Strindberg's Star (49 page)

He pulled his shoulder bag close and looked at Eva in the darkness. But the light was too poor for him to make out the expression on her face.

*

N
othing could have prepared Don for what awaited them once the helicopter had landed. Yet he had seen the exact same sight in Eberlein’s glass-encased negatives.

Lytton’s men had brought him up to an enormous abyss that had opened in the ice, like a chasm, straight down into the underworld. Its edges were totally smooth, as though they had been cut with a flame. The vertical opening of the tunnel was so wide that it was impossible to see its other side.

The helicopter had landed about a hundred yards away, and dragged tracks led through the snow toward the opening. The South Americans had fetched their metal crates and lined them up on the edge of the abyss.

Don pulled his jacket tighter around himself as a shield against the howling wind. Then he saw Rivera and Moyano taking hold of one of the boxes and dangling it over the edge of the hole. When the metal touched the inner wall of the tunnel, they let go of the handles, and in an instant the box had disappeared downward.

“
Éste es el final.
We’ve reached our final destination,” Agusto Lytton shouted through the storm. “I’m sorry to say this, but for you, Señor Goldstein, the long journey will end right here.”

Lytton waved at Moyano, who had to lower his huge body so he could hear the instructions. Don could see the pockmarked face contort into an expression of disappointment.

“You’ll have to stay up here and keep watch with Moyano,” Lytton shouted. “I hope you both find some way to occupy the time.” Then the old man pulled Eva up to the opening. They took a big step over the edge, as though the abyss didn’t exist, and when Don looked again neither Lytton nor Eva was there.

He could hear some nervous voices among the South American men. But they soon followed, falling one after another down into the gaping emptiness.

Don and Moyano stood there alone, in the clouds of whirling snow.

*

A
fter more than an hour had passed, Moyano seemed to have grown tired of his task. The South American had begun to move around the opening, leaving Don sitting by himself.

And as Don sat there, looking down into the chasm, he could think only of Nils Strindberg. That this was what he, Andrée, and Frænkel had seen on that July day in 1897.

The inner walls of the tunnel shimmered blue and purple, and glistening strings ran down toward the underworld. Its walls held tight, with no cracks, defying the tremendous pressure of the billions of tons of water in the ocean. A tentacle that stretched down to the bottom through mile after mile of freezing sea. Don couldn’t understand how someone could manage such a fall, and yet Lytton and Eva …

His thoughts were interrupted by crunching footsteps.

It was Moyano, who had completed yet another circle in the roaring wind. Don looked up at the South American, who was now also leaning over the tunnel.

“
¿Es un milagro, no?
It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” Moyano whispered.

Don felt himself nod. Then he plodded through the snow on his knees, to get a better look at all the glittering light.

Moyano took off one of his gloves and crouched down beside Don. Then the South American felt along the inner edge of the tunnel with his fingers.

Suddenly his hand was stuck, as though the wall was made of glue. Moyano yanked and tugged, and there was a smacking sound as he finally managed to pull himself loose.

“Try it yourself,” he whispered to Don, who now also hesitantly extended his hand toward the edge.

In the next instant his glove had been sucked down into the depths of the tunnel.

The walls were flowing somehow, like a quickly melting glass surface.

Beside him, Moyano had taken another step forward and was balancing
unsteadily on the very edge of the opening. There was something about the figure at the abyss, Don thought, that felt threatening. He got up so that he wouldn’t be caught in the South American’s fumbling grasp.

Moyano lifted one boot at the prospect of one last step out into the nothingness. He held his arms out from his long torso, which was swaying in the gusts of wind.

Just when it seemed as though he was going to make a decision, the South American clapped his hand to the side of his throat.

At first it looked as though he had succeeded in crushing some sort of insect, but then the blood spurted out between his fingers and in cascades across ice and snow like a red shower. For a few seconds Moyano managed to remain standing, but then his legs gave way over the mouth of the tunnel, and he fell.

D
on turned toward the darkness, with his face straight into the wind. It was nearly impossible to keep his eyes open in the heavy snow, and he couldn’t put together what little he could make out.

