The Black Gate (12 page)

“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 gate’s horrors, don’t you mean?
Peter thought. Lowering his glass, Peter met the
Herr Professor’s
gaze and forced a weak smile. “Is it that obvious?” The others chuckled. Peter went on, “It’s simply too fantastic. That the gate is a portal, that I can understand because it’s grounded in scientific principles with which I’m at least passingly familiar. But the idea that a human being can be physically transformed into…something else, simply by passing through, is difficult for me to grasp.”
 

Von Falkenstein nodded with sympathetic understanding while Mina produced a cigarette and lighter. She lit one for him and one for herself. Peter took the opportunity to take out his pipe, while Hoth lit his own cigarette. Baumann, his lips twisted into his trademark smirk, only sat quietly, his legs crossed, looking like a leopard in a tree. Relaxed. Deadly.

“You’re aware that my request for a replacement specified someone with a knowledge of the occult?” Von Falkenstein asked.

Peter nodded.
 

“Have you given any thought as to why?”

“Not really, sir.” Peter shrugged. “I had no frame of reference. I merely went where I was ordered to go.”

“There are two reasons,” von Falkenstein explained. “I first required someone with agility of thought. The gate itself is something that anyone with a firm understanding of engineering or physics could, after the initial surprise wore off, grasp without undue difficulty. But the actual fruit of the project is beyond conventional understanding, particularly for those with an aptitude for the traditional scientific and engineering fields, where the Universe displays clearly defined laws.” Von Falkenstein’s expression darkened. “Indeed, more than one member of my staff has been unable to cope with the reality of what the gate can accomplish.”

“And the second reason, sir?” Peter prompted.

“I needed someone well grounded in not only the Party’s genetic doctrine, as you must be as a member of the SS, but whose knowledge of our Aryan heritage goes beyond the typical level of understanding.”
 

“I’m not sure I get your meaning, sir,” Peter said slowly.

“As you know,” von Falkenstein explained, “the Reich is founded on the tenet that the Aryan race, of which we all are a part, is genetically superior. We may be Aryans of the purest blood, yet we are still merely human, are we not? We grow old and die. Our flesh can be pierced and torn, our bones broken and crushed.” He pointed to Peter’s leg. “You yourself have a daily reminder of your own mortality, of the ease with which these fragile bodies can be damaged or destroyed.” His eyes narrowed. “But what if we could change all that? What if we could recapture in our bodies the glory enjoyed by our ancient progenitors, our forebears from Atlantis from nearly a million years ago?”

“So what Kleist said about the woman in the jar, that she had Atlantean genes, was true?” Peter said, and Von Falkenstein nodded. In that moment, the inexplicable connection between the Black Gate project and the
Ahnenerbe
, the institute founded to prove Nazi ancestral claims, became crystal clear. “Forgive me, sir, but I have to confess that I never truly subscribed to Helena Blavatsky’s thesis that the Atlanteans were the fourth root race. Accepting that Aryan blood is pure is easy enough, but her assertions that we are descended from Atlanteans, that Atlantis was
real
…” He was not sure what else to say. His father had pursued that myth after reading Helena Blavatsky’s
The Secret Doctrine
, upon which much of Nazi Germany’s racial ideology was based. One of Blavatsky’s assertions had been that modern Aryans were among the segments of humanity that formed the fifth root race, descended from the fourth root race that had itself arisen on the lost continent of Atlantis in ages past. It was fanciful claptrap that needed to be bent only slightly to suit the Nazi cause. The irony that Blavatsky, herself a Ukrainian, would have been considered a Slavic subhuman by the Nazis did not escape him. “I thought
Herr
Kleist was making some sort of inside joke.”