The Holocaust Opera

By
Mark Edward Hall

Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998

www.damnationbooks.com

The Holocaust Opera
by Mark Edward Hall

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-333-1

Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-334-8

Cover art by: Neil Jackson
Edited by: Lisa Jackson

Copyright 2011 Mark Edward Hall

Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American and UK Print Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Invisible Toothpicks:

An Introduction to The Holocaust Opera

By Vince A. Liaguno

Music and horror have always shared a symbiotic relationship. Think of a scary movie and, inevitably, some ominous snippet of soundtrack accompanies the memory. Try and imagine Halloween and not hear the synthesized notes of John Carpenter’s score, or The Exorcist without Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Or the menacing chords of composer John Williams’ two-note title theme to Jaws or the screeching violins of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score that ushered in Janet Leigh’s showery demise. Music is an essential element to the horror experience, helping to create mood, enhance atmosphere, and foreshadow the imminent terror lurking around every dark corner. It’s as fundamental a sound to horror as the scream itself.

But while we’re intimately familiar with music as an accoutrement to horror, what about music as the source of horror itself – the composition of harmony and melody as a catalyst for terror?

In the novella you’re about the delve into, Mark Edward Hall tunes his instrument – in this case a blood-tipped pen – and launches into a haunting melody of words to give voice to one of the greatest real-life horrors in history: The Holocaust.

Sixty years after the SD-Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing units known as death squads – went on their first routine mass killing mission in Lithuania during the summer of 1941, we struggle to assign depth and dimension to the horrors of the Holocaust. In The Holocaust Opera and its juxtaposition between the beauty of the story’s titular musical composition and the abject ugliness of the colossal failure of humanity that resulted in the extermination of six million people at the hands of a madman and his followers, Hall uses the defined parameters of music composition to frame his story and bring shape to the horror.

All so that we may see.

Like the best genre fiction, The Holocaust Opera illuminates that which hides in the darkness – the darkness of history, the darkness of human betrayal, the darkness of our own reluctance to face what is, for many, unbearable. It’s not pleasant to see what the darkness hides, not pleasant to loosen a few of those tightly-woven knots that keep our comfort level safely moored. But Hall isn’t really bothered by our level of discomfort – in fact, he flips the reader a solemn middle finger with The Holocaust Opera. Good storytelling isn’t about maintaining arbitrary comfort levels, but rather flying in the face of them. Good fiction – good genre fiction, in particular – peels back the painful scabs of healing wounds and forces us to face the raw tissue underneath.

Last November, in anticipation of writing this introductory note you now read, I traveled to Washington D.C. to tour the National Holocaust Museum. Call it my wanting to put a face to a name or whatever motive you’d like to assign to such an action, but, fact is I did it. And the experience was horrible.

Just as it should have been.

As I cast my eyes upon image upon image of unimaginable human suffering, there cataloged and organized by chronological atrocity, I experienced myriad emotions and sensations, from outrage and disgust to sadness and shame at being part of a race of beings whose cruelty and depravity know no limits, whose capacity for evil seems boundless. But the strongest emotion I felt was fear – overpowering, blood-curdling fear. Fear of the knowledge that the atrocities of the Holocaust occurred during civilized times, nary sixty years ago. An event that took place while my own father was a young boy of twelve sneaking into movie matinees and discovering his pre-adolescent love of the New York Yankees and a pretty little songbird named Connie Francis.

For me, that was the real horror of what I saw in the museum that day; that something so fundamentally evil could happen right under the noses of industrialized nations, many of which stood idly by while men were separated from their wives, children taken, crying, from their parents. Human apathy emerged for me as the greatest horror of the Holocaust.

“That’s the trouble with this world,” Jeremiah Gideon – Hall’s madman-or-maestro composer of the fictional music piece at the center of The Holocaust Opera – observes. “People try too hard to forget. They believe that forgetting is healing. It’s a mistake, I tell you. We must always remember. Remembering is healing. If we forget, then we’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”

And indeed we have. One only needs to look at the more recent ethnic cleansings in regions like Bosnia and Darfur to realize that the possibility for mass apathetic denial is less a fear and more a sad, quiet reality. With society’s emphasis on blocking out anything unpleasant from our peripheries, there is an entire school of thought out there that finds teaching about the Holocaust in schools too morbid, while others outright deny the extinction of millions of Jews – a mindset that ‘s inexplicable and culturally irresponsible when one considers the physical and photographic evidence, the eyewitness accounts. It’s that same aversion to the unthinkable that’s kept us more focused on “reality” TV and reduced images of mass graves in Bosnia and reports of gang rapes in Darfur to background noise in our collective consciousness.

Perhaps it’s in his recognition of the enduring tragedy of public indifference that served as Hall’s catalyst for The Holocaust Opera – a story in which a young singer named Roxanne Templeton is drawn to a piece of music whose chords and melodies are so unfathomably strong that she cannot ignore, cannot relegate the disturbing images it conjures to the back of her mind. Through the work of fiction you’re about to read, Hall imagines a world in which evil cannot be ignored and human suffering cannot be snubbed by changing a channel. He forces his characters to confront the atrocities of human cruelty through eyelids being held open with invisible toothpicks – in this case, a haunting musical opus. Even when his characters want to shutter away the horror, they can’t. This seems to be his message for humankind: You can’t blink away the horror.

Despite its dominant horror elements, at the heart of The Holocaust Opera is a message of hope. After all, as Hall’s protagonist philosophizes, “the human spirit is not capable of existence without hope.” So, even while we’re bearing historical witness to the continued blind eye of the collective, there is always hope – ever-present and sustainable even in the worst of circumstances as demonstrated by the survivors of genocide and other unspeakable human atrocities.

So permit Hall permission to prop your eyelids open with the invisible toothpicks of this haunting little tale. Let the rhythm of his prose pulse beneath your skin; allow the melody of his narrative to carry you along that great continuum between horror and hope. For it’s in living through the horror and reaching for the hope that we uncover the truth of the human spirit in all its ugliness and beauty.

Vince A. Liaguno

Long Island, New York

January 12, 2011

The Holocaust Opera

“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?”

(Jeremiah: Lamentations 1:12)

“The Magic’s in the music and the music’s in me.”

–John Sebastian

I sensed the moment I met Jeremiah Gideon that my life had been altered in some incontrovertible way. I ignored that sense. I stepped into his world willingly. He was an enigma, the most gifted talent I had ever encountered, and I was in awe of him.

I was a singer back then, raised in a small Iowa city. I came to New York chasing a dream. It was the first time I had been out from under the sheltering wings of my wonderfully-wise parents. I sought stardom, and I had their fond blessing to help guide me. When I look back on it now, I can see just how naïve I was. Dear God, if only I could have seen the future.

My parents were from the Beat generation. Their bible had been, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. For them, it had been a time of free love and following one’s heart. They wanted me to experience life as they had. They wished me only happiness and had always encouraged me to follow my dreams. So I did.

I had been singing since the age of three, at first hamming it up for my family, then church choir, later glee club, and when I was fourteen, I formed my first band. I called it Leather & Lace, after the Stevie Nicks song. We stayed together for five years. We were popular in and around my hometown, but that was it, and it didn’t last. There was nothing original about our sound, and when I finally woke up one day and admitted to myself that we were never going anywhere, I bailed out. Two of the guys in the band were married with families and couldn’t just pack up and leave everything, and the drummer, a girl, wanted to be my lover. She was a sweet kid, but I wasn’t interested. I liked guys.

I was good and knew it. Fate had blessed me with a soprano’s voice and a full four-octave range. I had been telling people for years that I was destined to be a star. I don’t think anybody ever doubted me.

So, I came to New York, a green twenty-one-year-old. It was springtime and the city enchanted me. Everything about it looked, sounded, and smelled like success, and I was more excited than ever before in my life. I hadn’t come from a wealthy family and I had very little to start me on my way. I came in a clunky old Chrysler mini-van, two suitcases filled to the brim with the remnants of my life, an old Gibson guitar, and my dreams.

I had been in town only two days when Jeremiah’s and my path crossed. I can’t tell you it was destiny because I don’t know about such things.

I was out searching for a cheap apartment. A joke, right? In New York? I was somewhere in the East Village, an old residential area near Avenue A and Bond. The streets were lined with stately brownstones; homes that had once been symbols of New York’s old-style elegance. During the 19th century, millionaires like the Astors and Vanderbilts had built homes here, but the waves of Irish, German, Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrants who flooded into New York City in the 1900’s soon displaced the elite, who moved uptown. Now, the buildings were decrepit and rundown, their vacant eye-like windows blackened with soot that seemed to completely seal off the outside world from whatever secrets lay within.

I knew from what my parents had told me that the area had been home to the Beat generation of the 1950s, the hippies of the 1960s, and the punks of the late 1970s and 1980s. Today, it’s still a young person’s neighborhood, with its experimental music clubs and theaters and cutting-edge fashion. So, of course, that’s the section of the city I was drawn to. I did a lot of walking in those first few days. I could have driven, but I didn’t. I wanted a real feel for New York, and walking was very liberating, and educational. I let my feet lead the way, and that’s where they took me.

I expected a bustling neighborhood, but that’s not what I found. Instead, I discovered a stark, nearly forsaken place, a shadow world; a quiet village that existed, tenuously at best, within the confines of the greatest city on Earth. There were few cars parked on the deserted wind-swept streets and even fewer pedestrians walking its sullen sidewalks. The people I did encounter, faceless, all of them, walked briskly, heads down, collars of windbreakers turned up against the biting late-march chill, hats pulled down over unseen eyes. Like vampires scurrying from sunlight’s dark promise.

Somewhere near East-80th and Willow I began to slow my pace, for it was there that a feeling of melancholy seized me. I sensed more than heard music, soft and poignant, haunting, as though it was coming from the depths of my own romantic soul. I stopped, looking around for its source. It seemed to be coming from everywhere all at once, a permeation of soulful melancholy. How could such beauty exist? I wondered. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was the sound of angels weeping. The melody was gorgeous, with a counterpoint that was oddly foreign, yet strangely familiar, so lush that I wanted to both laugh and weep. I had been transported to a world of dreams.

I soon located the music’s source. It was coming from one of the brownstones. I stood there for a long time in front of that building, unable to move, staring mutely toward that sound as though I’d been hypnotized. Finally, I went to my knees in front of a grimy basement window. I used the sleeve of my blouse to wipe at the glass and I peered in. I felt no shame, no embarrassment; only enchantment.

Back to me, at a piano in a small, neatly kept flat, sat a young man with long dark-brown hair. I could not see his face, but somehow I knew that it would be as haunting as his music. He would play some of the melody and counterpoint and then he would write notes on a lead sheet. It seemed he was composing. I can’t begin to describe the complex emotions that stirred inside me as I watched, nor can I tell you how long I knelt there. I was lost in an imaginary dreamworld, a virtual haze of delirium. I fancied myself a young Billy Holiday, standing on stage in a small smoky cellar singing those gorgeously poignant melodies.

“What’r yer doin’ there, girly?”

The voice startled me back to reality. I twisted around in a panic and struggled to my feet. My legs were aching and my knees felt raw from kneeling on the rough sidewalk.

I stood blinking in surprise. Before me stood a bag lady with piercing eyes and a twisted gray mouth. She was very thin. Her deeply-lined sallow face was streaked with grime, and her sharp blue eyes had sunk abysmally into the bony architecture of her small skull where bruise-colored indentations lined them. Her outfit consisted of a dirty brown buttonless overcoat, an oil-streaked printed polyester blouse and a pair of oversized black men’s trousers tied around the waist with a frayed electrical cord. On her head, she wore a green felt cap that was so full of rips and holes it could have been salvaged from the maw of some crazed animal. Beneath the cap, her gray straw-like hair hung untidily around her stooped shoulders.

“Well?” she demanded.

I stammered some idiotic reply. Even now I’m not sure what it was.

“Stop babbling, fool! I asked you what yer doin’ there.”

I was still blinking, bewildered, when I found my voice, or rather this squeaky little voice that I didn’t recognize as my own. “I...I was...ah...I was just listening to the music,” I said, stuttering like a little fool, ashamed, afraid that I had violated some sacred trust.

“Lovely, ain’t it,” she said, picking at a rotten tooth with a grubby fingernail. Her voice was grainy and scratched, as though her interior mirrored the visible, outward part of her.

“Yes,” I said breathlessly, and gratefully relieved that I was not going to be scolded for my shameful eavesdropping. “It’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. Please, do you know who he is?”

The bag lady’s sharp, sunken eyes drew down on me, leaving me decidedly uncomfortable in their grasp. She grunted and threw her head back, laughing heartily. “You don’t know, do you, girly?”

“Know what?” I replied. If there was a joke here I certainly didn’t get it. “I’m from out of town,” I explained.

“Yes, girly,” she said in a small, ironic whisper. “Yes, you are.” She looked me up and down, an expression of complete and unqualified contempt on her seamed face. “Believe me, you don’t want to know him. If I were you, I’d walk on down that street and forget you ever heard that music.”

At the thought of doing what the lady had suggested, I felt a sudden aching loss inside of me. It was as if the universe I had imagined while absorbing those lush melodies had begun to crumble to dust at my feet. I could no more have walked away than I could have put a gun to my own head and pulled the trigger, and the bag lady knew it. She shook her head ruefully and emitted a disgruntled-sounding little squawk. “Who is he?” I demanded, this time without shame, without reservation.

“A troubled soul,” the woman replied, now with a slight hint of resignation in her voice. “A troubled soul who writes troubled music. His name is Gideon, Jeremiah Gideon. That’s all he does, you know, sit at that piano and compose those haunted melodies.”

“He’s incredible,” I said. “Do you know him?”

“No!” the bag lady barked. “He’s not a very sociable soul; but most everybody on these streets knows about him.” She looked sharply at me. “We all have ears, you know!”

“His music seems so filled with passion...but somehow sad,” I said, my mind ushering in visions of everlasting love turned tragic. Of loneliness, heartache, despair.

The bag lady gave me a sour look. “You’re a romantic little fool,” she opined. “Could get you in trouble.”

I could only look at her, unable or unwilling to take issue.

She snorted at my non-reaction. “Rumor has it he’s writing some sort of modern saga based on the experiences of his ancestors.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said in reply.

The woman looked at me as though I’d said something obscene. “Don’t be such a little twit,” she scolded. “They were in the holocaust. His grandparents were exterminated. His parents managed to escape...barely with their sanity. Now they’re all gone. The boy’s alone, wracked with pain and grief. Can’t you hear it in that music?”

My hand went to my mouth to stifle a gasp. Of course I could hear it. That’s what the emotion was about, sorrow and grief, not passionate love turned tragic as I’d first imagined. The lady was right. I was a little fool. “Oh, my,” I said shocked. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t, girly. Now you do.” Her piercing blue eyes stared at me from the depths of that seamed face. “Rumor also has it that if you listen to that music long enough you’ll become infected with its message of despair and that eventually you’ll go stark-raving mad.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I replied shocked. “It’s only music.” As I was mouthing the words, I realized that I might be kidding myself. I had already come to the conclusion that there was something extraordinary, perhaps even supernatural, at work here.

“Well, it’s of no consequence to me,” said the bag lady. “You’ll do what you will. Haven’t you wondered why there’s nobody else on this street?” I glanced up and then down the stark street and realized for the first time, that other than the bag lady, I hadn’t seen another living soul in more than two hours.

“They scurry like saints with crosses from that music, girly. So beware.”

The lady turned then and shuffled on her way, her hands over her ears, as if the music was indeed hurting her. I watched her for a long time, speechless, knowing that something else should be said, but unable to find words to describe my emotions. Halfway down the block, she stopped and stared back at me. A flight of noisy pigeons took wing from an alley and my eyes were drawn to their fluttering ascent. When I looked back, the bag lady was gone.

I became frantic and fidgety. I didn’t know what to do next. I knew what I wanted; I just didn’t know how to go about getting it. I felt like an addict in need of a fix. I knew that I did not have the courage to heed the bag lady’s admonitions. I stood on the sidewalk, whirling around like a mad dervish. I needed to get into that apartment. I could not control my emotions. I had to talk to that boy about his music, his pain. I felt that our lives had somehow intersected, that his pain was now my pain. I sensed that no one else could understand the deep turbulence inside him like I could. I knew of no graceful way to get what I wanted, so finally I just went to the door and knocked.

I was persistent. He didn’t come immediately, so I stood and hammered. After a while, the music stopped and I heard the clatter of a chain-lock on the other side. The door was finally opened and there stood the young man, six feet tall, handsome, with sad, haunted brown eyes and a jagged scar on his right cheek. I winced when I saw it, and hoped that he hadn’t noticed my reaction. He wore faded blue jeans and a white button-down shirt open at the throat. Around his neck hung a gold chain with the Star of David resting against his hairless chest.

He just looked at me, his face expressionless. “I’m Roxanne Templeton,” I said. “I...heard your music from the street.” My voice trailed off as I felt color rise in my cheeks.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s beautiful,” I replied in a soft voice, but not without a trace of awe. I knew my description paled, however, in the face of those indescribable melodies. “I wonder if you might be in need of a...singer?” What made me say that? I had no idea. In all honesty, I hadn’t known what I was going to say until the words were out of my mouth. I think I would have said just about anything to get close to that boy. My mouth was cottony-dry and I felt like I might pee down my leg any second.

Finally, a small smile creased the corners of the young man’s generous mouth. “Are you a singer?”

“Yes,” I replied

He nodded. “How did you know it was me playing?”

“A bag lady,” I said. “She told me about you.”

He stepped past me and looked up and down the street. His face wore a grim look. “I haven’t seen a bag lady on this street for months,” he said. “Since the garbage strike ended. What did she look like?”

I shrugged. “A bag lady. Gray hair, green cap, bad teeth, piercing blue eyes.”

He nodded. “And what did she tell you about me?”

I knew I was really blushing now. I did not want to mention the holocaust. She was probably a crazy old bat who’d made the whole thing up. “She said you were a composer of beautiful melodies,” I said finally, shaping what felt like a pathetically inept smile.

“She did, huh?”

“Yes, and I have to agree with her.” I smiled, a little more sincerely this time, and the young man’s face finally broke into a wide grin.

“Jeremiah Gideon,” he said, extending his hand.

“How do you do?” I said taking it. His handshake was strong and his fingers were hot, like tines of pure energy, and oh-so-soft. I might have been touching something divine. I fairly swooned, and so help me God, an electric shock sped through my arm and arrowed directly into my heart. My legs shook and for a short, panicky moment I thought they might give way beneath me.

“Are you just out for a stroll or do you live in this neighborhood?”

