Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  It wasn’t the cause of this.

  He turned back to the open sea. The surface of the water was frothing in the heat coming down from above. He needed a better view of the hole in the sky, he needed to see what was beyond! What was coming through? The notion was as insane as him jumping into the rowing boat, untying the rope and grabbing the oars to power himself across to the shallow ridge of black rocks where he had seen the silhouette. It wasn’t rational. It was a compulsion. He had to do this. It was what was needed, for him to be there.

  The witness.

  All the time he kept his eyes on the sky above the bunker where the hole continued to expand. Shouts of alarm were coming from the settlement. Erich pictured the squads of men mobilising under Raske’s command. What would they think when they came to the bunker?

  The furious blister of compressed and repelled sunlight flexed violently. A concussion wave detonated like thunder and echoed off the mountains.

  The air became like a furnace around him, and then hotter still. The sea started to heave, as if it were a giant beast trying to wriggle and turn away from the heat. The paintwork on the rowboat began to bubble and peel. Erich gritted his teeth around a howl of pain streaming from his throat. His hands… his face… burning!

  He rowed on, relentless, eyes fixed on what was now taking shape above.

  The boat nearly smashed apart as it struck the rocks. The impact jarred him, knocked the oars from his hands which were red and blistering. He managed to stop himself from falling backwards. Getting to his feet he stumbled out of the smoking shell of wood and clambered onto the rocks. Heat haze filled the horizon around him. A large wave crashed against the rocks and showered him in a spray of water and foam. It was wonderful! He laughed and staggered up a serrated mound of the black, irregular islet and found a vantage point to observe from.

  The air was becoming cooler. He turned and cast his gaze back towards the shore. The bunker was baking in the furnace heat. The bulging crown of repelled sunlight had shifted forwards, and was now searing the landscape in waterfalls and tendrils of fire. Erich could hear the screams of the men and woman in Svolvær. Soldiers and locals, burning alive. The Order of the Black Sun were not here. The Sami woman had opened the way — she had fulfilled a vast sacrifice for them…

  His eyes were drawn upwards, towards the rim of a shape — it was a sound, a colour, a mass of substance that was not material but… a swirling vortex of the Outer Chaos that smashed against his senses and shattered all his understanding of logic, and perception, and reality.

  The bulk of it was spreading outwards to reveal an inner core…

  The fabric of light and time was shredding apart.

  Something was showing itself. Something was coming through!

  For an unknown reason, he dropped his gaze back to the bunker. A feeling of being watched…

  NO!

  The word screamed from his heat-seared throat and cracked his charred lips.

  NO!

  He stepped to another rock, raised his arm in agony and waved it, warning the figure who stood at the wide slit of the observation gallery. Run! Save yourself!

  The figure just stood there, staring, as if transfixed. The uniform, the modified peak of the field cap… in a singular moment of paralysing horror, Erich realised the figure he was looking at was him.

  He had seen his own smouldering form through the warped lens of time and space. A parody of annihilation, a mockery of insanity. He had witnessed his own fate before it happened.

  Erich stood there as a curtain of darkness swept the sky away, leaving a burning hole of brilliant dazzling light — whiter than white. And he knew that this was the Black Sun. The air boiled but his lungs did not wither. The sea collapsed and then rose up in a heaving wave, but his body was not washed away.

  As the Black Sun peered through the weird hole caused by this cosmic alignment, all light was sucked to the edges — so that every building, and form of landscape appeared to be black framed in dazzling, burning penumbra. Erich stared into the primordial darkness even as his eyes melted in their sockets and the optic nerves fused with the alien energy pouring through them directly into his brain.

  Abruptly as it began, it ended. The stars were no longer in alignment. The way that had been opened now closed.

  His vision remained, despite the lack of eyes. His awareness came through other senses.

  Erich found the boat flung upon the rocks, scorched and encrusted in soot, like his hands, but it was sea worthy. He rowed back. In the bunker there was nothing left. Where there had been the bodies of five men were now smears of a dusty carbon blackness streaked with grease and emanating an acidic smell. Vaguely humanoid forms…. burnt onto the floor like shadows. The same would be found in the settlement. But Erich could not go there to look. His situation was tragic.

