If only Teufel himself had stayed behind to make sure that his orders were carried out properly. Instead he and his bitch had raced off in pursuit of the British agent and his secret weapon.
The bonfire had been assembled from the debris of the entrance hall, but at the back of the house, thankfully out of sight of the rest of the Germans swarming over the ruination at the front.
As it was, she broke free of the two striplings who had been set the task of burning her body, killing both of them. Pulling their bodies into the shade of a pergola, she drained them both dry, setting herself on the path to a swift and full recovery.
Before anyone else was aware that she had escaped, she was already on her way to catching up with the British spy and the secret weapon.
Going by foot and not at the peak of fitness either, she had reached the Darmstadt Dam after dark. From there – following signs that Teufel had already been there before her – she followed the trail his entourage had left into the hills and practically to the gates of Castle Frankenstein.
She barely registered the cold wind against her cheek, but felt it in the hollows of the healing wound in her chest, its frosty breath a discomforting splinter of ice that went all the way through to the bone and knitting muscle of her shoulder socket.
Thankfully the haphazard stake had not damaged any of her major organs; although a great deal of blood had been spilled, the truth was that none of her injuries were life-threatening. She would recover from them soon enough and her body would heal itself completely, given time.
Cat-like eyes taking in what little light there was, Katarina studied this side of the castle in intricate detail.
She took in the smoking ruin of one of the gatehouse watchtowers, the open checkpoint below, the looming pylons penetrating the fortress itself, the electrical cables descending to the transformers of a sub-station somewhere within the complex, and the soldiers now scurrying about all over the battlements like swarming ants.
She grunted in annoyance and frustration. Once again the crude methods of the girl-soldiers were hampering her own rescue efforts.
As she continued to survey the fortress, she penetrated the fortress with preternatural senses beyond those possessed by mortal beings. She knew he was there; the taste of him was on the air. It was only a faint trace, but it was there nonetheless.
And, of course, she already knew that Prisoner Zero was there too, incarcerated somewhere within the castle’s walls, and that if he were not saved… From what she had been told, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
However, the conventional route she would have preferred to take to gain entrance to the castle was closed to her now. Had that been the only way in, then things might well have been tricky for her now. Except that she had visited the castle before, long ago, when she was still newly born to her twilight existence.
Descending from the wooded crags, shadow-swift, Kharkova skirted the southern perimeter of the castle, moving through the knotty undergrowth with barely a sound. Her progress unhindered by the darkness, she kept a watchful eye on the imposing silhouette atop the bluff above her.
And there at last, half a mile from the fortress on its eastern side, in an overgrown hollow in the tangled woodland, within earshot of a raging river, she came upon what she had been looking for.
If she hadn’t known it was there she would never have found it; but she did. To any casual passer-by it would have been dismissed out of hand as just another animal burrow – if that. But Katarina knew better.
Pulling aside a screen of knotty brambles and woody creepers, she exposed the entrance to a shallow cave. Crouching under the natural screen and stepping through the dark hole, she made her way further into a tunnel descending through the hillside, the ceiling rising above her until she was able to walk upright again.
The darkness was all-enveloping, but Katarina knew where was she was going. Cosseted within the damp earth confines of the tunnel, she followed the stone-lined passageway as it turned west towards the roots of the crag upon which stood Castle Frankenstein.
ISLA VON HAUPSTEIN started, suddenly bolt upright, ears alert, darting glances around the room in which her master was now ensconced, as if seeing things that others could not.
“What is it, my dear?” Lieutenant-Colonel Teufel asked from the desk at which he was working, the hairs on the back of his neck rising in anticipation.
“She’s here,” his adjutant hissed. Isla inhaled deeply. “I can smell her.”
“Who?” Teufel asked, regarding her with darkly hooded eyes.
“The vampire,” she replied, turning eyes wild with feral hunger on her master. “She’s still alive.”
“Good,” the Devil said, a death’s head leer on his pale face. “And there was I, fearing that things would be boring from here on in. I do so prefer the thrill of the chase to the actual capture. Don’t you?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
The Prisoner
THE SUN WAS a ball of molten iron hanging in a blood-red sky. Ulysses could feel every square inch of his skin blistering at its cruel caress, burning away every nerve ending. His very existence was pain given flesh.
And then he woke up.
ULYSSES GASPED FOR breath. He felt a chill on his brow.
Anxiously he looked around him. He soon realised he was only using his left eye. The right seemed to be covered with something. He tried to blink, but his right eye stubbornly refused to respond.
He was in some kind of laboratory – that much was plain. A flickering, inconstant blue-white light, like sparking bursts of ball-lightning, lit the chamber, revealing bare stone walls, banks of primitive Babbage engines, and workbenches supporting a plethora of glass tanks containing a soupy yellow-green fluid. And suspended inside that murky miasma…
A host of hideous memories – or were they hallucinations? – suddenly assailed his mind: flashes of images of masked surgeons; glinting razor-sharp scalpel blades; the glare of arc-lamps; and fingers probing where fingers were never supposed to go.
