Hildy’s Story
1
Lieutenant Wilhelm Weishaupt was the commander of a very small platoon—five soldiers, guarding a border tripoint that had not seen military action for, depending on how you counted it, either sixty-odd years or nearly a century. He loved his job. It was, perhaps perversely for a military position, relaxing, affording a lot of time to go out strolling along walls older than the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, looking over the hills, dales, and rockslides, honest and free in his fatigues beneath the sky.
The Bundesheer had seen better days to be sure, but that was a long time ago, and besides, any way of thinking that considered going out and raping and pillaging the western Balkans ‘better days’ than standing and watching the birds was a way of thinking that Lieutenant Weishaupt wanted absolutely no part of. This was one of many border forts that had been built in Carinthia and the Tyrol throughout the period when the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had been a world power. It was one of if not the only one of these forts that still served any military function whatsoever, and Lieutenant Weishaupt was keenly aware that his platoon, 1444 Squadron, existed basically as window-dressing, one of the army’s token ‘romantic’ settings, reminders of days gone by. It was like joining the Foreign Legion and shipping out to Djibouti.
He had heard from Sergeant Sturmvoraus that 1444 Squadron was getting a sixth soldier sometime soon—new meat, a Private Wildermann who had joined the army at the absolute minimum legal age in order to escape her home situation and get enough money to have at least a fighting chance of getting through some university in Germany. She (Private Wildermann was a she) had taken the train down to Arnoldstein and would probably report for duty at the fort shortly.
Falling into this reverie, considering the nature of this platoon and its assignment, Lieutenant Weishaupt felt almost ridiculous. He had gone through surprisingly tough training and several tours of duty as an enlisted man, built himself up into somebody who had on several occasions been described as at least moderately badass, and his first command role was ‘guarding’ Austria’s tripoint with two other EU countries, Slovenia and Italy. The only reason the command still existed was that somebody in the Austrian government was apparently a hopeless romantic who had read a lot of Boys’-Own-type war stories growing up. Lieutenant Weishaupt thanked God for this person (or, perhaps, these people). At thirty-two he was already the sort of man to put greater value on birds and the watching thereof than on cans of whoop-ass and the opening-up thereof. Mellowed young, his old age would be long.
Not only was this his first command role, it was also very likely to be his last. His predecessor as captain of 1444 Squadron, Richard Scholl, had been given this post at the age of thirty and held it until his retirement twenty-eight years later. Weishaupt had been here for three years and was looking forward to at least another two decades. Nothing ever happened here except for the passing of seasons and occasional personnel turnover, and that was just the way he liked it.
At about fifteen-hundred hours on this late spring day Sergeant Sturmvoraus brought him word that the ‘new meat’, as Sturmvoraus called Private Wildermann, had arrived and was waiting to be shown to the commander of the platoon.
‘Thank you, Sergeant Sturmvoraus,’ said Weishaupt. ‘Is Private Wildermann in the main mess?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. You may go now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Weishaupt took the old stone spiral stair down from the walls into the main hall of the fort, where the new recruit sat at the foot of a long wooden table. A loud clock was ticking in some nearby room.
Private Wildermann was very young, seventeen years old. She had just got out of school, brilliant, highly commended, and made a beeline for the army straightway because otherwise she would never be able to afford university, especially in Germany, and would have to keep living at home. What was wrong with Private Wildermann’s home Lieutenant Weishaupt did not know. He hoped to get to know her, as he tried to know everybody under his command, and so at some point he would probably learn her story, but for now she was simply the new girl, tabula rasa as far as he was concerned.
‘You are Commander Weishaupt?’ she asked.
‘I’m…I’m Lieutenant Weishaupt, yes,’ he replied. ‘I take it you’re Private Wildermann?’
‘Yes, sir. Private Wildermann. Born 23 December 1988 in Leoben, Styria.’ She handed Weishaupt a slip of paper headed ‘Rekrut Hildegard Theresa Wildermann, Österreich Bundesheer’. It had a very brief biographical capsule and the note that Wildermann had only undergone very basic training because it had been decided early in the process that she was to be sent to Arnoldsteinfort and this was, as Weishaupt spent so much time reflecting on, generally considered a very cushy assignment. ‘Know, Oberleutnantmeister,’ said Wildermann, ‘that I only intend to do the one year of military service that would be mandatory were I male. I intend to study at the University of Jena in Thuringia, Germany, and…’
‘Wait.’ Weishaupt held his hand up. ‘First of all, you’re being way too formal for my comfort. Second of all, the mandatory military service for men is six months, not a year. Third of all, my rank is Second Lieutenant[1]. There’s no such rank as Oberleutnantmeister. And my name is Wilhelm Weishaupt. I’ll call you Hildegard if you call me Willy. Or you could be like Heinz Sturmvoraus and insist on ‘Lieutenant Weishaupt’ and I’ll call you ‘Private Wildermann’ if you’re comfortable. But I’d really prefer…’
At this, the new meat seemed to perk up considerably. ‘All right, Willy!’ she chirped. ‘You can call me Hildy.’
This change in Wildermann’s—Hildy’s demeanour briefly threw Weishaupt for a loop. Then he realised that this was probably how she really was and she had just been overly formal and stiff as a precaution due perhaps to having had very tough officers in training or something.
‘So,’ said Hildy awkwardly. ‘What’s done around here in, uh, in Arnoldsteinfort? Drills, practises, reveille, what sort of…?’
‘Bird-watching, mainly,’ said Weishaupt.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said bird-watching.’
‘Yes, I heard you, but…seriously?’ Weishaupt nodded. Hildy laughed. ‘That’s brilliant!’ she said. ‘Oh, I knew I’d love this when they told me I was coming out here.’
‘This platoon and this posting exist because of some suit in Vienna’s romanticism,’ said Weishaupt. ‘It’s intended to give a very few incredibly lucky people who the army has nowhere else to put good memories and a taste of what nineteenth-century frontier guard duty was allegedly like.’
‘Somehow I doubt things were like this in the nineteenth century.’
‘Yes, I said allegedly, Hildy.’ Weishaupt leaned forward intently. ‘So where are you from? What’s your story?’
‘I’m from Leoben, as it says on my papers,’ said Hildy. ‘If you don’t know where that is, it’s about an hour’s drive north-west of Graz. As for why I’m here…’ She hung her head. ‘My father is not a very kind man and has a hard time telling the difference between ‘family’ and ‘potential threat’ to the authority he thinks he has. He’s…’ She shook her head. ‘You understand?’
‘Let me tell you a secret that only the soldiers at Arnoldsteinfort know, Hildy,’ said Weishaupt. ‘I wasn’t born in Austria, I was born in Russia, into one of the families of utter and absolute diehards among the Volga Germans. We moved to Austria when I was fourteen. That’s not the secret. The secret is that while we were living in Tsaritsyn, growing up, there was scarcely anybody in my life other than my immediate family who did not regularly beat the tar out of me.’
