Schell’s breath was ragged, too.
She tried to buck him off, but his bulk was too great. How had he survived the strikes to his head?
“Hure.”
That, too, she understood. Whore.
A surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins, and lifting her head from the floor of the crypt, she tried to focus her eyes. But then a hand, fat fingers spread, pushed it back down again so powerfully she nearly cracked her teeth.
“Sie schlagen mich.” Again.
And he was going to settle the score.
The truncheon she had hit him with was lying only a few feet away—she stretched an arm out toward it—but it might just as well have been a mile. He grunted in derision, and she felt a splat of blood and spit fall from his mouth and onto her cheek.
“English bitch.”
Bracing herself on her elbows, she rocked her hips, back and forth. He gripped her shoulders to hold her still. From far above, she heard the swell of an organ’s pipes. As he bore down, hoping to crush her, she reared up, just enough to throw him off-balance. She did it again, and this time raised her body sufficiently high to topple him. He slipped to one side, groaning. The blows to his head must have taken some toll! She was able to turn over at last, and see him—his eyes were cloudy, and his thick blond hair was creased and matted to his skull with dried blood. If only she had hit him one more time when she’d had the chance . . .
Her feet scrabbling sideways at the floor, she managed to put a few inches between them, enough to get to her knees, and then to stand, however unsteadily. Her left shoe felt like a red-hot vice around her swollen foot. Picking up the truncheon—it was slick and unwieldy in her hand—she steadied herself. He was bobbing on his knees, shirttails hanging loose, a gas mask, strangely enough, dangling from one pocket of his overcoat. He was twisting his mouth to say something, but he never did get it out. With both hands on the truncheon, Rebecca swung it so hard that his head spun nearly all the way around, blood and teeth flying, before he flopped onto his belly, his chin smacking on the floor. Panting from the exertion, she waited to see if he moved again—she was not going to make the same mistake twice—but he did not. Still, just to be absolutely sure, she rested her good foot on the small of his back and pressed it there.
The hunter, claiming her kill.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Graf knew, from a previous trial run, that it was exactly 295 steps from the floor of the cathedral to the commanding heights of the Whispering Gallery, set on a cornice running the circumference of the dome. But he did not remember being so winded from the climb that last time he had tried it. Of course, on that trial run he had not encountered the turmoil in the crypt, or in the library, nor had he been carrying the viola case. When he emerged into the gallery now, it was very different than it had been during the day. The long rectangular windows that surrounded it, each set of four punctuated by a niche containing a piece of classical statuary, admitted only moonlight, which cast an eerie bluish glow all around.
And tonight, unlike before, he was quite alone there.
Far below, but directly beneath him, lay the more brightly lighted expanse of the church, and the reverent worshippers listening to the choristers—thirty young boys, their voices raised in sweet harmony—singing to the booming accompaniment of the mighty church organ. The music echoed around the gallery, reverberating from the curved walls, soaring to the top of the dome overhead, so stirringly that even the painted Gospel figures adorning the spandrels seemed to have come to life. But Graf had already picked out his spot, and doing his best to block out the noise and distraction, he went right to it, gently resting the viola case on the wooden bench that ran the length of the space. Concentrate, he told himself, concentrate.
Peering down from the iron railing, he could see the pulpit to his left, the endless nave straight ahead, and in the very center of the floor the great circular medallion marking the apex of the dome itself. It was a multicolored mosaic, a round sun emitting spike-like rays, and bordered by a black marble ring advising, in Latin, that anyone seeking Christopher Wren’s monument should simply look around them. The medallion could not have made a better target.
Stepping back from the rail, he took from one pocket of his coat a pair of rubber gloves—the thinnest, but most durable, from his lab—and snapped them on. From the other pocket, he removed a gas mask, then unwound its straps and looped it around behind his ears. Since the goggles interfered with his vision, and the lower portion with his breathing, he would only raise it to his face at the last minute—just before arming the bomb and hurling it over the rail.
