by P. W. Child
Sam could feel his flesh crawl with the similarities between Petr and his own pursuits. Suddenly he remembered the night when the captain and his dogs chased him down.
“There is a woman leading them. Dark hair, German. She has a stick in her hand…no wait…a rifle? No, it is a harpoon?” Mihail frowned. From his nose a red ribbon of blood emerged, running over his mouth and spraying as he spoke through it.
“He has the cards, the evil cards in his hands. They are close behind him, but they cannot see him because he is standing on the other side…” he reported, shaking insanely.
“What other side?” Petra asked loudly so that he could hear her.
“The other side of the portal. He is right there, but they are blind to him. Petr is sitting down! Why is he sitting down? Shut those fucking dogs up! They are hurting my ears!” he screamed at whatever he was seeing. Then he panted so deeply in continuous succession that they thought he would pass out, but he continued.
“He is laying out the cards, terrible cards that make him throw up, but he keeps putting them down while the dogs are looking for him! I see the Nazis searching, calling to each other, letting the dogs loose. They call the woman Greta. That’s…that’s her name. Greta! She sees Petr’s leg when she walks to the side, sticking out from the portal,” Mihail huffed through the bubbling blood on his mouth. He cried out in pain, screaming into the air. But his cries did not echo, instead it sounded as if his shrieks duplicated into a few layers and then were bluntly consumed by the lifeless atmosphere.
“Jesus Christ! We have to get out of here, Sam!” Nina screamed, clawing at her friend’s arm and tugging at him to move, but he was frozen in astonishment. The churning mist swallowed them up, but still they could see each other.
“Hang on, Nina!” he said. “I want to hear this.”
“We are going to die here!” she cried.
It was then that Nina noticed that Igor was gone.
“She shot the arrow through his leg! Pulling…it through. My god, I can feel it! Here come the dogs! Petr! The dogs!” the hysterical clairvoyant wailed. “They have him! They have him by the leg, pulling him through so that they can see him. The woman is stepping on the shaft of the harpoon arrow to put Petr on the ground and keep him there for the dogs. Holy…h-holy…c-c…they are tearing his throat. Bitch! She is trying to take the cards, but Petr throws them backward and they vanish in the air. There is only a few she can see and she is taking them. Bitch! Petr is ripped to pieces. He is dead, my god! They are chewing his flesh. Petr is dead and the woman tells the men to look for the portal but they cannot find it. She walks away with some of the cards and leaves the body behind. Like he is some fucking animal…Nazi bitch. Greta!” Mihail screamed in the mist, but his words were drowned by the rising vomit and he sank to his knees to throw up just like Petr did.
Nina buried her face in Sam’s chest.
“Please Sam! Can we get out of here?” she pleaded.
“Fuck yes,” he replied sternly and pulled her with him. They left Mihail and Petra on the path and went back on the road to get to the car.
“Thank god the fog is lifting,” Sam wheezed as they labored to hasten away from the evil woods. But as the fog lifted, there was no sunlight and no road. It was dark as midnight and they halted abruptly. In silence Sam and Nina looked around them, clinging to each other.
“S-Sam?” Nina stammered. “Tell me I am not insane. Are you seeing this?”
“Aye.”
“What the fuck is going on?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. I suppose it is night?” he answered, looking up at the tangled branches and fallen dead trees he took pictures of not fifteen minutes before.
“Don’t leave me,” she said, her voice brimming with hysteria.
“I won’t. I won’t. You are the only good thing about this situation. Why would I leave you?” he said, again inadvertently revealing his feelings for Nina at the worst of times.
Still, she welcomed it, bad timing or not.
Behind them in the dark, something rustled. As if he knew what was going to happen, Sam quickly put his hand over Nina’s mouth as she screamed. They could not see anything, so Sam switched his camera to video and tuned on the infra-red function.
“Night vision,” he boasted.
“I’m not so sure I want to see what is in the dark with us,” she admitted, her breathing shivering as she spoke.
“Well, we have to see how to get out of here,” he explained.
“This is seriously fucking with my head, Sam. This actually tops all the other shit I thought had driven me over the top before,” she gritted in sheer panic.
“I know. Me too, believe me. I hope we are just having some lucid nightmare from Mihail’s hash or something,” Sam replied, trying to keep his cool as much as he could. He flicked the screen on HD and started walking forward, dragging Nina’s little body heavily with him with every step. By her shaking torso he could tell that she was absolutely petrified.
“Sam, do you feel it too?” she whispered.
“I feel so many things, you are going to have to be more specific,” he said while the grey square of the screen glimmered on his frowning dark brow.
“Like we are not alone. Like…like there are a thousand people standing among the trees and they are moving one step forward every time we do,” she rasped, digging her nails into his arm.
“Aye. That, I feel clear as day,” he accidentally punned and got another leer from her. “Sorry.”
They trudged forward until they came to the edge of the trees, but instead of finding the road they had come from, where the minibus was parked, Sam and Nina discovered that they had progressed in the opposite direction. When Sam raised his screen, they saw that they were standing at the border of the feared circle, the heart of Hoia Baciu’s haunted forest.
