Shadows Across America Read online

  Henrique gasped for breath. Michelle suppressed the terror building up inside of her. She feigned indifference and offered Henrique more food. He asked if they could go somewhere else.

  “You want to go home?”

  “No, I just need some air. To catch my breath.”

  “But you hear the voices, don’t you?”

  “There are no voices,” Stobert answered sharply. “None at all.”

  “You have the dreams, Walter. I know that. It affected me, too, although in my case it was just an echo. Nothing entered me, and yet I still hear it from the void. It chases me in my dreams. I tremble just to think about it. The presences took refuge in you; there was no other vessel. They can only be transferred to a relative.”

  Stobert spun around like a wounded animal. “How do you know that? What are you talking about? You’re crazy! We both went mad that night! It was an adolescent fantasy we never got over. What about the chief? He was there—did he see anything?”

  “He couldn’t see a thing. He was an idiot.”

  “It’s just an old wives’ tale. You’re a victim of your own superstitions.”

  “Your hypnotic gaze, Walter, your abilities. I’ve heard all about your strange cult, your unnatural magnetism.”

  “It’s called collective hysteria!”

  Schwindt raised his chin as though he were receiving an order. His voice grew slower and more portentous. “Do you know why I haven’t handed you over to those who would welcome me into their circles for just such a gift? When it would be my ticket into the oligarchy that runs this planet?”

  Stobert didn’t want to hear another word about this madness. But suddenly, a monstrous tremor ran through his body. It came from beyond, from the abyss that had settled in his soul. The weird, incomprehensible language was speaking through him, using him as its puppet. He shivered. “Because the voices ordered you to serve me.”

  Schwindt’s arrogance suddenly disappeared. He now looked like a small rodent. “Then you do know. You can’t deny the truth, Walter. It’s not you they obey. It’s the presences. Just like me, damn it. And yet I place at your service the empire I have built for reasons that shall not benefit me in any way whatsoever. We were cursed that night. Both of us.”

  “I only wanted to serve the party! If we’d taken the book, we’d have become—”

  “What? What were we? A pair of schoolboys trying to prove ourselves in the lowliest party cell run by a tavern drunk who snored while we dreamed. Do you know what we’d have become? What we are: a pair of pariahs. It took me a long time to realize that, but I did. There was no book. Where did you get that nonsense? Who told you about it?”

  “I can’t remember. I was an orphan; I was raised by my aunts. They had no contact with him, but there were always whispers. They were afraid of him. Why do you think the book wasn’t there?”

  “I spent years looking for your supposed grimoire . . . all the books about the supposedly arcane arts are nothing but fakes, frauds, hoaxes.”

  “What about those secret circles you were talking about?”

  “Your uncle didn’t belong to those groups. I don’t know what his affiliation was or where he came from. I imagine it’s an oral tradition, like the druids. It works by direct lineage, and that’s what matters. Did your uncle have any children or grandchildren? I couldn’t find any records after the war. Do you remember having a cousin?”

  “Maybe . . . maybe, yes. I remember something, but if they did exist, they died of influenza.”

  Schwindt’s face darkened. “Then listen to me, Walter. More than your life depends on it.”

  The three of them walked at an exasperatingly slow pace to the shore of the river, where Henrique started to relax. Once there, they looked for somewhere to sit down, and he battled against himself to continue the story.

  “Grandfather was terrifying; we were happy not to see him. Once we became adults, our duties as grandchildren were explained to us. He had a list of families that we were to seek out. We had to father daughters with women from those families. Like I did with you. We had to seduce the woman and ensure that the baby was a girl. If it was a boy, we had to try for a girl later on. They didn’t want boys. If it was a boy, we had to arrange an abortion or anything else, just so long as we produced a girl later on. It was hard, very tough. It was how we lived, but I never gave it a second thought. Sometimes I felt lonely and sad, but we were given everything we could possibly want.”

  Michelle bristled. “What list? I was on that list?”

  “They told me your grandmother’s surname and where your family was: the country and city. They knew everything; I just had to look for female descendants. Your mother was too old for me. I was twenty-two or twenty-three. So I chose you. That was how it was with all of them—I never knew more. Only Grandfather knew. That was our world: we didn’t ask questions. We never considered refusing to do what we were told. Later, of course, after acting that way for many years, we started to have doubts. We didn’t live at the colony anymore and started to think differently. One of the cousins wanted to marry a girl who gave him a son and promised to have a girl in exchange, but they were both killed to teach us a lesson. They took the baby out of her belly right in front of him to make an example of it. My brother was smarter. He found out what they didn’t want him to know: he found out about my girl cousins. He sought me out to tell me. He had realized that we were monsters for fathering girls like that. We were just the same as they were. He had learned more but decided not to tell me. But he did make me swear that we would never again make any more daughters. Then he killed himself. I had eight daughters I never met, and everything started to get more difficult. I thought hard, suffered, and didn’t know what to do. In the end, after the accident, I was no use to them anymore.” He touched his stump. “I went back there, but they rejected me. They didn’t care about me. They threw me out. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t have any experience. I ended up begging and sleeping in doorways. Fortunately, my friend found me and helped.”

