Page 35 of Geist Fleisch
Heinrich cut him off with a sharp laugh. “Let’s at least be candid with each other. Youdowant this, my friend, even if it’s not top of the list. Don’t worry, I take no offence.”
“Good for you.” Callum’s eyes widened as he heard footsteps approach them in the snow. He looked back at Heinrich, but the man only stared at him with that same knowing smile. Callum gestured to him to get dressed as the stranger rounded the trees.
“Guten Tag,” Callum said quickly, hoping it would distract the intruder from the well-endowed Florentine sculpture in pale German flesh standing cavalier in the snow.
The stranger paused just long enough to look at Callum. His eyes grew wide. He shook his head, muttered something Callum couldn’t make out and trudged on, the steady scrunch of his footsteps on snow fading once more.
“It’s not every day an empty suit of clothes bids you good afternoon,” said Heinrich. “You should have shed them, though our friend may have then decided to take them for himself. It’s been hard to trust people since the great inflation.”
“What are you…” Callum looked down at his apparently empty sleeves. With no gloves, he’d kept his hands in his pockets for warmth. Even he could no longer see them. “What’s this?”
“You know what’s happening to you. It will happen again and again until one day, you just don’t reappear.”
“You offered me a cure for that too. Your little sample just about—”
“Yes, yes, I know what happened to you with the spirits. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking differently? There are benefits to not being seen, after all.”
A chilly breeze hit Callum’s throat. He wasn’t sure why, but it invigorated him. He bit his lip again, then licked them as he watched Heinrich push back his shoulders, making a show of his broad chest, his sturdy body, and… other animated assets. “You’re telling me that kid was you?”
“Yes. But I’ll answer no more questions until you’ve accepted my terms. What is it you want, Callum? If you wish, you can cast off your clothes right now. We can rut like animals in the snow until your twenty odd years of pent-up English countryside lust is good and sated. No-one will see us. No-one will know.”
“So, you’re like me? Is that why I can see you but that bloke couldn’t?”
“Callum,” Heinrich wagged a cautionary finger. “Your greatest want, or we can stop wasting each other’s time.”
Whatever his origins, it was hard to concentrate with this enviable specimen of Germanity taunting him without a thought for either the cold or modesty. But then, Heinrich had told him not to concentrate, or to think too hard. What did he want?
“To be free.” The words felt glib, but not dishonest. “Or to matter, I suppose?”
“Which is it? Do you understand what either of those things mean?”
“Look, you asked me the question and I answered it.”
“With words that mean nothing to you because you can’t fathom their outcome.” Heinrich tilted his head as he drew near enough to stroke Callum’s chin. “If it’s freedom you seek, you’vebeen granted a remarkable gift. Who is freer than the man unseen? As for longing to matter… to whom, my friend?”
No longer did Callum feel exposed alongside a man unbothered by prudish morals. On the contrary, he now welcomed Heinrich’s touch. He felt the anger that had wound so tightly in his chest release. Anger, directed not at Heinrich, or even at Frank Bakker, but at himself.
“It’s so simple, yet so frightening, eh?” Heinrich purred, his face now inches from Callum’s. “The freedom to love unselfishly, and matter more than anything to that person. Now, I didn’t read your mind, but you’re not so complicated a man. I can see that’s what you want.”
Callum shivered when Heinrich’s lips brushed his. He explored the man’s cool skin with unseen fingers, letting the coat Bakker had given him fall into the snow. Not feeling the cold at all now, he began working the buttons of his shirt.
Heinrich grabbed his wrist. “Know that I cannot give you that. Pleasure? Yes, unlike any you’ve ever imagined. And answers? Most certainly. But not love. You understand this, yes?”
The notion of loving Heinrich had not entered his brain, even if other organs were begging him to play the part. Pleasure unlike any he’d imagined? “Answers,” he whispered as Heinrich’s lips brushed his again. “You promised me answers.”
Heinrich nodded, slowly running his fingertips up Callum’s bare chest until they stroked Callum’s chin. “And I am a man of my word.”
The man’s strength shouldn’t have surprised him, but as he mashed their lips together and pulled Callum’s body tight against his, Heinrich’s façade fell, revealing a being long past the threshold of ordinary. Callum threw himself against the man-creature’s body, all cold forgotten as they fell back into the snow, Heinrich’s powerful embrace cushioning his fall. It reminded him of being a kid with Anne, finding deep nooks and valleys in trees. There, they would tuck themselves in and pretend the tree’s spirit had wrapped them up in a big hug, and was now pouring all its wisdom into their childish minds. Only Heinrich was doing it for real. Each second of his embrace offered a new image in the memory of a hungry boy, full of rage. Callum felt Heinrich’s hunger, and his loss. A father? A brother? The former lost to a bomb, the latter to the same muddy, gas-soaked fields that had claimed… Callum could no longer tell if Heinrich was even German. It seemed a triviality, lost under an immeasurable void that drew yet more anger, more rage at the world.
Within the embrace, an unspeakable power and heat filled a hole in the young Heinrich’s heart. Callum could feel the boy fighting, as if they now shared a mind and heart as sure as their bodies intermingled. The fight for his body would come soon enough. He heard bones cracking beneath the screams of the child whose thoughts he now shared. He felt fibrous flesh beneath tortured skin reshape itself into a being of raw power and beauty. But whose beauty? Not the child, Heinrich, to whom sex and the male body remained little more than an abstract mystery. This was a different power that made the boy’s rage seem paltry, and amplified it a hundred-fold.
Callum watched as more souls perished in his mind’s eye. He heard their screams and felt the blasts of weapons whose horrors defied recognition. A fire turned a room of frightened mothers and their babies to ashes. A great wave of heat and death vapourised the walls of some exotic city in the far east. Noxious fumes claimed lives in their millions, not on the battlefield, but in windowless pits designed for the purpose, and so it continued.More cities, London herself, torn apart in a firestorm that made mockery of disasters that had befallen the city in years past.
In those who did survive, Callum felt a hatred unlike any he’d known. Unlike the rage of the young Heinrich, who’d lost a father and a brother… No, it washisrage. He saw his own father, face shorn away by a firestorm that had peppered its remnants with shrapnel. The man who’d accepted the pleasures of Callum’s mouth on his sex behind The Dancing Fox before beating him near-senseless now gurgled his own blood before the muddy wheel of a truck filled with uniformed men flattened his head into the road with a wet ‘pop.’ Each death, each enemy, was more satisfying than the last. Wrath borne not of a child, but of a god.
Callum sprang apart from Heinrich and scrambled away in the snow until rough trees scratched his naked back. Even then, he wanted to retreat further, to where the woods of Tiergarten could swallow him completely. He had no words for the man-creature that stood before him, mouth wet with blood that trickled down its powerful chest.
Heinrich offered him a tender smile, catching the trickle on a finger and sucking it clean. “I’ll save you the question. I’m not a vampire, or a daemon, or a werewolf… but the boy? The man? I am only as They remade me.”
