Dead flesh isn't easy to animate and it should have been downright impossible. But then I was getting to the point where words like "impossible" and "unlikely" and maybe even "coincidence" were being eradicated from my vocabulary. Ever since my sojourn among the Loa and subbing for Baron Samedi, the dead seemed to respond to my presence with a preternatural vigor. Maybe this was just more of the same.
Sort of.
Alas, this stitched-together semblance of a body wasn't good for anything much beyond lumbering around and scaring the bejezus out of any rational beings it encountered. Which was plenty good for the next twenty minutes as I cleared the second-floor hallway from one end to the other. But sooner or later it was bound to come down to a fight and this putrefying mass of dissolving muscles, rotting sinews, and decaying bones wasn't up to throwing a real punch, never mind a kung-fu kick or beating a hasty retreat. I needed firearms and opportunities for grander acts of destruction.
I also needed to get back to my own body and get it disconnected from those machines before Mengele completed his Bionic Manikin play.
I staggered on down the corridor, moving a small herd of fortress personnel before me like a cattle drive of the damned as I searched for the nearest staircase back up. Another pair of security goons appeared, pushing their way through the crowd to approach me.
Now I was in trouble.
The first burst of weapons fire went wide. These guys had cojones but you would need bowling balls to face what they were looking at and not have a little tremble in your trigger finger.
The second burst clipped me. The third sent several rounds right to my torso.
Having been in actual combat I've seen machine-gun fire pick a man up off his feet and throw him three or four feet back from the shooter. At the very least it will knock you down.
I kept to my feet. Kellerman's liquefying flesh was an ineffective barrier to the bullets: they passed through me without meeting enough resistance to affect my frame as a whole.
The guards dropped their HKs and ran.
I picked them up, bracing the stock of each against the insides of my cadaverous elbows and forearms, and stalked on down the hall like Sigourney Weaver.
Sigourney Weaver on a coke-fueled Aliens pub crawl and missing her head, if you will.
I finally reached the stairs after Ramboing my way through about twenty more of Mengele's staff. I was starting to think this might work and maybe I wouldn't be needing backup after all.
But then I reached the stairs.
Going down might have worked. Going up, however, required some motor skills that were a little more demanding. After a few Pratfalls of the Living Dead, I reluctantly turned and shuffled off in search of the elevator.
Precious time was passing and the word had evidently gone out. I encountered no other personnel on my way to the lift. The elevator, when it arrived, was empty as well. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the third level. The doors closed and it started upward with a slight jerk.
Halfway between floors it stopped with a big jerk.
I punched buttons but nothing happened. It looked like I was the big jerk: someone had cut the power
I turned and looked out through the glass walls at the lobby below. People were coming out to observe the headless corpse in the big specimen jar trapped between the second and third levels.
No point in hanging around: I quit the cold, lifeless flesh that had toted Theresa Kellerman on her last mission and jumped through the wall to land back on the floor I had just left. As a spook I could move more swiftly, now, but the stairs were still going to be a bit of a problem. Behind me and above, the headless corpse fell against one of the glass walls and then slid to the floor of the lift, leaving a greasy orange smear in its wake.
I passed by the OR and checked in on T's head before continuing the search for my own. It was gone. Too bad I hadn't taken the time to stash it in the autoclave before leaving.
The stairs were a bitch but at least I wasn't providing anyone with a visible target this time around. Eventually I made it to the top and hurried down the hall like a narcissistic Diogenes in search of self.
The fire had been put out, though it still smoldered here and there. No bodies were in sight. I had to hand it to these guys: even after more than sixty years the Nazis were still an efficient lot.
I moved ahead and noted that, as I approached the area where I had last left myself, new guards had been posted. They were doubled in number and spaced out in pairs so that every man could watch and be watched by the others. The Mengeles were quick studies.
But were they quick enough to stop me from popping into the nearest warm body with a paper cut? And then starting a chain reaction of bloody noses that would have them killing each other off as I kept skipping ahead to new corpora delicti?
Before we had a chance to find out, I spooked on ahead and checked the room where I had last found myself.
It was empty.
I moved on, afraid I'd spend another hour before I found it again, afraid I'd be too late, afraid—
I found it a couple of doors down, in the room at the end of the hall.
