by Sean Wallace
“Might as well test the theory,” said Rolf. He felt, he realized, mildly nervous. Nothing more.
“What do you m— sir!”
Rolf stepped out of the trees and into plain view. He waited in the stillness, but there was nothing. A bead of sweat crept over his temple. He brushed it away.
“Come on,” he told the others, and started walking.
The ground was covered in a thick growth of grass and studded with rotted tree stumps. How long had it been since they’d cleared the area and built the camp here? He had no idea.
The gates were shut, secured by a chain. “Mueller,” he said.
The big man moved forward, bolt-cutters in hand; when he drew level with the gates he stopped, stepped back. He turned and stared from Rolf to Kroll.
“What is it?” Kroll demanded. “Mueller, what?”
When the big man didn’t answer, Rolf stepped past him to the gate and halted.
The floor of the parade ground hadn’t been visible from their previous vantage. Now, though, it was, and clearly so.
And it was strewn with bodies.
The parade ground floor was sandy; now it was dark with dried blood. The soft buzz of flies wafted through the gate, and the reek of spoiling meat. The dead were all in uniform—SS uniform—and many still clutched weapons in their hands. Pistols, rifles, submachine guns, knives—or indeed, anything else that had come to hand.
“Get us in, Mueller,” said Rolf.
“But Herr Hauptmann—”
“We are here to carry out a mission,” Rolf said. “Whatever else we are, we are still German soldiers.”
“Do as the Herr Hauptmann orders, Mueller,” said Kroll. Mueller looked at him; Kroll didn’t speak, just gazed calmly back. Finally Mueller nodded, bowed his head and stepped back up to the gates.
Reiniger was looking back towards the woods they’d emerged from, his rifle’s barrel moving back and forth. “It shouldn’t be this quiet.”
“That’s enough,” said Kroll.
“Let’s get on with this,” said Stein. His voice was jagged and grating.
“All of you,” said Kroll.
There was a loud metallic snap, then a hiss and rattle of falling metal links, as Mueller cut the chain on the door. He pushed the gates wide, aimed his rifle ahead and stepped through. Rolf, and then the others, followed.
They crossed the parade ground in a loose circle, guns aimed outwards. The huts stood empty and silent, the windows—many of them shattered—like black, staring eyes. No movement. No sound.
“What happened here?” Reiniger muttered.
Rolf looked down. At his feet lay an SS man, both hands wrapped round the hilt of the dagger he’d plunged into his own left eye. Another lay beside him, a bullet hole in his temple, pistol still in his hand.
“They killed themselves,” said Kroll. “They all killed themselves.”
“Not all,” said Stein. “See?” He gestured towards a dozen bullet-riddled corpses slumped on the ground. Another SS man knelt a few feet away, surrounded by empty bullet casings. He was propped into the kneeling position by the barrel of his Schmeisser, which was still wedged into his mouth. The submachine gun’s butt was still braced against the ground.
“What the hell happened?” Reiniger asked again.
Mueller was muttering what sounded like a prayer.
“Shut up, all of you,” said Kroll. “What now, sir?”
Rolf nodded towards the “chapel” he’d sighted before. As they advanced on it, he saw something else—a low wide heap of odd, flattened objects piled up beside its open door.
He was still trying to identify them when Mueller beat him to it. “God! Dear Mother of God!”
“Mueller—” began Kroll, then broke off as he saw too.
Rolf approached the . . . things. They’d been crushed flat, but there was no blood. It must have gone somewhere. So they must have been killed elsewhere. All the blood—all the moisture of any kind, it looked like—had been sucked or squeezed out of them. The bodies were punctured and perforated, and in places the dried, withered flesh was burned, as if by fire or some strong acid. Not all of them still had faces, but the ones that did were still screaming. Even in death.
Behind him, Reiniger vomited. Mueller was praying again, and this time Kroll didn’t try to silence him. Stein drew level with Rolf and looked down at the bodies, head cocked to one side, fascinated. Only Rolf, it seemed, looked down at the corpses and felt nothing. Nothing we haven’t seen before. Death, mutilation, agony—this particular combination of them might be new, but that was all that was. His eyes were drawn to the wrist of one of the crushed, desiccated corpses, and saw a five-digit number tattooed there. Neither the piles of corpses, or what they had once been, were new, only how they’d died.
