Hugo struggled to see once they had passed so far along the passage into the mausoleum that the daylight from the entrance dwindled. He mentioned this to Lucacz, whose hand he held. ‘Then do something about it, posh boy,’ came the unsympathetic reply.
‘What?’ Hugo replied, nettled by the indifference. ‘I’ve not got any matches.’
‘You’re useless,’ Lucacz sniggered.
‘But you can see perfectly well in the dark, dead boy. You’ve forgotten the living don’t have your sympathy with the lightless tomb.’
‘Hah! But you’ve not yet realised how your exposure to the World Beyond has changed you, boyfriend. Click your fingers and wish for light. The finger-clicking isn’t really necessary but it will concentrate your powers.’
‘I have powers? Seriously?’
‘Have I ever lied to you?’
‘Well … maybe not, though I don’t think you’ve ever told me the whole truth either.’ Hugo paused in his shuffling walk and clicked the fingers of his disengaged hand. Astonishingly, a radiant source slowly filled the tunnel, like a glowing mist.
‘Was that you, live boy?’ Jonas called back, approvingly. ‘Good call! You’re coming along magically.’ He paused as they reached the mausoleum’s internal junction. He walked to the left and pointed to two coffins covered in faded red velvet and nailed in gold set next to each other in a pair of loculi at waist height, the right hand one still retaining a number of ragged and withered floral wreaths. ‘Now these boxes here will do,’ the boy said. He reached up and rapped on the panels at the feet of them.
There were a few moments of silence after the dull thuds of the boy’s fist on the coffins, and then two more presences stood in the tunnel. One was recognisable to Hugo as Count Oskar Maxim, the Victorian secret agent. The other seemed to be a slighter Tarlenheim boy, having a sheaf of wild and wispy blond hair with a very intelligent look to him. He peered round, as if he had been short-sighted in life. ‘Ah, so you’ll be Jonas Niemand, the enigmatic angelic spirit,’ he stated.
‘That’s me!’ Jonas grinned. ‘Enigmatic. Magical. And this here is another Count Hugo, your relative.’
‘And that’s me,’ the living Hugo affirmed. ‘The son of Prince Franz IV, who was your nephew. Named after you, as it happens. I think you were one of my godfathers.’
The elder Hugo smiled affably at the younger, and then asked why he and his brother had been summoned back into the world.
‘We thought it would be polite, sir.’ The younger Hugo said. ‘I think that Jonas plans to do some building work here to make a new home for the Icon of Christ.’
The elder widened his eyes. ‘It would be polite, I suppose. To have such a sacred object in these tunnels would be a great honour, but I do wonder what side-effects we might experience.’
Karl Wollherz nodded. ‘That is a concern, sir. It may not be a quiet neighbour to you and your family.’
‘Nah!’ Jonas stated firmly. ‘We’re gonna put it deeper under the hill, in a new tunnel. I gotta few tricks to keep it quiet and inconspicuous. It won’t be easy to get into that tunnel, either. We need to make the entrance difficult … like a puzzle to solve.’
Old Count Hugo seemed amused. ‘Excellent. I like a good puzzle. The worst thing about being dead is I can’t any longer do the Ruritanischer Tagblatt crossword, despite now being no longer blind. Such a pity.’
‘You can help, sir,’ Karl smiled. ‘And your brother too if he wishes.’
Count Oskar Maxim shrugged. ‘I’ll give it a pass, gentlemen. It’s more my little brother’s thing. Now I shall just return to resting in peace.’ He faded away into the darkness.
Jonas led them down the left hand tunnel and before long they entered a large chamber, with a domelike roof, dimly lit by means of ancient and dirty skylights. The chamber was lined by ranks of stone slots, most occupied by ancient coffins. Some were decaying wooden boxes but many others were leaden anthropomorphic containers. The centre of the chamber was occupied by an empty circular dais.