  “What friend? From the colony?”

  “Yes, I often went back to ask for help from outside. Some days they gave me some, and on others they didn’t. One day they said that if I ever came back, there would be trouble. My friend Santiago lives there, and he helped me. They allowed it because I’m a grandchild. He brought me to Joinville and taught me how to claim social security and look for odd jobs, some Spanish classes, customer service . . . and he brought me a little money from them every month so I’d never go back. I know that they allow it so they’ll never have to see me again. I tried to kill myself, too, but I was too afraid. Then I started to come to the church, and I remembered my brother and my cousins, who never received help from anyone. And I realized that I had never helped anyone either. I searched for the mothers of my daughters. I found five, but two of them had lost their daughters and never answered me. I sent as much help to the other three as I could. And my life changed. I work when I can, and the money I have goes to the church and my daughters. I keep some to pay for my room and for food. And so I try to make up for all the evil and sins I have committed. Now I have my faith in God.”

  “The two of them who lost their daughters: Did they tell you how it happened?”

  “No. I never heard. I heard from people I knew, like when I came looking for you. They said that they didn’t have the girls anymore. I wrote but never heard from them.”

  Michelle was trying to stay calm.

  “Henrique. There’s something that I don’t know if your brother knew about. I think that your grandfather always did the same thing. They kidnapped my daughter and brought her to him, maybe the other two girls too. I think maybe all of them. I think they spied on them, took them, and brought them here. We have a list. I want you to look at it so you can tell me if your other two daughters are on it. I need you to tell me everything you know, Henrique, anything that might help us. Do you understand?”

  “No . . . that ca
n’t be. It can’t be true. It can’t . . .” Henrique began to shake like he was in front of a giant insect. An insect that fed on his guilt. “Não pode . . . Não pode.”

  The sky turned dark at an ominous wink from Schwindt. The clouds roiled as he continued his story.

  “As the years went by, I began to hear myths and legends. At first I didn’t believe them, but later I found that they’re taken seriously by those at the top level. Not that I’ve ever found any corroborating evidence. People whispered about necromancers, secret gatherings at which incomprehensible beings were summoned, dark secrets that predate writing, passed down by blood until the fall of the last European empires. Bloodlines that were wiped out by the two world wars. I heard all manner of superstition. Until an antiques collector led me to an old Polish peasant who described a pagan ritual a noble had performed on his sister in Greater Russia when he was just a boy. It was his most vivid memory. The ritual, Walter, was the same as the one I saw your uncle perform in Vienna. That half-mad peasant had been affected, just like me.”

  Stobert began to feel dizzy. “Who was my uncle? A kind of witch?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they really existed. And if he was, why allow himself to be killed? Think of your power, Walter, the way you control people. He could have made us eat our own insides before we became a threat. That bothered me for decades. I wondered if it was because of your family ties, a weakness he had for his nephew. Or maybe you had disappointed him, and this was his punishment.”

  “I barely knew that creepy old man.”

  “I don’t have any answers, just theories. Listen, nothing is written down, nothing about these people, just rumors and folktales. On my travels, I crossed the Iron Curtain, and the most fruitful source of stories came from remote farms in Ukraine, fragments of memories from before the revolution. They refused to talk about the strangers, not even in tales by the campfire. They feared them even more than the nobles, with whom they had some relationship I couldn’t determine. They had mastered some kind of . . . dark art that was transmitted directly to their children and grandchildren of both genders. The important thing was that the lineage never be broken. The lore was based around the transmission of . . . the presence of a master onto their disciple before they died. Think of a slave master controlling the most wretched creature you can imagine, passing on their unique knowledge and power but only so the creature can escape and swallow up the unfortunate victim.”

  Stobert felt a lump in his throat and grew even colder.

  “Transmission of the presence to one’s own blood and the ability to control it through dark knowledge. The greatest risk, the only thing they were afraid of, was dying without ejecting it from within them first. Otherwise . . .” Schwindt shivered. “They had to transmit it and the apprentice had to receive it so they would become the new master. That opened my eyes. If your uncle had lost his children, might he have transmitted it to you, Walter? Could we have provoked him? And if you die without passing it on to someone else—”

  “Quiet! Don’t you think I worry about that every day?”

  “But not all my questions were answered. You’re not a direct descendant, so you couldn’t be the recipient. This raised another question: What happened in cases like your uncle’s, when they lost their offspring? It wasn’t uncommon. That’s where their servants, the vassals, come in. One of them gave me an old manuscript he’d treasured for many years. It was no more than a list, a set of names they called ‘vessels.’”

