It looms overhead, a grey mound of concrete or stone in the darkness; a narrow window, dark as the crypt, overlooks the entranceway. The gates are solid slabs of wood bound in metal, but they lean drunkenly away from the huge hole that the Dragon blew between them. I pause, and someone whacks me in the back: "Howard, get down!"
I get down and feel icy cold through the thick padding on my knees and elbows. There's some radio chatter: terse announcements as each team makes its way through a series of checkpoints. "Chaitin, keep the blockhouse covered. Hutter, any signs of life?"
"Hutter: nothing, boss. Blockhouse is warm, but nothing's moving outside it. Uh, correction. I have a temperature fix on the courtyard; it's a couple of degrees warmer than outside. Probably heat from the blockhouse." The blockhouse is glowing brightly on infrared, a surer sign of life than anything else we've seen.
I edge through the tunnel under the walls–rammed earth overhead, frozen like cement–and peer round the corner at the blockhouse. The name doesn't do it justice; it's the central building in the complex and it's built like a small castle. Windows, high up, big dome erupting from the roof, small doors shut tight against the chill. Some kind of small vehicle, like a weird cross between a tank and a motorbike, is parked against the wall, dusty with a sprinkling that isn't snow.
"Cool, I always wanted a Kettenkrad," someone remarks on the common channel.
"Morris, shut the fuck up; the cylinder heads are probably vacuum welded anyway. Chaitin, check out the doors. Scary Spice, cover with the M40."
Someone who doesn't look at all like one of the Spice Girls moves up beside me and levels something that looks like a drainpipe fucking a submachine gun at the blockhouse. Someone else, anonymous in winter camouflaged pressure gear, jogs forward and then dashes at the door. Bazooka man whacks me on the shoulder to get my attention: "Get back!" he hisses.
"Okay, I'm back," I say. Funnily enough I don't feel afraid at all, which surprises me. "Say, are you sure this isn't Castle Wolfenstein?"
"Fuckin' dinna say that else ye can live with the fuckin' consequences," someone rumbles in my ears. Soldier #1 raises something that looks like a plumber's caulking gun and squirts white paste around the frame of the blockhouse door. Still no sign of a welcoming committee. I glance up at the hostile red stars above the battlements and wonder why I can't see very many of them. A thought strikes me just as the guy with the plumber's mate sticks a timer into the goop and bounds back our way then crouches: "Cover!" The ground bounces and smoke and gas puffs out from the edges of the door–the gunk is a high-brisance explosive and it cuts through the reinforced steel door like a blowtorch through butter. I see the door getting bigger and beginning to squash vertically–then it slams past us and the escaping gush of air bowls me right over and nearly rolls me along the frigid ground.
"Jesus," someone says, and I turn round to see where the door landed behind me. Something is wrong my nerves are screaming–where the hell are the Ahnenerbe? There should be people here, that's what's wrong.
Scary Spice has his grenade launcher levelled on the chamber behind the door, but the air flow has stopped and when Chaitin tosses in a flare it lights up a bare, empty room the size of a garage, with sealed doors to either side. "Spooky," I remark. "Looks empty. Anyone home?"
The SAS aren't waiting around to find out; the whole of Bravo team piles into the empty vestibule in a hurry and Chaitin moves forward. More chatter: "Airlocks, this is a fucking death trap get us in get us in . . ."
"Castle fucking Wolfenstein, eh?" Alan remarks in my ear, and according to my chest panel he's on a private channel. I join him.
"Why isn't anybody here?" I ask.
"Who the fuck knows? Let's just get inside, fast. You got any ideas?"
"Yeah. If you depressurize this building and Mo's inside you'll have lost us our best clue yet."
"If I don't depressurize that building and some fucking Nazi revenant ices my people I'll have lost more than just our best clue." Someone taps me on the shoulder and I jump, then turn far enough to recognise Alan. "Remember that," he says.
"We're here for information first–" I say, but he's cut over to another channel already so I don't know if he hears me. In any case, he taps me on the shoulder again and waves me toward the vestibule. Where Bravo team has sprung a door with a big locking wheel, hopped through, and the wheel is now spinning behind them. Airlock door, at a guess.