“I’m looking for an apartment.” I told him, and I could hear my voice quavering.

“I see,” he replied. “Do you often knock on strange doors when you hear music?”

“This is my first time,” I said. “The melodies were just so beautiful...I...couldn’t leave. I had to hear more.”

“Well, come in then,” he said, leading the way down a set of stone steps into a basement flat. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “You’re really quite good, you know.”

“I’m trying to write an opera. Do you sing opera?”

“No,” I replied in all honesty, scared to death that he would send me away. “Actually, I’m a rock singer, but I have the voice for opera. I could do it if someone would show me how. Besides,” I said, deciding to make a bold move, but shaking in my shoes. “Your music doesn’t sound like opera to me.”

“Oh? It doesn’t?”

I shook my head. “No, it sounds more modern, less stuffy,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “I’ve never heard opera with melodies like those.”

“No?”

“Uh, uh.”

He sat down at the piano and began playing the pentatonic scale. “Sing along,” he told me. I was so nervous. I felt like I was auditioning for the most important gig of my life. When I began, it was with a shaky, somewhat hesitant voice, and then as the moments passed I began to sing more confidently.

“You’re a soprano. That’s good,” he said. “Try this. In the key of C.” He began the introduction to Hoagie Carmichael’s beautiful and timeless, Stardust. Luckily, I knew the song and so I sang it with confidence. When we finally stopped, Jeremiah was silent for a long moment, looking at me. I watched him carefully. His features held the same enigmas and complexities as his music. His eyes held a depth of emotion that astounded me, as though they were windows to some lost and forgotten soul, and what I saw inside that soul, imagined or otherwise, both enthralled and troubled me. There was a war going on inside that boy, and it contained all the elements of the real thing. I saw hate and passion and despair and resolve, and the turbulence was so chaotic, so powerful, that I could not look away. He held my gaze like a hypnotist. I was astonished by his level of passion. It was something my life lacked. I realized also that it was the kind of passion necessary to attain a profound level of artistic achievement.

“That was very good,” he said finally, breaking the psychic spell he held over me. “You have a beautiful voice, and a four octave range. I’m impressed. Yes, I believe you could be a great opera singer. Would you like to sing some of my songs?”

For a moment, I could not find my breath. I couldn’t believe he was asking that question. “Yes.” I hissed, and almost fainted.

* * * *

That was the beginning of it all. I still needed an apartment, and a job. I found work almost immediately with a semi-popular rock band, Chained City. Their singer, a girl, had overdosed on heroin the week before and they needed to replace her immediately or lose important gigs. I answered an ad in a local music paper and went to an audition. I was the twenty-seventh one and they hired me on the spot. It was for the money, nothing more. My heart was never in it. I wore the clothes and did all the moves, but from the moment I’d heard Jeremiah Gideon’s music and had looked into those dark, sad eyes, I was hooked; nothing else in the world mattered to me.

With Jeremiah’s help, I found an apartment. He knew some people in the neighborhood. He asked around and within forty-eight hours I was moving my two suitcases and my guitar into a tiny fourth-story attic that had been converted into a loft apartment. It wasn’t the greatest place in the world, but it faced north and on cloudless, smog-free days I could see a piece of the downtown skyline in the distance. Better still, the price was right. I didn’t care about the pitfalls. The important thing was, I was here, finally, in New York, and I would be working with the greatest young composer in the city. Everything else seemed inconsequential.

Jeremiah knew his way around town. In the days that followed, he took me to some thrift shops where I purchased enough tattered furniture and used appliances to meet my needs.

Jeremiah was indeed an enigma. Although he owned the entire building in which he lived, he resided alone in that small basement apartment. For reasons that were unclear to me, the bulk of the building had long ago been sealed off from occupancy.

This much I managed to glean from him. Mostly, he kept silent about his life, even as I blabbed on about my own. I told him about my wonderful upbringing, church choir, glee club, of my parents’ encouragement to follow my dreams.

“You’re very lucky,” he said.

I had to agree. I believe I told him everything there was to know about my life—something I’d never done with anyone before—and he was an attentive listener, but still, he remained maddeningly clandestine about his own past.

One day, while we were working on some of his gorgeous melodies, I finally got up enough nerve to ask him about his parents.

He stopped playing and avoided my gaze, perhaps recalling some long lost poignancy. Finally, he turned to me, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “They were old. They had me late in life.”

“They died?” I prodded.

“They were in their fifties when I was born,” he said. “I was sort of an afterthought, I suppose.” Although he didn’t come right out and say they were dead, I took this to be an affirmation of that fact.

“They say children who are born to older parents oftentimes have the spark of genius,” I opined.

He scowled. “Who are they?”

I shrugged and gave him a wry smile. “People. I don’t know...I heard that once.” Jeremiah was very modest about his talent. He did not like being called genius and he set me straight almost immediately.

“You’re an only child?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. There was a long pause and another one of those sad smiles clouded his face. “You know what I’m trying to do here, Roxanne?” He nodded in the direction of the sheet music on his piano stand.

I shrugged, remembering again what the bag lady had told me, but never daring mention it to Jeremiah. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be successful at it,” I replied. I wasn’t just being nice. I was telling him the truth. His music went far beyond anything I had ever experienced, and carried me to places I never imagined existed, and did it with textures I’d never dreamed possible. It was as if his talent had taken music to the next step in the evolutionary process. I felt privileged that I had been fortunate enough to be touched by this boy and his genius. If it suddenly ended right there and then it would have been enough to last me a lifetime.

“I’m trying to write a body of music that captures the spirit of what it must have been like in the death camps,” Jeremiah said. “Are you familiar with the holocaust?”

I winced. Here it was, finally, the confession. “Well, sort of,” I replied. “Isn’t everybody?”

He emitted a small humorless laugh. “No,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “There’s an entire generation of children growing up now who are being denied the truth. People are saying that Jews made it all up to get sympathy, and in some schools they’ve stopped teaching it altogether. They say it’s too morbid. Today, everything has to be politically correct. We have a tendency to deny the horrific, or make light of it, even as our modern society has turned into the most violent in history. Go figure.

“History is supposed to teach us about the mistakes of our past so that we don’t repeat them, but it can’t happen when we have this tendency to rewrite it to suit the politically correct whims of the day. It just so happens that now, more than sixty years after the fact, for whatever reason, society has decided to deny the extinction of millions of innocent human beings.”

I nodded, not knowing how to reply. My knowledge in these matters was sorely lacking. “Your parents were there, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Jeremiah said. “They were at Auschwitz, the Nazi death factory in Poland.” A quicksilver tear traced a line down his scarred cheek.

I couldn’t bear to see him in pain. “Jeremiah,” I said. “That was then, this is now,” not realizing until it was too late what a lame thing it was to say.

“Oh, so you think I should get on with my life and stop dwelling on the morbid, huh?”

“I think it’s non-productive to dwell on a past that can’t be changed.”

“That’s the trouble with this world. People try too hard to forget. They believe that forgetting is healing. It’s a mistake, I tell you. We must always remember. Remembering is healing. If we forget, then we’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Don’t you see?”

I sat looking at him. I suppose I didn’t see. I’d read about the holocaust, of course; had studied it in school, in fact, but it was just a story in a text book; another bland assignment on the rocky road to graduation. There was no way I could begin to grasp the terrifying reality of what it had actually been like there. I’m from the Midwest; the members of my family had never been kidnapped, raped, humiliated, tortured, or gassed. My life had been a sheltered one. Concepts of that magnitude of cruelty and suffering were beyond my ability to fathom.

“I want people to imagine it,” Jeremiah cried out. “I want them to feel it as if they were there. I want them to taste it, to suffer the same indignations. I don’t ever want the citizens of this planet to forget what happened to those wonderfully-brave people. I want everyone in this world to be stripped for a moment of every conceivable human dignity, to live in total despair without the luxury of even hope.” Jeremiah’s voice dropped to an angry whisper, his entire body trembled, and tears coursed down his cheeks. “That way they’ll remember, and that’s what I want my music to convey!”

“It sounds to me like you want all of civilization to keep on suffering—”

“Yes,” he shouted. “I do! Everyone is to blame for what those people had to endure!”

“Jeremiah, it was one crazy madman—”

Jeremiah became very animated, jumping up from the piano bench and pacing, gesturing with his arms and hands, his eyes wildly turning in their sockets. “So when the next crazy madman comes along, are we going to fall right in step behind him? I’m telling you it was more than one person who did it. It was a mindset. It was mass hysteria. The darkest caverns of human nature. Hitler alone didn’t hold the machine guns on those people and herd them like cattle into the gas chambers. He alone didn’t sterilize them without anesthetic. He alone didn’t rape them and torture them and strip them of every conceivable human dignity...” Jeremiah stopped and was silent for a long moment. His throat worked, but no more words came out, only these tiny little choking sounds. Tears were streaming down his cheeks and I had never in my life felt more empathy for a person than I did at that very moment. When he began speaking again, his voice was filled with resolve. “I will be successful at conveying the feelings inside me,” he said. “I’m determined. I must send my message to the world.”

“A message of despair?” I shot back.

“Yes!”

I then began debating with the same ferocity as Jeremiah. I suppose his anger was contagious, because it began to swell within me as well. “I must confess then,” I said, “that from the moment I first heard you play, I could feel your anguish and your sorrow, and yes, your despair. At the same time I was uplifted, as if there was an entire world of hope in it for all of us. That’s what your music did for me.”

Jeremiah took me by the shoulders, forcing me to look directly into his wet eyes. “Are you absolutely sure about that, Roxanne? Are you positive that hope is what you’re hearing in my music?”

“Yes!”

Jeremiah smiled then, but beneath the smile I saw something I couldn’t quite pigeonhole. It could have been fear, or anger, or even relief. I wasn’t sure and I was suddenly quite confused about everything.

“Jeremiah, the human spirit is not capable of existence without hope,” I said. “You’re no exception. It’s part of what makes us human. How do you think the ones that survived that horrific time did it? They never let go of the dream. I may not be very old, or wise, but this much I do know. Whether you want to admit it or not, hope is there in your music, larger than life. Hope is there inside you. It’s the part I’m attracted to.”

Jeremiah’s eyes softened then, and another small smile gently kissed his soft lips. “Where did you come from, Roxanne Templeton? You’re such a bright shining star in my life. Somehow you manage to see good in everything.”

My cheeks heated. “I see good because it is there. I don’t understand all the heartache in your life, Jeremiah. I don’t understand why you’re so bitter. Maybe someday I’ll be able to. Perhaps someday you’ll feel comfortable enough with me to confide totally in me. It’s even possible that I could help you.”

He looked at me fondly, his wet eyes shining like brown jewels. “You are helping me,” he said “You believe in me. That’s help enough for right now.”

* * * *

Hope blossomed. For the first time, I felt like I was making progress getting close to that boy, and, for the time being that was enough. It would have to be. We went back to the music. It was, after all, the reason for my being there in the first place. I dared not hope that anything else would ever come of it. The music took precedent over everything else in our lives. Jeremiah was extremely passionate about it. We were at a stage where, if there was going to be an opera—as Jeremiah liked to call it—we would have to start adding other musicians, singers, and actors and Jeremiah would have to start soliciting theatres for rehearsal space.

Whether he wanted to admit it or not, future generations would enjoy his compositions for the textures alone. They would not be reminded of the evil of the Nazi uprising and the subsequent holocaust. This was a personal thing to Jeremiah. I never lost sight of how important it was to him. It was, after all, the very thing that had inspired him in the first place.

Jeremiah and his pain had kindled a spark of curiosity inside me. When I wasn’t working with him or the band I found myself spending a considerable amount of time at the library researching the holocaust. I discovered things that horrified me. I never knew that man had the propensity to be so cruel. Over time, I began to understand a little more about Jeremiah and his anguish.

I rehearsed and performed with Chained City at night, but during the day was Jeremiah’s and my time. He was a patient and forgiving maestro.

We spent a great deal of time together in the months that followed. Spring turned into summer and summer to fall. When we weren’t working, we would walk in central park holding hands like lovers, laughing and talking. We weren’t lovers, though. Not yet, anyway. I began to see changes in Jeremiah. Changes for the good. I was happy.

In late September, the leaves rioted into brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow and in October they fell, a cool wind that held the promise of winter scattering them helter-skelter throughout the park and onto the busy streets of Manhattan.

Jeremiah came out several times and listened to Chained City, although I could tell that it was merely a placating gesture to appease me. He would sit expressionless, sip on a beer, and would never offer a whisper of praise, advice, or criticism to myself or the other members of the band, which, by the way, infuriated them. Later, only after we had left the club, would he comment. His comments were limited pretty much to praise for me alone and on the amazing difference between my two voices; the rock voice of which I made my living, and the sensitive voice I used to convey Jeremiah’s gorgeous melodies.

I never pressed him for blandishments. I could not have cared less. What we were doing together was light years ahead of what I was trying to accomplish with Chained City, and I supposed his indifference was his way of conveying his total lack of interest in rock n’ roll and the state of the pop music industry in general.

* * * *

In all of the months since first making Jeremiah’s acquaintance, I began to realize that, as far as I knew, I was his only social life. Rarely did I go to Jeremiah’s without an invitation; never to just socialize. We worked hard, and our work was so exhaustive that on most days I would all but crawl home fatigued, and on nights when I wasn’t working or rehearsing with the band, I stayed in, reading or watching television, usually falling asleep from sheer exhaustion.

One night, feeling depressed, I decided to walk to the market, buy a bottle of wine, and surprise Jeremiah. Yes, I suppose I was feeling a little insecure, and perhaps even a little bit horny. No shame in that. I wondered much about Jeremiah in those days. Although he had casual acquaintances, I realized he had no real friends, and I wondered why a handsome and sensitive young man would live his life in the reclusive manner in which he did.

Mostly I wondered why he had not made a move on me. I knew I was attractive. I had a mirror, for God’s sake, and in the clubs, at night, the men and boys would fall all over themselves trying to impress me.

So why not Jeremiah?

We seemed to have everything else, friendship, and a good working relationship. Why did we not have sex? In my naiveté I decided that he was just a shy boy and that shy boys sometimes needed a little coaxing.

So I decided to dress a little more seductively than usual on that night. First, I showered and powdered, put on my sexiest underwear, topped it off with a frilly white blouse, cut low in front, a pair of tight leather pants and high-heeled boots. I poofed my long, wavy, autumn hair with a blow dryer, gave it a little tease, grabbed my coat, and left the apartment.

After buying the wine, I made my way up Bond Street on foot. Although a cold and biting wind fluted through the brownstone canyons, there seemed to be quite a few people out and about. The holidays were drawing near and the atmosphere was festive. The close proximity of other human beings helped to lift my spirits, and in some odd way comforted me. As I approached Jeremiah’s block, the windswept streets quickly became deserted. I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I alarmed when I began to hear the faint stirrings of music.

As I’d done on the first day I’d met Jeremiah, I decided to spy on him through the basement window before going to the door. Feeling like a naughty voyeur, I got down on my hands and knees. Seeing that the window was moist with condensation, I pulled a Kleenex from my coat pocket and wiped a small circle of glass clean.

I wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted me on the other side. Something was wrong with Jeremiah, and I was immediately captivated by it. He sat at the piano and he seemed to be surrounded by an aura that danced in time with the music he was playing. That was my first impression at least; an aura. It only took a split second for me to revise the impression. What I’d initially thought of as an aura, now looked like something alive, liquid, a shifting bubble that shimmered, waxed, and waned in and around the body of the boy as if he was immersed in it, like a placenta sac filled with dancing fluid. As Jeremiah pounded out the notes to a composition I’d never before heard, the fluid inside the sac became more and more agitated until it was literally speeding around his body, boiling, flowing, squirming in sync with the alien melody that was coming from the piano.

Panic seized my heart and gave it a squeeze.

I scratched my way to my feet and backed away from the window in horror. The sack containing the bottle of wine fell from my hand as my palms involuntarily slapped against my ears. The bottle hit the sidewalk and shattered, but I did not hear it, I could not hear anything but the alien music in that awful moment. My head throbbed with its symphonic pulses as my heart raced, pounding like a kettle drum in my chest. I began to moan in agony, still unable to drown out that terrible sound.

Lyrics to a song I did not know came into my head, but I did not like them so I threw them out. I wanted to scream. I needed to get away from that building. I turned and ran blindly down the sidewalk as tears spilled from my eyes and scoured my cheeks, the cold wind freezing them to my flesh. Fifteen minutes later, I fell against my apartment house door panting harsh rasps of breath. The din in my head had begun to subside, but not by much. I put the key in the lock with a shaking hand and fell into the hallway, struggling to stay conscious as I crawled toward the stairs.

* * * *

I felt unclean.

I did not know why this was so, or why I felt so terribly defiled.

I stood in the shower for a long time, scrubbing at my skin until it felt raw. I could not stop sobbing. The music had gone, but its aftermath lingered in me like a terrible hangover.

The only solution was to sleep.

I dreamed that there was a wide-eyed woman cowering in the corner of my bedroom, naked and bruised, covered in lacerations, her hands, hooked into desperate claws, reaching out plaintively. I felt her pain and her anguish. It was like no other dream I’d ever experienced. I tried to see through the layers of the dream in hopes of identifying her, in hopes of helping her. It was no use. I awoke crying and terrified. Later, I fell back into a deep and troubled slumber and did not awake until the middle of the next afternoon, and only then roused by hunger.

There were three messages from Jeremiah on the answering machine. I ignored them all and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I ate it ravenously, washing it down with two glasses of ice-cold milk.

Later, my bell rang. I knew who it was and dreaded answering it. He was persistent, however, so finally I went over, and buzzed him in.

* * * *

I made a snap decision then—I’m unsure as to why—not to confront Jeremiah with what I’d seen and heard the night before. I was feeling better, and strangely, with the light of day slanting in through the skylights, all of it seemed surreal, as though it had been conjured from out of my troubled sleep. Down deep I knew better, of course, but at the moment, that didn’t matter. I was willing to put my better instincts on hold. What did matter was, for the very first time I realized—no, I admitted to myself—that I was in love with Jeremiah. That was the emotion that won out over all else.

When he came in through the door, I was prepared for the worst, but when I saw him, an immense sense of relief flooded over me. He was just Jeremiah, of course, the tall and handsome young man with the wide smile and sad eyes that I had come to love.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His tone was that of the perfect gentleman apologizing for some minor indiscretion. He sensed something, or saw something in my eyes, I’m not sure which, but I’m absolutely certain of it now, for rather than grill me about missing the day’s rehearsal, there was something in his eyes that looked like understanding, or perhaps even resignation. He came silently into my arms and held me. Our lips met and we fell into bed.

