Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (55 page)

A
Musselmänn,
Bruckman thought, I’m becoming a
Musselmänn . . .
and felt a chill of fear sweep through him. He fought to hold onto the world, afraid that the next time he slipped away from himself he would not come back, deliberately banging his hands into the rocks, cutting himself, clearing his head with pain.

The world steadied around him. A guard shouted a hoarse admonishment at him and slapped his rifle butt, and Bruckman forced himself to work faster, although he could not keep himself from weeping silently with the pain his movements cost him.

He discovered that Wernecke was watching him, and stared back defiantly, the bitter tears still runneling his dirty cheeks, thinking,
I won’t become a
Musselmänn
for you, l won’t make it easy for you, 1 won’t provide another helpless victim for
you . . . Wernecke met Bruckman’s gaze for a moment, and then shrugged and turned away.

Bruckman bent for another stone, feeling the muscles in his back crack and the pain drive in like knives. What had Wernecke been thinking, behind the blankness of his expressionless face? Had Wernecke, sensing his weakness, marked Bruckman for his next victim? Had Wernecke been disappointed or dismayed by the strength of Bruckman’s will to survive? Would Wernecke now settle upon someone else?

The morning passed, and Bruckman grew feverish again. He could feel the fever in his face, making his eyes feel sandy and hot, pulling the skin taut over his cheekbones, and he wondered how long he could manage to stay on his feet. To falter, to grow weak and insensible, was certain death; if the Nazis didn’t kill him, Wernecke would . . . Wernecke was out of sight now, on the other side of the quarry, but it seemed to Bruckman that Wernecke’s hard and flinty eyes were everywhere, floating in the air around him, looking out momentarily from the back of a Nazi soldier’s head, watching him from the dulled iron side of a quarry cart, peering at him from a dozen different angles. He bent ponderously for another rock, and when he had pried it up from the earth he found Wernecke’s eyes beneath it, staring unblinkingly up at him from the damp and pallid soil . . .

That afternoon there were great flashes of light on the eastern horizon, out across the endless flat expanse of the steppe, flares in rapid sequence that lit up the sullen gray sky, all without sound. The Nazi guards had gathered together in a group, looking to the east and talking in subdued voices, ignoring the prisoners for the moment. For the first time Bruckman noticed how disheveled and unshaven the guards had become in the last few days, as though they had given up, as though they no longer cared. Their faces were strained and tight, and more than one of them seemed to be fascinated by the leaping fires on the distant edge of the world.

Melnick said that it was only a thunderstorm, but old Bohme said that it was an artillery battle being fought, and that that meant that the Russians were coming, that soon they would all be liberated.

Bohme grew so excited at the thought that he began shouting, “The Russians! It’s the Russians! The Russians are coming to free us!” Dichstein and Melnick tried to hush him, but Bohme continued to caper and shout—doing a grotesque kind of jig while he yelled and flapped his arms—until he had attracted the attention of the guards. Infuriated, two of the guards fell upon Bohme and beat him severely, striking him with their rifle butts with more than usual force, knocking him to the ground, continuing to flail at him and kick him while he was down, Bohme writhing like an injured worm under their stamping boots. They probably would have beaten Bohme to death on the spot, but Wernecke organized a distraction among some of the other prisoners, and when the guards moved away to deal with it, Wernecke helped Bohme to stand up and hobble away to the other side of the quarry, where the rest of the prisoners shielded him from sight with their bodies as best they could for the rest of the afternoon.

Something about the way Wernecke urged Bohme to his feet and helped him to limp and lurch away, something about the protective, possessive curve of Wernecke’s arm around Bohme’s shoulders, told Bruckman that Wernecke had selected his next victim.

That night Bruckman vomited up the meager and rancid meal that they were allowed, his stomach convulsing uncontrollably after the first few bites. Trembling with hunger and exhaustion and fever, he leaned against the wall and watched as Wernecke fussed over Bohme, nursing him as a man might nurse a sick child, talking gently to him, wiping away some of the blood that still oozed from the corner of Bohme’s mouth, coaxing Bohme to drink a few sips of soup, finally arranging that Bohme should stretch out on the floor away from the sleeping platforms, where he would not be jostled by the others . . .

As soon as the interior lights went out that night, Bruckman got up, crossed the floor quickly and unhesitantly, and lay down in the shadows near the spot where Bohme muttered and twitched and groaned.

