The nameless dead

Nine

There was a flash of white light and I came round. Doctors Brown and Rivers huddled at the foot of the bed. I let them confer for a while, my mouth and lips drier than raisins. Finally they noticed that my eyes were open.

‘You’re awake!’ Rivers’s face was unusually animated.

I looked at his colleague. Alexandra Brown’s cheeks were glowing and her eyes were bright.

‘Fantastic, Matt,’ she said, gripping my forearm. ‘You did really well.’

I was glad she was happy, but I was still tied down and desperate for a drink. I looked pointedly at the cup on the bedside table.

‘Undo the straps,’ I gasped, after I’d been given water through a straw.

They glanced at each other.

‘Not yet,’ Rivers said. ‘Dr. Brown’s protocol is that we must wait an hour.’

‘Wonderful. So what happened? I heard music, the Who, I think, then I was falling…’

‘I’ll need you to tell me everything you can,’ the woman said. ‘But the results I have so far are very encouraging. Your readings are better than I ever expected.’ She was like a schoolgirl with a new crush, though not on a human, but a process.

‘Calm down, Alex,’ I said.

She shot me a look that was slightly less icy than normal. ‘Excuse me. I’ve been working on this for a long time.’

‘Good for you. Just tell me what it means for me.’

‘Very well.’ She went back to efficient-scientist mode. ‘It’s difficult to describe for the layman. Basically we tapped into the deepest levels of your memory. Much of the data will need extensive analysis before its significance can be established. The process caused you to speak numerous words in German that we think were triggers. The reverse-conditioning action that I have built into the procedure means that those words will no longer provoke you into predetermined courses of action.’

‘Try me.’

She looked at Dr. Rivers, who nodded. They went over to the bank of screens at the foot of the bed.

‘Blaue Reiter,’ she said.

I felt absolutely nothing.

‘Remarkable,’ Rivers said. ‘Quite remarkable.’

‘Machtergreifung.’

The same again.

‘Wohlauf.’

Ditto, and so on. In every case, I remained completely unaffected. That was unlike the sessions I’d had with Rivers, when I always had to fight the triggers’ effects consciously, with varying degrees of success.

‘Congratulations, Dr. Brown,’ Rivers said, gripping her hand. If he hadn’t been such a dry old stick I’d have bet on him inviting her for a candlelit dinner when we were done.

‘That isn’t all, Mr. Wells,’ the female scientist said, levels of formality in the lab now fully restored. ‘You also gave certain information that I think will interest our FBI colleagues substantially.’

‘What information?’

‘Please, Mr. Wells,’ Rivers said. ‘You can’t expect us to share classified material with you.’

‘Classified material? You just said it came from me. Why can’t I know what it is?’

He was looking uncomfortable. ‘Those are the rules.’

Dr. Brown was getting excited again. ‘Are you sure you have no recollection of what you said?’

I shook my head. ‘I fell for a long time. After that, I found myself walking through a forest, and then crossing a river on a small boat. There was smoke in the air and I heard voices, a lot of them crying. I went through a ruined city, but there was no one around. Just more voices…’ The scene seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

‘That’s very gratifying,’ Dr. Brown said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The “katabasis” was induced by my process,’ she said proudly.

I found my bearings. It so happened that I knew what the term meant-a descent, specifically to the Underworld. When I was at college studying English, I did a project on the literary tradition of such journeys. I’d always been fascinated by the depiction of hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost. That had led me in all sorts of strange directions: from Wilfred Owen’s subterranean First World War trench poems, to the trips to the death god’s realm described by Homer and Virgil, to the urban wastelands of T.S. Eliot. I’d brought in works of art, too-ancient vases and sculptures showing Charon and Cerberus, visions of demonic horror by Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel, Rodin’s sculpted Gates of Hell. The fact that the Rothmann conspiracy had involved a satanic cult called the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant and had previously spawned a killer who left maps of hell attached to the victims meant that the literary and artistic traditions had extra significance for me, no matter what Alexandra Brown’s drugs and other methods of suggestion had brought out.

‘So you did brainwash me.’

She gave me an imperious look. ‘Certainly not. My process is directed toward the extraction of material from subjects, not the insertion of predetermined stimuli. The emphasis is on making use of structures already present. Do you have some knowledge of underworld voyages?’

‘You’ve read my file. My whole life has been one of those recently. What about the triggers?’

‘What about them?’ said Rivers.

‘Wakey, wakey, Lester. Do you think Alex here’s process has nailed them all?’

‘Please don’t call me that,’ the pale woman said.

‘How about Sandra? Or Lexie?’

‘Please, Mr. Wells.’ She was irritated. One-nil to me.

‘Probably,’ Rivers said, in a low voice.

‘Is that a scientific term?’ I asked.

‘Unfortunately it is,’ he replied. ‘We have now identified a total of one hundred and seven trigger words and phrases. The likelihood is that there are few, if any, remaining.’

‘It’ll only take one,’ I said, remembering the murders in the cathedral. That shut them up.

