Christian took her hand and placed it on his shoulder before turning to leave. “Do you have any idea what might happen tonight?” He asked.
“None whatsoever. If our luck holds nothing will happen, just two foolish people chanting in a clearing.”
“And if it doesn’t hold?”
“Well, if I were you Lieutenant I’d be ready to run. But, then again, running has never been my strong point.”
What did she mean, he wondered? That he was more familiar with running from situations? That she wasn’t? Or that it would be hazardous for her to move anywhere at speed without a guide? It didn’t really matter he realised, the sentiment was clear. This night held danger for them all.
The contempt that the SS held for Cosmina as the two groups passed each other on the path made Christian cringe. The way they eyed her with open hostility was distasteful at best, but fortunately they held their tongues. One flicked a smouldering cigarette butt into the fire and then spat on the ground. A juvenile gesture, but one that offered Christian an excellent view of the strange contraption he wore around his neck. The darkly tinted flying goggles bumped against the buttons on his tunic. He also seemed to be carrying a short but heavy chain in one hand. Christian walked on, puzzling over this combination of equipment.
He led Cosmina past Eckhart — the man radiating expectancy as he stood in front of the triangular entrance to the cage — and then guided her to her allotted position against the spiked structure. Christian took her hand and looked towards the horses’ tying post.
Seeing his men stationed there he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll stay close.” Then he moved her fingers past the vicious prongs until they could grasp the exposed silken thread.
“Bring the hounds!” Eckhart shouted and there was a responding crack of wood.
Hounds? Christian wondered if he had heard correctly. He saw the SS team, their eyes hidden behind their strange goggles as they used crow bars to lever open the crate.
Hounds? That didn’t make sense. There had been no indication that anything living was housed inside that box.
“Commence Fräulein Stafie!” Eckhart called again, and soft words in a weird, melodic tongue issued forth from Cosmina. Hearing them gave Christian some solace, but this was soon dashed by the nightmarish visions that were emerging from the ruptured crate. He could register the presence of the men with their chain leashes, but the creatures they led…
There was no way such monstrosities could be called hounds. They were dog-like in size but horrifically fluid within his comprehension. A dizziness swept over him, compounded by the deep chanting baritone of Eckhart’s voice that now boomed over the whole proceedings. Christian reeled and began to feel the world slipping away from him. Back. Back to a time when…
* * *
A sharp stinging sensation tingled across his left cheek and brought him back to a drowsy reality. He blinked his eyes, trying to focus and felt the same burning spark followed by a throbbing in his jaw. He realised that someone was slapping him, and that someone was Ernst. His burly friend hauled him to his feet, leaving Christian to wonder how and why he had ended up on his knees.
“Christian! Christian!” Ernst was shouting and shaking his shoulders, rousing him, bringing him back to the present, and the reality of…
“My God! What do we do Ernst?” Christian had to shout over the hurricane that was blasting through the clearing.
“We stop them!” Ernst’s eyes were wide, but there was determination in them too, keeping the panic in check. “Get Fräulein Stafie to safety. I’ll deal with Eckhart.”
Christian looked wildly about him, saw the cage aglow with a kaleidoscope of beautiful yet terrifying light. Something scintillated at the heart of the structure, something bright and shiny that danced through the air under its own volition. The helmet. Just as Christian felt himself slipping away again, a hefty hand clasped the side of his face and turned his view aside.
“Don’t look! Get Fräulein Stafie, then run!”
With a strong shove, Ernst pushed Christian towards where Cosmina still stood. Her hair was a living thing, all tendrils lashing about in the turbulent air. He staggered towards her then turned to see what his friend was planning. There was Ernst, running in a tight arc, quickly positioning himself behind the rapturous Eckhart so that…
“No!” Christian bellowed. He was hardly able to hear the word in his own head. It was futile to think it had the power to stop his friend as he sprinted at the oberst and threw himself, and his target, through the swirling, triangular maw of the cage.
