Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  Hannah's returning vision focused slowly on her captor, standing a foot in front of her, smiling. Helen Earth had discarded her sect robes and was garbed in her full Sonderkommando Thule dress uniform, jackboots and swastikas and all. That removed any lingering doubts, then. The question was, what was going to happen to her now?

  It didn't seem that torture was what Helen had in mind. Psycho-sexually speaking, sadists liked their victims to see the tools that were about to be used on them, but there was no evidence of stainless steel trays laden with shiny implements here. Sadists also generally liked to see their victims writhe, but she had been constrained far too tightly for that - in fact, there was no give in her bonds at all. Spread-eagled as she was, her ankles and wrists were chained so tautly that her backside was flattened against the unyielding stone wall behind her, cold on her ass. Flexing a wrist experimentally to test the strength of the chain, she felt the stubborn resisting clack of a ratchet that had obviously been employed to retract the chain to its maximum tension. The ratchet felt wooden. An old mechanism, perhaps mediaeval. And if the thing had lasted for that long, then it was a pretty good bet that she was going nowhere.

  Then again, perhaps she was. The lack of any instruments of torture was not necessarily the good thing it implied, and it probably meant only that Helen wanted to keep her immobile until she killed her. And that particular event was not, Hannah suspected, too far away. It wasn't so much the when as the how.

  Her eyes focused more and she looked beyond the sect leader, ignoring her lascivious stare. The bitch was taking in every inch of her, of course. She could at least have had the professional courtesy to dress her in some Dazzed and ironed Catherine Oxenberg Lair of the White Worm undies - it was the industry standard, after all. Jeez, anyone would think people had a problem with her purity.

  Hannah saw that she was being held captive in a round, stone chamber whose dimensions fitted very neatly into that part of the monastery to which she'd been unable to gain access. The courtyard, in fact, featureless apart from its green glassed dome and what seemed to be a large-bore well of some kind in the centre of the floor. The well was covered by a thick wooden trap, but heavy as the trap looked, it seemed raisable by means of another ratchet and chain mechanism, and Hannah wondered whether it was just plain old H2O that it covered. Somehow, she doubted it.

  The presence of the well made Hannah's spirits sink, but not so much as the presence of the two figures in a similar predicament to herself.

  Perry and Colleen.

  The two girls were manacled at one hundred and twenty degrees to herself, in what seemed to be the full chaining complement of the chamber. The pair had also been stripped and appeared drugged, but there was something deeply depressing in the way they stared flatly at Helen, heads hung low, as if they would be utterly resigned to her wont whether dosed to the eyeballs or not. Hannah had to remind herself that it was death these girls had signed up for, but doubted that Helen's wont was going to deliver them in quite the way they expected. There was going to be no going gently into the good night in this place - this promised to get very messy indeed.

  Helen used a handkerchief and wiped the dribble from Hannah's chin, spitting on the cloth to wet it. Hannah twisted her face away and snarled.

  "I gather that your people already know there's something down there," Helen said, nodding to the well. "But as yet I imagine you have little idea exactly what."

  Hannah debated pretending otherwise, to see if Helen could be drawn. But she needed information and this was no time to bluff. Begrudgingly, she shook her head.

  "I imagine also that you expect me to tell you, yes? As all self-respecting captors should?"

  Hannah nodded.

  Helen raised a finger and paused, taunting her deliberately. "We'll see," she said. "First, so that you are under no illusions as to your fate, permit me a little demonstration." Two acolyths entered the chamber and operated the wooden trap. Wooden ratchets clicked and chains tautened, and it rose with a rumble. It moved smoothly for something so old, a disturbing indicator that it had been raised often.

  Dank and cold air flooded the chamber, giving Hannah goose pimples. With the air came an almost overpowering stench of death and corruption. It was so foul that it acted like smelling salts on Perry and Colleen, rousing them slowly from their stupor. Before they came round fully, however, Helen's demonstration began. The acolyths moved to Perry. One of them flicked a lever next to the girl that released the ratchets in the wall, and she and her chains slackened. Together they lifted her by the armpits and half-carried, half-dragged her clanking towards the well. Perry was compos mentis enough to comprehend that something bad was about to happen and she began to struggle in her chains, her bare heels skidding just above the stone floor. But the realisation that she was going to be despatched by methods other than merciful came far too late.

