by David Bishop
"I didn't mean to," the terrified German protested. "God knows I don't want to go back through that dungeon but it's our only way out of here."
"What dungeon? Is that where these steps lead?" I asked.
"He's quick, I'll give him that," the cheerful man quipped. "I'm Stiefel, Gunther Stiefel. Ignore my sour friend, but Ralf's not one to trust strangers quickly."
Ralf pushed Karl aside, revealing a heavy wooden door behind them. A rusted metal bolt was holding the door shut. Ralf handed his matches to Gunther before bracing a foot against the wall and tugging hard on the bolt. Eventually it shifted, the metal crying out in protest at being moved. Another almighty pull and the bolt slid free. Ralf shoved his right shoulder hard against the door and it gave inwards, unleashing a vile stench of decay and a cloud of black flies. They swarmed into the stairwell, snuffing out the match and plunging us into darkness.
"Bojemoi!" I gasped, clamping a hand across my nose and mouth. "What is that smell?"
Gunther struck another match, the dancing flame throwing harsh light on his features. "As bad as that smells, where it comes from is worse."
Hans bent over to help the injured German to his feet, but the man slumped on the stairs did not move.
"He's gone. Beck's dead."
"Just as well," Ralf replied. "He'd have slowed us down too much. Come on." Ralf moved into the darkness of the dungeon, carefully working his way forward.
Gunther clapped an arm round Karl's shoulders. "You come with me, Richter. We can go in there together, okay?"
"O-Okay..." the frightened man muttered.
Gunther chattered happily as he ushered Karl into the dark, using words to distract his comrade. "Did Helmut ever tell you what Ralf and I did the day before Operation Barbarossa began? I was busy getting our Panzer ready for action, but Ralf? He was busy getting drunk."
Hans snapped off the bottom half of Beck's identity disc and stowed it away in a pocket. He caught me watching him and smiled bleakly. "No way of knowing if I'll ever make it back to Germany or get the chance to hand his disc in to the authorities, but I've got to try. Beck had a family, a wife and two young daughters. They deserve to know what happened to him. At least, to know that he died fighting for his country." Hans grimaced. "I won't tell them the rest." He marched into the dungeon, the darkness swallowing him within moments.
I followed Hans into the shadows, struggling to see where I was going. A few glimmers of twilight crept into the stinking chamber from small, greasy windows set high in the walls, but our main source of light came from the single lit match Gunther was carrying. I trod on something round and brittle. It collapsed beneath my boot and I nearly fell over, crying out in dismay at the thought of being trapped in this place. I reached down to steady myself and felt my fingers plunge into something moist and soft, the surface writhing beneath my palm. Gunther turned round to see what was wrong and suddenly I had a lot more light in front of me.
I was standing atop a pile of rotting human corpses, my hand inside the decomposing torso of a German soldier. Maggots crawled and wriggled around my fingers, several of them trying to climb up my wrist and inside my uniform. I snatched my hand away and beat it against my tunic, determined to shake off the insidious carrion-eaters.
Gunther chuckled at my panic and horror. "Careful, comrade! Trust me, you don't want to spend any longer in here than you have to. This is where the vampyr keep their larder. No doubt your friend upstairs will be looking for fresh supplies to restock it. Karl spent three days as a captive in this hole before we liberated him."
That explained his utter terror, I realised. Hans helped me get upright and we continued our uncertain journey across the corpse-strewn dungeon, Ralf leading us towards a far corner of the sinister chamber. I could see a glimmer of light seeping in from high on one wall, as if a rectangle was glowing on the stone surface. As we got closer I realised the shape was a small hatch, the rectangle formed by light creeping past the edges of the wooden door. There must be a tunnel or shaft behind it, leading out into the countryside.
Dusk was falling on the countryside around Sighisoara, but there was still enough light in the air to pick out the hatchway. Ralf clambered up several footholds in the wall and opened the small wooden door, letting more light into the dungeon. I knew better than to look around, not wanting to see any more of the horrors Constanta and his kind had kept in that subterranean hellhole. Instead I concentrated my attention on Ralf squeezing himself through the narrow hatchway in the wall. At one point his torso became jammed into the rectangle, but he fought his way onwards. His boots disappeared from view, but I could still hear his gasps for breath as he dragged himself along the tunnel.