‘Tsaritsyn?’
‘Yes. I refuse on principle to call it Stalingrad or Volgograd.’
‘Willy, forgive me, but child abuse is a bit different, qualitatively, from bullying, no matter how severe.’
‘Yes, I know that. And I’m sorry, Hildy.’ Weishaupt sighed, leaned back, and looked up at the vaulted stone ceiling, dappled with light from the high window-slits. ‘The point is…really, Hildy, in these lethargic times…people don’t volunteer to join the Bundesheer unless there’s something that they really feel the need to get away from.’
‘That’s a jolly thought,’ said Hildy with a tone of slightly bitter sarcasm.
‘It is, actually!’ said Weishaupt. He stood up and went over to a leaded window, the only one in the hall that was not simply a slit under the eaves, and looked out over the bare hill bordering Slovenia and the wooded hill bordering Italy. ‘This is a place of voluntary and beautiful exile from a cynical world.’
‘Yes,’ said Hildy, ‘well, in university I intend to catalogue that cynical world.’
Weishaupt turned to her, and pursed his lips. ‘History?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Geography. Human geography.’
Weishaupt emitted a short peep of breath. ‘That could work out well for you, though,’ he said. ‘This world is corrupt. But not everything is necessarily so.’
‘It occurs to me,’ said Hildy, ‘that I am lucky to have been assigned to 1444 Squadron.’
‘Yes, very lucky,’ said Weishaupt. ‘This platoon has never had more than seven soldiers at any time and usually we only have four or five. The bare minimum that we aren’t disbanded. Currently we have me and you, Sergeant Sturmvoraus, Corporal Bernhardt, Private Heidemann, and Private Schlick. That is to say—Willy, Hildy, Heinz, Franziska, Klara, and Jacob.’
‘And…can you introduce me to Franziska, Klara, and Jacob?’ asked Hildy. ‘I believe I already met Heinz—Sergeant Sturmvoraus—whoever.’
‘Klara is asleep,’ said Weishaupt.
‘But…it’s three-twenty in the afternoon.’
‘She stayed up until eight in the morning.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘Trying to catch a rat in the barracks.’
‘And did she catch the rat?’
Weishaupt grinned with obvious pride in this little garrison here, the place and duty that he found beautiful because inconsequential. ‘Yes, she caught that rat, all right. That’s Private Klara Heidemann for you.’ He extended a hand to Hildy. ‘Take my hand,’ he said. ‘Come on. I’ll introduce you to Jacob and Franziska.’
2
‘All right,’ said Schlomo Toph. ‘First things first: somebody is messing up these jaunts with information about the deaths we cannot be reconciled.’
‘Clearly,’ said the Nish. ‘As little as I was inclined to think that Hildy, who after all is my friend, is a murderess…Santana, honestly, seems even less inclined to kill people. In the same way that tar is even slower than molasses.’
‘But we don’t know Santana that well,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Anyway, that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that we’re being shown contradictory pasts.’
‘Yet the insight into people that we getting is very good, very potentially useful,’ said Schlomo. ‘I think we need to identify and isolate what of these showings is not true.’
‘Oh, definitely,’ said Cosgrove.
‘There’s also that weird thing where the smoke and fire impinged on the existence that we were seeing,’ said the Nish. ‘What was it that it said? Telling us to find somebody called Marina Ostrogova who…something about Hildy and Santana.’
‘Habeas corpus,’ said Cosgrove. ‘It’s a concept in English law. I think it means ‘has the body’ or something along those lines. I don’t know what that means in this context.’
‘I know what none of this means in this context!’ said Schlomo. ‘That message made no sense. We are not exactly in positions to go and use Internet and look up Marina Ostrogova.’
‘Why not?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘Because you have to have physical fingers to use keyboard,’ said Schlomo. ‘Unless we can come into possession of a golem or something, a golem just lying around or something, or anything else that we can magically control with our minds, we are stuck as powerless observers.’
‘I’m really beginning to doubt Miss Henderson’s bona fides in helping our little investigation,’ the Nish said bitterly. ‘Why exactly did we agree to this strategy in the first place, rather than, I don’t know, calling the police?’
‘The short answer is that Reveka Metawi threatened us, remember?’ said Cosgrove. ‘The long answer is that at the time it seemed like a new and novel way for us to solve the murders and for me to, if need be, even prove the supernatural or at least have some sort of book deal.’
‘You are a strange girl,’ observed Schlomo.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove, ‘well, be that as it may…I don’t think any of us were anticipating this turning from a murder investigation, to a murder investigation with mental time-travel, to some sort of…’ There was no non-vulgar way to describe this, so Cosgrove cursed for the first time since she could remember. ‘Some sort of supernatural clusterfuck involving false murders, some kind of implanted memory, multiple iterations of the same events that don’t fit together, mysterious commands written in flames and smoke, that golem-looking waiter…’
‘Glad you picked up on that,’ said Schlomo. ‘I was wondering if it was just me, if that waiter really was such a strange person…’
‘Oh, he was definitely incredibly strange,’ said the Nish. ‘I probably would’ve pegged him for a golem like you two did but I’m not entirely sure what a golem’s supposed to look like.’
‘They have no souls, you know[2],’ Schlomo pointed out.
‘Yes, quite,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Between the golem-looking waiter, the mysterious commands written in flames and smoke telling us to find some apparently-Russian lady, the incongruent repetitions of the same events—we’re in the third existence of our investigation now, and there are bound to be more in the pipeline—and the general this-ness of the experience, I’m really not sure what in God’s name happened here that made this stop being just four murders like…’
‘Like ones that might be committed any day in an Arab ghetto in East Jerusalem,’ said Schlomo.
‘Well, yes,’ said Cosgrove.
The Nish cleared her throat. ‘Um…’ she said. ‘Mary? My pineal gland hurts.’
‘…Your pineal gland hurts.’
‘That’s what I just said, yes,’ snapped the Nish.
My…they were already snapping at each other over such small things. Would that this not have to continue for so much longer—!
It came readily to mind for the Nish to revise her manner of perceiving what sort of person her Mary was. ‘How Cosgrove was’ was not only relevant to the supernatural and pineal weirdness going on; ‘how she was’ to at least some extent was the weirdness going on. The Nish’s first impression of Cosgrove as basically Hachi from that Nana manga had gone entirely out the window as soon as Cosgrove had started having hushed, hurried conversations with Schlomo all the time. Having started out thinking of her in this way, it had come as a great surprise to the Nish when Cosgrove turned out to be less Hachi and more Harriet Vane.
Cosgrove would be whatever the Nish needed her to be: a private eye, a priest of God, a cop, a dirty cop…
‘It is time,’ Miss Henderson said, ‘to see more of who Hildy is.’