  Everything is wrapped in silence. The sea crashes against the rocks without noise. The seagulls wheel overhead with voiceless cries. Looking at his hands, shimmering and drifting like smoke held together by some clever conjuring trick, Erich understands. He is out of time, outside of time, existing in a shattered fragment of the world he was once in, neither here nor there. Locked between a gap in time and space. A shadow bound to exist forever. A shadow of the Black Sun.

  BLOODBORN IN SARANDË

  By Patrick Garratt

  WHILE the sand pressed against Alexio Davies’ cheek was wet, the hand of Lieutenant-Commander Jones had been wetter. Davies fluttered his eyelids as waves lapped at the soles of his boots. The tightening sensation of the officer’s slimy palm on his forearm had faded, as had the pain of sucker welts left on his skin, but neither had been entirely washed away by days rocking in clear Aegean water. Green and black belching screams took him and he found his naked back crushed against olive bark. He wiped pieces of vomit from the papers scrunched at his feet and remained seated as he reeled under blows of recall. Saltwater stains marked the edges of his papers, which he’d unsealed in his skiff as the British cruiser retreated south to brave the Italian cape. Sail east to Sarandë, Albania. Rendezvous with Greek pilot Aristeidis Marinos. Scupper a Yugoslav destroyer before it falls into Italian hands. All wrong. The same paranoia that had guided him to a sand spar three miles north of the intended meeting point pushed him to his feet. He staggered through the dunes lining Albania’s bald coast and away from the sea.

  His plan, as best he could understand it between the blurry fits that forced him into dry ditches to hide, had been to circle back to avoid approaching the target from the beach. His teeth splintered a stick as his limbs shook the scrub. Visions of past glories flitted behind the whites of rolled eyes, the work of Italian frogmen in the Med undone and ships saved. Months ago now.

  His Greek parentage had made him perfect for operating in the region. Once HMS Ajax’s darling diver, Davies had suffered ignominious side-lining thanks to increasingly regular blackouts, and any aspirations of rising through the officer ranks had been locked away with him in quarters. Lieutenant-Commander Jones’s suggestions that Davies should become more involved in covert operations away from the water seemed an obvious solution, but in the days before leaving the ship the diver’s condition had worsened, so much so that Jones himself was the only crew member allowed to enter his cabin.

  Davies removed the stick from his mouth and ran the end of a grimy finger around the circular wounds on his wrists. He waited for darkness and the opportunity to move onto a bluff overlooking the beach without risk of being spotted.

  * * *

  “What’s he saying?”

  Tobacco-yellow spit arched from the communist guerrilla’s blistered lips as he glanced over at Davies. The sleeping Brit writhed over the roots of an ancient, man-shaped olive tree at the edge of the camp, his grey woollen blanket wet with sweat. A scout had nearly shot Davies after happening upon him in a ditch, and was stunned to find the Englishman could speak fluent Greek. Clearly sick and virtually defenceless, Davies repelled the commandos with his white skin a
nd loose pink lips, but his papers checked out. The communist unit’s leader, Aris Zachariadis, paused when Davies told him he was to meet Marinos, then said he believed the Englishman had been deceived. Marinos was rumoured to be working with Germans in the area and couldn’t be trusted. The Greeks exchanged puzzled looks while Davies vomited into the sand. That was half a day ago, and Davies had been asleep in the safety of the camp since sundown.

  “I don’t know what it means.” Zachariadis pulled spiralled hairs from this heavy beard. “I think it’s English.”

  Davies’s twisted syllables dampened the flames of the communists’ campfire and darkened the pupils of the smoking soldiers.

  “What’s wrong with him? Do the English want him dead?”

  Zachariadis flicked the end of his cigarette into the fire, dusting off his puttees as he stood.

  “I don’t know. But we can’t let him meet Marinos and we can’t kill him.”

  “Then what? Leave him here?”