  There was no preamble and nothing at all Hannah could do. The acolyths unlocked Perry's shackles and hurled her flailing form into the well.

  There was a high-pitched, rapidly fading scream followed by a series of horribly flat thumps and chocking sounds that made Hannah turn her gaze to the side. Then there was only silence.

  Colleen was shaking her head rapidly in denial, and she began to cry. Helen slapped her across the face, silencing her. "Change of mind?" she asked. "No longer wish to throw your sad little life away?" She smiled and backhanded her again. "Then we'll have to do it for you."

  She turned her attention back to Hannah, as if Colleen didn't exist at all. "This is the only original part of the monastery that remains, and had been buried here beneath rubble and soil for hundreds of years. The trap holds up remarkably well, wouldn't you say, for something built by mediaeval monks?" She caught Hannah's flicker of surprise and smiled. "Yes, they built it, and for the very same purpose it's used today. They were the first to see the light, you see. The light that came of darkness."

  The light, Hannah wondered? What the hell was she talking about?

  Helen continued. "I imagine those monks prayed as they made their sacrifices," she said. "Only animals, in the beginning, of course - sheep and goats, the odd cow. I wonder whether the praying stopped when they began to sacrifice human beings instead, or if their piety simply became yet more fervent?" Helen tutted in disapproval. "Men of God, eh? What can you do with them? How is your defrocked partner by the way?"

  Business partner, Hannah thought. Well, apart from that time in Guatemala.

  "Would you like to pray for this girl, Hannah?" Helen asked. She nodded to the acolyths and her sick demonstration was repeated as the struggling Colleen was summarily despatched after Perry into the dark. Like her friend, her screams lasted no more than seconds before the horrible thumps and chocking sounds stopped them dead.

  "No?" Helen queried. She motioned the acolyths towards Hannah. "Then how about for yourself?"

  Hannah growled with rage, thrashing out against her shackles until they cut into her flesh. She managed to bite clean through her ball gag, spat it out so that it dangled from its straps on her sternum. "You murdering bitch," she said matter-of-factly.

  "Hannah," Helen Earth said, "this has been going on for hundreds of years. Who am I to argue with such tradition?"

  Hannah remained silent for a second. The girls were gone, but the anger and sorrow she felt would have to wait. In no doubt that she would soon be joining them, what she needed was information, anything that might enable her to survive.

  "So, are you going to tell me what's down there or not?" she demanded. "Is it vamps, is it boggs or is it trogs? A dragon, ET, or the famous Boswell Wyrm? Go on, gizza clue. What the hell are you doing here?"

  "Victor Schauberger," Helen Earth said, and for a moment it seemed like a complete non sequitur.

  Then Hannah recalled her Forteana. Schauberger was the scientist most cited as the developer of Nazi flying saucers in World War Two. With others such as Schriever, Belluzzo and Habermohl, he had reportedly invented the antigravity drive
. For years, conspiracy magazines, books and websites had published shots of saucers adorned with his Nazi swastikas. The problem was, most if not all of these had been proven to be fake, and the utter lack of physical evidence of these saucers after craft had led to the whole theory being debunked. It was generally considered, in fact, to be a-

  "Crock of crap," Hannah Chapter announced.

  "You're right," Helen Earth said, surprisingly. "It was complete crap, as far as Schauberger and his theories went. Oh, there were projects based at Mauthausen, Leonstein and other facilities, but most of those involved with them were, how shall I say, reassigned within months. The theories failed to work, you see." Helen laughed and then added derisively, "Antigravity based on tonal vibrations, on living water, on the harmonics of the cosmos - it was all bullshit."

  "So we agree on one thing. What happened?"