After making love, we ordered Chinese, had it delivered, and sat in bed eating crab rangoons and pork fried rice while watching old reruns of Friends and Seinfeld. After eating, we made love again, and then again, each time more desperate and impassioned than the time before, as though our obsessions were dragons and we were attempting to slay them.

Jeremiah and I had become lovers. That was the incontestable truth. At that moment in time, nothing, not even my own common sense, could have swayed me from such a triumph.

* * * *

Change was in the air. Although I’d tried to bury the memory of what I’d seen and heard on that awful night, it did not want to stay dead. It had become a restless corpse. In the days that followed, the headaches became more frequent and persistent, as did the dream of the wide-eyed woman cowering in the corner of my bedroom. I would wake in the night, my head filled with song, my heart full of panic, and I would try to reconcile the dream with what I believed to be reality. As the symphonic rhythms and melodies of Jeremiah’s compositions rang in my psyche like clarions, I realized that the harder I tried, the more the line between the two blurred.

In sort of a half-assed way, I tried to convince myself that my burgeoning problems stemmed from the loud nightclub atmosphere of my work life with Chained City. I never really believed that.

I would go home and try to rest, but the songs in my head and the ache in my heart would send me spinning downward into depression, until finally the depression would worsen into something akin to despair. I tried to sort it out, wrestling day in and day out with the problem and its possible solutions and/or consequences. I had always been such a happy camper, never a depressing thought. I was changing, and I did not like what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Furthermore, I did not want to admit that Jeremiah’s music might be at the root of my anguish. Just the same, I felt an intense need to find out more about the death camps and the Nazis. I knew that Jeremiah and his music were connected to all of that in some elemental way, and I was determined to strike the correlation, whatever it might be, whatever effort it might take. Never in a million years did I expect to find what I found.

* * * *

Increasingly, I spent less and less time at home. When I was there, I slept, and when I slept, I dreamed of the abused woman in the corner. I dreamed of the fleshy sac that had surrounded Jeremiah that night, and of the mysterious song that had pierced my heart like a lance.

When I wasn’t rehearsing with Jeremiah or playing with the band, I began to spend enormous amounts of time at the public library, digging, researching, determined to strike the correlation that I knew must exist. In time, I became so familiar with the holocaust and its innumerable inhumanities that I began to see myself as part of it. I began to imagine that I’d actually lived it in some incomprehensible way. Frequently, I would fall asleep during my studies, only to dream of the woman cowering in the corner. I’d come awake with a scream on my lips and the librarian would tell me to go home.

I was persistent, however, and would go back the next day, and the next, hopelessly obsessed with the holocaust and its myriad atrocities. So you can imagine my surprise when the revelation I’d been desperately seeking finally came in the form of a man rather than a textbook.

He was a small, bookish man who spoke in a quiet and dignified voice. I was searching the racks for more information when I bumped into him.

As it turned out, he was there for the same reason as I, researching the holocaust, and that common interest got us talking. It didn’t take him long to draw the Jeremiah Gideon story out of me.

“Jeremiah Gideon?” the man said, raising an eyebrow. “You’re working with Jeremiah Gideon?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at his reaction. “You know him?”

“Of course. I’m Dr. Max Friedman, from Julliard. Jeremiah was one of my students.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Wow.”

“You’re working with him?” he said again.

“Yes.”

“In what way?”

“He’s writing a body of music and I’m helping him sort out some of the vocals.” I gave him a thin smile, running my hand through my hair, unsure as to why I’d stopped short of telling him I was actually the main vocalist for Jeremiah’s compositions.

“Really?” Dr. Friedman said, scrutinizing me now with intense interest. “Surely then, you must be aware of the richness of the young man’s gift?”

“Oh, yes,” I gushed. “I am, and I’m honored to be a part of his music.”

The professor looked quite uneasy. “He doesn’t usually take on prodigies,” he said, and there was no masking the silent question in his eyes. Are you fucking him?

I looked away from his steady gaze, feeling both guilty and angry. I had no reason to be either of those things, of course. Jeremiah and I were in love and there was no reason to be ashamed of that. The truth was, lately I’d begun having doubts of my own. Was Jeremiah truly in love with me, I wondered? We were lovers, true, but at Jeremiah’s insistence we still kept separate residences, and I knew no more about him and his past than I had on day one. I must have been wearing my heart on my sleeve, for the professor’s face reddened and his demeanor turned pensive.

“Listen, Ms....”

“Templeton,” I said. “Roxanne Templeton.” I held my hand out and the professor took it rather hesitantly.

“Please be careful,” he told me. “I know this might sound strange, but Jeremiah’s gift is...well...very...special.”

“I’m aware of that,” I replied. “But why should I be...careful?”

“I’m afraid I’m not making myself clear,” Dr. Friedman said. “What I mean to say is; Jeremiah’s music has a...rare...depth. His compositions have a way of affecting people in a...well, in a physical way.”

“Good music is supposed to affect people in that way,” I replied, sounding like a naïve child.

I saw small beads of sweat break out on Dr. Friedman’s brow, and his mouth was working, struggling to articulate his thoughts. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the moisture away.

“Listen, Ms. Templeton, I’m going to be straightforward with you because I don’t see that I have any other choice. I believe there’s something hidden inside the complex architecture of Jeremiah’s compositions, something...lethal...perhaps something...evil.”

An involuntary expulsion of laughter escaped me. “Something evil?” I said. Was this some kind of power play? Surely, the good professor was joking.

The professor’s small eyes drilled into me, and there was not a trace of humor in them. “It’s something the mainstream hasn’t yet noticed,” he said, “and thank God for that. Jeremiah’s compositions are not yet widely known.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Ms. Templeton, when I listen to Jeremiah’s music, I sense something not quite right about them. Now, please listen very carefully to what I have to say. Your life may depend on it. I have managed to obtain a tape of several of his compositions and I’ve been studying them. Without reservation, I must tell you that they contain elements that defy logic.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, feeling a sudden and overpowering repulsion to this terrible little man. Was Friedman a jealous competitor of a gifted student?

“Tell me you aren’t affected emotionally by his music.” Friedman said.

“Well, of course I am.”

“There, see.”

“I still don’t know what you’re suggesting.”

“Tell me his music doesn’t run your emotions through a gamut.”

“I can’t deny it,” I said. “But—”

“Listen to me,” Friedman interrupted, and his voice had become sharp and hurtful. “I’m here trying to strike a correlation between Jeremiah’s music and the despair in the death camps. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that’s what you’re doing here as well.”

I nodded, realizing that he was absolutely right. Coincidence, I told myself, but was it really?

“Exactly,” Friedman said. “But I tell you, there’s something wrong. Jeremiah may not be in total control of his own compositions.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Of course he is—”

“No!” Friedman said. “You must listen! The mathematics is skewed; the compositions are tainted with something. Please believe what I’m telling you. I used to be able to listen to his compositions at length...” Dr. Friedman’s eyes glazed. “Now...I...cannot so much as bear even a single...passage before the despair overwhelms me...wanting to make me do things that are...against my better judgment...against my moral character. Each time I try, the despair nearly consumes me. I can’t talk about this anymore,” he said. “Please forgive me. Just thinking about this nearly does me in.” Dr. Friedman covered his ears with his hands, as if he was trying to block out unwanted sounds. The headaches and the dreams and the despair that I’d been experiencing over the past couple of months came rushing up on me, as palpable as a cold shower. My knees weakened and my gut churned with nausea. Friedman’s eyes were sick with anguish and they were wet with emotion as they rolled nearly helplessly in their sockets.

“What does it make you want to do?” I demanded. “Please, I need to know.” The professor did not answer me; instead, he turned abruptly and walked briskly, yet unsteadily, down the library aisle, leaving me sick and shaken and wondering.

* * * *

That had been my second tangible inkling that something was horribly amiss. Again, I did not mention it to Jeremiah. I believe I was afraid to, if you want the truth; afraid that the fragile glass house I had constructed around myself since arriving in New York would shatter into sharp and dangerous shards. The truth was—although I had not mentioned it to Dr. Friedman—Jeremiah’s compositions were affecting me in much the same way Friedman had described. As each rehearsal session closed, I would stagger home with blinding headaches and intense nausea, feeling empty, sick, and depressed. I would lay awake well into the morning hours, afraid to fall asleep, terrified of facing the naked lady in the corner with the shocked eyes, the lacerations, the imploring arms.

I should have ended it all then, but I didn’t, I couldn’t have even if I’d tried, because by then I was past the point of no return. I was falling down a spiral without end and I desperately needed to see what was at the bottom.

* * * *

The third inkling that my world was in the process of coming apart came a little more than a week later. Jeremiah and I were out for a stroll. We were walking past a series of dingy shop windows when I spotted animals in cages behind dirty glass. There were several mongrel puppies and a slate-gray kitten that could not have been more than four weeks old.

We stopped and peered in. It soon became apparent that the animals in this shop were sorely neglected. I took Jeremiah by the hand and started for the door. He stiffened and stopped.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He was staring at the storefront. “There’s something wrong,” he said. “This used to be Pop Shaw’s music emporium. I haven’t been down this way for almost a year, but now there’s no sign it ever existed.” He stepped back, shading his eyes with his hand, looking up. The black-painted sign above the door had, PETS, lettered on its face in gold leaf. It appeared old and weather-worn. Dogs barked and whined, and cats meowed from within.

I tugged on his hand again, frowning. Finally, his feet came unglued from the sidewalk as he somewhat hesitantly followed me into the shop.

An elderly man with iron-gray hair, a bushy mustache, and sagging, sallow skin greeted us with a yellow-toothed grin. His eyes were piercing and inquisitive, but cruel somehow. He might have been handsome as a younger man, but now he looked drained and defeated. A cigarette smoldered between nicotine-stained, white-gloved fingers. The shop was dingy and cluttered and smelled of animal excrement and cigarette smoke. The man was impeccably dressed, however, and the white gloves were an oddly eccentric touch.

“May I help you?” the gentleman asked. His voice’s timbre was smoothly melodic, his accent thickly German. I saw Jeremiah stiffen at the sound of it.

“Yes,” I replied. “I was wondering about that kitten in the window.”

“Ah, yes,” the man said. He went over, opened the cage, and with his white-gloved hands he took the small gray bundle of fur out. Holding the animal dangerously close to the business end of his smoldering cigarette, he began stroking it roughly. The kitten mewed in irritation and began to writhe. The man squeezed his hand around the animal until it stilled. I wanted to snatch the kitten from him. He was repulsive and cruel. I had this sudden and horrific vision of him snapping the kitten’s little neck with those mime-white hands of his. “None too soon,” the man went on, handing me the animal. It curled up to me immediately and began purring and I felt relief that it was still breathing.

Jeremiah was glancing curiously around the shop. “What do you mean none too soon?” he asked.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the man. The cruelty fled from his sallow face, replaced by the yellow-toothed grin. He stiffened and came to attention like some gross parody of a soldier. He thrust out his hand, clicking his heels together. “Wilhelm Schroeder,” he said. “Welcome to my zoo. Here, they call me the executioner.” I took an involuntary step back as Jeremiah stared. Schroeder continued to showcase his yellow teeth.

“Executioner?” I repeated. He nodded, still grinning, still holding out his white-gloved hand and I had an almost overwhelming urge to turn and flee from the shop. Instead, I took hold of his hand and shook it. I did not know what else to do. My parents taught me to be polite. I didn’t like the feel of his skin through the thin material of the glove. It was too cold, too clammy. It did not feel even remotely human. I pulled my hand back quickly and when I thought he wasn’t looking I wiped it on my jeans with revulsion.

“You see,” he went on in that smooth, nearly hypnotic voice of his. “Most all of the pets here are strays brought in by concerned citizens. The little one you’re holding is scheduled for the needle tomorrow.” His cruel eyes seemed to shrink and all but disappear into the folds of loose skin beneath his bushy brows. He leered forward, the yellow smile now a frozen rictus on his sallow visage.

“The needle?” I said, sheltering the kitten beneath my arms and backing slowly away. I could feel my eyes widening in horror.

“I can only afford to keep them for so long, you understand, and if nobody claims them...or adopts them, well...” His voice trailed off, even as the unspoken thought lingered there between us.

“You inject them with something?”

“Oh, no, Miss...ah, what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t,” I replied, “but it’s Templeton.”

“Miss Templeton. Ah, yes. You see, Miss Templeton, injections would be much too costly. I simply stick a long, sharp-pointed needle into their brain through the openings in their ears. It is quick and perhaps painless, and much less expensive than poison.”

I did back away then, totally and unequivocally horrified, suddenly quite afraid of this terrible man. I was reminded of something in that moment: the books I had been reading on the death camps and of one man in particular, a monster really, a Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as The Angel of Death. I remembered reading that he liked experimenting with human subjects; he would kill them in exactly the same way that Schroeder had just described. In a way, this little shop that disguised itself as a humane society was no more than a death camp for animals. Wilhelm Schroeder was its grinning executioner.

He must have read the look of terror on my face because he opened his dreadful mouth and laughed. “I do more good than bad, young woman,” he said in a meticulous tone. “I can assure you of that. A lot of these animals find homes through me. It is far better than them living out their miserable lives in the streets where a multitude of horrors abound.”

I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed with him, but I nodded nevertheless.

“What happened to Pop Shaw?” Jeremiah asked.

“Pop who?” Wilhelm Schroeder said in obvious irritation.

“Pop Shaw,” Jeremiah repeated. “This used to be a music store, you know.”

Wilhelm Schroeder’s cruel eyes once again retreated into his skull and his sallow skin seemed to sag on his face. “I’m afraid you’ve made some mistake, boy. I’ve been here since before you were born.”

Jeremiah stared expressionless for a long moment, but there was something in his posture that alarmed me, some deep-rooted rage that might surface at any moment. Schroeder had called him boy, and I remembered reading a reference that the Nazis had called male Jews ‘boy’, just as white southerners had once referred to blacks.

“Let’s go,” I said, turning and nudging Jeremiah toward the door.

I hugged the little gray kitten to my chest. “I’ll take her,” I told Wilhelm Schroeder, suddenly afraid that he would refuse to relinquish her in favor of the pleasures of execution. “What’s the charge?”

“There will be no charge,” he replied with a slight smile. “Saves me the cost of food...and, of course the unpleasantness of...well...you understand.”

I understood, all right. Somehow this twisted man found joy in killing. I could see it in those cruel, yet gleeful eyes and in that terrible yellow smile that now seemed more like a grimace. I shivered.

“Wait just a moment,” Schroeder said, looking at Jeremiah with circumspect eyes. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“No,” Jeremiah said, turning to leave. Schroeder grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

“Ah, but I believe I do. Your name is Gideon. Is it not?”

Jeremiah nodded, but he could not hide the incomprehension or the terror on his face.

“I knew your parents long ago,” Schroeder said.

“I don’t think so,” Jeremiah replied.

“Ah, but I did. I haven’t seen them about in quite some time. You look very much like your mother, you know. In fact, the resemblance is almost...supernatural. Tell me, are they well?” Schroeder’s gray, bushy eyebrows rose in inquiry above his cruel eyes and his revitalized grin was the most terrible thing I had ever seen.

“You’re mistaken,” Jeremiah said matter-of-factly.

“Tell me,” Schroeder inquired. “Where are your parents now? I would very much like to...see them again.”

“Fuck off!” Jeremiah said, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me toward the door. By the time we hit the sidewalk Jeremiah was shaking badly and I was near the point of tears.

“That anti-Semitic bastard,” Jeremiah said. “There’s something wrong in there, something about the feel of that place.”

“I know. I can’t stop shaking. He’s so creepy.”

“I don’t care what he said. The place used to be a music store.”

I shot Jeremiah a puzzled frown. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Jeremiah glared at me. “I grew up in this neighborhood. Pop Shaw’s music emporium was sandwiched between an Italian restaurant called Gino’s and a Chinese laundry. Tell me what you see there.”

I looked back and stared open-mouthed. There was indeed a Chinese laundry and an Italian restaurant called Gino’s. When I looked back at Jeremiah, I saw some kind of dreadful enlightenment come over his face.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t give me that, Jeremiah. What was all that about your parents?” I felt suddenly very confused about everything. Who was Jeremiah Gideon? Why wouldn’t he talk about his past? How come he lived in the basement of a large brownstone dwelling that had been mostly closed off from the world? Other than Jeremiah’s basement apartment, I had never been allowed in any other part of the house. On several occasions, I suggested the possibility of a guided tour, but Jeremiah always remained adamant in his refusal to allow me—or anyone else, as far as I knew—admittance into that seemingly sacred realm.

“It was about nothing,” Jeremiah said. “That sick bastard was just being nosy.”

“I don’t think so, Jeremiah. He knew your name.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You haven’t talked about it at all!” I replied, anger inflaming my words. “I know nothing about you, for fuck’s sake! Jeremiah, we’re lovers. You have got to start trusting me.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“That’s right, you don’t, Jeremiah. I don’t even know who you are. Screw you!” I turned to leave. Jeremiah gripped my shoulder. I wrenched free of his grasp and whirled to face him. There were tears in his eyes and I felt tears of my own sliding down my cheeks.

“What you don’t understand, Roxanne, is, I can’t confide in you.”

“You can do anything you want.”

He shook his head adamantly. “I’m afraid,” he whispered, and it was the first time I ever consciously realized it. He was being clandestine because of fear, not arrogance. Jesus, he was afraid, but what on earth was he afraid of?

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” he said with a sigh.

“You didn’t drag me into anything,” I reminded him, softening like a little fool. “It was I who forced my way into your world. Remember?”

Jeremiah nodded and his gaze held mine. I thought again of the night I’d seen him through the window encased in some sort of fleshy sac. I’d been having nightmares ever since, afraid to fall asleep, beating myself up, seeing things, hearing things, thinking that I was the crazy one. Now, I wasn’t sure of anything. Jeremiah held my gaze and for the first time since making his acquaintance, I sensed something terrible inside him. There was something in those soft, sad brown eyes that wasn’t real, wasn’t natural.

He lifted his hand up and gingerly caressed the scar on his face, and then he put his hand out to touch my face with the fingers he’d used to touch the scar. I winced and drew away. Jeremiah showed no emotion. I stood on that sidewalk and I could not look away from his hypnotic stare, nor could I find my tongue to speak any more useless words.

* * * *

We parted company then, Jeremiah going his way, me going mine. My heart ached deeply. I did not want to lose him, yet I understood then that he had never really belonged to me. I think it was the first time I consciously realized that Jeremiah could never belong to anything except his dark destiny.

