The nightmare started off slow, with a pair of wrought-iron boot scrapers, just inside the door. It was an unassuming beginning—as was the carpet runner of industrial-grade material. The red weave bore the marks of dusty boot prints and stretched the length of a stone-flagged corridor leading to another pair of double doors some forty feet away.
I drifted toward the next set of doors, strangely self-conscious in the brightly lit but unfurnished hallway. I was, after all, invisible to the human eye.
Still, the layout was a bit intimidating. It made sense to have a temperature lock up here in the mountains where even the daytime wind chill could drop below freezing in the summer. But I was also mindful that the arrangement was identical to a suicide run in a medieval fortress. Although there were no obvious murder holes or arrow slits, modern technology made hidden panels and trap doors all the more likely. I shook my head: replacing arrows and molten lead with sensor-guided lasers and jets of poisonous gas shouldn't make any difference. I was as transparent to conventional traps and weapons as I was to walls and doors.
But I couldn't shake a prickling sense of unease. If something as big and as bad as the Wendigo couldn't get past the first door, then being all other-dimensiony might not be any protection from what might lurk around the next corner.
The next set of doors was more ornate. A second look, however, indicated that the ornamentation was appliqué. Heavy blast-doors lay beneath the façade, more functional than the outer doors and tricked out with electronic locks. Breaking in without the right key code would require a portable Cray with penultimate hacking software. Or enough high-yield explosives to bring down half the mountain.
I swam through the doors in a couple of breast strokes.
The other side opened out into a great atrium. Forget spooky old castle, this was Grand Hotel, done in '30s Art Deco with heavy Bauhaus influence. There were great staircases leading up and down, curving about a glass-cage elevator with gleaming brass fittings. Corridors curved off to my left and right, suggesting a greater labyrinth beyond. Assuming the old adage that you "can't go wrong if you go 'right'" I turned in that direction and began following the great hall as it arced further into the mountain's bowels.
The lighting in the corridor was dim, possibly set for the circadian rhythms of the occupants to match day and night outside. The rooms on the other side of the doors were darker still. I got the impression of maintenance facilities, meeting areas, offices, recreation facilities, weapons lockers, and numerous storerooms as I made my rounds and dropped down to the next level.
There were people down here. Men sleeping in barracks, women in dormitory chambers, couples in private apartments. And a nursery for children.
A lot of children.
It was hard to get a head count as the rooms were dark and I kept messing up my night vision by moving through the partially lit corridors and then sticking my head into another block of pitch-black darkness.
It suddenly occurred to me that my infravision wasn't kicking in. Had I left it behind with my flesh? It was one of the dark gifts bestowed with the vampiric infection. Was there a dividing line between the baggage of my past life and the carry-on luggage I was still toting around? I instinctively reached for the light switch, checking myself as my fingers passed through the wall plate.
There were too many targets to count by searching for hearts' fires. Maybe I'd have better luck upstairs.
I struggled up the mushy stairs, no longer possessing a silver cord to use as climbing leverage in my ascension. And I noticed something else: I was getting tired.
Maybe ghosts were supposed to take naps during the day. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept—in the flesh or out of it. And maybe losing my astral connection had taken an additional toll. Whatever the reason, climbing the stairs up to the third level felt more like climbing a mountain. Maybe I should find a nice, dark storeroom and catch a little shuteye—a difficult proposition under any other conditions now that my eyelids were transparent.
No storerooms were immediately evident on the third floor. What was evident was a profusion of laboratories, medical facilities, and operating theaters. Each room, each chamber differed from the others in its equipment, layout, and appointments.
Take the operating rooms. One seemed geared for a broad range of procedures, another for microsurgery, a third specifically set for OB/GYN procedures, and a fourth that—well—looked like a vivisectionist's wet dream: everything up-to-date and state-of-the-art while offering a sense of retro familiarity for adherents of the Spanish Inquisition.
The labs had some commonality—I recognized gene sequencing and splicing equipment in more than one—but the remainder of the setups were alien beyond an electron microscope, some optical models, a number of centrifuges, and a dozen or so microworkstations networked to something likely mainframesized in the basement somewhere.
And then there was the Worm Farm.
One lab looked like a pet shop given over to aquarists with a couple hundred fish tanks lining the walls and situated on most of the tables, as well. The tanks, however, contained no fish, no snails, no crab, shrimp, or amphibian populations. There was variety but it all fell within a single phylum of the animal kingdom: Platyhelminthes.