There was a break in the music, the last chords of the hymn dying down. A few words were being preached from the pulpit, largely indecipherable from up here, and of no importance, anyway. With all the deliberation of a surgeon about to embark upon a complicated operation, Graf unlatched the case and lifted its lid. The canister lay cradled in its black velvet berth, with soft rags, made from Schell’s old coat, tucked into every corner around it to provide extra cushioning. Schell . . . he had hoped to have him up in the gallery, too, not only as an accomplice, but as a witness to his achievement. Who would vouch for him? There was the secretary of state Wilhelm Solf, back in the Colonial Office in Berlin, but even he didn’t know much about the plan. Graf had purposely kept him, like everyone else, in the dark.
Still, he could not dwell on that now. The act was the thing.
Sitting down beside the case, he lifted the bomb out with both hands, and laid it in his lap. The minister was still prattling on—Graf could occasionally make out a phrase or two about the enormous sacrifices made by the nation, or the resolute character with which Britain was meeting the brutality of the savage Hun—as he carefully loosened the screw on the tip of the canister. Beneath it, the nitroglycerin charge lay. Schell had assured him that he had weighted the bomb in such a way that it would fall headfirst and explode on contact. But from this great height, Graf was certain that however it landed, the detonation would occur, and its lethal contents would burst out on a cloud of poisonous gas. All he needed to do first was give it a shake or two, enough to crack the tubes inside, and mix the deadly brew.
He had anticipated this moment for so long, he was reluctant now to proceed. He would wait until the music died down, and only then, as the organ pipes subsided, as every voice went silent, as the worshippers sat enraptured, would he ignite this long-planned Götterdämmerung.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
How long it took him to fumble his way out of the dark library, Wells could not be sure—but it was too long, that much he knew. He had banged up against several shelves, then circumvented the fallen librarian, before stumbling over the andirons and almost landing in the hearth. Regaining his balance, his hand fell on one of the pokers, which he gratefully gripped harder. At last, he thought, lifting it from the rack, he would have some kind of weapon. Not a gun, as Graf had, but something.
Groping for the handle to the door, he eventually found it, and stepped out into the dim gas-lit corridor. The walls echoed with the strains of the pipe organ—Bach’s “O Man, Bewail Thy Grievous Sin,” if he was not mistaken. But the only sign of Graf was a footprint smudged in black ink . . . heading toward the end of the hall, where a velvet cord had been dropped and a winding staircase led to the upper gallery.
Poker twitching in his hand, Wells went to the stairs and started up, wary of alerting Graf to his pursuit, but eager to close any distance between them. He knew he was on the right track when he saw yet another smear of ink on a step. But he heard nothing and saw nothing of the man himself. What, he wondered, was his plan? And what, more to the point, was in that viola case he had been carrying?
As he rounded the last landing, he saw a brass plaque that read, “The Whispering Gallery: In addition to proper decorum, visitors are reminded to observe all necessary safety precautions.” Wells moved even more slowly now, keeping close to the inner wall—the stone thrummed with the music—unti
l he could stick his head out enough to look around the gallery’s vast circumference.
In the gloom, it was hard to see anything clearly—a golden aura from the lamps in the nave below had turned the gallery into a flickering magic lantern show—and Wells wondered if he’d somehow lost the man’s trail. But how? The stairs had led nowhere but here. Exhausted already, unsure of what he could possibly do next, he leaned his head back against the wall. Having come this far, was he going to fail in his duty now?
“Straight across,” he heard, softly, “on the bench,” and nearly jumped. The wall was whispering to him, but in an unmistakable voice. Hoarse, gravelly. The voice of Sergeant Stubb.
Whose ghost was nowhere to be seen.
Wells’s eyes sprang wide, and looking where he’d been told, he discerned the outline of a lone, dark figure now, sitting on the curved bench that went all the way around the gallery. He held something in his lap, to which, head bent low, he was carefully attending. Resting beside him, barely visible behind the wrought-iron railing, was an open instrument case.