"Bravo, Mike here, we have atmosphere–half a kilopascal at only twenty below freezing. Pressure's coming up: lock safety is tripped. Everything here looks to be in working order, but dusty as hell. We're ready to go through on your word."
I follow Alan and Alpha squad into the vestibule. Scary Spice is busy laying strips of some kind of explosive gunk all around the airlock door, while one of the other soldiers lines up on it with a heavily insulated light machine gun. I flick to the main channel and listen to the crackly chatter; something seems to be wrong with my radio because I'm picking up a lot of noise. Noise–
"Howard here, anybody else picking up a lot of radio hash?"
"Hutter here, who was that? Repeat please, I'm reading you strength three and dropping."
"Hutter, Bob, cut the chatter and use your squelch. We've got a job to do here." Alan sounds distinctly preoccupied; I decide interrupting is a bad idea and focus instead on my suit radio in case there's a problem with it. A minute of fiddling tells me that there isn't. It's a really cute UHF set, able to hop around about a zillion sidebands at high speed–analogue, not digital, but the pinnacle of that particular technology. If it's picking up hash then the hash is spread far and wide.
I walk back to the vestibule entrance and look up at the sky. The stars are really prominent; the smoky red whirlpool of the galaxy stares down at me like a malignant red eye, startlingly visible against the night. I hunt around for the moon but it's out of direct sight, casting knife-edged black shadows across the pale blue snowscape. I blink, wishing I could rub my eyes. Blue? I must be seeing things. Or maybe the optical filters on my helmet are buggering my colour sensitivity–I've had it happen with computer screens before now.
I turn back to face the interior and someone is waving me forward; the airlock door gapes open. "Howard, Hutter, Scary, your cycle." I move forward carefully. The concrete floor is chipped and scarred, stained with old grease marks. I look round: something large is inching toward the gates–Pike, and the cart with the H-bomb. "I'll follow you through with the charge," Alan adds. I step through into the airlock room, boggling at the array of pipework on view–it's like something out of a war movie, the interior of a beached U-boat, all plumbing and dials and big spinner wheels. Hutter pushes the door closed behind us and cranks a handle. The airlock is narrow, and dark except for our helmet lamps; I shudder, and try not to think about what would happen if the door jams. On my other side Scary Spice yanks a valve-lever in the opposite door, and there's a thin hissing as fog spills into the room from vents along the floor. A needle in my suit's chest instrument panel quivers and begins to move–air pressure. After a few more seconds I feel my suit going limp and clammy around me, and hear a distinct clank as the hissing stops.
"Going through," says Scary Spice, and he spins the locking wheel on the inner door and pushes it open.
I'm not sure what I am expecting to see; Castle Wolfenstein is a definite maybe, and I was subjected to the usual run of second-rate war movies during my misspent childhood, but the last thing on my list would have been a kennel full of freeze-dried Rottweilers. Someone has powered up an overhead light bulb which is swinging crazily at the end of its cord, casting wild shadows across the emaciated-looking corpses of a dozen huge dogs. Next to the airlock is a table, and behind it a wall of lockers; ahead of us, a wooden door leading onto a corridor. The light doesn't reach far into those shadows. Hutter prods me in the back and as I step forward something crunches under my boot heel, leaving a nasty brownish stain on the floor. "Yuck." I look round.
"You can switch your transm
itter off," says Hutter, "we've got air." She fiddles with her suit panel: "Looks breathable, too, but don't take my word for it."
"Quiet." Scary Spice looks round. "Mike?"
"Mike here." My radio isn't crackling as much now we're indoors. "No signs of life so far–lots of dusty offices, dead dogs. We've swept the ground floor and it looks as if there's nobody home." He sounds as puzzled as I feel. Where the hell are the bad guys?
"Roger that, Hutter and yon boffin are with me in the guardhouse. We're waiting on reinforcements."
I hear a squeal of metal and look round; Hutter is closing the airlock door again, and it sounds like it hasn't been oiled for fifty years.
"Uh, we have bodies." I jump; it's a different voice, worryingly shaky. Chaitin? "I'm in the third door along on corridor B, left wing, and it isn't pretty."
"Barnes here. Chaitin, sitrep." Alan sounds purposeful.