I'd been moved from a surgical facility to a security hub. Rows of monitors showed a multiplicity of views throughout the complex, including several perimeter areas on the outside. The overturned anthill analogy was morphing back into an orderly beehive of recovery and reconnoiters. Groups of personnel—some uniformed, most drafted from support staff—were sweeping the various levels for signs of further disturbance or incursion. Treatment of the injured was proceeding apace. Surgeries were being performed in six different theaters.
And I was in here, secured to a padded gurney with enough leather straps to delight a leather queen and restrain Houdini. Like I said, these guys were no dummies. Take one little corpse for a stroll and suddenly they were locking down bodies left and right. And keeping three more guards in the room as well as a doctor wearing a handgun in a belt holster and a scary-looking nurse who looked like she was recruited from the Russian Olympic shot-put team.
The IV needle lodged deep in my arm would probably allow me ingress to my own flesh but unless I could unbuckle a few belts and convince a half-dozen people to look the other way, I wasn't going any further.
Still, I had to do something and I had to do it soon! The needle in my arm was directing my unique blood chemistry through a tube connected to an antique blood transfuser and, from there, down an adjoining tube to another needle in another arm.
Mengele Prime.
His wheelchair was momentarily abandoned and he lay on a small couch that had probably been carried in for this "battlefield" procedure. At least I hoped they had just brought it in. It didn't match the rest of the décor and you don't want people doing highly dangerous direct transfusions if they regularly mix their art nouveau with their art deco. The original Mengele looked like nothing as much as an ancient mummy being prepared for a fresh round of wrappings and vestments.
Only . . . tock tick: he wasn't getting older, he was starting to get younger!
As I watched, his crinkled, parchment skin began to lose its papery look. Livered age spots were starting to fade even as the pale, pale hue of his epidermis took on a faint hint of color. In just a few minutes he had turned back the clock, moving from a centenarian to a man merely in his nineties. The Death Angel of Auschwitz, The Mangler, the Evil Genie of Eugenics, was being reborn for another generation, perhaps for all time, in this hour, in this place . . .
And by the power of my blood!
He trembled and groaned as his ancient flesh convulsed and the infinitesimal timepieces at the heart of each cell shivered into reverse. The couch was short but still wide enough that there was no danger of his rolling off. And he didn't need restraining straps while the nurse who looked like a cross-dressing truck driver sat beside him. Still, the needle was jostled in his arm and a small cranberry tear wept from the place where he received my unholy communion.
There was no doubting what had to be done and I jumped with only the slightest hesitation.
I should have known better. The previous incursions involved victims who were caught completely off-guard. My last fleshnapping bypassed a competing psyche altogether.
But, as I said, the Mengeles were quick studies. They learned, adapted, prepared. Counterpunched.
I jumped into the body of a feeble old man. There was nothing, however, feeble about the intellect waiting for me inside.
Ahhhh, Cséjthe! I was wondering when you would return.
As easily as I had knocked over and trampled the previous psyches I had run into, I now found myself put into a psychic half nelson by this current encounter. And as much as I struggled to free myself it was becoming abundantly clear that I was completely and effectively trapped. Maybe Mengele had more experience in wrestling personal demons: I was thoroughly pinned to the mental mat of his consciousness.
You'll never get away with this, Mengele! I grunted impotently.
My dear Mr. Cséjthe, I have always gotten away with "it." Do you know what I used to say to my Juden guinea pigs back in Auschwitz? "The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." It was true then and it continues to be true today. Most of the filth that thinks of itself as "mankind" is merely cattle, fit only to serve the purposes of its Masters. Their herd mentality only leads them to the slaughterhouse that much more quickly.
Oh, yeah? I was a little short on defiant comebacks and it was the best I could come up with for the moment.
Yes. And now you have to decide, Mr. Cséjthe, whether you want to eat the hamburger or be the hamburger.
Meaning?
If I had more time I could construct some sort of electromagnetic device to restrain your noncorporeal essence. As things stand now I have one of three courses of action. One, I could continue to restrain you by the power of my superior will and intellect . . .
But you gotta sleep sometime.
Agreed. So, two, I could strike a deal that would put us on the same side—
Not bloody likely!
A mutually agreeable arrangement, then. I have things that you want; you have something that I want.
What do you have that I want?
Your body, for one.
Yeah, and I suppose you'll just give it back.
In time. If I can successfully clone your preternatural flesh and your unique blood-producing marrow, then you can have your pick of the original or any number of copies.
Sounds like I might be in for a bit of a wait. Unless you have some sci-fi short cut to speeding up the maturation process.