A confusion of images flowed past Christian’s eyes. Angry reds and yellows dominating the spectrum emanating from the cage, one of the SS guards struggling to quickly release a collared monstrosity, the flash of the helmet as it jumped in fits and starts.
Somehow Christian managed to turn his face away once more and saw Cosmina, still dutiful in her actions. He drew courage from that image and moved towards her. Gently, he plucked her hand from the silken cord and then, throwing decorum to the wind, slung her over his shoulder and ran.
As soon as she was detached from the structure, the sound of metal being stretched and twisted beyond its stress threshold snapped and ground in the air behind them. There was a cry, more a wail, and thoughts of Ernst made Christian look back.
One of the SS guards was being flailed about by an invisible force, his clothing and flesh falling away in effortless ribbons against the barbed surface of the cage. Sickened, Christian struggled towards the treeline. A powerful thump of air caught him on his right side, and a huge indentation suddenly appeared in the forest floor, as if some mighty, invisible trunk had been flung to the ground. Pure adrenaline allowed him not to dwell upon this and he sped on until a frantic horse suddenly blocked their path. Eckhart’s stallion must have broken free of the group, and now it proved a formidable obstacle. Its eyes were bulging, foam flowing from its mouth and flanks. It reared and Christian had a split second to read its intention. It leapt straight into a crazed gallop in one direction while he wrenched Cosmina in another.
He could hear her, yelling something behind him but there was no time to talk, no time to guide her. They reached the standing trees and moved rapidly between the illuminated trunks.
The going became harder, low ferns brushing against his legs as he ran, the weight of her punishing his shoulder. The thwack of their motion through the brush cut above the noise from the clearing, but the echo of it behind them alerted Christian that they weren’t alone. They were being pursued.
He pressed through some denser foliage, placed Cosmina with her back to a tree and pressed a hand across her mouth. The clatter of twigs and leaves increased until a low, thick-set figure burst into view. Christian reached for his Luger and then the breathless figure spoke.
“Why aren’t you running?” Ernst gasped.
“Why are you chasing us?” Christian replied in a flood of relief.
Ernst barked an unhinged laugh at that and grabbed Cosmina’s hand.
Together they ran — sometimes three abreast, sometimes in single file. They ran until the unearthly conflagration behind them no longer lit their path, and then they ran in shared, soothing darkness. They ran until the snarling and the howls could no longer be heard, and the only noises around them was the fear of the forest animals they disturbed. Animals, like themselves, which knew the value of flight.
TERROR OF TRIBEČ
By Martin Korda
AS I lay here, death rasping through me with every breath, I must finally record that which I have spoken of only once; a macabre secret carried in silence since I divulged it to two British agents forty years ago while I lay in a hospital bed much like the one I lie in now. I write these words in the hope they will survive me, perhaps find their way to men better equipped than I to discover the mysteries behind what I witnessed.
I was still a young man caught in the limbo betwixt adolescence and manhood when the Nazis began their occupation of my country in Ma
rch of 1939. In those days, my brother and I would spend our days working on our father’s pig farm in the heart of the Tribeč Mountains and our evenings adventuring through the forest that encircled our home. Soon after the invasion, word reached us of soldiers clad in black uniforms bearing a Black Sun insignia taking children from surrounding villages, but such was our farm’s remoteness that we placed little credence in what we perceived as hearsay and half-truths from passing travellers.
After the Nazis arrived, my father’s malaise, already entrenched by my mother’s death the previous summer, deepened; fuelled by a newfound weakness for Slivovica and a simmering anger at the fragile liberty wrenched from our nation’s hands. Ondrej and I would increasingly spy father holding furtive conversations with strangers, but we dared not enquire who they were.