Chapter 25 – Brutal Truth
“What do you mean? What happened?” Heinz roared over the phone. He could not believe what he heard. Herr Mueller had survived the ordeal, but lost two of his sons. Heinz-Karl Heller, once Mueller’s subordinate in the Leipzig faction of the local militia, asked his friend to help him locate and apprehend these people who were out to hurt the young Romanian boy. He needed to eradicate them without him having to worry about his wife’s hold on the child.
But as fate would have it, the old farmer was still recovering from a serious neck injury and several broken bones and torn ligaments from being subjected to torture for many hours.
“I finally had to tell them where I took the young man in Weimar. And I still don’t know if he survived their hunt. Last I heard, my daughter – she is a nurse at the hospital where we took the journalist – she had spoken to him and told him to find the little boy. That was the last time she saw him,” Herr Mueller informed Heinz.
“So this Sam Cleave character was not a bad man?” Heller asked.
“No. Good boy. Hunted by these pigs for filming them executing four people or something,” Mueller replied.
“And your daughter told him to protect the boy,” Heller repeated, just to make sure he had the whole thing straight. The situation and its new developments had him torn. His wife and stepson were apparently going to kill the man who had to get Radu away from them. Who was he going to side with? A street kid from Romania who stole for a living? How could he side with a stranger from Scotland who was about to turn Heinz’s wife over to the authorities for acts of terrorism and murder? And with Igor helping her, no less, it was a sickening notion what they were up to. But they were his family – for almost three decades.
He could not choose, even though he knew that one side was evil, in pursuit of power, just like the old regime. After speaking to Mueller, Heinz decided that he would not make up his mind about the moral conundrum just yet.
First, he would make sure that Radu was safe. Then he would travel to Romania himself to find this Sam Cleave and hopefully intercept the man’s hunters with the help of the Romanian secret service. Maybe, if h
e appealed to Cleave, he would not implicate Greta in the murders, even testify against the men in her charge to keep her from going to prison for the rest of her life. In truth Heinz did not really know what he was going to do, but he knew one thing – he had to be there to stop all the killing and god knows what else they planned for Radu. He could not fathom what they would want with the boy.
“Helga!” he called the housekeeper as he exited the study, but there was no answer. He called again, even calling the cook, but she did not answer either. Greta was known to give her staff the day off when she felt generous, and he came to that conclusion. So he went to check on Radu. Heinz was going to take the boy to the military academy where he could put him up until he returned from Romania, until it had all blown over.
When Heinz came into Radu’s room, the curtains were drawn shut. All he could see was the shape of Radu’s body under his blankets, but when he pulled the covers back, he discovered the dead body of his cook. Heinz jerked backward, his heart exploding in his chest at the sight of the petite old woman’s slit throat and her clawing hands grasping the bedclothes.
“Mein Gott,” he gasped. He knew the housekeeper was not given the day off either. But she was missing.
Heinz went charging through the house, calling Radu and Greta. He even acted as if nothing was wrong, so that she would not think he knew what she was up to. After he had checked the entire house, he realized that she had the boy. But fortunately he knew where she was headed and he only hoped he could make it there before her. To check which flight they’d be on, he went back to her office and checked her computer. There were no ticket bookings he could find, so he assumed she would take her own private plane, leaving him to travel the old fashioned, public way.
Cussing incessantly, he went through her files to see what he was up against. Heinz was shattered by the sudden vile awakening he was dealt. He felt as if his entire marriage had been a lie, as if he was just some idiot she used to give her a good image of stability and values. The big German was sobbing as he paged through her remaining files with pictures of their holidays, their wedding photos and video clips of all their adventures with Igor when he was younger.
Wiping the tears as quickly as they kept coming, the hardened man cried, “Why Greta? Why would you throw all this away? You have such a good life and for wealth, or power…or…what in god’s name are you doing it for anyway?” he screamed with clenched fists he slammed down. Under the force of his fists the cabinet door fell open and a file fell out. Choking on his sorrow, feeling utterly betrayed into what escalated to a bloody nightmare, Heinz-Karl Heller opened the folder and paged roughly through the sheets. They were all doctor’s bills, medical aid brochures, hospital bank accounts, the usual fare of what his wife donated to. But then he found a report with her name on it, and he could not resist reading.
It was a medical report, dated several months before already, stating irrevocably that Greta had rapidly passed through to Stage c4N3M1 of her liver cancer and that it had spread to her pancreas. Heinz-Karl wept bitterly at the sudden collapse of his entire world. It was not just the devastating news that his wife, his partner and lover for no less than a quarter of a century, was dying, but perhaps even more the fact that she was all of a sudden nothing more than a stranger to him. Heinz-Karl felt as if he had been living in a beautiful dream all these years in blissful comfort and trust while outside his slumber his wife and her son lurked as nightmares of the waking world, keeping him asleep.
He called the security at the gate.
“Herr Heller?” the voice said.