  “No. We’ll take him to the front at Sarandë and hand him over to the British there. They have spies with I Corps. I have a contact who’ll be able to help.”

  Davies kept his bloody eyes turned away from the fire’s light and pulled the edge of the soaked blanket over the blackened, cracking skin above his wrists.

  * * *

  Sarandë lay dark against the soundless sea through Davies’s binoculars. A moss of palm fronds smudged the town’s beach, fuzzy against the rigid lines of two small, moon-picked Allied sub-hunters brooding in the bay. The Greek army had occupied the clutch of white boxed Albanian buildings and donkey carts the previous winter, beating back the Italians after their failed attempt to invade Greece. Coastal support from the British navy had been in vain: the Greeks had failed to press their advantage on land and the Italians had formed a new front. Greece’s I Corps camped to the north of the city, thrusting a wedge of artillery between the port and the Italian placements to the northeast.

  Zachariadis whispered to Davies without taking his eyes from the glasses.

  “We need to go down into the town. I’ll take you to meet my contact and you’ll be taken to a British ship.”

  Davies licked his fraying lips. “No,” he said.

  “What? By God, man, I’ll kill you here.”

  “You will take me around the Greek patrols to the I Corps encampment.”

  Zachariadis swivelled in the dust and reached for his dagger before freezing at Davies’s wet touch. The communist dropped the binoculars. Twenty feet down the hill one of the band’s officers glanced up at the commotion before shrugging and returning to his cigarette.

  “Do as you are bid,” hissed Davies, his fingers sucking up the communist’s crawling skin.

  * * *

  “There.”

  Davies pointed ahead towards a ruined tavern on the edge of the semi-permanent collection of barracks and fires. Thousands of Greek soldiers cluttered the bleached, lunar landscape north of Sarandë. Dusk melted into the netted barrels of Schneider howitzers and field guns, and the scent of grilling meat drifted out over the sounds of complacency, of rattling glasses and card game arguments. The building to which Davies had signalled was set apart from the camp, its roof collapsed and its walls white. Now he looked closely through the binoculars, Zachariadis caught the flicking of coloured lights, as dim as stars, through the tavern’s black windows.

  “What are we doing here?” The communist commander’s face shone with sweat in the moonlight.

  “I don’t know,” said Davies, tears tracing his cheekbones. “I’m sorry.”

  Davies was up and over the escarpment before the soldier was able to reply, the camp’s distant din easily dulling the scuffing of his boots through the dirt. The communists’ number two appeared, flat on his chest in the sand.

  “We must leave,” he said. “If I Corps finds us here we could be shot.”

  “We go nowhere,” said the commander. “Something’s happening. Just make sure you’re ready.”

  * * *

  Davies used the tavern to shield his approach from the encamped Greek soldiers. Faint streamers of green and red leaked from the roof, more obvious as he whimpered across the final feet to the doorknob. A Greek air force officer grabbed him before he fell. Davies swayed on the dusty road, gelatinous liquid dripping from his exposed finger bones. The pilot’s leather face. The cracks in the prison. The black light. Infant screams filled the nursery as his father held him forward as the desperate rays sought their exit, sought their baby key. Snapped shut. His mother told him his father had died testing aircraft over Naxos, that they had immigrated to Britain to escape a past which now reached out and touched Davies on a crumpled shoulder.

  “My son,” said Aristeidis Marinos. “We’ve been waiting for some time. You should have met me on the beach. It would have been easier.”

  The tavern’s main room, wide to the galaxy-scarred Albanian sky and ringing with crickets, proved to Davies an incomprehensible scene. Masked faces and uniforms stretched and collided as he fell to one knee, only prevented from falling to the bar’s creamy Albanian flagstones by his pilot father. A greying man, vampirish in features and dressed in SS uniform bearing mixed, unofficial insignia, hissed at the couple in German then switched to Greek.

  “Get up, Alexio,” he said. “We need you now.”

  Hairless women near the lightless fireplace rocked back and forth, their hands to their bandaged eyes. Davies attempted to rise but found himself glued to the tavern’s floor as if in a dream. Tendrils of glowing red vapours rushing from the women’s mouths to wrap around Davies’s head and neck.