After a few minutes even those sounds faded away. I stood in the fading light beneath the hatch with the three Germans, trying not to think what would happen if Gorgo found me helping four enemy soldiers escape the castle. After an agonising wait Ralf's voice echoed down the tunnel, calling the others after him.
"Come on, we can get out this way! The tunnel comes out behind the castle where it opens into a ditch. From there we can crawl away unseen. The tunnel's as narrow as the hatchway for the first section but it widens out after that. Come on!"
Gunther sent Karl through the hatch next, then followed him out of the dungeon. Hans paused to shake my hand, a smile visible on his face in the gathering twilight.
"Thank you, Victor Zunetov. I don't know how we'd have gotten out of here without your help. I never thought I'd hear myself saying that to one of Stalin's soldiers."
"We may be on different sides in this war, but we have a common foe."
"True. Perhaps, when this conflict is over, our two sides can unite to defeat that foe?"
"I hope so. It may be our only hope." I was going to add more, but the bellow of Gorgo's voice nearby froze the words in my mouth.
It sounded as if the vampyr was in the dining hall above us. I could hear him shouting my name, over and over, demanding to know where I was. I urged Hans into the tunnel, slamming the hatch shut after him. Now I had no choice but to turn round and face the dungeon. I could make out the shapes of the bodies sprawled across the cold stone floor, but little else. With the hatchway closed, the stench rising from the rotting flesh threatened to overwhelm. I scrambled across the carpet of corpses, breathing through my mouth instead of my nostrils, trying not to hear the sound of skulls grinding together beneath my boots.
A new light flooded into the dank chamber, spilling down the stairwell. Someone must have opened the secret entrance at the top of the stone steps. Please let it be Eisenstein, I prayed. But my pleadings went unanswered. The guttural voice of Gorgo bellowed down at me, demanding to know what I was doing in the dungeon. I ran across the remaining bodies to the door and scrambled up the steps to where Beck's corpse was crumpled, arriving at the German soldier moments before Gorgo came into view. He glared at me, one hand clutching a flaming torch, his other aiming a pistol at my head.
"What are you doing down here, Zunetov?"
I nudged Beck's body with my right boot. "I heard someone coughing while I was in the dining hall. I realised there must be a hidden entrance, leading to a concealed corridor or stairwell. This coward had hidden himself, hoping not to be found. I executed him."
"What else did you find down there?" Gorgo demanded.
"Some kind of dungeon filled with German corpses. Good riddance to them," I sneered.
The vampyr regarded me coldly, his eyes searching my expression, trying to find any hint of falsehood in my features. Eventually Gorgo turned away, seemingly satisfied by my explanation. He marched up the stairs, telling me to follow him. I did as I was told, hurrying to keep pace as the imposing vampyr took three steps at a time.
I emerged into the dining hall to find Eisenstein waiting outside, blood seeping from a vicious wound on his face where someone had struck him across the cheek with a weapon. No doubt Gorgo was responsible for the pistol-whipping, but Eisenstein did not flinch when the vampyr l
oomed over him. I closed the hidden panel, sealing off the secret stairwell and blocking out the stench of rotting corpses below.
"Nobody goes down there without the permission of myself or Lord Constanta, not unless they wish to share the fate of those already in the dungeon. Is that clear?" Gorgo demanded.
Eisenstein and I both saluted, acknowledging the order. I made a silent vow to myself. No matter what else happened in this war, I was determined never to visit that charnel house again. I was a good communist and did not believe in a deity, but I now knew what hell looked like.
PART TWO - BERLIN
SIX
It was Friday, April 20th - Adolf Hitler's birthday - when Gunther, Karl and the Vollmer brothers were reunited in Berlin. The quartet of Panzergrenadiers had escaped from Transylvania eight months earlier, retreating through the Rumanian territory on foot until they encountered a German motorised division. The four soldiers hitched a ride with their fellow countrymen, glad to escape the homeland of the vampyr.