Flatworms.
And on the walls above the softly burbling tanks: a generation of scrawled notes and formulae related to engrams and the theory of biochemical memory.
I stood there in the dim, green glow of the illuminated aquariums and felt the nonexistent hair on my nonexistent arms prickle and stand away from my nonexistent flesh.
"It's very pretty in here, don't you think?" said a strange voice from behind me. Which didn't help the prickling the least little bit. "I come here often, at night, because of the colors."
I turned around slowly.
There was no one there.
"The colors?" I asked, trying not to croak. My voice that is.
"The creatures. The water. The way the light moves through the tanks and out again. It changes, you know."
"What does?" I thought I saw a shadow fall across the jade luminescence of a long, low tank.
"The light. It's made up of many colors, you see. It only looks white most of the time." The shadow darkened. "Did you know that when you look at a red rose, it isn't really red?"
"It isn't?"
"No." The voice was young, almost girlish. Almost but not quite. "The petals absorb all of the colors of the spectrum except crimson, which is reflected back to your sight and registered on the retinas of your eyeballs." There was a hint of bored petulance in his tone and I wondered if puberty would tweak it to surliness or nurture something nastier within the next several years. "So you might say that the rose is every color but red."
"I—I hadn't quite thought of it that way," I said.
"As long as you're going to think about it, consider that all reflected colors are the ones that are essentially rejected by the objects that fall within our vision . . ."
"Interesting," I said, trying to figure out just who and—more importantly—what I was talking to. "Reflection is one thing," I added, nodding at a spill of turquoise light from the nearest aquarium, "but refraction is quite another. Does the water strip—absorb all the colors save one?"
"I had not considered . . ." the shadow said, taking on substance. "But it stands to reason that the visible color is, once again, the rejected hue from the spectrum. All other wavelengths are absorbed by the transmitting medium." A young boy stepped out of the darkened recesses between two tanks on opposing tables. "Which begs the question . . ."
"The question?" I didn't like the sound of this. I couldn't think of a single question within recent memory that I had ended up liking. And, lately, they had taken a definite turn for the worse. An orange flatworm with green striations oozed up the side of the tank behind the boy. Perhaps I should have thought of the creature as every color but orange with green markings. But I was a little distracted by the fact that I was able to debate the thing's color scheme since it remained visible through the kid's upper torso.
"You and I," the ghostly boy said. "What are we?"
Such stuff as dreams are made of, Prospero had said. A man grown weary of life and looking forward to escaping life's tempests in the restful oblivion of the Big Sleep—so maybe Shakespeare's magician was a tad biased.
"Are we the rejected light?" the kid continued. "A reflected color while the rest of what we were is absorbed into the landscape?"
Like I said: not particularly keen on the questions that were coming my way these days.
"You're new, aren't you?" he asked, switching to another question that I hesitated to answer directly. "I haven't seen you around here before. I'm Beppo." He didn't stick out his hand; what would be the point?
Beppo? Were the ghosts of the Marx Brothers waiting in the wings? What was next? Smurf Nazis Must Die? I was definitely past tired and edging over into hallucinatory. "Robert Walton," I said, trying to keep my guard up and simultaneously letting myself go with the flow.
"That name sounds very familiar. Should I know you?"
That depended upon the reading proclivities of twelve-year-old boys. "I shouldn't think so." And dead ones at that.
Of course, given that context perhaps I should have selected a nom de plume from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
"Did you have an accident or are you a part of one of Grandpère's experiments?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Where's your body, Herr Walton? Is it in one of the labs? Down in the morgue? Or did you find your way here on your own from outside?"
"Uh, I don't know," I lied. "I'm kind of confused." That, at least, was pretty truthful. "Where am I?"
"Brut Adler. The Eagle's Aerie. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Eagle's Rookery. Grandpère hatches many fledglings here in this granite nest. Someday soon he will hatch himself and be reborn. Perhaps then he will rename it der Phönix Scheiterhaufen—the Pyre of the Phoenix." He said this with a curious mix of pride and wistfulness.
"Really?" I said. "And how is he going to do that? Some kind of breakthrough in blood chemistry?"
"If only it were that simple," answered a new voice. The other nurse from my hospital room back in New York had just entered the lab and she did not seem happy. "He prepares to be reborn by killing the unborn! He butchers babies so that he may live a second life! And a third! And Gott knows how many more!"
