In addition to the gold, the beasts brought along extensive information about the stretch of the Cornwall and Dover coasts of England as a “gift of good will.” The creatures informed Weber and his associates that soon, the leader of the Deep Ones would come from far away to make the pact between their underwater nation and the Reich a reality. The report hinted that the leader of the Deep Ones, a being called “Dagon,” was thought by Weber’s team to be planning to to appear in less than twenty-nine days, on the next new moon.
Bruning closed the file and opened his eyes. Beneath the wing of the plane, roads spread out like arteries bringing the cancer of the Reich to the defenseless towns of France. Men, tanks, guns, infecting everything like a disease, turning children into soldiers, metal into bullets. The great engines of the Reich converted flesh into prosperity, at the cost of lives. It was like some terrible machine that never should have been, sprung into existence by its own accord, finding nourishment in death. Around him, in him, Bruning could feel the pulse of that machine. Events too large for him to consider blotted out the world, and as he sat and tried to piece together his part in the charade he realized that soon he would be on that beach. Alone with his secrets, he would see those things as they shambled from the waves in the dark of the new moon. He could see himself there already, frozen with fear—he would stand by as Weber gave the world away to things older than mankind.
Bruning placed the file carefully in his briefcase, which was now bulging with various secret reports from Offenburg. The night before his departure he had stolen everything in the Karotechia files to which he had unquestioned access. How rapidly would those missing files be noticed? Sooner rather than later, he supposed. Within the month he would have to choose—a dash for England with what he had, or suicide. The British would never believe him, he knew, even if he made it past the channel defenses. No one sane would believe a story such as his. But no matter how outrageous it was, it was his story, and he had his part to play.
Bruning would not stand by and let evil take its course again, no matter the price he had to pay. Perhaps he would even live long enough to reminisce about the choices he should have made in the past. But right now, as the plane dipped a wing and prepared to land, the past was a luxury, and all Bruning could see was the darkened blanket of the future as it rolled over everything he had ever known.
CHAPTER 4:
I am part of that part which once, when all began, was all there was
November 20, 1942: Cap de la Hague, France
The smell of the sea air cut into Bruning’s brain like a knife, instantly eliminating all excess thought with the terrible images the smell brought to his racing mind. Something primal and pure called out to him from inside, warning him away from the waves that crashed outside the kleigs on the light-bleached shore. Past the circles of white light in which only he and Weber stood, the beach was painted in the extremes of night; random liquid splotches of white or black, areas of grey, great blank gaps, places his eyes could not see. The beach was too much to take in all at once, but his eyes frantically tried to search every square inch of it in some defensive reflex. His body trembled and his hands shook. He looked on, dumb; frozen like a statue, while his soul shrieked something as deep-seated and intrinsic as the fear of death. He was on the beach, dear God. There was no escape. Above it all, the full moon stared down like a bloated, sickly reptilian eye, unblinking and cold in the frigid November air.
“One in the water!” A distant voice shouted hoarsely from one of the towers, and a cascade of clicks erupted behind him. It took Bruning a moment to realize the soldiers were cocking their weapons in preparation. For what? Perhaps just that—preparation. Silence drifted back in, and only the monotonous roll of the surf as it swept the shore could be heard. But then, subtly intertwined with the breaking waves, another sound. The splash of something walking from the water. Bruning strained his eyes to pick out the shadow of a form from the black beyond the lights, his ears following the indistinct noises of something as it moved out there, but no matter how hard he strained, nothing could be seen. The noise stopped, lost in the dull crash of the surf, disappearing in a heartbeat like it was never there.
Bruning turned to look at Weber, and the look on Weber’s face was so starkly mad, so far removed from any human expression he had ever seen, that he unconsciously took a step back, his boots digging deep into the damp sand. A thousand options reeled in his mind, shaking him to his core. Never organized or realized, they spun on and on as the world continued forward, mindful of only its own pace. To Bruning it seemed he was simply observing as his body performed various preordained actions. It seemed events had taken on a life of their own and no time had passed between the landing at the airfield and the arrival at the Cap de la Hague Camp. How had he come to be here? Why? Why had the Deep Ones called a meeting so early, so far before the new moon when they had never done so before?
“Do not worry. It is not so bad.” Weber whispered to him in a reassuring voice through his madman’s smile, and for the millionth time Bruning wished he had never surrendered his pistol at the gates of the beach. Weber held up his right arm with a skull splitting grin, and slowly turned forward again to face the sea. A shout came up from the camp then, from behind Bruning, so close it sounded like the man was on his coattails:
“Watch the left!”