  "Tibet happened," Helen said simply. "The Natu La Pass. SS Hauptsturmfuhrer and zoologist Ernst Schafer led an expedition there in 1938, a search for our Aryan origins. Ernst found more than our origins, however. Tibetan folklore was rife with tales of a light that had plummeted from the sky in ages past, and Schafer investigated. There in the snows he eventually located an object that he knew rendered invention of the antigravity drive unnecessary."

  "A downed UFO," Hannah guessed.

  "A downed UFO," Helen repeated. "Pilotless, but salvageable. Nevertheless, the archaeology needed to extricate it safely from the ice took over two years."

  "You were in possession of off-world technology from the start of the war," Hannah said cruelly, "and you still couldn't win?"

  Helen sneered. "They were able to unlock only the most basic of its functions. This great find became little more than a sub-orbital hovercraft. One function did work to their advantage, though. Stealth shields capable of rendering the saucer undetectable to any radar system."

  "So they had total freedom in enemy airspace?"

  "And used it. Heinrich Himmler got it into his head that where there was one saucer, there would be others, and they would hold the data needed to access the locked functions. Himmler was nothing but a former chicken farmer, but he had visions of death rays, space platforms... a Nazi base on the moon. So Himmler ordered an intensive research program - Vordringlichkeitsstuffe, high priority - to map similar accounts of lights falling from the sky throughout history. And he codenamed the project Bifrost, after the bridge to the Gods."

  "Find much?" Hannah asked casually.

  "That would be telling. The saucer visited the Antarctic, the Amazonian Basin, Ngorongoro Crater, Tunguska-"

  "And Boswell, North Yorkshire," Hannah finished for her.

  "Among other locations on this miserable little island of yours. It's funny. Bifrost could have hovered over Big Ben itself and no one would have known."

  "Department Q knew. I'd heard they kicked your asses not far from this very spot."

  Helen Earth stroked Hannah's cheek. "You know that much, then. What you don't know is that was only because Bifrost found something fallen from the skies here that was so very different to what we unearthed at the other sites."

  This was it, Hannah thought. This was the news she needed to hear. But she wasn't going to hear unless she played it cool. "Please don't tell me you've got William Shatner's toupee down there."

  Helen Earth shook her head and breathed out her answer slowly. A sudden look appeared behind her eyes that Hannah found completely out of place - and wrong. "Something wonderful. Something had come not from the skies but from heaven itself."

  "Heaven heaven?" Hannah said. She didn't like the way this was going at all. Be cool, she thought. "Wow."

  "They found our saviour had come," Helen said breathlessly.

  Hannah faltered, thrown and uneased by Helen's strange and abrupt change of attitude. Had the Nazi bitch gone God-squad on her or what?

  "Our... saviour?" she queried slowly.

  "Our saviour," Helen repeated. As she did, the unexpected religious fugue disappeared as quickly as it had come. She waved on the acolyths. "Let me introduce you."

  Oh, I don't think so, Hannah told herself. But if she was getting out of here alive, she had to wait, bide her time. She allowed the acolyths to loosen the ratchets, to grab her beneath the arms and lead her towards the well before she made her move. Deep breath. Just one chance at this, she knew. One.

  She took it.

  As the acolyths unlocked the shackles from each of her wrists, Hannah grabbed onto the chains and span on the spot, wrapped one set of links about the neck of the first acolyth and whiplashed the second in the face with the other. As she fell backwards into Helen Earth, flooring the pair of them, Hannah pulled on her stranglehold, forcing a desperate choke from the mouth of the first acolyth, and the key to the ankle shackles out of her hand. Hannah snatched up the key and kneed its owner hard in the small of the back, sending her tipping head over heels into the well. There was no time for thumps or chocking sounds because the chain around her neck tautened and instantly snapped her neck. The body couldn't even twitch.

  Hannah bent forward and turned the key quickly in the first shackle. Even as the chain was falling away, she had already turned her attention to the second.

  But Helen was more resilient than she thought, and almost inhumanly fast. No one is that fast, Hannah thought, as a jackboot smashed into her chin and she heard her jaw crack loudly. The impact sent her arcing backwards into the air and all she could see was the rising blackness of the well, feel its sudden dank chill enveloping her. She snapped to an almost immediate halt next to the body of the first acolyth, agony flaring in her ankle and in her pelvis as the one remaining chain reached its maximum extension and nearly yanked her leg away at the hip. The back of her head cracked into the rough rock wall of the well and she hung there by one fiery, cartilage-ripped limb, turning slowly, dazed.