3
Arthur Wildermann’s fist connected heavily with his daughter’s face. She fell against the wall, lip split, with lurid wet red glinting out through the zigzagging black gap in the bottom of her face. Evil splotches of purple fading into yellow shone with the gross sheen of bruises and blisters up her cheek and along on to her brow. Arthur Wildermann pumped his fists like a drunken or maddened pugilist.
‘Father…’ whimpered Hildy, golden-haired maiden of twelve she was. ‘Father, you can’t…’
‘Say it!’ roared Arthur. ‘Say ‘kleine’ again! I dare you. I double-dare you, motherfucker!’
Hildy just moaned. She lifted her hand to her chin, looked at it, saw the blood that had coursed down from her torn lip, and broke out into a sort of weeping scream. Arthur staggered, clutching his head. He had had quite a bit of drink and the rasping noise of his daughter’s anguish was intolerable. Arthur kicked his daughter in the back and staggered off to go lie down.
Hildy sighed. She stood up, hobbled over to a mirror, saw how badly her lip was bleeding, and disappeared into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out with her lip covered in what looked like little fibrous flakes of toilet paper mixed in with some kind of ointment. It smelled strongly of witch hazel; it must, thought the invisible watchers, have stung Hildy something awful.
When Hildy’s mother got home she made it very clear that she felt that the incident had been at least partially Hildy’s fault. Arthur, explained Theresa, was a wounded beast when soused, to be given quarter and obeyed as one would give quarter to and obey a rogue elephant. For the sake of living peacefully with her father when he was in his better states, Theresa felt that the duty was incumbent upon Hildy to give him his berth and deal with his issues when he was in one of his ‘moods like this’.
Hildy, whose bottom lip would probably have at least a small scar bisecting it for the rest of her life and whose sense of balance was temporarily faltering for being boxed round the ears so hard, disagreed strenuously with this. She went into her room, flopped down on her bed, picked up her phone, and called her friend Astrid, a really cool girl three years her elder.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Astrid,’ said Hildy weakly. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m…fine, thanks, but…’ Astrid was silent for a moment. Hildy knew that Astrid was oft concerned or worried for her, that she found it disconcerting and troubling when Hildy called her and spoke to her in that weak whispery tone. She did not deserve Astrid Streiner for a friend. She knew this. Astrid was so compassionate, so caring, and everything Hildy said and did just weighed on the other girl’s soul. ‘How are you, then, Hildy?’
‘Dad, he…’ Hildy shook her head. ‘I think I have a split lip.’
Astrid was silent again, then clucked her tongue. ‘Oh, God, Hildy,’ she said. ‘Hildy, your life can’t keep going on like this.’
‘Well, what would you suggest, Astrid?’ asked Hildy. ‘Mum’s blaming me, so I can’t go to her for any…’
‘Wait, your mum is blaming you for this?!’ blurted Astrid. ‘What?! Why?’
‘She says that I should take care not to wear on dad’s nerves when he’s drunk and angry,’ said Hildy. ‘And he is really drunk and angry.’
‘Where are you now?’ asked Astrid.
‘I’ve locked myself in my room. It’s a miracle they’re not banging on the door clamouring for me to come out. Mum’s probably trying desperately to ply dad with more liquor so that he calms down.’
‘But wouldn’t that make things worse?’
‘No. Eventually he just loses consciousness.’
‘You are remarkably blasé about this whole situation,’ said Astrid nervously. ‘Honestly that worries me quite a bit.’
‘Why does it worry you?’
Astrid took a deep breath. There was no way to say this other than the direct, blunt, brutally honest way. ‘Because I don’t want you to get into a state of mind where you even consider, for one moment, settling for a violent and indigent life.’
From Hildy, a harsh and humourless laugh. ‘Nobody, anywhere, ever, could get used to a life like this,’ she said. At least this was her belief. Hildy did not know anybody else who had the experiences that she had; her conceptions of how people dealt with these things were guesses, and deliberately rose-coloured ones as she went through life forcing something like optimism upon herself.
This was her, optimistic. This was her happy face. As to her unhappy face or how she truly felt in her Herz der Herzen, she was not about to share this with the world. She cared about the world too much. Truly acting on how her innermost soul felt about her situation would lead the world nowhere good, and so half of Hildy’s free time was spent doing spiritual exercises to calm herself down the likes of which would have shocked Ignatius Loyola and the monks of Mt Hiei.
There was this tremendous mess all through the Wildermann family down through the years. Hildy knew some of the vague psychological background common to families such as hers, and she realised that it was very probable that Rainer Wildermann, beloved Großvater, had been terrible to Arthur in his childhood just as he was terrible to her. And Johannes Wildermann had probably beaten Rainer, and Johann Nepomuk Wildermann had probably beaten Johannes, and Udo Wildermann had probably beaten Johann Nepomuk, and on and on and on, right up to the tribes of Roman Pannonia. Or perhaps it was more recent, with Johannes or Johann Nepomuk or Udo being that bad apple spoiling the barrel.
Hildy could at least take comfort in the idea that this meant that there was a good chance that Arthur would be very kind to Hildy’s own children.
That was to say—
—If Hildy didn’t end up killing herself before she could have children.
Hildy and Astrid talked on. They talked about school, Astrid three grades above Hildy; they talked about boys, Astrid three years’ worth more interested in them than Hildy; they talked about the innocence of childhood, Hildy theoretically three years closer to it than Astrid but in reality…yes, in reality, not so much.
‘Honestly?’ said Astrid. ‘I think you should get out of Leoben.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Hildy. ‘—I mean, how?’
And she and Astrid talked on this, in circles.
Even a miserable and bleak life is never devoid of passions, and there were two great pleasures in the world for this young Hildegard Wildermann. One was clothes; the other was the school subject of geography. The lines, places, and faces, names in languages thousands of years removed from her own, cartographic symbols condensing volumes of information about lands other than this on to a single page, everything redolent of the outside, the broad horizons and dizzying vistas, the things that lurked in beautiful monstrosity and monstrous beauty beyond the bounds of Leoben, of her neighbourhood, of her family. It was remedial for her, this almost Aristotelian categorisation of the gnarls and gouges and cakes of scars on the skin of the planet Earth. Best of all, though, was the geography of people, of cities and roads and buildings. The physical geography let her know that places less the specific problems of her own place existed; the human geography, all the more beloved, let her know that they were inhabited. This world had people living in it who did not have Hildy Wildermann’s specific problems. She did not know why such an overly narrow reassurance made her feel so much better, but there it was.
4
The mountains were always singing here. The slightest noise in these high deserted fields would sound and resound from the high summits and the low summits, the horns and the tarns, down the easternmost Alps into the Hungarian Basin and unto the bounds of Croatian and Dalmatian hills. Hildy, fifteen years old, arm in a splint, strode out in the alpine meadows, smiling, shouting, listening to her voice reverberate, twirling around midst flowers beneath the autumn sky.
