THE SPANISH LESSON
The seventeen-year-old narrator, a dude named Lucius, is tall, thin, hot-tempered, and possesses, so he tells us, the ability to consume enormous quantities of drugs. He is also an aspiring writer. A semiautobiographical tale? It certainly sounds like one.
Lucius sets the stage: in a Costa del Sol village of white stucco houses, a group of expatriates, mostly American, live in a row of houses at the sea's edge—expats who, for him, embodied the bohemian ideal. As a way of aligning himself with these older men and women, Lucius rents a small beach house and starts writing poetry. Several weeks after moving in, he initiates a bittersweet romance with a dreamy blonde California gal by the name of Anne Fisher. But it doesn't last long. "By the time she left me some months later, I had grown thoroughly sick of her, but she had—I believed—served her purpose in establishing me as a full-fledged expatriate."
Life for Lucius and the expats hums along, although Lucius remains an outsider. But then something unusual happens: a man and a woman—twins—move into the beach house next to his. Lucius characterizes them as "two suitably substandard people," a couple of years older, Tom and Alise, who say they are from Canada; however, Lucius surmises that their accents are definitely Northern European.
All the expats are put off by the twins, especially Richard Shockley, who views them as a threat to their dope-taking and occasional dope-smuggling. Surely, Shockley voices, the twins' weirdness will draw the attention of the police. His suspicions have some basis in fact: the twins have been seen making strange movements on the beach, and they set lanterns in their windows and let them burn all through the night. The local fishermen judge them to be "the devil's spawn."
A committee of expats led by Shockley asks Lucius to keep an eye on the twins. Since Lucius has never really been included in their group, he refuses their request and, as a way of extracting a measure of revenge, he goes next door and warns Tom and Alise.
Lucius explains the situation—how their actions on the beach and their lanterns at night are weirding everybody out. Tom replies, "We don't want to cause harm, but there's something we have to do here. It's dangerous, but we have to do it. We can't leave until it's done."
Tom goes on to tell Lucius of their background: they are not Canadian but German, having been raised by a dictatorial father after their mother's death. They were beaten, locked in closets, and fed poorly for nearly twenty years. They eventually escaped, found ways to raise money to flee to Spain, and now plan to travel to India after they receive more money for some goods they stole from their father.
From the moment he enters their house, Lucius senses the twins are communicating telepathically. His intuition is confirmed when he hears Tom say, "We thought if there was the appearance of a romantic involvement between you and Alise, people might take us more for granted. We hoped you would be agreeable to having Alise move in with you." Initially taken aback, Lucius agrees once Alise explains that she will only do the cleaning and the shopping; furthermore, there's no need for physical contact.
Events move apace. As it turns out, Alise shares Lucius' bed and, in her own odd way, is a very active participant in their sexual relationship, which leads to an intimate bond of sorts. The expats take this development in stride.
Then the tale kicks into overdrive—vintage Lucius Shepard. When the twins are off on their daily walk along the beach, Lucius sneaks into their house and reads the notebooks he saw on his previous visit. From the lengthy diary entries, he learns that the twins are refugees from a parallel universe where Hitler won the war and established a genetic manipulation project. Twenty clones, Tom and Alise included, were placed in a cave for further experimentation. At one point, all the clones were brutalized, but Tom and Alise escaped through a tunnel to this world.
Lucius is shocked but skeptical. He figures all these diary entries are simply a consequence of them being beaten and kept in a closet for all those years by their sadistic father.
As a way of discovering the truth, Lucius follows the twins down the beach to see what they are actually up to. Keeping hidden, he does indeed behold the miraculous. The twins start moving in a way that reminds him of T'ai Chi. The air in a section of the sea becomes distorted, as with a heat haze. The distorted air grows larger and larger, and he begins to see odd translucent shapes swirling within. Then, suddenly, all returns to normal.
What happens next is for Lucius Shepard to tell. But I'll give a hint: on their next trip to the beach, the twins activate the tunnel described in their notebooks and the victorious "Hitler world" bleeds into our own. Lucius realizes his real "Spanish lesson" is that there are multiple hidden worlds and dimensions within the cosmos, and that the struggle between good and evil is deeper and infinitely more sinister than anybody can imagine.
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