Shivering, Bruckman lay in the darkness, the strong smell of earth in his nostrils, waiting for Wernecke to come . . .

In Bruckman’s hand, held close to his chest, was a spoon that had been sharpened to a jagged needle point, a spoon he had stolen and begun to sharpen while he was still in a civilian prison in Cologne, so long ago that he almost couldn’t remember, scraping it back and forth against the stone wall of his cell every night for hours, managing to keep it hidden on his person during the nightmarish ride in the sweltering boxcar, the first few terrible days at the camp, telling no one about it, not even Wernecke during the months when he’d thought of Wernecke as a kind of saint, keeping it hidden long after the possibility of escape had become too remote even to fantasize about, retaining it then more as a tangible link with the daydream country of his past than as a tool he ever actually hoped to employ, cherishing it almost as a holy relic, as a remnant of a vanished world that he otherwise might almost believe had never existed at all . . .

And now that it was time to use it at last, he was almost reluctant to do so, to soil it with another man’s blood . . .

He fingered the spoon compulsively, turning it over and over; it was hard and smooth and cold, and he clenched it as tightly as he could, trying to ignore the fine tremoring of his hands.

He had to kill Wernecke . . .

Nausea and an odd feeling of panic flashed through Bruckman at the thought, but there was no other choice, there was no other way . . . He couldn’t go on like this, his strength was failing; Wernecke was killing him, as surely as he had killed the others, just by keeping him from sleeping . . . And as long as Wernecke lived, he would never be safe, always there would be the chance that Wernecke would come for
him,
that Wernecke would strike as soon as his guard was down . . . Would Wernecke scruple for a second to kill
him,
after all, if he thought that he could do it safely . . . ? No, of course not . . . Given the chance, Wernecke would kill him without a moment’s further thought . . . No, he must strike
first . . .

Bruckman licked his lips uneasily. Tonight. He had to kill Wernecke tonight . . .

There was a stirring, a rustling: someone was getting up, working his way free from the mass of sleepers on one of the platforms. A shadowy figure crossed the room toward Bruckman, and Bruckman tensed, reflexively running his thumb along the jagged end of the spoon, readying himself to rise, to strike—but at the last second, the figure veered aside and stumbled toward another corner. There was a sound like rain drumming on cloth; the man swayed there for a moment, mumbling, and then slowly returned to his pallet, dragging his feet, as if he had pissed his very life away against the wall. It was not Wernecke.

Bruckman eased himself back down to the floor, his heart seeming to shake his wasted body back and forth with the force of its beating. His hand was damp with sweat. He wiped it against his tattered pants, and then clutched the spoon again . . .

Time seemed to stop. Bruckman waited, stretched out along the hard floorboards; the raw wood rasping his skin, dust clogging his mouth and nose, feeling as though he were already dead, a corpse laid out in a rough pine coffin, feeling eternity pile up on his chest like heavy clots of wet black earth . . . Outside the hut, the kliegs blazed, banishing night, abolishing it, but here inside the but it was night, here night survived, perhaps the only pocket of night remaining on a klieg-lit planet, the shafts of light that came in through the slatted window only serving to accentuate the surrounding darkness, to make it greater and more puissant by comparison . . . Here in the darkness, nothing ever changed . . . there was only the smothering heat, and the weight of eternal darkness, and the changeless moments that could not pass because there was nothing to differentiate them one from the other . . .

Many times as he waited, Bruckman’s eyes would grow heavy and slowly close, but each time his eyes would spring open again at once, and he would find himself staring into the shadows for Wernecke. Sleep would no longer have him, it was a kingdom closed to him now; it spat him out each time he tried to enter it, just as his stomach now spat out the food he placed in it . . .

The thought of food brought Bruckman to a sharper awareness, and there in the darkness he huddled around his hunger, momentarily forgetting everything else. Never had he been so hungry . . . He thought of the food he had wasted earlier in the evening, and only the last few shreds of his self-control kept him from moaning aloud.

Bohme did moan aloud then, as though unease were contagious. As Bruckman glanced at him, Bohme said, “Anya,” in a clear calm voice; he mumbled a little, and then, a bit more loudly, said, “Tseitel, have you set the table yet?” and Bruckman realized that Bohme was no longer in the camp, that Bohme was back in Dusseldorf in the tiny apartment with his fat wife and his four healthy children, and Bruckman felt a pang of envy go through him, for Bohme, who had escaped.