She had been able to get out of the house, out of Leoben, for a few days, and take stock. Leoben was actually a very nice little city. Were it not for the painful things in her own life personally, Hildy thought that she would probably like it a lot. And here, out in the hills, this was good. She could look down and see the towns of Styria’s valleys, look up and see the eastern Alps charging into the distance.
Hildy Wildermann, on occasion, really enjoyed life.
She was already thinking about what she wanted to do after high school. Getting out of Leoben, as far out of her family as possible, was a definite necessity; getting out of Styria, or even Austria, was something that she was seriously considering. So many of the best universities were in Germany, and none particularly close to the border—Heidelberg, Göttingen, Berlin, Jena. Jena looked really good.
She would also never be able to afford Jena unless by some miracle she got either full sponsorship or a well-remunerated job for which she was actually qualified. Hildy Wildermann aged fifteen years and ten months was really not qualified for very much.
Option: ‘normal’ entry-level retail or fast-food job. Problem: Hildy had too much pride, and besides, such a job would not exactly pull her up from relative indigence.
Option: the German government probably had extensive financial-aid programmes for these things. Problem: Hildy wasn’t a German citizen. She wasn’t sure if Germany’s right-of-return laws (the part of German citizenship law that was based on blood rather than location) applied to Austrians, because Austria was itself a separate German-speaking culturally Teutonic country. It wasn’t in the conventional sense a diaspora population.
Option: look for a surveying or cartographical job of some kind. Problem: while Hildy was probably intellectually qualified for this, it was probably the sort of position where they wanted some prior experience. Such as a university thesis. Hence the need to go to university in the first place, hence the need to get money in the first place. This option was not just putting the cart before the horse, it was pre-emptively executing the horse and shooting the cart into low-earth orbit.
Option: grifting, panhandling, begging, theft. Problem: should be self-evident.
Option: pretending that the ornate, warmed-tone painting in Auntie Marta and Uncle Uwe’s house was by Klimt and selling it on the grey market. Problem: similar to the problem with the last option, with the additional issue that the resemblance to a Klimt was superficial and would not have fooled a true collector.
Option: joining the Bundesheer. Problem:…
…Problem. Hildy really did not want to go into the army.
Hildy stopped her walk before a sheer cliff-face that seemed almost, at the top, to overhang itself, like the crest of a wave. An old mountain road, icy with frost before the meadows and choked with sad, bedraggled weeds, led up beside the cliff to an opening or rough door about thirty or forty metres above Hildy, between the narrow ledge of the clifftop and a steep slope rising up to the main bulk of the mountain fastness.
‘Strange,’ muttered Hildy. ‘There’s no cave attraction on my map here…’ She opened her hiking map and looked it over again. ‘No, shouldn’t be a cave…’ She shook her head. ‘Actually, it says there is a historic ruin in…huh. That’s odd.’ She looked up along the road and above the rough-hewn door. There were several other openings, more like strange shadows from this perspective. Although she was looking from an oblique angle and could not see them altogether clearly Hildy thought that they were probably the mouths of vertical or steeply diagonal shafts. ‘Ventilation…? Light…?’ Hildy chuckled in sudden epiphany. This was an old mine working.
She toiled up the narrow road beside the cliff, taking care not to use her injured arm too much. Clasping her map folded to her breast, she debated with herself whether or not to write on it specifications of what terms like ‘historic ruin’ referred to, exactly. It might be helpful if she forgot about this day and later came this way again; but it was a nice map, and she had issues with the idea of defacing it.
Hildy reached the main mouth of the mine. The workings were rough; the mine must have been from the Middle Ages if not even older. She was surprised that it had lasted this long. Rain and wind and sun had worn around the edges of the door, turning it into this rough gash in the mountainside that she now stood before, but the workings of the mine had in general held up remarkably well over the centuries. Little heaps of detritus were scattered over the ledge and the flanks of the mountains. Below the road, the cliff plunged in freefall still motion to its base in the vast meadow in which Hildy had been walking.
Who had worked this mine, and what hearts of metal or stone had they brought up from the bottommost tunnels, just barely piercing from the epidermis to the dermis of the Earth? Had those days been any gentler? Could history be therapeutic, curing the human perspective in the same way that geography did? Hildy’s history teachers sure as Hell had not presented it that way.
Hildy heard a chunky clinking sound and spun round to see what it was. She could not see anything. She imagined that it had just been a rock falling somewhere in the mountains around here—part of the ambient music of the echoing spires. She shrugged. Best not investigate mines. Dangerous. Like people. The mine was scarcely any better than going back into Leoben would be.
She set off back down the mountain road, taking some snapshots of the ancient mine before she left. Halfway down the road she heard the clunky clink again. She frowned. An avalanche would be…unpleasant. She knew that avalanches usually involved snow, and that she was too low on the mountain’s flanks for there to be snow quite yet—some of the flowers in the fields were even still alive, though wilted. But, still…And after all, there was even now a thin layer of hoarfrost on the muddier parts of the antique road.
And as Hildy Wildermann came once again on the straight meadow way, she heard a small high voice whispering ‘Don’t let the kobolds get you while you sleep.’
5
The moon was high over Arnoldsteinfort. Hildy stood on the battlements, looking out over the border tripoint in the pastoral hills and sighing happily to herself.
It was a warm night in the dog days; Hildy had been stationed with 1444 Squadron for a little over two months. Franziska Bernhardt, Klara Heidemann, and Jacob Schlick she considered friends—the first non-Astrid friends she had ever really had. Astrid had not been supportive of her idea of joining the Bundesheer to get money to go to Jena. She had said that it was stupid and wouldn’t work anyway. Hildy had tried to write or call her several times since arriving in Arnoldstein, but to no avail.
Hildy hated being betrayed and relished the risky thrill of initiating human contact, the way a happier person might relish standing silent upon a mountain height and looking down over untouched valleys that had seen no outsiders’ eyes in generations. If she herself were in such a position, no doubt she would fall to her knees in joy and start exploring every intimate nook and cranny of the valleys, carefully, kindly, gently, so as not to disturb them. A place was just like a person, and a person was just like a place, to Private Hildegard Theresa Wildermann.
She had, through finesse and finagling, joined the army at seventeen. She laughed to think this; it was so unlike her. But there it was—! Acting as if she belonged and Arnoldsteinfort was close to belonging in fact, and she belonged at Arnoldsteinfort as much as anywhere else she had ever been…
The moon shone bright on Hildy, and the stars in their courses seemed to her favourable. She had never been as interested in mapping the heavens as the earth, but she had picked up some background knowledge, of things like the fact that some of the brightest stars that she was seeing now were probably Vega, Altair, Spica, and perhaps Sirius; that there was a large triangular grouping involving at least two of the constellations Pegasus, Cygnus, and Lyra[3]; and the fact that the Plough was visible the whole year round because it was close to the celestial north pole.
