by Mat Nastos
Rough arms pushed passed Himmler and reached for the thick, iron plates strapped around Grimm’s torso. As clawed fingers brushed the magical girdle’s etched surface, a bright flash of white light accompanied by the smell of roasted flesh filled the room, blinding anyone unfortunate enough to have been staring at it.
The beast filling Reinhard Heydrich’s form screamed, its pain echoing in the ears and minds of the every living being in Prague Castle, and no doubt bestowing nightmares to those within a mile of its position.
“Is the light of Odin too much for you, creature?” Grimm laughed. “Come, try again!”
“No matter, you’ll be dead soon enough, and with you the one-eye’s last hope. Prepare them for travel, Reinhard.” Himmler rubbed unconsciously at a spot of Grimm’s spittle that dared to have splattered along the cuff of his immaculately-pressed uniform. To Heydrich, he added, “They will go to Lezaky as part of the sacrifice. They’ll feed your hunger and serve as a warning against future insurrection by the gypsies.”
“Of course, Herr Himmler.” Eagerness bubbled off of Heydrich. “They will be ready in time for the train to leave at midday.” Himmler knew his friend would have them ready for travel once the abysmal hunger burning in the Reichsprotecktor’s eyes had been satiated. “First, I would feed.”
“Very good,” said Himmler, moving out of the room. As the cell door was pulled shut behind him, the Nazi high commander called back, “Don’t play too hard, dear Heydrich. Remember, we still need their life forces for the final ceremony.”
“Yes, ‘dear Heydrich’,” mocked MacAndrew. “It’s nice to see you still follow the orders of your master like a good dog, yeah?”
“You are a fool, Englishman,” laughed the Nazi in a graveyard’s voice. “Reinhard Heydrich is no more. His soul was the key to my entry to your world. Tell them, Jew. Tell them who stands before you. Tell them of their destroyer.”
“He speaks truly,” started Wittgenstein, still visibly shaken from his encounter with Himmler and the death of his companion. “Reinhard Heydrich is gone. His essence was devoured as one of the giants of old passed through. The Jotnar is contained within what is left of Heydrich’s human husk by the cold iron chest plate.”
“Yes! This device!” Heydrich pounded his fist into the black, iron plate encasing his chest. The runes scratched into its outer shell with the bones of holy men convulsed dimly, challenging the humans to gaze long enough into their light for dementia to overcome them. “The Jew’s technology, has allowed me to breathe the air of Midgard once more. With my rebirth, Gjallarhorn is blown and Ragnarok comes! The final Twilight will fall on the world of man and the Jotnar will reclaim our dominion of the Earth!”
“Christ, man, then get on with it already. With all this talking, I’m ready for something to liven things up a bit,” MacAndrew laughed long and loud. Bereft of other weapons, the veteran used the one tool honed to devastating effect by a thousand generations of Scottish warriors – his tongue. “What are you, German or French? Kill us or shut up!”
Hands that burned cold like ice lashed out and gripped MacAndrew’s neck. The Scotsman’s shout was cut off by the Nazi’s claw-like fingers tightening, threatening to cut off the vital flow of oxygen to his lungs. When Grimm leapt to his friend’s defense, a second powerful hand struck a blow that sent the giant reeling across the dirty prison floor as if his great weight meant nothing at all.
MacAndrew struggled to no avail. Heydrich held him as easily as a mother holds a child, and pulled him close to a face etched with fury, lips pulled into thin lines around clenched teeth that bordered on fangs.
“I grow tired of you, little one,” said the possessed German, foaming at the mouth and throwing spittle into the face of his captive. “Now you will feed my hunger!”
The burly veteran soldier was engulfed with a sickly green light that burst forth from Heydrich’s remaining human eye. He tried to scream as the glow began to tear his very soul from his body, draining his life into the monster that clutched at him. Somewhere in the background, as if they were a hundred miles away instead of mere feet, MacAndrew heard Grimm and the German scientist yell out in protest and horror at what was being done to him.
Ian MacAndrew knew he was going to die at the hands of the man he had traveled a thousand miles to kill.
