The Bone Bridge- Chapter 26

(The Hole)

Hans Dietrich took off his black leather trench coat and tossed it on the bare metal desk. Ordinarily, he never wore the thing, anymore. But in keeping with his rare but cruel humor, he wore it to his group’s latest “investigation” at the Nesterov Art Museum in Ufa. It was also the same coat he wore the day he killed his new acquisition- Milo Dragović.

Separating the former Slavic dictator from his wife wasn’t easy. Dietrich knew that acquiring her would be a waste of time and energy. The Olympic silver medalist and former Vice Chairman of the national Communist Party had hated him from the beginning and for good reason. Her cooperation, to say the least, could not be counted on.

There was another reason to leave her behind to haunt the Nesterov Museum- Now separated from her, Dragović’s only chance to be reunited with his wife Irina was to cooperate. It was a promise he made to all those trapped souls: Cooperate and I’ll personally send you and your beloved on to the next world.

How would they know that he lacked both the technology and the inclination to effect that?

Dietrich approached the cottage-sized chamber and touched a readout. From the moment of acquisition, every entity’s unique energy signature was logged into the mainframe and identified by name. Dragović was no exception and it wasn’t difficult to call up that signature and get the former dictator’s attention by disrupting his energy field. The effect across the board was, to ghosts, a sensation akin to what we call physical pain or discomfort.

“Over here, at the window,” Dietrich said to the intercom. As always, the trapped spirits roiled and were restlessly moving like caged panthers. About 50 would appear then phase out of sight to be replaced by the others. All told, Dietrich had collected a menagerie of 117 of the world’s most noxious spirits.

As he waited for Dragović to appear at the large round window, Dietrich amused himself by wondering how well his latest acquisition was getting along with his new playmates. Putting a guy like Dragović in with this bunch was like dropping a soft, wimpy pedophile into a general population made up entirely of murderers and other types that would best be served in a mental institution for the criminally insane. If they chewed him up and spit him out, c’est la vie. Then Dietrich would continue looking for his uniter.

But if he survived this baptism of fire, as it were, so much the better. And the German truly hoped that he could count on Dragović. Hitler would’ve been a more logical not to mention efficacious choice but for some reason he was unavailable. Besides, the dragon of Central Europe owed him.

On the finger touch screen, Dietrich fine-tuned the energy signature finder and locked on before dragging his finger over the control that interrupted Milo’s energy matrix. The speaker was on and when he slid his fingertip over the control, he could hear a cry of pain.

“Milo, come to the window and I’ll stop,” he said in Russian. Eventually, a portly figure emerged from the swirling chaos and went to the three inch-thick glass as commanded. “Milo, how are they treating you in there?” The former dictator gave Dietrich a blank then a wry look as if insulted by the query.

Dragović looked remarkably unchanged from the day Dietrich killed him. The blood that channeled along his lightning bolt-shaped scar was even in its full glory. The only other defect in his extra corporeal being was the bullet hole in his forehead made by the German’s kill shot in 1991. Moreso than most, Dragović had a fully developed sense of residual self-imaging, no doubt mainly due to his bloated ego.

Most ghosts and spirits show up as black or white masses or indistinct or even deformed in a manner inconsistent with their deaths. Those more abstract entities, it was learned, either didn’t have a defined residual self image from their appearance in life or simply didn’t care about being recognized by maintaining their life image.

“I am treated well,” he finally responded in Russian. “Better than you treated my wife and me. Some of the people here have heard of me.”

Dietrich nodded. By their own admission, some of the entities he’d trapped over the years were very old, some of them allegedly centuries old. But his team had also acquired enough contemporary spirits so that it was guaranteed at least some of them would have heard of Dragović and may perhaps had even admired him.

“I have a proposition for you.” Milo inclined his head in an attitude of curiosity and cynicism. “While I’ve acquired an impressive collection of entities, they are nonetheless an eclectic and fractious lot. I am in need of someone with your oratorical skills to get them all on the same page. That is why I acquired you. You are the man I need.”

That much was true and Dietrich, for once, was speaking with complete veracity. Yet the former Stasi interrogator also knew from years of experience in dealing with political enemies of the state both real and imagined (it never mattered to Dietrich which category they fell into) that hours of torture can actually yield less actionable intelligence and cooperation than can a few words of flattery. It might not have been as entertaining as torture but Hans Dietrich knew good and well, as did millions of others, that Milo Dragović’s greatest source of hubris was his skill in rhetoric.

Turning swords into plowshares was a cliché that didn’t do justice to his oratorical gifts. From the time he improbably seized power in 1971 and turned a regional rump party into a majority powerhouse, Dragović’s fiery, impassioned speeches took the Slavic world by storm even against the not-inconsiderable forces of pre-Communist government loyalists.

“So, you come for help from the man you killed. How ironic.” Dragović’s rich baritone in life was now a raspy sound not unlike dry ice rubbing against itself. But the timber of pragmatism and authority remained. “And why should I help the man who killed my wife and me?”

“First off, I killed you, not your wife. Secondly, you do what I ask of you and I will release you and everyone in here and reunite you with Irina. And you two can go back to haunting the Nesterov Museum and scaring the peasants of Ufa. Thirdly…”

“Yes?” Milo hissed.

“You owe me. You killed my father.”

“What are you talking about?”

“His name was Dr. Fritz Dietrich and he was an East German scientist. Remember when you were Deputy Minister of your country’s bureau of psychic warfare in your intelligence ministry?

“When I was with the Stasi,” he continued through his teeth, “I interrogated a Czech by the name of Dubćek. He admitted placing a psychotronic device on my father during a Communist Party meeting in 1967.” He pulled it out of his front pants pocket and showed it to the dead man. “Look familiar, Milo? This very device allowed a remote assassin somewhere in central Europe to home in on my father. And he died in front of me, my sister and our mother.

“You dispatched that assassin under orders from your Soviet handlers, your future benefactors but you dispatched him, nonetheless.” Dietrich then placed his face against the window so that every word briefly spread fog across it. “Problem: You got the wrong man. Your courier dropped the device in the wrong coat pocket.”

“I do not remember. There were several assassination operations during that time.”

“The one that killed my father was your only failure as Deputy Minister. Of course you remember.”

“I do not.”

“Then if the people pulling your strings didn’t think enough of you to give you the true results, you were a poor stooge of a Politburo that would eventually leave you to twist in the wind. And you will do as I tell you. Otherwise…” Dietrich slid his finger across the disruption bar of the screen, making Dragović writhe in paroxysms of what was obviously agony. “Or I will do this to everyone in there with you and you will suffer the consequences. You will never see Irina ever again and you will spend all of eternity in dire, excruciating pain.” He briefly slid his finger to the right, turning the disruption up to maximum for emphasis. Milo Dragović’s self-referencing residual image largely dissolved into luminescent chaos before Dietrich slid his finger to the left, lowering the disruption to zero megajoules. “And it will feel like that. Do we have a deal?”

Dragović nodded even as he struggled to retain his residual image. “What do you want from me?” Dietrich’s hand fell from the screen as if his arm suddenly went dead and he approached the window again.

“I want you… I want you to unite the dead.”

“Unite them against whom?”

Dietrich smirked and told him.

Chapter 27.