Alas, no. This is reality, Mr. Cséjthe, not some hack writer's fevered dream. But what is twenty to thirty years compared to losing your body forever? Then there is also the matter of your wife and daughter . . .
Jenny and Kirsten are dead. You can't hold them hostage.
I have their DNA. They are already reborn anew.
Big unfucking deal! All you've done is duplicate their genetic material. That's not the same thing as what and who they really are. Did you make backup copies?
You suspect I would create multiple hostages?
I'm pointing out that if you make more than one Jenny, which one is really the woman I married? You've taken the sacred concept of personhood and turned it into a carnival shell game. Spiritual three-card monte. Three Jennies? Which one contains the original soul? Shuffle 'em up and make us guess. And assuming that one clone even ends up with Jenny's soul, what about the other two? Do they get dupes or whatever's next in the queue? Or do they get anything at all? You may be able to clone biological matter but what about the non-material? Is it immaterial?
Does it matter so much to you, Cséjthe, as long as you get your wife and daughter back?
I can see where the question of a person's soul has never been an issue for someone like you, asshole. The problem is I don't know that I'd get my wife and daughter back! What you're doing might be no different than finding a woman and child who resemble my deceased family and performing enough plastic surgery to make them physically identical but no more duplicates in mind and personality than complete strangers. And, at the other end of the spectrum, there's the possibility that you would be doing something much worse.
Worse?
Check your Bible, Igor. Jesus said something interesting in the twelfth chapter of Matthew about what happens when a spirit departs from the body and then tries to come back later. It seems you may get some renters who weren't listed on the original lease. Occupants who are likely to do way more damage than any security deposit can cover!
Then perhaps you should be worried about returning to your own jar of clay.
I've been doing nothing but, Doctor Demento. Let go and I'll do a quick bed check.
I think not. Your body isn't going anywhere for the time being.
So I noticed. The point is you think you're all hot snot when it comes to Xeroxing the human genome but you're just cold boogers when it comes to the metaphysical.
The metaphysical?
Like the question of what rushes in to fill the void once you've set up the housing. You may have hostages, they may look like my wife and daughter right down to their mitochondria, but I'm betting that the hearts and souls of my family are beyond any human reach now. They've gone where science cannot yet reach and may never go.
Then let us speak of something less theoretical and closer at hand: the woman, Deirdre.
Deirdre?
Even now she is in surgery where my promise to the Kellerman woman is being fulfilled. If all goes well my little protégé will finally obtain a body that will not rot out from under her in a matter of days or weeks. As soon as the nerves in her neck are properly fused to the host's central nervous system, the original head will be excised and removed so that a full transfer of conscious and autonomic functions can take place and symmetry can be finalized. I assume that you would prefer that your friend's head not be discarded.
Bastard!
And if, as I suspect, her consciousness should survive in the same manner as the Kellerman woman's, there's a good chance of finding her a host body as well. Possibly cloning her her own over time.
I struggled but still found I was unable to extricate myself from his mental grasp. Is that all?
All? What? Would you like for me to offer wealth? Riches? Power? Something else to sweeten the deal?
Oh yeah, that would do it. Move me into a higher tax bracket and I'll happily spit in God's eye, betray the memory of my family, and buddy up with the greatest child molester and murderer of all time. No, shithead, you said three courses of action. I think we've eliminated one and two from the list.
Agreed. The third option is actually my preference, Cséjthe. I have everything I need without your cooperation. Your body continues to function separate from your consciousness. And I don't believe I can trust you to keep any promises that violate your cattle code of ethics. So the third and preferable course of action is to simply snuff out your dislocated mind like a pinched candle flame.
Oh. Kill me. Now there's a surprise.
Really?
No. Only in that you're trying to talk me to death, first.
I needed time. While it is obvious that my will is stronger than yours, holding you is one thing. Destroying you may take a little more of an effort. As your transformative blood drips into my veins, it makes my flesh younger, my body stronger. As the vessel regains youth and vitality, the mind is invigorated, as well. Even now my hold upon your own consciousness grows ever stronger. It will not be long before I can crush your thoughts as effortlessly as I would crush the hollow, matchstick bones of a bird or a mouse!
And the pressure that surrounded my thoughts began to increase, pressing in upon my consciousness as if my head were still corporeal and being squeezed within a heavy steel vise.
I heard a shout and thought it was my own. Then the pressure lessened a little and I could see through Mengele's eyes. An alarm had gone off and the room was filling up with security goons.