“Now’s the time,” Stubb whispered. “Now.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
It was the gas mask in Schell’s pocket that had, at first, puzzled Rebecca—but then, it had suddenly made absolute, and awful, sense.
Whatever their plan was, and however they were planning to execute it, there were only moments to avert it.
Seizing the mask and looping it around her neck, she falteringly made her way to the exit, and then, with both hands to steady herself against the stone walls, climbed, one laborious step after another, up from the crypt. The boy choristers were sweetly singing, in their high-pitched harmony, as she propped herself in the arched doorway, swaying on her blazing foot. Looking all around, she saw no sign of Wells, or Graf, or for that matter, anything amiss. Until she noticed a young sailor, in a wheelchair, glancing at her, for all the world as if he had been expecting her. He was pointing, and rather urgently, toward the door to the upper gallery. She knew that staircase—she’d gone there several times over the course of her life—and she knew that it was hundreds of steps high. Hundreds of steps that she would never be able to climb in her present condition.
But she also knew that it led to the balcony that overlooked the entire center of the church, and its congregation.
She looked up at the iron railing—black and gold—that surrounded the Whispering Gallery, and though she could not be sure from such a distance and at such a height, she thought she saw someone in a dark overcoat, sitting just behind it. Her eyes went from that commanding post to the congregation below, from that high ground to the mosaic medallion in the floor—a target as plain as any in the shooting range at the Fairyland arcade.
It all came together for her in one terrible flash. Careening toward the pulpit, she knew what she had to do—and knew that she might have only seconds to do it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Under most circumstances, Graf would have been transported by the organ music, carried away on the tide of Bach’s genius. A countryman, of course, and in his view, the superior composer, even to Beethoven. Where Beethoven was all emotion, Bach was all intellect, his compositions so exquisitely calibrated in their harmonic and motivic organization that he might just as well have been a scientist. Graf felt that he and Bach, however different their occupations and aspirations, would have had a seamless meeting of the minds.
But now, he was simply waiting for the music to stop, waiting for the last chords to die out, so that in the ensuing silence he could shout out, in triumph and exultation, the kaiser’s own war cry, “der Sieg ist sicher!”—“victory is assured!”—and hurl his bomb at the gleaming target below. That moment was coming, and soon, and in preparation now, he lifted the canister from his lap and shook it, just enough to hear the tinkle of the glass tubes cracking inside, their contents commingling with the gas, to make the lethal brew. The explosive charge was set, and there was nothing left to do but to don the gas mask hanging down around his neck. With gloved hands, he removed his eyeglasses—he always felt strangely naked without them on—and slipped them into the pocket of his baggy coat. Then he tightened the straps of the mask behind his ears and settled the device over his mouth and nose.
The air was suddenly stale, and he could hear his own breathing. His vision was obscured behind the thick goggles, and the gallery, dim to begin with, darkened further. He had to blink several times just to focus his vision, and then, once he felt accustomed to having the mask on, he stood up and approached the railing. He held the bomb like an offering, and as the last measures of the music played out, he lifted it high above his head, both hands damp with a nervous sweat, and waited. He was not a praying man, but now he did. He prayed for his attack to go off without a hitch, to rain down destruction upon his enemy, to instill fear in English hearts everywhere and shatter the nation’s will to fight on. He was praying for all these things when he caught, out of the corner of his eye, a furtive movement.
At first, he considered it a mere shadow, but when he dared to turn his head and look away from the black-bordered sun that lay below, he saw it again, much closer, so close that before he could even react, he saw a murky form lunging straight at him. The sharp end of an iron rod prodded his breast, hard, knocking him backward and off of his feet.
The bomb slipped from his hands, traveling the length of his body like a rolling pin and then sliding onto the floor, where it butted up, unexploded, against the bottom of the rail . . .