As the life began to ebb faster and faster, a warmth began trailing up his arm, slowly and weakly at first, but growing in power as seconds fell from the clock. If he had been able to look down, he would have seen the rune on his forearm pulsating in time to his heartbeat. If he had been able to hear, he would have been greeted by a sound not unlike the beating of a thousand raven wings in the distance.
When the sound and throbbing reached a fevered pitch, it was Reinhard Heydrich’s turn to scream for a second time. Fingers spasming in pain, the Heydrich-thing dropped the Scotsman to the cell floor, backing away.
“You resisted my feeding? How?” Heydrich stalked back over to the now half-prone MacAndrew and jerked him to his feet once more. “I sense the stench of the Gray-One on you as well.”
Nostrils flared wide, Heydrich sniffed the air around MacAndrew before dropping down to his level. Like lightning, the German ripped the Scotsman’s shirt sleeve off in one motion and shrieked in terror upon seeing the rune of Odin branded on his prisoner’s arm. The mere sight of the sigil seemed to inflict agony upon the demon-possessed man, causing him to push the Scot to the ground once more. Cowering, and trailing a litany of vile curses in an arcane language that hadn’t been spoken on the mortal plane in more than ten centuries, Heydrich backed away.
Struggling to sit, MacAndrew gasped, “Bitten off a bit more than you can chew with me, eh?”
Heydrich’s response startled the prisoners. Spinning nearly one-hundred-eighty degrees on his heels, the Jotnar-enhanced man shattered the chains restraining Wittgenstein with a swipe of his hands and enveloped the scientist in a bear-hug strong enough to fracture ribs. That incandescent green light flowed like liquid out of Heydrich’s eye and mouth, sloughing over the frantically caterwauling Austrian caught in his arms. Wittgenstein jerked back, trying to put distance between them, but one hand snaked its way around the scientists neck and pulled him close.
Less than two meters away, MacAndrew screwed his eyes shut, unable to do anything to help the shrieking victim of the Jotnar’s uncontrolled ire.
In a moment, the attack was over. The effects of Heydrich’s violation of the Austrian were both immediate and dreadful. It seemed as if Wittgenstein had aged fifty years in a matter of seconds: skin, thinner than paper, hung loosely from spindly bones, and what little hair remained on the man’s furrowed head had faded in color completely. Across the flopping jowls hanging below Wittgenstein’s neck were glaring, crimson burns in the shape of Heydrich’s clutching hand – five open, blistered wounds.
“Stare at the fate that awaits all who oppose the Jotnar, insignificant mortals!”
It took a moment before MacAndrew could even tell if Wittgenstein still drew breath. Somehow, in spite of the shock to his system and the massive drain on his life’s energy, the scientist lived. Barely. Although, with the desiccated state of his body, the Scotsman wasn’t sure for how long he’d be able to hold out.
Gods, that could have been me. Shame and relief fought for dominance in MacAndrew’s head.
“The One-Eye will not be able to shelter you forever, Odin-pawn,” snarled Heydrich. He signaled for the prison’s fractured door to be opened. “After the sacrifices at Lezaky, I will be able to come further into Midgard. Then I’ll break whatever spells the decrepit, old god has protected you with. When I feed on your souls, the Jotnar will return and Ragnarok will take this land!” To the guards outside the cell, he added as he departed, “We leave within the hour. Should the giant cause trouble, kill the Englishman.”
Alone, save for the reverberating bass of their dungeon chamber’s door
, it took Ian MacAndrew a series of ten slow, deep breaths before he was able to move again. The closeness of what he had just witnessed – the wrongness of what Heydrich had become and what he had done – was beyond the scope of anything the Scotsman had been prepared for in his training. His entire world had been widened, opened in ways he had never imagined, and didn’t want.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he finally said. Though if pressed, he wouldn’t be able to say to whom he had spoken. Grimm, Wittgenstein, himself, or to God – whichever one happened to be listening at the time.