‘So you are staring into space?’ asked a soft voice that Hildy did not recognise.
‘It’s not space to me, but heaven,’ she murmured. Then— ‘Wait.’ She turned around. There was a beautiful woman in the dress of a nun beside her. ‘Are…who are you?’ asked Hildy. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘I cannot stay here, cannot stay here now,’ said the nun. And then the nun laughed. It was a clear, quick, sparkling laugh, a kind of Mary-Poppins tinkle that did Hildy’s heart good despite seeming as if it would be smarmy ‘on paper’, so to speak. The nun’s laugh carried, and lasted a long time, and then she disappeared.
‘What the Hell just happened?’ groaned Jacob Schlick further along the battlements. ‘Ugh…Wildermann, I think we might be a little sleep-deprived.’
‘Yes…’ said Hildy dreamily. ‘Yes, that was…odd. I think we might be a little…a little, yeah.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘I’ll go see if Franziska and Sergeant Sturmvoraus can relieve us.’
Why Arnoldsteinfort even had night watches, Hildy had no idea. Presumably it was all part of Weishaupt’s act, keeping up the appearance of some vague military utility for Vienna’s benefit. Weishaupt was a true romantic, and that was the only reason why 1444 Squadron still existed in this day and age. Hildy felt a little out of place and she was not precisely sure why. It was as if everything she said or did or was was just a second out of sync with everybody else here. She yearned for them to like her and be nice to her, and for the greater part they were. But there was something off about them.
‘Did Hildy actually come to enjoy the army at any point?’ asked Cosgrove. ‘What I’m seeing here seems quite lovely, really.’
‘Yes,’ said Schlomo, ‘it is nothing like how I experienced army duty for twenty years. Even peaceful assignments not like this for me. I really wonder how this platoon get away with operating like this.’
‘I once saw a recruitment advertisement for the JMSDF that had a boy band dancing on the deck of a carrier singing, in English, ‘Seaman ship at sea, seaman ship for love, seaman ship for peace’,’ said the Nish.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove, ‘but that’s the JSDF. The Bundesheer’s an army that has some actual active deployments. In the Balkans, especially, I think.’
‘Yes, that is correct,’ said Schlomo.
‘Thank you, Schlomo,’ said Cosgrove. ‘In any case, what I wonder about this is…’
‘In such a lovely place as this, why didn’t she stay as long as she could?’ ventured the Nish.
‘Exactly.’
The Nish shrugged. ‘Evidently, doing geography was really important to Hildy.’
‘Say, Nish,’ said Cosgrove languidly. ‘You knew Hildy rather better than I or Schlomo did, right?’
The Nish nodded. ‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Did you…’ Cosgrove twirled her hand around and pursed her lips. ‘At any time did you feel that there was something wrong with her? That she had these trauma problems, that she was manic, that she put up walls and faked a lot? Did you catch on to all that, at all?’
‘No.’ The Nish hung her head. ‘I didn’t.’
‘So she became good, over years, at hiding problems,’ said Schlomo. ‘Do you think that may have been part of training, or what she learned through experience in the army?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Cosgrove. ‘From what we’ve seen of Lieutenant Weishaupt he seems possessed of a rather touchy-feely command style. Hiding one’s feelings doesn’t seem like the sort of skill he’d feel the need to impart to his soldiers.’
‘The romantic unprofessionalisms of Willy Weishaupt are not the chief concern,’ Schlomo said with a sigh. ‘There are any number of ways for Hildy Wildermann to have learned to seem as if normal.’
6
‘Seem ‘as if’…’ mused the Nish a little later. ‘Seem ‘as if’…I’ve known people who have been incredibly hard to pin down as individuals because they seem to mimic other people, especially prominent figures—Audrey Hepburn, for example—to make people like them better.’
‘These people are crazy,’ said Schlomo in his bellicose way. ‘I have never met nobody like that, I want to meet nobody like that, and I do not know what sort of person we are talking about.’
‘Narcissists, lunatics, borderline crazies,’ said Cosgrove.
‘Well, it is clear now, right, that Hildy is a ‘borderline crazy’, as you put it?’
‘Quite evident,’ said the Nish, ‘though fortunately she seems able to get along in society.’
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove. ‘When I was in seminary they taught us some psychology, some of the problems that people can have, some of the things that can go subtly wrong in the wiring upstairs—for our pastoral work, you know. Hildy Wildermann’s a prisoner in her own poisoned mind. People like her can be very dangerous, but I don’t think that she is. It may be that since I’ve seen the origins of her being I’m more inclined to be kind…but even so, I don’t see her as violent or a hazard.’
‘I’d like not to, either,’ said the Nish glumly.
Cosgrove shot the Nish a wry half-smile. ‘Having trouble scrubbing the image of her killing three people and then herself out of your mind?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m trying to ignore it because logically it’s exactly as credible as Santana shooting Hildy after botching a Bond one-liner. No more, no less.’
‘My feeling is that we can trust anything we are shown up unto mid-afternoon of 10 September 2009,’ said Schlomo. ‘Anything in that evening…not so much.’
‘Yes, this would appear to be so,’ said the Nish. ‘Yet I can’t…it’s upsetting, you know.’ She shook her head briskly like a dog trying to rid itself of unwanted water in its fur.
‘One wants to save a person like Hildy after seeing all this, doesn’t one?’ asked Cosgrove. The Nish nodded. Cosgrove put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Only problem is, some people are beyond help. I’m not saying that Hildy is. But some people get so bent under the burden of sin and shame that even if the burden was by some miracle removed they’d never be able to walk upright again. Their figure would just not be shaped that way any more.’
‘So Hildy…’
‘I just said,’ said Cosgrove, ‘I’m not saying Hildy is one of those people. But if she is…’ She whistled.
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ snapped the Nish.
‘I wonder,’ said Schlomo, ‘can people like that love?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Honestly I think that they’re a little too far gone for that, at least normally…but we can love them, and…well, they’re to be avoided in some instances…’ She threw up her hands. ‘It really depends on who the person is, and if the sin and shame have destroyed them or merely bent them. You can straighten something bent. You can’t resurrect the dead.’
‘That’s not true!’ cried out a voice in the wilderness. ‘That’s not true! I hate that kind of pseudo-Calvinistic fatalism, Cosgrove! I really hate it!’ A young and beautiful nun stomped up and down and worked her fists. ‘Giving up on Hildy Wildermann…it’s giving up on the whole human race, in microcosm…eternally.’
Schlomo had heartburn that day, despite not technically having an actual chest. How this was possible, none of them could divine.
‘Hey,’ Schlomo said, ‘I want to speed this up a bit. Could we just skip ahead to the seventh through the tenth of September?’