I did a lot of soul searching on the walk back to my apartment. I needed answers to a thousand daunting questions. In the beginning, it had been enough just to be with Jeremiah. Or so I’d told myself. The logic was always there, of course, that eventually I would be able to break down his barriers. Now, I was further away from that goal than ever before, and my heart ached with a terrible knowledge, a terrible burden. I could not just let him go, I realized. He was much too important to me. I now needed more than secrecy and empty hope, and I knew what I would have to do to get those things.

As my mind worked, I stopped at a market and bought cat food and a litter box. Out on the street, a cold autumn wind cut through the lonely canyons of brownstones. In the distance, the city groaned like a hibernating beast. I tucked the little ball of warm fur between my coat and my body and could not shake the eerie feeling that I’d just saved a living soul from the clutches of some unspeakable evil.

* * * *

I slept poorly that night. Nothing new in that. My mind would not let me rest. The plan that had been just a seed earlier in the day had now germinated into this ugly little bud that wanted to blossom. I kept it at bay, terrified of bringing it into the light. It would not go away. In the morning, I put a pot of strong coffee on and went down to retrieve the paper.

Upon my return, I discovered the yet unnamed kitten awake and mewing for milk. I busied myself feeding her, trying to occupy my mind with possible names. I could not concentrate. I poured a cup of coffee, sat down, and opened the paper.

The morning headline shocked me to the foundations of my being. It read:

POPULAR AND GIFTED JUILLIARD MUSIC PROFESSOR, DR. MAX FRIEDMAN, COMMITS SUICIDE

For a long moment, I could not breathe. I went back to the headline, hoping that it was a mistake, praying that it was another Max Friedman. There must be two Max Friedman’s in a city this size, my mind insisted. Perhaps there were, but the man I had encountered at the library that day more than a week ago was staring out at me from a recent photograph. There could be no mistake. I read the article and then read it again.

It seemed that Dr. Friedman’s body had been found by his wife at 1:00 AM, slumped over his desk in his study. It was presumed that he had been listening to a student’s compositions (something he did often for the purposes of grading and critique) because a portable cassette player was found on the desk before him with the power turned on and a tape in the slot. It was reported that he had left a suicide note, but that the contents were being withheld pending an investigation.

It seemed that Dr. Friedman had driven separate ice picks simultaneously into his brain through the openings in his ears. Both picks were embedded to the hilt, the handles still firmly gripped by blood-drenched fingers now inflexible with rigor mortis.

* * * *

I read the article a third time, and a fourth, shaken beyond articulation. My world was in the process of coming apart. There was a pattern here that I’d begun to recognize as the long night previous had passed. The bag lady all those months ago and her reference to Jeremiah’s music hurting the ears; the absence of pedestrians in Jeremiah’s neighborhood, as if some form of lethal poison was leaching out onto the streets; my own terrifying experience that night as I’d gazed through the basement window; Dr. Friedman and the things he had confided in me. What about Wilhelm Schroeder, I wondered? Could he be connected in some way? Yes, I sensed a connection there as well. It could not be coincidence. His method of animal extermination; his recognition of Jeremiah; his inquisition about his parents.

There was my own growing sense that something wasn’t quite right in Jeremiah’s world: the headaches of late, the accompanying depression, the woman in my dream. Who was she? Why was she haunting my darkest hours? As the weeks passed, I’d become increasingly convinced that she was relevant in some way, that she was trying to communicate with me, or perhaps warn me of some imminent eventuality.

The mathematics is skewed, Dr. Friedman had told me on that day. The compositions are tainted with something.

What? I wondered. What on God’s-green-earth could skew mathematics or taint ordinary music? Then I remembered something I had learned long ago about music from a teacher:

There is no such thing as original music, she had told me. Do not kid yourself, music is not another of mankind’s clever inventions. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. It is as constant as the tides or the changing of the seasons. As human beings, as artists, we merely pluck it out of the fabric of existence and temporarily call it our own. In time, it goes back into the collective pool and is recycled. It is merely one of the forces born of the same mathematics that created the universe. And though we are sentient and intelligent beings, we have little control over its designs.

We have little control over its designs!

That statement kept reverberating in my brain as I sat rereading Dr. Friedman’s obituary and drinking cup after cup of hot, black coffee. Perhaps Jeremiah’s music, for some inconceivable reason, was born on the rim of the universe—a place I had once fleetingly and stupidly delved into during a childhood bout of petulance—or perhaps it hadn’t been born at all, but conjured instead from some dark place.

We have little control over its designs.

This was the thing that had been nagging me. What if Friedman had been right? What if Jeremiah had little or no control over the music he was composing? What if some force beyond his power was pushing him onward, nudging him toward the realm of some terrible destiny?

I began to feel all hot and panicky.

I went back to the article and reread it.

The police were in the process of searching for the tape’s composer. If all else failed, they would air the tape on radio station WNBC at precisely 6:00 PM this very evening. The implication struck me like a hammer blow. What would happen when they played the tape on the radio? Dear God, what might happen if millions of people tuned in and listened to those compositions?

I stood up quickly, my knee slamming the underside of the table and spilling my coffee all over the article. I made a mad lunge for the phone. A gray, streaking mass came at me from out of nowhere. I barely had time to register its significance before the kitten slammed into my chest like a small locomotive, pushing the wind from my lungs and knocking me back against the table. Its tiny talon-like claws sank into my flesh like fishhooks. I screamed and tried to rip the wretched thing off me. Its strength was extraordinary. In an instant, it had shredded my clothing and ripped my flesh.

I grabbed hold of its small, furry mass firmly with both hands, attempting to dislodge it. The kitten came back with renewed fervor, its power nearly supernatural, shredding my arms and lunging at my face. Its face was contorted with evil, its eyes bulging madly. I closed my hands around its tiny neck and squeezed with all my strength until it went still. With revulsion, I threw the evil, now dead, thing into the bedroom and slammed the door shut, standing with my back against it, breathing in harsh gasps and trembling uncontrollably. My arms and breasts were bleeding. I ripped off my top and surveyed the damage. It was extensive. In the bathroom, I hastily cleaned the wounds with a cold, wet washcloth before dousing them with hydrogen peroxide. I dialed Jeremiah’s number, sobbing hysterically.

* * * *

He answered almost immediately and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he knew. “My God, Jeremiah,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You son of a bitch!”

“You must come quickly. I have something to show you.”

I was there in just under thirty minutes.

Jeremiah was a basket case. When he got a look at me, he stopped crying, staring. “He made me do it,” he said.

“You bastard!”

“You don’t understand. I had no choice.”

“You’re a liar!”

“Come,” he said, trying to take my hand. I refused to relinquish it, pulling away from his advances with revulsion. I followed him at a distance as he led the way from his basement apartment up to a second floor landing. I followed him down a long echoing corridor where at the end he stopped, looking furtively around him before unlocking a solid hardwood door with #2 on it. He ushered me quickly through the opening and into a small, unpretentious, but neatly kept kitchen. The room was quite dark, the shades at the windows drawn. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I could see well enough to know the place was immaculate. The cupboards were clean and there were no dishes in sight. The colorful linoleum looked like it had been scrubbed recently. He closed the door gently and relocked it, standing with his back against it, breathing erratically.

“We must be quick,” he said. “I cannot take the chance that he should slip through while the door is open.”

“Slip through?” I said. “Who? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Shh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. He led the way through an archway into a spacious room that had probably once been a parlor. Heavy drapes at the windows kept the room in a perpetual state of shadow. Jeremiah flipped a wall switch and the room lit up. There was a white grand piano in the center of the room. Sitting on a bench side by side in front of it, their heads bowed like school kids napping at their desks, were two corpses. One was obviously a man, for he wore a black tuxedo, the other, a woman, wearing a white evening gown. There was no odor. The bodies had long since passed the point of decomposition, now they were merely leathery-looking husks inside the tattered and moldy garments. Each had sharp objects that resembled knitting needles protruding from their ears.

My hand went to my mouth as the gasp convulsed from my throat. “Oh, God, no!” I shrieked, stepping back away from that dreadful sight. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Jeremiah, who are they?”

“My parents,” Jeremiah said with no emotion in his voice.

I stared at him, eyes wide, and began backing toward the archway. “You knew about this?” I sobbed, feeling the hysteria swelling like a tide in me. The scream ripped from my throat before I could stop its expulsion. I tripped over my own feet and went down, landing on my ass out in the kitchen, still screaming, clawing to get away from that terrible room of death. Jeremiah lunged at me, grabbing me roughly, yanking me to my feet. I began to kick and thrash. His eyes were wild, but he was not trying to harm me. This much was clear. He just wanted me to shut up. He was as frightened as I was. I could see it in his eyes. The fight went out of me and I collapsed in his arms, sobbing.

“Please,” he said. “You must be quiet. We do not want to draw him here.”

“Him? Who the fuck is him?”

“Downstairs,” Jeremiah whispered. His eyes were swirling with panic. “I’ll explain everything.”

“Explain?” I said, wrenching myself free of his grasp, my voice filled with incredulity. “You let your parents rot here, while you sat downstairs writing evil music, and you want to explain?”

“I didn’t have a choice. It was their wish to be locked up and left here like this. It was their way of protecting me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

He shook his head.

“But, why, Jeremiah? My God, why?”

* * * *

We left the apartment in pretty much the same manner as we’d entered it, skulking, furtive, like thieves stealing away from the scene of a crime. Jeremiah led the way back down to his apartment. I followed him at a distance, repelled by him and everything he touched.

In his apartment, I sat down uneasily, my body rigid. I no longer trusted him, realizing that everything we had—or rather, everything I’d deluded myself into believing we had—was a lie. He sat down opposite me, forming thoughts.

“You see this scar?” he said after a long moment. I nodded. “It happened six months before I met you. You see, I...” Jeremiah paused watching me carefully. There was an embarrassed, almost apologetic look on his face. “You see, Roxanne, I knew there was something wrong with the compositions—”

“You knew? Jesus Christ, Jeremiah, why didn’t you tell me—?”

“Please,” he said. “I couldn’t. Let me explain. I was...seriously trying to abandon the project.”

“Bullshit!” I yelled. I was fuming, angrier than I’d ever been in my life and terrified all at once. I wanted to pound him with my fists, I wanted to kill him, but I stopped myself, knowing that I must, knowing that I had to understand what I’d gotten myself into. I felt quite strongly that I was trapped, that my very survival depended on the creative use of my brain, not my animal emotions.

“I came up out of a sound sleep.” Jeremiah continued. “I was in a total panic and holding my hand to my face. There was blood everywhere, on the bed, running down between my fingers, and I could feel that there was a deep wound on my cheek. Then I saw him. He was there, in my bedroom, hovering above me like some fucking demonic ghost. There was a jagged knife in his hand and it was smeared with blood. My blood. His eyes were bright red and glowing, like two burning coals. His form was human, but he had these two massive horns growing out of his head. He was evil, Roxanne, I swear. The most evil thing I’d ever seen. The most evil thing I’d ever felt.”

I just stared at Jeremiah, all emotion drained from me.

“Please, Roxanne, you’ve got to believe me. You see, my parents knew that if they died in that terrible way, and locked themselves away in that dark apartment, that it would confuse him, and that there was a good chance that their actions would provide protection for me indefinitely. I don’t know how they knew that, but they did. It worked, until now. Something’s happened. Something’s changed. I think he suspects that they’re dead.”

I continued to stare at Jeremiah, totally speechless.

“I swear, I didn’t know what they’d done until it was over,” Jeremiah said. “I came home from classes at Juilliard one day five years ago and found them like that. They did it for my protection.”

“How in hell would dying up there like that protect you?”

Jeremiah opened a drawer in a stand next to where he sat and extracted a ream of papers. I looked down and saw writing on them. “Here,” he said, handing the papers to me. “It’s all in there.”

I took the papers with a shaking hand, staring at the writing. I was unable to make any immediate sense of it. My mind was mush, and the scratches on my breasts and arms were stinging and throbbing like hell. I looked back at Jeremiah in confusion and his features distorted through the tears in my eyes.

“He said the cut was child’s play,” Jeremiah said. “A warning, that if I did not give him what he wanted, he would come back and gut me like he’d gutted my grandfather.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?”

“Schroeder. The pet shop man. Only his real name isn’t Schroeder. He lied about that.”

I was shaking and sobbing now, nearly hysterical. I knew that I had to get control of myself, but I just couldn’t stop. I sobbed for what seemed like a long time, bent over, my head cradled in my arms. Jeremiah made no attempt to comfort me. He just sat there. Either he was in shock or he was the most insensitive bastard I’d ever known. It was okay, I suppose. I no longer wanted his comfort. I no longer wanted anything from him. I felt cold, and distant, and confused.

“Who is he, Jeremiah?” I managed, finally, in a voice that was merely a husky whisper, but even as I made the inquiry, I thought I knew his name. I’d been reading about him in the books on the death camps. He’d caught my attention early on in my studies, and I’d read everything I could find on the man and his life. It was as if I’d somehow been purposely drawn to his dark story. I could not understand how it could be so, but dear God, it was. I’d known moments after leaving the pet shop yesterday. I just hadn’t admitted it to myself until now. The white gloves, the bushy mustache, the impeccable clothing, the handsome face with the cruel eyes, the reference to the Zoo. It all added up to one terrible man, a monster really; unequaled in the annals of mankind’s propensity to be cruel. He should be dead, but if Jeremiah was telling the truth, then he had somehow eluded God’s final judgment.

“Josef Mengele,” Jeremiah whispered. “His name is Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death.”

It was a long moment before I regained my senses. I knew, and yet hearing his name still shocked me to the foundations of my being. At the library, I’d learned that Doctor Josef Mengele, the butcher of Auschwitz, fled from Poland on January 17, 1945, as the Soviet army advanced toward Berlin. A few years later, he slipped out of Germany through Italy where he boarded a ship bound for Argentina.

At the time, no one except the nation of Israel had been interested in his capture, and he was mostly forgotten about by a world more eager to put the brutal past behind it than it was to pursue and punish the guilty.

Eventually, Israel gave up the search. Within a decade after the war, holocaust stories had become unpopular in Israel. By then, warriors had become more honored than victims. There is now even a prejudiced approach to holocaust survivors. They were treated as scattered rejects and remnants of an unhealthy mentality. From sheep to the slaughter, Jews transformed themselves into proud warriors who refused to be intimidated.

I’d also learned that bones believed to be Mengele’s were dug up in Brazil in 1985. It was reported that he’d died in a drowning accident there in 1979. Forensic tests on the skeletal remains were inconclusive, however.

“I swear, I didn’t know it was him yesterday until he mentioned my parents,” Jeremiah said. “He didn’t look like the thing in my bedroom, but it was him. I’m sure of that now. Somehow, he’s come back in human form. He’s evil, I tell you. He’s some sort of shape-changer, but he’s worse than that. Somehow, he can move freely between the world of the dead and this world. He can become different things and different people. I can’t explain how, but I know that it’s true.”

“No, no, Jeremiah,” I said, shaking my head. “You must be mistaken. That was Mengele at the pet shop yesterday, wasn’t it? In the flesh? I mean, alive. That was no trick. He wanted you to know it was him.”

“Yes, he wanted me to know it was him, and no, he wasn’t alive.”

I shook my head again. “That man yesterday wasn’t dead, Jeremiah,” I insisted. “He was very much alive. He somehow escaped death. We saw him. We talked to him. I touched him. Isn’t that right? Isn’t it possible that he somehow survived?” I was grasping like hell for a sane explanation to this nightmare, even as the memory of touching that man’s hand made my skin crawl.

“No!” Jeremiah said with finality. “He’s dead. At least the mortal part of him is. If you went there today, you’d find a music store, not a pet shop. It was all a trick.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“Because my father killed him,” Jeremiah said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “My father, Aaron Gideon, he’s the man who killed The Angel of Death.”

* * * *

I blinked, staring at Jeremiah. “My God, Jeremiah. Why? How?”

It was a long moment before Jeremiah replied to my inquiry, and even then he didn’t answer me directly. “Do you believe that a human being can be inherently evil, Roxanne?”

“Christ, I don’t know.”

“Evil comes in many guises and has called itself by many names,” Jeremiah said. “Lucifer, Cain, Grendel. Every faith has its name for evil. The victims and the survivors of Auschwitz—my father included—believed Mengele to be the earthly manifestation of Azrael, the true Angel of Death. The Talmud, the Jewish Holy Book, has references that equate The Angel of Death with Satan, implying that he is evil rather than good. Azrael in Hebrew means, ‘Assistant or helper to the gods,’ thus, angel. It is said that he is ‘forever writing in a large book and forever erasing what he writes.’ What he writes is the birth of man, what he erases is the name of man at death. This is what Mengele did at Auschwitz. He erased the names of millions of good human beings from the earth.”

“What does this have to do with the music, Jeremiah?”

“Magic,” Jeremiah said. “Everything was based on magic. I don’t know how it works, but I do know that it’s real. The entire philosophy of the Third Reich was founded on an occult order using ancient, esoteric knowledge and practices. Everything that defined the Nazi party had its roots in the supernatural. From the Order of the SS to the Swastika, every element was motivated by esoteric teachings inspired by the occult writings of Aleister Crowley, Nostradamus, Helena Blavatsky, Eliphas Levi, and John Dee to name just a few, along with the magical elements that they believed to be contained within the music of Richard Wagner and Wolfgang Mozart.”

“Jesus, Jeremiah,” I said stunned. “How do you know all this?”

“After I found them dead like that, and realized what they had been through, what my father had done, and what I was now being compelled to do, I felt that I had no choice. It was pure survival.”

“You still haven’t explained the connection to the music.”

“From the time Josef Mengele was old enough to listen to and appreciate music, he was totally enamored by Wagner. He came to believe, as did Hitler, that there was a secret and magical message hidden inside Wagner’s complex musical structures and that the message was a road map for world domination.

“Although Mengele didn’t pursue music as a career, he took it up as a hobby and eventually he became a pretty fair musician. He studied Wagner and eventually became somewhat of a scholar on the man and his musical genius. He came to believe that he understood his message better than anyone who had come before him. He knew that notes of certain sequences when played just so, could affect listeners in odd ways. We all know that, to a certain degree, music does affect mood. It’s part of why we listen to and create it. It’s why certain songs make us want to dance, or make love, or uplift us, or even depress us. Mengele somehow understood all of that on a more intellectual, perhaps even on a more visceral level than most, and though he himself was only a fair musician, he was in a unique position to manipulate the creativity of others to suit his own designs.”

