EÒRPA: THE ULTIMATE TRIP Mickey Spargo
The story so far: Amidst the fragile peace of a radioactive world, a nameless narrator embarks on a surreal, hallucinatory journey by clanking steam trains and underground tunnels, haunted by phantoms of a former reality.
Part Two
THERE I WAS. In Neu Hamburg. Feeling surrounded by the enemy. The gantry lights strained my eyes. Everything glowed too much with an intensity that made my them ache. And before I knew it Midget Man was back over at the bar.
He talked to the stick insect bartender in the cracked leather waistcoat. The stick insect leaned into him, listening, flickering his eyes at me.
Midget Man squeezed back through the crowd and planted a bottle in front of me.
‘Mein Herr,’ he said.
What the hell.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Na ja, na ja, kein problem, glaubst mir.’
When I looked down at him again, his eyes rolled up inside his head. His arms went rigid, and he shook like a hammer drill.
And after his shake rattle and roll stopped, he looked around, sheepish, shoulder left and right, unscrewing his neck from his Arab collar and bowtie and talked to me as if nothing had happened.
‘Let us go somewhere else, mein Herr,’ er sagt.
And after leaving the bar we cut down Rostoker Strasse. It was as dead as it was before.
He walked. I followed. Until I heard a scuffle behind me and turned to see eyes-of-glass from the bar not twenty metres away.
Midget Man looked up at me.
‘You know him,’ he whispered.
I shook my head.
‘How will you know when I find one?’ I asked.
‘I will know,’ she said.
‘So I’ll be followed?’
‘You really don’t know?’ Midget Man asked.
‘No,’ I said.
When eyes-of-glass reached for his pocket, my hand darted to mine.
Midget Man ran away from me when I ripped out my Taser, took aim, and discharged a live wire.
There was a flash. And before I know it, I was stunned and looking up at Ursa Minor.
A jackboot kicked the Taser out of my hand.
I couldn’t move.
I stopped shaking long enough to see eyes-of-glass glaring down at me.
‘Schnell!’ he said.
Midget Man’s feet scrape a gritty distance away from me.
The pain subsided but my muscle-work didn’t come back so fast.
And that’s when they covered me. As if I were a rag doll, my arms were hefted up over their shoulders with my feet dragging behind.
‘New identity papers, personally franked by me, taser as you insisted, and some genuine de novo currency to keep you going for a while…’ she said.
‘No cards, no flexi-plastic credit withdrawals from in the wall thingies? No moby?’ I asked.
‘No traces,’ she said.
The place stank of damp, fungal spores and sweat.
I lay slumped on the single cot in the corner of the room and feared for my lungs. A skinhead entered, bowed and offered me a cigarette, the real kind, all rolled up with shreds hanging out of either end. I took it and after he lit it for me, he bowed and shuffled backwards all the way out of the door.
‘You are a very lucky man,’ eyes-of-glass said.
I took a drag.
My head was reeling.
‘You can see?’ he asked.
He leaned back against the grubby wall.
‘Now that depends on what you mean by see,’ I said.
He smirked. ‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Like shit.’
‘That was a stupid thing to do back there,’ he said, pushing himself away from the wall.
‘Not from where I was standing,’ I said.
‘Were you trying to kill me?’
And he was very matter of fact about it, like he found it amusing, or didn’t care, or it was both.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then just what were you doing?’
‘I was following orders,’ I said.
‘Ah, absolving responsibility for one’s actions,’ he said.
I reached into my pocket and searched for my own cigarettes. It was like he could read my mind.
‘Angels should not smoke,’ he said.
My heart banged.
‘I am no angel,’ I said.
‘And you feel that you do not belong here?’ he asked.
‘I am a tourist.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, now I think that you are a little more than such a thing, but welcome to Neu Hamburg, anyway.’
‘Does that mean I can go now?’ I asked. ‘Or are you going to kill me?’
He looked startled.
‘But why would I want to kill you?’ he said.
‘Just an impression.’
‘I would have thought it was the other way around,’ he said. ‘That is if that popgun of yours with its funny wires had not backfired on you.’
‘Yeah, that was kind of a bummer,’ I said.
I stood up, stretched and grinned. ‘Do you intend to keep me here?’
He looked at me. ‘But you are not a prisoner, friend.’
‘No?’
‘No. You collapsed, and my comrades and I helped you back here, to safety.’
‘Well, thanks. But there’s something funny about that. You would think that you would have taken me to a hospital instead of this… this place whatever wherever it is.’
