Many in the Reich believed the remnants of that long-lost land could still be found, hidden in inaccessible places. The bottom of the ocean, the Antarctic shelf, the depths of the Congo...
And now, it seemed, Bruning had found proof of the legend. A proto-human beast which walked like a man.
Frank placed a hand on Bruning’s shoulder.
“What shall we do, sir?” For the first time Frank’s voice was filled with uncertainty. In the unfamiliar situation, he did as any good Nazi would. He looked to the next on the chain of command for direction. All pretense and boredom had bled from him in an instant.
Bruning peered into the eyes of the beast, the yellow-grey irises with their reptilian pupils, as if the answers to his questions could be found there, or some future could be glimpsed in the ghostly reflections on their glass.
“Frank. Do you remember what happened to Verhaeren? I assume you were involved in his ‘liberation’?” Bruning’s voice was solid, stoic and distant—different than before. It was the voice of a man who has buried all he loved and who looks forward only to revenge or death. Frank’s hand fell away from his shoulder numbly.
“Yes, sir. I remember.”
“Every file connected to Verehaeren, these books and the creature will be on a plane to Offenburg tonight, or you too will be ‘liberated.’ This is of the highest priority. Consider it an order of Himmler himself.”
Frank never hesitated and was gone in moments. In his element once more, comfortable in intrigue and death, he moved too efficiently to ever fail. Bruning had no doubt his demands would be met. What else could he do? Shoot Frank and burn the building to the ground? How could he stop the chain of knowledge which would bleed out from this place without ending his own life at the same time? For the good of mankind, all hints of this horror should be erased. But he was a footnote, not a hero. The Reich would have its way with him. If he was lucky, he would die by his own hand.
If not...
Bruning stepped back and sat down roughly, a hitching sob coming from so deep within him he shook like a rag doll. Then it was gone again as quickly as it had risen. He had come to collect one evil and had found two intertwined. Wiping his moist eyes he looked up at the rotted boards in the ceiling and tried to imagine a God who could create such coincidence. One who could construct beasts and man and everything that has ever been, and then put them in place and time, playing the universe like some great instrument, where chance was melody and fate was meter. Some great God floating serene and perfect in the center of everything, causing everything, being everything. But the vision, what he needed, would not come.
Instead he heard the way Erich’s knuckles had rapped on the floor when they retrieved his body, saw the pattern and spray of blood on his wall, sticky with brain and bone, smelled the shit and gunpowder.
From their respective places, each of which had been preordained in time, the animals looked on, mute. Dead. Waiting for the outcome of events over which they had no control. They waited to be moved or burned or sold. But most of all, they waited. Although he did not know it, Bruning waited, too. He held his head in his hands and spoke aloud to the darkened room.
“Oh, Erich, they will not stop until we are all ‘liberated.’”
A hundred silent eyes looked back, flat and unimpressed.
CHAPTER 2:
Hard studies all, which have cost me dear
November 12, 1942: Offenburg, Germany
“You do not understand! We are very close!” Oberscharführer Hermann Weber shook the table when he stood, outraged and red-faced, his lanky form casting scarecrow shadows on the walls of the cramped room. He looked like a grieving father, unable to cope with the concept of the loss of a child, eyes frantic with fruitless worry, hair prematurely grey from trying to turn back time by force of will alone. The papers spread on the table noted only death and expenditures. The pictures showed pretty French beaches strewn with bodies. Naked women washed up like driftwood, eye sockets emptied by the hungry sea.
“You have not been dismissed, Weber. Sit.” Standartenführer Eduard Kitt had expected such a reaction. Weber had put more than two years of his life into his Project Black Water out on the coast of Normandy. In that time one of the group’s researchers had been lost and more than three thousand of the lesser races thrown into the sea as offerings to Weber’s so far elusive species of water-dwelling humanoid. But the orders were from Reichsmarshal Himmler himself and Kitt had no choice. Restructure, consolidate, limit. The greatest secret the Third Reich held was preparing for the invasion of Fortress Europe. The Karotechia—as the group to which Kitt, Weber, and Bruning belonged was known within its ranks—would not be taken by surprise. The Karotechia would ensure that if the Reich were subsumed by the enemy, it would take the world with it in one final, all-encompassing blaze.
“I see nothing here to indicate any change since your last report on the ninth.” As if to illustrate the point, Kitt leaned forward and glanced at the photographs, eyebrows raised expectantly. Distinguished, haughty, and cruel, his face was that of a disgruntled headmaster. Kitt’s eyes tried to muster compassion when he looked back at Weber, but fell short. Instead he looked only bored and tired.
“Oh, but sir, I have seen them! They have sung to me and my men! I...uh...I have a wire recording. We must follow the protocols set down in the book or they will not meet with us. It is like taming an animal. It takes time...
