Ehrlichmann, garbed as a worker, joins a shift as they troop in lines twelve abreast down the ramp and into the tunnel. After shuffling one hundred metres with the others along the concrete-walled passage, he finds himself on the lip of a great well, looking down onto the heart-machine. While the others pour down the metal stair-cases to the floor of the well, Ehrlichmann gazes at Maria’s great machine. At the core of it is a gargantuan tree of pipes, each a metre or more in diameter and festooned with heavy-duty valves, which disappears into a hole in the floor. Below him, lines of workers approach the heart-machine, to administer to its needs as it powers Atlantis. They pull levers and turn wheels, controlling the city’s unsleeping source of energy deep beneath the island.
Ehrlichmann descends the staircase, each step drawing him nearer to the heart-machine, each step moving him further into a world of heat and noise and toil. As he approaches the bottom of the stairs, he is reminded of his visit to the Mittelwerk, where the Reich’s V-Weapons are manufactured. But now he comes not to admire German efficiency, but to destroy Atlantean invention.
At the foot of the stairs, he peers out onto the floor of the well. The pipes leading down into the Earth are the key. The valves govern the passage of water down to the magma below, and the superheated steam which returns. Ignoring the workers busy at their levers and wheels, Ehrlichmann marches from his hiding place. He heads straight for the pipes, determining on a specific course of action as he draws closer. He reaches the tree of pipes, and can feel heat radiating from them. There is a gap of half a metre between the outermost ring of pipes and the lip of the hole in the floor. He peers into this gap, but cannot see any bottom to the shaft. Hot air rises from it and bathes his face. If he prevents the return of the steam, then pressure will build up below and rupture the pipes.
He chooses which valve to close and crosses to it. He gives it a turn, stops and looks about him warily. Some of the workers are gazing his way, but incuriously. No one moves to stop him. Maria, it seems, has so cowed these people they have become slaves to the machine.
Ehrlichmann spins the wheel with vigour. It grows stiffer as the valve within the pipe narrows the aperture through which the steam passes. Soon it takes all his strength to move it centimetres. He hangs from one of the wheel’s spokes, using his body-weight to supplement the strength of his arms and torso. The valve squeaks shut.
Ehrlichmann steps back. Nothing has changed. He gazes about him, but the workers are still busy at their tasks. There is a pressure gauge nearby. He sees the needle on the dial slowly begin to rise. The final quarter of the dial is marked in red, and the needle will reach it soon. He stays until it does so, then he leaves.
He climbs the stairs back up to the tunnel quickly. He crosses to the railing and looks down into the well. The heart-machine is shaking and vibrating as though in mechanical pain. The workers mill about in confusion; they point and gesticulate. Steam rises from the shaft down to the centre of the Earth and writhes spectrally about the pipes. More dials are now in the red. Indicator lights begin to flash.
Ehrlichmann turns and runs. Back above-ground, he turns towards the shore. He can feel the earth beneath him shaking. Light tremors ripple across the street. People stop and gaze down at their feet. A chthonian groan echoes across the city. Ehrlichmann reaches the beach while, behind him, a rain of masonry, architraves and trim from the skyscrapers, falls crashing to the street. The elevated railway writhes and twists, popping rivets and bending girders. Somewhere a train crashes to the ground, the noise it makes like a cataract of metal. People scream.
Ehrlichmann gazes at the metropolis. As he watches, one of the flying buttresses on the Tower of Babel detaches and falls, seemingly in slow motion. Great bergs of masonry calve from the building. Elsewhere, a skyscraper collapses, folding in on itself and sending up a great pillar of dust and smoke. The effect of Ehrlichmann’s sabotage has been more effective than he could have imagined.
Abruptly, Ehrlichmann remembers what Plato wrote of the fate of Atlantis…
As a thick column of ash and smoke erupts from the mountain’s peak—it is actually a volcano!—and molten rock writes hellish lines down its slopes, Ehrlichmann wonders if he has done the right thing. The ground trembles, stills briefly, and then quakes again more violently. Atlantis is doomed; the volcano will bury the city, the island will sink into the ocean. The world Maria and the Atlanteans would have created will never be.