  “You said that there was nothing written down.”

  “And this might not be real, but I’d like you to take a look.” Schwindt reverently handed over a yellowing, moldy parchment.

  “These names are all connected. They look like family trees.”

  “Exactly. To them, other humans are simply livestock, and that includes nephews or even children that haven’t been initiated. That is why they raised a parallel lineage with their servant girls, peasants, or orphans; it didn’t matter. They had plenty of bastards: empty vessels to whom the presence could be transferred until another master recovered it. These were the recipients. And if the recipient died without passing it on, they were still cursed, but who cared?”

  “You’re telling me that I was my uncle’s vessel?”

  Stobert could feel the voices close by. Voices from a frozen hell beyond his understanding.

  Schwindt shook the page. “You haven’t read the list properly. Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

  “My uncle . . . my uncle had a list?”

  “That’s what I believe. It was the only document we were able to obtain that night.”

  “Where is it? Did you keep it? No, it must have disappeared decades ago.” His brain lit up with a solution. “Forget it—I have two sons and a grandson on the way. They can be my vessels.”

  “We need to get the list. Your uncle must have been a great master to be able to use you, but I doubt we’ll be able to. Your children are a long way from the original source; we can’t take the risk. You need to return to the main branch—you need to mix the two bloodlines again and join them both together. Your offspring will produce offspring with the people on that list. The list was never lost. You know very well who kept it: the man who posed as our leader.”

  “Our section chief. Is he alive? Have you found him?”

  “He was much easier to find than you were. He never saw combat, never left his hometown, and as Austria wasn’t de-Nazified, he was never pursued. He didn’t even have to hide. He got fatter and fatter like a pig, and now he’s a venerable town councillor. You must come with me to Europe, Stobert.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go back to Austria.”

  “We’ll meet him in Switzerland. He’ll come to us.”

  Michelle and Ari went back to the apartment without saying a word. They each went to their own room. Time seemed to slow down. Each minute shattered into shards, and sleep never came. Michelle was wide awake with a lump in her throat so painful she couldn’t even cry. Henrique had been overwhelmed by what she’d told him. He hadn’t been able to go on. They’d left him their number, just in case, but weren’t very hopeful. Then they’d made contact with Caimão, the mercenary, and arranged to meet the next day. But this prospect didn’t help Michelle out of the pit in which she found herself. The image of the girls locked up and forced to produce children made her heart race until she began to hyperventilate. She stood up, gasping, and wished she were dead. She destroyed everything she touched. Even worse, her entire life had been a lie; everything she’d done had been to help someone else. She’d tainted the only pure thing she’d ever known. She destroyed everything she touched, corrupted and ruined it. Nothing about her was useful or healthy. All she could think about was the punishment she deserved. She didn’t care what it was so long as those around her were unharmed. Michelle wrapped herself up in the sheets, thinking about saving Michi and about disappearing, being consumed by darkness. Fading away.

  Halfway through the night, she was frightened by a shadow at her door. A sleepy Ari was leaning on the frame.

  “I know you’re awake. I could hear you tossing and turning.”

  Michelle didn’t know what to say, while Ari didn’t know what to do.

  “I don’t know what you’re feeling, but I can imagine what you’re thinking. This is a completely irrational situation. I’m struggling to process it myself. But it’s obvious that they didn’t take Michi to . . . they waited until you were . . . old enough to . . . you know. They didn’t come looking for you at twelve years old. Whatever happens, you don’t have to worry about Michi. They went to a lot of trouble; she must be very valuable to them.”

  Then Ari left just as abruptly as she’d arrived. However, her curt words were a balm. Michelle was still upset, but now her anguish had been reduced to manageable levels. She was able to cry under the pillow for the rest of the night.

  The Grande Dixence, 1977

  At six in the morning, the im
pressive view of the Grande Dixence dam was at its absolute best. Swathed in the early-morning mist and completely devoid of visitors, it looked like a futuristic complex abandoned by a civilization that had melted into the mountains. It was a ghostly wall, a thousand-foot drop into an unseen valley. The rainstorms of the previous weeks had accelerated the ice melt, and the safety sluices had been opened, letting out a thunderous roar of gushing water. The sluice gates, which were functioning at maximum capacity, produced a furious waterfall that fell as a funnel into a hazy white chasm, a raging maelstrom that sent foam rising back over their heads hundreds of feet above.

  To one side of the cascade was a parked Citroën DS, the famous Shark, while a yellow BMW E21 emerged from the cloud of water and parked a few feet away. Out of it stepped a rotund, bald Teutonic man with a small moustache and a nervous demeanor. He wrapped himself up in his coat and hat, which he had to hold on to, to prevent from flying into the gorge. Leaning on the railings overlooking the abyss were two individuals. One of them had gone hatless while the other was wearing an ushanka. They both wore long Barbour jackets.