by P. W. Child
Chapter 26
Lita had sent Dr. Gould back to Edinburgh to be exchanged for the Vision of Kvasir. In the High Room of the fortress on Dùn Anlaimh, she paced up and down the length of the room in the mid-morning light. The clouds occasionally drifted apart enough for the sun to peek through, changing her hair from a dark hue to a luminous crimson that bled down to the small of her back. And then, as if her tresses conducted electricity, it would glow and dim, glow and dim with the change in the penetrating light from the vast eastern window that overlooked the water and some of the deserted wet landmass.
“Before I remunerate you, Prof. Lockhart, I want to show you something,” she said without looking at the old man sitting by the round wooden table next to the wall. He watched the tall woman walk from one side to another and back again, immersed in something written on an old time rusted document. The letterhead was that of The Order of the Black Sun and its footer, the Swastika.
“Certainly,” he said and folded his hands over his lap. As an expert on arcane, rare and antique literature, he was always eager to investigate newly discovered material. Professor Røderic had been a client of his since the 1960’s when they met at a symposium in Berlin. Throughout the years, both being members of Ahnenerbe, Lockhart had assisted her diligently in obtaining abstruse material, esoteric literature and most often, illegally traded scrolls from ancient finds not yet catalogued.
“Now that we have procured the vial I went through so much trouble, and men, to get,” she bragged, “I am wasting no time in setting this search in motion. As soon as Slokin returns with the Vision of Kvasir,” she stopped in her tracks and looked at him, “you will be drinking from it, my dear Hermann.”
Lockhart swallowed hard and sat forward in the grand chair. He turned his head sideways to better hear her repeat it, “Excuse me?” He was in disbelief.
“Oh come on, Hermann, you know you want to see where it is.” Lita laughed spitefully, sounding like a spoiled, little girl who played a cruel trick on a friend. She clapped her hands rapidly in glee and pulled up her nose at him.
“So do you! Why don’t you drink it? I am too old for such nonsense. Besides, if it works, my geriatric heart might give in with that poison in my blood,” he whined, not at all afraid of her intentions, but instead vexed by her erratic decision making.
“Oh, stop bitching, Hermann. I’m just as geriatric as you are,” she admitted her age and he was not at all surprised, being one of the few living people who knew what she really was. “Besides, I have to lead the hunt for Valhalla. I can’t be going in and out of trances the whole time. It will have to be you.”
Hermann sighed and sank back in the chair. He dreaded expeditions, being a man of solitude who preferred the indoors. This trip, wherever it would take them in the world, would be the death of him. He loathed travel, especially hiking or taking on rough terrain. Being surrounded by musty documents in small rooms with high ceilings where the only movement was the trickling dust particles illuminated by window lit sunshine – that was Lockhart’s world. That was as far as he was interested in finding Odin’s great Hall of the Slain and whatever bestial wickedness was trapped within.
Lita lit a cigarillo and flicked the hem of her long blue velvet dress walking on the Persian carpet which covered the stone floor. Hermann marveled at the manner in which she moved, so effortlessly, so youthfully.
“Now, I have a good reason for taking you with. After all…” she snickered with a playful wink, “…you are the expert.”
“On paper, yes,” he protested, but she hushed him.
“No, listen to this. You are, according to this memorandum, the best man for the job,” Lita insisted. She sat down and smoked while she held the yellow paper up in the light to read it to him. Lockhart had no idea how she could possibly merge an old Nazi document, with his significance, in drinking poison to induce visions for her to use as a map to Valhalla. But he always humored her and so he poured a sherry and gestured artfully for her to go ahead. As, Lita started reading Professor Lockhart felt his heart stop and his adrenaline rendered him weak in the chair where he sat turning white as a sheet at the scab Lita picked.