The boy howled back at her, rage suffusing his features, contorting his face into a nightmare mask of hate and fear and even sorrow. He ran at her, his arms straight out from his sides, his hands balled into impotent fists. "Shut up, Gretchen! Shut up! Shut up! Shut! Up!"
He ran into her without slowing—passed completely through her—and continued on, passing through the wall. His wail was audible for a few moments more, fading down the outside corridor.
She sighed as she stared at the wall where he had phased through. "I really shouldn't have been so blunt in front of Beppo."
"Any boy's liable to take it personally when you dis his grandfather."
"Any boy, perhaps," she said absently, "but for Beppo any attack upon his grandpère is the same as an attack upon himself . . ."
The tumblers in my brain spun and finally clicked into place: the twins, the spitting image of their old man, the reproductions of my unborn wife and daughter . . .
I turned toward the new apparition. Yep. Semitransparent and wearing a white gown instead of a nurse's uniform, now. But no question about it: she was the spitting image of the nurse who had assisted the Pipt twins and Terry-call-me-T in my hospital room a few hours earlier this evening. Entirely too much spitting in the imagery department.
"Gretchen?"
She had turned to consider the boy's exit but now turned back toward me. "Yes?"
"Your name isn't Ilse?"
Definite frown: "No."
She had the look of one who had grown accustomed to her noncorporeal state. Which meant she hadn't kicked the bucket in the last several hours. "And you don't have a twin sister, do you." I don't think it was really a question at this point.
Her frown became a harsh line slashing across the bottom of her otherwise pretty face. "I have no sisters."
"A daughter, then? More than one daughter?"
"I said that he butchered babies," she finally answered in a tremulous voice. "I didn't say that they all died!"
Gretchen followed me as I stalked out of the lab and began trotting down the corridor in a half march. I set a deliberate pace that enabled me to poke my head through a door and check a new room every forty-five seconds.
"Isn't it rich?" I muttered harshly. "Aren't we a pair?"
"What?" she asked, hurrying after as I checked another lab with refrigerated storage space.
"But where are the clones?" I grumbled, "Quick, send in the clones . . ."
"Then you know."
"Know? No. Not everything. But I should have guessed sooner. The Pipt-Nikidik connection for example."
"The what?"
"If laughing boy was going to be consistent with his little Oz code names then I should have connected Dr. Dick to Dr. Pipt right away. In The Marvelous Land of Oz Dr. Nikidik was the original inventor of the Powder of Life and lived in the mountains of the Gillikin Country. Later, in The Road to Oz, Dyna reported his fall from a great precipice and he was presumed dead. Interestingly enough, when Dr. Pipt turns up later in The Patchwork Girl of Oz AND also has the recipe for the Powder of Life, one has to wonder if maybe Nikidik faked his death and changed his name to avoid persecution for the illegal practice of magic."
"What are you talking about?"
"Serendipity. Synchronicity." I stuck my head into another room. "How many of him are there?"
"How many?"
"Yeah. I make two from the pair of docs—" Oh. Paradox. That was the stupid pun that kept rattling around in my subconscious. I grimaced. "—the twins—except they aren't really twins. Any more than Ilse is your sister or your daughter." I moved on to the next door. Surprise: a private gym. "So, how many?"
Her alabaster and transparent flesh was a wash when it came to displaying contrasts; I almost missed the furrowing of her brow.
"What? Can't count that high?"
She shook her head. "It is just that I don't know how to count them. Do you ask how many there have been? Or how many are currently viable?"
"What? 'Viable'? You mean unlike our boy Beppo?"
"The boy's death was an accident. He, at least, survived for more than a decade. Some died while still in the womb. Others . . ."
"Others what?"
"The handivork of Gott is not mocked, Mr. . . ."
What name had I just given Beppo? "Um, Krempe."
"Mr. Krempe. The same samples, the same treatments, the same procedures—the same flesh—and the outcomes vary. Some don't survive. Some shouldn't survive. Herr Doktor has become very particular as the time for his consummation draws near. He tolerates little short of perfection."
I stopped sticking my head through doors and walls and brought my face close to hers. "You're telling me Pipt had other versions of himself destroyed?"
"In some cases it was the humane thing to do. In others . . ." Her voice trailed off.
