Astronomy(18)

Leder had the box. He produced it for them, wrapped in a blood-soaked kerchief.

Susan picked the cloth apart, just enough to see a note scribbled in a barely legible hand.

“This note is from Bülle?” She tried to make it out, but the note wasn’t in German. “What does it say?”

“It is in Phrygian. He is begging my forgiveness for what he did to himself. The note says, ‘I cannot bear to read anymore.’ ”

“You mean—Oh, Jesus.” Susan set the box down. She looked for someplace to wipe her hands.

“I have never had the courage to open the box. You may take it with you if you wish.”

“We may come back for it at a later date,” Shrieve suggested with a polite smile.

Leder eyed the door. “Do you hear anything?”

“I know who’s out there. American soldiers are out there. You’re plenty safe.”

Leder listened, but whatever had caught his ear was gone.

“Without Bülle,” he continued, “we could never finish the project. We might unleash the forces of the Necronomicon, but we could never control them without his insights. And then, when Schlegel, when he—” Leder became emotional. He turned his face away. His shoulders went up and down. He made a sighing sound. “I found myself alone, you see. I told them they were unleashing forces they could not control. But of course, with the Russians advancing on Berlin, and the situation in the Ardennes collapsing, they were so desperate for results. In the end, they took what we had completed and set up an experimental station in the Franconian Wald. Some observatory on a lake in the backcountry there. I don’t know the name. I was ordered to assist in the operation of the plant, but I could bear no more contact with the powers of that hideous book.

“The night of the Grand Experiment—that awful night—I got a call as I was sitting down to supper. This young man, he sounded like a graduate student, berated me for not being present at the moment of Germany’s triumph over the Allies.

“Almost incidentally, he demanded to know the specific masses and energy potentials for each of the Great Old Ones, as named in the Necronomicon. I was eating my dinner, and I did not care for his tone, so I told him that I did not have that information and that the man who did had killed himself a few weeks earlier.”

“You were very masterful, Carl.”

“That’s telling him,” Bogen chimed in.

“Yes. Thank you. The young man swore at me and told me I would be visited by Major Malmagden’s personal guard.”

“Malmagden? Krzysztof Malmagden?” Susan felt her stomach flip, the way it did whenever she made a parachute drop.

Leder frowned. “Why yes. Do you know of Major Malmagden?”

“Just go on with your story,” she said.

“I must confess, I have heard rumors about Major Malmagden’s bodyguard, and I was not unafraid. It is said they are not even human. Are you quite all right, my dear? You look a bit pale.”

“Go on,” Susan said. “You told this kid to screw off.”

Leder had to place himself in the scene. “Yes,” he went on. “I finished eating and went for a walk to the post. About ten o’clock, I get a second call from this same young man—there has been a terrible accident; twelve people have died and it is all my fault.”

“Did they say what had occurred?”

Leder frowned. “It was hard to make out the words. Something was filling the phone line with static. I believe they wanted information on how to close an interdimensional portal from a distance; I’m not sure. He kept shouting something—‘It’s coming. It’s coming through.’

“He demanded I provide him a way to shut down an elaborate Sigil of Transformation. Well, the solution should have been simple. Just erase the markings, yes? For some reason they could no longer go near the tower where the original summoning had taken place.

“I tried to give him a sturdy revocation involving candles and one of the Book’s most powerful spells, but apparently they could not get close enough to the disaster to effectively use the spell—the temperature at Site Y was so hot that candle wax melted immediately and ran within moments of their stepping outside of the bunker.”

Leder pressed his lips together. He looked down at his hands. “I told him to try the spell without the candles, but he could no longer read it from his copy of the Book. He told me no one at the site could read it.”

“What does that mean, ‘No one could read it’?”

Leder shook his head. “I have wondered that myself. This young man—this haughty young man—was practically in tears when he rang off.”