“We have plaster casts of their footsteps on the beach, and...and even a scrawled note in the sand in Greek.” Weber shuffled madly through the papers on the desk, as if his entire argument depended on just this one thing. He held a photo up, showing large and sloppy Greek characters scrawled in the sand. They were written facing the water, and the footsteps surrounding them did not look...right.
“Bruning? I am not lettered in Greek.” Kitt looked to the small man, lumped in a chair like an inanimate object. When the photo was placed in front of him, Bruning glanced up like a fighter considering taking the fall. His eyes narrowed as they flitted over the image. When he finished reading his head lolled down, as if he was beset by fatigue.
“It says: ‘Soon.’”
“You see! They will come to parlay with agents who offer them ‘the token of blood,’ as it says in the book. We will rule the seas through them! Think of it. Three quarters of this planet controlled by an ally of the Reich! The British and American fleet sunk without engagement! All I need is some more Jews, Russians, or what have you—”
“Weber, I understand your difficulties, but the orders from Wewelsberg are clear. We must bring your research team back to Offenburg immediately to prepare. You are just consuming too many of our resources.” Kitt picked up his hat and folded the documents into a billfold in a sweep of his arm. When he looked up again, all expression had left his face, as if he had forgotten what they had been speaking of. He glanced down again, unable to meet the intensity of Weber’s gaze. When he spoke again it was in the controlled voice of a bureaucrat.
“You are, however, free to continue your experiments for the time being and are not needed here yet. We all still have high hopes that your project will prove most beneficial to the Reich, but your allotment of equipment and men will be reduced greatly.” Kitt glanced over at Hauptscharführer Karl Bruning, whose eyes, bloodshot and half closed, wandered about the photographs on the table in some sort of daze, like his thoughts were somewhere else, somewhere far away.
Weber hesitantly sat back down and slowly placed his hat on the table.
“I understand. It will take some time to disassemble the operation.”
“Yes. I will send Hauptscharführer Bruning here as an advisor, to make sure things run smoothly. You have until March to close up the project. Then back to Germany for the meeting of the group at Wewelsberg. You may go now.”
Weber ambled out of the room, hat beneath his arm, his face as foul as the weather had been the past few weeks in Offenburg. Outside the rain continued unabated, and over the sounds of
typewriters and talking from the main hall, a telephone rang endlessly.
“There, Karl, what did I tell you? A well-earned rest. A vacation on the French coast!” Kitt stood and patted Bruning on the shoulder consolingly.
“Why am I being kept from the Thule investigation?” As he spoke, Bruning picked up a photograph from the gruesome assortment on the table, of a naked woman who lay sprawled on a beach. Her arms and legs were thrown wide in unsymmetrical positions and her head was decorated with seaweed and foam. In her mouth, which hung open like an unhinged door, a small crab was crawling about, content. Her eyes and eyelids were gone, leaving shiny pink sockets which seemed to look in all directions at once.
“The group thinks it best you get some rest. You are too valuable for us to lose.” Kitt stood and began collecting the photos and papers, nimbly arranging and stacking them into a neat pile, avoiding Bruning’s gaze.
“Like Erich?” Bruning handed over the last photograph.
“Strohm lost himself and we both know it. Go away, Karl. Get some rest.” Kitt snatched the photograph and closed it within the bulky file. He handed it to Bruning in a forceful way, as if he were physically pushing away all responsibility for Project Black Water in the simple movement.
“Study it. Talk to Weber about travel arrangements. I think he leaves Wednesday.”
“Good night, Eduard.” Bruning collected his things in slow motion and drifted to the door. He looked very old.
“How can I help you, Karl? What is bothering you, really?”
Bruning turned back slowly with his hand on the door knob and placed his hat carefully on his head. “About the Thule investigation—how is it going?”
Kitt smiled as if he had just solved a nagging problem.
“Oh! Is that all. You are worried about your pet project, yes? Things could not be going better. We have made great headway. Himmler gave it over to Standartenführer Andries, Stephan Andries, the man who located the von Junzt—but what is wrong, Karl?”
“Nothing.”
“Your face just then...”
“It is nothing, Eduard.”
“Get some rest, Karl. Get some rest and come back for the meeting a better man. Enjoy the seaside.”
Bruning shut the door carefully, leaving Kitt and his world behind. Since the return from Antwerp his distance from the group had grown, despite his new proximity to most of its membership. The stuffed ape-creature and the books recovered from the Gestapo had disappeared after a brief meeting with a group member unknown to him when his plane had landed in Offenburg. Congratulated, but held at arm’s length, he had even enjoyed a gift from Reichmarshal Himmler himself, a first-edition copy of The Birthright of the Aryan Race, personally signed by the great man. Bruning had burned it, still in its lavishly wrapped box.