"They're–looks like a mess room, boss. It's hard to tell, temperature's subzero so everything's frozen but there's a lot of blood. Bodies. They're wearing–yeah, SS uniforms, I'm vague on the unit insignia but it's definitely them. Looks like they shot themselves. Each other. O Jesus, excuse me sir, need a moment."
"Take ten, Greg. What's so bad? Talk to me."
"Must be, uh, at least twenty of them, sir. Freeze-dried, like the doggies: they're kind of mummified. Can't have happened recently. There's a pile against one wall and a bunch around this table, and–one of them is still holding a pistol. Dead as they come. There's some papers on the table."
"Papers. What can you tell me?"
"Not much sir, I don't speak German and that's what they look to be in."
Someone swears creatively. After a moment I realise that it's Chaitin.
"Status, Chaitin!"
"Just trod in–" More swearing. "Sorry, sir." Sound of heavy breathing. "It's safe but, but anyone who comes here better have a strong stomach. Looks like some kind of black magic–"
Hutter taps me on the shoulder and motions me forward: "Howard coming through. Don't touch anything."
The building is a twilight nightmare of narrow corridors, dust and debris, too narrow to turn round in easily with the bulky suit backpacks. Scary Spice leads me through a series of rooms and a mess hall, low benches parked to either side of a wooden table in front of a counter on which sit pans that have tarnished with age. Then we're into a big central hall with a staircase leading up and down, and another corridor, this one with gaping doors–and Chaitin waiting outside the third door with someone else inside.
The scene is pretty much what Chaitin described: table, filing cabinets, pile of withered mummies in grey and black uniforms, black-brown stains across half of them. But the wall behind the door–
"Howard here: I've seen these before," I transmit. "Ahnenerbe-issue algemancy inductance rig. There should be–ah." A rack of stoppered glass bottles gleams from below the thing like a glass printing press with chromed steel teeth. There's a wizened eyeless horror trapped in it, his jaws agape in a perpetual silent scream, straining at manacles drawn tight by dehydrating muscle tissue. I carefully pay no attention to it: throwing up inside a pressure suit would be unwise. Bulldog clips and batteries and a nineteen-inch-wide rack–where's the trough? Answer: below the blood gutters.
"One last summoning, by the look of it, before they all died. Or shot themselves." I trace a finger along the boundary channel of the arcane machine, careful not to touch it: they probably filled the channel with liquid mercury–a conductor–but it's long since evaporated. If it was a possession, that tends to spread by touch, or along electrical conductors. (Visuals, too, although that usually takes serious computer graphics work to arrange.) I turn away from the poor bastard impaled on the torture machine and look at the table. The papers there are brittle with age: I turn one page over, feeling the binder crackling, and see a Ptath transform's eye-warping geometries. "They were summoning something," I say. "I'm not sure what, but it was definitely a possessive invocation." For some reason I have an unaccountable sense of wrongness about the scene. What have I missed?
The mummy with the pistol in its hand seems to be grinning at me.
I flick my radio off and rely on plain old-fashioned speech to keep my words local: "Chaitin," I say slowly, "that corpse. The one with the gun. Did he shoot everyone else here–or could it have been someone else? Was he defending himself?"
The big guy looks puzzled. "I don't see–" He pauses, then sidles round the table until he's as close to the corpse as he can get. "Uh-huh," he says. "Maybe there was someone else here, but he sure looks as if he shot himself. That's funny–"
My radio drowns him out. "Barnes to all: we've found Professor O'Brien. Howard, get your arse downstairs to basement level two, we're going to need your expertise to get her out. Everyone else, eyes up: we have at least one bad guy unaccounted for."
My skin crawls for a moment: What the hell can be wrong with Mo if they need me to help rescue her? Then I notice Chaitin watching me. "Take care," he says gruffly. "You know how to use that thing?"
"This?" I clumsily pat the basilisk gun hanging from my chest pack. "Sure. Listen, don't touch that machine. I mean, like really don't touch it. I think it's dead but you know what they say about unexploded bombs, okay?"
"Go on." He waves me past him at the door and I go out to find Scary Spice crouched in the corridor, eyes swivelling like a chameleon on cocaine.
"Let's go." We head for the stairs, and I can't shed the nagging feeling that I've missed something critically important: that we're being sucked into a giant cobweb of darkness and chilly lies, doing exactly what the monster at its centre wants us to do–all because I've misinterpreted one of the signs around me.
