Astronomy (13 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
Susan stared at the fluorescing lines across the floor. Charley had gone through.
Had he made it?
“What is it?” she asked him. “What’s in there?”
Malmagden pursed his lips. “That is hard to say. We in Zentralbund have used the spells of transformation since the early days of the war. Obviously, those entreaties went somewhere. Perhaps to Azathoth Himself? Who can say? I suppose we might have been more curious than we were, but there was a war on, you know. If Azathoth is in some way responsible for the Angle Web’s fortuitous geometry, I suspect our constant transit has gained His attention in some way we cannot fully understand.”
“He’s tired of people caging rides.”
Malmagden looked pained. “You anthropomorphize what can barely be conceived,” he said. “It is hardly your most endearing trait. I can only suggest we limit our use of the Web to the minimum. Maybe, if we survive long enough to see Kiel again, we will take the bus around town awhile, yes?”
If we survive . . .
Susan felt a shiver go up her shoulders.
“One thing,” he pointed out. “Whether Azathoth is responsible for the recent difficulties or not, It will be close at hand when we step out. The presence of a body of three billion solar mass is going to warp space-time at the other end.”
“In English?”
Malmagden put up his hands. “There will be some scattering effect as each of us steps through. It is unlikely we will arrive together.”
“What are the chances we’ll arrive at all?”
Malmagden smiled. “Life is, how you say? A crap shoot?”
He made the signs, he spoke the words, he disappeared.
Chapter Nine
E
NTERING THE ANGLE WEB WAS EASY
the second time. Indeed, Susan was almost inhaled into the darkness.
It was leaving that was hard.
Whatever anonymity she’d enjoyed previously was gone now. A cloying fascination, verging on lust, pressed in around her mind. It cuddled her, probed for a way in. She felt the darkness close in around her, pliant and yet unyielding, like the fleshy walls of some vast capillary.
She focused her mind on the task of getting through.
Speak the spells,
she told herself.
Make the signs.
She recited the words in her mind; the thought of opening her mouth in this hideous, half-living space was enough to make her retch.
The Angle Web realigned itself all around her. Somewhere in the distance ahead lay warmth, but maybe too far. She moved toward it, but the blackness resisted her. She turned her shoulder into it. Reluctantly, the gloom yielded to her. She had just enough time to feel relief. And then things turned hazy.
She remembered walking through the Angle Web. She remembered hitting something. The impact was fairly hard. She hadn’t smashed into the ground as she had expected, but she hadn’t floated off to some nice, easy afterlife either. She rubbed her shoulder as she thought about that impact, and her shoulder hurt bad enough she figured she couldn’t possibly be dead.
She looked about and found herself pressed against an expanse of rock. It wasn’t quite so sheer as a cliff, but sheer enough. Any sudden movements, her precarious grasp would begin to slip. She heard the sea. Directly below, waves licked a rocky shoreline.
She grabbed onto a jutting rock and pulled herself up onto her elbow to improve her view. To the east lay a limitless horizon, the light falling through cloud banks far out to sea.
She figured it for the Baltic. The water was as gray as she had seen the Baltic get in winter. It certainly was cold enough for the Baltic. Where was she really? She knew only that she wasn’t dead. Everything else was negotiable.
She heard a truck whining through the low gears as it made its way up a two-lane highway a hundred yards to the south. She saw the buff-colored camouflage and the black cross on the door. She froze. The truck continued on, ignoring her. It topped the rise and was lit by a blaze of late-afternoon sun.
She started to slide down the hill, past the rock that had given her purchase. She reached out a hand and grabbed a thick chunk of root covered with an oddly tough and springy bark. She held on, barely breathing till the truck disappeared.
Only then did Susan glance up at her handhold. It turned out not to be part of a tree after all, but a boot, poking straight up from the side of the hill. Susan jerked her hand away, started to slide down a long slope toward the sea. She grabbed on again. Nobody complained.
Whoever was inside that boot had been inserted, headfirst, into the solid bedrock of the island. The leg poked straight out. Another one shot up next to it.
Carefully, she managed to climb. A few feet up the hill, an elbow rose up from the gravel, as if someone were swimming from the road to the mountain peak just above her head.
A tank barrel stuck out of the crest of the mountain. Beside it rose an aircraft wing. She guessed by the shape that it was an FW-190.
She knew where she was—this was a staging area. She had found the other end of the pipeline that stretched clear back to the warehouses on the docks of Kiel. The half-buried soldiers, and pilots, and tank drivers that littered this expanse of blonde rock had made injudicious travel arrangements, and paid the price.