There was little for Bruning to do at the institute, separated from Offenburg as it was. To the members of the group, the former Girls’ Academy would always be known as “The Old School”; to outsiders it was the Institute for Ancestral Research. The sprawling walled grounds and luxurious buildings, erected by the local aristocracy at the turn of the century, were turned over to the SS in 1938 by order of the Chancellery. It was only later, during the formative days of the group, that the Institute was fabricated as a front behind which its researchers would congregate and study. Today, inside its doors, at any given time over fifty researchers tore apart the ancient books of man in search of alien science.
It was here Bruning began his career with the group. In 1940, after his induction from the regular ranks of the Ahnenerbe SS, he had come to the quaint little institute to search a book called Unaussprechlichen Kulten—or Nameless Cults—for codes and ciphers hidden within its pages. What they might contain the group did not say, but during his work on the horrible tome it became obvious to Bruning that the group knew what it was searching for, and that, indeed, there were messages and codes hidden within. He had become nothing more than a useful tool.
Bruning tried as best as he could to ignore the contents of the book. It was not his responsibility. But the writing had bled through his defenses, and even to this day haunted him in dreams. The mad man responsible for the book’s creation, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, traveled all over the world collecting the filth with which he composed his accursed magnum opus. He died in Dusseldorf in 1840, found rent to pieces by animal attack in a room locked from the inside. Apparently von Junzt succeeded in his search for power, but was finally devoured by the physical manifestation of his lusts.
Of the five-man team which transcribed, scrutinized, and searched the book for ciphers, Bruning was the only one he knew of still in service within the group. Of the missing scholars, only the suicide of Erich Strohm was known to him. The others simply had been slowly separated from him during the project, never to be seen again. Since the project’s completion in April 1941, clearly delineated by the suicide of Strohm, Bruning had seen none of his fellow scholars. He longed for their contact, people who had shared a similar misery and grief, who had also read the damnable book. He longed to find them and sit with them and talk of secrets. But it was best not to ask questions of the group. It had a reputation for giving very final answers.
The disappearances and the consolidation of the group’s researches were an indication of much larger events within the Reich. To any who still believed that Germany would be victorious in this war, the call from Himmler to Wewelsberg came as a final blow to their thinly-sheltered certainties. The elite of the German elite were coming home to prepare to end the world, if the need arose. And they would not have been called back if such an outcome were not a distinct possibility.
Worse yet, Bruning considered, only the Reich knew of these terrible secrets. Only the twisted affectations of Himmler’s quest for Germanic medieval history had led to these discoveries, and no other country on the Earth had enough madmen in power to promote such inquiries without public outcry. The Allies would overrun the Reich with their enormous strength and resources, and the Karotechia would end the world with a power the Allies couldn’t even hope to conceive of. It was this thought more than any other which robbed Bruning of any hope, robbed him of the belief that perhaps things would work out after all, that it would all be all right in the end.
In his heart he knew that the group, if called upon, would do this final thing without question.
Bruning stepped out into the rain, walking briskly towards his apartments through the puddles and leaves, trying to shake off the dire turn of his thoughts. Above him the electric lights flickered to life, illuminating the dull grey dusk with bright white brilliance. Off to the west, near the main gate, a military car pulled in, driving slowly up the cobblestone drive, flags flicking in the wind. Bruning walked faster, turning his back on the scene of German efficiency, and trotted up the steps of his building, retrieving his keys from his valise.
Inside the warm common room two young SS men played a game of cards while listening to the soothing din of the radio. Their jackets neatly folded on the sofa indicated their lesser rank and Bruning rushed past them, ignoring the specifics about them, what they looked like, who they were. It mattered little if the world would be coming to an end and they were of a lesser rank than he. They stood anyway, the two, as he rushed past them and up the stairs, but they did not follow. As Bruning retreated to his apartments, he heard their muffled laughter from beneath his floor, echoey and indistinct.
The bolt slid home. It made him feel a vague and artificial safety.
The mirror on the door threw a reflection back at him which his mind registered as that of a stranger. Black uniform, empty features, gaunt cheeks. He no longer thought of himself as a person, as a thing capable of projecting a reflection. It seemed now that he was more simply a figment in other people’s imaginations. He was here because they needed to believe someone like him would be here. They read what they wanted into him.
He followed his routine, removing and hanging his jacket over the mirror and placing his boots in
the hallway for shining. Outside the window the upper limbs of a swaying oak tree played in the wind while the rain fell, heavier than before. Bruning turned up the heat in the rooms and sat on the bed, which offered up a muffled shriek of springs in protest.
Directly in front of him, where he had placed it moments ago without a thought, was his holstered pistol, hanging casually off the back of an old wooden chair less than two feet away from his head. It hung there, silent and heavy with fate.
Trying to empty his mind of the images he found behind his eyes, Bruning sat for a long time.
After a while, something in the room changed. Slowly Bruning leaned forward on the bed as the wind shrieked outside. As if of its own volition, his hand found its way to the reassuring butt of the pistol. With a slow, dull hiss, the Walther slid from its holster like a snake shedding its skin.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 3
