The Demi-Monde: Winter (26 page)

A nod from Trixie.

‘Excellent.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘And keep that Eyetie slave of yours out of sight. Heydrich hates the Medi races almost as much as he hates Shades and nuJus.’

Despite their having been advised that the Leader would not be arriving at the Manor until the evening, Heydrich’s cavalcade swept into the grounds a little after one o’clock that afternoon, the Leader’s Mercedes steam-limo set in the middle of a phalanx of armoured pantechnicons full of SS militia.

Captain Dabrowski had drawn up his company in front of the house to provide an honour guard, but he and his men were ignored by the four black-uniformed men who clambered out of the steam-limo and across the driveway’s swept gravel to the steps that led to the main doors of Dashwood Manor. Trixie knew them all; their engravings were forever on the front page of The Stormer. All were Heroes of the Revolution: Vice-Leader Comrade Beria; His Holiness Comrade Crowley; Colonel
Clement, the head of the SS; and, of course, the Comrade Leader himself.

Trixie was beside herself with excitement: to be actually meeting the Leader in the flesh! It was the dream of every good member of the RightNixes – the ForthRight’s youth movement – to meet with the Great Leader face to face.

She tried to calm herself. The Leader’s arrival had been so unexpected that she and her father had had to rush to greet their distinguished guest, but now she stood with her presentation bouquet and dressed, a little uncomfortably it had to be admitted, in a stylised peasant’s dress – the Party was encouraging women to shun the ‘decadent’ styles coming out of Paris – embroidered with blue Valknuts. Trixie hated the dress, but her governess had insisted.

Her father gave the Party salute, intoned the Party oath and then bowed a greeting. ‘Good afternoon, my Leader, you do my home tremendous honour.’

‘You are not wearing a uniform, Dashwood,’ said Heydrich, who then proceeded to make a critical study of the garden, obviously assessing the defences. ‘I require all members of my government, when on official business, to wear their uniform. By wearing a uniform we signal that we are all of one accord. It demonstrates, Comrade Commissar Dashwood, that you have sublimated your individuality to the will of the Leader and of the Party.’ He tapped at the side of his highly polished boot with the riding crop he was carrying. ‘One day all men in the ForthRight will be obliged to wear uniform, and when they do it will signal that their identity is in the Party’s gift; that individuality and independence of thought are decadent and obsolete, that their only function in life is to obey.’

The Comrade Leader spoke very quickly, as though his mouth had to hurry to keep pace with his mind. Trixie was still musing
on what he said – trying to memorise it for repetition at the Academy – when he moved to another subject. ‘I have come to interview the Daemon,’ said Heydrich abruptly. ‘You have a study I might use for this purpose?’

‘Why yes, Comrade Leader.’

‘Then have the creature brought there.’ Heydrich’s gaze drifted towards Trixie. ‘Is this your daughter, Dashwood? Is this the girl who has been assisting with the Daemon’s interrogation?’

‘Indeed, Comrade Leader, may I present my daughter, Lady Trixiebell Dashwood.’

Trixie curtsied and automatically recited the mantra of the RightNixes, ‘One Race Defines Us, One Party Unites Us and One Leader Commands Us.’ She held out the bouquet and one of the Leader’s flunkies took it.

‘Charming,’ murmured the Leader as he held out his hand to Trixie. ‘You are to be congratulated, Comrade Commissar, on siring such a perfect flower of Aryan womanhood. With girls as beautiful and as racially pure as this I am confident that the bloodstock of the ForthRight will soon be free of the contaminants of the UnderMentionable races.’ He smiled at Trixie. ‘You must always remember, Lady Trixiebell, that ABBA has given the women of the ForthRight the divine task of breeding out the racial impurities that defile our Aryan birthright. My advice is that you marry young and be fruitful.’

During the moment when the Leader had shaken her hand she had a chance to study him more carefully. He was tall, narrow-hipped and lithe – his svelte body wonderfully presented by his ink-black uniform – and his long face was dressed with an imperious nose and narrow-set, very pale eyes. He was a perfect specimen of the ‘ForthRight Man’, the Aryan male.

An impish, unpatriotic and decidedly dangerous thought
popped into Trixie’s head: perhaps though he could even be considered too perfect. It might have been how soft his hand was when he had shaken hers. It might have been that his uniform was too immaculate or that his eyes contained no humour or humanity. There was something almost doll-like about him: as though she were meeting with an emotionless, soulless automaton.

