Biblical (34 page)

“And that is almost exactly what Gabriel said …” Macbeth nodded thoughtfully. “But I still don’t see—”

“Maybe we’re shining our torches on more than one reality. And maybe that’s got something to do with—” Casey was cut off by the ringing of the phone. When he answered it, Macbeth could tell instantly from his face that it was bad news.

Very bad news.

*

There was no television in the apartment, so they used the laptop Casey had given Macbeth to get the TV news as a live Internet feed. It was the usual jumble of a breaking story: the camera darting instead of panning, pulled in one direction
then another, magnetized by shouts and sirens or the sudden tumescence of a fireball. The light and the colors were polarized on the screen: bright yellow and orange bursts and flickers against the dark blues and turquoises of the evening sky; silhouetted figures appearing and disappearing against the brightness of the flames as firefighters and cops rushed back and forth.

“Fuck …” said Casey. “Holy fuck.”

The image cut to an on-the-spot reporter, her perfect makeup illuminated imperfectly in the spot of a camera light, chaos in shadow and amber glow behind her.

“At this time, Boston PD are reluctant to point a finger at any particular terrorist group, and have not yet even confirmed that the blasts and resultant fire here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were caused by terrorist devices, but it seems clear that this has been a coordinated series of attacks on MIT. Furthermore, unofficial sources have suggested that responsibility for the explosions has been claimed by Blind Faith, the fundamentalist Christian group. The group has already been blamed for an escalating series of attacks on research institutions and individual scientists over the last year. It is too early to confirm if Blind Faith is in fact behind this tragedy that has caused so much damage and so many deaths. I’m afraid we still don’t know exactly how many fatalities we are dealing with.”

“Do we know where the explosions took place, Kathy?” asked the baritone of an invisible male news anchor.

“All indications are that there was a sequence of six large blasts, three of which each took place in a different building within the MIT campus. The first blast took place in –” she referred to her clipboard notes “– in the Dreyfoos Tower of the Sata Center, where the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is located. The second blast took place directly across Vassar Street, in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building. The third took place in the Fairchild Building, in the
Haptic Technology laboratory, which I am told specializes in touch-based interfaces between humans and technology. But it was the Gillman Quantum Modeling Project, located in the Pierce Laboratory on Massachusetts Avenue, which seems to have been the main target, with three bombs – and I think it’s safe to assume that these were indeed planted and remotely detonated devices – exploding in the space of one minute. Professor Steven Gillman is said to have been present in the building at the time of the explosions and is, as yet, unaccounted for, along with fifteen fellow scientists. Firefighters have so far been unable to get to the seat of the fire where temperatures are said to be excessively high even for a blaze of this nature.”

“Shit …” Casey turned away from the screen and began pacing the kitchen, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. That’s exactly the unit Gabriel Rees worked in, the team he was on …”

Markus opened his eyes and quickly sat upright.

Out of nowhere, the sky had darkened: mid-afternoon had become late evening in a matter of a second. But it was more than the time of day that had changed: Markus felt chilled bullets of rain on his face and the air had suddenly become cold and infused with a strong smell. A disgusting smell that seemed like the odors of urine, feces, sweat and unwashed linen all combined and magnified.

The neat rectangles of pale gray gravel were gone. The open space was gone. In its place were rows of barrack sheds, like the ones the guide had shown them, leaving only a small courtyard between them and the administration building, with the Jourhaus to one side. Markus stood up suddenly from the bench, as if stung, but when he looked back the bench was gone. The willow was gone. The smell. That clinging, sickening stench that seemed to swell and eddy in the air as the cold breeze changed direction.

None of this made sense. What had happened to the other students in his party? Where had all of these other barracks come from? He could no longer simply walk across the square so he took the path that had erupted from nowhere and headed back to the Jourhaus. It was a path of bare earth, but earth that had been pressed flat and brushed. This was insane.

A shrill, sharp sound made him jump: the blast of several whistles. He looked in the direction the sound had come from.
Four men trotted out of the main administration building and into the courtyard square, urgently blowing their whistles. The four trotting men were in uniform. Black uniform.

This cannot be happening. The thought burned in Markus’s mind. This simply cannot be happening.