All the same, he did not look too closely at their faces. Especially not those of the women. At last he looked away.
“Come on,” he said. “We have work to do.”
“Sir . . . ” Kroll was pale. “Surely we should . . . ”
“Whatever Projekt Wotan is, this is its work. Perhaps now we know why it has to be destroyed. We have explosive charges, incendiary bombs. We’ll use them to destroy whatever this is.” Rolf glared at Kroll till the sergeant looked down, then at the rest of his men, one by one. “Now come on,” he said, and walked to the “chapel” door, pushed it wide and went through.
After a moment, the others followed.
Once I was a man with a family.
I was my parents’ only child. They were good people, and I loved them dearly. They ensured I had a good education, was clothed and fed. I went to war to protect them from the enemy.
At the front, I received mail from them regularly, and wrote back whenever I could. Until one day, I received a letter in another’s handwriting. Unfamiliar. One of the neighbors, as it proved. One of the few who had survived. Writing to tell me that not only the house I had grown up in, but the entire street was gone—blackened craters and ruins, stubs of masonry and charred timbers, all that remained.
An Allied air-raid, the letter said.
It was quick. They would have felt nothing.
The hole in the ground that had been my home,
like the infected cavity left by a torn-out tooth.
I went to war to protect them.
Once I was a man with a family.
Now I am nothing.
The “chapel” was empty. A plain wooden building, apparently a single room. There were rows of chairs. Nothing else.
“What . . . ?” began Kroll.
Rolf raised a hand for silence and crossed the floor to the back of the “chapel,” where another door was set into the wall. He pulled it open; cold dank air gusted out. Rolf stepped back and to the side, aiming the barrel of his Schmeisser into the dark.
Beyond the door was what looked like a cave—a tunnel cut through living rock. The “chapel” had backed onto the hill, the “black mountain” itself, but it was now clear that the heart of Projekt Wotan lay within the hill itself.
“Sir . . . ” began Kroll.
Rolf stepped into the tunnel. Cool damp air engulfed him, fell around him like cold damp sheets. There was a faint sound in the distance. The cold air gusted into his face, and then the breeze died. A moment later the breeze blew again, but back down the tunnel, back inside the hill. Another moment of stillness, and then it blew out again.
Torches clicked on; their pale beams played across the tunnel walls. They were ribbed; the tunnel had been carved into the hill.
“Stop. Wait. Look.” Rolf leaned in closer to inspect the wall. The torch beam shone on something—symbols of a kind he didn’t recognize. “What are these?”
“Runes?” suggested Stein, in his dead, grating voice.
“No.”
“Hebrew?”
“No.”
“Hieroglyphs, perhaps?” said Reiniger.
“God knows what they are.” Rolf pointed the Schmeisser ahead of him and kept goin
g. His booted feet splashed in the shallow water on the tunnel floor.
They’d gone somewhere between ten and twenty meters before the tunnel walls vanished. Their torchbeams flashed through darkness and hit wide stone walls instead. “A cavern,” said Kroll.
“I know,” said Rolf. He shone his own torch across the floor until it ended abruptly, dropping away into space. “Watch out ahead, there’s a drop.” He turned and shone the torch sideways; the light played over a blood-spattered white coat.
“There’s a body here,” he called, and went to examine it. The breeze blew across his face, then back again. In. Out. It made a faint noise as it blew back and forth, as if whispering over—no, not stone. What, then? The knowledge hovered at the periphery of his awareness, refusing to step into the light. Rolf tipped the body over onto its back. The dead man stared up at him with the bloody, ragged sockets that had been his eyes. His hands were red claws, pieces of tissue still clinging to them.
“There are more here,” said Stein. He slipped past Rolf and played the beam of his torch over more corpses, a good half-dozen. All were in white coats. All had apparently stabbed or battered themselves or one another to death. There were tables, an instrument panel. “There are some notes,” he said.