Ulysses gasped in shock and tried to sit up, but felt leather belts dig into his bare flesh as he strained against the harness securing him to the operating table.
He could move his head, but that was all.
Ulysses started to panic. He had been somewhere like this before. Memories of an operating theatre, its tiled walls crusted with dried bloodstains and worse. His heart quickened, and his breathing became shallow.
It was said that after it was gone, a man did not remember the pain he had once had to endure. And it was a good thing too, otherwise Ulysses would have gone mad from it, he was sure.
He was, however, aware of a dull ache in his face. It was his eye. It felt sore. He went to rub it, before remembering that he couldn’t move his hands.
Tensing his arm again, Ulysses tried once more to extricate himself, gritting his teeth as the leather cuff around his wrist rubbed the sparse flesh raw. But it was no good; no matter how hard he tried he wasn’t going to be able to free himself that way.
He stopped and tried to relax, hoping to clear his mind so that he might come up with a way out of his current predicament.
The last thing he remembered clearly – before the tormented visions of scalpel-fingered surgeon-torturers slicing him up – was someone entering the cell, in which he had been interrogated by Daniel Dashwood on and off since he had first been brought to Castle Frankenstein, and roughly clamping a rag soaked in chloroform over his nose and mouth.
Tied to the chair and unable to resist, other than for his semi-dream of demonic doctors, the next thing he had been properly aware of was waking up in a horizontal position, strapped to a gurney of some kind and unable to move, his eye aching horribly. It was like having a piece of grit in his eye that he couldn’t blink clear or even rinse away with his own tears.
As he lay there, pondering his predicament, the sounds of the lab filtered through to his conscious mind.
He could hear the risin
g hum of electrical capacitors culminating in a crackle of discharging energy. He could hear the wheeze and hiss of a bellows, the rattle of an Enigma engine processing data somewhere in the background, and the glub-glub of air bubbles in a tank of fluid. There was the clatter of surgical instruments in a kidney dish and a murmur of voices. It took him a moment to tune into the fact that they were speaking German.
“He’s awake, doctor,” a voice said. It was male, young and subservient. It also sounded strangely familiar.
“Is he now?” came another voice, this one more thickly accented and cracked with age. Or possibly by insanity, Ulysses thought. It was certainly a possibility in a madhouse like this.
There was a metallic crash as something was dropped into a pan and then the sound of footsteps ringing from the floor of the laboratory. Moments later a figure was there at his side, looming over him.
Ulysses stared up at the emaciated spectre. It was wearing a blood-stained surgical gown. Several bright red traces were horribly fresh.
“Ah, so he is.” It didn’t come as any surprise to Ulysses that the broken voice belonged to the horrific creature. Various lenses, offering different degrees of magnification, were mounted on a metal clamp around his head.
Pulling his surgeon’s mask away from his mouth, he revealed a disquieting leer. The freak was smiling at him.
“Good evening,” he said in carefully enunciated English. “How are you feeling?”
Ulysses stared at the man in abject horror. How was he feeling? What kind of a question was that?
And then he was seized by a moment of doubt. Having thought he’d known, with horrible certainty, what was going on here, he now began to question his original assumption. Perhaps he had been injured and the surgeon was fixing him up. Perhaps the restraints were for his own protection. Perhaps he had been rescued whilst unconscious and he was in some safe house somewhere operated by the German Resistance. Hope blossomed like a winter snowdrop.
And then the reality of his situation came crashing back as the deathly surgeon continued. “But how rude of me. I have not yet introduced myself. I am Doctor Folter of the Frankenstein Corps, and I shall be your surgeon for the duration of this procedure.”
Ulysses swallowed hard. It felt as though there was a hot stone in his stomach, melting through the tangle of his intestines.
“Procedure?” he managed at last, his tongue thick in his mouth, his mind eye’s replaying the nightmarish images of ghoulish cadavers with finger-knives poised ready to slice him limb from limb.
“But of course. It is a long time since we have had any spare parts of such quality to work with, even despite the injuries you have sustained since being brought here,” he grumbled, obviously unhappy at how his latest specimen had been treated. “But thankfully most of that is only surface damage. Your left arm especially,” he said, almost hungrily. “Such strong and supple flesh. So young and fresh.”
“My eye,” Ulysses mumbled, painfully aware of the throbbing coming from the middle of his face. “What’s happened to my eye?”
“This eye, you mean?” Folter said casually, holding up a pair of forceps. Gripped within its metal teeth was a glistening ball of white jelly, shreds of fine muscle still attached.
Ulysses stared into the small, dead pupil of his own right eye and was unable to stifle the scream of horror that burst from him then. It felt as if his eye-socket was on fire.
As terror seized him he tried to form a question between his howls of horror.
“You want to know why?” Folter asked.
Ulysses nodded furiously, unable to stop his remaining eye flicking from the monstrous surgeon to his grisly prize and back again.
“I would have thought that was obvious. But here, let me show you. Seziermesser?” the surgeon called to his assistant, the two of them turning Ulysses’ gurney about.