A second truck hit the bottom of the incline. Susan watched from behind an aircraft wing as it bounced past.
This was a smaller vehicle, opened in the back. Two soldiers held something that looked like a limp bag of laundry.
They were shaking it. They were making facetious gestures about tossing it off the back of the truck. One of them made a pistol with his hand and jerked an imaginary shot at it—
ka-pow
. Susan looked closer. They were tossing around Charley Shrieve.
She didn’t believe it at first. She thought maybe it was some dead German soldier they had dug up for proper burial, but no, the guy wasn’t dead. He was unconscious. They were watching him too closely for the man to be dead.
She thought maybe it was Malmagden. But Charley Shrieve’s slumping dignity had become something familiar to her in the last few days. Bad eyesight or not, she couldn’t miss him.
Susan darted from airplane wing, to tank turret, to boulder, keeping Charley in sight. When the truck passed over the horizon, she broke from her cover and sprinted to the crest of the mountain.
The road turned down; the truck bumped along until it disappeared into the great expanse of some giant factory, spread out over the western side of the island.
The evening sun gleamed off giant cubes built of open steel girders, strung with red lights that painted the ground with a dim, sulfurous glow. A chain-link fence followed the road right up to the crest of the hill. A sign bolted into the fence referred to the place as “Vergeltungswerke #16”: The Reprisal Works. If Studebaker were in the apocalypse business, this is where they would be.
She realized she had arrived at
Das Unternehmen
.
She pushed herself up on wavering legs to try and take the whole of the place in. She couldn’t from here. V-Werke #16 was a whole great necropolis of open-girdered structures, smokestacks, and elevated railroads. It covered the western face of the island right down to the waterline. The only way she was going to find Charley in this place was to walk through the gate.
There was a thought to dry her throat.
She slid back down the mountain. Ten minutes of hunting among the forest of half-buried soldiers, she found an
Einsatzgruppe
technician named Berghoff, not so fresh as to be gamy, not buried so long that his uniform looked weather-beaten.
She changed quickly and made her way down to the fence. She had no idea what she would say if anyone stopped her at the gate. She didn’t want to rely on her ability to lie her way into a place like this. Even here on an island in the middle of the Baltic, they’d be suspicious. She tucked her hair up under Berghoff’s cap; even then she wasn’t sure she could pass for a man.
A truck full of aviation fuel rumbled past, on its way to the hangar down the road. It occurred to her she might hijack a truck. How hard could it be? Wait until somebody slowed down, swing up on the running board, and jam a gun in their neck. Berghoff had obliged her with a P-08 Luger. Who could say? The gun might still work. It looked scary.
She became so involved in the particulars of her hijacking, she failed to notice the truck pulling up beside her.
A sweaty-faced sergeant leaned over the back. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Do you realize what time it is?”
“Flat tire,” she called back.
“Where? We didn’t see any cars on the way over here.”
She waved her hand, just go on.
The man examined the black uniform she had on. “You are
Einsatzgruppe
?” He frowned. “I don’t believe it.”
A couple of others were leaning over, watching her in the same critical way. Susan took up her belt a bit, in something she imagined to be a masculine gesture. Her hand managed to rest itself on the holster flap of Berghoff’s Luger.
One of the others chimed in. “You don’t look the type.”
She gave this one the same sort of hard look she had seen men exchange in bars. “What type is that?” She hoped she sounded dangerous.
The truck stopped. The driver leaned out the window to join in the argument. A line of black vans pulled up at the crossing. She didn’t know who they were exactly, but they were right on time to get her out of trouble.
“My ride,” she said.
They looked at the vans uneasily. Hard as they were, they were regular Wehrmacht. These vans with the mobile shower insignia apparently represented warfare beyond the bounds of their ideas of warfare.
“You don’t want to go with them,” the sergeant said. He dropped the tailgate. “Come on. We’re all going to the same place anyway.”
Everyone in the truck was watching her. She laughed. She stuck out her stomach a little, trying to imitate a man’s thickened middle.
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
Someone stuck a hand out to her.
“I can do it myself,” she said.
The hand remained. The face behind it bore blanched, staring eyes surrounded by white, articulated scar tissue in the shape of round motorcycle goggles.
“Don’t mind him,” the kid said. “He’s been blinded.”