None of them discussed what they had seen with members of the motorised division, and rarely with each other. To mention the vampyr during the hours of darkness felt to the likes of Hans and Ralf as if they were invoking a demon, while speaking the same word in daylight seemed strange. Once safely beyond the borders of Transylvania, it was hard to believe the horrors they had witnessed there were real.
At times one or another of the quartet tried to convince his comrades to speak out without success. A single voice among them always counselled against such a choice. Time and again Karl convinced the other three to stay silent. His argument was a simple one: if they struggled to cope with the truth themselves, how could they hope to convince outsiders, fellow Germans who had fought on the Ostfront but had never seen the vampyr? Better to bide their time and wait for the right moment to alert their countrymen.
The rest of 1944 and the early months of 1945 became a long, slow, agonising retreat across the hills and valleys that the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg tactics had once conquered in mere weeks. By April 1945, that same Wehrmacht was a shadow of its former glory. The Luftwaffe was a broken, spent force, scarcely able to muster enough planes to trouble the enemy squadrons controlling the sky over Germany. Far too much of its resources and energies had been diverted to the wasteful and largely ineffective V1 and V2 flying bomb campaigns. There were even rumours that the Führer had authorised a manned version of the V1, with a pilot steering the missile at his target before parachuting out at the last second.
Meanwhile, American and British bomber crews were giving Berlin a pounding, knowing that the rapidly advancing Allied ground forces would soon preclude further raids on the capital of the Reich. USAAF and RAF planes marked the occasion of the Führer's fifty-sixth birthday with a particularly heavy raid, pounding the city with wave after wave of bombs in the morning. It was a fine day, the fourth such day in succession.
While the battle for the sky above Berlin had been lost, the ground war continued unabated. The four Panzergrenadiers had been split when they neared the capital a few weeks earlier. In truth they were Panzergrenadiers in name only now, the once mighty ranks of Panzer long since destroyed by Soviet T-34s. Sightings of German tanks were few and far between, and the men of the Wehrmacht were just as depleted.
Ralf and the others found themselves fighting alongside boys and old men from the Volkssturm, Germany's home guard. The People's Storm had been formed in October 1944 as a last line of defence should the worst come to the worst. That time was now upon the Fatherland's capital.
Hans had turned twenty-two since his short time within the walls of Castle Constanta. But he felt much older than his years when surrounded by teenage boys, all of them eager to die for the Führer. They were plucked from the ranks of the Hitler Youth, given little or no training, and sent forward to wherever the front was that day. There were often no military uniforms left with which to clothe them, so the Volkssturm was issued black and red armbands adorned with the words DEUTSCHE WEHRMACHT.
Guns and ammunition were at a premium, so youths were armed with Panzerfausts: a lightweight anti-tank weapon even an eleven year-old could fire. Hans had been horrified to see children cycling towards Russian T-34s, fearlessly riding to their deaths, believing they were achieving some kind of immortality for service to the Thousand-Year Reich.
Amazingly, some of the youths did succeed in destroying the Bolsheviks' battle armour, which was more than many Panzer had managed in the early months of Operation Barbarossa. But losses sustained by the Volkssturm were sickening, generals in Berlin using the brainwashed fervour of children to slow the Russian advance by a few hours at most. Hans knew, had he been born a few years later, that he would have been one of those teenagers cycling towards certain death. So he did his best to save as many of the boys as he could, training them to add stealth and cunning to their handful of Panzerfausts.
Even with help from Karl, Hans knew he could not save all the children. Perhaps he could not save any of them, but he could try. He took charge of several Volkssturm squads at the eastern edge of Berlin, giving the young warriors a leadership they had been sorely lacking. Most of the old men conscripted into the People's Storm had long since deserted, fleeing the battlefield for the comforts of home. It was shortly after dawn on Hitler's birthday that Karl had caught one of the elderly men sneaking back towards Berlin. Karl brought the aging deserter to Hans for interrogation.
The old man refused to give his unit, but did let slip his given name was Otto. Hans found part of an official document among the deserter's few possessions. It stated his age as fifty-eight, but Otto looked closer to eighty. He had fought in the previous war and counted himself lucky to have survived that conflict. He had no intention of perishing on the battlefield in this war.