In the dark behind him Bruning heard the sound of men in heavy gear running up the beach. Why were they running? What was on the left? The questions ran around his brain like a rat in a trap, endlessly circling, eating at his sanity, but their repetition soon was drowned out in the lulling crash of the surf, and he found himself searching again, watching the water, dumbly fascinated. The terror was so real now, so tangible, he was sure he would perish long before he even saw the thing, and the feeling brought with it some small tint of relief. In his chest his heart beat double time. He was positive that it could not maintain such a pace for long. He was almost hoping it couldn’t. A cold sweat had risen, and fallen from his brow, stinging his eyes, but his hands were shaking so much he could not bring himself to wipe his face, for fear Weber, the madman, would see his dread. That the...things would see his fear and feed on it.
How was it that he came to be here? He found with stark amazement he could not piece together the series of the events which led him to this nightmare beach. Everything before this moment had disappeared in the gauzy, indistinct fog of memory.
The next sound was from ahead of them, from near the sea, and it was hard for Bruning understand. There was a thump—the sound of a body dropped on to a wet beach—and then another louder one, much closer. Only when the third noise sounded did Bruning realize the thing was leaping towards them, covering the distance from the waves to the lights like some giant frog. Just like in the report. He thought for a moment he might actually faint, or die, when he saw the thing. His brain was singing, his blood was pounding in his head, every iota of his being was telling him that this was the wrong place to be, the wrong thing to be doing. But somehow, he stood his ground, heady with the knowledge of forty machine guns trained at his back.
He had spent his whole life trying only to get by, and had ended up in the midst of true evil. Bruning had seen strange insubstantial creatures materialize and dance in unearthly colors in the bunker at Offenburg. He had seen scholars kill themselves over the meaning of a single passage in a musty book three centuries old. He had seen the dead rise and walk from the sleep of the grave on black and white film. He thought he knew what he was fighting. He thought he understood what the world was up against.
And then the Deep One was there with them in the kliegs and Bruning knew what terror truly was.
The smell that rose up off it was tremendous, and it brought to mind the fishmarkets of Bruning’s youth. That was all his mind knew to connect to the alienness of the creature which stood before him. His thoughts struggled to push together remnants of familiar things in a rough approximation of the beast, to explain it away as a co
nglomeration of well-worn ideas. Even as it lumbered towards him, Bruning thought of how he and his boyhood friends would skulk behind the stalls on the Elbe and poke at the jelly eyes of the enormous fish snatched from the murky depths of the river. The catfish he had seen there once—a huge, 360 kilogram fish with a mouth the size of his torso and the flat, unforgiving eyes of something terrible even in death—looked much, but not quite, like the creature which crouched before him.
The Deep One squatted comfortably on huge greenish-blue haunches, its bulbous head floating above its glistening torso like some obscene balloon. It had hands like a human, except for the bone ridges evident on each knuckle, the skin flap used for swimming between each finger and the blue-grey tinge of the skin. The mouth flopped open like a busted trap, hanging wide, revealing dozens of sets of small, pearl-white, razor-sharp teeth which hung at random angles, as if they were glued in place by inattentive children. Ridges of bone, spines, and other inhuman features distorted the face further, pushing the edges of what could be considered human proportions to their limit. But it was when you looked at the eyes that the feeling of fear changed to pure, alien terror.
The eyes were awful.
Completely inhuman, those black globes glistened with intelligence. Occasionally flashes of light revealed gold-tinted irises buried deep within their gelatinous lenses. Reflected in them, Weber and Bruning and the stark white lamps of the camp were reversed and distorted to carnival mirror proportions. The eyes seemed to draw everything into themselves, consuming the entire world with a glance. Bruning thought it would be easy to just stare into the glaring alien eyes forever. To lose yourself in them and never, never—
“Hermannweber.” The thing croaked, its voice liquid and rumbling. The glistening red feathers of its gills flashed madly as it inhaled to speak again. It took two ponderous steps forward on its awkward legs, crossing the distance to Weber with its claw outstretched as if to shake hands. As Bruning watched in horror, that is exactly what Weber and the Deep One did. When their palms touched, a sick, squelching noise rose up and it took all Bruning’s self-control not to cry out, to laugh, or to scream at the improbability of the scene which had unfolded before him.
“Claude, this is Hauptscharführer Bruning.” Weber spoke in accented French, indicating Bruning with his free hand. The Deep One, Claude, held fast on Weber’s hand even after they had finished shaking, as if its years in the sea had stripped away all but the most basic memories of human custom. Weber, finally, slowly slid his fingers free from the beast’s grasp, and wiped them on his heavy overcoat, but Claude did not seem to notice. All the while Weber kept his grin, as if it had been surgically implanted on his face. When Claude opened his mouth again a wave of the most foul air Bruning had ever smelt overtook him, and he choked back a wave of nausea as Claude spoke.
“Bruning. Yes. We have much to do, Hermannweber. Dagon has come far to make true our agreement. I am come to work out the ritual. Where is Schwelm and Soldin?” Its French was oddly stilted, but was clear enough despite a severe lisp. Its inhuman eyes searched Weber’s face for the answer, ignoring Bruning completely.