Someone was pointing at one of the monitors. A switch was thrown and the image was duplicated on the large, master screen above the rest.
The view was of the outside. Specifically the front doors. Which were wide open. No one was in sight, though.
Of course the Wendigo and her army of Amerind guardian spirits probably wouldn't register in the electromagnetic spectrum so they wouldn't be picked up by the security cameras. But something would have had to have been done about that big Ttsilolni—the swastika—over the entrance for them to breach the outer doors.
Someone turned a knob and the outside security camera zoomed in, enlarging the entrance area. There was no eagle, no wreathed swastika, no "Brut Adler" chiseled above the entrance, only an amorphous mass that rippled and writhed over the rough stone.
"What is that?" a guard asked.
The camera zoomed in closer. The mass was predominantly orange, shot through with black.
Orange and black suddenly rose up and obscured our vision completely. Mengele reached up and brushed at his eyes. I tried to pull away, actually getting halfway out of his head before his mind grabbed hold again. His fingers, meanwhile, came away with a captured insect. It was a monarch butterfly; its orange-and-black wings dusting his fingers with a fine powdering of scales.
Another one fluttered by to land on his arm near the needle feeding his vein.
"Where are they coming from?" he wheezed.
He might well ask that in the larger context: monarch migration paths took them from Florida, the coast of Texas, and the mountain forests in Central Mexico to the Canadian borderlands and back again. But while they traveled various routes over the Eastern Plains and along the West Coast, the migratory patterns avoided the Rocky Mountains. And sightings were rare during the summers and never during the winters.
We weren't in a large room so it didn't take that long to answer his question in the smaller context: a dozen more orange-winged invaders were crawling between the metal vanes of the air vent and spilling down from above.
As another wave of monarchs fluttered over, circling Mengele like curious gliders, I made another attempt to pull free. This new distraction was sufficient: I popped out of the old man's carcass like a cork from a champagne bottle. He stopped waving at the insects long enough to make another mental grab for me and he, too, popped out. Mengele's body collapsed and the nurse and doctor were suddenly faced with the double duty of shooing butterflies while checking their patient's vital signs.
Meanwhile I had a very tenacious foe still attempting to put me back in a psychic headlock. Any hope that a sudden shock had killed him disappeared as I noticed the silver cord that snaked back to his physical body. I was facing an astral projection of the Death Angel of Auschwitz, not his ghost. His vague, translucent form resembled the photographs of Mengele in his prime, not the wizened old man sprawled on the couch. Which reminded me: with every minute that ticked by, his body was absorbing more of my blood from the transfusion and growing younger and stronger in the bargain.
He lunged for me and I decided, strategically, that the floor beneath my feet just wasn't that substantial, after all. I dropped like a stone in a well, catching a glimpse of hundreds of butterflies on the floor below flying reconnaissance patterns.
Just in time I decided the basement floor was solid and bounced to a stop before losing myself in the mountain's bedrock beneath. I took a moment to examine my plan and prioritize. I needed to find Deirdre and stop the operation before it was too late. I needed to return and stop the transfusion before it was too late. I probably needed to hook up with Wendigo and her troops to: (a) get their help and (b) keep them from harming either of us on their bloody rampage before it was too late.
And to cover the most ground the fastest, a physical body would be an asset. So, first on the list: head for the upper levels and look for another bloody staff member on the way.
I was five ghostly strides into my revised plan when Mengele bungee-jumped into the basement behind me. Like I said, a quick study.
I ran.
"I'm not letting you escape, again," he called after me. "I'm not safe as long as you are loose!"
"Ditto, Dr. Frankenfurter." I dove through the wall next to the door and found myself in a narrow service corridor. I turned left and ducked around the corner. It was a dead end. Too late to reverse my steps, I waited, hoping he would go the other direction.
He didn't. "Now you're trapped," he said, coming around the corner and blocking the entire width of the passage.
"Boy, you're really new at this, aren't you?" I dodged sideways through another wall. I found myself in a room full of corpses.
The morgue that served Brut Adler was only set up to accommodate up to four cadavers at a time. Current events had forced the staff to stack bodies on the tables and the floor like so much firewood. As I picked my way through the constricted maze of dead flesh, I fancied I could hear vague stirrings from within some of the piles. If I hung around long enough maybe the dead would reanimate like the neighbors back home.
Considering these guys' resumes, that was probably the last thing that I wanted.
