Von Falkenstein had been right when he’d told Peter that, like the gate itself, this would have to be seen to be believed. He felt the tug of madness pulling at the rug on which stood his sanity. “Mein Gott,” he whispered.
The jars contained biological specimens suspended in formaldehyde, just as one might see in any advanced biology class. But Peter doubted that any student or professor of biology in the world above them had ever seen anything like these.
Unable to help himself, drawn by morbid curiosity, he leaned closer. One of the smaller jars contained an eyeball the size of his fist that had a brilliant orange iris surrounding a slit pupil that stared back at him. Another contained the end of a claw the length of his entire hand that had a wickedly hooked talon at the end. Other jars contained what looked like internal organs of some type, although the only one Peter could clearly recognize was an enormous brain that was grossly misshapen, with one side massively oversized compared to the other. Another jar contained a reptilian scale, glittering like mother of pearl, that was as large as a salad plate.
Then his eyes fastened upon the jars that contained the heads. There were six, each more horrific than the last. The first was recognizably human, but one side of the skull was distended while the other had shrunk, and the crude sutures that ran around the circumference of told him that this was the head from which the deformed brain had been taken. The dark brown eyes stared out at him, and the mouth was twisted into what could only be a rictus of mortal agony, perfectly preserved by the formaldehyde.
The second jar contained what looked like the head of a gargoyle. Had Peter seen it anywhere else, he would have thought it an excellent Halloween prank by an imaginative student. Here, he could only shudder at the long hooked nose, pointed ears, turned down mouth and sharp, pointed teeth. The skin was a pale gray, covered with rough scales. The eyes had been removed, and were no doubt somewhere in one of the other jars of this macabre collection.
Three of the remaining heads were little more than misshapen lumps of bone and flesh, with the facial features contorted into various unnatural appearances. Peter had never considered himself squeamish, but these were so grotesque that he had to look away.
Then he came to the three enormous jars that were placed on an elevated shelf. The first two contained decapitated torsos, each disfigured in different ways, as if through some monstrous mutation.
The third jar caught him by surprise. It contained the torso and head of a woman whose dark tresses floated free in the liquid, and was connected to a complex pump and filter mechanism that hummed softly. Her arms and legs had been surgically amputated, the raw bone and flesh clearly visible. Like the other faces, hers was twisted into an expression of agony, but her eyes were closed, which came as a blissful relief to Peter. A line of crude stitches ran from the center of her forehead into her hairline. She had been lobotomized.
He leaned closer to the jar, wondering who this woman might have been and what she could possibly have done to deserve such a fate. Her expression left little doubt that her body had been savaged while she had still been alive and conscious.
In the time it took him to blink, the woman’s eyelids flew open to reveal empty sockets, and her lips parted in a soundless scream.
Stumbling backward, Peter pointed at the jar and cried, “She’s still alive!”
He would have crashed into the table behind him that was laden with burners and glassware had Baumann not caught him.
His heart hammering in his chest, his eyes still fixed on the apparition in the jar, Peter grabbed Baumann’s arms and shouted, “What in God’s name is this?”
“Calm yourself, Müller! She’s perfectly harmless. Now let me go.”
Baumann’s command voice cut through Peter’s hysteria, and he fought to bring himself under control. With the greatest reluctance, Peter did as Baumann had ordered. As distasteful as Peter found the SS man, gripping the fabric of his uniform reaffirmed his own grip on reality, a reality that was rapidly slipping into the realm of nightmare.
“Don’t be so squeamish,” Baumann chided. “You’ve seen bodies on the battlefield. At least this one isn’t covered in blood and gore.”
“How can she still be alive?” Peter whispered as Baumann firmly propelled him back toward the jar and its squirming occupant.
The poor woman let out another scream in the liquid as she battered herself against the glass, and the cracks in Peter’s sanity widened. “Herr Doktor,” Peter asked slowly as he fought to keep his stomach from vomiting its contents onto the smooth concrete floor, “how is this possible? She should be dead!”
