Ash (73 page)

Delphine and Louis were now right behind him. He held out an arm to prevent them venturing further and they stared in awe as the archaic weaponry rattled against the walls.

The investigator slowly pushed his companions back, and the thrumming sound grew softer the further the trio backed off.

‘What is it, David?’ Delphine asked. ‘What’s making them vibrate like that?’

‘You might call it poltergeist activity, but I think it’s stronger than that,’ he told her. ‘My guess is that it’s telluric energy – “earth energy” is another name for it. Its tremor comes from a force beneath us, although I do seem to have some weird attraction for it. God knows why: maybe I’m a trigger of some kind. Let’s just say my presence induces paranormal agitation. It’s a bit complicated. I’ll try and explain if . . .’ He realized he’d chosen a bad word. ‘
When
we get out of here. But there’s no chance of getting past this entrance without being killed. We’ll have to find another way out.’

Suddenly Louis raised a loose-robed arm and pointed towards the entrance lobby. Ash followed his direction and saw someone emerging from the smoke-haze which now filled the whole area.

‘
Mr Ash!
’ a voice called. ‘
Dr Wyatt!
’

‘I think it’s Andrew Derriman,’ said Delphine, trying desperately not to choke on the smoke fumes by taking in shallow breaths.

Ash saw that Delphine was right. The general manager of Comraich was rushing towards them – and he was going to pass by the armoury!

‘
Derriman, stop!
’ Ash shouted as loudly as he could, holding up a hand of warning.

But Derriman was either too overwrought or too confused to heed the investigator’s words.

He was only just past the entrance to the large armoury room when an ancient iron axe tore itself from the wall and flew straight at him as if hurled by a powerful warrior. Its edge, blunted with age but an effective weapon nevertheless, buried itself in the side of his head.

Ash watched horrified as Derriman staggered and turned, yet did not quite fall. He looked directly at Ash with a puzzled, almost comical expression, as if to ask what had just happened. Then the gash in his skull began to bleed, and more antique weaponry flew at him from every part of the room. He only had time to utter a short but sharp shriek before he toppled to the floor, his body a grotesque pin-cushion of blades, swords, spears, double-edged claymores and other death-dealing weapons of old, as brutally effective now as they had been centuries before.

But it was only when an iron mace, its round head embedded with inch-long spikes, smashed into his face that death finally relieved his agony.

Aribert Heim, the evil Nazi doctor who had caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the abhorrent Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, left his suite on the castle’s fourth floor. He’d flinched each time another bomb had gone off somewhere in the building, hiding in the rooms which, until so recently, he’d shared with his Nazi colleague Alois Brunner.

Strangely, although pleased to have the place to himself, last night Heim had felt very alone. And afraid.

Heim had decided to stay in bed until the fuss was over, pressing his hands hard against his ears to block out the screams and shouts, the pounding of running feet. He would have been content to lie there all night if necessary, with his bedclothes pulled over his head, hands clamped against his ears, but there was a bigger problem. Even with the door closed and his head beneath the sheets, the acrid smell of smoke reached him.

The castle itself was burning.

Hastily clambering into his dressing gown and slippers, he warily stepped out into the corridor and walked towards the source of the most calamitous sound: the fourth-floor landing. He reached the rail above the broad, curving staircase, and peered over to see guests and staff alike struggling against one another to descend, even though great plumes of smoke billowed up from below. Down there, at the very bottom of the oval staircase, he could see an enormous flickering orange glow, which suggested the fire had taken hold. Why were these stupid people running in that direction?

Like lemmings they fled, not away from the fire but directly towards it.

Perhaps there was an exit the conflagration had not yet touched. Certainly, the front doors had to be caught in the blaze. A side door, then. There should be one through the offices behind the receptionists’ counter. But he was definitely not going to join the throng below, tied in one huge knot of arms and legs.

Even the Jews had gone to their deaths peacefully, and the only sound that had come then, muted through the gas-ovens’ metal doors, was the wailing. That dreadful sound came to his ears now, even over the screams and bellows of distress as people below fought each other to get clear of the collapsed heap of humanity spreading from the stairway and swelling out into the lobby like a spillage of oil.