Another earthquake throws Ehrlichmann to the sand. It occurs to him that Ultima Thule too will never be founded, will not be there to allow Ernst Schäfer’s expedition to discover it in 1938. Germany and the Führer will have to win the war without the Thulans’ help.
No matter. It will make victory for the Fatherland so much the sweeter.
FURTHER READING
Farrell, Joseph P: The Reich of the Black Sun (2004, Adventures Unlimited Press) • Farrell, Joseph P: The SS Brotherhood of the Bell (2006, Adventures Unlimited Press) • Ferry, Joe: Women in Science: Maria Goeppert Mayer (2003, Chelsea House) • Gill, Anton & Gary Hyland: Last Talons of the Eagle (1998, Headline) • Griehl, Manfred: Luftwaffe X-Planes (2004, Greenhill Books) • Hale, Christopher: Himmler’s Crusade (2003, Castle Books) • Harbinson, WA: Projekt UFO (1995, Boxtree) • Herwig, Dieter & Heinz Rode: Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Strategic Bombers, 1939-1945 (2000, Midland Publishing) • Hyland, Gary: Blue Fires (2001, Headline) • Pennick, Nigel: Hitler’s Secret Sciences (1981, Neville Spearman) • Timaeus, Plato (360 BCE) • Seidler, Franz W & Dieter Ziegert: Hitler’s Secret Headquarters (2000, Greenhill Books) • Stevens, Henry: Hitler’s Flying Saucers (2003, Adventures Unlimited Press) • von Harbou, Thea: Metropolis (1927) • Witkowski, Igor: The Truth About Wunderwaffe (2003, European History Press)
METAmorphosis
by
STEVEN SAVILE
“You left us to burn,” the first man said.
“Or rot. Or melt. Or fester. Or just f-f-fade away. It doesn’t matter what word you use for it. You abandoned us, Steve,” his partner said, shaking his head sadly. “You let us down.” He spread his hands wide. He had no lifeline on his palm. Indeed he had none of the crags and creases that marked my own hands. My mother – God rest her soul – would have said it looked as though he had never done a hard day’s work in his life – but then, she said that about me all the time and my own hands were leathery with age and pitted by the thousand cuts that had been the simple art of living my life. The arthritis didn’t help. It turned them into bird’s claws that curled in on themselves. Gone were the days I could stride continents and slay dragons or punch out villains with a single left hook. I was no longer the hero of my own story.
“I can’t believe you did that to us,” the first man said, planting a hand on my chest and pushing me back into the hall.
I stumbled back a couple of steps, caught by surprise. I hadn’t done anything apart from pour myself a nice single malt and light up a cigar (hand rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins if my man was to be believed). It was my only ritual, but I’d done it ever since I finished writing The Secret Life of Colours when I was 21 and I had thought it was just what writers did. Though back then it had been a stringy liquorice-papered cigarillo not a big fat Cuban. It was the ritual that was important, not the smoke. It’s the little things like that that keep us in touch with the kids we’d been when we set out on this journey of ours, right? My friends joked that my cigar’s got an inch longer and thicker for every zero tacked onto the end of the advance. If only they knew. The bank account had plenty of zeroes but they were in the sort code and the international routing number, not the balance.
“Inside,” the shorter of the two barked. He sounded like some sort of genetic cross between man and Pitbull. He looked like something else entirely. He was ugly. I mean really ugly. It took me a moment to realise he suffered from some sort of deformity and wasn’t just pig ugly. It was his skull. It was oversized and lumpen, as though bloated by elephantitis. I was struck by the ridiculous carto
on ‘super villain’ quality of it: the hunchbacked dwarf with a giant brain his skull can barely contain. If I’d written it, he would have been plotting to take over Metropolis whilst Clark Kent was tangled up in his telephone booth, or Gotham while Batman was tongue-tied with the delectable Ms. Vale. Let’s just say that my Spidey Senses weren’t just tingling, it was full-scale warning sirens, high alert, DefCon whatever the most worried/paranoid number is. Right then, as the dwarf pushed his way into the cabin it was off the charts.