It was around this time that the storms began; violent elemental outbursts that tore ebony chasms in the sky and spewed electrical talons that rasped in the direction of the distant battlements of Castle Čierna Brána where Ondrej and I had spent summers re-enacting the heroism of the child lord Milos the Brave, fabled vanquisher of a Mongol incursion six centuries ago. Ondrej, younger than me by four years, became increasingly obsessed with investigating the stronghold as each night we watched lightning spike twelve times towards the ancient ramparts. Despite my protests, my fraternal caution soon acquiesced to Ondrej’s youthful enthusiasm. It is a regret that I carry now to my grave.
One morning when father had taken to a particularly black mood, we resolved to finally reconnoitre the castle. Winter’s heavy air had relented to spring’s fresh optimism and with each step our reverie rose; a levity curtailed only by the discovery of a mauled rabbit that sent Ondrej into a fit of sobs and beseeching pleas that we should bury the creature before moving on. Even surrounded by the inevitability of death on the farm, Ondrej had never been able to stomach it. And so with bent knee and clawed hands I scraped back the soil and placed the creature into the crude grave while Ondrej wept with averted eyes, begging me to promise that each time we came to this spot we’d whisper a prayer for the deceased animal.
The sun was at its apex by the time we’d meandered to the periphery of the mountain fortress that had stood sentinel for centuries above a valley cleaved by the patient grind of ancient glaciers. Less than a year had passed since our last visit, yet the castle seemed different to us now, as though shrouded by a gloom that quelled the light. On the battlements men clad in dark uniforms stood rod straight to attention, the sight of the crooked crosses and baleful Black Sun insignia emblazoned on their uniforms sending our bobbing heads ducking for the sanctuary of the rock spur that concealed our presence.
We should have turned back then, but fuelled by adolescent foolhardiness we began scuttling between points of crude cover to attain a better view of the fortress’ new inhabitants, and before long our movements had drawn the attentions of nearby soldiers whose barked alerts sent us scampering in panicked flight into the mass of trees at our backs.
Running on dread-driven legs I blundered into the forest until my blood soured to vinegar and I stumbled to a leaden-legged halt, hissing Ondrej’s name amidst the looming barks of our pursuers. But no reply came.
Day yielded to night. Denial morphed into panic as I searched for him, ambling through the thicket in a directionless daze. Desperation drove me on. Behind every tree, inside every bush, there was hope. I pictured him now sitting with father sipping soup and awaiting my return ready to gloat how he’d outrun me. But I knew such frail hope would dissipate the moment I passed through the door.
I can still picture my father’s face as I told him; his methodical movement to an old carved box on the mantelpiece from which he drew an archaic revolver and without a glance at me, how the gloom swallowed him as he ventured outside. We spent the night searching for Ondrej, our desperate calls dulled by the din of a storm that raged with Herculean fury. When we returned the next morning the sun was still obfuscated by the roiling clouds, and soaked and sore from a night of trudging through tar-like terrain, we fell to our beds without sharing a word. For two days and nights we repeated the routine. In my shame I had taken to sleeping in the barn, but slumber eluded me as minutes stretched like an abyss into the silence of night.
It was on the third day that an event occurred that would forever alter the way I perceived our place within this infinite universe. Returning from another futile search I was suddenly struck by a compulsion to speak with father; even the most egregious lambasting would be preferable to the silent torture he’d subjected me to since Ondrej’s disappearance. As I neared the farmhouse, unfamiliar voices rose from within, and creeping to a window I peered in to see father speaking with a group of six men dressed in military uniforms. Terror took me as I ducked from view, listening intently for the Teutonic bite that typified Hitler’s henchmen, but to my surprise the strangers spoke with the elongated plummy syllables of the British drawl.
“All we’re asking, old boy is for food and shelter tonight and that you lead us to the castle in the morning,” implored a moustachioed man who stood with a poise that implied authority.
My father, sat in a rocking chair and smoking a pipe with his now customary distant stare, remained silent.
“Look, we were informed by the Three Kings that you know a lesser trodden path to Čierna Brána that circumvents the patrol routes. It’s a matter of great military importance that we find out what is happening within those walls. It affects us all.”
“Us?” rumbled my father.