"Yeah, I'll bet. I've seen Herr Doktor's handiwork."
"That is not to say he destroyed them all. He keeps several alive downstairs to better understand what can go wrong with the processes."
I turned away and began checking doors again, wondering what fresh horrors I might find if I looked in enough of the rooms. "So tell me, Gretchen—alive and viable—how many Pipts has this guy pooped?" The next room contained a small indoor swimming pool.
"There are seventeen living children between six months and twelve years of age. Nine adolescents. Seven adults in their twenties and thirties. Three in their forties. One in his fifties. He is the most dangerous. . . ."
"Oh? And why is that?" A private bathroom and sauna lay behind the next door: I was getting closer to Pipt Prime.
"Herr Doktor did not perfect the biochemical transmission of memory engrams until a month or so ago. He experimented with controlled environments, hypnosis, and duplicating key events and experiences during his doppelgangers' development."
"Sort of a Boys From Brazil scenario, huh?"
"I do not understand."
The next room was a private office. The furniture and décor more appropriate to a CEO than a midlevel manager. "Read Ira Levin. Most people prefer Rosemary's Baby. But I'm more interested in his 'monsters are made, not born' thesis."
"Well, his oldest doppelganger received conditioning that was designed to enhance certain aspects of Herr Doktor's personality beyond the original parameters and this turned out to be a mistake that even he admits to. The man must be watched carefully and constantly.
"In the decades that have passed since his first attempts, he has worked toward perfecting a chemical means of memory transfer. It has taken decades of bloody sacrifice and horrific failure but he now believes he has made a critical breakthrough. Very soon now he will attempt to place his actual memories within an infant version of himself!"
I thought about the lab with the multitude of flatworm species creeping about the aquariums adorning the walls and benches and tables and remembered the Thompson and McConnell "worm-running" experiments from the previous century. "Don't tell me the doc plans on grinding up his brain and feeding it to his clones?" It was something that the Nazis might have experimented with in the death camps of World War Two but no one in their right mind would seriously attempt with another human being—much less themselves. Of course the evidence that Pipt was in his right mind was seriously AWOL at this point. A Platyhelminthes with flatworm instincts and impulses was a far cry from the complex organism with higher brain functions that calls itself human.
She shook her head. "Not grind up, no. He extracts fluid from the brain tissue—I do not understand the full process. It is most effective when reinjected into an embryonic host and allowed to wash over fetal brain cells."
"And the doctor, himself, would survive this process?"
"No. Not the original brain tissue, anyway. That is why he has waited to perfect the process with many test subjects . . ."
That was creepy. Even more so if he was using cloned versions of himself as guinea pigs.
The physical clones of Pipt wouldn't possess identical psyches: he couldn't mimeograph the original mind and memories without destroying it. The question was how many versions of himself had he lobotomized trying to develop the means to perpetuate his own consciousness in successive copies? They might not possess the same thoughts and memories as his own but he would have a means of discovering how effective the actual transfer of memory and personality might be if he was willing to sacrifice enough human replicants over an extended number of years. I shivered. It was a monstrous concept to undertake with any group of test subjects . . .
To engage in a premeditated pogrom of atrocities upon the mirror versions of your very own flesh and blood? My mind just couldn't get a foothold there. Instead it turned its attention to whether or not Pipt might have finally discovered how much of the human personality template was "nature versus nurture"—any distraction as a port in the emotional storm.
But I couldn't afford any distractions now. "Gretchen? You said that the doctor has finally achieved the breakthrough he's been searching for all these long years?"
She nodded. "Well, actually, he finalized the process several years ago."
"Then what's he waiting for?" I asked. But I already had a pretty good idea as to the answer.
"He is afraid. What if something goes wrong? What if the transference is more like a copy and the destruction of the original is still death and final oblivion?"
I nodded. "So what's finally changed all that—besides his time running out?"
"He speaks of another breakthrough these days," she said. "A new kind of blood infusion that has recently come to his attention."
"A blood infusion that might enable him to survive the process," I guessed, "and even permit a different approach to longevity if not immortality."
"Yes. It is to be delivered tonight."
"And Hitler?"
"I'm sorry, I do not understand."
"You're sure there's no Fourth Reich, spooky resurrection, rule-the-world plot afoot?"
She looked at me like I was speaking gibberish.