There were two doors in this room, one to my left, one straight ahead. I headed for that one as Mengele burst through the wall behind me. His cord was slowing him up a bit; it dragged at him like an ectoplasmic leash made out of garden hose. I pushed through the door without opening it and found myself out in a main corridor.
This part of the downstairs area looked familiar. If memory served, the stairs leading up were another sixty some yards on down, past where the curve of that corridor placed them beyond my line of sight.
I took two long strides and then skidded to a stop as Mengele popped out ahead of me. Damn! His learning curve for astral maneuvering was considerably shorter than mine! Worse, he was anticipating my moves!
"Anywhere you can go, I can follow," he taunted. "What is more—as my physical body grows stronger and younger, this intangible form seems to grow stronger and faster!"
In the meantime, my psychic batteries were running down. There were no ectoplasmic jumper cables connecting me to any kind of an external power source. I was cut off from rendezvousing with Wendigo upstairs and, even if they found their way down here in time, there were no guarantees as to what any of them could see or do while we were in our present state.
A swarm of butterflies came fluttering around the distant curve of the corridor as if responding to my silent question.
Mengele had his back to them but must have noticed something change in my face—this guy didn't miss a thing. He turned and took a step back as they flapped and spiraled toward us. Then he shrugged and turned back to me.
"Insects?" he asked. "You storm my citadel with insects?" He shook his head. "Not that it would have made any real difference but I might have seen the logic in bees or wasps. Maybe spiders . . ."
"Spiders aren't insects," I said.
"I know spiders are not insects! They are arachnids! I am not stupid!" He swung his arm out to gesture behind him. "Butterflies . . . butterflies are stupid!"
I wasn't sure what was going to happen next. Maybe nothing. But I took a step back anyway. "The Aztecs didn't think so."
"What?"
"The Aztecs. Native Americans. Inhabited Mexico from the north to the central region, flourished around the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries."
"Extinct savages!"
"Funny, I would have expected a little more professional courtesy. Even respect. The Aztecs developed a high culture and civilization while your Hohenstaufens were in political freefall and your Habsburgs were kicking and pulling each other's hair over the dynastic toy box. The Aztec high holy days made your Triumph of the Will look like Waiting for Godot."
Mengele jumped: a butterfly had just fluttered by, grazing his ear.
"Anyway, the Aztecs—who were self-styled experts on the subject of death, by the way—believed that the Danaus plexippus—that's the monarch butterflies for the taxonomy challenged"—another flew through his shoulder and he grabbed his upper arm as if stung—"were actually the souls of the dead. More specifically, dead children."
The butterflies were starting to swarm him and he began to scream as they darted about, dipping in and out of his translucent form.
"That's funny," I said, though there was nothing remotely funny to be found here, "they're butterflies. Even if they were bees or wasps or spiders—who aren't insects but arachnids, by the way—they couldn't hurt a noncorporeal being. Could they?"
"They burn! Burn!" he shrieked, swatting at them with his hands. It was worse than ineffective: his hands passed through his orange-winged assailants with no resistance but his palms began to bubble with psychic blisters.
"So, even though this wasn't a part of the plan, I'm betting that you're suffering psychic feedback from the memories of your victims."
"What? What?"
"The plan was to get some help in covering up your swastikas. Didn't know they'd show up as butterflies. Or that they'd bring the pain. Think of it as a little Vulcan mind meld—a whole lotta little mind melds—with a whole bunch of your victims."
"Butterflies!" he screeched, staggering down the hall toward me.
I backpedaled and the monarchs stayed with him. "Not just butterflies, Joe; spirits of the dead. A lot of spirits of the dead! We didn't have much time to round up an army who'd be willing to abandon the peace and grace of their eternal rest. Much less get involved with unpleasant earthly matters and distasteful people like yourself. Under the circumstances, there was just one place to go: Oswiecim."
"Oswiecim?"
"Well, more properly the fields of Brzezinka, Birkenau, the largest cemetery in the world. Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war—their ashes form a very deep substrate of the soil, there—as you should well know. Your Nazi masters thought to rewrite history and, failing that, to burn and bury the evidence. Well, you know the old saying: 'Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out?' Well, God sorts, Herr Doktor! Sooner or later He gets around to it. No task is left undone on the eternal time clock. All rivers run to the sea. Every dog has his day. All birds come home to roost. The same goes for butterflies."