“We’ve already covered this, Chamberlain’s decision regarding the Sudetenland was regrettable, but…”
“These are dark times, gentlemen. Your nation needs a leader of strength not a man who gives away that which is not his to give. I cannot help soldiers who serve such a man.”
“This is absurd!” snapped the moustachioed soldier.
In the silence that followed I scanned the remaining men. One of them, a sliver of a man with deep, care-worn rivulets running above bushy brows and battered circular spectacles stepped forward, hands held upwards in a gesture intent on conveying trust but which even to my inexperienced eyes, smacked of desperation.
“Mr. Rastlinka,” the man began in Slovak. My father sat up, surprised as I to hear the man speaking our mother tongue. “My name is Doctor Josef Straka. For the past year I have worked for the British government to investigate phenomena that science has been unable to explain. Some months ago during a raid on Castle Kammerstein in Prague our agents acquired a text called The Book of Shadows, a book that the Nazis had gone to great lengths to attain. It seems that Hitler has become hell bent on finding ways to exploit powers not of this world for the advancement of the Third Reich.”
My father’s expression remained unmoved. Straka’s desperation deepened. “We believe that before we captured the tome it came into the possession of a high ranking Nazi officer and known occultist Doctor Schultz Nagle von Asberg, a close associate of SS-head Heinrich Himmler. COMINT intercepted communications that suggest he’s attempting to use an ancient ritual outlined in the text to open a portal called a Black Gate between our world and another to muster powers against our forces. The storms you spoke of to the Three Kings, they bear striking similarities to the ones outlined in the Book of Shadows. If we do not act, we could face a time of darkness unlike any the world has ever known.”
My father observed Straka coldly and relit his pipe as the first grumble of thunder announced itself from the night sky. “Trenčín. Your accent, it is from Trenčín,” came my father’s reply. Straka nodded, confused. “A man from my country who works for those who sold us to the Nazis is no countryman of mine.” My father nodded towards the British soldiers around him.
“But…” stammered Straka.
This time my father spoke in English. “Good night, gentlemen. I regret I can be of no assistance to your mission.”
“Mr. Rastlinka, be reasonable! Surely you must see that if our mission to stop von Asberg fails our
nation may never see independence again, not if the Nazi war machine achieves its goals.” Straka’s words hung like a final challenge to my father’s conscience, the two men holding each other’s stares, but I already knew father’s reason would not yield to his pride, and turning his back on the soldiers he relit his smouldering pipe and gazed into the fire.
Straka and the soldiers exchanged defeated glances as they filed towards the exit. Alert to the threat of being discovered, I bolted towards the barn just as the sky unleashed a torrent which flooded in cascades of bulbous drops that blinded me as I stumbled on. Once within the sanctuary of the outhouse I stood panting for breath, only for my attention to be drawn to raised voices outside.
“That’s just bloody great. What the hell do we do now?” came the grunted Cockney complaint from one of the soldiers as the group passed by the barn. “We can’t stay out in this Captain, it’s stair rods out here,” exclaimed another soldier. Peering from a crack in the barn doors I spied the men outside, and whether moved by their plight or a vain hope that my brother still lived within Čierna Brána, I beckoned them in.
Introductions were scant, merely grunted thanks as I shared my sole source of sustenance; a hunk of hardening bread. Only Straka refused to eat, standing apart from the soldiers and staring at the abyssal sky as it spewed bolts of cobalt that shattered into innumerable violet shards and plummeted in the direction of Čierna Brána with staccato descents; like a shoal of squid swimming towards the shore.
“Fascinating,” he whispered.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I mused, pointing towards the descending azure mass.
“The storm is different tonight?” Straka enquired, his eyes betraying ill-masked fear.
Straka and the moustachioed man — who’d introduced himself as Captain Norris — exchanged concerned glances. “Tell me, lad, what have you heard about children disappearing from around here?” enquired the captain. The words spilled from me as I explained about Ondrej.
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