“Ahnenerbe Section 16A, blah blah blah. We herewith wish to report on the suggestion by Bruno Schweizer to travel to Iceland, as he had previously undertaken. Blah blah has reason to believe that Iceland harbored considerable treasure pertaining to the research on Aryan heritage as conducted by the Ahnenerbe,” she raised her eyebrow at Hermann, who kept his poker face well intact. She continued heartily, “Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and founder of the institute should be notified of any discoveries directly relating to the possible location of unknown weapon blah blah. This is the weapon I am looking for, Hermann.”
“I understand that part, my dear. Still, what does this have to do with me being the unfortunate inebriate?” he asked impatiently, perfectly aware of the damning information in that document he was certain she already perused. Therefore, there would be no need to keep her reading it any farther.
“You are so impatient,” she smiled. It was an evil smile and they both knew that she had Lockhart by the proverbial balls for the rest of his life.
“Hurry up, I have other engagements,” he sighed nonchalantly.
“Alright, I’ll skip ahead,” she said, bursting with excitement at what she wanted to reveal she knew. “Then it tells here of how a secret expedition to Iceland was undertaken, secretly funded by a few elite members of the Ahnenerbe, but….wait for it…without the knowledge of Himmler and his administration!” Her face was now just insufferable, distorted in a childlike expression of surprise that was simply meant as patronization. “Apparently an SS officer, um, Obersturmführer Hans Krieger, undertook this trip to Iceland after finding a remnant of Viking treasure, reportedly originating from the tribes of Odin. Then it says this officer took with him a woman and her son, while her younger daughter was left in the care of the SS as surety. You see,” she said, amused, and turned to face Lockhart straight, “they needed to know that the woman who knew where Valhalla was, would not take them on a wild goose chase lest her young daughter be fed to the gas chamber!” Lita laughed. “Genius, isn’t it?”
Lockhart shrugged, “Age old insurance tactics.”
“Now this is the best part,” she continued, and Lockhart felt his heart rate increase. “While her son was left similarly, at the hotel, the woman reportedly was forced to take the Obersturmführer to the site of which he wrote down the coordinates and continued to pry his way into the sacred place. But while he was in Iceland, his colleagues discovered his ploy and so the SS sent a killer to track him,” Lita indirectly read from the document.
Now and then she looked up to see if Lockhart was becoming uncomfortable yet, but he remained unresponsive. She may have thought his straight face was for his attempts at denying what he knew, but in truth he was again caught in the dreadful reminiscence of that painful long past incident and he hardly heard what Lita said anymore. He knew the story. He knew the ending too.
“Anyway,” she carried on with zeal, “when the killer came to the hotel he only found the boy, so he took him to point out the location…”
Her voice faded into the background, babbling away, complete with her theatrics. Lockhart remembered that day. It was mid-December 1940 and he was so cold. He was hungry too, because the officer did not care about anything other than going to the place where Odin held council. His mother and the Obersturmführer had been gone for hours and he recalled how concerned he was for her life. And rightly so. As he sat in the passenger seat of the old automobile, the killer was navigating the sleet-covered road with, Hermann pointed to a burial mound his mother had shown him as a small boy when they were there for a tribute.
There was the Obersturmführer’s car, but nobody was there. The assassin told him to stay in the car because it had begun to snow. Hermann never forgot the dead blunt silence in that car while he waited for his mother to emerge from behind the mound.
The white blanket of snow fell like feathers from the cold sky and impaired his vision. Finally, two figures emerged. Hermann was delighted to see his mother unharmed and she walked alongside the killer. Hermann felt his tears come as he recalled that day, but he did not care. As his mother smiled and waved at him, the assassin pulled out his pistol and shot her in the back of the head. The old man pinched his eyes shut as the moment of the impact blossomed in front of his mind’s eye and a tear severed from his lids fell on his sherry glass.