‘Not far from Altonaer Fischmarkt,’ he said frowning, his words cut off by a thud I felt in my chest as much as I heard.
The skinhead rushed in. ‘Mein Herr. Schnell!’
Eyes-of-glass rushed over to the window and threw it open. And that’s when I heard the drone. Pushing my head out alongside his I looked up at the sky where streams of orange and red fire poured down.
‘What the hell is that?’ I asked.
Eyes-of-glass turned and looked at me. ‘Welcome home, Bruder.’
People ran around in the cobbled street below.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is going on?’
I couldn’t believe it. I mumbled, searching for the words.
‘Das feuersturm?’ I said, ‘It has begun?’
‘Firestorm?’ he asked. ‘What firestorm?’
I turned to him.
‘The date?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘The date? Today’s date! How many times must I ask?’
‘The twenty-seventh of July, of course!’
Stunned, I fell back against the wall.
‘Operation Gomorrah.’ The words fell from my mouth.
… one-thousand-five-hundred degrees Fahrenheit… twenty-one square miles destroyed… seven hundred and fifty-nine aircraft… nine-thousand tons of bombs—Grand Slams and Tallboys… whirlwinds of fire rip through the city at two-hundred-and-forty kilometres an hour…
‘Fifty thousand dead in one night,’ I said.
I gazed down at the street below as people screamed in panic, blindly running around, trapped, crashing into each other.
‘What are you talking about?’ eyes of glass shouted at my face.
‘Two days?’
‘Yes, two days,’ he yelled. ‘You went. We waited. We thought you would never come back. And then you appear out of the blue. Only there is something wrong about you. Changed. Turned into a stranger. Then you try to shoot at me with that stupid thing.’
‘But I have a whole lifetime of memories,’ I yelled over the horrendous drone piling down on us from the sky. ‘Only the memories are like a dream to me now. Woken from a dream and fallen into a nightmare. They never told me how they would do it.’
I ran after him down the alley.
‘Just that I should find you,’ I went on, running out of breath. ‘And after I found you, they would do the rest. And this is it? They kill the whole city?’
‘They must have found a way back through,’ he cried out at me over his shoulder, ‘before you did. Some way to communicate one end to the other. Otherwise they wouldn’t know anything, would they?’
I stopped dead in my tracks.
‘But that must mean that they find the Bell after the war is over.’
He ran, and I followed with my lungs bursting as we raced down Helgolander and under the bridge towards Stintfang.
He stopped, slithering on the condensation of the cobbles, twisting his ankle.
‘Scheisse!’
The sky over the Elbe River droned with invisible flies in the stratosphere, Lancasters and Mosquitoes.
‘What are they doing?’ he asked.
But I already knew, watching, wide eyed, disbelieving my own senses as rivers of molten lava poured down.
‘Hell on earth to punish the city,’ I said.
‘The Bell, it must displace time as well as place,’ he said. ‘Do you think?’
‘But why? Why did I do it?’
I stopped.
‘Oh mein Gott!’
‘What?’ he asked, limping closer to me.
I looked at him.
‘They have used me as a homing device.’
‘When I went through the first time,’ I said, ‘I must have arrived at the other end, in another time, stunned, dazed, I don’t know, and forgot where I came from in the first place; from here. And when they got hold of me, they sent me back, tracking me to here. And now they know where I am, they are doing this.’
We raced through the streets, scrambling over cobbles. Women screamed with children in their arms. A little boy in short trousers slipped and crashed down. His mother cried out to us, ‘Mein junge, mein kinder. Entshudigung, Helfe mich!’
I ran back, pulling the boy up by his arm. The street glowed orange when a sheet of flame burst across the sky. A hurricane of heat rammed down on the alleyway, punching out the air.
I pulled the boy’s bloodied face to my chest. ‘Jesus Christ!’
The heat of the air sheered the skin off the back of my hands.
I had dived into a doorway. But a tornado of wind sucked me out again, careening me along the wall. When another rush of air filled the void, a brick crashed into my back, pummelling me to my knees.
‘What happens?’ eyes-of-glass screamed down at me. ‘What happens now?’
I held the boy close.
‘I can’t remember,’ I lied.
He pulled me to my feet, the boy still in my arms. The noise of the bombs was deafening.
‘What? What happens?’ he shouted.
‘I don’t know,’ I yelled back over the noise. ‘I must have lost my memory on the way back.’
‘Firestorm!’ he yelled. ‘You said firestorm! What did you mean by that if you can’t remember anything?’
