The Last Days of New Paris

  “Yes,” she says. “I did. There was nothing I could’ve done to stop your comrades losing their lives in their idiotic attack. The Free French watched, you know that? They were there, too. But they didn’t intervene. I couldn’t have saved your people even if I’d wanted to but I thought maybe I could find out what this ‘Secret Invocation’ was the documents referred to. Sounded like they were having trouble with it. Imagine my surprise when it was just a manif.” Just Breker’s vulgarity.

  “You let them die!”

  “I needed to know what the Nazis had. So I could stop them. Your comrades,” she says the word mockingly, “were going to die, anyway. I work for Hell, Thibaut.”

  Sam clenches her fist and opens her mouth in a sudden wordless shout, and Thibaut hears windows blow out on other floors. He wants to say more but men have appeared in the corridor, again, guards are firing machine guns at the exquisite corpse. It staggers but rallies. It steps through intervening space to stave in their heads. It pushes open a door and, polite as a curate, waits for its companions.

  “After this,” Sam says, “we can have this out. But now? Shall we?” She indicates the way. Thibaut looks at her, at the flickering light in the threshold.

  When after long moments he says nothing, she heads for it, and he follows.

  —

  A huge chamber. The center of Drancy has been hollowed into an emptiness fringed by the remnants of pipes and doorways, walls, where once there were bunks and berths, offices, laboratories, torture chambers, before the undesirables of Vichy were moved elsewhere. The room is full of terrible machines.

  Panicked scientists and SS officers prod at gauges and dials below an Alesch crucifix. They have stayed behind as Sam’s hexes send fires through the building. On one wall above them is a big sigil it hurts Thibaut’s head to see.

  In the center of the cavernous room priests are circled around a heaving tarpaulin-shrouded bulk. They are linked by chains and wires, a fence of men. They are fervently praying, clicking rosaries.

  Beneath the shroud something huge is raging. It howls and moves.

  —

  Right below the crucifix Thibaut sees Alesch himself, sees him see them back. Alesch raises his hands in a kind of murderous cringe.

  A uniformed man steps forward, pistol raised. An almost boyish face under dark sweat-slick hair, his mouth in a crooked gap-toothed grimace. Josef Mengele. He aims at the intruders and all his Gestapo aim, too.

  Sam snaps, her witched camera blasting a man apart. Thibaut raises his own rifle, flexing his innards as hard as he can when he shoots and a flock of owl-headed jugs plummet from nothing to harass the Gestapo.

  The exquisite corpse runs at the Germans. The soldiers fire. Their bullets do nothing. Someone shouts a curse. The manif reaches them. It hits with its hammers, breaking Nazi hands and bones and weapons as they scream and shoot it again.

  “Take Alesch out!” Sam shouts. “And Mengele!” She scrambles for cover. The exquisite corpse is making for the priests now. “Call it off, quick!” she calls. “Sic it on the fucking doctor!”

  And Thibaut shouts at it but the manif has its fury up. He tries to stop it, scrunching up his eyes, but if it hears his unvocalized plea it ignores him. It reaches the circle of prayers.

  It leaps as it comes, its legs go stiff, it descends. It tramples a priest.

  The man falls and dies. The chains that link him to his fellows snap.

  One by one they begin to scream. They stare at their dead colleague. There is the sound of tearing canvas.

  “Wait,” shouts Sam. “It’s broken the circle! Those machines…”

  “What have you done?” someone yells in French.

  From under the shroud, a shell roars out. A line of fire blasts a hole in the wall.

  There is silence. Fingers grip the torn hole from beneath. They clutch. Something bellows.

  The priests are pulling off the wires that link them, scrabbling to get away. Alesch is shouting, flattened against the wall, and Mengele is running. The thing beneath the tarpaulin grips it and begins to tear. With a wall-cracking cry, the beast uncovers itself, rips itself to light.

  Fall Rot.

  —

  Caterpillar treads grind. The oilcloth falls shredded to unveil a tank. A Panzer III, stained by conflict, rolls forward on the concrete. From the front of the chassis, in front of the gun-turret, protrudes the torso and head of a giant. A man.

  Fall Rot.