The angelic boy put his hands on his hips. ‘I think I know what’ll go there,’ he declared. He frowned at the dais, and with a grinding thump it was no longer unoccupied. A huge stone sarcophagus now loomed over the room. It was plain and unadorned sandstone other than a legend in a Gothic cartouche at its foot, which read: HIC IACET FENICIA COMITISSA BEATA.
‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s one problem solved.’
‘Well thank you, Jonas dear,’ the lady herself said, appearing amongst them. ‘That must have been quite a weight to move.’
‘Nah. I’m strong, me,’ the angelic boy laughed. ‘Now we gotta do the main job. Somewhere for the Icon.’
‘Yes well, dear, you need to bear something in mind when you do. One day a very special human being will need to gain access to it. So he must be given a key to do so.’
‘Oh? Who would that be?’ Jonas asked.
‘The warrior of God. Mendamero.’ Fenice said, looking intently at Jonas as she did so. ‘He is a man of prophecy, not least prophecies that concern you, Jonas Niemand. I met him centuries ago in my castle of Belvoir in old Rothenia while I was still alive, though in human terms he will not be born yet for over thirty years.’
Young Hugo gasped. ‘He’ll be a man who can travel through time?’
‘He’ll have help from some acquaintances of Jonas. I will not say friends.’
‘Them!’ the boy hissed, with a look of mingled scorn and anger on his handsome face.
‘That’s an odd name he bears,’ Old Hugo commented. ‘Mendamero. It’s not Rothenian.’
‘It’s a translation and transliteration, my dear. His true name has to be concealed, or he and his family would be in deadly peril from the Evil One in his own day. It uses the Latin words ad nemorem.’
Old Hugo raised an eyebrow. ‘My lady, your Latin is not as good as it might be. I think you mean to say “at the woodland” or some such phrase. But you misconstrue the word for woodland, which is in Latin nemus. It is a third declension neuter noun, and you’ve mistaken the accusative, or rather the locative, form which is nemus not nemorem. What you meant to say was in Latin ad nemus, I think.’
‘Ah!’ the lady looked a little embarrassed. ‘My education was not as good as it might have been and certainly no match for yours, sir. I was not intended to be a scholar. So another of the burdens the poor man must bear is my lack of grammatical knowledge. But he must be called Mendamero now. It is inscribed in the stream of history and prophecy.’
Jonas shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He pointed at a blank space in the northern wall of the chamber. I can make a tunnel from that point back into the hill leading to another secret vault. So … we need a door here. Any ideas?’
Young Hugo chipped in. ‘This door has to have a secret key that only this Mendamero guy can use to enter and find the vault of the Icon, right? But what sort of key?’
‘A proper door with a conventional lock and a key won’t work. How could this Mendamero person ever be given the key?’ Lucacz rolled his eyes.
‘Dead boy’s right,’ said Young Hugo. ‘But what other sort of lock is there?’
‘Quite right, boys,’ Old Hugo said. ‘Besides that, the door might need to be opened by other people than Mendamero. Now there is a sort of lock called a combination lock, which needs a fixed sequence of numbers to open. Perhaps we could consider that sort of lock, and find a combination that Mendamero would work out.’
Jonas grinned. ‘You two Hugos think it through. In the meantime I have some heavy engineering to do. Go disappear out into the churchyard and give it some thought. I’ll be a while here.’
The pair paused as they emerged into the sunlit graveyard. The elder breathed deeply, stretched himself and beamed. ‘We’ll go into the church. We need paper and a pencil, and we might find them inside.’
The pair found seats at the rear of the great nave of the collegiate church, under the organ gallery. There they also found a visitors’ book with a pencil placed next to it. With an apologetic shrug, Old Hugo ripped out the blank rear endpaper of the book and the pair settled at a table.
‘Now then,’ mused the elder, ‘a combination made of numbers would not work as they would be too random to be penetrated, so we must use letters and find a code word that this gentleman Mendamero will work out with ease. Any ideas?’
‘Er … I’m not really one for puzzles.’ Young Hugo was already a little daunted by the intellectual edge of his deceased relative, but he did find an idea. ‘Why not use his name, MENDAMERO?’