The boy’s head lolled back in my arms. His eyes were closed, at peace. His face glowed under a sky on fire. His mother was already gone, dead or dying. I didn’t know.
‘He’s dead, Bruder,’ eyes-of-glass said gently. ‘Let him go.’
I lay the little body down on the cobbles.
My tears evaporated under fire.
‘What happens, Bruder?’ eyes-of-glass asked. ‘Tell me the truth.’
I could hardly look at him.
‘The entire city is destroyed in one night.’
‘We can’t survive,’ I said.
‘Liar!’
‘Bruder, believe me,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It is no use.’
The heat was so intense that it caused the tar of the road to grow soft under my feet. I jumped back. A young woman in a thin dress ran onto it from the other side. The tar molten under her. She fell.
‘Mein Gott!’
She pulled herself up. Her flesh burned as she crawled over. I turned away. I couldn’t look. I wanted to scream but there was no air. The flames were sucking it out of the city. The heat stung at the flesh of my face, and I was nowhere near the naked flames.
But it burned. The very air burned. I ripped the jacket off my back and covered my head. And just before the window in front of me shattered, I saw my reflection staring back at me.
‘Now you remember?’ eyes of glass said, looking at my reflection in disbelief as twin fans of violet light streamed out behind me, flickering like wings into the night.
Eyes-of-glass spoke close to my ear. ‘That neither of us is human, Bruder.’
‘What are we? Why can’t I remember?’
But he only shrugged and looked at me as we ran. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Our bodies are human enough. But we are not, that I know. And we can die. And once we are within the limit of the Bell, our wings shine more brightly than ever. But none other than those like us can see them, though. No human can. No real human.’
Another hurricane came next, rising from the street, gouging up the cobbles in a whirlwind of fire eviscerating everything in its path. Lowing like a great beast it ripped away everything.
‘The Bell,’ he said. ‘It is our only chance.’
‘No!’
‘We have to. It’s our only chance of survival.’
‘But they might be waiting at the other end for us, don’t you see?’
‘They won’t dare kill us, the only ones who can use the bell, even if they are waiting at the other end.’
I grabbed his shoulders.
‘It is no better on the other side, Bruder,’ I said. ‘Believe me. There are worse things over there.’
‘Worse than this?’
‘Something is wrong here,’ I said. ‘If they can’t see, and only we can, how did they find us in the first place?How did they know?’
‘Petty jealousies come in all guises,’ he said. ‘And some lost their way and turned on us. Others who used die Glocke before you did. As you said the Bell must have survived the war. You travelled to Peenemunde where another one is then back to here. At least that was what was supposed to have happened.’
I thought about it for a second. ‘And I was sent through not knowing what might happen to me?’
‘No, you were not sent.’
‘What then?’
‘You insisted that you go. You took a gamble,’ he said, ‘that you would come back with answers.’
‘Answers to what?’
‘That die Glocke works. That at Peenemunde you would have found out a way to escape the war. A place where we could take the others to safety. That is after all why we are here, remember? To help them escape. But you must have been deflected somehow. Who knows?’
I was shocked. ‘And a telephone call to Peenemunde would not have been good enough?’
‘Not for you it wasn’t. Besides, do you think they would have told us anything? They would save their own skins, yes, but ours? I don’t think so. That is why you said you had to go through yourself. To see if the bell really did provide an escape route from this war.’
My face must have been a picture.
‘Do not look at me like that,’ he said. ‘It was your idea. No one made you do it. No one could stop you even if they had wanted to.’
I bit my tongue. I could not remember any of this.
I stepped away from him, turned, and then stepped back.
‘But I went forward in time. How did that happen?’ I said. Then, ‘My God! That means I have changed history. It will change everything.’
He shook his head. ‘Nein, Bruder, you cannot change the future. The future has no history. And that is what they are most afraid of, whoever it is that wants to kill us.’
‘I just feel so damned confused about everything,’ I said. ‘I can recall some things that have not even happened yet. But I can hardly remember anything about now, our time.’
‘You are still as bloody-minded as always,’ he said, smiling despite the horror descending on the city around us. ‘That has not changed.’
Then I thought of something he had said.
‘What others? Save who?’ I asked.
‘You have forgotten about our friends already, and the ones who shield us, those people? The ones who see war for what it is, humans with spirits more so than even we have? They can’t travel using the Bell. No humans can. But we can. You have proved that, even if you didn’t get away with it completely unscathed. But we can bring back answers to use and find the safe roads out of all this. Maybe even find a way to change the war before it has had a chance to get any worse.’
