The Best of Lucius Shepard (12 page)

I approached a man
standing nearby and asked what was going on. He looked at me askance, then
checked around to see if anyone was watching us. “Haven’t you heard?” he said.

“I’ve been away,” I
told him.

This, I could see,
struck him as peculiar, but he accepted the fact and said, “They thought he was
coming back to life, but it was a false alarm. Now they’re offering
sacrifices.”

The procession of
cars had reached the steps of the Citadel, and from them emerged a number of
people with their hands bound behind their backs, and a lesser number of very
large men, who began shoving them up the steps toward the main doors. Those
doors swung open, and from the depths of the Citadel issued a kind of growling music
overlaid with fanfares of trumpets. A reddish glow—feeble at first, then
brightening to a blaze—shone from within. The light and the music set my heart
racing. I backed away, and as I did, I thought I saw a face forming in the
midst of that red glow. Hitler’s face, I believe. But I didn’t wait to validate
this. I ran, ran as hard as I could back to the street behind the warehouses,
and there, to my relief, I discovered that the tunnel had once again been
opened.

I
leaned back, trying to compare what I had read with my knowledge of the twins.
Those instances of silent communication. Telepathy? Alise’s endocrinal control.
Their habit of turning lamps on to burn away the night—could this be some
residual behavior left over from cave life? Tom had mentioned that the lights
had never been completely extinguished, merely dimmed. Was this all an
elaborate fantasy he had concocted to obscure their pitiful reality? I was
certain this was the case with Alise’s testimony; but whatever, I found that I
was no longer angry at the twins, that they had been elevated in my thoughts
from nuisance to mystery. Looking back, I can see that my new attitude was
every bit as discriminatory as my previous one. I felt for them an adolescent
avidity such as I might have exhibited toward a strange pet. They were neat,
weird, with the freakish appeal of Venus’s-flytraps and sea monkeys. Nobody
else had one like them, and having them to myself made me feel superior. I
would discover what sort of tricks they could perform, takes notes on their
peculiarities, and then, eventually growing bored, I’d move along to a more
consuming interest. Though I was intelligent enough to understand that this
attitude was—in its indulgence and lack of concern for others—typically
ugly-American, I saw no harm in adopting it. Why, they might even benefit from
my attention.

At
that moment I heard voices outside. I skimmed the notebook toward the others on
the floor and affected nonchalance. The door opened; they entered and froze
upon seeing me. “Hi,” I said. “Door was open, so I waited for you here. What
you been up to?”

Tom’s
eyes flicked to the notebooks, and Alise said, “We’ve been walking.”

“Yeah?”
I said this with great good cheer, as if pleased that they had been taking
exercise. “Too bad I didn’t get back earlier. I could have gone with you.”

“Why
are you back?” asked Tom, gathering the notebooks. I didn’t want to let on
about the loss of my job, thinking that the subterfuge would give me a means of
keeping track of them. “Some screw-up on the set,” I told him. “They had to put
off filming. What say we go into town?”

From
that point on, no question I asked them was casual; I was always testing,
probing, trying to ferret out some of their truth.

“Oh,
I don’t know,” said Tom. “I thought I’d have a swim.”

I
took a mental note: why do subjects exhibit avoidance of town? For an instant I
had an unpleasant vision of myself, a teenage monster gloating over his two
gifted white mice, but this was overborne by my delight in the puzzle they
presented. “Yeah,” I said breezily. “A swim would be nice.”

*
* * *

That night making love with
Alise was a whole new experience. I wasn’t merely screwing; I was exploring the
unknown, penetrating mystery. Watching her pale, passionless face, I imagined
the brain behind it to be a strange glowing jewel, with facets instead of
convolutions.
National Enquirer
headlines flashed through my head. NAZI
MUTANTS ALIVE IN SPAIN. AMERICAN TEEN UNCOVERS HITLER’S SECRET PLOT. Of course
there would be no such publicity. Even if Tom’s story was true—and I was far
from certain that it was—I had no intention of betraying them. I wasn’t that
big a jerk.

For
the next month I maintained the illusion that I was still employed by the film
company and left home each morning at dawn; but rather than catching the bus
into Malaga, I would hide between the houses, and as soon as Tom and Alise went
off on one of their walks (they always walked west along the beach, vanishing
behind a rocky point), I would sneak into Tom’s house and continue
investigating the notebooks. The more I read, the more firmly I believed the
story. There was a flatness to the narrative tone that reminded me of a man I
had heard speaking about the concentration camps, dully recounting atrocities,
staring into space, as if the things he said were putting him into a trance.
For example:

.. .It was on July
2nd that they came for Urduja and Klaus. For the past few months they had been
making us sleep together in a room lit by harsh fluorescents. There were no
mattresses, no pillows, and they took our clothes so we could not use them as
covering. It was like day under those trays of white light, and we lay curled
around each other for warmth. They gassed us before they entered, but we had
long since learned how to neutralize the gas, and so we were all awake, linked,
pretending to be asleep. Three of them came into the room, and three more stood
at the door with guns. At first it seemed that this would be just another
instance of rape. The three men violated Urduja, one after the other. She kept
up her pretense of unconsciousness, but she felt everything. We tried to
comfort her; sending out our love and encouragement. But I could sense her
hysteria, her pain. They were rough with her, and when they had finished, her
thighs were bloody. She was very brave and gave no cry; she was determined not
to give us away. Finally they picked her and Klaus up and carried them off. An
hour later we felt them die. It was horrible, as if part of my mind had
short-circuited, a corner of it left forever dim.