“Like he’s doing with you now?”

Jeremiah dropped his eyes to the floor and nodded. “He used human beings as guinea pigs. He would strap headphones to their ears and play different selections from Wagner’s operas, operettas, and symphonies. He would play them in different sequences, backward and forward. In his experimentations, he discovered that certain note sequences would cause people to react in odd ways. Sometimes, he would play the same passages over and over again, turning the volume up each time until the patient was either deaf or mad or both. He discovered that certain harmonics could actually kill people. Some would affect patients on such a deeply emotional level that they would commit suicide.

“Although most of Mengele’s experiments were done using Wagner’s compositions, eventually he came to believe that he could compose something magical himself. He believed, as did Hitler, Hess, and the others who made up the Third Reich’s elite, that magic powers had been bestowed upon them by some sort of divine intervention, thus destiny was on their side and they could not fail.

“His intention was to create something exotic, a body of music that would draw the listener in and captivate him with its beauty and complexity, but contain a secret key, a magic message that would have the power to cause madness and chaos. He didn’t even know that it was possible until he met my father. You see, Mengele was not a great composer, and as much as he believed that providence was on his side, he was on the road to failure.

“After taking up his post at Auschwitz, he began recruiting musicians, desperately trying to find just the right ones to accomplish what he believed could be accomplished. Some of the most brilliant minds in Europe were being wasted in the gas chambers—and that included musicians and composers—and Mengele decided to do something about it. With his vision and intellect and the genius pool he had to choose from, he could not fail.”

“Jeremiah,” I said. “There is nothing in the history books about this. Yes, Mengele was an evil genius, everybody knows that, but he was a medical doctor. He worked with genetics, not music, he was fascinated with twins. He tried manipulating their genes by doing all kinds of horrendous and barbaric things to them. He would exchange their blood and inject colored dyes into their eyes. His interest, like Hitler’s, was in breeding a pure Arian race.”

“That was his day job,” Jeremiah said. “His real passion was secret, known only to a select few of his inner circle; and he had Hitler’s support. Their intention was to stun the world with a new kind of power.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s what he’s up to now, isn’t it? He’s never given up the dream.”

“That’s right,” Jeremiah said. “He was cut off in mid-stream, now he’s come back and he wants to play some more.”

“He’s using you to get his wish. You can’t let him.”

Jeremiah made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“Come on, Jeremiah, just say no.”

“You don’t understand, Roxanne. It’s not that easy.”

“Well, make me understand then. Jesus, what happens if they play those songs on the radio?”

“I don’t know.”

“They caused Friedman to kill himself, for Christ’s sake! I think you do know.”

“You’re still alive,” Jeremiah said, as if this in itself was some sort of victory.

I pulled my shirt down and showed Jeremiah the extent of damage the kitten had done to me. I showed him my lacerated arms. “That’s right,” I said, “but for how long? Even now, I feel something in those songs working in me, altering me, wanting to make me do things that are against my nature. Christ, Jeremiah, I’ve been having nightmares, seeing ghosts. When is this going to end?”

Jeremiah stared at me.

“Why, Jeremiah? Why did you go along? Tell me how this nightmare began. I need to understand so that I can help you to end it once and for all.”

“It’s all in there,” Jeremiah said bitterly, pointing at the papers in my hand. “It’s their confession. You can read it for yourself. That’s how I found out.”

I let the papers fall from my hand. They cascaded onto the floor at Jeremiah’s feet. “Goddam it, Jeremiah! I don’t want to read it! I want you to tell me. I think you owe me that much. Don’t you? Come on, we’re running out of time.”

It was a long moment before Jeremiah began talking. I could see his mind working behind those sad eyes of his, forming thoughts. I could also see that this would be very difficult for him, reliving a terrible nightmare that he hadn’t started, that he hadn’t actually lived, and yet, that was, in some twisted way, his alone now to either resolve or die trying.

“They herded them into cattle cars,” Jeremiah began. As he talked, his voice became nearly hypnotic, and I was transported back to that terrible and shameful time in the history of the human race.

“They came by the tens of thousands. The journey took days. The temperature was below freezing. There was no food, or water, no bathroom facilities. They were the latest victims of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jewish race. They were treated worse than animals. My parents and grandparents were among them. They were from Hungary, the last Jewish community to be rounded up for extermination.”

Then

Fifty-one-year-old Abraham Gideon and his wife Miriam were among the detainees on the train that day. Abraham and Miriam’s twenty-three-year-old son, Aaron, and his wife, Eva, were there as well. They had been captured by the Nazis and thrown into cattle cars. They endured a torturous four-day journey in freezing weather through snow-clogged mountain passages and dark forests to Auschwitz, Poland, the final stop in a nightmarish journey that could only have one outcome.

On the journey, Miriam became ill and could barely stand on her own. They had all heard the stories, of course, and most of the adults had a reasonably good idea of what their ultimate fates would be. But, for the moment, at least, Abraham and Aaron were mostly concerned for Miriam. Would there be doctors there to tend the sick? Or would Miriam have to endure her illness without treatment? Their worst nightmares could not have prepared them for what they found at Auschwitz.

As the train shuddered to a halt inside the Auschwitz compound, the prisoners finally got a glimpse of the terrible place that, for most of them, would be life’s final destination. The cattle car doors were violently thrown open by Nazi SS soldiers wielding machine guns. “Raus, raus!” (“Out, out!”) they screamed at the frightened and confused passengers who staggered out through the doors under a rain of cudgel blows and past the snapping jaws of the camp’s attack dogs. In the distance, five smokestacks belched thick columns of smoke into the frigid winter sky. The air was thick with the smell of fear and the stench of burning flesh. Orders were being screamed. Dogs barked. Children wept.

Males and females were separated immediately, each forming their own line. Most were unaware that this was the last time they would see their loved ones alive.

Into the midst of all the chaos strolled an officer who seemed very much out of place. His uniform was immaculately tailored. His handsome face was set with a kind smile. He was cheerfully whistling one of his favorite opera tunes by Wagner. He carried a riding crop in his white-gloved hand, but rather than striking the prisoners with it as he passed along their ranks, he used it to indicate which direction he wished them to go in, links oder rechts, left or right. The detainees were unaware that this charming and handsome officer was selecting which new arrivals were fit to work and which ones should be sent immediately to the gas chambers and crematorium. Life to the left, death to the right.

As the officer strode down the ranks, perusing the new arrivals, making his grim choices, inconceivably, on the sidelines, an orchestra made up of rag-tag prisoners played waltzes.

This gave the whole thing a surreal atmosphere. It also gave young Aaron Gideon an idea. He and his father, Abraham, had been separated almost immediately from their wives and they were desperate to be reunited.

As the officer strode within earshot, Aaron decided to make a bold move and said, “I am a musician.”

The officer stopped, looking the young man up and down. “Oh?” he said.

“Yes, and so is my father; and my wife is a singer.”

“And who is your father?”

“I am,” said the older man beside Aaron. “My wife became ill on the train, and I wish to make sure that she is taken care of.”

“What is her name?” the officer, whose nametag said Mengele, asked.

“Miriam. Miriam Gideon.”

Mengele had an aid write the name in a large notebook. “We will see that she is taken care of.” He smiled.

“Thank you, kind sir,” Abraham said.

“So, you say you are musicians?”

“Yes,” replied Aaron.

“There are many musicians in camp, as you can see,” Mengele said, gesturing toward his orchestra of rag-tag prisoners.

“We are better than them,” Aaron replied.

“Really,” Mengele said, unable to contain another small smile. “What are your names?”

“Abraham and Aaron Gideon,” said the older man.

“What sort of musicians are you?”

“Classically trained,” Abraham said proudly. “And my son is a composer.”

“A composer,” Mengele said, gazing with interest at Aaron. “A creative composer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you follow form, or do you improvise?”

“Both, sir.”

“Very interesting. You say your wife is a singer?”

“Yes, sir. She is.”

“A fine singer?”

“Yes, very fine.”

“Her name, please?”

“Eva.”

“Eva. Very well then. I will consider what you have told me, and if I decide to hear more musicians, I will call for you.”

Days later, when the two Gideon men were nearly frantic with worry over the fate of their wives, soldiers came and called them from their work detail, which consisted of feeding dead bodies into the crematorium. They were brought before Mengele for an audition. Besides Mengele, there were three SS officers, two enlisted soldiers, and a woman in the room. The woman, a striking beauty, was introduced simply as Brawne. She sat behind a desk taking notes and was quite attentive to Mengele.

Abraham was a violinist and Aaron, a pianist. They used instruments that were provided for them. Nervous, tired, and hungry, but resolved to do the very best they could under the circumstances, both men performed requested selections. They played well together and Mengele and his entourage seemed impressed.

“Wagner!” Mengele said, jumping up from his seat behind the desk. “I wish to hear something from Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen. (The Nibelung’s Ring) Can you play any selections from Der Ring des Nibelungen? What about Die Walkure (The Valkyrie), or Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods)? If you can play something from these selections, then perhaps I will be able to do something for you.” Mengele raised an eyebrow.

The two men glanced nervously at each other. Aaron came down hard on the piano keys and began the opening to Twilight of the Gods. Abraham followed suit with a lush violin entrance. They played well and accurately. The officers in the room all wore bemused expressions. Mengele showed no emotion.

In the middle of the number, Mengele abruptly pointed at Abraham and said, “You, out!” The two SS Soldiers went immediately to the man.

Abraham stopped playing and laid the violin down, bewildered. “But—”

“There will be a place for you in the prison orchestra. Now, I wish to talk to your son alone. Please, out!”

“What about my wife?” Abraham asked. “You said that you would see to her care.”

“So I have.”

“Will I be able to see her?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mengele said sadly, “for she has been taken to the chimney.”

“The chimney?” Abraham said, confused.

“Yes, you fool, the crematorium!”

Abraham collapsed to his knees in sobs. The two SS soldiers roughly dragged him to his feet. “Why?” Abraham begged.

“Because she was ill! Because we do not have enough doctors to see to the sick and injured! She was not strong enough to work, and she was not a musician, or a singer, like Aaron’s wife.” Mengele shrugged as if what he’d done was of little consequence. Brawne could not hide the look of horror on her face, and her expression was not lost on Aaron.

Mengele had mentioned Aaron’s wife, Eva. Although sick with grief over the apparent loss of his mother, hope blossomed in him that Eva had, through some miracle, been spared.

The soldiers dragged Abraham from the room and Mengele turned to the young composer. “Now, if you cooperate,” he said, “I will see that you and your wife are given special treatment.”

“What do you want?”

Mengele smiled. “I wish for your assistance in writing an opera. I have already spoken to your wife. She has...passed the audition...you might say, and you were right, she is a very fine singer.”

Aaron glared confusedly at Mengele. His mind was a whirling mix of assumptions and possibilities. “What sort of opera do you wish to write?” he asked, knowing that he must not show his grief or his deep and inexorable hatred for this terrible man if he intended to stay alive.

“Some of the notes and passages are in my head,” Mengele explained. “Some I have already written down. I will show them to you and we will see what kind of composer you are. Others will come in time. If you are creative, you will live, if I am disappointed, then you, your wife, and your father will all die.”

So that is how Aaron Gideon and Josef Mengele came to know one another. They worked together for months, and in time, a body of music began to take shape. Something had happened between Eva and Mengele that Aaron had no knowledge of. Following their tearful reunion, she was like a wilting flower, or worse, a crystal dish. She no longer confided in Aaron and he was afraid that if he pressed her, she would shatter. So, he remained silent, watching her, watching Mengele, watching the woman, Brawne, who was almost always in their presence while they worked, but rarely spoke. Eva was a physically beautiful woman, and Aaron understood on a deeply emotional level that Mengele was interested in more than her singing. Brawne suspected as well; Aaron could see it in the quick and poisonous glances she gave Mengele when he showed Eva special attention.

As time passed and the silences between Aaron and his wife lengthened, he became convinced that there was a secret between her and Mengele. It began to eat away at him. He was terrified that his own sanity might come unhinged if he wasn’t careful with his emotions and that his resulting actions might jeopardize whatever chances they had at survival. There was no single formula for survival in the death camps, but Aaron was keenly aware of how lucky they were, compared to most of the prisoners, and that any sort of insubordination on his part would mean a one-way ticket to the gas chambers.

Mengele’s command post contained a piano, a bar, all of the luxuries the other prisoners could only dream about. He allowed the young Gideon couple to live in a small cabin next door, let them bathe, and fed them well. During the day, while Mengele was occupied with his other duties, Aaron and Eva worked on the compositions. Brawne was most always there and in time she became more outgoing and began to initiate dialogue with the Gideons. They both liked her, but were always careful of what they spoke of, especially in front of the guards who were sometimes in the room with them. The exact nature of her relationship to Mengele was unclear, although they suspected she and Mengele were lovers.

In the evenings, Mengele dressed Aaron in tuxedoes, Eva and Brawne in evening gowns, as though they were actors in some warped drama and Mengele was its supreme maestro. Aaron did not question Mengele’s eccentricities; instead he played along, and observed, and wondered, and worried.

Together, they worked tirelessly on the body of music. Mengele seemed pleased with their progress and assured Aaron and Eva that their continued cooperation would be rewarded. Aaron was no fool. Although he did not believe Mengele’s reassurances, he had no other choice but to go along and pray for miracles.

In time, however, the music began to affect them all in ways that Aaron did not understand. He and Mengele had been experimenting with harmonic tones inside the structures of the songs and finally began to understand how they could be discreetly placed into the compositions. The tones were so subtle that they added no discernable differences in the compositions from the viewpoint of a casual listener. There were definite and noticeable differences in listeners who were exposed to the songs over a period of time.

The addition of these peculiar tones caused headaches and depression in all of them. Mengele became irrational and began to abuse Brawne verbally. He pushed the sessions to the very limits of emotional and physical endurance. Aaron did not like the changes in Mengele and he liked even less what Mengele was forcing him to do. He’d never imagined that music could be manipulated in such a way, and he was horrified that Mengele was so devious, so barbaric, that he would consider using the muse as weapon.

As each session closed, Mengele seemed to be slipping further and further away from rational thought. As a buffer against the sickness and the negative compulsions, he began to drink heavily, and with intoxication he became even more belligerent and abusive. Brawne seemed to be the one taking the brunt of his rage, for she began to show signs of physical abuse. Aaron became convinced that Mengele’s sanity was slipping even as he fought to hold onto his own.

In those days, Aaron rarely saw his father, but realized that a position in the camp orchestra had spared Abraham, at least for the time being. So he played along, biding his time, hoping that he could keep his own sanity intact long enough to take advantage of an opportunity to escape if one should arise.

As Mengele’s rationality eroded, he began to pay more and more attention to Eva. As he coached her singing, he would hold his body close to hers. All the while, Eva would steal terror-filled glances at Aaron. Brawne would avert her eyes, as if in shame, not daring to look upon Mengele and his blatant misbehavior.

Aaron was furious with rage and jealousy and he was nearly crazy with hate for Mengele. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing any of them could do. Mengele held omnipotent sway over everyone in camp and not a soul dared question his authority.

One night, after a particularity long and brutal session, Mengele, drunk, spirited Eva away, leaving Aaron and Brawne alone together.

“What is he doing with her?” Brawne whispered to Aaron as tears welled up in her eyes.

“I don’t know,” Aaron replied in frustration. “She will not confide in me. Something is happening. She is not the same woman I married.”

“He has taken her as his lover,” Brawne said. “I can feel it.”

Aaron gazed at Brawne with intense scrutiny. “You are his lover, are you not?”

“Was,” Brawne said. “Now he beats me when I question him.”

“Are you a prisoner?” Aaron asked.

Brawne shook her head. “I am German. I came here with Josef two years ago, but I do not like what I see here: all the barbarism. I do not like what he has become. He’s obsessed, insane, and I have begun to fear for my life.”

“Why don’t you just leave then?”

Brawne made a noise that might have been a small, humorless laugh. “It would never be allowed,” she said. “I know too much.”

“Then we are all prisoners,” Aaron said. “God have mercy on us.”

Aaron and Brawne parted company then, Brawne leaving of her own volition while Aaron was escorted to his cabin by the guards. It was the last time he ever saw Brawne alive.

Two days later, Eva returned to Aaron bruised and bleeding, tearful and whimpering. There was something else that Aaron noticed other than the physical. There was something in her eyes that had not been there before, some terrible knowledge or infestation, or both. When Aaron pressed her, she had simply said that Mengele was in the process of giving her something that she could never under any circumstances divulge. It was so sacred, so ghastly, that its disclosure would mean death for them both.

So the nightly rituals continued—now without Brawne—and at the close of each session, Mengele would take Eva with him rather than sending her home with her husband. Each day, when she returned to Aaron, that thing in her eyes had grown brighter and more dreadful somehow. Along with it, her fragility grew until she was nothing more than a pallid and lifeless husk incapable of anything but obedience.

Through an accident of logistics, one day Aaron and Eva found themselves alone together for a few moments. It was the first time in weeks, and Aaron, no longer able to contain himself, pressed her for answers.

“Do you want to die?” she said, her eyes bright with terror. “Do you want all of us to die? I cannot ever talk about what he is doing to me.”

“You must. I am your husband.”

“No, Aaron, I cannot!”

“Do you know what happened to Brawne?”

“I believe that she is dead,” Eva told Aaron. “I think he killed her. I sense it in him. He will kill us both if ever we speak of this again.”

Although that was Eva’s final word on the subject, Aaron sensed, even as it all ended and they gained their freedom, that it was not over, that Mengele had made indelible wounds on Eva that might someday come back to haunt them both.

Now

“Papa never told me any of this,” Jeremiah said. “I had to find out for myself after they died.” He pointed at the scattered papers on the floor. “After they found out that I’d become...infected, they almost went mad. You see, I never knew anything until five years ago...God, if they’d only confided in me...maybe I could have prevented all of this from happening.”

Jeremiah stopped talking as his eyes filled and spilled over. I was both stunned and speechless. I had never heard such a story. Even as I knew that time was running out, I could not take my eyes off Jeremiah. I sat forward, like a child, my eyes round in my face, my mouth open in awe, as I anticipated the rest of this extraordinary tale.

“My mother was a different woman after the abuses of that monster,” Jeremiah went on. “She was distant and cold, her nights filled with terrible visions and panic attacks. In later years, she was overcome with self loathing, and on a number of occasions she even attempted suicide. You see, she knew that the Angel of Death would return someday, that he was not done with her. He had instilled his terrible promise in her all those years ago.