"Yeah, well, hidden castle in the mountains, Nazis working on secret experiments, the laws of God and Man being broken—or at least severely dented—I can't believe that Hitler's brain or clone or cryogenic carcass isn't behind one of these doors. Or the box that Jay is bringing down the aisle."
She looked around in confusion.
"Never mind." I stuck my head through the next door and found myself looking at Adolph Hitler in full dress uniform, very much in the prime of his life.
I jumped a little: the painting was that realistic.
I pushed on through the door and found myself in a spacious library. Not a lot of books but a whole lotta fireplace off to my left. The fireplace I had last seen in Pipt's psychotropic email. The fire was damped for the night and the main lights were off except for a single beam from a track light in the ceiling.
Der Führer was attired in an army greatcoat while the painting's other occupant wore the full-dress uniform of the Waffen SS. He was a captain and the breast of his tunic bore several medals. The so-called mastermind of the so-called master race clasped his hand in a congratulatory manner. There was a brass inscription plate affixed to the bottom part of the frame but, as the subjects were rendered in life size the frame stretched from just inches off the floor to nearly a foot above my head. As I moved closer, I could see that the painting was very detailed, adding to the initial impression of realism. What most drew my eyes, however, was the face of the other man in the portrait. The rounded head, the dark hair and eyes, were becoming more and more familiar with each passing day: a younger version of the mysterious Dr. Pipt, an older version of Beppo, an exact match for the pair of docs who had shanghaied me from the hospital. As I got right up to the canvas my eyes moved to the inscription near the floor and I knelt to make out the finely etched script:
1942—The Iron Cross—First Class,
The Black Badge for the Wounded,
The Medal for the Care of the German People—
Awarded to Captain Josef Mengele, M.D.
The room lurched around me and I fell through the floor.
Mengele!
No one person better embodied the horrors of the Nazi death camps than Dr. Josef Mengele.
The idea of six million human beings rounded up and systematically sent to their deaths is horror enough but the genocide of the Jews is only part of the story.
The forced relocations, separation of family members, cattlelike internments, death by gassing or bullet, mass immolation of human corpses—all seem almost humane and even prosaic by comparison when the stone of history is turned over and the hidden, squirmy atrocities are brought forth from the dark, secret places.
The concentration camps were more than just holding pens for Germany's undesirables. More than just waiting rooms until the showers and the furnaces were able to play catch-up. Some were special windows into Hell where portions were set aside to serve as horrific research facilities. And staffed by scientists who carried clipboards instead of pitchforks and whose heads sported surgical caps in place of horns.
Here were opportunities to research the effects of extreme cold on the human body. For every hundred Jews or Poles or Gypsies forced to endure frigid temperatures and then treated to painful, often fatal, rewarming experiments—perhaps a German soldier serving on the Russian front might someday benefit.
Perhaps.
Battlefield medicine could be advanced without risking the Fatherland's troops. Prisoners could be shot, burned, have ground glass, sawdust, caustic agents rubbed into their wounds—and then be restrained while gangrene and sepsis taught the doctors what they wanted to know about pain thresholds, morbidity, shock, and the human will to live.
Biological warfare was birthed in the camp clinics as children were injected with infectious agents and progress of each disease was painstakingly documented and mapped.
Gruesome accounts were legion. But Mengele's reputation overshadowed all the others, rendering them into nothing more than mere sideshow thrills outside the dark castle of horrors that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.
He was Hitler's point man on eugenics research.
That was the given excuse.
It was one thing to cleanse the earth of the subhuman races. The Aryans believed they were destined to be the master race, the über ideal. But as superior as the German peoples were supposed to be to the flotsam and jetsam that had infiltrated Europe, they knew that they still fell short, as a whole, to the fuller potential that lay dormant within their own genes. While they were supposedly further up the evolutionary ladder than the rest of mankind, there were rungs yet to climb. There was still a gulf between "man" and "superman" that the Nazis' selective breeding programs had failed to close.
Enter Captain Josef Mengele, M.D. War hero, medical doctor with a background in eugenics, party loyalist, and cold-blooded sociopath. The death camp at Auschwitz, Poland, was the perfect laboratory to explore the full spectrum of cruelties conceivable by the human mind and their effects upon the human body.
He was movie-star handsome, well groomed, and always impeccably attired—dark green tunic neatly pressed, medals prominently on display, death's-head SS cap jauntily tilted to the side revealing a precision part in his dark, wavy hair. Even amidst the dust or the mud of the unloading docks, his black boots were always polished to a mirror shine, his white gloves immaculate—except for those occasions when his temper would flare and he would lay hands on a prisoner in a bloody-minded rage.