The slap of the Leader’s riding crop against the black leather of his jackboot snapped Trixie out of her reverie. ‘So to work, Comrade Commissar; we cannot, through indolence or the squandering of time, allow the reins of government to slip from our grasp.’

As Heydrich and his party were shown into the house, Trixie and her father trotted after the Leader’s delegation. Trixie was just in time to see the Leader being shown into her father’s study and Crowley, with Clement at his heels, wandering off in the direction of the ballroom, presumably to check on the construction works being done in advance of the evening’s séance. As soon as the study door was shut, Beria began barking out orders, demanding that the Daemon be summoned.

Five minutes later the creature was escorted down from its room by two of Clement’s SS troopers. As Trixie watched it descend the staircase, she was amazed by how sanguine the Daemon seemed. It even bade her a jaunty ‘good afternoon’.

Didn’t the silly thing know it was going to meet the Leader?

Once the Daemon was shown into the study, Beria shut the door and stationed two large and imposing SS soldiers to guard it. As Beria forcefully reminded Dashwood, no one was, in any circumstances, to disturb the Leader whilst he was in conference with the Daemon.

The Dashwood household settled into a sort of hyperactive indolence: everyone ready at an instant to do the Leader’s
bidding but not daring to do anything whilst they waited. Trixie decided to return to her embroidery, but as she was climbing her way up the staircase that led to the upper floors of the Manor and her bedroom, she saw Captain Dabrowski dodge back into one of the guest bedrooms on the first floor.

Odd …

But not as odd as what she saw when she peeked through the door’s keyhole. The Captain was kneeling next to the empty fireplace, apparently listening to the wind whistling up the chimney. She turned the doorknob and to her amazement found that the Captain had bolted the door from within. Perplexed and not a little aggrieved by his antics, she rapped on the door. A second later the bolts were pulled and the door was edged open. ‘Yes?’ said the Captain in a decidedly disrespectful and impatient tone.

‘What are you doing in there, Captain?’ Trixie demanded in a loud and imperious voice. ‘I know you have jurisdiction over this house regarding security but what I saw you doing …’

She wasn’t allowed to finish. The Polish Captain reached out, grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her into the room. Trixie gave a squeak of complaint but when she saw the revolver in his hand and noted that it was pointed in her direction she decided that any more squeaking might not be a good idea.

‘Be very quiet, Miss Dashwood, or I will be obliged to silence you.’ He shot the bolts to the door, then pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and stuffed it into the keyhole to deter any more would-be voyeurs.

‘Are you mad? My father …’

‘Miss Dashwood: shut up! I have been presented with an ABBA-sent opportunity to find out what that bastard Heydrich …’

Bastard? Trixie flinched away from the dangerous insult.

‘… is up to. If you are quiet and do what you are told, then
I will leave here without harming you. But if you attempt to call out or to raise the alarm then I will silence you … permanently. Make no mistake, these are desperate times and I will not hesitate to sacrifice one life to save millions. Do you understand?’

The look in Dabrowski’s eyes convinced Trixie that he was in earnest. She nodded her agreement.

‘Very well,’ said the Captain, ‘if you will come and sit with me by the fireplace, I think we will hear history being made.’

‘What?’

‘The chimney at this side of the house runs up from your father’s study. By sitting quietly we can hear everything that is said in that room.’

‘You can’t eavesdrop on the Leader,’ Trixie protested.

But they could.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Williams, would you take a seat?’

For an uncertain moment Norma Williams stood by the door of the shadow-draped room. No one had told her who she was to meet, but from the panic that had enveloped the house she guessed it was someone important. She moved towards the desk and took the leather tub chair indicated. Closer now, she could see who her host was.

Oh, sweet Lord.

‘Perhaps I should begin by introducing myself …’

‘I know who you are. You’re Reinhard Heydrich. I’ve read about you.’

‘I am gratified that the exploits of my doppelgänger in the Real World should still have resonance so long after my death. One does not wish one’s efforts in life to have no impact on history.’

‘Oh, you’re remembered all right: you’re remembered as one of the most evil, hateful men who has ever lived, as the perpetrator
of the greatest crime ever committed against humanity, as the man who industrialised genocide. Yeah, history remembers you, Heydrich, remembers you as a mad, bad, psychotic mass murderer.’ A disturbing thought struck Norma. ‘But how do you know about having a doppelgänger?’