The sight of his mother’s face bursting open in a mess of bloody bone and lumpy matter had haunted him for years and here it was once more revisiting him. It was an atrocious vision to see. He remembered how he felt when it happened – so lost, his loss and grief overwhelming any fear he was supposed to feel for the killer. As, the man lifted the barrel and pointed it towards the windshield, something drove Hermann to leap from the car and dash away in the falling curtain of snow. Shots rang and he could hear a bullet whistle near him, but he ran until his legs were like lead, his chest burning fiercely and his wispy gasps forming in front of his face. As he raced past the black protruding tree roots and charged over the sharp rocks that punished his shoe soles, Hermann’s sobbing resounded inside his head.
His ears were covered by the woolen flaps of his knitted hat and he only heard his own heartbeat and the sound of his weeping. It was as quiet as it was inside that car while he ran and in his awful loneliness the lack of exterior sound made him feel as if he was all alone in his own universe of pain and sadness. Surrounded by the white woods, he cried harder with every step forward. Then he heard it.
A horn sounded through the woods. He stopped, but his heart kept running. As Hermann listened for the origin of the sound, it came again. In the cold white oblivion of his flight, the haunting sound of a whispering horn permeated throughout the trees. The teenager had heard this sound before – at the tribute they attended when he was little. He knew what that sound meant. The Brotherhood.
They had trailed Frau Brozek on her trip as involuntary accomplice to the Obersturmführer and watched the tragedy unfurl before they could swoop down on the intruder who had kidnapped one of their league. Without hesitation, one of the women put an arrow through the killer’s eye and then they continued to collect the body of the murdered Obersturmführer. Both men were never seen again and the vehicle was found deserted a few miles down the road without fuel.
All this happened at the time when the British had invaded the neutral country of Ireland. German nationals still present on the island were all being rounded up to return to Germany. One of these was one Bruno Kress, a German researcher funded by the Ahnenerbe who found the boy anxious and terrified while out on an embankment nearby, speaking to a local shaman.
After a shocking account of the incident, the teenager fainted. Irritated by his story, Kress decided to lug the boy along with him under pretense that he was an orphan assisting Kress with his field work. Hermann was past the worst memory now and his eyes dried. He remembered how Kress was incarcerated on the Isle of Man and it was here that their paths separated. By some stroke of luck brought on in the wake of a spate of misfortunes, the unfortunate and bewildered Hermann Brozek was adopted by a British lecturer of Anthropology in Kent, Margaret Lockhart.
In 1955, Hermann heard that Kress had eventually published his Grammar of Icelandic in East Germany. Apparently, Kress later worked for the East German Staatssicherheit, but Lockhart never saw him again.
His mother’s involvement in The Brotherhood cost his sister her life back in Warsaw and for many years, Herman Lockhart felt unbridled guilt for her death. It was a terrible fate she suffered while he was off in the United Kingdom, growing up as a free citizen. His sister never even knew of The Brotherhood, or Ahnenerbe, or even the heritage of her bloodline, yet she died for it. An innocent dying alone, not knowing whether her mother and brother were ever coming back for her; it ripped his heart to shreds when he thought on it.
“Hermann!” Lita’s rasp slit his ears, “Are you listening?”
He nodded.
“So, since you have been there before you are the lucky drinker.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Why would you challenge me?” she asked, suddenly shifting into her intimidating self. In fact, she was taken aback by his indifferent reply.
“Look, since you know so much about me, is it not obvious that I would not want to revisit that place? Besides, when I was there, I saw nothing magical about it. It was a heap of snow covered dirt like a million others in the northern countries, for pity’s sake. There was no door, no temple, no great hall, and certainly no sign of any powerful presence. Nothing,” he explained, while he had to admit to himself that he truly did not know what was on the other side of the mound in that terrible place where he saw his mother die. There could very well have been an access tunnel, or some grand lock or key, perhaps a throne of rock and iron - he would not know.
Lita stared at him with a look of disbelief. She reckoned he still thought he had a choice. She guessed that he still did not figure out that he was not getting paid for Nina’s abduction unless he helps her locate Valhalla. She imagined that he did not realize that his life was now in peril if he dared disobey her order.
“My dearest, dearest Hermann,” she smiled and rose to her feet, abandoning the old document to the floor, “if you don’t take me to Valhalla, the Order of the Black Sun will learn of your treachery before you finish that sherry.”