  “Get up,” Marinos said, his hand dragging at Davies’s ruined fatigues. “They’re Norns. They’ve been controlling your dreams for months. They brought you here. You aren’t asleep. Get up now.”

  Davies held up his hands to find them bubbling, their meat falling away to the tavern floor. He turned to flee, but his feet were fixed and he risked snapping his legs. An SS officer, a young senior assault leader, pushed Marinos aside and shouldered Davies’s weight. He spat at the older German in odd uniform.

  “Do it now, Lohmann,” he said, his face taut with disgust. “He’s changing. You nearly killed us all by waiting for his blood, so take it.”

  Lohmann stepped forward and grabbed Davies by the neck, pushing his stinking breath into his melting eyes.

  “My name is Albrecht Lohmann, Alexio Davies,” he said, keeping his grunting voice low to avoid any chance of detection. “I am a devotee of the Black Sun, and you are very special to me.”

  Pleading fingers of black light. Childish screams echoing from the nursery’s white walls.

  “His blood, Lohmann.” The SS Einsatzgruppen officer slapped his hand on the butt of his holstered Walther P38. Lohmann bared his teeth before tearing away an apple-sized piece of Davies’ rotting throat with ragged nails. Black drops splattered the assault leader, causing him to drop back, flapping at his face. Lohmann shrieked with laughter.

  “It can’t hurt you, Müller,” he said. “Your Totenkopfring protects you.”

  Müller flashed Lohmann hate from the floor as he rubbed the silver ring on his finger and wiped the greenish blood from his mouth. Davies grasped as his neck, his world expanding and retracting into the corners of the room, from which leaked six black figures, silk masks dripping down from their crusher caps. They began to groan. Müller screamed from the floor as the blood on his face lurched to life. A chattering red humanoid, a demonic humming bird emitting a bass buzz, hovered before Davies and Lohmann on membranous wings. The SS officer, his face stretched with terror, held up his ring to the imp. The devil’s tiny face chirped in mocking.

  “Is that the bloodborn?” Müller’s voice quavered.

  “Yes,” screeched Lohmann, now unconcerned by the I Corps tents near to the tavern. “And it’s time to free this child.” He pushed Davies to the floor.

  The bloodborn sped into Marinos’s eye, razor wings peeling the area of his skull leadi
ng to his hairline like an over-ripe banana. Jets of blood pissed from the Greek’s face as he collapsed, too shocked to scream. He squirmed in a splashing slick as the imp clattered against his bones, eggs leaping from the tiny monster’s body into his blood to erupt into new demons until a swarm chattered in the tavern’s air above Marinos’s shuddering corpse. When the blood pool was exhausted, a solid mass of bloody evil whirled before Lohmann’s cackling grey mouth. Davies’s whined, his hands now jellified and fingerless, and began to fit on the floor in a pool of slime. Müller drew on his SS officer training and regained composure, arming his pistol as he clambered to his feet.

  “Now, Lohmann,” he said. “Send them to the Greeks.”

  The Black Sun sorcerer used his palms as demonic magnets to push the swarm’s opposite pole through the open roof and into the black sky. The stars and moon were visible no longer.

  Within seconds screaming erupted at the edge of the I Corps encampment. Müller strained as he pulled open the trapdoor to the tavern’s cellar, releasing a dozen SS rank and file. They lined themselves against the glassless windows facing the Greeks with two MG 34 machine guns and a bristle of Karabiner 98k rifles. The room exploded in gunfire, German lead cutting into the line of tents, the nearest of which now stood under a cloud of buzzing red.

  Lohmann grabbed Davies and pushed him flat on his back, his Greek diver’s misshapen skull smacking into the bar’s stone floor. Oblivious to anything other than the destruction of the Greeks, Müller ordered the SS advance under cover of the machine guns. Chaos engulfed the Greek encampment. Tents burned as flesh stripped from bone and automatic weapons blazed wildly at the sky.

  “Now,” screamed Lohmann, barely audible over the endless stutter of the MG 34s.