‘That is changing history again,’ I reminded him.
‘It would have no effect on us,’ he said. ‘It would only change a future that hasn’t happened yet, not what has already passed. We can’t stop the future happening, it will do so itself, anyway. But we can change it from here, change the outcome, change destinies, save lives. That is, after all, what we are here for.’
We ran past Berliner Tor down to the Elbe. Black water reflected the orange and red flames. Flotillas bobbed on the surface. Screams were in the distance. Parents with their children in their arms threw themselves into the river.
The trees were ripped clean of their leaves. Naked branches, like black dead veins, pleaded to a sky on fire.
A woman leaned over a pram. She gathered her baby to her breast.
‘Bruder! Bruder! What is happening? It’s insane!’ I screamed, knowing the answer but not wanting to know at the same time.
The woman with her baby in her arms climbed onto the wall. She jumped over the side into the river.
Eyes-of-glass stopped by the embankment then scurried up the side and pulled away the turf.
‘Help me with this,’ he said.
We grappled with a hidden manhole cover and pulled it away.
He scrambled in feet first. I join him as a liquid sheet of yellow fell from the sky.
‘Schnell!’ he screamed.
I slammed the cover closed over our heads.
The tube down was a tight fit.
The ground shuddered.
Fragments shot down.
I threw my arms over my face as I slid into the tunnel.
Arms still over my head I ran. The ground inclined sharply. I stumbled and crashed into him and brought him down with me.
Rolling onto my side I blinked earth out of my eyes.
Faint blue glimmered in the distance. But it was the silence that got to me.
Bruder stood up, reached down, and helped me to my feet.
‘We don’t have much time,’ he whispered.
I said nothing as I followed him towards the light.
We stayed close to the walls.
There was an electrical hum, powerful with a slow pulsating life to it as we entered a circular chamber of black submarine-iron.
Our boots clanked on metal then we stopped and stared at the bell standing before us on a dais. The violet light radiating beneath it shone so brightly that it was too painful to look at.
‘Remember it now?’ eyes-of-glass hushed into my ear.
Windows were set high in the walls. I looked up them.
Footfalls in the distance ran towards us down the tunnel we had just come out of.
‘Bruder!’ I said.
‘We must hurry.’
I couldn’t agree more, but hurry where?
Just then red light oozed into the chamber like slow clotting blood.
Angels with dirty faces, their blood red light fanned out behind them. Their faces were eyeless tight flesh.
They rushed around the perimeter aiming their MP38 guns at us.
There was silence again but for the pulsating hum of the bell, then the sound of slow, deliberate footsteps.
I turned to look at the figure emerging into the chamber.
‘Not so dumb after all, are we?’ she said.
I couldn’t believe it.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘all you had to do was kill him and none of this would have been necessary.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ I said to him.
‘Madam Helena Blavatsky,’ he said. ‘My my my, what a traitor you turned out to be. Whatever happened to the Universal Brotherhood?’
A shot rang out. Eyes-of-glass fell to the floor. When I crouched down, she took a step. ‘It turned out to be more fun having it work for me than it did the other way around.’
‘Hurry, Bruder,’ he said. ‘Save yourself. You can go forward in time again and stop her.’
Another shot rang out, and he yelped in pain.
I looked at her. ‘Du Sünde Weibstuck!’
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ she said, brushing a hair out of her eyes. ‘You are the only real pain in all of this.’
I reach down and dragged him closer to the Bell.
When one of her red monsters stepped forward, a sheet of blue shot up from the ground plate and sliced his face away and its torso fell back.
‘Always a blunt pencil in the box,’ she said when it clanged to the ground.
‘What do you want?’ I yelled at her.
‘Nothing much,’ she said, ‘except you on my side, or dead. Whichever is more convenient. You still have a chance, even now, you know.’
‘What then?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘We need slippery things like you for the wormholes, something to slither through from side to side. You did quite well on that score, at least at first. Pity you didn’t see things our way.’
‘Which is?’
‘Chaos,’ she said. ‘What else do you think makes the world go round? It creates wealth. It creates power. Always has, always will.’
‘Then how did you get here?’ I asked, playing for time. ‘You cannot use the Bell. So how did you get here?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been here. I’m only one end of many others. And you are a travelling link in a very long chain connecting me to... well, me and any number of mes at the end of every strand. You, my boy, are just a messenger. A thing caught in the web, a doodle bug, a homing pigeon, a cybernetic time bomb if it comes to that.’