“You are looking at our future, my friend,” Kleist told him, gesturing with a bloody glove. “In her body you see our ancient selves.”
Peter just gaped at him, uncomprehending.
“Her genes are Atlantean,” Baumann said.
“What?” Peter blurted.
“She is Atlantean,” Kleist confirmed, stepping closer to the jar. He tapped the thick glass with a finger, his hands now relieved of the bloody rubber gloves he’d worn earlier. Without eyes she couldn’t possibly see him, but somehow she sensed where he was. She snapped at him like a viper, her teeth bouncing harmlessly off the glass. “She started life in this world as a nothing more than a well-used Jewish whore, but was transformed by her travel through the gate to immortal magnificence.”
A hysterical giggle bubbled up from Peter’s throat until he cut it off, afraid he might not be able to stop if he let it escape through his lips. “That’s impossible.”
“And yet, here she is,” Kleist replied. “You cannot dispute the reality before your eyes, my friend.”
“Think of it, Peter,” Baumann said, his voice edged with excitement. He was staring at the mangled woman, yet his focus was somewhere far beyond. “Imagine soldiers with the strength of a dozen men, who can move at blinding speed in total silence and who can deliver killing blows as easily as snapping their fingers. Men with telepathic powers that could possess your soul, making their will your own. Should they be injured, their wounds would heal in moments. Only decapitation or piercing of the heart can kill them.” He turned his eyes on Peter, who shrank back from the intensity of his gaze. “We believe that she is effectively immortal. Give all these traits to the best men of the SS and we could create a new breed of warrior that will strike terror into the hearts of all who oppose them. They will be the sword and shield of the Reich for the next thousand years, and beyond.”
“Test subject 98-7,” Kleist said, pointing at the woman, “proved everything the Standartenführer just told you. And he will be the first of the Führer’s new army, its leader.”
“This is what you want to become?” Peter whispered, horrified.
“Yes,” Baumann said, his voice softening. “I cannot imagine any greater sacrifice I can make for the Vaterland, or any greater gift I could receive in return.”
His mind reeling, Peter turned back to the poor creature in the jar. “What…” he rasped, pulling himself back from the brink of the abyss into which those thoughts must inevitably lead, “What happened to her eyes?”
“We had to remove them,” Kleist said, “as a precaution. I had to remove part of her cerebral cortex, as well. She had tremendous powers of persuasion, and could make you do virtually anything if you looked directly into her eyes. She sent one of the members of the staff on a killing spree before we finally understood what we were dealing with. I had to remove her arms and legs because of her stupendous strength. She could bend steel bars like they were rubber. And she had other…interesting abilities.” Grinning, he flicked his fingers against the glass, sending the woman into a silent rage. “But now, without her appendages, with no leverage and no power over our psyches, she can only wriggle like a helpless worm.”
“I still don’t understand how she can still be alive,” Peter said. “Is the fluid somehow providing her with oxygen and food?”
Kleist shook his head. “The liquid is actually water with a very
precise measure of inhibitor chemicals to stem her ability to heal. Without it, even with this level of trauma her body would regenerate, and quite quickly. But food? No. She can survive without it for an indefinite period of time.”
“How long has she been in there?” Peter asked, although he really didn’t want to know. He clenched his fists, trying to focus on something other than the warm wetness welling in his eyes, a reflection of his pity for this poor forsaken woman.
“She went through just before the damnable Tommies destroyed the dams and flooded the main cavern,” Kleist answered.
Since last May, Peter thought, horrified. “Most of a year,” he whispered.
“Quite remarkable,” Baumann commented. “Immortal, and nearly impossible to kill.”
“Indeed, indeed!” Kleist agreed. “The only other weakness she has, which we discovered quite by accident, is an acute sensitivity to ultraviolet light, which causes painful burns to the skin. But she has no need of daylight. She can see — or could, before I popped out her eyeballs — extremely well in near total darkness.”