“I’m getting a little ahead of the story,” Jeremiah said. “In the camp, during that long and torturous time, while the air was filled with the acrid stench of death and the anguished screams of the condemned, Aaron had to sit there at the piano and play. He had to write and rehearse that cursed opera, wrought upon him by an unholy entity, while in a room nearby the woman he loved was undergoing some sort of supernatural transformation by a monster not of this Earth.”

Then

Aaron vowed each night and each day that he would kill Mengele. If it was the last thing he did before he died, he would destroy him. So, like a child with a particularly fertile imagination, Aaron dreamed of taking Mengele apart, working over the myriad possibilities in his mind until he was nearly crazy with them.

Change was in the air. In recent days, there had been talk of war’s end. Rumors spread quickly in camp. There had been rumors before, but this one had come from the guards.

By this time, Mengele had lost all sense of purpose. He was obsessed now more with Eva than he was with the opera, and the only good that came of those terrible days was that the body of music began to lose focus. Aaron believed that this is what saved all their lives, perhaps the lives of many more thousands, millions even. It was a terrible trade-off, however, for he would never again be able to look at Eva or their lives together in quite the same way as he had before the horrors of genocide changed them so dramatically.

So, one night, more than a month after Brawne’s disappearance, there was a commotion outside that distracted the guards. There were gunshots and people screaming. One of the guards left his post inside and went out to check on the commotion. That left Aaron alone with a single guard. He saw a rare opportunity and tried to overtake the soldier, but he was beaten to the floor with the butt-end of the guard’s rifle.

The next day, Mengele had Aaron’s father, Abraham, hauled out into the yard, and while Aaron and Eva, as well as most of the camp looked on, Mengele produced a powerful-looking knife with a jagged-edged blade. He swung the fisted weapon high above his head, spun around so that everyone could get a good look at it and said, “Let this be a lesson to those who would dare subvert my authority!”

The arm containing the knife descended in a vicious arc, the reflective blade glittering like a dark jewel in the mid-morning sun. Aaron screamed, “Nooo!” and tried to break free of his captors, only to be beaten to the ground by a ferocious rain of cudgel blows. Mengele drove the blade into Abraham’s abdomen just below the navel, brought his arm powerfully up, and split the man open like a gutted fish. Abraham’s innards spilled out onto the ground at his feet. His eyes, open wide in shock, stared at his murderer. Mengele yanked the knife out and backed away. The two guards holding the older man let go of him. Abraham fell to his knees, still staring at Mengele with his shocked expression, before keeling forward and landing face first in a pile of his own steaming intestines.

Now

Jeremiah’s voiced choked to a halt as copious tears coursed down his cheeks. He lifted his hand to his face, his fingers lightly and absently caressing the scar there, and I was keenly aware of the fact that he believed the weapon that had cut him was the same one that had disemboweled his grandfather all those years ago.

I was horrified, barely able to breathe. I had never heard such a barbaric story. It wasn’t the end. God, no. Far from it. I would soon discover that the worst part was yet to be told. I remained silent, staring at Jeremiah. The truth is, I was incapable of speech. I only wanted him to continue on with his dark tale. I needed to know how it ended. I suddenly felt that I was connected to it in some incomprehensible way; as though I, too, had been there, and had lived it, and had suffered the same cruelties and indignations. Perhaps my soul had somehow intersected with another, I reasoned, for it contained ambiguities that baffled me, and might be made clearer by the story’s outcome. Jeremiah began to talk again, and I sat listening, totally in his thrall.

Then

In the next few weeks, Germany fell to the allies. Leadership was in chaos. With news of the end, German troops were abandoning their posts all over Europe. Most of the guards laid down their arms and went home to their families. That left the remaining prisoners without much supervision. Some of the officers, not particularly loyal to the Third Reich, just disappeared. Other, more loyal ones, stayed behind in hopes of keeping order and continuing the genocide. Mengele was among this latter group. It was soon apparent that there would be no rekindling of the status quo. The war was over, and the Nazis had been soundly defeated. While the Russians were in the process of liberating the camps, Mengele made hasty preparations to flee. Aaron was keenly aware of his intentions, vowing to stop him if he could. Eva warned him, however, begging him to let it go, but he would not listen. By then, Mengele had abandoned Eva and had sent her back to her husband. He’d abandoned the muse, the dream of world domination, and told Aaron that no harm would come to him, that he was free to go.

Aaron had other ideas. In the days that followed, he assembled a small band of willing men and together they rose up against the remaining officers and men. There wasn’t much fight left in them, and the ones who were not killed, ran away. The fracas alerted Mengele, however, and he cleanly made his escape. When Aaron and his men reached Mengele’s quarters, they made a gruesome discovery. Lying on her back in Mengele’s bed, strapped spread-eagled and naked, was Brawne. It appeared that she had been dead for quite some time, for her body had already begun to decompose. The marks of torture were still evident on her body, however. There was no doubt as to how she’d died. Aaron and his men took her to a small field beside the compound, dug a hole, and put her in the ground.

Afterward, Aaron returned to Mengele’s quarters and took everything the monster left behind—personal items, mementoes, musical instruments, every scrap that he could lay his hands on—and he burned it all in one of the furnaces. The one thing he did not find a trace of, however, was the body of work, the music itself, that which he had been forced to compose beneath the brutal hand of The Angel of Death. He understood that it had probably been the only thing Mengele had managed to salvage in his haste to escape the very fate he had perpetrated on so many.

The killing had finally come to an end, and Aaron and Eva were free. Aaron vowed that it would forever be the end of the evil muse, as well. Eva could not share his sense of closure. She knew Mengele on a deeper and more profound level than did Aaron. She, after all, had been the beneficiary of a dark promise, that although was still thirty years from fruition, would always haunt her darkest dreams.

After the war, the Gideons were liberated and moved to New York. Once establishing themselves, Aaron joined an organization of Nazi-hunters who were all holocaust survivors, and he vowed to track Mengele to the ends of the earth. There was a tremendous effort amongst these survivors immediately following the war to bring the criminals to justice. A worldwide communication system was set up and many of them did get their due. Years passed, and there was no word of Mengele or his whereabouts. It was as if he had dropped off the ends of the earth. Even so, Aaron never stopped dreaming of the ways he would kill the monster if he ever got the chance. He wanted his own kind of justice.

Eva felt Mengele’s presence in ways no other human being ever could. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she would open her eyes and he would be there, his smile a frozen grimace on his face, his insistent body pressed against hers, his rancid breath on her cheek, his dark promise a cold and supernatural whisper on his arctic lips. She would bolt upright in bed with a stifled scream locked inside her, fearful of waking Aaron, and that he would...know. For the rest of the night, she would sit whimpering and hugging herself, praying that dawn would hasten its entry upon the world so that she might once again feel safe, that she might once again feel clean.

Aaron did know. He was no stranger to the despair that haunted his wife’s darkest hours, and those terrible times only strengthened his resolve.

In the meantime, Aaron continued to compose, trying as best he could to put the terrible memories of Auschwitz behind him. And, in time, he managed to get some of his music published.

They carved out a niche for themselves in New York society, entertaining at parties and upscale clubs. Aaron played and Eva sang. And, for the first time in their lives, the Gideons had found some semblance of happiness.

Then one day, more than three decades after the horrors of Auschwitz, their lives again began to unravel. Aaron received a communication that Mengele was alive and hiding out on a farm in Brazil. In spite of Eva’s insistent pleadings to let sleeping dogs lie, Aaron prepared to leave. He was gone for more than three weeks and there was no communication from him. Eva was nearly frantic with worry. Twenty-three days later, Aaron returned, drawn and haggard, his eyes haunted, and despite Eva’s pleadings to confide in her, he would not.

“For thirty years you have been the keeper of secrets,” he told his wife, with more than a touch of resentment in his voice. “Now, it is my turn.”

“It has been for our own good,” Eva said.

“For our own good?” Aaron railed. “Or for yours? Trust me, Eva, you do not want to know what happened in Brazil. You do not want to know what I did to the evil bastard who ruined our lives.”

Yes, Aaron now had his own secrets to keep, and Eva reluctantly resigned herself to his right to them even as she felt the dreaded promise growing inside her with a renewed sense of ambition.

One night, not more than three weeks after his return from Brazil, Aaron was awakened by the sound of music; beautiful melodies, haunting chord structures, and harmonics. He came awake in a sweat and went to the piano to write it down lest he forget it. He was instantly captivated, thoroughly enchanted. It was as if his mind was conjuring the music from the depths of some previously unknown creative fountain. He was grateful for the inspiration. Eva admonished him, however, cautioning him to be on guard.

“Nonsense!” Aaron chided. “Mengele is gone and I promise you, he will never again wield influence over our lives.” He smiled and took Eva in his arms; but Eva did not smile back, for she knew that Aaron’s promise was as empty as the cold void that haunted her darkest hours. She, after all, had her own promise to keep, and as she stood in the embrace of her husband’s arms and in the midst of his good intentions, she felt the dark flower of that promise blossoming at the very center of her being.

So, while Aaron worked tirelessly on the muse, writing it down, sorting it out, organizing it, Eva did her best to avoid him. He was too caught up in himself and his newfound fountain of creativity to see anything beyond his narrow focus. He’d discovered a renewed sense of life and his purpose in it. The joy in the compositions came from the knowledge that he was doing something good for those who had lost their way in the camps, that through this body of music—his music—their legacy would be indelibly fixed in the collective mind of man, never to be forgotten. That in the end, Azrael, the Angel of Death, could not erase their names from his book of death. They would live on in this glorious body of music that Aaron had entitled, The Holocaust Opera. He never suspected...no, that’s not entirely correct. He refused to believe that anything sinister could be at work, until it was far too late.

Now

“It was him, wasn’t it?” I said breathlessly. “Mengele? Somehow he’d come back through the music? Isn’t that right, Jeremiah?”

Jeremiah stared straight through me, as though I were made of gauze. He did not answer me, instead he simply continued on with the story.

Then

By the time Aaron suspected the truth, his obsession had become so powerful that he was nearly insane with it. When he finally came to his senses and realized that he’d been duped, that Eva had been right all along, he tried to abandon the project. He discovered that to end it all would have been to die. The music had captured his soul, but more than that, it had become his heroin and the only way to appease the reaper was to strap the band around his arm and stick the needle in the vein.

Now

“Jesus, Jeremiah,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with me, isn’t it? It’s what’s wrong with you. The music is infected with something evil. That’s why we’re sick.”

Jeremiah nodded absently, and even after all that had happened, all that he knew, I could see the sick longing in his eyes. It was in my heart, too. God, I knew I was right. I could feel those dark melodies pulling at me in that moment in an almost physical way, stirring in my gut like an edgy whirlwind, wanting to consume me, wanting to hurl me into the fire. I licked my lips, feeling the dread settle over me like a shroud as the final chapter of Jeremiah’s extraordinary tale began to unfold.

Then

One night, Aaron was startled awake by a sound. He had been dreaming dreadful dreams, of course, even after thirty years they were still with him, and would be, he supposed, for the rest of his life. That was not what woke him. That night, it seemed the nightmares were not confined to his head. They were there, in the bedroom with him.

Eva was not in bed beside him. She was kneeling over by the window, her head bowed, her eyes closed, and there was some sort of fleshy sac surrounding her; she was totally encased in it, like a transparent bladder filled with viscous fluid. Neither the bladder, nor the fluid within, distorted Eva’s features, however, for Aaron could see her nakedness clearly through its transparency. Her hands rested atop a large and distended belly, that of a pregnant woman, and, using both hands, she was pushing down on the belly as if attempting to expel something from within it. This is when Aaron realized without a shadow of a doubt that Josef Mengele was the architect of their lives. He had been wielding influence over them since Auschwitz. He had done something to Eva all those years ago, some magic or spell that Eva had never been able to speak of, perhaps because she had had no real knowledge of its particularities, and now, since Mengele’s death, the magic was hastening toward fruition.

Aaron sat up and called Eva’s name, but she made no sign that she’d heard him; she was in some sort of sleep-trance inside the fluid-filled sac, bent only on expelling the object that had distended her abdomen so dramatically.

Getting up out of bed, Aaron crossed the room toward her. He had to stop abruptly, for below Eva, the floor began to iris open like the lens of a camera. Eva and the fleshy cocoon that shrouded her did not fall through the opening, however; instead they were suspended above it in some incomprehensible way. Shadows began to move across the sac, though there wasn’t sufficient enough light in the room to cast them. Inside the iris, beneath her, the darkness was so pervasive that the mere word made a mockery of its own definition.

The source of the shadows became evident, for out of that infernal night a parade of atrocities began to unfurl. Aaron stood spellbound as emaciated souls writhed in flames and incinerated like doomed moths before his eyes. There were laughing men with grossly distorted features, their swastika-banded arms looped with human intestines; a child’s severed head hung from the rafters of some vast building, its milky eyes staring accusingly up at him.

Aaron suddenly realized what this all meant. These were the atrocities of the death camps, of course, atrocities he had helped to perpetrate by his own complacency, but worse, his own cowardice. Yes, he had suffered, he had sacrificed, but not nearly as profoundly as most. He had eaten, been allowed to bathe, had a warm bed to lie down in. He had written terrible music for a terrible man and had made only one perfunctory attempt at escape, an attempt that had resulted in the murder of his own father.

This was to be his punishment. He was convinced of that now. He was staring into the depths of Hell, but worse, Hell was staring back at him, beckoning for him to come and join in the celebration of eternal suffering.

Eva writhed inside the fluid-filled sac now, pushing down hard on her abdomen. Again, Aaron called her name, shouting this time. To no avail. She could not hear him. He believed that if he made a move toward her, he would fall into that pit of horrors beneath her and become consumed by it.

Above him, the ceiling seemed to shift. He glanced up and saw that it had disappeared altogether. In its place, the all-too-familiar winter skyline above the Auschwitz smokestacks came into view. It was a sight he had tried unsuccessfully all his life to forget. An electric-red sky glowed in the aftermath of a setting sun as diffused sienna-colored clouds drifted from the smokestacks and began to shape themselves into the vague form of a human head. From the head’s frontal lobes, giant ram’s horns protruded, spiraling back and ending in lethal points. Aaron fell back against the bed, an involuntary grunt of horror escaping him, for in that instant he recognized the form for what it was. The Angel of Death had somehow come back, seeking revenge. Dear God, it was true.

Eva was suspended between those two points; the hellish atrocities below and the terrifying form of Josef Mengele’s horned head above. Death and darkness were all around her. It was all around them. Hadn’t it always been? Wasn’t this the lesson of their lives?

“You should have listened to her,” Mengele said, as he stared down at Aaron with deeply hooded eyes. “You should have let sleeping dogs lie.”

Aaron squinted up at the apparition. “Would it have made any difference if I had?”

“When you found me in Brazil,” Mengele said, ignoring Aaron’s question, “did you not wonder why I came so willingly into your embrace of death?”

“You were old and weary, like me. I imagined you knew that someday I’d come, and that I’d be bearing gifts of retribution.”

“Yes, I always believed that. I also knew that it was past time for the games to begin afresh.”

“Games? Games? Haven’t you had enough?”

“Me?” Mengele gave a short laugh. “You waited your entire life for some word of my whereabouts. Don’t deny it. You could not wait to exact your pathetic revenge. I am not the only game player here.”

Aaron stared up at the intimidating form. “What do you want?”

“I’m surprised you have to ask.”

“Please?”

“I was sent here to erase the name of man from the earth. I was not given any particulars, only that I was to go forward in any way the task suited me, and regardless of the method used, I understood that failure was not an option.”

“You’re a lunatic!” Aaron said, dismissing the apparition with a flap of his hand.

“I was sent forth as flesh,” Mengele said, ignoring Aaron’s outburst. “So I assumed...”

“What did you assume?”

“Toward the end of the war, when I began to realize that time was short, and the opera would not be completed—”

“You used Eva,” Aaron said.

“I did not even know if I would survive, so, yes, instinct told me that Eva was my assurance that the promise would live on unto fulfillment. She was so beautiful, so vulnerable.”

“What about Brawne?”

“She could not give me what Eva could give me.”

“So you butchered her.”

“I did what was necessary.”

“You stole our lives,” Aaron said.

“I knew the moment I saw her—”

“What did you know?”

“That she had been sent to give birth to the promise. I did not have the talent to accomplish what needed to be done. This was clear. You did, but I understood that time was running out. So, there was only one thing I could do.”

Eva’s head rotated around inside the fleshy sac and she fixed her eyes coldly on Aaron, with so much burning hate. Even as her hands worked to expel the object that had distended her abdomen so dramatically, her hateful stare cut through Aaron’s heart like a lance.

“Dear God, what have we done?” Aaron said.

“It was you,” Eva shot back in rebuttal. “You and your cowardice. You did not even fight for me—”

“I...couldn’t,” Aaron said. “You knew what it was like there. Impossible for any of us to fight.”

“No, it was impossible to win. Never impossible to fight. That’s where you failed. That’s where we all failed. Josef took me and you never said a word. After a while, I began to enjoy flaunting it in your face. It did not have to happen, Aaron. You could have done something. Instead, you did nothing. Now it is time for both of us to pay the price.”

“He’s dead,” Aaron said to Eva in way of explanation, pointing up at the horned creature above them. “I don’t care what he says, or how much he tries to intimidate us, I killed him with my own two hands. What we see here...all of this...none of it can be real...it’s some sort of illusion. I killed him, I tell you.”

“No illusion,” the Mengele-thing said with a hearty laugh. “You made a monumental mistake in Brazil, you know. If you had just...killed me this might have all been prevented.”

Aaron stared up at the man-creature dumfounded. “What are you saying?” he asked, but even as he mouthed the words, the truth wrenched a gasp from his throat. “What was I supposed to do?” he said.

“What I wasn’t prepared for was the...manner in which you accomplished the act,” Mengele said. “I never would have guessed—”

“That I could be so creative?”

“No, I always knew you were creative.”

“What then?”

“That you could be so blatantly irreverent.”

“You deserved it, you bastard. What did you think, that I’d open my arms in approbation?”

“No, but I deserved better. You were treated well at Auschwitz. Don’t deny it.”

“It was a death camp, run by barbarians!”

“Visionaries!”

“You arrogant bastard. You stole...everything from us! What gave you the right?”

“We took what we wanted and you and your kind went like sheep to the slaughter. You were fools. Eva is right. You did not even fight us.”

“We will never make that mistake again.”

“It matters not, for the end is near.”

“What are you talking about? The end?”

“The end of everything. Do you not know what is happening to Eva?”

Aaron shook his head bewildered.

“Look.”

Aaron’s mouth gaped open as Eva’s efforts began to bear fruit.

