Open Writing

Monterey Bay, California
August, 2034

Steve Chappel pushed his chair away from the workstation, interlocked his fingers, then pushed his hands out before him, making his knuckles crack satisfyingly. He’d been at his word processor for nearly three hours, and it was time for a break. Just what it was that Herr Hess said to Churchill would have to wait for another day. He had to do more research; besides, a ham sandwich was waiting to be built, and Steve was hungry, not to mention thirsty. He uncoiled his lanky six feet four frame out of the chair and headed for the kitchen of the small one-bedroom house on the coast at Monterey. It was small, he reflected, but it was his, thanks to Aunt Ellen, who died a few months earlier.

And, regardless of the house’s size or condition, the land was almost-beachfront property; well, it was located on a bluff overlooking the coastal highway. He’d had a few offers already from local developers. Originally he was tempted, given his financial state, but in the end, he turned them all down. Then his first book was accepted for publication, and the advance, while not huge, was enough to keep away the wolves, and the creditors.

The book was a harmless bit of fantasy, all swords and sorcery and wizards, and the publishers must have liked it a lot to give any kind of advance at all to a first-time author, so Steve was grateful. Hell, he thought, I’ll be as grateful as they want me to be. I’ll grovel, kiss ass, whatever it takes to get it off the ground once it comes out.

The temporary financial security of the advance enabled him to finally sit down and write “The Hess Book”, the one he’d been working on since he was in college.

Like many historians, Steve never was satisfied with the official line about the deputy leader of WW2 Germany and his dramatic flight to Britain in 1941, and his subsequent imprisonment; as it turned out, for the rest of his long life. There were just too many mysteries there for an inquiring mind to accept. Why, for example, if he really went to sue for peace, did Churchill turn him down? Why was he imprisoned and tried as a war criminal, when he seemed to be trying to end the war? Why was no one allowed to interview him in Spandau jail, where he spent the last 21 years of his life as its only inmate? And why did he commit suicide in 1986, after spending so long in jail? If, in fact, it was suicide.

Rudolph Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in1894. He served in the Kaiser’s army in World War One, joined the Nationalsozialistische ( Nazi ) Party in 1921, participated in the Munich Beer Hall putsch (revolt) and was arrested and imprisoned with Hitler in 1923. While in prison, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to him. He became Hitler’s private secretary, and was appointed Deputy in charge of party organization 1933 when Hitler came to power. In 1934 he was made a minister in the cabinet.

In 1939 he was made Third Deputy Reischfeurher, below Second Deputy Hermann Goering, the Minister of Defense, and head of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe. But it was the First Deputy, Martin Borman, who was the mastermind. Was Hess jealous, perhaps? Did he feel, after all his unswerving loyalty to Hitler that he deserved better? Why, after his flight to Britain and trial, not to mention a succession of prisons, had he spent the 20 years from 1966 to 1986 and his subsequent alleged suicide as Spandau prison’s only inmate?

These and other questions had always intrigued Steve, and at last he was able to research seriously, and write the book that he hoped would explain it all. Although he was writing it as a novel, his research was as sound and meticulous as he could make it, and while he would take license with characters’ motives and dialogue, he was determined that he would not invent anything purporting to be a salient fact. Hell, he thought as he opened the refrigerator and began the hunt for the makings of his lunch, Strieber did it with Majestic. If I could write a book half as good as that one, I’d be well satisfied.

Still in his mid-20s, the critics called Steve Chappel a young man of Some Promise, comparing his first book to works by such luminaries as Terry Brooks and even—gasp—Tolkein. One reviewer had called his hero, a teacher who finds a way to enter parallel worlds, an adult’s Harry Potter. Steve enjoyed the comparison, since he considered the brilliant series of books about the young lad at the school for wizards as being as much for adults as for children. But whatever the genre, if he could do even fractionally as well as the legendary J. K. Rowling had, he’d be more than satisfied; he’d be ecstatic. Steve had been writing since college, seven years, and he regarded those years as his apprenticeship to learn his craft. He was still learning, of course, and he hoped he would never stop, but also he thought his acceptance had been his reward for the years of hard work.