A man at the front of the truck bore similar white scars circling his eyes. Susan said nothing as they lifted her aboard. She made no reaction. She wasn’t sure if this was something
Einsatzgruppe
was supposed to know about or not. No matter, the look on her face was plain enough that everyone laughed.
“Things could always be worse,” the blind man told her. “One thing I’ve learned in this life, things could always be worse.” He just figured they were laughing about him.
“Why don’t you tell the new fish here what your job is, Gerhard? Tell him why we’re spending the next ten hours roped in together, you and Willie, with us in between.”
Susan glanced down and saw Gerhard playing a coil of stiff mountaineering rope from his left hand to his right. Then she noticed the metal rings at each soldier’s belt. When the time came, they would all be clipped into a tether, like a chain gang. With a blind warden at each end.
Why?
“It need not come to any unpleasantness,” blind Gerhard said in a reasonable voice. “Do your job and keep your eyes away from the windows, and I won’t need to do anything I don’t wish to.”
“What if we look out the windows and don’t scream?” This, from a young soldier grinning nervously. “What if we just lock up? How will you know whom to shoot if we don’t scream?”
“In that event,” said the blind man at the other end of the truck, “Gerhard starts at his end, I start at my end, and we just work our way down till we meet in the middle.” Perhaps this was supposed to be a joke. No one laughed.
Sirens lit up across the plant. The truck driver yelled back to pull up the gate.
“Hear that?” He jerked his thumb at the weird ululations filling the evening air. “
Das Unternehmen
has begun. We’re going to be late.” He jerked the truck into gear. They followed the line of black vans through the gate.
Chapter Ten
T
HE TRUCK FOUND ITS WAY TO A PROMONTORY
at the edge of the V-Werke compound. They overlooked the ocean from here. The site had been excavated for some kind of large-scale construction. Flat spots had been planed out of the earth all around them. But only three buildings had been put up. Susan recognized two of them from Faulkenberg Reservoir; the third she knew from her dreams.
A domed observatory opened toward the western horizon. Beside the observatory rose a second tower, taller and narrower, with a crystal dome and oddly lit windows dug out of the sides.
Between the observatory and the tower sat a little
biergarten
, set up to take in the leaden Baltic sunset.
She didn’t need to see inside there to know what she would find: brown-shirted astronomers gauging the nanoseconds to apocalypse on their six-handed watches; sullen Wehrmacht officers who could have won the war but for the politicians’ meddling; hangers-on, basking in the bankrupt war stories of resolute men.
The truck passed the observatory and circled up against the second tower. Gerhard passed his rope down the line of soldiers. Silently, they clipped themselves into place, like mountain climbers ascending the Eiger.
The blind one held the rope up to her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m assigned to . . .” She looked back at the line of vans pulling up around them—mobile showers. She suddenly realized what they were. “I’m assigned to the sacrificial unit,” she said.
They looked at her as if she joked about something unspeakable. She looked away embarrassed.
Christ,
she said to herself,
you can
’
t even win when they believe your lies.
The rear gate came down. An officer in black
Totenkopf
SS uniform shooed everyone into the tower. He had an MP-38 machine gun and a pair of Dobermans. The Dobermans sensed the shifting wind from space. They spun around the length of their short leash. They leaped at a certain star low in the western horizon, and snapped at it as if to drag it down.
“Hurry along,” the officer said. His voice was a throaty growl. “The time for the renewal of time is at hand.”
He wavered a little. Susan realized the man had been drinking. A half-empty bottle of brandy trailed from his hand. She started to say something, caught hold of herself—she recognized the bottle from her days among the Back Bay rich. It was Napoleon Brandy, one hundred thirty years old. Who knew where he had stolen it from, but he was enjoying it now.
Susan marveled at this. She had been treated to really good brandy just once, at Christmas, in the home of a University Benefactor. At the bottom of the cut-crystal glass had been maybe a teaspoonful of stuff that went up her nose before she ever got close enough to drink it.
This man was getting black-out drunk.
The gall.
The battalion followed an elevated catwalk around the interior of the tower, and then down to the open floor. Susan found herself staring way up the inside of a long, opened interior. She had seen grain silos like this on her Uncle Mern’s farm in Pennsylvania. Except this one had a crystal cap at the top, and odd-shaped windows all around.
And then there was the odd effect of the lighting. Straight overhead, the sky was black with evening. Yet through each of the ornately portaled windows, light gleamed through—not the red-eyed lamplight from the power plant, but wan sunlight, coming in from a dozen different angles, as if each window looked out on a different world.