“She is bringing forth The Angel of Death. Delivering the promise, Aaron. Have you not had to live all these years with it plaguing your lives?”

The revelation struck Aaron so forcefully that he nearly fell over. Of course. All those nights with Mengele, Eva returning with that terrible thing in her eyes, that knowledge or infestation that was both prophetic and terrible. Mengele had been whispering more than sweet nothings in her ear. He and his kind—whatever sort of magicians or monsters they were—had been feeding her something evil, something that would take thirty years to come to fruition.

Aaron heard Mengele laugh, even as the clouds that bore his ram’s-head image up began to dissipate. “Come back here!” Aaron commanded, as he took a step forward, reaching his hands out, trying to catch hold of one of the tatters in hopes of choking the last vestiges of life from the monster. Alas, it was too late. The Angel of Death had evaporated completely from the alien sky. These final words resounded in Aaron’s head as he went:

“I will have my Holocaust Opera, Aaron...He will be the best of all three of us. He will have your talent, my determination, and Eva’s beauty and compassion. The world will never know until it is too late. Raise him and do him no harm. For he alone will have the power to destroy everything he surveys, including those who would stand in his way.”

Eva was now screaming desperately and writhing like a lunatic inside the sac, which was now spinning like a whirlwind around her. The red sky sank toward the floor and was being fed into the swirling wind. The pit of atrocities rose up to meet the chaos, and the two melded together as one; like a rainbow inside a blender. Eva was lost in the violent turbulence.

“Nooo!” Aaron screamed as he made a desperate grab for his vanishing wife. His footing seemed uncharacteristically fluid, however, and his step was not sure. The room seemed to widen and spread around him like a swirl of black ink. Aaron fell into the swirl, no longer able to hold his balance, or his consciousness for that matter, and for a moment, just before everything went dark, he was certain that he, too, was being consumed by the chaos.

When he awoke, Eva was lying on the floor beside him, moaning. Her naked flesh was pale as marble and beaded with a fine lacing of sweat. A newborn child lay between her legs near the opening to her womb, the umbilical still attached. Aaron got to his hands and knees, staring in awe. He did not know if what he’d just experienced was a dream, a hallucination, or something worse. Whatever it had been, had brought forth a miracle. They now had a child to call their own. The particularities seemed inconsequential. On that night, Aaron made a vow that he would raise the child with goodness and mercy, teach him manners and grace, and with all of his will, he would sway him away from the darkness that had plagued their lives for so very long.

Now

Jeremiah stopped talking and hung his head as if shamed. My pent-up breath escaped me as if from a bellows. I had never been more astonished than I was at that moment. “Oh, God, no,” I said, totally and unequivocally shaken. “Jeremiah, I don’t believe it. You’re not the son of that monster. You’re not some...Angel of Death. I know you too well. You’re good, and you’re kind. That cruel man was none of those things.”

“It’s true,” Jeremiah said. “All of it. I swear.”

“But...how...? My God...how?”

Jeremiah pointed at the pile of papers at our feet. “It’s all in there,” he said. “You can read it for yourself if you want. It was their parting gift to me, a gift of darkness. Besides, I know I’m not Aaron’s son. I couldn’t be. Like all of the men in the concentration camps, he was castrated within the first few weeks of his captivity. Somehow, I grew inside my mother for more than thirty years, and it took Mengele’s death for me to be born. I know it sounds preposterous, but it’s true. I’m not sure what I am, Roxanne. Perhaps some kind of monster.”

“No, Jeremiah!” I said, kicking violently at the papers, scattering them across the floor. “You’re a man, a good and kind man. I don’t care what it says in that supposed confession. I don’t care what you’ve been made to believe.”

Jeremiah absently touched the scar on his face, and I could see a small spark of hope glisten in his eyes.

“What happened to Aaron’s muse, Jeremiah?”

“After that night, the infected music never again haunted him or his dreams. It was as if some unspoken bargain had been struck between him and Mengele on the night I was born. You see, Mengele didn’t need him anymore. Now he had me.”

“What about Brazil?” I said. “Why was that the catalyst that brought all of this to bear?”

“On May 31, 1985, nearly six years after I was born, West German police raided the home of one of Mengele’s lifelong friends. Several letters from Mengele were seized and it was learned that Mengele was living in Brazil. Brazilian authorities were notified and within a week they had identified the family that had harbored Mengele all those years. The police raided the home and were told that Mengele had been murdered in his bed in September of 1979, and that they had buried him in a lone grave on the property.

When police asked how he had been murdered, the family would not say, only that they had never seen such a sight. The body was exhumed. What they found has never been made public.”

“What did your father do to him, Jeremiah?”

For a long moment, Jeremiah struggled to speak. His mouth worked and tears began coursing down his cheeks. “With ice picks,” he said finally, the words choking in his throat. “One in each ear. Just like Professor Friedman. They were still there, buried in the corpse’s skull when the body was exhumed.”

“Oh...my...God!”

“I never knew any of this until I was in my last year of college,” Jeremiah said. “You see, by that time I’d already become infected with the virus. As much as my parents tried to steer me in directions other than music, they couldn’t. The music was in me from the time of my conception, and it will always be in me. You see, Roxanne, it is a virus. I’ve no doubt of that now. Once it gets inside you, you can’t get it out. Like my father, in the beginning, I had no idea. I thought it was a gift and so did my professors. When Papa and Mama found out what I’d been doing, what I’d been composing, they nearly went mad. It was only then that I finally heard the true story of their ordeal in the death camps. I’d known they were holocaust survivors, I just hadn’t been told the details of their ordeal until then. Somehow, they thought that if they protected me from the truth, it would all just go away. I was so angry at them for the deception that I left, and it was weeks before I sorted it all out in my mind and decided to come back home and tell them that I was sorry. By then it was too late. I found them upstairs like that. I found their written confession. When I read it, and learned the circumstances of my birth, I thought I’d go crazy.

“They said to leave the place in darkness, to lock it up after I left and to never return. That I would be safe as long as Mengele didn’t know they were dead.”

“Maybe they didn’t do it to themselves, Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah stared at me with wet eyes. “What do you mean? Of course they did. They left the confession.”

“Think about it, Jeremiah. Think about all the stuff you just told me. Your father was determined to destroy Mengele and he would have done anything. Maybe your parents were on the verge of warning the world of what might happen. We know for a fact that Friedman had figured it out. Maybe Friedman didn’t kill himself either.”

Jeremiah stared at me, and I could tell that I was getting through to him. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said: It is a virus, Roxanne. Once it gets inside you, you can’t get it out.

Suddenly, I thought I understood what Mengele’s plan had been all along. His intention was for the entire world to become infected with whatever hidden evil lay buried inside the music. He’d tried unsuccessfully to work his evil magic with Aaron and Eva Gideon and when he knew he would fail, he worked some kind of Nazi magic and brought a child into the world, pre-programmed to do his terrible bidding for him. Jeremiah was good. Somehow, Mengele had failed. God, I wanted so much to believe that.

The mathematics is skewed. The compositions are tainted with something.

Dear God, Mengele—wherever he had come from, whatever he was—wanted mass suicide, mass hysteria. It would be his ultimate and parting gift to the world. I stood up quickly, adrenalin pumping through my bloodstream as the truth slammed home.

It is a virus, Roxanne. Once it gets inside you, you can’t get it out.

Jeremiah stood up and I lunged at him, pounding my fists against his chest, sobbing. “You bastard,” I said. “You knew, and yet you allowed me to come into your world. You allowed me to fall in love with you, you son of a bitch!” Jeremiah dropped his hands to his sides and made no attempt to fight back, or to stop me for that matter. He stared straight ahead as I beat on his chest, his eyes overflowing with tears as they slid down his cheeks. Finally, when I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I stopped and fell against him as convulsive sobs wracked my body.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I should have resisted you. I should have sent you away. But I was weak, and alone. I thought that maybe things would get better if I let someone into my life. I was wrong. You can go now, if you want.”

“Is that it?” I asked, pushing roughly away from Jeremiah. “You can go now? After everything I know? After all we’ve been through together? You can go now?”

“It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“No! It’s not what I want. I don’t care who you are, or where you came from. I love you, Jeremiah.” I searched his eyes, and I saw something in them that gave me hope. Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps he was the greatest magician or the most cunning deceiver in the world, but I wanted to believe that he had the power to resist Mengele’s persuasions. God, I wanted so much to believe.

I knew right then and there that if we were going to get out of this terrible mess alive, I would have to be strong. I could not afford any more tears or energy-burning outbursts.

“Jeremiah, how did Professor Friedman get a copy of your compositions?”

Jeremiah stared at me in bewilderment.

“Come on,” I said. “We don’t have time to sit around here feeling sorry for ourselves. Tell me how he got them.”

“I don’t know,” Jeremiah said. “We made some while I was still at school, but I took them all back when I left. Unless...”

“Unless what, Jeremiah?”

“Unless he gave it to him.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “They knew each other? Do you think Mengele saw to it that Friedman got a copy?” I was pacing the floor in front of Jeremiah now, running my hands through my hair trying to fit the pieces of the zaniest jigsaw puzzle in the world together. “We have got to stop them from playing that tape on the radio. Do you understand?”

“The opera’s not finished,” Jeremiah said.

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see? Even if you don’t finish it, even if Mengele’s sick vision never comes to its full potential, there’s enough evil in those songs to cause a catastrophe. In a city this size, millions could go berserk and commit suicide, or kill each other.”

I went for the phone and grabbed it up, dialing 911. “I need to talk to someone at the police,” I told the man on the other end.

“What does this concern?” the voice asked.

“It concerns the death of a Doctor Friedman last night and a tape that was found near him. They don’t have to play it on the radio. I know who the composer is.”

“Do you now, Miss Templeton,” the soothing voice answered and I froze in terror.

“Who is this?” I asked through numb lips, but I thought I knew.

“It is your friend from the zoo. The executioner. You remember me, don’t you, Miss Templeton? By the way, how is the dear little kitten, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I breathed. “How did you know—?”

“Where my son is concerned I, know everything.”

“He’s not yours, you sick fuck!”

“Ah, but he is. Nothing you do or say will ever change that.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’m upstairs playing with the dead. We’re preparing to have a little party in preparation for the completion of our fine opera, and the debut of some of its songs on the greater metropolitan airways. The opera cannot be finished without its esteemed composer, so, if you don’t mind, I would appreciate you bringing my son to me now.”

I threw the phone away with revulsion and looked at Jeremiah. His eyes were round and wet and filled with terror. “He got through, didn’t he?”

I nodded as tears of terror slid down my cheeks.

“I never should have opened that door.”

“Oh, Christ, Jeremiah,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll go to the police and tell them the story and beg them not to play the tape.”

Jeremiah nodded earnestly, looking as though he was relieved that someone had thought of this simple solution.

“What time is it?” I asked, noticing through the window that it was nearly dark outside.

Jeremiah looked at his watch. “It’s almost quarter to five.”

I lunged for the door, grabbed the doorknob, turned, and pushed, but the door would not move. I pushed all my weight against it and still it did not budge. I screamed in frustration.

“Let me try,” Jeremiah said. I moved aside as he slammed his weight against it. It still did not open. He turned and grabbed up a chair, and in a rage smashed it against the basement window behind the sofa. The chair’s legs hit the glass and shattered into splinters. The glass remained intact.

“Oh, God,” I said. “It’s him. He’s not going to let us leave.”

“There’s only one thing we can do,” said Jeremiah.

“What?”

“We have to give him what he wants.”

That’s when Jeremiah’s eyes began to change. It was just a subtle change, like a calm body of water that has suddenly been rippled by a passing squall. My body stiffened as I watched the change, knowing beyond a doubt now that something supernatural did lurk behind Jeremiah’s façade of complexities. I began backing away, moving my head slowly from side to side. “We can’t,” I said.

“We must,” Jeremiah said, coming forward and taking hold of my wrist. “It’s the only way we’ll get out of here alive.”

“At what cost, Jeremiah? Haven’t enough people died by that butcher’s hand?”

Jeremiah put the index finger of his other hand vertically against his lips to shush me, and I knew that he was right, that the only chance we had of escaping this nightmare was to make Mengele believe that we would give him what he wanted. Jeremiah let go of my wrist and picked the phone up off the floor putting it to his ear. “Are you still there?” he said. He nodded a couple of times and said no more. He laid the phone back in its cradle and went to the door, motioning for me to follow.

* * * *

It opened this time, only instead of turning left toward the outside, Jeremiah turned right toward the stairs. I followed him, the urge to bolt strong in me. I was just kidding myself. I knew the door wouldn’t open. We were in this for the long haul, like it or not. So I followed behind Jeremiah, the dread growing in me like a tumor. At the end of the corridor Jeremiah stopped as we both stared at the door to apartment #2. Without touching it, the door began to creak slowly open.

From somewhere beyond, music played.

Jeremiah stepped over the threshold and into the darkened kitchen, halting to accustom his eyes before he began again, a cautious step at a time. I followed, feeling numb, absolutely certain that each breath I took would be my last. At the archway to the living room, Jeremiah halted again. There was a murmur of voices from within, almost whispered, delicate and cadenced, like a television with the volume on low. Behind the cadenced voices the music played on, poignant, gorgeous, the sound of angels weeping. I began to cry, for I recognized the melody as one of Jeremiah’s compositions.

Jeremiah stepped into the room and I followed, moving to his left and gripping his arm tightly. I was not sure that I wanted to witness whatever atrocities Mengele was offering up even as my wet eyes remained wide open in inquiry. At first, I saw nothing, but as my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, the room began to give up its secrets.

Jeremiah gasped and took a step back. I dropped my grip on his arm and took another step forward, squinting to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I was. There could be no mistake. Aaron and Eva Gideon were alive. Hours ago, they had been dead, both sitting at the piano with their blackened heads bowed, knitting needles protruding from their ears. I wasn’t really surprised. Since coming to New York and meeting up with Jeremiah, my life had been filled with illusions. Why should this moment be any different? The illusion could be that they were still dead, I supposed, not alive, as they now appeared, and this intimation of life might well be the deception. Or perhaps they had never been dead at all and what I’d seen then was the illusion. Ah well, there wasn’t much point in further speculation. I would know the truth, sooner than later. I was suddenly quite sure of that.

The Gideons were sitting side by side on a sofa against the far wall, staring toward me and their son. A burning candle on the coffee table illuminated their features in ghostly relief while casting their shadows against the wall behind them like dark monsters. Back to at the piano, playing Jeremiah’s composition sat a man I recognized immediately, even from behind; the gray hair, the impeccable clothing, the white gloves. There could be no mistake. The executioner had come calling. He did not turn to greet us, just kept playing that maddeningly beautiful song.

“Come,” Aaron Gideon said, motioning me forward, “and bring our son with you.” I turned and saw the frozen look on Jeremiah’s face. I took his hand and pulled. His feet reluctantly came unglued from the floor as he followed along, not for a moment taking his astonished eyes off his parents. The song played on. I made sure to skirt the piano widely, not wanting to come within reaching distance of the executioner and his intentions, whatever they might be.

“It’s good to see you,” Aaron said as we approached. I noticed that they were dressed as they had been earlier: Aaron in his black tuxedo, Eva in her white evening gown. Both garments were immaculate now, clean and impossibly unruffled. Hours earlier, draped on corpses, they had been moldy and tattered.

“What is this?” Jeremiah said, the incredulity harsh in his voice. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“We’ve come back,” Aaron said.

“Back?” Jeremiah echoed. “How? Why?”

“It was Josef,” Eva replied. “He found out about us and brought us back.” Eva smiled at her son, but there was nothing pretty or sincere in the gesture. It was a forced smile, that of a mannequin, as though there was a hand in her head shaping it. Jeremiah sensed the wrongness of it too, I could tell by his hesitation.

“You’re not real,” he said. “You think you can fool me, but you can’t.”

“Yes, darling, we’re real,” Eva said, the disconcerting smile frozen on her face. “I don’t know how or why, but we are. We’ve just had a long sleep, that’s all.”

“Sleep?” Jeremiah said, his voice sharp with amazement. “Is that what you call it? Sleep? You were dead. You killed yourselves like cowards, and then you wouldn’t allow me to tell the world, or even bury you!”

“We couldn’t.”

“Is that monster my father?” Jeremiah asked, pointing toward Mengele, who was still sitting coolly behind the piano playing the gorgeously impassioned melody. “Is all of that shit you wrote and left me the truth?”

“Yes, he is the father,” Eva said. “It is all true.”

“The father?” Jeremiah asked. “Is he my father?”

“He is the father of darkness,” Aaron said. “The Angel of Death.”

“In him we all have a father,” Eva added.

“No,” Jeremiah said, backing away. “This isn’t right. You’re not my parents. Let’s get out of here, Roxanne. This is bullshit.”

We turned away from the Gideons with their Botox smiles and headed back toward the archway. The executioner rose slowly from the piano stool. The music had stopped, but in its wake other sounds were coming into play: weeping children, the roaring of immense furnaces, gruff orders barked in German, barking dogs, the distant sound of a high-pitched train whistle. Before we could take more than two steps, the light from the single candle behind us brightened, throwing our shadows forward onto the archway opening as if it were now a movie screen and we were to be the night’s entertainment. I soon realized, however, that there was no screen there. The archway had become a swirl of black ink and the kitchen beyond had completely disappeared. There were no walls. There was no floor with its colorful linoleum, no cupboards to rifle through or windows to look out of. There was only a swirling blackness that seemed to be shaping our shadows into images of death and despair. The archway had become a doorway into the past—blackened smokestacks delivered the ashes of the cremated into an eerie alien sky. There were rows of wooden barracks with lines of the colorfully-clad condemned, shivering with cold, the terror at the realization of their fates plainly visible on their faces. There was a train station with a rag-tag band playing a discordant melody as a man that could only be Josef Mengele perused a line of prisoners, separating them with his riding crop: death to the left, life to the right. Foamy-mouthed German Shepherd dogs with wild red yes pulled against their leads as handlers struggled to hold them back.

The floor beneath my feet suddenly seemed insubstantial. I had stopped, as had Jeremiah, to witness the atrocities through the doorway beyond, but the floor seemed to be tipping us toward the archway, wanting to deliver us into that terrible place and time.

“You must finish the opera,” Mengele said to Jeremiah. He was standing between us and the piano, gesturing for Jeremiah to sit down and play. “Come. It shouldn’t take long.”

“No! Never!” Jeremiah said. “I will not do your dirty work for you.”

“You must. You are the only one left with the talent. It is the reason you were brought upon this world.”