Had the ice out there become
alive
somehow? It moved toward him like a billowing wave of grayish white. The whole block of snow came rolling, towering up like ghosts and spirits. It came rushing toward him in fluttering whitish gray camouflage.

That was all Don saw before he was thrown down onto the ice. He lay there with a body on top of him, feeling his mouth fill with snow. An elbow against the back of his neck pressed the rest of the air out of his lungs. He desperately managed to twist a little bit and take a few short breaths.

Don lay there gasping and saw a pair of studded wheelchair wheels slowly rolling up.

“Don Titelman,” said a familiar voice from above the wheels. “I must say, you are really starting to be a pain.”

Finally the elbow moved, and Don could roll onto his back and
look up, blinking. Through the snowfall he saw Vater’s face, which was half burned off.

“You were in a real hurry to leave us last time, in Wewelsburg. But I never gave up hope that we would meet again.”

His one eye dead; the other alert and sharp.

“Pick him up,” said Vater.

Don felt his arms being clasped and the soldiers lifting him until he was standing. His boots slid in the snow as he tried to shake himself loose. Eberlein stood at Vater’s side in a camouflage uniform and nonreflective glasses. Behind him, the Toad was approaching with waddling steps.

“So close to the solution of the mystery, and yet you still haven’t gotten to see anything,” said Vater. “Elena?”

One of the soldiers detached from the row: a small figure that approached Don with fluid movements. When she took off her hood, Don saw the woman’s smoky eyes, which he recognized from the north tower at Wewelsburg.

“Yes, Vater?” said Elena.

“We’ll take Titelman down with us,” said Vater. “This will be a fitting end for him.”

Don saw one arm being placed in a handcuff.

“And you’ll be responsible for him down there, Elena,” said Vater.

She extended her wrist and Vater put a cuff on it, locking her to Don.

W
ith his thin back sticking up out of the electric wheelchair, Vater rolled up to the edge. He looked down at the shimmering blue opening. Then he said, “From now on, no more talking.”

Elena moved her boot toward the inner wall of the tunnel and nodded at Don to do the same. When she put her weight down there was a slurping sound, and her heel was immediately stuck.

It looked as though a hand had caught her and was now trying to
drag her down. The green eyes looked up at him. “
Venga,
Signor Don. Come.”

Don hesitantly took off his aviator glasses and heard the wall encircle his own boot. Then Elena yanked on the handcuff, and in the next instant they had both tumbled down.

T
he wall of the tunnel sucked him downward with a speed that only increased. The sticky grip that had caught Don’s boot like flypaper had also pasted itself onto his back. But even though he was hanging there like an insect, unable to move, he was presumably traveling faster than if he had been freefalling into the depths of the underworld.

The rush of air pressed so hard against Don’s face that he was forced to look upward in order to be able to see at all. His hair stuck out from his head like a broom from the resistance of the air, and his velvet suit flapped and strained, as though it was going to be ripped to pieces. The snowstorm had become a shrinking white point during the first few seconds of his fall. Now it was long since gone, and yet the tunnel hadn’t gone dark or dim.

Shimmering lights pulsed from the blue-violet walls like stars in the night sky. Hanging above him were all the camouflage-clad figures that were tumbling down along with Don.

The one he could see best was Vater, who dangled, stuck in his wheelchair, only about thirty feet higher up. Alongside Vater he could see Eberlein, who looked like a butterfly nailed to the wall of the
tunnel, and something that resembled a white cue ball: the familiar shape of the Toad.

Don had always thought of hell as something that was eternally burning, but strangely enough, it became colder the farther down they went. He managed to turn his head toward Elena in the strong wind, and he saw that her eyes were closed but her mouth was moving, as though she were in some sort of trance.

Don wondered whether he should try to wake her, but her face seemed so peaceful that he chose to let her be. Instead he hugged the bag tighter, and he, too, closed his eyes. Then he continued to fall without worrying about looking.

H
e kept his eyes closed for so long that in the end it felt as though his eyelids had grown rigid. He could hardly move his mouth, his cheeks, his forehead, frozen by all the biting winds.