  Almost dreamily, Hannah stared past her dangling arms into the inverted abyss. Caught in the half-light from the top of the well, she saw a silvery blade projecting from the rock just inches below her fingertips, another that scythed out at an opposing angle a little further down, and beyond that, set in the rock in ways that would make it impossible for a falling body to avoid them, a third, fourth, fifth, and more, until they could no longer be seen in the deeper darkness. Fresh gore in varying amounts dripped from their razor edges.

  That explained the chocking sounds, she thought as a shadow blocked out the half-light.

  "That was stupid," a voice observed. "It only caused you unnecessary pain."

  Hannah swallowed blood, a sharp chip of tooth, craned her neck and looked up. Yooof! That hurt. She saw that she was dangling about a body length and a half inside the well and the silhouette of Helen Earth loomed above her. "I'm not good with blind dates," she shouted up at the sect leader. "Even with saviours. So what is it, Helen, huh? Come on, don't keep me in suspense..."

  Helen Earth laughed briefly, stopped suddenly, and Hannah felt a chill that was nothing to do with the well. "That wasn't my intention," she said. Hannah looked on helplessly as the woman leaned into the pit and fitted a key into the last ankle shackle. She tried to kick at her with her one free leg but Helen simply batted her foot away. There was nothing to do but go out fighting.

  "Yo, Fraulein!"

  "What is it?"

  "Heil be back."

  Helen Earth smiled. "Heil be back. Doubtless some inane pop culture reference which I'm meant to understand, yes?"

  "Yeah, you know - Arnie? Fellow countryman of the short guy with the moustache?"

  "Oh, him," Helen said with a snort of derision, and Hannah wasn't sure whether she meant Arnie or the other one. "That's a joke, is it? Heil be back."

  Helen turned the key.

  "No, Miss Chapter," she said emphatically, "you won't."

  With a wail, Hannah fell. Almost instantly she felt the first of the blades slice a neat line in her back from shoulder blade to buttock, though the wound didn't feel deep. Lucky, that was all. She knew sh
e was fractions of seconds away from being sliced and diced and she had to act faster than she had ever done before. If she didn't...

  Oh yeah, she could see the morning papers now. "Dyke gets screwed by mincer!" Old Warren'd get his kicks out of that, sure enough.

  From what she could see, she had one advantage. The countless bodies - human or otherwise - that had fallen and been sliced to pieces during their drop through this hell-hole had coated it with a clotted and congealed layer of blood and tissue that had accumulated over the years into a spongy lining on the rock. She might just be able to use that to gain some control of her descent.

  She looked beneath herself as far as she could, as far as the light lasted, and twisted her body to compensate for what was coming as best as she was able. There was a blade coming up under her right ribcage. She swivelled and bent backwards at the hip, kicked herself off the wall. Another appeared, ready to cross-section her midriff, and she bent double to avoid it. She grabbed at a grotesque bush of dried intestines, momentarily braking herself before it snapped away, then used this slightest of delays to bypass the next of the cutting edges. She pirouetted, she bounced, she pushed, booted and threw herself on and off the safe patches of the bloodied well here, then there, again and then again, like a human pinball in some nightmare machine. Once, she managed to grab a section of femur that had become amputated only God knew when and then jammed above a blade, and this she used to block her impact on the one that followed, snapping the bone but negotiating the razored edge without harm. She was in deeper darkness now and reacting more from instinct than sight but again she bounced from wall to wall, in one move locking her body as straight as a knife, in another curling into a foetal ball, whichever was her best strategy for survival. But she was also becoming exhausted and her contact with the blades more and more frequent. She hissed with pain as the razored edges sliced variously into her right thigh, along the length of her arm, and across the side of her neck, barely missing the carotid artery. She knew she couldn't keep this up. She just couldn't...