‘Hm,’ said the Nish. ‘Hm.’ She tapped her foot. ‘Well, yes, I think we can deduce the rest of Hildy’s past from what we’ve already seen. Presumably she finished her year at Arnoldsteinfort without incident and then went to Jena. And then, in an Asian tour, Jerusalem. So…’ She took in a breath through the line of her teeth. ‘Yes, I think going ahead to the relevant phase is a good idea.’
‘All right,’ said Cosgrove. ‘All right, that could work. Uh…I’m not exactly sure how to control this process, though.’
‘I think you have to ask for Miss Henderson,’ said the Nish. ‘Say ‘Miss Henderson, a little help here?’ She should come. She has in the past.’
‘We’ve never specifically asked for her in the past, though. I wouldn’t peg her as some kind of familiar that can be summoned.’
‘No.’ The Nish shook her head. ‘No, definitely not. I’d never suggest that. She’s more like an extremely powerful youkai or bakemono[4] of some kind. I still think she might come if asked, though. She’s been pretty obliging before.’
‘Point taken,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Schlomo, your thoughts?’
‘Eh?’ Schlomo scratched his chin. ‘I suppose asking for help is going to do nobody any harm. Why are we discussing it so heatedly? Just do it.’
7
It was six in the morning, the twelfth of September. The Ten Kings and Four Grandsires were chewing out G.T. Schuster-Slatt and Victoriano Santana for their behaviour in the past weeks.
‘…This sort of confusion in your positions and actions is entirely unacceptable!’ shrieked King Blackbird, Alain Bayard of Lille, France.
‘Perhaps,’ said Schuster-Slatt, ‘if we knew just what the Kingfisher’s up to and how he’s been handling all these situations, how and why he’s doing what he’s doing…’
‘Shut up, you fucking dinosaur rocker,’ snarled King Cottonmouth, Gregory ‘Bubba’ Hamilton of Bowling Green, Kentucky. ‘Santana, how do you explain this?’
‘I don’t know what I’m rightly meant to be explaining,’ said Santana apologetically. ‘Sorry, King Cottonmouth, but the Kingfisher hasn’t exactly been forthcoming lately. I’ve just been going on as best I can.’
‘You define this as ‘as best you can’, Victoriano?’ asked Grandsire Cinque, who took the form of a shimmer in the air. The Four Grandsires had been incorporated into this alliance just five years ago, a year after the arrival of the current Kingfisher and two years after Santana had been sucked into it. Nobody knew what exactly they were or where they had come from, only that they answered solely to the current Kingfisher—not any incumbent, the specific man who was currently in that position. As such, he, not yet then Kingfisher, had risen to that post very quickly and the Four Grandsires had been elevated up to a level equal with the Ten Kings. They were spookily powerful and Santana really resented them. The Kingfisher never told anybody else anything anymore. He just went around pretending to be a perfectly normal and stable person, filtering down orders via these sentient little flickers that could only really be seen through peripheral vision. Santana understood that even the Kingfisher needs must cut loose sometimes, but lately it was as if the man was doing nothing but cut loose.
Outside the room stood Miss Henderson, uncertain whether or not she should go in.
‘Worried about something?’ asked a flickering patch of air looking vaguely like a woman’s face.
Miss Henderson turned around in horror that soon subsided into annoyance. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you. Hello. Yes, I am worried. Those people whose tutelage I’m dealing with have asked for me to come and explicitly tailor their journey through existences to make things easier for them.’
‘Well, what is wrong with that? Miss Henderson, you like these people!’
‘Yes, but what the Ten Kings and Four Grandsires have been discussing recently makes me worry that doing this won’t really change anything.’
The face sighed. ‘Remember, Miss Henderson, that this was never going to be a simple police case or even a simple mystery story. This never was, is not, and will never be an affair that Cosgrove, the Nish, and Schlomo can solve using the simple rules of deduction and forensics.’
‘Yes, I know that!’ snapped Miss Henderson.
‘Then,’ said the face, ‘if your actions within the tutelage of those three was never going to change anything, what are you so worried about? If nothing was going to change, what has changed?’
Miss Henderson snorted. ‘Just the sort of koan I’d expect from a person like you,’ she said. ‘What’s changed is my realisation of my role in this.’
‘Which is?’
‘For now, totally meaningless.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said the face. ‘The situation cannot be resolved through detective means, so how can it be resolved? Through people. You are showing them people, which engenders understanding.’
‘Have you ever had an opinion not couched in overly optimistic theology?’ asked Miss Henderson.
‘Yes, quite a few, in the old days!’ said the face. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to go now. The reason I’ve been here for more than forty seconds or so to begin with is that I’m only doing it with my face. We’ve run out of time and I’m getting tired.’
‘When can I talk to you again?’ asked Miss Henderson.
‘Well,’ said the face, ‘you could come to me if you want to. I’m only a mile or so away.’
‘I don’t like going through the slums,’ said Miss Henderson.
‘Fine. I can come back some time this afternoon.’ The face vanished before Miss Henderson could protest that this was too long.
Miss Henderson sighed. Even she, the great Bone Sceptre, could get flustered or sidetracked or upset or just plain bored on assignments. Yesterday, as part of her cover, she had had to read a thirty-page brief by some idiot out in Philadelphia Amman, a ramble about the weather in Jordan. The man in question was constantly submitting these files, but he also sometimes sent in things that were actually of some use, so somebody had to meticulously screen all of his reports. It grew tiring very quickly.
Miss Henderson’s oversight in this task was practically nonexistent, and that lovely yet maddening woman to whose disembodied face she had just been talking was the closest thing that she had to a confidante and ally—well, she was a confidante and ally, just not an ideal one, given her…shall Miss Henderson say, unique situation.
Matter flowed from place to place but could only with difficulty cross the seas beyond the existences. That was why this place, this Jerusalem, had had to be designated as ‘mission control’. And when they arrived, later on, another Jerusalem would become ‘mission control’, the existence that would then contain them.
8
Miss Henderson agreed to transplant Cosgrove, the Nish, and Schlomo right into the thick of it, 8 September 2009.
Fatima, Reveka, and Hildy were sitting in Jerusalem’s Botanical Gardens eating pita and babaghanouj. Reveka did not seem to be enjoying herself and Hildy looked pensive, but Fatima looked quite happy.
‘So did you enjoy Mary and the Nish’s flat on Friday?’ Fatima asked.
Reveka nodded. ‘It was a little weird,’ she said. ‘Overcrowded, honestly.’
‘Well,’ said Hildy, ‘to be fair, I think that was a problem that the Nish had as well, so it was hardly out of malice on their part.’
‘No, I’m not saying it was! Believe it or not, Miss Wildermann, I don’t ascribe everything that I don’t like to people conspiring against me.’ Reveka tore off a piece of bread with her teeth and swallowed it before continuing. ‘I don’t think Mary thought it through, though, and…’
‘Hey!’ said Fatima. ‘I like Mary Cosgrove!’
Reveka nodded. ‘So do I. But I don’t like how she sometimes doesn’t think things through.’