And as the bed rotated, the arc-lamps spinning past above him, Ulysses wondered wildly. Had he heard correctly, or had he imagined it? Had Folter really called his assistant Seziermesser?
“There,” Folter said proudly.
From his new position, Ulysses could see the arcing capacitors now, bursts of chained lightning coursing between them, filling the air with the tinny stink of ozone and static electricity.
But it was the contraption standing in front of it – like some macabre medieval torture device – that seized his attention and wouldn’t let go.
It was a huge rusted iron frame, stained red with rust, and other things besides. It was covered with a plethora of leather restraining straps, chains and cable-spun electrodes. Chained to it now was a monster of a man. At least it must have once been a man, but was now definitely all monster.
It had to be at least seven feet tall, its height and breadth across the shoulders bulked out by the addition of an extra pair of arms, and the bones and muscles needed to support them. Livid scar lines showed where the pieces of – by the looks of it – at least three different bodies had been sutured, stapled and bolted together to create this abomination. Parts of the body were textured a bruised purple, shot through with visible green veins. Perhaps this discoloration was the residue of the chemicals the body parts had been kept in until they were needed. Or perhaps it wasn’t blood that was running through the creature’s veins anymore.
As well as the flesh of three dead men, Ulysses could see where the madmen responsible for this monstrosity had been forced to resort to using mechanical components in place of missing human parts. No doubt the addition of hydraulic joints at the knees and down the length of the monster’s spine were to help it cope with the additional musculature that had been stitched onto the body to support four huge arms instead of the more conventional two.
The features of the face hung low between its massive shoulder blades might once have been considered handsome, but not anymore. Aside from the thick stitches, livid purple scarring and dried blood caking its broken nose, there was a hole where the thing’s right eye should be.
“I know,” Doktor Folter said, following Ulysses’ appalled gaze. “Magnificent, isn’t it? I might even go as far as to say wunnderbar!”
He admired his creation for a moment, lost in silent rapture.
“Why copy the Creator’s pattern when one can do so much to improve on what is, at best, a primitive design? We were so limited in our aspirations at first; wanting to do nothing more than mimic the great man’s work. But we have a much greater understanding of human anatomy and mechanical science now; modern medicine is capable of so much more.”
The monster sagging within the chains securing it to the frame, like some grotesque parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, looked like anything but the paragon of human perfection; more like some hellish abomination dreamt up by a madman, which was what it was.
“My masterwork!” Folter declared with a flourish of his arms.
Beyond the frame, Ulysses could see other corpses in various states of reconstruction. Through an archway in the wall beyond that, he saw shelf after shelf of giant preserving jars containing all manner of human limbs, internal organs and even the occasional pickled brain.
“We have done as much reconstruction as we can,” the surgeon said, dragging the despairing Ulysses’ attention back to the corpse-hulk hanging from the rusted steel frame, “but there’s nothing like the real thing, and you have provided us with exactly what we needed, and for that I thank you.” Absent-mindedly, Folter twizzled the forceps holding the eyeball between his forefinger and thumb.
Still smiling, he turned to Ulysses. “Perhaps you’d like to see how your sacrifice is helping to create something that is… almost divine.”
The man was clearly insane; to think that Ulysses would really be interested in seeing how his own mutilation was benefitting the Nazi war effort.
“For what we practise here is truly an art, and is not art an expression of the divine within us all?”
Ulysses could bear it no longer. As Folter and his young assistant set to work, a
ttaching his stolen eyeball into the monster’s empty eye-socket, merciful oblivion overcame him and he blacked out.
PULLING THE NEEDLE from the thick thread, Folter tied off the end and then descended the step ladder in front of the undead hulk and regarded his creation.
“A masterpiece,” Folter said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
“Yes, doctor,” the young Seziermesser sycophantically agreed.
“It’s only a shame our guest could not appreciate the wonder of what we are doing here. To create life where once there was only death. Are we not as unto the Great Creator Himself?”
“You are, Doktor Folter,” the young man said obligingly.
“Thank you, Seziermesser, thank you,” Folter said graciously. “Now it only remains for us to bring our creation to life. Prepare the galvanic radiation.”
“Yes, doctor. At once, doctor,” the other said, hurrying to carry out his master’s wishes.
Standing in front of a bank of imposing machinery, the younger man began to tug at a series of levers and in response, accompanied by a rising hum, the electrodes began to pulse and spark more rapidly.
“Raise the frame!” Folter commanded, lowering a pair of tinted goggles over his eyes as he did so, transfixed by the crackling bursts of tame lightning now arcing around the domed roof of the chamber, lighting everything with their flickering blue-white glow and casting deep black shadows at their passing.
Locking the first set of levers in place, the young man then set about heaving on a second set, sweat beading on his brow from the sheer effort.
With a grinding rattle, the entire frame on which the corpse-thing hung spread-eagled rose towards the roof of the chamber. When the steel rack was a good fifteen feet clear of the chamber floor, the rising mechanism ground to a halt, swinging gently.
Folter now turned from delighting in his marvellous creation and took up a loop of chain, which was also suspended from the ceiling, in his thick rubber gloves.
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