‘Hmm. Good thought, young man. Obvious, but not blindingly obviously. So it must be presented as part of a word puzzle.’
The elder Hugo applied himself to the sheet of paper and sketched out a 9 × 9 grid. He pondered a while and then rapidly filled the grid, passing it over to the younger. The resulting grid looked like this:
| I | N | H | O | C | M | O | D | O |
| D | E | I | V | I | R | H | O | C |
| A | N | T | E | M | O | V | I | T |
| V | T | V | I | D | E | R | I | T |
| F | A | C | I | E | M | D | E | I |
| I | N | F | I | D | E | M | E | T |
| S | P | E | M | V | I | T | A | E |
| Æ | T | E | R | N | A | L | I | S |
| I | N | C | H | R | I | S | T | O |
Reading from left to right, the younger Hugo recognised Latin words, and he read them out: ‘In hoc modo dei vir hoc antemovit ut viderit faciem dei, in fidem et spem vitæ æternalis in Christo.’ Latin was one of his few intellectual accomplishments, so he confidently translated: ‘The man of God should proceed in this manner if he should wish to see the face of God — in faith and in hope of eternal life in Christ.’
He frowned. ‘That seems clever, but how does it help Mendamero?’
The elder chuckled. ‘Mendamero shall show the way!’ he declared. ‘Look again,’
Young Hugo did, and it clicked. The nine-letter word Mendamero could be found by taking one letter from each line from the top to the bottom.
‘Wow! That’s really clever, sir. It’s a combination code and a warning put together. Let’s see what Jonas can do with it, eh?’
When they returned it was to find a new arch on the north side of the chamber and a tunnel disappearing into the interior of the hill to the rear of the mausoleum. Jonas Niemand took the sketch and gave it some thought. ‘Ahah! Very clever. It’ll make a neat puzzle. It’ll need a mechanical door attached to cables, gears and springs. But I can do it. Now you’d better leave, Young Hugo. I have to move the Icon and other secret stuff into the interior, and we can’t risk exposing you to it.’
The magical boy grinned, and then impulsively hugged Hugo round his waist. ‘I like you, live boy. You and your mad, dead boyfriend. We’re friends. Now let me give you a gift. Pick me up.’ Hugo lifted the boy till he was level with his face, at which Jonas reached around his neck, and kissed him on the lips. Then he withdrew a little and breathed long and hard in Hugo’s face. The scent of the World Beyond enveloped him and his head spun for a while, before settling.
Jonas grinned. ‘That’s against the rules, but you’re now more of the World Beyond than you are of this world. I did the same for my mate Wilchin. So things won’t be so bad when the crisis comes.’
‘Crisis, what crisis?’ Hugo gasped, as he put the boy down.
‘Ask dead boy,’ was all the reply he got.
***
The pair paused a while in the churchyard. ‘What now?’ asked Lucacz.
‘One thing I’m sure about, you’re not going to tell me about this crisis business.’
‘Nope,’ affirmed Lucacz.
‘Then we’ll spend the night in the family house down the river. Then we’d better go and pick up Martin’s car from where I left it in the abbey.’
As they were strolling the tree-lined lane to the Great House of Tarlenheim, hand in hand, Hugo felt moved to say. ‘It’s about time we lived together more openly, Dead Boy. Your new body is less obviously supernatural and we can get away with being a couple in a Bohemian area like the Wejg. Heck, we can go clubbing together! Explaining it to Martin might not be easy, but he’s hardly conventional himself.’
Lucacz squeezed his hand. ‘I’d love that, Posh Boy. Do I get a makeover, now I’m joining the aristocracy by marriage?’
Hugo laughed. ‘We’ll ransack the wardrobes and see what we can find you. It may be a bit dated, but it’ll be quality. Tomorrow we’ll ride down to Medeln, along with a groom to bring the horses back. You won’t spook the beasts will you?’
‘Me? No. All horses recognise me as a friend of Empress Brunhild. And once a stable lad, always a stable lad. Now. Our marriage bed tonight. Do something really special for your Lucacz.’
