The Black Gate (11 page)

Rounding the corner with him, Peter found himself standing before a steel door more massive than any he might have imagined in the world’s largest banks. A similar door was located a short distance down the other direction of the junction. He also noticed that the vault door on the right side wasn’t the original. Concrete patches to the floor and around the circumference of the tunnel were clear evidence that some earlier version of the door had been removed.

“That door would take you into a large service tunnel that leads up to the cavern,” Baumann said, nodding in the direction of the door to the left side of the T junction. “We originally needed a tunnel to bring down the materials from the rail siding through the cavern to build the cells in here, but then had to enlarge it to accommodate some of our test subjects.”
 

Peter tried to get his mind around Baumann’s last words. The vault door before them was easily large enough to accommodate a pair of elephants walking side by side. He opened his mouth to ask a question, then snapped it shut again, afraid of looking a fool.

A combination lock dominated the lower right quarter of the door, and Baumann spun it left and right. He made no attempt to block Peter’s view, and Peter carefully noted the numbers, filing the information away should he need it later.

Baumann spun a spoked wheel as large across as Peter’s arm span, and the door began to swing open with an accompanying hum of hydraulics.
 

The sound level instantly rose to a dull roar that reverberated down the rock-walled corridor.
 

“Don’t dawdle, Peter!” Baumann called as he stepped over the threshold. “The door must never be left open an instant longer than necessary. Believe it or not, we’ve had a few leakers.”

“Leakers?” Peter asked as he stepped through.

“That’s what we call the ones that have escaped. Not many have gotten past us, mind you, but every zoo has at least one escape artist.”

They were received by another guard detail, more SS men in combat gear. If the ones near the elevator were on edge, these men were little less than terrified.

As the senior man on duty slapped a large button beside the door to close it while another soldier stood ready to spin the bolts closed, Peter flinched as a
basso profundo
bellow echoed from up ahead, followed by a
boom
that shook the floor.

“He’s been doing that all morning, sir,” the squad leader reported, licking his lips.

“Of course he has,” Baumann said in a matter of fact tone. “He’s hungry.” Looking at his watch, he added, “Don’t fret,
Hauptscharführer
. His dinner should be on the way soon.”

“As you say, sir.” The sergeant’s face paled.

Baumann nodded in the direction of the long corridor before them. “This way, Peter.”
 

“If I may ask, sir, who is this person you were speaking of? The one who’s hungry?”

“I have no idea what his real name is. We just call him Ivan. He was a Russian prisoner. I’m not sure what you’d call him now.”

Baumann led him through several twists and turns to what Peter took to be a medical laboratory that formed a hub, with five more corridors radiating outward like spokes. The hub itself was perhaps fifty yards across. Large work tables, festooned with everything from racks of test tubes and beakers to electrical equipment cluttered with dials and buttons, were arrayed in orderly rows. A dozen or more men in white lab coats, with a few women acting as assistants, were hard at work. Some looked up briefly, but quickly returned to whatever they were doing. Unlike the soldiers, they seemed undistracted by the zoo-like cacophony.

Along the circumference of the main room was a series of examining or operating rooms with glass windows so that the goings-on inside could be observed by those in the central laboratory area. The glass, he noted, wasn’t what one might find in the average window. It was armor glass like that found in the vision blocks of tanks, the thinnest of which Peter judged to be at least two inches thick.

“Ah,
Herr Standartenführer
.” A tall, cadaverous man with thick spectacles and thinning white hair shambled toward them from one of the examining rooms. He wore a heavy leather apron over a white lab coat and rubber gloves. Spatters on the apron and gloves glistened crimson in the harsh overhead lights.
 

“Peter,” Baumann said, “may I introduce
Herr Doktor
Hermann Kleist, our research director.
Herr Doktor
, this is
Hauptsturmführer
Peter Müller, my new second in command.”

Peter snapped his heels together and bowed his head slightly, resisting the conditioned urge to reach out to shake the man’s hand.

“My pleasure, of course,” Kleist said with an amiable smile. “I had heard, of course, of your arrival.”

“I’m surprised, sir,” Peter said, “that I didn’t have the chance to meet you last night at dinner with the
Herr Professor
.”

An expression of stark rage passed over Kleist’s face so quickly that Peter would have missed it had he so much as blinked, but there was no mistaking it.

“The good doctor’s work keeps him down here most of the time,” Baumann said smoothly as Kleist regained his composure.
 

The doctor made a coughing sound that Peter realized was actually laughter. “Why don’t you just tell him?” He looked at Peter, his eyes magnified by his glasses to twice their natural size. “The good
Herr Professor
sees us as nothing more than swineherds,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his voice like the drops of blood that fell from his gloves to the floor at his feet. “He sits in his high tower, admiring his own brilliance in creating the gate, when it is we who truly make the
Führer’s
dream possible!”

“Come, come, Kleist,” Baumann said. “It’s not like you’ve never been to one of the good professor’s dinner parties. And you must admit that you
do
spend most of your time down here of your own accord.”

“Yes, that is true, but he could still…”

The conversation faded from Peter’s hearing as his eyes fastened onto a set of glass jars, dozens of them, arrayed on a long set of shelves along the circular wall of the lab. As if he was being drawn by a magnet, he found himself moving closer to them as Baumann and Kleist prattled on. Some of the jars were small, no larger than pickle jars, while four were as large as fifty-five gallon drums, with every other imaginable size in between.
 

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.”