The smell that had been eddying in the breeze became a sickening tidal wave as the doors of the barrack huts opened and figures tumbled out. They were people but it was like they were a different species of people: half ghosts already, tangles of impossibly thin limbs beneath striped prison uniforms; skull faces beneath formless, peakless caps.

The smell came from them. Markus knew it was more than being unwashed: it was the smell of disease and death. The guide had explained that in the last months of the camp, and stretching into the months after liberation, the death rate at Dachau had soared because of typhus.

What was he thinking? Why was he rationalizing this experience by equating it to a past reality? These people were not real. What he was seeing was not real. It simply could not be real.

The prisoners shuffled hurriedly onto the courtyard Appellplatz, forming rows. Markus noticed how their shambling became geometric precision. Everybody stood still and at some kind of attention. Shoulders sagged, heads hung. Coughs resonated. He was looking at an assembly of the dead. The long dead. The half dead even in their own time.

The four SS men, three with forage caps, the fourth with a peaked officer’s cap, ceased whistling and stood in the posture of authority: all with feet planted wide, the officer with his hands on his hips, the NCOs holding thick, short staves in front of them. Between the SS men was a low wooden trestle of some kind, the purpose of which Markus could not work out. The officer took a step forward.

“This is a punishment assembly,” he called out. He had a
thin, ugly voice and spoke with a Saxon accent. “To demonstrate the penalty for stealing from the prisoner shop.”

Markus knew from the tour that there had indeed been a prisoner shop, where inmates could pay – if they could afford it and in the tokens they had been given on arrival in exchange for their cash – hugely inflated prices for meager additions to the starvation diet they were fed. He felt sick with foreboding: he also knew that all profits from the shop had gone directly to the SS. If someone had stolen from the shop, then the punishment would be severe.

Why am I thinking like this? He cursed his folly. These are not prisoners, these are not real SS. What I am experiencing is a delusion, a hallucination. Think it through, Markus, think it through. He had read the reports of people all over the world imagining that they were seeing things – people and events that were not really there. A bug, they thought. Some kind of virus. I must have caught it too, he thought to himself.

But still the foreboding remained.

A fifth SS man, another forage-capped NCO, came out of the Jourhaus. He was holding a shackled prisoner by the elbow and walking so quickly that the prisoner had to perform a rapid shuffle with his leg-ironed feet. The prisoner was, like the others, emaciated and stooped, but even with that was a full head taller than his escort. Even from a distance, Markus could see that the manacled man was terrified, pleading to the oblivious guard in a quiet but high-pitched voice, like a beseeching child. Markus could also see the marks of a beating on the man: blood smeared across his nose and chin, one eye swollen and closed.

Stop. Markus’s command did not make it past a thought and remained unvoiced. I should shout. I should tell them to stop. Maybe they’ll hear me. Maybe I can make them stop.

But he didn’t shout or call out. He didn’t move nearer. There’s no point, they can’t hear me, Markus lied to himself. He knew
the reason he did not shout out was because he was afraid of exactly that: that they would hear him.

The urgent, high-pitched chatter became a whimpering as the prisoner was forced to his knees in front of the low trestle. Unfastening his manacles, they stretched his arms out wide and re-fettered them on the trestle, forcing him down onto the wooden structure, his head turned and his cheek pressed against the wood.

Dear God no, thought Markus. Yet he remained motionless, stayed silent.

“This,” proclaimed the Saxon officer, “is the justice you may expect for stealing the property of the Reich.” He turned to the NCOs. “Carry out sentence.”

It was the ease, the relaxed nature of their preparation, that sickened Markus most. The four NCOs stood two on each side of the man; each hunched then relaxed his shoulders, shook the arm holding the heavy club. It reminded Markus of golfers preparing for a swing.

“Proszę!” the fettered man pleaded, his voice wet and muffled. “Proszę! Wybacz mi! Proszę, nie rób mi krzywdy!”

The NCOs ignored him and were clearly establishing the order in which they should carry out their work. Nodding.

“Proszę!” Then in a desperate, pleading, Polish-accented German, “Please! Please sirs! Beg to forgive! Beg to forgive! Do not please to do that!”