* * * *
The basement level is colder than the surface rooms and passages. I find Sergeant Pike there, helmet undogged, breath steaming and sparkling in the light of a paraffin lamp someone has coaxed into oily, lambent life. "What kept you?" he asks.
I shrug. "Where is she and how is she?"
He points at the nearer of two corridor entrances; this one is lit by a chain of bioluminescent disposables, so that a ghastly chain of green candlelight marks the route. My stomach feels suddenly hollow. "She's conscious but nobody's touching her till you've given the okay," he says.
Oh great. I follow the chain of ghost lights to the open door–
The door may be wide open but there's no mistaking it for anything other than a cell. Someone's stuck another lantern on the floor, just so I can see what else is inside. The room is almost completely occupied by some kind of summoning rig–not a torture machine like the one upstairs, but something not that far away from it. There's a wooden framework like a four-poster bed, with elaborate pulleys at each corner. Mo is spread-eagled on her back, naked, tied to the uprights, but the effect is just about anything other than kinky-sexy–especially when I see what's suspended above her by way of more pulleys and the same steel cables that loop through her manacles. Each of the uprights is capped by a Tesla coil, there's some kind of bug-fuck generator rig in the corner, and half the guts of an old radar station's HF output stage arranged around the perimeter of a crazy pentacle surrounding the procrustean contraption. It's like a bizarre cross between an electric chair and a rack.
Her eyes are closed. I think she's unconscious. I can't help myself: I fumble with the locking ring on my helmet then raise my visor and take a breath. It's cold in here–it's been about eight hours since she was abducted, so if she's been there that long she's probably halfway to hypothermia already.
I shuffle closer, careful not to cross the solder-dribbled circuit inscribed on the stone floor. "Mo?"
She twitches. "Bob? Bob! Get me out of here!" She's hoarse and there's an edge of panic in her voice.
I take a shuddering, icy breath. "That's exactly what I'm going to do. Only question is how." I glance around. "Anyone there?" I call.
"Be with you in a sec," replies Hutter from outside the door. "Waiting for the boss."
I go fumbling in my padded pocket for the PDA, because before I go anywhere near that bed I want to take some readings. "Talk to me, Mo. What happened? Who put you here?"
"Oh, God, he's out there–"
She just about goes into spasm, straining at the cables in panic. "Stop that!" I shout, on edge and jittery myself. "Mo, stop moving, that thing could cut loose any moment!"
She stops moving so suddenly that the bed-rack-summoning-bench shakes. "What did you say?" she asks out of one corner of her mouth.
I squat, trying to see the base of the frame she's lying on. "That thing. I'm going to untie you just as soon as I've checked that it isn't wired. Dead man's handle. Looks like a Vohlman-Knuth configuration–powered down right now, but stick some current through those inductors and it could turn very nasty indeed." I've tapped up an interesting diagnostic program on the palmtop and the Hall-effect sensor embedded in the machine is giving back some even more interesting readings. Interesting, in the sense of the Chinese proverb–"May you live in interesting times."–or more likely die in them. "You use it for necromantic summonings. Demons, they used to call them: now they're primary manifestations, probably 'cause that doesn't frighten the management. Who put you on it?"
"This skinny guy, with a suntan and a German accent–"
"From Santa Cruz?"
"No, I'd never seen him before."
"Shit. Did he have any friends? Or do anything to set up that rack over there?"
I inspect the top of the framework. The chandelier-thing hangs from the roof of the execution machine like a bizarre, three-dimensional guillotine blade: cut any of the ropes holding Mo to the bed and it will fall. I'm not sure what it's made of–glass and bits of human bone seem to figure in the design, but so do colour-coded wires and gears–but the effect will be about as final as flicking the switch on a frog in a liquidiser. Trouble is, I'm not sure the damned thing won't fall anyway, if someone switches on the device.
"No," Mo says, but she sounds doubtful.
I'm checking around the foot of the necromantic bed now, and it's a good thing the instrument's got a log display: lots of very bad shit has gone down here, ghosts howling in the wires, information destroyed and funnelled out of our spacetime through weirdly tangled geometries of silver wire and the hair of hanged women. Bastards. I really ought to keep Mo talking.
The Atrocity Archives Page 19