  He is vast. He wears an outsized German helmet. His skin is cold white, his veins and muscles marked as if by wormtracks. He drips shadows from his eyes. His mouth is full of sharp teeth. He bunches immense arms.

  The demon is a centaur of tank and great man-shape. It is festooned with German flags.

  “They’ve made their own demon,” Sam screams. Absurd as ever, she raises her camera and begins to run right at Fall Rot. Her face is pure hate. “They built it…”

  Made under German orders, by Mengele’s biological researches and Alesch’s toxic faith, from the broken matter of Hell’s natives and from the energies of manifested executed art and their own murderous tech. To be a loyal demon, to be made of Nazi triumph. The avatar of the defeat of France.

  But their protections were precarious. The encircling prayer is gone, and Fall Rot rampages.

  It grabs two crawling priests, one head in each fist. It slaps them together, killing them offhandedly, swings their limp bodies as clubs against their comrades.

  It howls in what should never have been a language, spews dirt and exhaust. Sam comes for it, spitting magic.

  Mengele hauls Alesch by his robes and screams at him to focus. The room is filling with smoke and rubble and crawling priests and wounded soldiers. The Nazi doctor stands in the construct devil’s path. He slaps Alesch’s face and points.

  Fall Rot rolls toward them.

  “Sie werden mir gehorchen,” Mengele shouts. Alesch makes some holy sign. Fall Rot winces and swats the air.

  Behind that man-shape the tank’s gun swivels so the barrel smacks into Fall Rot’s pale side. It keeps pushing. “My God,” Thibaut whispers.

  The devil howls as the metal shoves brutally right into its body. It shatters ribs, rips skin that fountains blood, pushes aside innards and organs and plows on in. The devil screams.

  The gun rips right through Fall Rot and the demon’s chest reknits imperfectly in its wake, bones jostling back roughly into position, blood drying, skin fusing inaccurately. The weapon sucks free from the other side of Fall Rot’s meat with an audible plop.

  “Sie…” Mengele says, and goes silent. He raises his pistol and fires repeatedly into the demon’s flesh. He does not miss. Fall Rot keeps coming. The gun turns, dripping Fall Rot’s blood. Alesch shouts a prayer, pushes Mengele forward.

  The demon laughs and fires. The doctor disappears in a blast of blood and flame and mortar.

  —

  The exquisite corpse attacks.

  The manif rushes for Fall Rot, clicking in a frenzy, all its hate for the devilish pushing it hard and bringing its transmuting attentions to bear. With a scream of gears, Fall Rot lurches forward. It backhands the exquisite corpse, sends it spinning.

  The made demon and the living art circle each other. The manif stalks, staring with its old-man eyes. The machine-demon swivels jerkily, keeps the art in its sights. Its gun grinds back into Fall Rot’s body, making it bay, and the barrel stops midway through the meat, aiming through the sternum.

  The manif’s limbs are twitching, reaching for energies so the air vibrates. But it has never faced a devil like this. Fall Rot rolls forward, barrel pointing squarely at the exquisite corpse.

  Thibaut shouts a wordless warning but Fall Rot does not fire. It looks quizzical. It reaches out and grabs its adversary, one huge long-nailed hand at each of the manif’s joints. Those claws tense. The exquisite corpse shudders.

  The devil-thing made by science and demonology, built to obey and disobeying that injunction, infernal avatar of an i
nvasion, lifts its face and croons.

  With one awful wrenching motion Fall Rot rips the exquisite corpse apart.

  —

  There is a blast of energy, a great release. Everyone quakes. The manif’s components scatter. The engines whine.

  When Thibaut’s head clears he looks up to see the devil sucking at the ragged end of the exquisite corpse’s head. It licks at the broken machine parts where it tore the art apart. Thibaut retches. The devil laps.

  They made this demon manifophagic. That’s the energy, Thibaut understands. The fuel is the sacrifice of manifs, that’s what kept this secret channel open, so they could grab Hell-flesh and make this. It eats art.

  Fall Rot throws the exquisite corpse’s head in one direction, its human legs in another.

  Sam calls Thibaut’s name. She is wrestling with Alesch. Thibaut staggers toward her. He raises his gun but cannot fire at the bishop for fear of hitting her. They are fighting in the dust, by the gauges and dials. Thibaut feels the shake of tank treads. Fall Rot is coming.