‘Everybody sometimes doesn’t think things through, Reveka,’ said Hildy. ‘And from what I saw of her, Mary definitely at least did not seem like an idiot.’
‘I didn’t call her an idiot!’ snapped Reveka. ‘I just said…’
‘I know what you just said. I was agreeing with you, you twist. Now I have to ask a question. It’s something that’s been bothering me about this city. It probably bothers the people involved even more than it does me—probably bothers society at large, in fact. Why is there such a small population of Arab Christians?’
‘Haven’t we been over this before?’ sighed Fatima.
‘No,’ said Hildy. ‘No, I don’t think we have. See…’ Hildy went on and on about the human geography of Israel and Palestine; Fatima and Reveka were visibly forcing themselves not to start sniping at each other. Eventually what Hildy was saying mutated into a nearly half-hour speech, and Reveka cut her off.
‘You don’t want me to finish?’ asked Hildy, hurt. ‘This doesn’t interest you?’
‘Not really, no,’ said Reveka. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’d really appreciate it if…’
‘Can we discuss something else?’ Reveka snapped.
‘We’ve seen this scene before, haven’t we?’ asked the Nish.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove, ‘and it played out exactly like this from what I remember. Remember, we’re still in the consistent part of the timestream.’
‘Last time,’ said Schlomo, ‘we could not observe the conversation because we were bickering amid ourselves. So what are we learning now, from a second time?’
‘There seems to be some animosity between Reveka and Hildy,’ said the Nish. ‘And Reveka did threaten us not to tell the police after Mary found the bodies…’
‘But Reveka and Fatima have a thing, remember?’ Cosgrove prodded.
Schlomo nodded. ‘Something, some situation going on with Reveka and Fatima. I cannot think that Reveka would kill these people. She might kill some people. She probably has killed some people. I cannot think she would kill these people.’
And then the world turned and they saw another scene. This next prospect presented to them showed Hildegard Wildermann in a very strange and disturbing light. She was standing on an unknown rooftop—it looked like one of the mosques of the Old City—watching the sun go down over the New City and the Hill Country of Judea beyond. Her mouth was slack like a gargoyle, her posture was spread like an angel, and rays of evening light coming through gaps in the skyline shone almost directly into her hands, as if the sun itself was giving her its blood.
Hildegard Wildermann stood there as from somewhere behind and above and to the left came the call of evening prayer for the Muslims of Jerusalem. She stood there half-gargoyle and half-angel with the sun’s blood on her hands and the twilight massaging her back.
The people were all going into their proper places, and she mapped out the proper places for the proper people. That was what she did. Her calling.
She laughed, the sort of laugh that unrelentingly assaulted the foundations of the mind and soul. Cosgrove remembered reading Peter Pan many times in her childhood. If the first laugh of the first baby created all the fairies of the world, then Hildegard Wildermann’s laugh, right here, right now, as she ascended from the depths of an abusive childhood Hell to the rooftops of a city that was in theory at least at the very heights of Heaven, brought a rush of demons and monsters into the world and gave them all over into the hands of the same force that had destroyed her innocence and blasted away her sanity while she was yet too young to know that it was happening.
9
As it happened, the representatives of that force worked long into the night in their desperate attempts to shore up a series of complex and highly questionable plans. Hildy’s madness, and the other neuroses and psychoses of the little Jerusalem group, provided an unending cavalcade of opt-outs and excuses, and it would almost be remiss of them not to take advantage of this.
Cosgrove and the Nish, suspended in the darkness outside existence while Miss Henderson arranged for them to transfer over to the next existence, fell to arguing. The Nish’s position seemed to be that nobody would be dead were it not for that stupid party, which Cosgrove had neglected to tell her about before arranging it in the first place. Schlomo, listening from some distance, was getting tired of listening to them bicker and wondered idly when the next existence was going to get here.
Cosgrove, the Nish, and Schlomo had become a lot better at piecing this together while observing this existence. They had pieced together that starting at some time around sundown on the tenth of September they could not trust what they saw; the specifics of Hildy’s life and what was so messed up about her; that everybody involved seemed to suffer some vague religiously-themed paranoia or even hallucination in Jerusalem—Fatima’s generalised fear of djinn and demons, the Decapitator God attacking Padre Hermosa, the Nish’s trust in Sukuna-sama as counterpoint to her terror in Ehud Biton’s house; and that Hildy’s hallucination, based upon the strange voices in the mountains, likely involved kobolds.
Kobolds were figures of folklore, not religion. They were mine or mountain spirits in the fairy-stories of Alpine peoples, who would sometimes help out with farm work but sometimes deliberately ruin it. This explained the hammers that Hildy had heard. It was very likely that this was a girl who had multiple things severely wrong with her: the hammers and voices were a different problem to the abuse and the consequent adoption of a falsely manic and chipper personality. This was certainly connected to the carefully-hidden neediness and greediness, but was in no way the same problem as them.
‘It seems as if Hildy was so sick in the head,’ said Schlomo, ‘that she was caught in a vortex of mental tensions and could pass for a normal person at least in outward appearances. A balance that Jerusalem upset.’
‘Or it kicked them all into overdrive,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Mentally unbalanced people often have their problems worsened in an overwhelming place like Paris, or Florence—or Jerusalem. It’s called Stendhal syndrome in general and Jerusalem syndrome when the problems are almost sacerdotal.’
‘It feels uncomfortable to me, talking about Hildy as a test subject of some kind,’ said the Nish. ‘I considered—I consider—I don’t know if I consider her a friend now, but I did for several weeks.’
‘You have a very cool way of showing affection, Nish,’ said Cosgrove, ‘but you seem to take it seriously. I think that’s really great.’ She beamed. ‘I’ve got one of the coldest hearts in all of Christendom, really. But I like that cool kindness you’ve got.’
‘The temperatures of Christians’ hearts isn’t a subject that I’m really an expert on,’ said the Nish, ‘but yours actually seems pretty warm.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Cosgrove.
Schlomo cleared his throat. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘Eh…I apologise for breaking up a ‘moment’, but…’ He seemed genuinely sorry rather than just snarky about it. ‘We need to talk on what to do with the rest of this reality.’
‘What’s to do?’ asked Cosgrove.
The Nish folded her arms. ‘Oh, please. You really think that there’s absolutely no reason for us to see this version of the last few hours of Hildy Wildermann’s life?’
‘I don’t see any specific point in it. Remember I almost vomit whenever I see the actual killings…or the aftermath…’ Cosgrove’s voice trailed off into a disturbed, almost haunted moan.
The Nish put a hand on Cosgrove’s shoulder. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know. I understand.’ She turned to Schlomo. ‘What do you think?’
‘I…’ Schlomo frowned. ‘I am not, honestly, sure entirely. I definitely think that it might be helpful seeing more of Hildy’s existence—yet I do want to move on to Padre Hermosa’s existence.’