Eventually they loosed my bonds and let me go. My legs were unsteady and there was a vile metallic taste in my mouth. Dr. Brown said those side effects would soon disappear. I hoped the same could be said for any psychological effects of her process.

On my way out of the lab, to my surprise, I saw that it was after four in the morning. The gorilla had been told to escort me all the way back to our apartment. I managed not to screw with him by turning into a werewolf on the way. Karen was awake, but drowsy, so I kissed her and lay down beside her.

‘What happened?’

‘They told you I’d be late, didn’t they?’

‘Yes. What was Rivers doing?’

‘He’s got a new sidekick. Dr. Alexandra ‘I’m Pale Because I Only Come Out at Night’ Brown. She’s not only a grade-one weirdo, but she’s got a process.’

‘That sounds worrying.’

I gave her a rundown, wondering if she’d be put through it after she’d given birth. Were the drugs safe? Then I felt myself heading rapidly toward sleep’s Niagara Falls. I managed to kiss her again before my barrel went into the watery void. My last thoughts were: what exactly was in Dr. Brown’s pharmaceutical cocktail? And was I about to set off on a trip to hell?

I woke up with a clear head and serious hunger, having had no dinner the previous evening. It was nearly noon. Karen was encamped on the sofa, watching a kids’ cartoon on TV.

‘I’m getting in training,’ she said.

‘Yeah, we’ll be seeing a lot of those in the next few years. How do you feel?’

‘All right, I suppose. My appetite seems to have gone walkabout.’

‘So you don’t fancy a full English?’

She gave me a foxy smile. ‘As in breakfast? No, thanks.’

‘Sexual innuendo at this time in the morning? Shame on you, Karen Oaten.’

‘Why don’t you try “Karen Wells”?’

‘Because I know you’ll keep your own name. That’s who you are in the Met.’

‘Work isn’t everything, Matt.’

‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’

She took my hand and put it on her bulge. ‘We’ve got someone else to think about now. Magnus Oliver Wells.’

‘Where did “Oliver” come from?’

‘My grandfather on my mother’s side. I liked him.’

‘Okay.’ There were worse names. Like Heinz. Or Sebastian. ‘I’m ravenous. Do you mind if I stuff my face?’

Karen shook her head, then pulled me closer, her eyes suddenly damp. ‘Don’t ever leave me, Matt.’

‘Of course I won’t. What’s got into you?’

‘Nothing. It’s an emotional time. Now go and have your grease feast.’

When I came back with a plateful of eggs, bacon and sausage, I sat at the table. Karen had drifted off to sleep, so I left the cartoon and found a news channel.

I was halfway through a mouthful of food when I heard the announcer’s voice get serious.

‘In the City of Brotherly Love, a gruesome discovery,’ said the over-made-up woman with huge hair. ‘TV stations, including our own, were directed by anonymous calls to a disused factory in North Philadelphia. There, the crews found human organs said to come from murdered university professor Jack Notaro. His body was…’

The pictures showed a scrum of cameramen and reporters around a police line.

I watched as a tall man wearing a senior officer’s insignia on his uniform jacket and cap inserted himself between two street cops. Microphones were immediately directed at him, like arrows on their way to Saint Sebastian. Which made me wonder where the FBI man with that surname was. I was sure this was where he and Bimsdale had flown off to last night. The caption read Major Andrew Carstens, Philadelphia Homicide Chief.

The reporters were baying like wolves. It wasn’t often they got to make the headlines in their own story. A particularly pushy type, an oxlike man with carefully sculpted facial hair, got his question in first.

‘Major, will you confirm what was found?’

The policeman gave him a weary look. ‘As I think you know, Wayne, a human eye and kidney were located in the building behind me.’

‘By the crew from WZNT News,’ the reporter said proudly.

‘Major!’ yelled another reporter, this one Chinese and almost as tall as the cop. ‘Major, what about the Nazi objects that were with the organs? Are they linked to the murders in other cities?’

Carstens looked reluctant to answer. I wasn’t surprised. Peter Sebastian had probably fitted an explosive device to his backside. If he strayed onto the FBI’s patch, his colon would be well and truly irrigated. This was looking bad. Rothmann and his group of extremist thugs had to be involved.

Eventually the major went on, confining himself to stating that a copy of Mein Kampf, a Nazi flag and an SS dagger had been arranged around the eye and kidney. There were also Waffen-SS marching songs playing on a boom box.

I pushed the plate away, no longer interested in food. The camera was panning around the crowd, then zooming in on individual members of the public. These were the ghouls who rushed to rubberneck at crime scenes, the gorier the better. That was when I saw him, the shithead. He was wearing a beard-probably false-and had a woolen hat pulled down to his ears, but I recognized his ratlike features immediately. It was Gordy Lister, one of Heinz Rothmann’s sidekicks. In Washington before the slaughter at the cathedral, we’d made the mistake of letting him go before we knew just how important he was. Here he was, right back in the frame.

I picked up the phone-it only connected to our FBI minders-and told Julie Simms to get Sebastian on the line as quickly as she could. It wasn’t only Alexandra Brown who could make significant discoveries.