Heydrich gave an arrogant smirk. ‘All in good time, Miss Williams, all in good time.’ He took a cigarette from the silver box set on Dashwood’s desk, tapped it absent-mindedly on a thumbnail and lit it using a gold lighter he tricked out of the top pocket of his uniform. For several seconds he smoked silently, as though cogitating on what to say next. Finally his attention returned to his guest. ‘I came here today because I wanted to see you for myself. You are a very remarkable young woman, Miss Williams, unique in fact. You are the first Daemon we have ever been able to draw from the so-called Real World into this, the Demi-Monde. All the other Daemons came here to play their sordid little war games but you are different. You were brought here to play a leading part in one of our games.’ He blew smoke idly towards the ceiling. ‘You, Miss Williams, are our hope for the Future.’

There was something about the way he spoke the last sentence that frightened Norma. Why, she wasn’t quite sure, but Heydrich gave the impression that he was laughing at her behind his hand, that he knew something that she didn’t. The feeling she had as he sat there smoking his cigarette and sipping his coffee was that he was toying with her.

‘And what future is that?’

‘A Future where the past is rerun, where mistakes of history are rectified and errors of judgement eliminated and where what should have been … is. A Future that will be reshaped and remodelled to match the template of that Aryan paradise envisaged by Adolf Hitler.’

‘Adolf Hitler?’ Norma tried to make her question sound as offhand as she could, but in truth she was really disturbed by a Dupe talking about a person who, as far as Norma knew, had never been recreated in the Demi-Monde.

‘Oh, come now, Miss Williams, let us not be coy or naïve: we both know who Adolf Hitler is. The time for dissembling is over.’ He took a long, enjoyable drag of his cigarette. ‘You are wondering, perhaps, if I am feigning a knowledge of the Führer, that I am on what Yanks like you so picturesquely call a fishing expedition. Perhaps you think that it is a name given to me inadvertently by one of the other Daemons we have captured and interrogated? But in this you would be mistaken. I knew the Führer intimately and had the honour of serving him in many capacities, the final one being as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. It was in the Czech lands that my life in the Real World was so prematurely brought to an end. Yes, I knew Adolf Hitler. He was a great man, if emotionally flawed.’

‘Hitler wasn’t a great man: he was a monster. He was mad as they come. He was a homicidal maniac.’

Heydrich gimleted Norma with a savage look. ‘I really am not accustomed to being contradicted, Miss Williams, especially by those who do not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate the profundity of the Führer’s teachings.’

Now it was Norma’s turn to be silent, to take a few moments to cogitate, to wonder if, perhaps, this Dupe sitting in front of her really did have knowledge of what his ‘real self’ had been when he was alive. But surely, she thought, that was impossible. As she understood it, one of the immutable programming instructions ABBA had been given was that none of the Dupes populating the Demi-Monde would have any remembrance of what they were – or in the case of the PreLived Singularities, what they had been – in the Real World.

An awkward thought struck her: she was a Dupe and she had a remembrance of what she was in the Real World. It was all rather confusing and very, very disturbing.

Norma decided to play it cool. ‘Okay, so you’ve heard of Adolf Hitler. Big deal. Okay, so you think that lunatic was the best thing since the wheel. The question is: so what?’

‘An apposite question, Miss Williams, a very apposite question. And I understand from the disdainful manner in which it is posed that you have little appreciation of my talents. Indeed, if I were a normal man possessed of normal abilities and normal ambitions the answer to your question would be “not much”. It would matter not a fig that I have knowledge of the Real World denied my fellow Demi-Mondians. But I am not a normal man, Miss Williams, I am one of the Übermenschen, one of the Supermen whose destiny it is to rule the world. I am the Messiah sent to re-establish the hegemony of the Master Race – the Aryans – and to purify the world of the contamination of the lesser races. I am charged by Fate to enact the Final Solution. And being an Übermensch, I am a quirk of Nature, Miss Williams. Oh, I do not allude here simply to my genius and my skills as a leader but to the fact that uniquely in all of the Demi-Monde, I am the only one with memories of what the man on whom I am modelled achieved. I remember who and what I was.’