But suddenly in the rushing sound Don sensed a slight change of tone. The fall had finally begun to slow down. The pull of the wind subsided into a quiet murmur, and soon he was falling as slowly as a feather down toward the bottom, which lay hidden in a gray cloud of mist.

“They’re waiting for us,” said Elena.

There was a haze that surrounded them, and the cold was razor sharp. Don grimaced to try to get his face out of its frozen paralysis.

As quickly as the wall had glued itself to him, it let him go just as gently now. Don felt himself floating the last few yards to the bottom, where his boots sank into a deep layer of dust.

Elena had also landed, and the chain of the handcuffs jangled as she pulled him closer. He didn’t know why, but something made him grope for her hand, which seemed to be the only warm point in their landing spot.

A path that was arched like the ceiling of a Gothic church ran through the fog in front of them. Its walls radiated the same blue-
violet light as the tunnel, but they undulated in a completely different way, like lightweight fabric moving in the wind. But the air down here was still, humid, and raw.

Behind him, the soldiers were gathering with their automatic weapons and their night-vision goggles. Eberlein had bent down at Vater’s side, and the two of them were conversing quietly.

The electric wheelchair had sunk so far down into the dust that its wheels were no longer visible, and then Don was dragged along by the handcuff as Elena began to move through the mist toward the nearest wall of the vaulted path.

His boots plowed up clouds of dust, and he had trouble keeping his balance as he was yanked along. When they approached the billowing surface, Don saw that it was made of a strangely free-flowing material. In place of the glasslike walls of the tunnel, the vaulted path was composed of flowing dust, which fell in rippling streams. This cloven waterfall of ash seemed to be the only thing standing between him and the crushing weight of the masses of stone.

Don hesitantly stretched out his fingers to feel it, and his hand sank into the wall up to the elbow with no resistance. There didn’t seem to be anything behind it, just clouds of flakes and granules that fell slowly over his hand.

And as he stood there looking in at all the stars of light that sparkled in the violet-blue cascade, he began to wonder what he really knew about the cold hell of the myths.

The two Old Norse words
nifl
and
heim
literally meant “the mist-shrouded world.” A place where dusk was always falling, without night ever coming. According to the Icelandic sagas, a bitter cold would prevail here, filled with poisonous vapors and venom. The Inuit believed that it would lie far below the Arctic Ocean, in a place called Adlivun. It was Hades, the Greek realm of shadows, and his own grandmother would have said …

“Sheol,” Don mumbled.
“Geyen in Sheol.”

B
ut Elena didn’t see hell when she touched the rippling wall. Ever since she had fallen from the edge of the hole, she had been comforted by her mother’s whispering voice.

Now, standing there, she was seized with the impulse to take a step forward and walk into the falling dust. Far behind the points of light she thought she saw the contours of faces that were urging her in with their eyes.

She saw mouths, mumbling words she couldn’t hear. It was as though they wanted something from her, as though there was something that only she could give.

Elena put her hand in, and in the rain of millions of violet-blue specks, she thought it was starting to become remarkably transparent. A yellowish red aura formed within her skin, where muscles and tendons ran like luminous tracks. She cupped her hand and carefully brought some of the material out.

At first, it lay dead in her hand, like a lifeless grayish black powder. Then the sparks began to wake up, and her face was gradually illuminated with their light.

Elena thought of Wewelsburg and of the dust that the foundation had managed to salvage in sealed glass capsules. The material she’d had to start from, to dream up visions of the ultimate foundations of physics and chemistry. Now the sparks were talking to her again, showing her strings of molecules and patterns of atomic bonds. But she didn’t intend to try to produce any sketches of what the basic design of the world looked like.

Instead she held the granules up to Don and showed him their beautiful glittering surface. But the Swede just looked scared—his eyes were like dashes behind the foggy lenses of his aviator glasses. Don and Elena plodded side by side, some distance behind the snow-white figures. The soldiers in their camouflage uniforms glided forward along the walls like sharp contours of light.