"If I'm going to die in this madness, I want to die in my own bed with my wife Lotte at my side!" Otto said.
Hans couldn't help agreeing with the sentiment. He wished he could say the same, but the war had taken Hans far from home before he'd even thought about marriage. He shared a flask of vodka with the old man, the small quantity of alcohol looted while retreating through the southern regions of Poland. The coarse, acrid liquid helped loosen Otto's tongue.
"I was ready to fight until the finish," he explained. "We all were."
"All of you? There are others?"
"Not anymore," Otto said bleakly. "I was part of what our commander, Gefreiter Hartz, laughingly called an 'elite Volkssturm unit'. That meant we were all veterans of the last war so we knew one end of a rifle from the other. Not that many of us had rifles, let alone ammunition. When the Bolsheviks crossed the Oder on Monday, we were sent forward to help slow their advance. But the bastard Hartz never told us what was waiting out there in the darkness."
A familiar chill ran up Hans's spine. He had heard no official mention of the vampyr since returning to Germany, nor of any mutterings about Rumanian monsters from other soldiers on the Ostfront. But he recognised the haunted look in Otto's eyes and the old man's quivering hands for what they were: not evidence of cowardice, but of someone who'd seen the undead and knew what those fiends were capable of.
"Vampyr?" Hans ventured. "You were sent to fight vampyr?"
"How did you...?" Otto began, but his words stopped as realisation hit home. "You know about them, don't you? You've fought them before."
"They were our allies when Operation Barbarossa began," Hans said quietly. "After Rumania switched sides, so did the undead. Now they hunt us as prey."
"But if our commanders know about these creatures, why didn't they warn us?"
"Would you have believed them if they had?"
Otto's eyes narrowed. "No, probably not," he conceded.
"I imagine our leaders don't want us to panic," Hans added.
"As if things weren't already bad enough."
"Indeed." Hans rasped a palm across the stubble on his chin. "When did you see them?"
"Last night," Otto whispered. Fuelling himself with mout
hfuls of vodka, the old man told how his unit had been sent to fight a cluster of Russian commandoes operating behind German lines to the east of Berlin. Otto believed most of the enemy soldiers had been human, but the leader of the insurgents was not, nor his two bodyguards. The squad of elderly Volkssturm had the element of surprise for their initial attack on the Soviet commandoes, succeeding in killing half the invaders with a few well-timed and well-placed Panzerfausts. But the veterans were overrun by the survivors and torn apart where they stood. Otto saw his best friend's throat being ripped open, and then watched as the commander of the Russian squad supped on the dying man's blood.
"I already knew that monster wasn't human. It'd been caught in the blast of the first Panzerfaust. The Bolshevik soldiers nearby were shredded, but this fiend dissolved into the air before reappearing beside me, apparently unhurt. He smiled as he murdered Jürgen. I thought I was next but that thing decided to let me live. He said he wanted me to go back to Berlin and tell others what I'd seen and what was coming for them. I walked out of there, not a scratch on me, not knowing if I was cursed or blessed to have survived."
"Probably a bit of both," Hans replied. "What did you tell your commander?"
"I went back to HQ and I had murder in mind. Hartz had sent me and my friends out to die; used us like sacrificial lambs to test the strength of the enemy. I wanted to make him pay for that. But I was too late, the vampyr had beaten me to it. I walked into the communications tent as the sun came up this morning. Everyone one was dead: Hartz, the radio operator, everyone. The canvas of the tent was slowly turning crimson from the inside out. I'd never seen so much blood in my life. I was standing there, trying to decide what to do, when I heard Goebbels on the radio, making a speech for our glorious leader's birthday. He was calling on all Germans to trust blindly in Hitler, saying the Führer would lead us out of our difficulties."
Hans had heard the same broadcast himself. He still couldn't decide whether the Propaganda Minister Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels was mad or merely playing some cold-blooded trick on the people of Germany. The Red Army was racing towards Berlin, determined to capture it before the American and British forces did from the west. The Fatherland was being torn apart as vengeance for the war Hitler had waged upon Europe and the rest of the world. Was the Führer determined to see Berlin burn too, a monument to his folly and insanity? But that was a question for another time, another day.