  He sees Sam stab Alesch with a sharpened tripod leg. The bishop screams and convulses. She gets him to the floor and kneels over him and brings her weapon down again. He moans. She bellows into the camera that protrudes from him.

  A radio, too, tuned to an afterlife channel? She reaches up and presses buttons on the Nazi engines.

  Fall Rot gropes with its big hands and its big face smiles. Its gun pulls free of its body.

  Sam keeps pressing as the demon comes, quick sequences repeated until there is a sudden static crack. “Here!” Sam shouts in English. “It’s open! It’s here!”

  Fall Rot will go loose in Paris. It will eat the manifs of Paris, and grow stronger.

  It raises its arms and Sam screams into her camera again, and the room rumbles.

  Fall Rot looks down.

  A bass roar grows. Louder and higher, it rises with Doppler shift. There’s a screaming across the below as if a plane races through great caverns and tunnels, keeps on getting louder and louder until it is unbearable, until Thibaut and Sam clap their hands to their ears and he sees Fall Rot do the same, its expression anguished, and Thibaut feels his insides quiver and something rushes up toward the light.

  The flat earth detonates.

  A convulsion. Thibaut is thrown back hard in a blaze of shattered stone.

  A bomb-blast. A raid from beneath. Thibaut glimpses fire and an explosion billowing up through the earth, an igniting plume, shoving into the tank-centaur, enveloping it in fire, flame that roars up, makes Fall Rot roar, too, in agony it doesn’t understand, goes up then stops, a frozen moment of conflagration. A still moment.

  Which then as he watches reverses very suddenly and fast, like rewound film, and sucks everything away. Rushes back into the new chasm. Takes the tank-thing Fall Rot rushing with it, into the deep, leaving not a trace. Returns to the pit.

  —

  Thibaut lies coughing for a long time. A huge crater slides down into black. There is no tank, no tank-ruin, no too-big human torso visible. Thibaut stands.

  A second percussion sounds, a quieter, crackling blast in another room close by, and he cowers. But it is quickly gone and Thibaut rises again.

  “I got through to them,” Sam whispers. Thibaut’s ears are ringing but he can hear her. “This little gate cracked open. I got it wider.” With the energies of sacrifice. With what she did to Alesch. “They had to come up for this. For that…thing.”

  She leans against a wall. Sparks burst from the machinery. A few researchers are still alive, are moving, crawling in the dust. “That,” Sam shouts at them, “was definitely against the fucking treaties.”

  “You said they…your bosses…couldn’t intervene,” Thibaut says. “Or wouldn’t.”

  “There was a block in place. You saw what the priests were doing until the manif…stopped them. And my bosses wanted to avoid confrontation. But I got through. And they couldn’t let that lie. There’ll be a serious diplomatic incident.”

  Thibaut laughs at that a long time, hurting his wound. Even Sam smiles.

  —

  They stumble through the ruin while the Germans still alive crawl away from them. When he reaches it, Thibaut hesitates, then picks up the exquisite corpse’s head.

  It is half as big again as his own, but fleshy and light as papier-mâché. It moves its eyes to watch him, sadly. Some last bolus of life. The train in its beard makes a little hffhffhff sound. The caterpillar does not pulse.

  They go into the hallway. At the end is a cell containing a pile of terrible objects. Farmyard pieces, a rotting elephant head, leaves, tennis rackets, big-eyed fish, limbs, a pistol, a tiny figurine, a pile of saucepans, a globe.

  “Those are all from exquisite corpses,” Thibaut says. A charnel heap of components, a grave of ripped-up manifestation. Opposite them is another bank of machines, an engine and a single bunk like a prisoner’s. Thibaut’s stomach heaves at the smell of decaying image.

  “They’ve been harnessing what bleeds out of the manifs,” Sam says.

  Three walls are cracked, chaotic. One side of the room is perfectly neat, perfectly, unnaturally tidy. Its window is unbroken, its wall papered.

  “I heard another noise from here,” Thibaut says. He sifts through the pile with the barrel of his rifle. He probes with his hand and the soft decay of actualized dream fouls his fingers.