She found herself in a company of soldiers, all tethered into rows and formed up on each side by a blind executioner. An SS Colonel came out of an upper-level control room as they assembled. He waved his hand at the quatrefoils in the chamber over their heads. “Those windows served as portals,” he said, “so that our scientists could gauge the environment of distant and unseen worlds. As our undertaking is about to come to fruition, those windows now become a soft point where certain . . . things might enter.”
The Colonel went on to describe their duties. The men tied into the climbing ropes were to seal the windows with twenty-centimeter steel plate. They were further instructed to avert their eyes as they worked over the windows. “Curiosity is an occupational hazard in an endeavor such as this,” the Colonel admonished them. “And insanity is a contagious disease. Anyone showing signs of insanity will be shot.”
The Colonel had another bit of business of a more honorary nature. He stepped back from the railing to make room for a tiny little man bent over in a wheelchair. A blanket had been wrapped over his legs, and extended over some outboard device.
“You men of the Reich,” the little man croaked, “are entrusted with the second most important task of
Das Unternehmen
. At this moment, a blood sacrifice of three hundred
untermenschen
is being prepared as an offering to the embodiment of chaos, Great Azathoth. Azathoth comes to us this night to wipe the world clean of the deluge of race mixing and weak will that threatens to drown the Aryan race. It is your task to preserve what was best of the World Before as a monument to the World to Come.”
Susan wondered what exactly he was talking about. The only things down here were stacks of boxes. She saw one close to hand and peeled back the lid a bit, expecting the looted art treasures of Europe.
Inside the box were a set of small watercolor landscapes of a dreary and exacting hand. She could not imagine anyone sealing off a building like this to preserve such twee little exercises.
Something burred against the crystal dome above, as loud and angry as a P-51 trapped in a bottle.
“Pay no attention,” ordered the man in the wheelchair. “Our esteemed visitor is accompanied by certain . . . attendants. They are useless to us and interfere with the primary mission of this facility. They will be dealt with.”
The buzzing grew louder. Something slammed against the wall as hard as a mortar round.
A man halfway up the stair turned to look out the window. He screamed and backed away—too late. A third shock rattled the structure. The glass shook out of its portal. A shape, black and oily, wriggled through the window and fell on the screaming man.
A few of the men moved to help him, but they were roped in with their comrades. All watched in horror as the man was dragged out through the narrow aperture, wrapped in tentacles.
There followed one moment of stunned silence. In that silence, the wails of their fellow haunted every soldier in that darkened theater. A grisly cracking sound stopped the entreaties short.
The buzzing began again; only this time it was inside the tower. Susan looked up to see two of the wasp-like shapes circling the walls of the chamber.
Susan saw men pulling frantically at their safety ropes. The blinded attendants were at a loss what to do. They had been prepared to execute men driven mad by the sight of the nether-realities beyond these portals. They were unprepared for an insurrection.
Shots were fired. She felt a round
zizz
past her ear. The blind executioners were over-powered. The bulkhead crews released themselves from their tethers. They moved toward the doors, even as the creatures overhead began plucking victims from the crowd.
The man in the wheelchair tried to explain; the final sacrifice had yet to be made. Azathoth’s attendants—loathsome as they might be—were as fleeting as the Daemon Sultan’s attentions.
He appealed to their patriotism, then their intellect. In the end, he motioned his attendants forward. They pulled machine guns down on the crowd.
“No allowance will be made for desertion!” screamed the cripple.
This, she figured, was a good time to be leaving.
Machine-gun fire opened up behind her as she reached the door. She looked up as the crowd pushed her through. Things on the castle walls were waiting for the crowd to step out. She heard the burr of chitinous wings. She felt the whisper of air as something descended on her.
She ducked. A black appendage coiled about the waist of a man running along beside her. He disappeared into the night air. His screams dwindled away into the sky.
Then, as his head dropped to the ground beside her, Susan became aware of a subtle roaring sound. It was barely more audible than the surf, but it carried an insistent cadence.
She remembered the three hundred human sacrifices being assembled in the amphitheater nearby—three hundred missing patients from the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital? Whatever,
Das Unternehmen
succeeded or failed in those mobile gas chambers.
Charley might be there.
She started for the road. Something the size of a Tiger tank gleamed in the rising moonlight. She thought to hitch a ride. She called out to the driver in German. It started around as she approached, and something was wrong in the way it moved. No vehicle travels sideways. She moved back and the shape followed her across the road.