“Is everything in order? Has anyone come into my estate that we do not know?” Heinz asked apprehensively. He wished the guard would say someone did, that someone they had never seen before came in and killed the Heller’s’ cook and probably their housekeeper, too. Above all he just did not want to know that his wife was a murderer, but deep inside he knew what security was going to answer. He knew that she had done it, much as he vehemently denied it in his heart. If she could keep so many secrets from him for so long, it said much about her true character and such fickle minds were normally prone to homicide.
“No, sir. Only Frau Heller and little Radu left just a short while ago, but no-one had entered the premises other than your wife when she came back earlier, no. And only she left the premises. There have not been any strangers here, sir,” the man reported. Heinz felt his heart implode under the strain of it all. So suddenly, so severely, his life was gone for good.
“Thank you. That is all,” he said with his most composed tone of voice amidst his immense sorrow.
He booked a flight to Bucharest and packed an overnight bag for light travel. The old German did not have to take any of his side arms or rifles for his private excursion. He had plenty of friends in Eastern Europe from his days in the Wehrmacht, men with armories under their houses and access to an arsenal at any time. They would supply him with all he needed.
Heinz-Karl Heller stood at the Lufthansa check-in with his bag in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot and his countenance grave, but he was determined to put his emotional chaos aside and embark on his own rescue mission. Radu was in serious danger, if Greta was really this far gone in her madness. He had no idea what she wanted with the boy, but he reckoned it had to have something to do with her resolute insistence to adopt the child when they were in Romania. At the time it was an odd enough gesture, he thought, to adopt a child from another country who robbed you, no less. But now he knew there was some arcane reason for it, the details of which he was desperate to discover.
‘It is going to take far too long this way,’ he thought as he looked at the departure times.
With his own money, not that of the sponsors or trusts normally available to him and his wife for their exclusive travels, he chartered a private jet instead, forfeiting his trip on the national airline in lieu of time. He arranged with the manager of EuropAir Jet Rentals to book privately and for no receipts or flight itineraries of his trip to go on record. With his reputation it was a small favor to fulfill.
Once on the jet Heinz was forced to spend the journey thinking about what had happened and it was not at all pleasant. The worst was not being able to cry. Not since he was an early teenager had he so felt the urge to weep, but as usual he had to subdue it under the snakeskin of his image. Tough leather hides like him were expected to take control, know what to do, execute their duty with precision and efficacy – never were they allowed to have feelings. It was the worst pain Heinz had ever been in, even more than when his mother succumbed to her battle with Tuberculosis.
Broken hearted he sat staring from the small window of the jet as they flew over the Czech Republic. He knew what country it was, having flown over it so many times during the war, not the Second World War; the other war, the one no-one was supposed to know about after WWII. The big German was not sure if he was more distraught over his wife’s failing health and impending demise or the death blow she dealt him with her lies. Again Sam Cleave came to mind, the adversary of his beloved Greta. Was the man friend or foe? The question begged, which was his wife? Could he cast aside his lovelorn loyalty and do the right thing?
Tears welled in his eyes and his chest burned with the sting of injustice. Finally, he set his seat back just enough to make him comfortable and he closed his eyes. So much apprehension and rage ebbed and flowed through his heart that he almost looked forward to even the scales in the gross unfairness that polluted his life now. With his eyes closed the flight staff would not bother him, a clever disguise for his crying eyes and need to be alone without fear of judgment or the poison that would build up in his spirit if he did not purge it.
Chapter 26 – Contemplations of Glory
Radu’s skin was on fire. His small heart pulsed faster than a V8 piston as he panted under the blanket Greta had wrapped him in. The child’s top lip had a blister that appeared to have developed during the car ride to the jet, but that was several hours ago and they were now safely in
the great sky where it would take any opposing agent ages to track them down and even then, by then, she would have had done what she came to do. Even with the few cards she possessed she would at least be able to do something. Just as she did the day before when she tried the Dealing herself, she managed to make some change on a minute scale. But these changes had always been corrupt because she was not the Dealer; and maybe she did after all need the entire deck to bring about the chaos she intended.
“Hold on, Schatz,” she said to Radu. His weak body wheezed with every breath while his eyes darted profusely under his venous lids. She wondered whether he was awake or having a nightmare. The boy was never supposed to get this ill. Hopefully he would come out of it before they reached Cluj-Napoca. Without his health and assistance he was of no used to her. In fact, if he perished she would be next. Radu was her only savior, the only person alive that could direct the cards with success.
“Another cognac, please,” she smiled at the flight attendant, who obliged with a smile and a nod.
With the fresh alcohol in her glass, Greta Heller sat back in her seat, just about praying away the last hours in the air. Her time was running out. She wanted to be alive to see the change her childhood mentors, followers of Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring attempted. Maybe her feat would even surpass their ambitions, overshadow the very task Adolf Hitler failed at when the Black Sun was forced to temporarily disband after World War II. She would die a heroine, a martyr for the legacy of the Third Reich.
Radu, of course, would unfortunately not get any glory for his demise in the process. There was no place in the New Race for a Roma, god forbid! Greta was grateful that she managed to lay out the few, rather weak, tarot cards that she had in her possession. Never did she ever imagine she would place them just right to predict and cause the incident at the beer garden to bring Radu to her.