‘What is there we’ve not already done?’
‘Dunno. Fuck me somewhere … unusual.’
Hugo laughed. ‘An interesting challenge, my husband’.
***
The next morning, the two boys and an accompanying young groom, arrived at the abbey gatehouse early. They handed over their reins to the groom, and waved him off back to Terlenehem with their borrowed mounts.
‘He was cute,’ Lucacz observed. ‘In my day I’d have had him straight up in that hay loft.’
‘That place clearly has an erotic significance for you. Is that why you had me up there last night for sex? I’m still picking straw out of my hair.’
‘It was fun though, wasn’t it Posh Boy? Having sex like the servant class. I pride myself on being really rough trade.’
‘Your language was certainly rough. I’ve never been called things like that in my life. Where did you pick up those words?’
Lucacz sniggered. ‘It’s sexy isn’t it. A lot of it comes from the older boys who fucked me when I was a stable lad. They were big into demeaning us young ones. They liked treating us like we were girls, and they talked of our tits, clits and cunts … you go figure. But I was lucky I didn’t live in the ploughboys’ barn. That was violent. I saw the older ones there harnessing a team of naked younger boys to their plough and getting them to pull it across the demesne farm fields. They used the whip too. They thought it was a laugh. Sick. But you’d be amazed at what you can pick up in the World Beyond, especially from ex-soldiers. Don’t think for a moment the World Beyond is all sweetness, innocence and light. The Dead bring their vocabulary with them, and they use it.’
‘Thank you. You’ve put me off agriculture as a profession. So I’ll consider one more possible occupation closed off.’ Hugo looked around. ‘We’d better see if we can find my sister and see what’s going on here. We need that printshop to carry on producing Vor Sobodjen. If I’ve mucked that up, Martin will be very pissed and you might learn even more new bad words.’
The gatehouse was wide open, and they could see carts and trucks being loaded by tbe abbey’s servants and workmen in the yard inside. They encountered Euphemia organising a party of nuns in the cloister, and waited till she had dismissed them. She was not happy.
‘Do you have any idea what you two have done here?’ she scolded. ‘I told you that revenant was dangerous, Hugo. Now between you you’ve brought to an end centuries of religious life and endeavour, not to mention knocked a big hole in the economy of Ober Husbrau.’
It did not seem a good idea to Hugo to argue the point with his sister so instead he asked meekly what her plans were,
‘Me? I will have to stay here to run the printshop your resistance movement depends on. And that means I’ve had to resign my vocation. The abbey property is going to belong to a trust, and the trust will lease me personally the premises for a peppercorn rent.’ She sighed. ‘The abbess and many of the nuns are moving to the priories at Festenberh and Zenden to continue regular life there. Oh yes, and another complication is the fact that this abbey is on the Hendrik den Leuwen underground route, and we have just received two SOE agents trying to reach Zenden City. You’d better take charge of them. They can’t stay here, and the German authorities are soon going to get curious about the upheaval in the abbey. One of the new fellows at least is Rothenian, which may help. Come this way.’
Euphemia stalked off to the abbess’s lodging, with the two boys trailing behind her. At the stairs she indicated they should proceed, while she headed back to the yard without further word.
‘She’s not happy with you,’ Lucacz muttered.
They toiled up into the apartments, where the scent of tobacco smoke alerted them to the presence of the SOE agents. One was a heavy-set man, the source of the cigarette smoke. The other was …
‘Pip!’ yelled Hugo, and hurled himself into his cousin’s arms.
‘Lucky you’re here, Hugo. The place is in chaos. And you have a car too, according to Euphemia.’
‘We can take you as far as Strelzen, Pip. I expect you’ll be wanting to see Martin.’
The other man, introduced as Major Harries, growled in English, ‘We need to get to Zenden as a matter of priority, kid. Do you work for Tofts?’
Hugo ignored him. ‘Do you two have any papers?’