CHAPTER SIXTY
Rebecca had scrambled halfway up the steps to the pulpit, waving her gas mask, before a member of the cathedral watch spotted her and vaulted up right behind her.
“Let go!” she cried, batting his hand away from her arm. The bishop, looking aghast, tried to push her back down, but she shoved past him, too, and trying desperately to make herself heard over the final measures of the music, shouted, “Get out! Get out!” And then to emphasize the reason, she waved the mask back and forth above her head. “A gas attack is coming! A gas attack!”
She saw the front rows of the congregation taking notice, stirring uncertainly in their seats—was this woman mad?—and a few people quickly rising. From the far quarter, the navy man in his wheelchair picked up the cry, “Evacuate the cathedral! Now!” Even the watchman who had tried to stop her fell silent, and the bishop, holding his Bible in confusion, let her go on.
“Get out!” she repeated. At a clatter in the gallery high above, she looked up. All that could be seen was a tussle of some sort. Was it Wells, grappling with Graf and holding him at bay? Pointing her arm up at the fracas, she shouted, “Get out!” again and again, until her own lungs gave out and the bishop, at last grasping the situation, picked up the cry.
“Go!” he cried, stepping in front of Rebecca to lend his own authority. “Go now!”
With that, the stunned worshippers leapt to their feet and in a frenzied rush made for the exits on either transept, or back through the great western portal where most of them had entered. Those who were elderly, infirm, or wheelchair bound were swept up in the tide and carried toward the doors, the St. Paul’s watchmen trying to keep anyone from being trampled underfoot. The choristers, in their white gowns, flew from their choir stalls like a flock of startled doves. All was pandemonium, as the organ abruptly stopped and the cathedral was filled instead with the rumble of a thousand stamping feet and the roar of terrified cries.
Rebecca craned her head to see what was happening in the Whispering Gallery above, but from this pulpit, so far below, it was all like a shadow play, enacted behind the iron railings . . . angels and demons battling it out on the crenellated ramparts of heaven.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Graf had dropped his missile and fallen back with a thump against the bench, but Wells knew that the struggle had only just begun. With his gas mask still in place, the German rebounded, leaping up and batting at the iron poker that Wells was using like a rapier, thrusting and parrying to keep his
enemy off-balance.
Oh, how Wells wished that he held a better weapon!
Graf, cursing under the mask, was struggling to grasp the poker that Wells suddenly swung in a wicked arc at his head. With his first swing, Wells missed entirely, but the second connected, and to his relief, he saw Graf slump to one side, the mask slipping askew. But then the German’s hand dug into the pocket of his overcoat and fumbled around, before coming out with the revolver Wells had feared.
From a crouching position, he raised the gun and fired, an orange blaze erupting from the muzzle and the bullet ripping just under Wells’s arm, so closely that the fabric of the sleeve was torn. If he left any distance between them, Wells knew that the next shot might hit home, so instead of retreating he lunged at his opponent, slashing at his arm with the poker so forcefully that the gun went off again, the bullet banging bright sparks off the filigree of the railing. With one more blow to his wrist, Wells knocked the gun entirely free from Graf’s shaking fingers. It clattered to the floor, as the reverberation of the shots echoed around the chamber, a percussive accompaniment to the panicked cacophony far below.
In a rage, Graf ripped the mask off his face and snarled, “You damned fool! You damned old fool!”
Wells, exhausted, could barely stand, the hand holding the poker drooping at his side. Again, he thought, hit him again. Or better still, he should scramble for the gun.
“You can’t win,” Graf gasped, leaning back on the bench, breathing hard himself, and cradling his battered arm. “You’ve already lost!”
“Have I?”
“You and your whole bloody country.”
Wells was not about to argue the point just now. He suspected Graf was just playing for time, a thought confirmed in the next instant when, sufficiently recovered, Graf bolted up and ducked toward the railing.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 31