SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - U.S. Edition (12 page)

This demand seemed to be the final trigger for the brothers to grant their brains to some nice long vacation. Because, as if they had totally mutated into similar programmed roboters, they reached into their jacket pockets, took out some sort of packets and threw them at the stage. First I thought that it must be little tracts, although the sheer mass of this flood of paper made me wonder. But then the significant color and the typical volatile property of the paper made me realize the outrageous: The lads pelted the master with real bank notes! Countless bills rained on the platform, blew down on the big cheese until they softly slit to the ground. Had they thrown confetti, the scene hadn’t looked any different. The master showed his gratitude by bowing humbly. When the carol ended and the platform was almost completely cluttered with
bills, he continued his speech.
»
Grazie grazie mille grazie, o voi fratelli generosi!
« he said, panting and exhausted from the schl
ep of collecting the donations.

»Dear brothers, today we are ahead of the founders of our teaching. To them it felt unthinkable that the race which came from the First Reich in the Atlantic Ocean would remain a minority. They didn’t think that the majority of people will be kept frozen in the physical world, on the lowest level, and that they would so vehemently refuse to move up the ether and astral level, that the world would choose dispeace over the singing of angels. In short, our masters, which by now have reached the highest level, didn’t have a clue that mankind nowadays wouldn’t differ a single bit from the morons, lazy hacks and monsters of the ancient world.«

Although the brothers were literally steaming from the recent sportive performance, an almost dignified silence lay all over the place. The last sound of the choir’s singing had died, no one made a sound, and there wasn’t a single movement.

»Life is beautiful – mankind is ugly«, the hooded man said in a low voice. »That is the sad conclusion, even today. The world is full of demons, which keep those we need to guide from ascending to a higher form of being. Ancient images of God, narrow-minded views on the so called only saving way of living, but even more than that brute force, this is the message which is spread by the demons, and this is how they act. On that account we will no longer hole up in our ivory tower, but we will step into world history with the help of the miracle. We will shatter the furies of darkness,
cari fratelli
!«

A murmur went through the crowd, when actually I had been waiting for another roaring applause. This was a clean-cut case: Although the theosophists – esoterically dressed up – had a lot of skeletons in their closet, they hadn’t yet left their cozy simsalabim-bunker to enter the depths of world politics. They’d rather sing mantras, incarnate a little, magic up some angels and let things slide for the rest of the day. The evil – if there was something like that in their teaching anyway – to them came in an abstract figure, from a dark kingdom without further description, maybe somehow gassy and in the shape of a fantasy dragon. In the end, they didn’t really want to know. This charismatic master though demanded something concrete from them, an involvement in some dirty deal, reality. Little by little it probably dawned on them that what the master was trying to sell them as a miracle and for what they had been very generously donating until now might turn out to be something really earthly, maybe even real dynamite.

I for one didn’t have to battle with less mental stomach pain. Questions upon questions buzzed in my mind. Among what kind of morons had I ended up? What did this megalomaniac master have in mind, who didn’t plan for any less than saving mankind from the evil? Who was »the evil«, »the misanthropist« anyway? And the most important question: What was this miracle? And I almost forgot this little unimportant question: Which relation did this absurdity bear to the murders? Not with all the will in the world it would make sense to me. Because the only miracle that Giovanni and his friends were able to perform was identifying different shades of green on Spaghetti Bolognese.

But I didn’t have any time to think this through as the master now went to his ceremony, which kept me from wondering. This item in the agenda looked a lot the thing Samantha and I had been scared of the whole time. Horror crawled through my veins like poison and exerted some numbing influence on all of my organs. Because after the big savior had given the bitter medicine of healing the world to his followers, he wanted to give his soul a treat and put on some old record. This was the overture of the
literal saber rattling.

»Dear friends, we want to turn to the actual reason of our meeting«, he said and raised the sparkling saber. The reflection of the thousand candle flames that emerged from it shortly blinded my eyes. The pitiful guys inside the cage, who had kept quite until now, got nervous again and began to meow pathetically, as there didn’t seem to be any doubt about what was going to happen to them.

»These creatures are valuable vessels in which affiliated souls live. It needs the
ritual
that they can get in touch with us. Let us open our hearts and let them inside, hoping that they will open for us too. Let the freeing of the souls begin!«

The batmen found this tremendously splendid, as they were able to devote themselves to this cozy necromancy than being dragged down by their master’s mysterious suggestions, which actually promised some rather comfortless future. Immediately another Latin tune was struck up fervently, which now sounded a couple of shades darker though. The dark sound was the final signal for me to finally give birth to a clever idea and get to work. If I didn’t want to attend a massacre, I really needed to do something soon. Samantha also piped up with a similar request.

»Francis, Francis, I beg you, if you don’t want Rome to remain in your memory as the most terrible sight in your life, you need to perform an even bigger miracle as these murderers are about to! Hurry! In here’s a real bad atmosphere, and I’m afraid it’s about to explode into a gush of blood!«

And as if this begging needed some more graphic underlining, I saw how the master turned his back to the audience, walked towards the cage and
swang
the saber dramatically. Okay, I was to perform a miracle on the spot. The only problem was that in contrary to the master I didn’t have any connection to the
ether and astral level
so I could accomplish this. The horror, which had silently been lurking in the depths of my mind, now rose with decimal power. I began to shiver, and inside the chaos in my skull fractures of Samantha’s words resounded in what seemed to be an infinite loop. »... bad atmosphere ... wonder ... gush of blood ...« I believed to hear again and again as I stared into my fellow sufferer’s sad eyes, idle and like crystallized. The master’s hand grabbed the bar
s of the cage.