“All the better for a warrior,” Baumann agreed. “Imagine the advantage on the battlefield if we could operate freely at night? The Allied troops would be helpless before us.”
“No doubt, sir.” Peter began to turn away, sickened, when he caught sight of what was in the fourth and final jar. Suspended in clear formaldehyde was a pair of claws, vaguely human in form but like nothing Peter had ever seen. They were huge, nearly as long as Peter’s forearm, covered in a thick slate-gray scale that looked like stone. They hadn’t been severed cleanly from the hand, but ended in ragged flesh and bone, as if they had been torn or blown off. He was afraid to know what the appendages belonged to, but could not help but ask, “What is that?”
“That,” Baumann said, “is part of Ivan, the one you hear caterwauling down in his cell. He was the very first one through the gate, and nearly ruined the party for us all upon his return to this world. A Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket took off those fingers and stunned him long enough for Doktor Kleist to inject him with enough tranquilizers to kill a herd of elephants.”
“He survived a hit from a Panzerfaust?” Peter said, incredulous.
“Yes, yes!” Kleist told him. “Not only that, but his fingers grew back! Like Subject 98-7 here, his body can regenerate. Not all the specimens we have can do that, and that is why we have kept him alive. Others like him would make wonderful weapons, if only they could be controlled.”
“Now you know why the door to this area is so thick,” Baumann said. “Ivan destroyed the first one and nearly escaped. And speaking of Ivan, let’s go have a look, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.” Peter’s voice sounded wooden to his own ears.
Leaving Kleist to his gruesome work, Peter followed Baumann down one of the corridors that led away from the central chamber, then through a maze of corridors lined with cells sealed with thick steel doors. Many were silent, while unearthly grunts, groans, and shrieks came from the others. The hair on the back of Peter’s neck was standing on end, and his blood was ice water pumping through his veins. He was tempted to look, to peer in through the small barred viewing slits set at eye level in the doors, but he decided to keep pace with Baumann.
“How many test subjects have been put through the gate?” Peter asked, trying to keep his voice even.
“Oh, two hundred, maybe three,” Baumann told him. “I’ve lost count, to be honest. Before the RAF flooded us out, the Herr Professor was running three and four transits per day.”
“And how many are still alive in here?”
“Far too many.”
The corridor ended in another circular room, much smaller than Kleist’s chamber of horrors, but larger than the Herr Professor’s dining room. A single massive door, a twin to the vault door that controlled access to the level, occupied the far side. A much smaller door, perhaps two and a half feet square, was located in the lower half of the main door, and a viewing slit was cut through the metal at roughly Peter’s eye height.
“Go on,” Baumann urged. “Take a look. He’s perfectly harmless in there. Aren’t you, Ivan?”
The beast within roared and slammed into the door with such force that Peter could feel the impact through the soles of his feet.
With his heart hammering in his chest, he forced himself to step up to the view slit.
A gigantic finger, tipped with a spiked talon, jabbed through the opening, nearly stabbing Peter through the left eye before he dodged out of the way.
“Oh, by the way,” Baumann said, chuckling, “if he does that just hit the red button beside you. It sends a few hundred thousand volts through our friend from electrodes buried in the wall. We had armor glass in that slit, but he kept chipping it out.”
Peter hit the button and was rewarded with a deafening scream of pain as lightning bolts shot from around the door, lancing into Ivan’s hide. The creature backed away, amazingly agile for his monstrous size, his armored skin smoking.
He — or it, Peter wasn’t sure how to think of Ivan — was huge, easily bigger than an African bull elephant, with hairless skin not altogether different in color, but more akin in texture to the rock wall of the cell. He had two legs, two arms, and a head, but beyond that the resemblance to a human being faded away. His eyes were dark lumps of obsidian set back beneath a massive brow. The nose had been reduced to a pair of thin slits in the center of the face, above a mouth that closely resembled that of a shark. Razor sharp triangular teeth, bright white, sat in rows in lipless jaws. The thing glared at Peter, hate radiating from it in palpable waves, before it roared again.