“Called away, I’m afraid. They are off to find more women for the ritual.” Weber’s voice sounded strained as he tried in vain to match Claude’s limitless gaze.
“Good. This is good. We must honor the lord. Bring many others as well, for tribute. Those you have no need for. Enemies of your...race. And females as well.” Claude’s gills worked furiously as he spoke, fluttering in the freezing night air.
“Yes. Of course.” Weber reassured the monster and looked at Bruning in the precise manner of a man going under for the third time—but, somehow, the smile never left his face.
“There will be no...guards on the beach that night. Light no lamp besides. Follow the ritual set forth in The Book of Black Water. Do not deviate from these things or no meeting shall take place. My people have brought these things for the rite...” Claude paused abruptly and tilted his head to the side in an odd manner, seeming to stare off into the night sky. Suddenly the Deep One’s entire body was wracked with convulsive tremors spraying Weber and Bruning with foul smelling, ice cold sea water. As suddenly as it started, the alien reflex stopped and Claude continued his speech, unmindful of his bizarre interruption.
“... at ebb tide on the morrow you will find the stones. Erect them here by the night before the new moon.” Claude unfolded a single spiny finger indicating the center of the Cap de la Hague Camp beach. “Be sure to spill much blood on them.”
And then, without warning, it was gone in a single enormous leap, disappearing into the dark beyond the lights. Despite the evidence before Bruning’s eyes—the odd furrowed footprints in the damp sand, the noxious smell the Deep One left behind—even now it was hard to believe that such things could exist in the modern world. Already Bruning’s memory of Weber’s conversation with the thing was stilted and strange, and his vague impressions were rapidly approaching nothingness through some uncontrollable reflex of the mind. The Deep One was gone—or was it ever here at all? Only seconds had passed since its departure, and Bruning’s mind had almost convinced itself that the incident was nothing but a psychotic hallucination. Then he heard the substantiating splash. From out beyond the lights, the last bit of reality which shattered Bruning’s attempt at self-concealment sounded as the Deep One entered the roaring surf brazenly, splashing out to sea in the dark like a happy child playing in gentle ocean waves.
Weber’s hand encircled his arm and turned him towards the camp, drawing him along as he made his way back up the path to the main building. Bruning followed, stumbling in the sand, numb and without direction, glad to be offered a course of action.
“You see? It was not so bad.” Weber’s voice resonated with triumph, held in check by an undercurrent of fear. Bruning found he had lost the ability to speak. His mouth scissored open and shut in repetitive movements. With a sudden crash the klieg lights were extinguished, and the blue white afterimages blinded him as Weber guided him roughly back up the beach through the wire and gates.
As his vision cleared, Bruning watched as they passed submachine gun wielding silhouettes who saluted on either side—a ghostly gambit, men whose faces when glimpsed in the shadows looked lost and far from home. Bruning wondered, hollowly, if his face held those same scars.
The inside of Weber’s office looked foreign and artificial in the flickering light of the fluorescence. As Bruning sat and gained his composure, Weber brewed a pot of boiling water for tea. Somehow it seemed absurd and unimportant that they had been conversing with an intelligent creature from the lightless depths of the sea less than ten minutes before. But as his body and mind thawed, Bruning realized that all he had seen on the beach was a reality. His mind, braced as it was for the shock, found instead that the understanding of these facts slipped in gently, filtering down to the bottomless regions of his mind like water seeping into fissures in the ground. The knowledge was somehow already there, deep in his bones, and rose up from the black depths of his mind to coalesce with all he had seen.
It was all true.
“This will change all the world,” Weber blurted out, brimming with anticipation. Busying himself with pouring and sorting, Weber finally placed a steaming cup of tea in front of Bruning.
“Yes,” Bruning dully heard himself say. When he reached for the cup, it seemed to take his fingers forever to find the hot porcelain. Weber clapped his hands and rubbed them together vigorously.
“We have much to do before the eighth. I have to get moving equipment in here, for the stones. We can move in some of the Todt construction crews...And then there are the prisoners to consider, with the three trucks due tonight...” Weber spoke to the room, his back to Bruning, sipping at his tea. He turned suddenly. On the wall directly behind him the white skull of an SS banner grinned over his shoulder, mocking Bruning.
“Oh. Would you like honey?” Weber’s face found a mask of concern.
“What?” Bruning stu
ttered, placing his trembling cup back on the table.
“Honey, Bruning. Honey for your tea?”
“No. Oh. No.”
Weber fished out four files from a half foot stack of grey folders and rapidly sorted a small pile of papers from those four folders. “Personnel. Personnel.” He mumbled to himself over and over again as he leafed through the reports.
“It is time to discuss our deal, Weber.” Bruning’s voice did not sound like his own, and the forcefulness of his words felt strange coming from his mouth. It had been some days since they discussed what Weber would exchange for his silence in the apartments in Offenburg, but it was clear Weber recalled their deal.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 6