“Get them.”
Stein grabbed them. “Looks like someone’s tried to burn them.”
“Get them.”
“Yes, sir. What were they doing here . . . ?”
“Oh my God,” whispered Kroll. “Sir? Sir. Here. Look.”
“What . . . ” Rolf heard Stein mutter, as he turned. Both Stein and Kroll were shining their torches upwards; he shone his too.
Mueller, standing beside Kroll, let out an appalled wail and fell to his knees. Rolf was vaguely aware of it, and that he should shout at Mueller, tell him to get on his feet and act like a soldier. But he didn’t. All he could do was stare up at It.
It filled the huge, gaping hollow in the center of the hill, a hollow that went a long way down. Rolf looked down; the light of his torch vanished long before detecting either any bottom to the shaft or to Its bulk. And then he shone it up again, and It loomed over them, Its head almost brushing the ceiling of rock above them.
Was it a head? It was a vast, lumpy mass that crowned the pale, flabby pile that loomed above; a lumpy mass in which large black holes gaped, arranged without apparent system or symmetry. Some opened and closed; others remained fixedly open.
And that wind, that breeze, gusting in and out—yes, Rolf knew it for what it was now but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, couldn’t bear to acknowledge it.
Its great, unending heap of a body glistened greasily; Its hide was smooth, pale and slimy, like intestine, like great sheets of gut. Pale and slimy except for dark, glistening patches that spotted it. Were there holes in the middle of those patches? And if so, what were they? More mouths? No matter. Under that hide things moved, like great armatures of bone. It was as if someone was trying to erect a tent from the inside; the great bulk of It rippled and shifted.
Mueller was rocking to and fro, whimpering, burbling out what sounded like an unending, unheeded prayer.
Across Its surface, tiny vestigial limbs—arms that looked almost human, insectile or crustacean forelegs, octopoid tentacles—twitched and thrashed and writhed. There were a particularly active group of them around the edge of the pit, and as Rolf watched, the reason became apparent. The bone armatures moved again; the hide in front of them stretched taut, then split bloodlessly wide. The stench that gusted out had Reiniger vomiting again.
There were sounds in the air. Were they coming from It? Rolf couldn’t tell. It was like hundreds of tiny, twittering, chittering voices. There were words in there, sort of. He thought so, anyway. But he couldn’t make them out. They were shrill, sharp, nagging, scraping at the inside of his skull, jabbing at his eyes. He shook his head, sharply.
Kroll was backing away from It; he was shaking his head too. From inside Its body slid two thick, flat . . . objects. They were on the end of limbs that glistened—bone armatures again, the phrase wouldn’t leave his head—bone armatures coated in a thick, moving gelatin. The great flat objects on the ends of them resembled, he realized, nothing so much as huge, fingerless hands. Around their edges, thin, pale cilia stirred and began to move, dripping a colorless slime that hissed and smoked when it hit the floor.
“Kroll, get back from it,” Rolf shouted. “Get back! Get back!”
The sergeant backed away, then hesitated as he remembered Mueller, still moaning and rocking before It and the thick, groping hands.
“Just get back,” Rolf shouted, and Kroll backed away. As he did, long thin spines suddenly slid from the palms—for want of a better term—of Its hands. They, too, glistened and dripped. The cilia waved and tasted the air. The “hands” shifted slightly to the side. Towards Mueller.
“Mueller!” shouted Rolf.
“Paul!” shouted Kroll. “Get up, run!”
The “hands” parted and descended. At the last second the big man seemed to recognize his danger and let out a piercing scream. He half-rose, turning to run, but it was too late; the “hands” slammed together around him. His shrieks weren’t cut off, only muffled; they continued even as smoke and steam hissed out of the grip of the “hands.”
“Bastard!” shouted Kroll, and opened fire, raking It with a long burst from his Schmeisser. The great hanging sheets of Its hide twitched and flapped as the bullets hammered it.
A shot rang out and Kroll staggered sideways. And then another, and another. He stumbled back and stared—at Reiniger, who’d dropped his rifle and was aiming a Luger pistol at the sergeant.