“Then if I die, there will be no one left,” said Jeremiah, and I could hear the revelation in his voice. I wanted to scream, for I suspected what Jeremiah was about to do. I was helpless to aid him. I was sliding toward that improbable opening into Hell. Although Jeremiah stood on the tilting floor with me, he didn’t seem to be affected by its actions. I reached out and tried to grab hold of him, but it was too late, I was going down and he was moving in the opposite direction, toward the piano. I did scream then, loud and long.

My feet went out from under me and I landed on my back, cutting off the scream and knocking the wind from my lungs. My fingers scratched for purchase, I dug my heels in, trying to hold myself back. Beyond the doorway, the scene had changed. Now, it was similar to the images in Jeremiah’s story; half-human creatures combusted and writhed; there were grinning Nazis with distorted features, ropes of steaming intestines looped around their bodies. The heads of children hung from the rafters of a vast wood-frame building, their milky eyes staring in shock.

“Enough!” Jeremiah screamed and the shifting floor halted and tilted slightly back. “I will give you what you want. Just leave her alone.”

“Very well,” the executioner said.

I was scratching like mad at the elevated floor, trying desperately not to slip into the nightmare world beyond the archway.

“No, Jeremiah,” I screamed. “Don’t give that bastard anything. He thinks he’s a god, but he’s nothing but a piece of shit.”

Mengele’s head snapped around unnaturally and his eyes, now red and glowing, drilled through me. Horns began growing from his frontal lobes. “Look,” he said, pointing at the screen, smiling his dreadful yellow smile. “Tell me if you like what you see.”

The image beyond the door had changed for a third time. I saw the woman who had been haunting my dreams of late, beaten, lacerated, and cowering in a corner, her arms outstretched in supplication. Then I saw a room with an iron bed. I saw the woman strapped spread-eagled to that bed, naked, so terribly vulnerable. She was beautiful, but familiar somehow. Beneath her beauty, something dreadful lurked, some morbid knowledge or resignation.

Oh, my God, I’m dreaming this, I thought, as a small blossom of suspicion began to open in my mind.

“I can make that real for you,” Mengele said to me, pointing at the woman beyond. “Go if you like! She’s been waiting for your return.” He turned back toward Jeremiah. “Do you want to save her?” he said. “You can, you know. Just sit down and play.”

Jeremiah looked from me to the anguished woman beyond the doorway, then back at me, and I saw grim enlightenment come over his face. “Who is she?” he said, his voice full of suspicion.

“Look closer. You’ll see.”

Jeremiah squinted at the screen and I saw his face collapse into recognition. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“Ah, but it is,” Mengele said. “You don’t really think she came into your life by accident, do you? Come, my boy. If you do, you’re more naïve than I thought. I sent her to you. Don’t you see? She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and sent her to you. Your enthusiasm was flagging. I thought you needed someone to spur you on. It worked. She has become your greatest champion. Now play!” he commanded. “Or so help me God she will be forever lost beyond the doorway.”

I began to feel all hot and panicky as the executioner’s words echoed in my head. She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and sent her to you. Was he speaking of me? He couldn’t be. Images that were not my own began shaping themselves in my psyche, and I realized that I knew the atrocities of the holocaust on a more intimate level than I had ever wanted to admit to myself. Yes, I’d gone time and time again to the library in search of answers and had convinced myself that it was out of some morbid curiosity; an attempt to understand what had happened there in hopes of using my knowledge to help Jeremiah get beyond his pain. Now I could see that it was my own pain that needed to be rescinded.

Finally, I began to understand everything. The anguished souls beyond the door existed within the executioner. They were all ghosts of the creatures he’d devoured. They lived in some kind of no-man’s-land, a purgatory between flesh and death, suffering eternally, begging to be released. As long as the executioner lived, they would forever be condemned to that place of lost souls.

Was I one of the devoured? Was I one of the executioner’s lost souls? If so, then what of the memories of my family, my upbringing in Iowa, my church choir, my band? Was it all a fiction, a sham? I realized in that moment that I hadn’t called my family once since coming to New York. Nor had they been in touch with me. Why not? Were we that insensitive? Did they even exist?

I looked back through the doorway, at the spread-eagled woman on the bed. She was once mine, a plaything. I resurrected her and sent her to you.

The truth struck me like a lance. Oh, God, it was me. I was the woman in the corner, the ghost in my dreams, the presence that haunted my sleeping and waking hours.

As I gazed at the woman’s anguished features, I realized that I was there in that room looking through her eyes. The executioner moved towards me, at first just a ghost, a shadow, his features solidifying as he approached. I was in the corner cowering from his abuses. He grabbed my arm, yanking me to my feet and threw me onto the bed, binding my limbs roughly to the posts with abrasive cord. “Josef, please,” I begged in a voice I did not recognize, in a language I did not know. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because it has been written by a force far greater than us all. It is something you cannot understand. Now you must die.”

I was suddenly lost between two worlds, no longer in apartment #2, nor was I totally immersed in the world of horrors beyond the door. My wrists and ankles were invisibly bound to the elevated floor. I could not move. From across the chasm of time, I saw a legion of the devoured moving sluggishly toward the doorway, their eyes beacons, all of them bright with bloodlust. I twisted around and saw Jeremiah’s parents moving toward me in the opposite direction. Now they were dead, there was no question about it. Their milky eyes stared, knitting needles protruded from their ears. They, too, were of Mengele’s flock; the devoured, the undead? There was no question about it. Their arms reached toward him in supplication; please, they were saying, let us go. Give us peace.

My head snapped around and I gazed down at my body in horror, realizing I was naked and spread-eagled. I was the woman beyond the doorway, the maven of my darkest dreams. The executioner stood over me with his back to the doorway, grinning down at my vulnerability, the ram’s horns fully formed now, his face a glistening lantern, a serrated-edged hunting knife fisted tightly between both hands.

“Who is she?” I demanded. “Who am I?”

“Brawne,” the executioner said simply. “Your name was Brawne. I ended your life when it was clear that you could not give me what I wanted.”

“I gave you everything,” I told Mengele, as someone else’s memories again flooded through me like ice water. I tried to cast them out, but it was no use, they would not go. I was slipping further and further into that world of nightmares beyond the door.

“Everything but what I needed,” Mengele replied. He pointed toward Jeremiah, who was now just a misty fiction at the very fringes of my vision. “You see, I needed a prodigy, an heir. You were an obedient mistress, true, but that was all you were. When I met Eva...well, everything changed. I knew then that she would be the one who would usher in the promise. I should have died at Auschwitz, but I managed to escape, living a tortured existence away from my purpose, my true destiny. It was a mistake, but I knew that someday Aaron would come. When he did, he made a tragic error, you see, he tried to deafen me to the muse.” Mengele threw his massive horn-studded head back and howled with insane laughter. “He only strengthened my resolve. When he ended my mortality, that is when I began to live, and it is when Jeremiah began to grow inside of Eva. He was to be the perfect prodigy, but as he grew, he became disobedient. When one of his professors got nosy and began to suspect, well, that is when I brought you back and sent you to him.”

“What about my family in Iowa? My band? My life? Was it all a lie?”

The executioner grinned and the skin of his face now seemed stretched to capacity against his skull bones, so luminescent that it glistened brightly above me like a fluorescent lamp, the red lanterns of his eyes nearly scalding me. “Alas, yes,” he said. “This is not about you and your nothing life. This is about Jeremiah and a promise that must be kept.”

I struggled with my invisible bonds, screaming in frustration. “Can’t you see that the dream is dead, you pathetic creature! It’s over!”

“No, you are wrong,” Mengele whispered, shaping his dreadful, yellow smile “It is just beginning. Your life here in New York. It has been good, has it not?”

“I want more of it!” I screamed. “I want to be with Jeremiah.”

“You shall have your wish,” the executioner said. “Jeremiah only has to make it real.”

“Leave her alone!” Jeremiah screamed.

“I will not harm her, boy,” Mengele said. “Just do as you’re told.”

I twisted my head around and looked at Jeremiah. Now, he seemed much more substantive than he had just moments ago. I felt that something had happened; perhaps some delicate balance had tipped slightly back in our favor. Then I realized what it was. It was Jeremiah’s anger at being called boy. His face had gone crimson with rage. The visions beyond the door were strengthening, as well. The legions of the devoured were marching toward the gateway, toward Mengele’s back, the bloodlust vivid in their eyes. They somehow sensed that their executioner was close at hand. The gateway was opening, and if it closed before they could make it through, perhaps it would stay forever closed, thus ending their only chance to exact revenge for his sins and to rest finally in the everlasting.

Jeremiah was sitting down at the piano, his jaw set grimly.

“There you are, boy,” Mengele said with relish. “Do what you were sent here to do. Finish the opera.”

“Fuck you,” Jeremiah said, and without further ado his fingers came down violently onto the piano keys. From the very first chord, I instinctively knew what he was about to do. I knew what I had to do. Jeremiah’s resolve to write something good and meaningful, other than what he had been compelled to do by the forces of evil had been strong in him and had won out long ago, but he had kept it a secret, afraid that the executioner would find his way into his mind and destroy the inspiration. But I knew. God, I recognized it immediately. It was the song he’d been playing the night I’d gazed through the window and had seen him encased in that awful fleshy sac. Somehow, the lyrics had gone into me and had been hiding there ever since, waiting for this moment to spring forth.

The executioner, still standing over me, sensed that something not of his making was about to transpire. I saw the knowledge in his cruel eyes in the moment before he raised both his arms above his head, the hunting knife tightly fisted and poised viciously. From the archway behind him stood the devoured, writhing at the gates, desperate to reach their executioner, eager to exact their revenge, so close now that I could almost touch them, but still trapped in the past.

I was shaking with rage and terror, understanding that my life was about to end. It did not matter. Mengele had been right about one thing, at least. This was not about me. It was about all of the souls that had been lost for so long in the shadows. My life, this life, was not real. It never had been and it probably never would be. As the knife began its descent, Jeremiah played, and I opened my mouth and sang into the darkness, defiantly belting out the lyrics to a song that I instinctively knew. I sang directly into the monster’s face, knowing that the only thing that mattered in that moment was the music and those it could set free:

There’ll be no more offerings, no more sacrificial lambs,

There’ll be no more obedience, no atonement, no negotiations, decrying the unfairness of,

Generations dying in the ovens of hatred,

Abraham’s deference to a god gone mad, a deity of submission,

Is long passed,

From depths of darkness’ void, the anguished voices shall be heard,

And rise triumphant to take a final stand,

For mercy shall not be begged and we will live in honor, not favor,

And never again ask, as we have in ages past,

Why we were victims of some madman’s dream,

Not in this life, nor the lives that await beyond the door, not ever, ever again...

Amen.

As the final notes of the song rang out, the writhing legions of lost souls beyond the door broke through. I knew that the song—Jeremiah’s and my song—had been the catalyst necessary for the transformation. The executioner’s knife never finished its descent. The ram-thing that had once been Josef Mengele was devoured in a whirlwind of angry ectoplasm and he did not go quietly, for the roar of his disapproval as he was swept away by the tide, was deafening, shaking the rafters above me. I twisted my head around in time to see Aaron and Eva Gideon crumble into dust. The air around me twisted and whirled, picking up the combined ashes of the executioner, the Gideons and all the lost souls that had managed to make it through the doorway. The air was hot and thick and swirling with ash.

I was no longer naked nor bound to the floor. I scratched my way to my feet amid the ashes of the dead and ran to meet Jeremiah as he rose from the piano bench. I latched onto him and squeezed for all I was worth, so afraid that he would not feel me, terrified that I was not real, that any second I, too, would crumble to ashes and be forgotten as had so many souls throughout mankind’s brutal history. Jeremiah hugged me back, affirming my solidity. We stood holding each other, crying.

The hot ashes were quickly cooling now, and condensing, swirling in the room like fine mist.

Some sort of transformation was in play. The ashy mist seemed to be eroding the room’s features, and particles of it had morphed into ice crystals. Beyond the archway, however, the terrible past had disappeared and the kitchen had come back into focus, inviting in its stark reality. At the very end was the door, and waiting beyond it, freedom.

There was no time now to ponder the profundities of what had happened here. I understood that we needed to get out of the building fast. I took Jeremiah’s hand and together we ran beneath the archway and through the kitchen to the door. We stopped for one final look back, however, at the turmoil we’d left behind. The cold fog and ice particles that moments ago had been the ashes of the condemned were being whipped into an angry cyclone. The cyclone was in the process of picking things up—dust particles, loose papers, small solid objects—now, all stirring into the whirlwind, strengthening the maelstrom by degrees. The cold was deepening as well. My teeth were literally chattering together.

Jeremiah slammed open the door and we bolted down the hallway, then the stairs, taking them in bounds, joyous in our triumph of freedom. From behind us came the sounds of angry whispers that seemed to be gaining in decibels as the force behind them grew in intensity. Throwing the door open to the outside, we ran out into the night.

Above us, windows began to blow out, jagged shards of glass and splintered sash works rained down onto the sidewalk and into the street. As quickly as the debris was being thrown out of the building, it was being picked up and fed back into the ever-increasing cyclone. I felt my body and perhaps even my soul being drawn back into it. I fought its influence, knowing that now I possessed the power to do so.

The conspiratorial voices from within the building were strengthening along with the intensity of the maelstrom, growing to an angry crescendo—some sounding like animals, others strangely human.

Jeremiah took me by the hand and together we moved quickly out of harm’s way. A block or so down, we stopped and looked back. The entire building had become a hive of noise and oddly diffused light. Now fire had become a part of the mix—angry licks of it were shooting from windows and skylights, catching timbers and siding on fire even as the building began to collapse in on itself.

There were no neighbors exiting the nearby buildings to see what all the commotion was about. There were no curious pedestrians standing in the streets gazing in awe at the tumult. As far as I knew, no fire or police departments had been summoned. I was not surprised that Jeremiah and I were the lone witnesses to this oddly contrived drama. It was our battle, after all. Others could not see it because they had not lived it. Perhaps later, after it was over, they would discover the building’s loss, comb the ashes, and come to some learned and logical conclusion as to its cause. They would just skim the surface, of course, as unwilling to see the truth beneath the chaos as twentieth-century man had been to find the root cause of the holocaust.

Several blocks down, the noise finally abated, but now, a new sound was coming into play: music.

“Oh, God,” I said. “What time is it?” Jeremiah looked at his watch and confirmed my suspicions. It was 6:00 PM and it seemed that from every building we passed along the way came the magnificent sounds of symphony. Its joyous sound literally filled the air. Jeremiah and I recognized it immediately, of course: it was The Holocaust Opera, our very own souls singing the praises of liberation for a nation no longer shackled to its tragic past. The metropolitan airways had taken to the opera, it seemed, like birds take to wing. People were now passing us along the way and there was song on their lips and hope in their eyes. I saw no suicides, no mass hysteria, and no chaos.

If I was to believe all that had happened, then I would have to accept that I had been a simple victim of chance, that through some twisted sleight of hand the soul of a murdered innocent had become bound to this person I call self. If I was to believe all that had happened, then I would have to accept that Jeremiah was the son of a dark angel sent here by forces beyond my understanding to erase the name of man from the book of life. I nearly laughed at the absurdity of it. Who would ever believe such claims? I believed. I knew. So did Jeremiah. We were not of this place. This was an incontestable truth. We were both freaks, interlopers in a world gone slightly off center, a world, well, a world full of...freaks. Perhaps we weren’t so alone after all. The thought comforted me.

The air filled suddenly with falling snowflakes, a city-wide cleansing of white, fitting in its purity. Tears streamed down Jeremiah’s cheeks as he gazed up into the falling snow.

“We should go,” he said, and I did not press him for explanations as to where. Perhaps I would later, but not now. This moment was ours to savor and it was enough for me just to be at his side. I could barely see him through the snowy air. I knew he was there. I could feel him, solid and warm against my body. I brushed a hand across his cheek and kissed him tenderly on the mouth.

He continued to stare toward the heavens. I looked up, too, at the falling flakes, each an individual and complex pinwheel of white in a sea of infinity, all destined to be a part of the whole, steadfast, everything in its place, as it should be. I understood this for the first time, and despite the madness that had plagued our lives for so long, everything seemed suddenly okay. Not perfect, but okay. We had our lives, fragile as they might be; and in a world so filled with loss and rage, fear and hate, there was hope. That, at least, was something to be thankful for.

About the Author:

Mark Edward Hall lives in Richmond, Maine with his wife, Sheila. He is currently at work on a new book.

Also by Mark Edward Hall:

The Haunting of Sam Cabot

by Mark Edward Hall

eBook ISBN: 9781615720316

Print ISBN: 9781615720309

Horror, Psychological

Novella of 28,436 words

 

There are places that hold evil, houses so vile, so tainted, that people refuse to live in them. Farnham House is one of those places. Once an inn, this majestic old New England manor house is back on the market, and the price is very reasonable. Sam Cabot is a man tired of moving. Now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life in the country with his wife and young son. Little does he know that he will soon begin a long, slow descent into madness and that he will spend his summer living with dead things.

The Lost Village

by Mark Edward Hall

eBook ISBN: 9781615721856

Print ISBN: 9781615721863

Horror, Vampire

Novel of 256,448 words

 

Sarah Jameson Landry and her five year old daughter, Annabelle, haunted by the same insistent voice, embark on a reluctant journey to find their ancestral home. They discover a strange little village that somehow went adrift from the rest of the world. They uncover a horrifying legacy of missing children dating back hundreds of years, and learn the terrible secrets of their own ancestral past.

Michael Bannon, haunted by his own demons has come to James Village in search of anonymity. He finds distance cannot erase the terrible mistakes of the past. He discovers also that he is connected to Sarah and Annabelle. They form an alliance with a small group of friends and villagers, who are tired of being afraid, and resign themselves to the task of seeking the. Together they embark on a terrifying quest to destroy the evil that lies at the center of all their lives.

Also from Damnation Books:

The Prodigy: Author’s New Revised Edition

by Noel Hynd

eBook ISBN: 9781615720224

Print ISBN: 9781615720217

Thriller, Ghost

Novel of 89,807 words

 

Rolf Geiger is a talented young pianist; a handsome and charismatic prodigy of classical music, deeply in love with a beautiful woman. But he is also haunted by the ghost of his late mentor, Isador Rabinowitz, who is as angry and driven as he was in life.

On the eve of the greatest performance of his life, he must find a way to exorcise his fears and his spirit. If Rabinowitz prevails, Geiger will be ruined: his life, his career, his relationship, his sanity. And all the while, the life of his beloved Diana hangs in the balance. What truly is the cost of great genius?