The Kingdom of Shadows by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online Page A

be.
     
    In the cradle beside her bed, her own baby began to squall. It was a pretty little thing as well, if not quite so big as this one. And hungry, too.
     
    “Be quiet –” She would get around to the other child, her own, all in good time. It could wait. She lowered her head and kissed the one in her arms, as its tiny hands kneaded her full breast.
     
    * * *
     
    The handle of the door was broken, the wood around the metal splintered, as though from the impact of heavy boots.
     
    Marte pushed the door open, the topmost hinge wobbling, its screws wrenched partway from the frame. The light from the building’s hallway spilled into her parent’s flat.
     
    Or what had been their flat. Empty now, at least of living things. The furniture was still there, her father’s chair overturned, books tumbled from the shelves, the pages spread like the wings of broken birds.
     
    Behind her, she heard other doors opening, faces peering out through narrow slits. The tenants of the other flats now whispered to each other, watching her.
     
    On the street outside the building, she thought she had seen the little man, her father’s forger, the creature to whom her father had entrusted all his secret planning. From the mouth of a dark alley, the little man had peered out at her, then scuttled away on his ceaseless errands.
     
    He’ll tell them  – Marte’s breath tightened in her throat. Part of her, the hollow spaces that began just inside her skin, didn’t care. Not any more. If they came and took her away, to the place her parents had been taken . . . it didn’t matter. She could step outside, and the silent men would come up to her and take her arms, one on either side, there would be a car they could hustle her into . . . and then she would be gone. Disappeared, like so many others. At last, even the little part of her that people could still see would be extinguished.
     
    Now she wasn’t afraid. She set her suitcase on the floor, then turned and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.
     
    The street was empty. No one came up, no one spoke to her. She wondered if perhaps she had already disappeared, become the ghost of that girl who had looked out of the mirror at her, long ago.
     
    * * *
     
    “Look at those crows sitting up there.” Ernst von Behren lifted his gaze to the Romanische Café’s gallery, where the chess-players sat hunched over their boards. He gestured with a pudgy, well-manicured hand. The gaunt men did look like crows in their black overcoats, some of them still shiny from the rain that continued to drizzle past midnight. “They’ve always been up there. They always will be, I suppose.”
     
    Gunther glanced up with his glittering doll’s eyes, so perfect and untrue, but didn’t say anything. Von Behren watched Gunther’s high-boned face radiating boredom and contempt, feeling his own heart, not breaking, but sighing under the hammer stroke of a familiar pain.
     
    With his fingertips, he stroked the precisely shaped point of the beard on his own face, round and plump as a sad-eyed baby’s. He knew that he probably wouldn’t ever see Gunther again after this night, that Gunther would disappear wherever all the other handsome boys went. Gunther was sulking, not just because they had come here to the great cavernous Romanische instead of some dark cellar hole smelling of roach shit and candle wax, where Gunther could have turned his elegant profile to the trembling admiration of other brokenhearted men. But also because Ernst von Behren’s contacts at the UFA studios had proved ineffectual in getting Gunther cast in a film production, even in a nonspeaking role. Gunther was probably thinking now that there was little point in going to bed with him any longer.
     
    Well, to hell with him then , thought von Behren as he sipped at the cold dregs of coffee left in the heavy porcelain cup. He at least didn’t feel any guilt over the matter; a face as handsome as Gunther’s