He would meet the trains bringing new consignments of human misery to the camp every day. Other doctors involved in the selection process required drugs or alcohol to help them face this repugnant task. Only Mengele seemed to enjoy the process, showing up even on his days off to select his human guinea pigs and consign the rest to the work details, gas chambers and the furnaces.
For the most part he stood apart and above, flicking his riding crop to the left or the right, as he divided the prisoners onto separate paths. To the right, life. The showers that were not showers waited on the path to the left. It was calculated that, one by one, he sent four hundred thousand souls to the gas chambers. Infants, children, parents, grandparents—generations selected for extermination one soul at a time
For many, however, the path to the right was not the kinder choice.
Hitler had passed laws forbidding the vivisection of animals for any purpose, even medical research. No such laws protected the Poles or the Gypsies or the Jews. Mengele's approach to his research was less that of a physician and more like a Torquemada, torturing the flesh to yield up secrets yet unimagined. Twins were a particular obsession for him and he managed to acquire nearly 1500 sets between 1943 and '44. The majority were sent to Cell Block 10, where they were housed with dwarves and other "exotic" specimens to occupy what came to be known as "Mengele's Zoo."
Less than two hundred children survived by the war's end.
The stories that emerged after the war shocked even the battle-hardened veterans of brutal campaigns and vicious hand-to-hand combat.
Mengele, the survivors testified, would take daily blood samples from the children, sometimes in such great and persistent quantities that they bled to death into his syringes. He would exchange the blood between twins of differing blood types just to measure and record the full range and varieties of suffering that resulted. A mother testified that Mengele tried to starve her newborn baby to death to see how long it could survive without food. The experiment was spoiled after six days when she killed her own child to end its suffering. Multiple eyewitnesses told of the dissection of live infants and major surgeries performed without anesthesia, including a stomach operation on one occasion and the removal of a living patient's heart upon another.
Presaging the Crystal Gayle hit by nearly forty years, Mengele injected methylene blue dye into the irises of brown-eyed children. Perhaps he hoped to find a way to bring his own, darker coloring closer to the Aryan ideal. The results were predictable: some died, some went blind, all suffered horribly. One of the walls in his office was studded with the human eyeballs of his failures, pinned like a butterfly collection for everyone to see.
Everyone else, that is.
Twins were forcibly separated and placed in isolation cages, then subjected to a variety of stimuli to see how they would react. Others were surgically joined together to artificially create grotesque "Siamese" twins.
Men were castrated without anesthetics, women endured electrical shocks to their genitals for the "scientific" purpose of measuring their endurance. A group of Polish nuns were hideously burned when Mengele experimented with using an X-ray machine for sterilization techniques.
One eyewitness account, near the war's end, placed him at a particularly horrific event. The allies were approaching and the furnaces were woefully behind in eradicating the evidence of German war crimes. Everything was in short supply including Zyklon-B, ammunition, and petrol. A pit was excavated. Firewood dropped in. Enough gasoline was added to make a good start but the calculations depended upon the wood and then the fatty tissues to sustain the combustion process.
Mengele arrived with a coterie of SS officers on their motorcycles, laughing and joking, before the trucks, ten in all, were backed up to the edge of the pit. As the human cargo was dumped into the heart of the flames, some children actually survived long enough to clamber over the other bodies and climb, screaming, up the sides of their earthen hell. Some of the officers had to take sticks and push them back in until they were overcome by the flames or the smoke from their own charred flesh.
Shortly thereafter, the future "Doctor Pipt," along with hundreds of guards and medical personnel, slipped away in the night as Soviet troops advanced on Berlin. January 17, 1945.
I fell three full levels before I caught myself. I just managed to reassert the solidity of my surroundings before plummeting into the solid bedrock beneath Brut Adler and, even then, I had to fight an ongoing sense of disorientation.
I'd suspected from the beginning that "Pipt" was merely an alias, a code name designed to obscure any trail back to the "good" doctor. But even after tangling with demons and vampires and necromancers, I suddenly found myself very unnerved by the thought of one feeble old Nazi.
Well, not just one . . .
But they were still human and still fairly limited in number—thanks to Mengele's self-experimentation. For now.