Chapter 27
Gunnar finished his call a slight distance from Sam and Nina who were waiting outside the yacht club house. Sam looked at Nina, who was leaning against him. Her eyes were empty, although she did respond to his fingers on her brow with an almost inaudible sigh, blinking her eyes at his touch.
“Nina, what did they do? You have to tell us,” he said softly, doing his best not to apply even the mildest stress to her. It was imperative that they found out what happened to her while she was detained in the talons of the redhead, Swastika eyed witch.
Gunnar came over with a determined gait, a steely look, and something reminiscent of excitement in his face.
“Come, we have to get going. Lita is leaving her fortress in two hours. She is going on an expedition to find Valhalla and we have to get there before she does,” he rambled hastily as he flicked on his helmet and mounted his bike.
“Wait! Wait! What?” Sam protested, pointing at Nina behind her head with a puzzled expression.
“Don’t you worry about Dr. Gould. We’ll sort her out when we get to the Serpent Stone,” Gunnar replied as he sucked in the last of his cigarette and flicked the butt between his middle finger and his thumb.
“The Serpent Stone?” Sam asked. The leader of the Sleipnir boys did not reply. Deafening, his motorcycle roared as he revved it and nodded, urging Sam and Nina to get on their bike and follow. Nina said nothing, but she was coherent and responsive, which brought Sam some relief. He felt his chest well with warmth as her petite arms wrapped around his body and met on his chest. He could feel her body press against his back in a tight embrace and it made him feel strangely safe, even in all this madness of life threatening chaos they were now plunged into.
The two motorcycles wove through the streets of the city, across the lanes, not speeding, but moving swiftly through traffic. Eventually, they turned onto the open road south and made their way towards the countryside. Flanking the road was dense forest, broken only by the occasional narrow dirt path escaping into the main road. Sam could feel Nina’s head resting on his back and he silently wondered what exactly had befallen her while she was at the mercy of the Black Sun’s main bitch.
It infuriated him, not only that they got their claws on his best friend, the woman he had successfully hidden his feelings for over a long period of time, but also that he was in part responsible for her taking. It killed him to know that he elected to get drunk instead of running her errand in due time as she had requested. Had he just done as he wa
s supposed to, he would have been with her when she received that ill-fated phone call. He would have gone with her to the cemetery. He would have…he would have saved her from the trauma that followed, whatever it was.
Now and then, Gunnar would grow small ahead of them as he sped forward and Sam would remember to give the accelerator a bit of a challenge to catch up. He had no idea what the Serpent Stone was.
‘Knowing these lads it’s probably a temple. Serpent Stone. What the hell is it? I know, it sounds like a shrine. Oh god, not another shrine. I’ve had my fill of those last time in Tibet,’ he thought, his ponderings taking up most of his concentration. It made the trip feel shorter and before he knew it, Gunnar’s turn signal flashed right.
They meandered along a canopied trail, slowly navigating the hobbling road. The area seemed deserted, however the road appeared well traversed. Various track lines lay embedded in the shallow moist soil, proving that the path had had been travelled quite recently. Ahead of them, around a slight bend in the road, a small building came into view. Brick and tile met a roughly tarred area in front of it where two vehicles stood parked.
It was a small makeshift parking lot and when they pulled into it, Sam saw a gritty, rusty sign crown the roof. It was intended that way, not at all damaged, but ground away on the edges for ornate value to look old and worn. From the grated edges and the deliberately faded paint, there emerged Celtic motifs, beautifully intertwined, twisting like vines into circular coils. In the center of the sign, written in calligraphic perfection, the words Serpent Stone Tattoos.
‘Ah!’ he thought. ‘I did not see that one coming!’ Sam smiled in amusement at the constantly surprising things Gunnar and his clan introduced them to. When they stopped next to Gunnar he could see that same determination in the man’s face. It made Sam wonder if Gunnar ever smiled.