  Sam smiles and Thibaut does not smile back. He is thinking of the Main à plume who died. He looks at the flawless wall.

  “It must have just kicked out a lot of energy when your bosses blew up that thing,” Thibaut says.

  She says, “It was an abomination.”

  —

  I saved Paris, Thibaut makes himself think. Destroyed a new utter demon. I saved the world. He feels flat. Outside, the sunlight hits them differently than it did within the old city.

  Is this it? Are they done?

  “Where are the soldiers?” he says.

  They stagger on, alone and unmolested. They strain to hear attackers they are sure must be coming, but there is nothing. Relieved, confused, straining to stay alert, Thibaut and Sam haul past dirty broken buildings and rubbled corners. They keep their weapons in their hands in these ghost neighborhoods stained by war, wandering, Thibaut realizes, back toward the old arrondissements.

  And then abruptly they are in a jarringly perfect stretch of Paris. The loveliest town and houses. Perfect fronts, vibrant colors, crackless. Even the sky seems brighter.

  Sam and Thibaut come to a bewildered stop. Where is everyone? And how is this quarter so clean?

  The streets are empty, the sun is high, the shadows are small. The streets feel scoured.

  Why don’t we have to stay down? Thibaut thinks they should be creeping through the shells of buildings. Where are soldiers? He looks at pretty houses without war damage.

  “Something doesn’t make sense,” Thibaut says.

  “Really?” Sam says. “Just one thing?”

  They walk on a long time. Immaculate undamaged streets. They see no one.

  They pass a big hotel. It is picturesque, spotless, deserted.

  “The thing is, Fall Rot was already awake,” Thibaut says slowly. “Maybe it wasn’t him that they were having trouble manifesting. That they were sacrificing things for. They wrote there was something like that, right? That they had trouble with, trying to bring up. But Fall Rot was already manifest. Maybe they realized they couldn’t make Fall Rot work. Maybe they were even trying to get rid of it, but they couldn’t kill it. But what if it was something else they couldn’t invoke. Until Fall Rot was taken down.” Sam is still. “By your bosses. You heard that noise. There was a lot of energy when Fall Rot died, for sure. Maybe enough, at last, for whatever.

  “When you killed it,” Thibaut says, “maybe that was like another sacrifice.”

  He looks into the eyes of the manif head he still carries. “If killing an exquisite corpse feeds Fall Rot,” he whispers, “what does killing Fall Rot feed?
”

  Sam and Thibaut look at each other. Neither speaks.

  They begin to run. Through streets that aren’t just too scrubbed, too perfect, too empty for these times, but that have never looked as they do now. That do not look real. Thibaut feels like a stain, a smut of dirt.

  “We thought it was manifs to feed demons,” Sam says. “What if it’s the other way? And they’ve been trying to call up a manif?”

  Of what power?

  They have been experimenting to control such art. Wolf-tables rallying to the whip. The brekerman, obeying orders as it collapsed.

  “They’ve been trying to summon something,” Sam says. They hear gunshots. “In secret. And failing.”

  “Only,” Thibaut says, “we succeeded.”

  On the rue de Paris, running west toward the edge of the twentieth arrondissement, they see at last the rise of the city barricade at the end of this strange chintz. There by the German positions, jeeps, guns, mortars, the ready troops, the city is abruptly chaotic again, grime and imperfection again, smashed apart and becoming dust.

  Between them and the waiting Nazi guards, where the walls change, is a slight figure in a brown suit.

  The young man walks slowly toward the old city, as if in a dream or a slowed-down film. His footsteps take too long to land. He wears archaic clothes, trousers that balloon out from pulled-up socks. His hair is a strange pale parted black.

  Sam has gone quite white. She says, “No.” As the young man approaches them, the German troops fire.

  And Thibaut almost falls in astonishment because he sees the man unconcerned by any of the bullets that hit him, he sees him look hard at the closest shooter. And where the man looks, a house rises.

  Emerging instantly from nothing, clean, freshly painted, fussily rendered, pale, almost translucent. And the soldier, all the soldiers who were where the house is now are just gone. Replaced, with a sweep of attention, disappeared from this scene.

  The façades of Paris reappear, as the figure stares, and they are prettier and more perfect than they have ever looked, and they are quite empty.