A half-track came up over the rise, on its way to the amphitheater. A moist, gelatinous hide was revealed in thin slices by the headlight beams. Susan recognized the bellow of the creature from Faulkenberg Reservoir. It made sense. Azathoth was near; no doubt Azathoth had brought it.
She backed away into darkness.
A German soldier inside the half-track fired his machine gun through the forward gun slit. He succeeded in gaining the creature’s attention.
Oily tentacles flexed and coiled from beneath the translucent carapace. One of them followed the gunfire right into the half-track’s armored cab. A moment’s screams, and the tentacles withdrew, wrapped tightly around an MP-38 machine gun, and the arm of the man who had fired it.
Susan realized she was not going to hurt this creature with her pistol. She leapt down the slope as a tentacle slashed at the ground where she had stood.
Momentum and fear carried her on down the embankment toward the silver dome of the observatory. The thing came on behind her. A tentacle passed through her ankles. She skipped over it, turned, and fired blindly into the black mass looming up behind her.
A second tentacle coiled back like a scorpion’s stinger. She ducked as it whizzed by her head. It reared to strike again, just as Susan reached the observatory’s backdoor entrance.
She shouldered her way inside, slammed the door behind her. A great, moist rubbing sound passed along the corrugated steel wall. She spread her arms against the doorjambs to hold the creature out.
The door shoved twice. The second shove let in something tough and wiry that felt around the corner for her. She stomped at it. A tentacle coiled about her ankle. She pulled out Berghoff’s luger and severed it in seven shots. The bloody stump slithered outside.
A scream rattled every screw in the observatory’s metal frame. She braced herself for an explosion through the walls. But Susan got lucky; sudden rifle fire from the road slugged at the walls to either side of her.
A second volley made a soft, syrupy impact where it hit the creature itself. A shriek of rage swept through the observatory as the thing swung away toward the road.
Whoever was up there got a load of what they’d angered. The gunfire stopped. Susan heard cries of dismay, a diesel engine growling into reverse. In moments, a desperate volley and anguished cries marked the end of the chase.
She held her breath, waiting for the thing to return. She heard a crash along the highway, as if something huge were shouldering it clean of debris, and then another shriek, paled by distance.
The screaming from the Summoning Tower seemed to dissipate. Maybe this was a good sign. She figured one of two things had to be happening—the Zentralbund troops were taking back their island, or Azathoth’s attendant entities had run through all the available humans.
She closed her eyes. She strained to listen as the screams died out. A new sound overlaid the chanting of the sorcerers. She could not place it at first. And then she did, and found herself gaping with amazement.
It was the “Horst Wessel Lied,” a Nazi drinking song rooted in the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. She had not heard it since her first mission into Cologne, in 1942. She opened the door a bit just to make sure what she was hearing.
The bar itself shimmered a little as she watched. It seemed not quite settled in this universe. But there was no mistaking the music. The “Horst Wessel Lied” came out of every open window, strident and lachrymose as rancid honey.
The song wound up in a long piano roll-out. A raucous, beer-drenched roar announced: “He is here! Soon He is here! Time for the Renewal of Time!” Out on the patio, a couple of technicians were preparing their xenon torch for another shot against the moon. A pair of Luftwaffe Generals were pacing anxiously, their six-handed watches at the ready, awaiting the start of the game.
Apparently, nothing stopped the party at the Four Winds Bar. Not even the end of the world.
Susan wondered if she might see the black man, tending his bar as if it were the only place for a natural man to be. She squinted into an open door to catch some glimpse of him, and found herself under the gaze of an SS Stürmbannführer, and his friend, the young boy with eyes so blue they seemed to glow in the dark. They were smiling at something as if sharing a secret joke—smiling at her? She could not tell. She slipped back into the gloom of the observatory and eased the door closed.
Susan wondered if she had trapped herself here. The only other door led back out toward the highway. Out that door waited the creature that had chased her here in the first place.
She glanced around for a weapon. She found herself in an echoing darkness, light years away from the horror outside. In the center of the room, the barrel of a great reflector telescope rose up toward a retractable aperture. The opening was pulled back just enough to show a few stars in the western sky. Something up there was huge and misshapen, and burning the clean blue of sapphire—Sirius?
Whatever it was, the light of it touched every upturned surface in the room. Susan could see smaller telescopes in various states of disassembly, scattered about. A dimly lit anteroom produced fixtures of brass and aluminum and steel.