Of all the most ridiculous things, I thought about the whiskey – a 21 year old single malt, my favourite tipple, not that I’ve ever been a drinker – on the reading table beside the copy of the latest manuscript and wondered if I’d get to drink it. And then, my second thought was simply: thank God I’d finished the manuscript. It wasn’t a book yet – I didn’t think of it that way until it came back from the publishers all bound and prettied up, right now it was still a raw manuscript. But it was finished. I’d emailed it away to my agent. The stack of papers here was purely symbolic. It made me feel good to have them printed out and piled up so I could look at all of those white A4 pages with a sense of achievement. I’d done it. Finished. I didn’t want to be the guy who died with his masterpiece unfinished and it was left to some hack like… well… like me to finish it.
He put a gnarled hand flat on my chest and shoved me back again. My hip caught the corner of the dresser behind me hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I twisted and stumbled, falling to my knees. I looked up at the pair of them standing there all spit and bile, as a third character, a short woman – no more than five-three – stepped out of the shadows. She was pretty, or she would have been but for the scar on her left cheek that hadn’t healed properly after it had been badly stitched. I recognized the sort of wound – there was only one makeshift weapon I could imagine that caused that kind of unstitchable flap: a Stanley knife with two stainless steel blades instead of one. The trick was to wedge a matchstick between the blades to push them apart.
She was whiplash thin without being even remotely delicate.
She wore a workout top that revealed the incredible definition of her upper body. To use the kid’s vernacular, she was ripped. There were tramlines and the ripple of taut abdominals visible through the cling of her tight vest. In the moonlight her olive-skin looked almost opalescent, like an oriental glaze, and so very seductive. I’ve always had a weakness for that kind of look. I think it’s the stomach, those tight muscles and the promise of the belly button like it’s the most sensual secret of the body; this little intimate hollow like the bay at the nape of the neck or the crease between the legs that just isn’t seen all the time. That’s what secrets should be. Even now, facing the likelihood that she wasn’t here to tie me down in the good way, I couldn’t help but appreciate the raw physicality of her body and the beauty that went with her being so in control of it. It took me a moment – the space between heartbeats was always a line I liked to use when I was writing, we all have ticks, writers, if you read enough of our stuff – to realise that her almond-shaped eyes were incongruously blue. It was almost as though they had been Photoshopped there by a careless artist. Those two imperfections, the scar and the too-blue eyes only served to enhance her beauty, not detract from it.
She didn’t say anything as she walked over the threshold into the cabin. She wore standard issue military jackboots and combat fatigues. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and as she stepped into the light I could see the outline of a bolt piercing through her left nipple pressing against the cotton vest.
It’s the writer in me. I can’t help it. I heard someone say, “God is in the details,” once and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the minutiae of every scene. I’m always looking for the little unique tell-tale details that’ll give my characters more life, like the bolt piercing, like the pustules around the monstrous deformity of the dwarf’s skull and the rust on the row of buckles that climbed from the tall guy’s ankle to just beneath his knee. I was always looking for little things to make my stories come alive. Apparently, I couldn’t stop looking for them, even when the shit was hitting the proverbial fan.
Close up, I didn’t recognize any of the intruders, but I felt like I ought to. There was something naggingly familiar about all of them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
They certainly weren’t my usual midnight callers – that was limited to delivery guys, and be they of the pizza, Chinese or Indian variety they always came bearing food. These three came empty handed.
The tall guy wore a most peculiar pair of brass glasses that appeared to have more than a dozen interchangeable lenses attached to them on a series of hinges. Each lens was a different coloured filter, meaning they could be selected and adjusted in hundreds of permutations to shift the wearer’s perception. If he so wished the world could indeed be rose-tinted. I smiled at that observation, despite myself.
As though reading my mind he reached up for the lenses and shuffled them, choosing, I realised, to see the world in various hues of black.
I wished that wasn’t an omen, but what else could it be?