The Saxon officer laughed, then nodded to his subordinates. The first NCO, a short, squat block of a man, swung his club up into the air and brought it down onto the prisoner’s extended right arm at the elbow-joint. A sickening crack sounded in the damp, cold air and then another sound, like the whistle of a boiling kettle, that Markus did not immediately recognize as a human scream.

Like roadworkers driving in a bridge pile, the four black-uniformed NCOs swung in rapid, coordinated rhythm, blows
raining down on the prisoner. On his arms, on his back, on his shoulders, but never on his head, clearly for fear that unconsciousness would rob him of his pain. The sound of each blow sickening, the inhuman screams of the prisoner cutting through the air, through Markus’s skull.

Sinking to his knees, Markus sobbed. He looked across at the assembled prisoners. They stood mutely, their faces blank of expression and empty of emotion, most looking down at the ground.

Do something! Markus wanted to scream at them. There are more of you than them. Do something! But again Markus’s voice failed him.

The rain of blows continued. Occasionally, an SS man would step back, the others carrying on the rhythm while he took a break, then he would rejoin the battery to allow a colleague to take a turn resting. After a while, the officer waved a hand to halt the beating.

The prisoner no longer screamed. Instead his wet, rheumy wheezing echoed in the otherwise quiet of the square.

Another casual gesture from the officer and the SS men walked off the parade ground, without dismissing the assembled prisoners who remained standing to emotionless attention, eyes downcast.

No one moved. No one moved for ten minutes. For twenty. For an hour. And all the time, the parade square echoed with the squelchy wheezing of the dying man. Eventually, Markus began to walk slowly, nervously casting his eyes up at the guard towers, making his way to where the punished prisoner remained shackled to the trestle.

The prisoners arranged in rows did not seem to acknowledge Markus, to see him, but they had given him the impression that even if he had been visible to them, they would not have seen him, blind as they were to anything other than their own immediate and visceral struggle to survive.

He knelt down beside the beaten man. Markus could see that he was now far from the shore of life, drifting farther with each passing second. His body had not had time to contuse, or perhaps was too anemic to bruise, and Markus could see that his arms and torso were severely deformed where the blows had fractured arm and collar bones, forced ribs into shattered concaves. Eyes closed, his breathing was now a wet wheeze, viscous bubbles of blood ballooned from his nostrils, his lips encrimsoned.

“I’m sorry,” sobbed Markus. “I’m so sorry.”

The dying man opened his eyes and looked directly at Markus.

“Dlaczego?” he said in a moist almost-whisper between ruckling breaths. “Dlaczego nie możesz mi pomóc?”

“I don’t understand,” said Markus, overcoming his shock that he was really there, visible and real, to the man. He reached out a hand to touch him, to comfort him, but stopped short, afraid that his touch would simply add to his agony. Or perhaps simply because he did not want to confirm another dimension to this insanity, this hallucination.

“Why did you not help me?” the prisoner asked wetly in German before his eyes glazed.

This is a dream, he told himself. Not a hallucination.

Macbeth had slept fitfully and what sleep he had managed was laced through with dreams in which he was aware of his own dreaming. In this dream he was a young boy again, standing at the door of his father’s study; except the study was impossibly huge, the ceilings gravity-defyingly high and the too-big walls with their overfull bookshelves stretching orthogonally to an impossibly distant vanishing point.

His father was not sitting in his chair, instead standing with another man and a woman in front of his desk. The sight of the other man, whose face he could not see even when it was turned in his direction, terrified Macbeth. The woman was the most beautiful he had ever seen: Marjorie Glaiston, or at least Marjorie Glaiston as she’d appeared to Macbeth in his previous dream. The three adults didn’t notice the young Macbeth as he entered and made his way over to them, nervously clutching his encyclopedia to his chest. They were all too interested in what they were looking at to pay heed to him; something vast sparkled and flashed and glowed, suspended in the air of the study in front of and above them. It was a thing of light and no substance, a massive ball of color and luminescence that formed patterns out of nothing: amazingly complex patterns that took shape and changed and elaborated before disappearing, only to be replaced by other even more complex patterns. Macbeth, in his dream a boy in mind as well as body,
stood mesmerized by it. He now pressed close to his father and slipped his hand into his, making a huge effort not to look at the other man.