“I…” began the rabbi; then he took a breath and tried again. “I do not know how it works. The magic is supposed to last for one night, but what happens then…”
“Shit.”
“We need your help,” said the rabbi.
“To help you escape?”
“No,” said Karoutchi, “that isn’t why we did this. We did this to save our families. The Thule bastards have them. Everyone we love.”
“I don’t care,” said Franks. “They’re no family to me.”
“Is mankind family to you?” demanded the rabbi.
“Not all that much, no.”
“You live in the world,” said Karoutchi bitterly. “You have to at least care about your own life.”
“That’ll matter if I go back to my own body.”
“Maybe you will. Maybe all of this is for nothing,” said Karoutchi. “Maybe we have risked the lives of our families as well as our own lives for nothing. Maybe you are nothing more than a monster conjured through black magic, and maybe we’re all doomed anyway.” He came and knelt beside Franks, his face alight with desperate intensity. “Listen to me…you are not the first monster we have made. And you are not the most terrible.”
“The dog, right. You guys keep skating the edge of that but so far you haven’t told me shit about it. What goddamn dog? You’re all some kind of scientists, right? Well, I’ve known some scientists in my days. Mad as the moon. I know that they can cook up worse things than better bombs and mustard gas bombs. I even heard there’s a race on to make some kind of bomb that will blow up a whole city. Imagine that, just one bomb.”
“This is worse,” said Karoutchi.
“Worse?”
All of the men nodded.
“Much worse,” said the rabbi.
Franks grabbed Karoutchi by the throat and pulled him close. “What the fuck did you make?”
He allowed the man just enough air to croak out a few hoarse words.
Karoutchi told him what they’d made.
-6-
Château de Brejean
Margeride Mountains of Lozère
Massif Central, France
April 20, 1943
Franks stood in the rain. He had no nerve endings; there was no skin to turn to gooseflesh in the cold downpour. He stared unblinking into the night sky. Being in this form brought back old, old memories. He remembered things he had long wanted to forget. Damn those skinny bastards for doing this to him.
Damn everyone here.
The shed was hard against the edge of the fence, fifty yards from the closest watchtower. Strange dogs walked up and down between the fences, but they did not bark at him or raise a cry of alarm. Why would they? He was made of mud and stone and the roots of trees. He was nothing to them. Not yet.
The guards in the tower swept the spotlight back and forth, and Franks stood silent and still as the light passed over him. They did not see him because he stood close to the shed and he did not look like a man. If it hadn’t been raining, maybe they would have spotted him. He doubted they would understand what they saw. Not until it was too late, and even then, maybe not.
The light passed by and Franks began walking through the darkness toward the château. It was a large, sprawling house that had belonged to an aging vintner and his family. The vintner was dead; so were his wife and their sons. The two daughters worked in the house, cleaning it, trying not to be noticed by the monsters in black uniforms. Trying, but seldom succeeding.
The thought of the dog troubled Franks.
Not in terms of his own safety, but in how such a thing could change the course of the war. If the scientists were telling the truth. If they were not exaggerating, or perhaps all driven mad by the horrors of what their lives had become.
The Dog. The hound. The whatever-the-hell-it-was.
Karoutchi and the rabbi had given it a name. La Bèstia de Gavaudan.
The Beast of Gévaudan. Franks had heard of it back when he was running with the Hessians. He’d had an arrangement with them that he could kill anything unearthly, but his path never intercepted that creature. As he moved toward the house, he pulled details of the tale from the back closets of his mind. The animal’s species was never determined, and theories ranged from an oversized gray wolf to a tiger someone had imported from Siberia. However because most eyewitness accounts described something houndlike, the members of the Thule Society referred to it as a dog: specifically Hitler’s dog—Der Führer Hund.
Whatever the thing was, the beast was undeniably bloodthirsty, attacking more than two hundred people and slaughtering one hundred and thirteen and badly injuring forty-nine. These attacks began in the summer of 1764 and lasted. Examination by officials sent by the King of France found ample evidence of savage teeth and claws, and many of the victims had their throats torn out. The beast not only killed and maimed, but the remains showed that it partially devoured them. Some dog, thought Franks. The creature had staked out a hunting ground that stretched fifty by fifty-six miles. The locals government and constabulary were unable to stop it and so King Louis XV sent soldiers, nobles who had reputations for trophy hunting, groups of armed civilians, and a number of royal huntsmen. Many of them died, too. The killings went on, despite the slaughter of many large wolves, and then abruptly stopped when a local hunter named Jean Chastel shot a massive wolf on June 19, 1767. Legend held that Chastel brought the creature down with a silver bullet and that when he cut the thing’s stomach open, human remains spilled out.
That was the legend. Most such stories are lies stitched together with a slender thread of truth. The full reality was even more disturbing than the legend, though, which was something that was becoming increasingly common. The world was bigger, stranger, less safe and far less sane than he had thought, and that was saying quite a lot considering Franks’ own complex and troubled origins. Most days he was the worst monster he could think of. Now there was this damn thing.
