear that the Americans are over the Elbe and that the Russians have crossed the Oder and are marching on Dresden and threatening Berlin itself. In the north a combined force of Japanese and Americans are meeting little resistance as they approach Bremen and Hamburg, and in the south the French are swarming along the upper Danube, having already taken Vienna. Even the Führer's sacred Bavaria is threatened by General Patton and his merciless armoured brigades.

But the worst news of all came this morning. Goebbels sent a personal messenger from his headquarters in the cellars beneath the Propaganda Ministry with an urgent dispatch which dealt a blow to the heart: the Blackshirts have capitulated. Our hopes had all been pinned on their holding the Low Countries and opening a corridor through to Berlin as a means of escape, but now we hear that Montgomery has entered into negotiations with Eisenhower in the hope of saving the remnants of the 7th Army. As a final cruel sting in the tail the message added that the Leibstandarte AH, the Führer's personal SS Division, had been a party to the surrender and is now no more.

The conditions down here, twenty metres below ground underneath the Chancellery, leave a lot to be desired. Our quarters are perpetually damp and even the air-conditioning cannot get rid of the smell of many human beings forced to live like
animals on top of one another, day in and day out. The Führerbunker consists of eighteen rooms (little more than concrete cubicles) divided by a central passageway which is used as a general sitting area and, further along behind a wooden partition, a space where the daily staff conferences are held. On either side of this narrow passage are the private rooms: on the left Hitler's bedroom and study, and next to these Eva's bedroom, bathroom and dressing-room. A small anteroom adjoining these is used by the Führer's personal SS bodyguard.

My two rooms – bedroom and office – along with Stumpfegger's bedroom and first-aid station are on the right of the passage; further along are the rooms which contain the emergency telephone exchange, the guardroom and the Diesel power house. At our end of the Bunker we are fortunate in having the emergency exit which leads up four flights of concrete stairs to the Chancellery garden. But even the close proximity of this isn't much of a comfort, for there is a general standing order that no one is allowed outside until after dark and then only for a maximum period of forty-five minutes. It's like living in a submarine moored permanently at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Cold, damp, depressing.

Every day there is a constant stream of visitors: Doenitz, Bormann, Keitel, Jodl, Kesselring, Christian, Speer, Krebs, and dozens of aides and adjutants ferrying messages back and forth. I try, as much as possible, not to get too involved in the continuous and wearying round of staff meetings, map conferences, Orders to General Staff, and so on. I find it very tedious and there isn't much to be gleaned by listening to their endless inane chatter, so I stay in my room writing my diary and reading Carlyle's
History of Frederick the Great
(the Führer's personal copy, which I borrowed). Sometimes I while away the hours by chatting (!) to Eva in the comparative privacy of her bedroom. We are rarely disturbed there, which is convenient.