Cosgrove furrowed her brow. ‘We decided that we’re doing Padre Hermosa next? Is this something I’m forgetting about?’
‘I thought we had discussed this,’ said Schlomo. ‘Padre Hermosa, then me, then see where else we go. That a problem for you?’
‘It’s…no, no, it’s not a problem,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Fine, let’s…’
‘Ahaha! What’s with these guys?’
Miss Henderson frowned. The guffawing man behind her was watching the television, but the sound was down so she could not tell what exactly he was watching or whether or not its apparent humour was intentional—or, indeed, existent. Tom Carter thought that the stupidest things were funny. He would go around saying ‘roast beef’ (a phrase which he found inherently hilarious for some asinine reason) and ‘macaroni salad’ (ditto) at all hours to anybody who did not simply lock him out of their workspace.
The only reason why Carter even had a job was that King Catfish, who had been with the group for decades, was his uncle—nepotism in the original and purest linguistic sense.
‘Hey, Carter,’ said Miss Henderson languidly. ‘C’mere a minute.’
‘Huh?’ Carter tottered to his feet and shuffled over, scratching his buttocks through his sweats. Miss Henderson sighed. How inelegant these people were. ‘What is it, Miss Henderson?’
‘Your uncle’s out of the city for a few days, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Nope. Why?’
Miss Henderson growled slightly. Her eye twitched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s just that for the most senior of the Ten Kings to leave Jerusalem for several days on an unclear assignment immediately after one of the Kingfisher’s little experiments—when we’re still trying to clean up the pieces and put them back in the box, so to speak—doesn’t seem like the best state of affairs for us.’
‘You’re smiling,’ said Carter, pointing at Miss Henderson’s face. ‘What’re you smiling about?’
‘I’m not smiling,’ said Miss Henderson tensely.
‘Yeah you are. What’s that about?’
‘I am thinking of a funny joke,’ said Miss Henderson, a falsehood.
She hated this assignment so damn much.
‘All right,’ said the Nish. ‘How about this? I can go see the murders. You two can wait here if you’d like.’
‘Fine,’ said Cosgrove. ‘That’s fine, Nish. Go do that.’
The Nish nodded and smiled wanly. ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Hold tight,’ she said, and disappeared. She traversed the long spaces and appeared again in the mouth of the alleyway near the restaurant. It was 10 September. The sun had just set and the western horizon was still in a bloody blaze. The east was already dark, not pitch but just in the borderlands of dark blue, dark purple, and black. The sky above would probably never become truly black, because of the lights of Jerusalem. The shadows in the alleyway, streaming across the Nish’s line of vision like ink marbled across a piece of artist’s paper, were likely as dark as it was going to get. Walking into the shadows the Nish could only make out simple shapes around her, even though the alleyway had a streetlight shining into one end and the lights of the restaurant’s back kitchen at the other.
The Nish walked down the alleyway into the lights of the restaurant kitchen. With a sick, almost-physical thrill of imposition she passed immaterial through the back door. The chefs were working hard; must be a packed house to-night. She tried to remember if, back in Fatima’s existence, the restaurant had been notably crowded. She could not recall exactly what the conditions had been that time.
Going out into the dining areas she found them much the same as in the previous existence, and it was crowded now; her mind worked subtly, clicking together the idea, the fact, that it had been crowded then also. She had to look around a bit before she saw the table with Fatima, Hildy, Padre Hermosa, and Benny. It was in an alcove set a little aside from the front door of the restaurant.
‘…—oshima, actually, but yes, southern Japan. It’s been a while since I was in the Middle East.’
‘And where were you then, child?’ asked Padre Hermosa, folding his arms and leaning forward to indicate interest.
‘Mecca,’ said Hildy.
There was a short beat and Fatima spluttered her drink from her mouth and right nostril. ‘By God! How the Hell did you get into Mecca?!’
Hildy laughed breezily. ‘Are you angry, Fatima?’
‘No, but…HOW?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Benny. ‘What’s so special about that?’
‘Non-Muslims are not supposed to be allowed inside Mecca,’ said Hildy. ‘I got in by bluffing, really, because it is hard to, with diligence and accuracy, screen people by belief system.’
‘Fatima, child,’ said Padre Hermosa gently, ‘you are not offended by this?’
‘Not especially,’ Fatima admitted. ‘Mainly I find it actually quite hilarious. It is only offensive in that you even had to…’
At this point the lights in the room all did a very odd thing like turning a colour that was somehow the chromatic opposite of white on a colour wheel[5]. The Nish felt dark stars exploding behind her field of vision and heard Padre Hermosa’s voice saying ‘Well, you aren’t really committed to your religion, are you, you bitch?’ It was Padre Hermosa’s voice and it was coming from Padre Hermosa’s mouth but it was not Padre Hermosa. It was something like what one might expect an incredibly good digital imitation of his voice to sound like, and as his verbal tirade against Fatima—which was nothing like Padre Hermosa’s real personality either—continued, the Nish thought that she could vaguely make out a hint of actual auto-tune, or at least something very like it.
Hildy didn’t hear it as auto-tune. She heard it as the distant tinkle of miners’ hammers into alpine rock. The mine-dwarves came, and kept on increasing, and she was there helpless as Padre Hermosa’s mouth chewed out Fatima. Then Padre Hermosa’s body took out a gun and shot, not Fatima, but Benny in the chest. Benny flailed over backwards and toppled from his chair and lay twitching and moaning on the floor. Then Padre Hermosa shot Hildy, Fatima, and a small object that he had laid on the table. The object released nerve gas.
Oh, this was just ridiculous! There was no way that this was what had actually happened. The Nish wasn’t really even paying attention any more as everybody in the restaurant choked to death and Padre Hermosa struggled to drag the bodies of his friends out the back door. She wasn’t even paying attention when Padre Hermosa shot himself in the stomach. In the stomach. Possibly the most asinine suicide-by-gun method known to man.
So the four lay dying in the alleyway while dozens more lay dying in the restaurant. And then the next existence began.
[1] Leutnant in German. Oberleutnant was First Lieutenant.
[2] This honestly depends upon which version of Jewish legend you are looking at and how you are defining a ‘soul’. A golem is very occasionally defined vaguely in terms of the Qabalistic concept of Guf, as a soul taken by ‘force and fraud of man’ from the Chamber of Guf, which is the repository of souls-as-birds before birth and after death, a treasury beneath the throne of God in the seventh Heaven. Unless one counts this rare and ill-defined concept, though, or accepts the possibility of artificial souls, Schlomo’s statement is mythologically accurate.
[3] The ‘summer triangle’ actually involves Deneb, Vega, and Altair, the alpha stars of Lyra, Cygnus, and Aquila.
[4] Read: ‘extremely powerful demon or monster’, though without the necessarily negative attributes of these English words and concepts.
[5] By definition, black and white have no opposites on a colour wheel.
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