Pip glanced sidelong at Harries and grinned, continuing in Rothenian. ‘No papers. Not even my old set of Republic of Rothenia ID. But since they’re in the name of Philip Underwood von Tarlenheim zu Templerstadt it’s just as well. Is this going to be a problem?’
Hugo grinned at Lucacz. ‘We’ll probably be alright. The Germans can be pretty slack after three years’ occupation.’
‘Who’s your friend, Hugo?’ Pip asked.
Hugo thought for a moment or two before answering. ‘Best not to give personal details, just call him Lucacz.’
‘Which is my actual name,’ Lucacz chipped in, grinning. ‘Does this moody old bastard speak Rothenian?’ he added, indicating Harries.
Pip stifled a grin of his own. ‘You’re a forward young man,’ he observed.
‘Lucacz has no filter,’ Hugo replied, with a weary smile. ‘Shall we get going?’
The drive was uneventful. Harries sat in the back seats with an indifferent Lucacz who, though he had known no English in life, said he had the facility the Dead possessed of an instant comprehension of all forms of human speech. He just couldn’t be bothered to communicate with Harries, to whom he had taken an obvious dislike which he was barely masking. Hugo and Pip were in the front chattering away. They only made a brief stop at Templerstadt, above the Taveln valley, where Pip was eager to stop and hug his aged grandmother, Countess Sissi, and pass on family news from her daughter Queen Helge in England. Hugo felt it very weird that he had been talking just the day before with the shade of the old lady’s deceased husband in the family mausoleum at Terlenehem. His life had become very strange indeed.
The first check on their progress came as the car drove down past the Spa. As the highway approached the city’s State District the car had to join a queue of others at a makeshift barrier operated by city police and German Feldgendarmerie. Lucacz called from behind. ‘Your turn this time, Posh Boy!’
Hugo quelled a momentary panic. ‘What do I do?’
Lucacz laughed, saying only ‘You’ll know.’
Hugo rolled down his window and when the policeman extended his hand for his papers he held his eyes. He felt the man’s momentary doubt when no papers were offered, and found he had the ability to grasp the stream of the man’s thoughts and channel them into a stream of compliance. The hand was withdrawn and instead the policeman saluted and said, ‘Thank you, Your Excellency, sorry to have delayed you.’
Hugo engaged the gears and moved forward. The Germans at the barrier seem to have noticed nothing. ‘Good job! Pretty much effortless,’ said Lucacz.
‘Er … what just happened?’ Pip queried.
‘Oh … I said they were getting lax,’ Hugo responded.
The car was quiet as Hugo edged it through the streets of Strelzen, where much of the remaining traffic was horse-drawn these days. Pip was staring outside at the Rothenian capital, and was obviously very moved to be within its familiar streets. ‘It’s better than I thought it would be,’ he remarked. ‘Not that many jack-booting Nazis on the streets. But the swastika flags everywhere make me angry.’
Hugo sighed. ‘You get used to it, I’m afraid.’ He turned down the narrow Wejg as he said it.
Pip laughed. ‘Here’s a piece of Old Rothenia the Nazis can’t change.’
Hugo sniggered. ‘Their officers like the clubs here, especially the homos. The Resistance has got all sorts of compromising pictures of quite senior Nazis enjoying the local whorehouses, especially the boys. We use them ruthlessly. The deputy chief of the Gestapo is quite a client I hear.’
Hugo turned into the narrow lane off which was the Tofts house. ‘Do you have radio access here, Hugo?’ Pip asked.
He confirmed it. ‘You can check in with London or Cairo, whichever station you’re working with.’
Pip left the car and stretched, and entered the house, Harries trailing after him. Lucacz held Hugo back, and held him round the waist.
‘What’s up, dead boy?’
‘That man Harries is bad news.’
‘He’s a dick, for sure,’ Hugo agreed.
‘No. It’s not just that he’s a dick — and don’t run down dicks, we get much mutual enjoyment from them. I can’t read his thoughts well, but what leaks out is bad. He’s been a murderer and a traitor, and worst of all part of him belongs to the World Beyond. Not any good part either.’
Posted 4 January 2025