“I got it open—the neo-Nazi group’s files. It wasn’t that difficult, honestly, I mean, these guys aren’t pros or anything.”
“Hallelujah.” I picked up my beer and went over, Clarence following. The Amazons were still looking through the pictures on Oxana’s phone, oohing and aahing over the security arrangements as much as the expensive furnishings.
“I actually unlocked the drive a few minutes ago,” Wendell said, “but right away I saw this video file labeled Die Beschworung that had its own encryption, and I just got that open. I really think you want to see this.”
“Why? Oh, please, it’s not Uruk the Aryan Beast doing the Pants-Off Dance-Off, is it?”
“I wish,” said Wendell. Even based on our short acquaintance, he seemed strangely grim. “Just look.” He clicked. The video started.
It was a dark room, that was all I could see at first. I was prepared for it to be another cult-murder, or maybe even the one I’d already seen. But something else was going on. “Oh, my sweet Lord,” I said as I began to understand. “These Black Sun people really are nuts.”
The Amazons and Clarence crowded in behind me to look over Wendell’s shoulder. “What do they do?” asked Halyna.
“Well, I might be mistaken,” I said as I watched the tiny, poorly-lit figures setting out their implements and readying their books. “But I’m pretty darn sure those crazy Nazi kids are trying to open a doorway to Hell.”
The last thing they placed on the floor of the dark room—it looked like the same warehouse floor where Bald Thug had met his untimely but probably richly deserved end—was not much bigger than a corgi dog. It wasn’t a dog, though, it was a human baby. We could hear its thin cries, the hoarse, hitching sobs of a child who’d been crying a long time.
“I cannot watch,” said Halyna and turned away.
I wish I’d done the same, but instead, I watched it all. One of the robed figures lit a fire in a trash can lid. None of us made a comment now, except for sharp intakes of breath when the knife came out, and helpless noises of disgust and horror when one of the masked men slit the child’s throat and drizzled the dying infant’s blood into the flames.
I wanted to kill the Nazi bastards so bad now, I wished I’d gone into their place with C4 strapped to my chest and taken the whole floor out in a blast of cleansing fire, even if it meant I went with them. But I hadn’t. I’d played with them like they were just punks. I hadn’t thought them worth my attention beyond that. My bad.
So I kept watching their miserable, badly shot little video.
It only got worse after that.
twenty-three:
shadow swimming in light
IT WAS so bizarre, watching it happen in that tiny little window on a laptop computer screen. It almost felt if we were spying, as if this were happening right now and we were kids staring through a keyhole, trying to find out what grown-ups really do.
“Is horrible,” said Oxana. The child had stopped moving, and was tossed to one side like an empty bag.
“Who are these people?” Wendell asked.
“Neofascist crazies,” I said, “but they clearly have bigger ambitions than just making the trains run on time. They’ve been spying on me for weeks. They think I know where Eligor’s horn is hidden.”
“Is this really the Eligor we’re talking about?” Wendell asked. “Grand Duke of Hell?”
“You know him?” Clarence was surprised. I guess he thought only crazy angels like me dabbled in this kind of stuff.
“I know about him, just like any American GI used to know who Himmler or Goering were. He’s one of the worst there is.” Wendell looked at me. “What do they want his horn for?”
“No idea,” I said. “I suppose they could be working for Eligor, but I can’t imagine him hiring a bunch of clowns like that. He’s too smart.”
“And do you have this horn of his, or know where it is?” Wendell watched me, daring me to explain what an angel might be doing with such a thing.
“No. But I want it for reasons of my own. Good reasons,” I told him, stung by his doubtful look.
Clarence leaned over to Wendell and said, in a loud, theatrical whisper, “Girl problems.”
“It’s nowhere near that simple, damn it! But I promise you that it’s connected to everything else going on here, that my reasons are honorable, and I want these murdering fascist fucks not to have it almost as much as I want to have it myself.”
“What happening now?” asked Oxana, who had barely been listening to us. “Is all dark.”
I turned back to the laptop. The little rectangular window had indeed gone black, as though Uruk’s little snuff film had ended. But it only stayed that way for a moment. Then something began to grow in the darkness.
At first it was only a bloom of yellow light, pulsing slowly on the floor around the smoky fire. Blood smoke, I reminded myself. Blood of an innocent. But then it began to rise, more like fog than light, and as it gradually grew into a column of shifting, sickly yellow, I could see that something crouched at the center of it, where the fire had been. That something was barely touched by the surrounding glow, its shape distorted and wavering as if this were being filmed beneath the ocean, or on another planet where the pressure was a thousand times greater than here. The light rose in a circular yellow smear until it became a single, unbroken column, a pillar of poisonous-looking vapors.
The thing that crouched inside the light was huge, and blanketed in shadow. I could see no obvious shape to it except that at the top of the mound of darkness two narrow slits blinked, gleamed. Eyes. Then the mouth sagged open. “Who summons me?” it said, in a voice like a cement mixer full of stones and offal.
I knew that voice.
Halyna had come back, drawn by our shocked faces as much as by the terrible, rumbling voice.
“So it’s you, you fat bastard,” I said.
Baldur von R. now came back into frame, kneeling beside the column of light, dwarfed by the thing he had conjured. “Sitri, great prince! You who are called Bitru, Master of Secrets! We summon thee! We bind thee! While you remain in our circle you will do no man harm!”
“Excuse me while I swear,” I said to Wendell and Clarence. “Fuck me sideways! I can’t believe even the Black Sun are stupid enough to make deals with Sitri. He’s as bad as they get.”
The figure in the column of light suddenly shifted, stretching in some places, shrinking in others, still a shadow-puppet but a little easier to see. It had the shape of a man, now, but with great hawklike wings and the face of some kind of cat.
“And what do you wish of me?” The deep voice sounded amused.
“Your help to throw down the mongrels and unbelievers! Your help to bring an age of purity back to the Earth, an age of power for those who truly deserve it!” I could hear the hitch in von Reinmann’s voice—he was terrified by his own success. I might have hated his slimy guts, but I didn’t blame him for being shocked. Performing a demonic invocation and having Sitri show up is like setting a mousetrap and finding you’ve caught a grizzly bear.
“And in return, will you perform a certain task for me?” The voice stayed the same, but the silhouette in the oceanic currents of light and wavering shadow stretched into something else—a tree with human fingers, but still with eyes of fire. Before von Reinmann could respond it shifted again, becoming the shadow of a crude, crooked chair.
The neo-Nazi leader was mesmerized by the changing shapes. “Of course, Master,” he quavered. “Of course, great Sitri! We will do anything you ask. You honor us with your trust.”
Sitri became a pillar of standing stone. “I honor you with my restraint,” the grating voice said. “One word from me and your souls would be strung like ribbons on the doors to outer darkness. Remember that.” This time the shift was more convulsive, and when it ended the shadow was swimming in the pillar of light, a thing of tentacles and beaks and trailing strands, part squid, part jellyfish. “You will find that which I desire, and you will bring it to me. To aid you in this, I will give you power over three servants, the Nightmare Children, the Boneless Ones, and most fearsome of all—”