He staggered about like a man on fire, the orange wings wreathing his wispy form in a semblance of mock flame. "It hurts!" he gasped. "Hurts so bad!"
"I can't begin to imagine," I said. "But then, I wasn't there. You were, though. I'll bet a trip down memory lane through the mind of one of your victims is as painful as if it actually happened to you. So, I'll bet a dozen trips are unendurable. Or are they? What about a hundred? A thousand?"
With a shriek of mindless agony, he lunged toward me. I stepped back and passed through a wall into another room. A familiar room. I kept moving. Past the stainless steel tables, past the shelves along the walls with their profusion of bottles, containers, and cases. Past the cabinets. Past the countertops with instruments and tools. Past the sinks. I stopped by the display case as Mengele came through the wall after me.
The butterflies did not come with him. Their physical bodies were stopped by the physical wall that was no barrier to our ectoplasmic flesh.
It took him a few moments to shake off the effects of the assaults on his mind and memory. Slowly, however, he seemed to gather himself while I wondered if I was smart to be staying and not running. I couldn't run forever so it made sense to make a stand wherever I might find allies. I just hoped my instincts were trustworthy in this case.
"So much for your butterfly brigade," he panted, drawing himself back up to stand erect.
I shook my head. "You think that's it? You can cheat fate with a flimsy wall, a closed door?"
He smiled and gave a ghost of a shrug. "I'm in here. They're out there."
"'Death is here and Death is there, Death is busy everywhere,'" I mocked, "'All around, within, beneath, Above is Death—'"
"'—and we are Death!' Do you think to frighten me by quoting Shelley?"
I shook my head. "You can't stay in here forever."
"I don't intend to. After I deal with you—" He paused and cocked his head. "What was that?"
I knew what it was—or had a pretty good idea—because I had been in this room before. Perhaps he had, too, but not without the protective insulation of flesh and blood and skin and bone.
There was a vague suggestion of haze in the air, like the taint of a recently extinguished cigarette. As the sound of weeping became more audible, the air thickened and took on a blue tinge. Light began to spill forth from the display case where the treble rows of craniums stared down in ghastly judgment. As the light grew in intensity, the illumination from the skulls shaded more toward green than blue, however.
"The dead down here aren't the same as the dead out there, I'm betting."
"What are you talking about?" he demanded, his voice rising to overmatch the increasing volume of the chorus erupting around us. The wails that had sounded like frightened children on my last visit now sounded angry.
"I'm talking about spirits that have had their resting places consecrated and blessed," I said. "Who have had the prayers of millions to tuck them into their long eternity. Who are visited daily by mourners and well-wishers from around the world and new generations with each passing year, assuring them that they are remembered and will never be forgotten.
"But here . . ." My arm swept the autopsy tables and instrument trays with their ghastly collections of flensing knives, bone saws, and tools whose jaws, blades, and teeth were starting to glow with an emerald radiance that hurt my transdimensional vision. " . . . what peace can come to those who perished in pain and horror and, most terribly, anonymity? To be forgotten? To lurk through eternal darkness, forever alone and unknown? No one prays for your soul. No one acknowledges that you lived or that your life had value. Your dust and ashes forever sealed in iron and stone, unable to return to the soil, unable to be reborn in the blades of grass or a flower, to feel the cool baptism of rain or follow the smiling warmth of the sun."
"Bah! Dead is dead!"
"And yet, here we stand, all ghostly, while you cower and cringe from a bunch of butterflies out in the hallway."
He lunged at me and screamed. That scream was echoed a hundredfold and sickly green light burst from the cabinet with such intensity that I was momentarily blinded. I heard the crystalline cacophony of shattered glass and suddenly the chorus of screaming doubled and trebled in volume. I was knocked back and vaguely felt the shadow of another wall pass through me. About the time I realized I was in the furnace room, Mengele was through the door and pressing his astral hands to my own silvery throat. We stumbled backwards and, had we been solid, we would have slammed up against the iron behemoth that served double duty in providing heat for a portion of Brut Adler and disposal for unwanted biological material.
Instead we kept going and found ourselves struggling waist-deep in flames!
Knowing where we were probably gave me a slight psychological advantage: I pried his fingers away from my neck and grinned in his uncertain face. "Welcome to Hell, Doctor! Don't worry about your luggage; you're on express check-in."
He stepped back and looked around like a frightened child. But the effect didn't last for long. How could it? The flames didn't burn us. The iron walls of the great furnace were well illuminated from the inside, showing every weld, every rivet, the venting high above.