In my head a single phrase resounded: »... bad atmosphere ... bad atmosphere ... bad atmosphere ...« These two words rotated in my mind like the inside of a spin top, where it endlessly multiplied and interfered through an overwound segmentation. They had turned into a mantra, a repetitious prayer in which content played a far less role than the
calming act of praying itself.

It might have gone on like that forever, endless droning and frozen in fear, until the prisoners’ ears would have been »deseeded«. But then something yelled inside me: »If there’s bad atmosphere, then open the damn windows!« I furrowed my brow. Shortly after, I got the message. Yes, it was true, when there was bad atmosphere, one should let in fresh air. From there it was a short walk to suit the action to the word.

»Francis, you really need to ...« I heard Samantha shout another time, and I knew immediately that she was gaping in astonishment. She had turned away from the frightening scene to face me, and so in the middle of her sentence she had noticed that I wasn’t sitting next to her on the balustrade anymore. Because I was already on my way to the cable control.

»Follow me, Samantha!« I yelled without looking back. »I need your help.«

»But what are you doing?« she shouted breathlessly. »Isn’t it too late already?«

»No. It won’t be too late until you feel somehow strange and the thermometer tells you that your body has been brought down to room temperature!«

The construction on the wall looked pretty much like the rolled out inner workings of a primitive hall clock. There was a real tower of ponderous old cogs, which were moved by chains with weights on them, rusty cranks and flywheels. Steel ropes ran from here through rings at the ceiling up to the hatches. Above all, the four massive levers on a panel caught my eye, as they were relevant for the opening and closing of the ventilation hatches. The first one was turned up, so I concluded that it must operate the open hatch. Somehow I had to get the other ones into the same position.

»Samantha, come here and give me hand, quick!« I said and noticed at the same moment that she was already standing next to me, full of expectation.

»We got to move this lever!«

»But why?«

»Bad atmosphere!« was all I said, while I jumped up with stretched forelegs. My paws hit the lever at full tilt. But it only moved in a narrow angle. I was falling down when I saw with a glimpse to the side that Samantha shot up and gave the lever another trouncing, using the same technique as I. With a dull snapping sound it finally veered! On the ground I watched how the cable control mechanism began to move, the cogs creakily meshed and began to turn, the heavy weights moved downwards, and a steel rope tightened. The second compartment slowly moved upwards.

Samantha, who took turns in watching my satisfied face and the situation she created, had become a cartoon of skepticism by now.

»And what is this about?« she said. It wasn’t a question, it was criticism.

»The infiltration phenomenon«, I replied shortly and shrugged.

Down in the vault a silent wind got up. The flames of the candles began to gutter, and even the fire of the torched on the walls got gradually plagued by a flicker. The batmen’s silk scarves were gyrated to the side and their capes were blown up a little. Some of them grabbed the brim of their toppers, so the good piece didn’t take off. Even the hooded guy paused his ritual, turned away from the cage and let his eyes wander to find
the cause of the interference.

This created a little bit of hope inside me. But I wasn’t allowed to pause now, if I wanted my plan to succeed.

»Keep going!« I cheered Samantha up, who still didn’t get what I was aiming on but apparently sensed that I
had something sensible in mind.

Our hind paws vaulted us skywards once again, and our f
ront paws hit the third lever.
This time it was real torture. The thing hardly moved an inch. We had to jump again and again. I felt my paws begin to glow from the pain of hard jumps, they’d turn numb soon. Little by little the damn lever shifted upwards in the end, and with a little inching it leaped up. The rope started moving, the third hatch moved up and another airflow caused one more eddy within t
he already existing wind-chaos.

It was a spectacle according to my taste! Based on their impact, we were able to study the roaring strength of the air so imposingly as if they had a physical appearance. Half of the candles in the room went out, after the flames had battled against the wind without a chance, also a couple of torches. But it was the t
extile
part of the panoramas that amused me. As if all of the brothers had been brought into microgravity at once, the toppers took of from their heads, flew up in the air in dancing motions, gyrated in a circuit inside of a tornado, then drifted apart and hovered along before the whole game began anew. The capes were exposed to a sheer hurricane and streamed in the wind, trying to outdo each other. It wouldn’t be fair to say that they panicked. But among the passel of theosophists notable concern arose. They had stopped singing by now. Heads were raised or shaken nervously. The initial dumbness turned into some awkward whispering, and from that some excited and loud chatter emerged. A couple of the old buddies even took of their mask because they just couldn’t believe their eyes. Ours inside the cave watched the spectacle as astonished as us, but unlike the humans they seemed to sense that this windy turn happened to be in their favor. The hooded guy stood in a hurricane of flying bills and inched the edge of the stage, prepared for flight in
case the situation sharpened.

And it actually did sharpen! Samantha and I enjoyed the confusion for just a second and then pored on our act of sabotage. Compared to the last time it turned out to be a walk in the park. Like basketball artists, who aim to shoot the ball through the basket with dash, we took off simultaneously, and when our paws concurrently hit the fourth lever, it actually did us the favor to turn up immediately. Finally the fourth hatch opened, and the concourse of the airflows from four directio
ns created the
utterest
chaos.

Before the candles and torches went black for good, for a couple of seconds I was honored with the very view that I had wished to invoke: The theosophists now stood in the epicenter of a real hurricane. The draft, which got increased in brute force due to the lengths of the tunnels and the property of the room, turned the tailcoat folks into human guinea pigs in some kind of cruel experiment in the middle of a wind channel. By now, they all held on to each other so no one got blown away. Several lost their masks. The black capes flapped so hard as if their owners were about to take off any moment. I could hear a scream here and there, which didn’t really speak in favor for this communities trust in god, and I could also see some of them looking for an escape from this squally hell in pure desperation. Only the cape man fled from our view – by now it was as if the earth had swallowed him up. Then even the last light went out and there was total darkness. But not for our phosphorus eyes.