But he, Aribert Heim, would not lose his dignity by joining them, frightened though he was. No, the best way to avoid a panicking crowd was to walk away, find another escape route. This is what he would do. This would show the
Dummköpfe
the honourable way to act by using his brain, which was still sharp, even if his body was a little feeble. He would escape the fire as he had escaped the Allies.

The smoke was growing thicker on the fourth floor as he returned the way he’d come, so much so that a dense layer of blackness permeated the ceiling, its languid, wafting underbelly drifting halfway down the walls. He tried to control his strained coughing by stripping off his dressing gown and tossing it over his head and shoulders, leaving him in blue-striped pyjamas, his body bent over to avoid the smoke. Meanwhile, his eyes were streaming tears, though they were caused by the astringent fumes and not apprehension or terror. He squinted up at the darkened smoke-filled ceiling, where he was sure he could see shapes like little pitch-black balls, some of them pulsating.

And something much worse.

Heim uttered a small cry as he quickly pulled the dressing gown back over his head, drawing in stinging fumes as he was forced to take a deeper breath. He was sure the smoke was forming into hands, clawing hands of no real substance, which tried to reach down to him.
Just my imagination
, his once-clinical mind told him in an effort to banish the fear. But he was quite clear about the images his blurry eyes had taken in. Stumbling on, he passed the door to his suite, but did not linger: it would be foolish to take shelter inside. Besides, he’d another goal in mind.

After falling once, feeling inexplicably frail, and having picked himself up, he finally arrived at the destination he’d been aiming for as the corridor abruptly widened into an ornate hallway. He’d reached the grand lift.

With some trepidation, Heim pressed the call button to summon the roomy lift to him, wondering if anyone else had thought to use this particular method of reaching the ground floor. Heim was satisfied the only danger lay at the front part of the castle, where he had seen for himself the flickering orange glow in the swirling fog of smoke near the bottom of the oval staircase. There must surely be other stairways towards the back of the building.

His tired old legs could barely support his weight these days, and tonight – probably because of all the excitement and dread of late – they were more exhausted than ever. He wouldn’t be able to walk down some ancient stone stairway; more likely fall down it and break his neck.

Anxiously, the German pushed the call button again and waited impatiently for the
ping
that would tell him the lift had arrived.

Meanwhile, the smoke around him grew progressively heavier. He doubled up almost to his knees, a raw cough raking his throat. There was pressure on his chest. He waited. And waited.

There were shadows all around him and several were almost tangible. He tried to ignore them, but held the dressing gown tightly around his head, peeking out occasionally to check that the lift hadn’t arrived unheard. When at last it came, he rushed to the slowly opening doors, thrusting his fingers through them in a vain effort to hasten the process. But the doors took their own time and in his efforts, his dressing gown slipped down his back to the floor.

He tried to squeeze through the opening sideways, and as he did so he ripped a button off his blue-striped pyjama jacket; it sprang across the hallway to land on the floor by a giltwood settee.

He practically stumbled into the capacious car, coughing and spluttering and wiping tears from his eyes. He barely registered the lift doors closing far more rapidly than they had opened, almost slamming shut.

The smoke haze inside the lift was like heavy smog. When his eyes adjusted themselves, although still somewhat blurred, he realized he was not alone.

In fact, the lift was crowded.

Crowded with people, all of whom had their backs to him. And oddly, they all, as far as he could tell in the gloom, wore the same blue-striped pyjamas as he.

When he blinked a few times to improve his vision, he realized their garb was tattered and grimy, torn in places and hanging loose from their bodies as if three or four times too large for them. And the blue stripes were darker too. And wider.

Heim tried to suppress a cough so as not to bring attention to himself, but he couldn’t hold it back. His throat was too raw, his mouth too dry. The choking cough escaped, followed by another, then yet another. Hand to his mouth, he tried to muffle the coughs, but still they were piercing within the confines of the packed, descending lift. He couldn’t remember pressing the Ground Floor button when he’d entered.