“What—” Rolf brought his gun to bear on Reiniger as the other man’s third shot took Kroll in the forehead, dropping him to the ground.
“His eyes—” gasped Stein.
True enough. Blood was pouring from Reiniger’s eyes, and indeed from his ears and nose. His free hand clutched at his head and a terrible keening sound came from his mouth, in the last instant before he thrust the barrel of the Luger into it and fired.
Even as he fell, Its “hands” opened, and a flattened, smoking thing fell to the cavern floor. Stein cried out and fled back down the tunnel. Rolf backed away, unable to look away from It. The thin, shrill, high chittering rose higher and higher in his ears; like Kroll before him he loosed a long burst of gunfire at It, then turned and ran.
Once I was a lover.
Her name was Hannah. I first met her when I was seventeen; a slender, pretty girl with blond hair and blue eyes. Oh, so very Aryan, just the kind of girl the Fuehrer enjoined good Germans to marry.
We kissed, yes. And there were other things. And the promise of more when I returned.
I asked my parents to give Hannah my love with each letter home, even as the memory of who she was and what she meant grew more distant; even as what she waited to give me on my return became something I bought, or took.
And then the letter about my parents. And all that sustained me—all that kept me going, especially after what I saw in the woods that day—was the thought that Hannah waited.
But on my return, I could not find her. Another family lived in her house, and knew nothing of whoever had lived there before. Others, who had known us both before I went to the Russian Front, not only denied any knowledge of her fate, but having ever known her at all.
Finally, I found one friend who, braver than the rest, took me aside and whispered the truth in my ear: Hannah’s mother, it had transpired, had been a Jew. And so the Gestapo had come for her, had taken her and Hannah and Hannah’s brother Otto away. Never seen since. Never to be seen again.
Her name was Hannah.
Once I was a lover.
Now I am nothing.
In the “chapel,” Rolf slammed the door to the tunnel and backed away, pulling the near-empty magazine out of the Schmeisser and slamming a new one into place.
“What now?” gasped Stein.
What, indee
d? Rolf thought, or tried to. Every impulse screamed at him to run, while he still could. But—
“The notes,” he said. “Did you get the notes?”
“What? Yes. Yes, I did.”
The chittering—that damned chittering sound—was in the air and rising, rising. It didn’t seem to bother Stein. Damn him, couldn’t he hear it? “Get them out. Read them. Find out what that—thing—is.”
“Yes.” Stein knelt, spread out the fragments of Projekt Wotan on the bare-board floor before him. “Here. What?”
“What is it?”
“It’s madness.”
“Read it.”
Stein nodded. “It says . . . The process of reviving It is slow but progressing. Thankfully we can ensure a steady supply of material to nourish It and enable Its revival . . . That’s all on this page, it’s half-burnt. Here’s another . . . It was worshiped, centuries ago, by the original inhabitants of Schwartzberg, before they were burnt by the Inquisition. It was mighty once, but was the merest minion of an ancient race who walked the Earth as gods in the time before man. It . . . ” Stein looked up. “I told you, sir, it’s madness.”
“So is that,” said Rolf, gesturing at the door to the tunnel with his Schmeisser. It. It. The notes spoke of the Thing in the cavern in the same way that he thought of it. Of It. It. “Keep reading.”
“Sir. The note says . . . It was left behind. The world changed. They could no longer live there. So It, and perhaps others like It, were left behind. To wait. To open the way when conditions were once more right. Perhaps to make those conditions come about. It was sealed inside the hill to protect It—’” Stein looked up, staring. “To protect It? What did It need protecting from?”
“Keep reading, damn it.”
“Yes, sir . . . It was sealed inside the hill and the hill was worshiped. It had power over the minds of men; they who propitiated It and served It would be rewarded by Its favors and Its aid . . . ” Stein looked up. “That must be the reason, then.”
“Yes. Why try to kill the Russians when you can make them kill themselves? And if you have enemies within, something like this would be very useful.” Rolf cocked his Schmeisser. “That explains why the colonel wanted it destroyed.”