He laughed. Bent over and tried to scoop an armful of flames into his embrace. "Do you see, Cséjthe? Do you see why the Master Race has discarded the childish fairytales of Heaven and Hell? There is no God! Only gods among men! The gods who have learned to evolve beyond the petty cattle morals of lesser societies!" The flames dropped in intensity. Instead of licking at our waists they barely reached our knees, now. "Poor Cséjthe, trusting in a higher power that isn't there or doesn't care. Do you know what Marx said?"
"Say the secret word and win a hundred Reichmarks?"
"That men are the apes of a cold God," he snarled as I watched a swirl of ashes rise up from the grating behind his feet. "So many of the unwashed masses are no more than beasts. You, at least, come close to thinking like a man. But you are still an animal. You and all the other apes who think they are men and will always be disappointed that, when your God finally does appear, he is someone like me!"
The swirl of ashes had risen above our heads forming a gray canopy that thickened and opened like a swaying, hooded cobra.
"Yeah?" I took two steps back and leaned against the inner wall of the furnace but willed myself to remain inside. "Well, welcome to the Monkey House!"
The flames had died all the way down to our ankles but now their color Doppler-shifted from orange to green as if someone had set fire to a huge spool of copper wire beneath our feet. The flames began to rise, again.
"Ah!" Mengele looked down in shock and surprise. "What?"
Tongues of teal licked up his legs, reaching his thighs, and he began to shriek again. He ran for the nearest wall. A thick coating of ash slid up to form an inner coat of gray. He rebounded instead of ghosting through and fell down into the fire. He reappeared almost immediately but his silvery visage was marred with gray and black weals as if his ectoplasmic form was physically burned by the green flames.
"Cséjthe! Help me!" he cried, stretching an arm wreathed in greenish gasses toward me.
"You really must be mad," I said.
He began to scream and curse, then. But not for long. The ashy canopy that had unfolded gray-and-black wings above and over us now swooped down and narrowed like the fine grains of sand falling through an hourglass. Pinching into a tight stream, they spun a seething cable the color of filthy silk and poured into Mengele's open mouth, choking off his profanities. The weight of the ashes forced him back down into the heart of the conflagration.
I am no voyeur when it comes to suffering and death but part of me wanted to stay and watch.
The flames had no effect on me and I remained untouched by a single flake of ash or soot. I knew in my heart of hearts that there was no escape for Mengele this time: he was in the hands of a jury, a jury of very special Threshers who would not release him until every little scrap was shredded, consumed, and obliterated so that his like might never again walk the earth in this form or any other. I could leave and trust them to take this particular threat from this world and, quite possibly, from the next.
Still, it only seemed right that someone bear witness.
That the monster who had done so many terrible things in secret, have someone who could return from these dark, anonymous rooms and testify to his final disposition. Not for his sake but for all of the victims that the world would never know about.
It would have been fitting.
Perhaps I would have risked my own flesh to spend the extra moments. I dared not risk Deirdre, however. I flew from the Hellish judgment in that great iron furnace and rushed back toward the outer corridor and the stairs leading upwards.
It was over before I got there.
Wendigo had already freed my physical body from the restraints so she had to hold me back once I'd slid back in and got all systems back up and running.
"They are all dead," she told me as the slender Indian maiden helped the guy in the hospital gown totter down the hallway. "We made sure there were no survivors. No one will carry any part of the nightmare forth from this place."
"There were women and children—"
"Everything dies here!" she insisted, her sweet face morphing into skeletal planes and hollows for the briefest of moments. "The dream of this madman will be forgotten! The Ohdow who know the ways of the earth and stone say it is but a small matter to cause the mountain to fall in upon itself. We will bury the evil here and it shall remain hidden from the Race of Man as long as the Spirit Guardians may endure."
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair," I murmured.
"What?"
"Shelley's Ozymandias. 'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.'" I bowed my head. "What about Deirdre?"
"I am sorry, Cséjthe. I am taking you to where they kept her body but I must warn you that we were too late. It is not a pretty sight . . ."
It felt, in that moment, as though the Ohdow had begun their work prematurely: the world seemed to cave in. I stumbled after her, legs numb, mind numb, heart numb, unable to speak until we reached the bloody operating theater where Theresa Kellerman had hoped to replace Deirdre's head with her own.
The Wendigo had a vast capacity for understatement.
The rescue had come too late.
And it wasn't pretty at all.