At last, they began to turn towards him: skeletal faces; sunken, haunted eyes; cheekbones that jutted over deeply hollowed cheeks; and jawbones that almost pierced their skin. The clothes they wore had no buttons, and the material was so threadbare and rough that he wondered how they could survive in the cold.

For the lift interior was very, very cold, so much so that the haze had become an icy mist. But none of them appeared to notice. They just stared as Aribert Heim, Dr Death, looked at them and shivered.

And not only from the cold, for even after so many years he remembered some of those emaciated faces with their shaven heads. He was hallucinating, that was all, he told himself; the past brought to life by his own panic. But now the ghosts that he, Aribert Heim, had created all those years ago shuffled towards him. And even as they fell upon him and began to pulverize his face, he still believed it could only be in his imagination. There were no such things as spirits of the dead. No matter how they stamped on him or beat him, tore his clothes away or stuck their skeletal fingers into his chest and yanked out his heart while it was still beating, he knew,
he knew
, without a doubt, this was all unreal, hallucinatory, impossible to be true.

But he did feel the horrendous pain.

And he did suffer a dreadful death, despite what he refused to believe.

Delphine screamed and buried her head against Ash’s chest to shut out the sight of Andrew Derriman’s thin body being cut to pieces, even as it lay on the stone floor.

The weapons still flew from the walls and into his prone body. It didn’t seem to be enough for the cruel spirits controlling them that he was dead. Ash, his arms protectively around Delphine, wondered if this was meant simply to violate the fallen figure further, or to torment them, the onlookers. Derriman’s corpse flinched each time it was hit, but Ash knew this was because the relentless weapons were cutting into nerves and tendons. There was no life left in the poor man’s body.

Would they soon start to fly from the armoury and begin to attack beyond it?
Meanwhile, the cries of hysteria and the
crump
of the growing fire came to his ears. It was difficult to see anything clearly beyond the armoury entrance, for the smoke was denser and the glow of the fire had reached a great height. All he could make out were blurred suggestions of milling figures. There had to be a way out down there somewhere, otherwise those people would be running down the hall to get away from the flames, but any attempt to reach the entrance lobby would result in certain death from the flying weapons. One thing was sure: they couldn’t remain where they were.

‘We have to make a move,’ Ash said as an iron club struck the side of the armoury entrance.

Delphine’s horrified eyes peered up at him. Louis merely stood close to them, straight and still, as if mesmerized by the activity inside the armoury.

‘David, where can we go?’ Delphine asked, and he was relieved to find a steadiness in her voice. If she cracked, it would make things even more difficult.

‘We follow the rats,’ he replied, as calmly as he could.

They retraced their steps and took the spiral staircase down to the medical unit entrance. And that was where the stairs ended.

‘Oh Christ, I was afraid this might have happened.’ Ash made the effort not to sound too desperate for the sake of Delphine and Louis. ‘These stairs won’t take us any further.’

Where the staircase should have been they could now see only a pile of rubble.

‘The walls must have collapsed in the explosion,’ he said.

‘Look!’ Delphine pointed. ‘The rats. They’re heading
into
the medical unit. Perhaps they can lead us out of here.’

Ash went to the open medical area doorway. He quickly scanned the scene and soon realized what was wrong. Somehow, confused perhaps by the twists and turns in the dimness of the spiral staircase, they’d missed the door to the upper floor of the medical unit and had emerged lower down.

‘I think we’ve come further than we thought,’ Ash said, turning to Delphine.

She came close to him, bringing Louis with her. ‘Of course! You’re right – this is where the welcoming suites and observation rooms are. The stairs haven’t collapsed; they were never there in the first place.’

Ash gazed into the second lower level, taking in the separate fires that burned fiercely inside, melting plastic curtains where some after-care patients had been housed. Further along, the suites were all burning. The heat from the unit caused the investigator to shield his face with his lower arm, while Delphine attended to Louis, pulling up the dried-out scarf she’d wrapped around his neck and lower face. She also pulled the hood forward, for it had fallen back a little in their rush. All that could be seen now were his disturbed, shadowed eyes.