It was at that moment that Bruckman realized that Wernecke was standing there, just beyond Bohme.

There had been no movement that Bruckman had seen. Wernecke had seemed to slowly materialize from the darkness, atom by atom, bit by incremental bit, until at some point he had been solid enough for his presence to register on Bruckman’s consciousness, so that what had been only a shadow a moment before was now suddenly and unmistakably Wernecke as well, however much a shadow it remained.

Bruckman’s mouth went dry with terror, and it almost seemed that he could hear the voice of his dead grandmother whispering in his ears. Bogey tales. . . Wernecke had said
I’m no night spirit.
Remember that he had said that .

Wernecke was almost close enough to touch. He was staring down at Bohme; his face, lit by a dusty shaft of light from the window, was cold and remote, only the total lack of expression hinting at the passion that strained and quivered behind the mask. Slowly, lingeringly, Wernecke stooped over Bohme. “Anya,” Bohme said again, caressingly, and then Wernecke’s mouth was on his throat.

Let him feed, said a cold remorseless voice in Bruckman’s mind. It will be easier to take him when he’s nearly sated, when he’s fully preoccupied and growing lethargic and logy . . . Growing
full . . .

Slowly, with infinite caution, Bruckman gathered himself to spring, watching in horror and fascination as Wernecke fed. He could hear Wernecke sucking the juice out of Bohme, as if there was not enough blood in the foolish old man to satiate him, as if there was not enough blood in the whole camp . . . Or perhaps the whole world . . . And now Bohme was ceasing his feeble struggling, was becoming still . . .

Bruckman flung himself upon Wernecke, stabbing him twice in the back before his weight bowled them both over. There was a moment of confusion as they rolled and struggled together, all without sound, and then Bruckman found himself sitting atop Wernecke, Wernecke’s white face turned up to him. Bruckman drove his weapon into Wernecke again, the shock of the blow jarring Bruckman’s arm to the shoulder. Wernecke made no outcry; his eyes were already glazing, but they looked at Bruckman with recognition, with cold anger, with bitter irony, and, oddly, with what might have been resignation or relief, with what might almost have been pity . . . Bruckman stabbed again and again, driving the blows home with hysterical strength, panting, rocking atop his victim, feeling Wernecke’s blood splatter against his face, wrapped in the heat and steam that rose from Wernecke’s torn-open body like a smothering black cloud, coughing and choking on it for a moment, feeling the steam seep in through his pores and sink deep into the marrow of his bones, feeling the world seem to pulse and shimmer and change around him, as though he were suddenly seeing through new eyes, as though something had been born anew inside him, and then abruptly he was
smelling
Wernecke’s blood, the hot organic reek of it, leaning closer to drink in that sudden overpowering smell, better than the smell of freshly baked bread, better than anything he could remember, rich and heady and strong beyond imagining.

There was a moment of revulsion and horror, and he had time to wonder how long the ancient contamination had been passing from man to man to man, how far into the past the chain of lives stretched, how Wernecke himself had been trapped, and then his parched lips touched wetness, and he was drinking, drinking deeply and greedily, and his mouth was filled with the strong clean taste of copper.

Passage

Introduction to Passage

“Nimbly for all his bulk, he scrambled up the jetty and onto the pier, the wood groaning under his boot.”

And there was Gardner, at a SFWA party in Califunny, standing with friends on a balcony of the hotel. I was inside, talking to Connie Willis’ daughter and Cynthia Felice. Suddenly the room began to shake, a slight shimmy that began to escalate, like major tectonic plates shifting. At first I thought it was Gardner and friends being silly on the balcony. Gardner can always be counted on to be silly at parties. The wind-up chattering teeth, the wind-up walking penis. Oh, we have seen them all.

But no—what we had here was a regular, old-fashioned California earthquake, the rattling walls, the cracking plaster, the bookcases falling on unsuspecting readers.

Cynthia and Connie Willis’ daughter and I were quick to find shelter in a doorway. We knew the drill. We’d read the books. We’d watched the movies. But Gardner—I swear this is true—levitated above the crowd, scrambled off the [jetty] balcony and into the hallway. When last seen, he was half way down the stairs, scattering elves and . . .

In other words, as creative a mind as he has—and few have better—he draws from nature. And if he wants passage to Elfland—or wherever—I am sure he can find the heads and hearts of other writers to buy his passage. After all, he knows where we all live.

Jane Yolen