He flexed his hands, feeling the “bones” made of oak root and stone beneath the muddy skin. Would that be enough to take on a creature like that? It was flesh and bone, sure, but also more than that. It was alive, and that technically meant that it could bleed. Whatever could bleed could die. The math, at least, was in his favor.
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Bare knuckles against something like that? Empty hands against something the scientist slaves of the Thule Society had labored over for two years? Going unarmed against a creature that was designed to slaughter whole platoons of highly trained and well-equipped soldiers at a time?
“Well,” he said very quietly to the night, “should be interesting.”
He kept walking.
The closer he got to the house, the more lights spilled unhelpful illumination down through the rain. He began moving in a zigzag pattern, dodging light in order to not have to dodge bullets. Not because he thought those rounds would hurt him, but because the noise would do him no good at all.
The last patch of open ground was the U-shaped gravel turnaround in front of the main steps. Two guards walked slowly back and forth, their jackboots crunching on the crushed stop, their slung machine guns barrel down and partly covered by the gleaming rain ponchos they wore. Franks studied the guards’ pattern and picked his moment. There was a single point where they crossed each other on each of their forward and backward passes. He waited until the next one and then went for them, crossing fifteen feet of open ground at a dead run, his footfalls partly muffled by rain and by the sounds of the two patrolling guards.
One of them caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye. He gasped, eyes going wide even as he pivoted, began raising the weapon, letting his poncho fall away, mouth opening to shout an alert. All of that happened in half a second.
Which was a quarter of a second too long.
Franks slammed into them, his bulk smashing them backward and down, his massive fists crunching into their faces. Blood and bits of teeth flew into the downpour. Franks heard one neck break. He felt
the whole front of the other man’s skull collapse inward. The impact of the rush sent them skidding and sliding over the gravel and when they stopped, neither moved. Not so much as a twitch.
Franks stood for a moment, startled at the effect of his punches. In his real body he was powerful enough to kill with a single blow, but he had destroyed these two men. They lay in rag-doll sprawls. Franks considered taking their weapons. The Nazis were assholes but they made excellent firearms. His fingers were much thicker than his true ones and he doubted he could squeeze one through the trigger guard, and that was a goddamn shame. Going in guns blazing might be fun. Unchain some hell on the Thule commanders and their thugs and then go looking for the beast. Looked down at the two clenched fists of this new—hopefully temporary—body. Mud and root, packed dirt and rock. Three jagged pieces of teeth were deeply embedded into his unreal flesh.
Then he bent and pressed both fists into the ground, onto the gravel. He punched the ground once, twice, a third time, driving the sharp stones more deeply into his knuckles with each impact. Then he rose and examined his work. The knuckles and backs of both hands were gloved in fragments of razor-sharp rock.
He nodded slowly.
He turned toward the house.
“Here, doggie-doggie,” he murmured.
-7-
Château de Brejean
Margeride Mountains of Lozère
Massif Central, France
April 21, 1943
The house bells were striking midnight as Franks entered the big house.
Between the turnaround outside and the entrance foyer, he had encountered five guards. They were stationed well apart so that they could command a useful view of the porch, the entrance, and the hall. Franks respected the threat posed by trained sentries, but he also knew the malaise that often came upon them from boredom. This château was too remote, too well protected, too overstaffed for there to be any credible threat, even with the likelihood of an Allied invasion of France sometime this year. Summer, perhaps, or the fall. It was inevitable but it had not yet happened, and so these guards had allowed themselves to become dulled by the monotony of guarding an installation so remote and secret that no one knew about it.
Franks made them pay for that inattention.
One by one, with fists of stones and crushing hands, he made them pay. He was quick, he was silent, but he was not nice about it. Not one of them got off a shot…nor a scream. The storm muffled the sound of smashed skulls and crushed throats. There would be a time for something louder, but not yet.
Franks never lost his smile. His monster face seemed to enjoy that smile, which felt strange because Franks rarely smiled, but now it seemed frozen there. Once he caught sight of himself in a hallway mirror. He was a heap of a thing, with features from a nightmare, eyes that blazed with actual fire, and a jack-o’-lantern grin.
Nice.
So nice.
Karoutchi and the rabbi had drawn a map for him in the dirt floor of the shed and Franks had memorized it before the running rainwater dissolved it. The laboratory was in the basement, which had once been used as a dungeon for prisoners during the Reign of Terror. Of course. Where else would someone build a monster except in the dungeon whose very nature was defined by slaughter. The Thule master must have thought it an appropriate joke.
Joke’s on them, mused Franks as he killed another guard and took his keys. The guard slumped down to the floor, legs and arms twitching, head twisted around as if to look for a way out. There was none.
The fifth key he tried opened the door, and as soon as be stepped onto the top step, he could smell it.
It.
There was no other way to describe the scent. Franks had been all over the world, from the cold forests of Russia to the steamy jungles of South America. He’d hunted humans and animals of every kind, but nothing smelled like this. Not a great cat, not a wolf, not a bear or a lion.
Nothing.