We were angry and
confused. Why would they kill what they had worked so hard to create? Some of
us, Uwe and Peter foremost among them, wanted to give up the tunnel and revenge
ourselves as best we could; but the rest of us managed to calm things down. Was
it revenge we wanted, we asked, or was it freedom? If freedom was to be our
choice, then the tunnel was our best hope. Would I—I wonder—have lobbied so
hard for the tunnel if I had known that only Alise and I would survive it?

The
story ended shortly before the escape attempt was to be made; the remainder of
the notebooks contained further depictions of that fantastic Third Reich—genetically-created
giants who served as executioners, fountains of blood in the squares of Berlin,
dogs that spoke with human voices and spied for the government—and also
marginalia concerning the twins’ abilities, among them being the control of certain
forms of energy: these particular powers had apparently been used to create the
tunnel. All this fanciful detail unsettled me, as did several elements of the
story. Tom had stated that the usual avenues of escape had been closed to the
twenty clones, but what was a tunnel if not a usual avenue of escape? Once he
had mentioned that the tunnel was “unstable.” What did that mean? And he seemed
to imply that the escape had not yet been effected.

By
the time I had digested the notebooks, I had begun to notice the regular
pattern of the twins’ walks; they would disappear around the point that bounded
the western end of the beach, and then, a half hour later, they would return,
looking worn-out. Perhaps, I thought, they were doing something there that would
shed light on my confusion, and so one morning I decided to follow them.

The
point was a spine of blackish rock shaped like a lizard’s tail that extended
about fifty feet out into the water. Tom and Alise would always wade around it.
I, however, scrambled up the side and lay flat like a sniper atop it. From my
vantage I overlooked a narrow stretch of gravelly shingle, a little trough
scooped out between the point and low brown hills that rolled away inland. Tom
and Alise were sitting ten or twelve feet below, passing a kef pipe, coughing,
exhaling billows of smoke.

That
puzzled me. Why would they come here just to get high? I scrunched into a more
comfortable position. It was a bright, breezy day; the sea was heaving with a
light chop, but the waves slopping onto the shingle were ripples. A few fishing
boats were herding a freighter along the horizon. I turned my attention back to
the twins. They were standing, making peculiar gestures that reminded me of
T’ai Chi, though these were more labored. Then I noticed that the air above the
tidal margin had become distorted as with a heat haze...yet it was not hot in
the least. I stared at the patch of distorted air—it was growing larger and
larger-—and I began to see odd translucent shapes eddying within it: they were
similar to the shapes that the twins were always sketching. There was a funny
pressure in my ears; a drop of sweat slid down the hollow of my throat, leaving
a cold track.

Suddenly
the twins broke off gesturing and leaned against each other; the patch of
distorted air misted away. Both were breathing heavily, obviously exhausted.
They sat down a couple of feet from the water’s edge, and after a long silence
Tom said, “We should try again to be certain.”

“Why
don’t we finish it now?” said Alise. “I’m so tired of this place.”

“It’s
too dangerous in the daylight.” Tom shied a pebble out over the water. “If
they’re waiting at the other end, we might have to run. We’ll need the darkness
for cover.”

“What
about tonight?”

“I’d
rather wait until tomorrow night. There’s supposed to be a storm front coming,
and nobody will be outside.”

Alise
sighed.

“What’s
wrong?” Tom asked. “Is it Lucius?”

I
listened with even more intent.

“No,”
she said. “I just want it to be over.”

Tom
nodded and gazed out to sea. The freighter appeared to have moved a couple of
inches eastward; gulls were flying under the sun, becoming invisible as they
passed across its glaring face, and then swooping away like bits of winged
matter blown from its core. Tom picked up the kef pipe. “Let’s try it again,”
he said.

At
that instant someone shouted, “Hey!” Richard Shockley came striding down out of
the hills behind the shingle. Tom and Alise got to their feet. “I can’t believe
you people are so fucking uncool,” said Shockley, walking up to them; his face
was dark with anger, and the breeze was lashing his hair as if it, too, were
enraged. “What the hell are you trying to do? Get everyone busted?”

“We’re
not doing anything,” said Alise.

“Naw!”
sneered Shockley. “You’re just breaking the law in plain view. Plain fucking
view!” His fists clenched, and I thought for a moment he was going to hit them.
They were so much smaller than he that they looked like children facing an
irate parent.

“You
won’t have to be concerned with us much longer,” said Tom. “We’re leaving
soon.”

“Good,”
said Shockley. “That’s real good. But lemme tell you something, man. I catch
you smoking out here again, and you might be leaving quicker than you think.”

“What
do you mean?” asked Alise.

“Don’t
you worry about what I fucking mean,” said Shockley. “You just watch your
behavior. We had a good scene going here until you people showed up, and I’ll
be damned if I’m going to let you blow it.” He snatched the pipe from Tom’s
hand and slung it out to sea. He shook his finger in Tom’s face. “I swear, man!
One more fuckup, and I’ll be on you like white on rice!” Then he stalked off
around the point.

As
soon as he was out of sight, without a word exchanged between them, Tom and
Alise waded into the water and began groping beneath the surface, searching for
the pipe. To my amazement, because the shallows were murky and full of floating
litter, they found it almost instantly.

*
* * *

I was angry at Shockley, both
for his treatment of the twins and for his invasion of what I considered my
private preserve, and I headed toward his house to tell him to lay off. When I
entered I was greeted by a skinny, sandy-haired guy—Skipper by name—who was
sprawled on pillows in the front room; from the refuse of candy wrappers,
crumpled cigarette packs, and empty pop bottles surrounding him, I judged him
to have been in this position for quite some time. He was so opiated that he
spoke in mumbles and could scarcely open his eyes, but from him I learned the
reason for Shockley’s outburst. “You don’t wanna see him now, man,” said
Skipper, and flicked out his tongue to retrieve a runner of drool that had
leaked from the corner of his mouth. “Dude’s on a rampage, y’know?”