“Such is the fate of those foolish enough to traffic with the Great Old Ones,” said Grimm, scrutinizing the after-effects of Heydrich’s gorging. “They will use you up and devour you before discarding what is left as refuse.”
“Is there anything we can do to help him, Grimm?”
“Not here, little Celt. The All-Father watches us still, but the Jotnar’s presence keeps him from aiding us directly here in the center of their power. The best we can do is make him comfortable until we can escape.” Grimm reached down and, focusing all of his great strength, tore his chains from their anchors in the ground. “For now, we are on our own.”
From his position shackled to the opposite side of the cold, stone room, MacAndrew called out softly. “Are you still with us, mate? Can you speak?”
“I will aid you… tell you everything if you help me get away from them,” came the barely audible voice of the withered vessel of the man named Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Still in shock from the attack and what he had seen happen to the scientist, MacAndrew moved over and eased the man up onto the tattered cot braced against the cell’s far wall and said, “We’ll help you if we can.”
Behind the Scotsman, his bulk seemingly filling the entire room, Grimm nodded in agreement.
“Ja.”
Smiling weakly, Wittgenstein motioned the men to move near.
“Come then,” he said. “Let me tell you a tale of horrors beyond your imagination.”
CHAPTER 15
PHILOSOPHER’S LAMENT
In the cold dungeon, waiting to be taken away for sacrifice, MacAndrew and Grimm sat back and listened to Wittgenstein’s story.
“The Old Ones you mentioned before ‒ the Jotnar?” said MacAndrew. Things were ranging quickly beyond his realm of experience and the pragmatic Scotsman didn’t like it one bit. It was fine enough to deal with God and the devil within the confines of church, but having to confront them face-to-face was more than he could handle and come away with his sanity.
“Yes,” answered the now-ancient Jew. “My research was responsible for reawakening the Old Ones, and for the Nazis taking your friend and his family for sacrifice.”
“Who are you, Wittgenstein,” asked MacAndrew.
“I am…” He shook his head. “I was a mathematical philosopher.” The man sighed, it was clear Wittgenstein was used to having his work misunderstood by lesser minds, and the Scotsman could tell for a genius of Wittgenstein’s caliber, all minds were lesser. “My work merged the study of logic and mathematical equations with the more esoteric studies of the mind. I took the facts that we know and wove them with the facts we feel. Science, philosophy, religion, even superstition. Until now they’ve been separate realms, but I saw they no longer had to be. They could be combined in ways that would pull back the great veil to reveal the nature of the very universe to us.
“As my reputation grew in certain communities, I was sought out by others whose proclivities mirrored my own. Men such as my companion, Philipp. He had been one of the finest minds I’d ever encountered. A master of science and of the mystic arts. It was through him that I had been introduced to a man who offered us solutions to our more mundane problems. Little did either of us realize that the man was Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a member of the Edda Society, and one of the men who founded the Godforsaken group. A zealot who followed Heinrich Himmler.”
“You? Why would you help the Nazis?”
“Somehow the Edda Society got word of my research that spoke of dimensions other than our own,” said Wittgenstein with the voice of a weary old man. “They plied me with promises of unlimited resources to conduct my experiments in breaching the barriers between our world and whatever lay beyond. Somehow they knew what would be waiting for us once my machines tore a hole in the very fabric of space. Their own scholars had been following a path similar to that of our work – attempting to break down the barriers between this universe and the next. To Philipp and me, the group was a blessing.”
Wittgenstein shook his head again. “At first, the patronage of the Edda was a dream. We were given vast amounts of money, access to any resource our minds could imagine, and magnificent facilities in which to conduct our experiments. All they requested from us in return was an openness with our findings. Whatever we found. Every discovery, every theory, every advancement in our understanding of the arcane sciences was copied by Edda scholars. For posterity’s sake, they said.
“Soon, we realized the Edda Society wanted more from our research. They weren’t trying to expand the knowledge of mankind as Philipp and I were. They were trying to steal power to aid in their plans of world conquest. By the time we recognized what their true agenda was, it was too late. We’d been pulled too deeply into their ambitions and had no way out. At least, no way that would end in our survival.