He drank in the scent with whatever strange senses had been gifted him with this new body. He could smell the paint on the walls, the iron in the nails of the stairs, the different kinds of wood used to build this house, the glue on the wallpaper, the coppery stink of blood. He smelled more and was aware of more than ever before, and on some odd level, he could identify each and every scent. But nothing in that catalog of odors put a name to the thing that was downstairs.
It gave him pause and for a moment he lingered at the top of the steps and wondered whether going down there was such a wise idea after all. What would happen if it truly was the unstoppable weapon the Thule masters had wanted? What if this hund von Hitler was something even he could not fight?
He flexed his fists.
“Fuck it,” he told the night.
And went down.
-8-
The Dungeon
Château de Brejean
Margeride Mountains of Lozère
Massif Central, France
April 21, 1943
There was a greasy yellow light at the bottom of the stairs and the sound of men speaking in low tones.
No. Not speaking.
Chanting.
Franks paused halfway down the stairs and listened. Male voices, but not speaking in either German or French. He strained to hear and grunted in surprise. The language was something very old and he only caught fragments of it. Words he’d read in old books and had seldom heard spoken because the language was a dead one. It was Sumerian, the language of ancient, lost Mesopotamia.
The words he caught were the names of old gods: Ereshkigal, the name of the queen of the underworld; and Ninurta, god of war.
Each time their names were mentioned there was a sound. Not a response, and not from a human throat. When Ereshkigal’s name was mentioned, there was a purr that was long, deep and almost sexual. When Ninurta was mentioned, that purr changed to a rumbling growl filled with hate and hunger.
Franks understood now.
The Thule-Gesellschaft were probably all insane but they were far from fools. They had to know that the war was lost and, when it was over, the whole world was going to bend Germany over a barrel and take turns. Justly so. Hitler’s mad dream had ruined Europe and nothing would ever be the same again. It couldn’t be. The Nazi tacticians had made too many critical errors. Trying to eradicate the Jews, turning on their Russian allies, pissing off the Americans and British…and a laundry list of other offenses. The invasion of France was coming. The end was coming. And so, wisdom had given way to desperation…to more bad choices.
Instead of trying to form new alliances or rethinking their military strategies, the Thule Society had looked elsewhere for a weapon. They had looked backward in time to cultures long dead, they had looked in shadows, they had stepped down into the outer rings of hell. When tanks and soldiers and bullets would not stop the incoming tide, they had made a monster.
Franks came down the last few steps and peered around the corner into madness and horror.
There were thirteen members of the Thule Society. They were naked, their bodies painted with cabalistic and alchemical symbols from half a hundred faiths. The Egyptian ankh and medieval roaring lion, the arrow of Artemis and the dragon of China, the Norse lightning bolt of Odin and the Arabic hamsa. And many others. Combinations of letters and numbers, runes, the elements, and parts of spells. The only one Franks did not see was the swastika, which he found amusing. More spells and symbols were painted on the floors, the walls, and on both sides of a heavy circle of salt that had been carefully laid around the thing to which they bowed and chanted and prayed.
The beast.
“Oh, shit,” said Franks.
He said it just a little too loud because caution had been smashed away by shock. The chanting stopped and every head whipped around toward him. All thirteen naked priests of Thule. And the massive head of the beast.
For beast it was.
Not a dog at all. Never a dog.
It was more like a great bull, at least in size, though it was the most m
assive thing he had ever seen. A bull in shape but as big as an elephant. A pair of massive horns arched over its misshapen head and below them were eyes as red as flame. A mane hung from its neck, but instead of hair, each strand was a wriggling worm with a fanged, gaping mouth. The chest of the creature was massive and deep, with rippling muscles and plates like those of an alligator, but darker and flecked with black and red. The body was tattooed with swirling stars and planets and burning comets as if to suggest that its power was infinite. Instead of hooves, the front legs ended in thick paws from which sprouted claws as long as bayonets. Everywhere he looked he saw lines of stitches, old and new: the marks of radical surgery that had been commanded by madmen and carried out by the damned. Karoutchi and the others had been forced to create an abomination. It was a perverse brand of science Franks knew all too well, though he had thought that his own misshapen form—the one that lay drowning in Paris—was the most fearsome example of that kind of insanity. He was wrong. The body of this beast was an affront to everything holy and sane.
But its face…
That was so much worse.
Even Franks felt a thrill of awe when he stared into that face. It was shaped like a bull’s but the teeth were like spikes of polished steel and from them dripped a clear drool that hissed and burned into the stone of the cellar floor. The monster threw back its head and uttered a roar that was the loudest sound Franks had ever heard. It was like a solid blow that plucked him off his feet and slammed him into the wall of the stairwell. He hit, rebounded and fell to his knees.
The Thule masters were scattered like leaves by the roar, but they scrambled back to their feet. They gaped at Franks with shock as great as he felt at seeing the monster, and he could understand why. After all, he was not something they had ever seen before.
One of them, obviously the leader, pointed to him and uttered a single word. He spat it with mingled horror and contempt.
“Golem.”
Then he turned and looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see the shacks of prisoners and spoke another word.
The Monster Hunter Files - eARC Page 35