Steve finished making his sandwich and carried it and a bottle of Miller Lite outside onto the deck. He sat at the round table and tilted the attached sun umbrella to provide some respite from the sun, fierce now in the middle of the day. Then he took a large bite of his sandwich, chewed and chased it with a mouthful of cold beer and looked out over the bay, spread out before him.

As usual, it was an impressive sight. No matter the weather, the view from the small cottage was always invigorating. Sometimes, even inspiring, although inspiration had been in short supply lately, and therein lay his problem. The book, once his all-consuming passion, was not going well. The last chapter had taken him a month to write, mostly in short bursts like today’s effort. Some days, he had done no writing at all, just sat on the terrace and looked at the view and drank beer. What he had once thought of as his life’s work was turning into a boggy morass of confused ideas and stilted paragraphs. Now, he found himself asking if he really wanted to continue with it, doubts he would have never thought possible.

He knew, or thought he knew, what the problem was. Julia, his girlfriend of four years, left him a month before the book contract arrived. She said she was tired of waiting for his proverbial ship to come in, and after he inherited the cottage, she left. Obviously, she had taken his moving in, instead of selling as she suggested, as a sign that he was settling in for the long haul.

They had met at the high school just up the coast in Santa Cruz, where she was the student counselor and he taught 20th Century History to mostly bored, uninterested teenagers. During their time together, Julia had made it plain that she thought Steve was wasting his time writing “silly little children’s fantasies”, and should be instead concentrating on seeking advancement in his teaching career. She had also disapproved of his writing the Hess book as a novel; he would be far better employed, she had opined, in treating it as a thesis to earn his Master’s degree.

But Steve had persevered with the fantasy novel even when the rejections threatened to bring him, literally, to his knees. Finally, after his aunt died and Steve got the cottage, Julia had announced that she had accepted an offer of senior counselor at a large school in Jacksonville. She gave him what had amounted to an ultimatum, saying that she would like him to come with her, but that she would be going whether he did or not. Steve chose not, and within a month, she had gone, clear across the other side of the country, trading a sunset for a sunrise.

Laying his half-eaten sandwich on the plate, he went inside for another beer. When he returned to the terrace, he sat down and was raising the bottle to his lips when he caught a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to look, and a moment later the boom of the explosion reached his ears. Shocked, he watched as a smoky fireball rose from the coastal highway. He leapt from his chair and ran to the other end of the deck where his telescope sat on its tripod.

Steve often used it to look at the stars on clear nights, and occasionally to watch ships far out to sea as they passed sailing north on their way to Los Angeles or San Francisco, or south to the Panama Canal. Always an avid fan of science fiction, the sight of stars and planets through the ’scope never failed to engage and stimulate him. Now, he trained the 56-power lens on the highway below, and saw the source of the fire and smoke.

Puzzled, he moved the telescope back and forth minutely, searching on either side of the fire for any vehicle other than the one he could see. He frowned as he squinted through the eyepiece; there seemed to be only one vehicle involved, a car, or what was left of it. It sat in the middle of the six-lane highway, totally destroyed, burning fiercely and belching clouds of black and occasionally white smoke while other vehicles slowed and moved cautiously around it. Steve felt a horrified shiver pass down his spine as he realized that whoever had been in the car had had no chance of survival; the vehicle was an inferno, its interior consumed.

Steve suppressed an irrational desire to race down to the highway. There was nothing he or anyone else could do for the occupants; they were beyond any help he or even the best-equipped rescue vehicles could give. He watched a moment longer, then turned away, sickened by the sight of death come suddenly to at least one person. Please don’t let it be a family, he thought. God….

He walked back to the table and sat in the umbrella’s shade, his appetite gone, the remains of his sandwich forgotten. He lifted his beer and drained it in one long draft, then belched softly and sat looking at the column of smoke, hearing for the first time the approaching emergency vehicles, the sound of their sirens reaching him clearly through the still air.