“After years of searching the globe for answers, Philipp and I found what we were looking for deep within the Kelheim Forest, just outside of a tiny hamlet there,” Wittgenstein said wearily, barely able to hold himself up on the nearly-rotted through wood of the cot. “In a cave we discovered the body of a creature the likes of which neither of us nor any of the greatest minds in Germany had ever seen before. A beast of leviathan proportions. Dead since the dawn of human history. Local fairy tales named its resting place as that of Garm, a truly terrifying monster of Norse Legend, and one of the Jotnar.”
As enthralled as he was with the German scientist’s story, MacAndrew couldn’t help but notice Grimm’s eyes burning at the mention of Garm’s name, his eyes screwing shut to slivers that blazed ice-blue in rage. Every muscle in the man’s enormous body was taut and seemed ready to split out of his skin. The Scotsman realized the story was a familiar one, a personal one to the man.
“The knowledge we found in the cave gave us incredible breakthroughs in our research. It was like a key opening a great door and liberating our minds from the trivialities of mundane thought. It was a great knowledge, a dark and terrible knowledge, but we couldn’t stop. We had to keep going. Something drove us on despite the horrors and degradations we found, that we performed.”
A coughing fit wracked the now ancient form of the once-spry scientist, sending him flopping back onto the thin straw bed. Surprisingly to MacAndrew, Grimm dropped to one knee next to the convulsing man and placed a hand on his head to try and calm his reaction.
“You were blind, selfish little men, but you were not in control. The Jotnar have a way of shadowing a man’s mind and making him do things he would not normally do.”
Wittgenstein smiled weakly and patted the back of Grimm’s over-sized hand. “Thank you for that, my friend, but I’m not entirely sure that was the case. We thought we were smarter than the gods and ignored their warnings. Soon we discovered a ceremony that could be used to reawaken the Jotnar. To communicate with it, and to bring Garm back to Midgard.”
A curse in German, one vicious enough that it stunned even the more jaded MacAndrew with its intensity, roared out of Grimm. The Scotsman was confused by the entire situation. This talk of Jotnar and gods and monsters sounded like the sort of stories he was told as a child. Fairy tales and bedtime stories. None of it made any sense to him.
“I don’t understand. What was this Garm?” he asked.
Grimm and Wittgenstein exchanged a long, serious
look, the significance of which was completely lost on the only non-German in the cell.
“Tell me.”
“The freeing of Garm is the first sign of the coming of Ragnarok,” answered Grimm finally. “It marks the Twilight of the Gods and the beginning of the Jotnar’s rule.”
“And that’s a bad thing, lad?”
It was Wittgenstein’s turn to answer in a tired, beaten voice. “It means the death of all humanity.”
“And you gave these murderers the means by which to let it happen?” MacAndrew was taken aback by the affront to sense. He’d risked his life countless times to fight the bastards to whom Wittgenstein and Frank had handed the means to commit genocide. And all for what? The promise of money? Whatever pity the soldier had felt for the scientist evaporated, replaced by abhorrence and loathing.
“It should have worked. The Keystone Machine was perfect. But something went wrong with the ceremony. We were able to stir the ancient giants from their eternal slumber. They spoke to us, gave gifts to their new servants in the Edda Society,” continued Wittgenstein, ignoring the Scot’s outrage. “But the pathways of the World Tree remained closed to us. Something happened during the ceremony we hadn’t planned.” Wet eyes, yellowed with unnatural age, shifted to stare at Grimm with a mixture of fear and of wonder. “You.”
“The old gods had other plans for us all, I fear. Plans beyond mortal ken,” said Grimm, his back turned toward his cellmates as he moved to the single tiny window leading out of the cell. “I was freed from your cold iron machines by the Gallows God and given Megingjord that had rested so long around the waist of his dead son to bind me once more to the living world.”
The reed-thin scientist spat his disbelief at the giant warrior. “But when Thor died, his belt was powerless. The Edda Society had tried to harness its energy for a decade thinking it would help them to cleave the veil between the worlds. To no avail. Without Thor, it held no power on its own.”