Still on my hands and knees, I looked up at him. The rest of his ensemble was no less a mismatch of environments or generations, and no less disturbing. He wore a long leather duster like a cowboy fresh of the high plains, and beneath it, a lace brocaded red waistcoat that would have suited a Venetian gentleman during the height of the Renaissance, and leather bolo tie. The steel toecaps of his boots were covered in mud from the hike to my isolated cabin.
Finishing the manuscript alone in the cabin instead of at home in the warmth and comfort of my city centre apartment in the company of my wife was another one of those rituals I’d become so obsessive about over the years. For obsessive read predictable.
“What do you want?” I sounded pitiful. I knew I did. If I’d been writing the scene I would have given myself some sort of backbone. As it was, the reality left me completely invertebrate.
“I thought you’d be more… impressive,” the woman said, finally. She had an accent. I couldn’t place it. Eastern European over Eastern, maybe? Still, full of promise, even if that promise was of impending pain.
“Disappointing, isn’t it? Like looking into the face of God and seeing nothing more than a miserable excuse for a human being,” the lens man said. “There’s nothing divine about this cocksucker.” He pronounced it cocksuckah, stretching out that last syllable like he was relishing a fiery slug of bourbon. I’d heard someone else speak like that before. That same intonation. Who?
“Take him through there,” the woman said, inclining her head to indicate the front room.
The two men obeyed without question, establishing once and for all the hierarchy here. They grabbed me by the arms and legs and dragged me through and dumped me in front of the roaring fire. It was banked high, the logs, still damp, spat and snapped as their sap shrivelled beneath the heat. I lay on my back. I didn’t dare move. I expected them to start kicking. To beat me. That was how these home invasions went down, wasn’t it? The intruders burst in, beat seven shades out of anyone unfortunate to be inside, and then left with whatever they’d come looking for. I wasn’t about to fight back. I didn’t want a beating to escalate into murder.
The woman looked around the room, taking it all in. I knew what she was doing. She was marking the various points of ingress and egress. She settled down into my high-backed leather armchair – it was the only chair in the room with its back to the wall, meaning there was no way anyone could sneak up on her from behind while she was sat there. It was also my favourite seat in the old cabin. She reached down and took my whiskey from the table beside her and downed it in one swallow. I guess that answered my question about the whiskey’s fate.
The dwarf and the lens man took up places on either side of the room, meaning I couldn’t look at all three of them at once. I had to keep moving my head, eyes darting between them.
“Shall we get started, Lise?” the lens man asked.
>
Lise.
Again, there was something very familiar about the name. The name, the eyes, the scar. I knew this woman. I was sure I did, but I couldn’t think straight. Mind you, right then I would have been hard pressed to remember my own name, even without a gun to the head.
“There’s something I’ve always wondered about you, Mr Writer Man. Why do you hate women so much? Because you do, don’t you? It’s in so much of what you imagine. Stuff like The Horned Man and Walk the Last Mile, they’re full of hate. You might dress it up as fantasy but what you are doing is taking stuff that is important, stuff to be cherished, and fashion the most ugly trick, and it is a trick, because once we trust you, you betray us by taking everything that we’ve told you we cherish, everything we’ve shared about life that is important, and you don’t just twist it, you pulverise it. You grind it until there’s nothing left to love. There’s so much hate in you.”
I looked at her. She was wrong. She was so wrong. I didn’t hate women. I was uncomfortable around them because I thought they were all better than me, but that wasn’t hatred, it was more akin to worship. I tried to defend myself. “JD Salinger wasn’t Holden Caulfield,” I said. It was a stupid line. I’d used it before. It was meant to separate the writer from the words, but people didn’t seem to believe that just because I could imagine something didn’t mean I believed it. I wasn’t God. I was just a guy who told stories. It didn’t help that when I was younger I’d used pretentious lines like, “I don’t write stories, I write little pieces of me,” so I could sound like a tortured artist and impress the ladies in the audience who always wanted to believe there was something more to me than just the words on the page. “I’m not Noah Larkin or Haddon McCreedy or any of the other characters I’ve created.”
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