‘But you cannot use it. It is true?’
‘Why would I want to put myself in danger when there are idiots like you, and them,’ she said, indicating the blood-red phantoms around her, ‘to do it for me? Us, I mean.’
I heard footsteps above and looked up. And there, at one of the windows, was Midget Man. He waved down at me and disappeared.
The Bell hummed louder, glowing blue purple.
When the ground beneath us shook with increasing power, she stepped back and looked up.
When a bullet from her gun shattered the glass of the window I rushed at her, dragging her onto the dais—the thing she feared most.
Her feet kicked. Her elbows rammed into my sides as I fell back with her on top of me. Scrambling onto her feet again I grabbed her foot and yanked back on the dais with all my might. She crashed down hard, screaming as bullets rang out.
‘Mein Herr! Mein Herr!’ Midget Man yelled from the shattered window above.
‘Jetz! Jetz!’ I yelled up at the little man as I held her fast. ‘Now! Now!’
When the chamber started to revolve around us Midget Man screamed then fell from the shattered window. I closed my eyes before his tubby little body hit the ground.
In the end I couldn’t tell who screamed the loudest, Midget Man, me, eyes-of-glass, her, or those traitors melting around us who had travelled too far too many times using the Bell and were now paying the price.
When the revolutions slowed to a stop, I found my hands holding nothing.
Staggering to my feet I crouched down to eyes-of-glass and saw that his eyes had changed to brown.
‘My leg,’ he said. ‘Those bastards shot it through twice.’
He stifled a yelp as I helped him to his feet.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, grimacing in pain.
But all I could do was shake my head. ‘I don’t know.’
As we stepped out of the circle, my foot kicked something. There was a metallic tinkling sound. It was her ring, all that was left of her.
‘Her grandmother’s ring,’ I said. ‘I remember asking her about it.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No grandmother. She was the same. Many spokes on the same wheel, something that is in many places at the same time. That’s what she was. She said so herself. There is no one spider waiting in the middle of this monstrous web of invisible strands.’
We clambered to the surface through a hole overhanging with weeds.
The sun was bright in a clear blue sky.
I looked back at the machine as it was now. Nothing but a ring of decaying concrete on pillars. Its iron skeleton rusted and buckled with age long ago.
I peered into the distance.
‘Those are the Hartz Mountains?’ I said.
‘Did you see those red phantoms?’ he asked as if he had not heard me. ‘Did you see what the travelling had done to them? I hope to God we never end up like that.’
‘I have no intention of ever going through that thing again,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if I have to walk a million miles to get where I’m going. Nothing is worth ending up like them.’
I helped him hobble up the side of a small hill, stopped and laid him down on the grass.
‘You saved me,’ he said.
I tied a strip of my shirt around his wound.
‘I had any choice, Bruder?’
‘You are my hero,’ he said, grimacing through the pain.
I shook my head, tying the knot tight.
He winced.
‘Nein, Bruder,’ I said. ‘That was Midget Man. He was the only hero in all of this. The little man died for us without thinking of himself.’
I helped him to his feet again, and we stumbled through wild vegetation without knowing where we were headed.
One bird sang out to another. Wings fluttered in the leaves of an oak tree. A dart on wings, a starling, flew over our heads.
‘Where are we, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Buchenwald, Bruder. I remember it now,’ I said, ‘the Wenceslas mine. Those men died to build that monster, that gateway to hell and back. Not all of them could be saved, but one. And that did him no good in the end. It looks like a different place now, in a different time. I don’t know.’
I stopped. ‘You know, I can’t even remember your name.’
‘Typical,’ he tried to laugh.
Just then someone called out in the distance. But as much as I looked around, I couldn’t see who it was.
Then there was the sound of legs whipping though the long grass. An old man approached us, tearing the cap from his head.
‘Mein Freund,’ I called out to him. ‘He needs help.’
The old man shook his head as if disbelieving.
‘All of these years I have waited,’ he said. ‘All these years and no one ever believed me, never one of them. Just a silly old man, they said. But welcome, friends, welcome home to Brunnlitz. I am Viktor Badanowski. But your mother, she is extremely sick, incredibly old. And she never gave up hope of seeing you again.’
Bruder and I look at one another and said the same thing. ‘We have a mother?’
Then to Herr Badanowski. ‘Eins mutter?’
‘But yes, of course, one mother. Now hurry. She has been waiting for so long now. Every night she clings to your grandmother’s ring, praying to her soul that she will return you to her arms once again.’
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