Page 30 of Geist Fleisch
Callum cringed, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. There was this bloke… He wanted to learn—"
“I do not need your explanation.”
A fresh rivulet of blood ran from the stump. “Why doesn’t it hurt? Am I going to die?”
“Am I supposed to know?” Ferdi asked. “I lived. I died. I found my way here. Your path is more complicated. I don’t know what you are, or what’s happening to you, but it is what allowed you to visit us, yes?”
Another laugh from the audience. Ferdi’s face was the only one that remained passive.
Callum swallowed. “Can I talk to Max?”
“Max does not want you to see you.”
“Please? I need to—”
“Sorry, I misspoke. Max does not want you to seehim.Outside the sanctuary, we cannot hide our scars.”
“But I can’t go back to the club, can I?”
“It is better that you forget Max and let him forget you. You’re two pretty boys who enjoyed a few moments together in a bar. There will be others, for you at least.”
“But I feel like I’m… like I’m almost not there!”
“I know. Do you want to tell me why? Perhaps I should tell you. You’re disappearing, yes?” Ferdi leaned forward in his seat as the crowd’s laughter and the film score grew quieter. “Why did you come to Berlin, Callum?”
“Anne. Her family’s got money. She bought—”
“Do not lie to me on top of being an idiot. I askedwhy,not how.” Ferdi at last stood, drifting over and resting his hands on either side of the stage, his ruined face turning Callum’s stomach with the smell of charred and rotted flesh, inches from his nose. “For the boys? To feel seen by them? More than by the father whose money you stole to buy a train ticket?”
Callum was too fixed on Ferdi’s injuries to deny the truth.
“Do you think you are the first? Max and I enlisted so we could be together. You became a thief and ran off to Berlin to fuck beautiful men. Neither plan worked out quite as we had hoped, did it, Callum? You’re a very attractive man. So, why don’t you have some new German boy on your arm night after night? Is it your lack of money, or your lack of solid flesh?”
That did it. Callum grabbed Ferdi’s shirt, snarling in the ghost’s ruined face. “Does this feel solid enough, you Jerry bast—”
A sickly green vapour shot from Ferdi’s mouth, filling Callum’s nostrils with a noxious smell that burned him from his eyes to the back of his throat. Callum fell back on the stage, clutching his face with his intact hand. Any trace of noise in the darkened cinema fell away beneath his muffled screams.
The burning grew, enveloping his neck, his shoulders and chest, down his back and stomach until it pricked its way through his buttocks and groin, reaching down his legs until it at last wrapped his feet in blistering heat. He shed his shirt and trousers, and was trying madly to peel his undershirt up over his head when he felt the touch of a cool, soft hand on his shoulder. As this new presence pulled him close, the pain fell away, replaced by the sensation of firm, supple flesh against his back as ghostly arms gripped him tighter. Callum tried to turn, to see the face of his rescuer.
“Don’t,” Max whispered in his ear, catching his shoulder.
Callum relaxed, recognising the voice, the touch, the odd calm he felt pushing against the man. “I thought you didn’t want to see me.”
“Not here.”
Callum wanted to bury his face in the ghost’s chest. All the questions he’d had, the offer Heinrich had made, all the things he’d wanted to say to Max fell from his mind as the ghost gripped the stump of his hand and squeezed. A faint ache shielded him from what should have been the kind of excruciating pain Max had felt the day a stream of bullets had torn through his gut. Instead of Max’s soft skin, he felt cold mud and the roughness of Ferdi’s overcoat before another shot carved through the back of Ferdi’s head. A stray shell destroyed half his face before he too succumbed to his wounds. The foul smell of gas burned Callum’s nostrils.
Max needed him to see it and feel it. They needed him to know.
The gentle warmth of a small dance hall replaced the grim battlefield. A place of fun and merriment, or so it had been in years gone by. Women smiled through blank, grey faces as children ran around them. Old men hoisted oversized mugs of beer, while a middle-aged man argued with one of the women in a manner that had to mean they were married. The only men in the place under forty were Max and Ferdi, dancing silently in the middle of the hall. The scene turned first into the rowdy, familiar sight of Suzi’s… then their sanctuary. That’s what Ferdi had called it. And even if he and Max’s love had failed soon after, their refuge for men who’d never returned, where they could know peace away from the orders and judgements of barking, power-hungry men remained.
Even Heinrich had admitted that their knowledge of such places amounted to less than what Bakker and his cohorts knew. But the elixir he’d dripped on Callum’s hand had proven his offer. If Heinrich’s associates had the power to make Callum visible and solid again, what was to stop them granting Max interaction with the outside world, if only for a while? Max, Ferdi and the others could go out and reclaim just a little of what was stolen from them. What was being stolen from him now.Thatwas why he could enter their place. A living ghost, welcome in a place for men stolen from their time.
Callum squeezed Max’s hand, but Max did not squeeze back. It was as if in that strange, shared moment, something had changed. In accepting an invitation into Max’s thoughts, he’d allowed Max just as surely into his. Heinrich’s offer was on the table.
Pain from the stump of his hand stabbed through him once more. Max’s hand faded with a greenish glow, stretching and wrapping around the wound, tighter and tighter. Far from bringing relief, it brought a searing heat that blanketed Callum’s vision with blazing white light. When it faded, he felt Max’s hand around his. The hand that had been severed, now restored, wrapped in Max’s touch. Flesh on flesh, noGeistleft between them. For the few seconds it lasted, their thoughts became one and the same. What it meant to touch one another, unharmed and visible in a world they could share.
The crowd in the Metropol laughed as Buster Keaton fell off a ladder and tore through an awning to the street below. Then, they screamed as Callum, still half-naked and blinded by the projector’s light in the theatre’s darkness, fell off the stage.