The question was how could I throw a monkey wrench in the works while I was having this out-of-my-body experience? I could borrow some flesh and bones, perhaps? And then what? One guy against a fortress full of Nazis? Even if I could find enough plastique in the various weapons lockers, and acquire detonators, and wire everything to go off simultaneously, AND not have anyone else find me or the charges first—I wouldn't know where to place the bombs so that all of the Pipts' destruction could be guaranteed. No, my best bet was to find a phone and call the Israelis. They wouldn't be fooled again.
They hunted him throughout the years. First the Allies, in their pursuit of war criminals, and finally Wiesenthal and the Jews who understood that monsters must be irrevocably staked and exorcised or they will return again and again to haunt succeeding generations.
Mengele was captured and held as an anonymous POW near Munich but escaped before his true identity could be established. Assuming a false identity, he worked as a farmhand near his native Gunzburg until it became clear that he would never be safe in Europe. With the help of his father's business connections, he obtained Italian residency papers and, from there, escaped to South America in 1949.
Argentina turned out to be the Nazi Riviera of the postwar decades. Juan Perón ruled his country with an iron hand but was popular with his people. The German expatriates understood life under a dictatorship and how to be an asset to those wielding the power. There and elsewhere the postwar Nazi networks provided aid, shelter, intel, and escape routes to those who had worn the death's-heads and the twinned lightning bolts during Germany's fevered nightmare. The Underground established a series of "ratlines" to Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, funneling refugees and resources. The Angel of Death benefited in both aspects and eluded arrest and capture for thirty more years.
In the end, it was said, he escaped man's justice but not God's. Mengele was relaxing at Beritoga Beach in Brazil in 1979 when he decided to go for a swim in the ocean. Away from the shore, he suffered a stroke and began to drown. No one knows whether it was the cerebral infarction or the aspiration of seawater that did what no human jury was able to accomplish. If it was the Hand of God, it seemed to many that He had been rather indolent in finally getting around to it. The only thing that the witnesses agreed upon was, that by the time the man the locals knew as Wolfgang Gerhard was brought to shore by the other swimmers, he was dead. Dr. Josef Mengele had gone to face a greater Tribunal of Justice than the one at Nuremburg.
So the story goes.
The rumors didn't even leak out until 1985 and not everyone bought into the forensic evidence after the body was exhumed. It wasn't until 1992 that DNA was taken from a bone and compared to Mengele's wife, Irene, and son, Rolf, that the casebooks were finally closed. The body in the Brazilian grave had Josef Mengele's DNA.
Yeah.
Sure.
And so did several dozen other people here in Chez Xerox.
As I began working my way out and up I was shaking my head—as if that simple act would clear it of nightmarish thoughts.
Vampires.
Werewolves.
Zombies.
Perhaps the classic horror stories are meant to distract us from the fact that the worst monsters are the human ones . . .
I ghosted through a maze of pipework that seemed related to the fortress's heating plant and stuck my head through a wall in search of an exit.
The next room had a furnace, an old-fashioned ironworks monster that seemed divorced from the tangle of ductwork in the adjacent spaces. Dim orange slots flickered in its heavily gated maw but the room was overlaid with a ghastly green glow that I could attribute to no single light source. The caged incandescent bulbs that lit the room for human eyes were switched off.
As I looked around I heard the faint whimpers of a child. The next room beyond? As I walked toward the far wall, a baby's wails joined in: two voices. A third began to keen as I pushed my head through the far wall. Nothing. Blessed silence. I had stuck my noncorporeal skull into solid bedrock.
The sounds increased and multiplied as I did a reverse ostrich and checked the other walls: more bedrock and an outer chamber with something that looked like a cross between a dumbwaiter and a freight elevator. Many voices were in full cry, now, sounding distant yet present, like someone had upset an entire preschool just next door.
Beyond the chamber was a hallway. As I stepped outside the sound receded. I turned and stuck my head back in. The volume grew. I considered the stainless steel tables in the dim blue glow. The shelves along the walls with their profusion of bottles, containers, and cases. Cabinets. Countertops with instruments and tools. A couple of sinks. A display case.
In the display case were three rows of skulls ranging in size from infant to adolescent. Some were distorted in disturbing ways. Most were blackened with soot and charring. All glowed a bright blue in the dimness. As the wailing grew in crescendo, the glass front of the case rattled and vibrated.
I turned and ran.