The creature was horrific enough. What was worse were the bones, human bones, that littered the floor of its cell. Some were whole, while others had been snapped into pieces by Ivan’s tremendous jaws. Some of the bones still had bits of flesh clinging to them in various stages of decay. Others shone pearly white. The stench that wafted through the view slit was horrific.
“You’re feeding him people,” Peter whispered into the momentary silence. “Human beings.”
“That’s all he’ll eat. We’ve tried everything else. We wouldn’t feed him at all, except that it keeps him calm. I don’t think even this cell would hold him if he truly got it in his feeble mind to escape.”
“He no longer thinks like a man?”
Baumann shook his head. “I don’t know if our friend here understands or remembers anything from when he was human. He’s a vast pit of black rage. I think that’s all he has left inside. Ah! Here comes lunch, right on time.”
Peter turned around. A squad of soldiers was dragging in a pair of men who’d been stripped naked, bound and gagged. One of them he recognized as a worker on the crew that had built the enclosure for the gate’s computing machine. The man’s eyes bulged with terror, and his gaze fixed on Peter, begging for mercy that was beyond Peter’s power to give.
“Why don’t you kill them first?” Peter choked. “Why torture them like this?”
“Because Ivan likes his meals fresh. He won’t touch them if they’re dead or drugged. He just gets very angry.” Baumann watched impassively as the guards dragged the victims to the door. “Don’t misunderstand, Peter. I would be perfectly happy to see this beast dead, burned to a cinder and its ashes spread into the nearest sewer. I believe that it’s far too dangerous to be left alive. Half my men were killed bringing it to heel when it escaped the first time.” Looking at the guards, he gave a quick nod of his head. “Toss them in.” Leaning toward the view slit, he called to Ivan, “Bon appétit.”
Two of the guards opened the small door, while another held down the red button, keeping Ivan at a distance. Four more guards shoved the first man through, then the second, before slamming the small door shut and locking it.
Even with their mouths gagged, the screams of the two hapless men inside the cell echoed through the outer room as Ivan, his deep grunts reverberating through the outer chamber, fell upon them and began to feed.
RUNES
Peter found himself sitting in von Falkenstein’s study with the other handful of people who made up the Herr Professor’s inner circle, celebrating the gate’s successful test. Von Falkenstein, who was in an ecstatic mood, served cognac to his guests in what, judging from Mina’s surprised expression, was an unusual event.
Sinking into one of the plush leather wingback chairs, Peter tried to purge the memory of what he had just seen on Level Three by focusing on the elegant trappings that now surrounded him. Persian rugs covered most of the polished wood parquet floors, while bookshelves of burnished cherry, bearing at least a thousand volumes, lined the walls from floor to ceiling. The ceiling itself was of patterned bronze, brightly polished, with a beautiful chandelier that cast a cheerful glow. A marble fireplace with a massive hearth dominated the end of the room opposite the double doors that led from the sitting room of von Falkenstein’s apartment. Peter was grateful for the warmth the blazing fire provided, although the chill he felt had nothing to do with the room’s temperature.
He, Hoth, and Baumann sat in chairs on either side of the fireplace, while Mina curled up on the love seat that faced the flames. After von Falkenstein finished serving his guests and set down the bottle, he came to sit beside Mina and raised his glass in a toast. “To the Reich’s inevitable victory,” he proclaimed.
“To the Reich,” the others echoed, raising their glasses in turn. Peter tossed down the cognac in a single gulp.
“Tomorrow will be a momentous day,” von Falkenstein said. “We should be able to make the final verification of the gate’s operation. Once that is done, we can begin to create the Führer’s new army.”
Peter nodded absently, his mind still consumed by the enormity of what was happening here.
“You look troubled, Peter,” Von Falkenstein said, as if reading Peter’s mind. “That is to be expected after your first visit to Level Three. All of us, myself included, suffered from a sense of grand incredulity at the gate’s wonders.”
The Black Gate Page 9