This would never have worked on Earth, of course, but we were all a long way from home.
Molly swooped in to join me, flying under her own power, her long white dress rippling around her. She was laughing and whooping with glee, her face alive with uncomplicated joy. She always was a great one for being in the moment, and also clearly happy to finally be doing something. She moved in close beside me, grinning widely, and then rolled over onto her back and crossed her legs casually.
“Show-off,” I said.
I glanced to my left and to my right. Droods filled the silver void all around me, falling at increasing speed on their various wings. Some had golden support struts like living biplanes, while others had formed actual birds’ wings with sculptured golden feathers. Some hadn’t bothered with wings at all; they streamlined their armour and threw themselves at the castle like projectiles. They were already far ahead of the rest of us, and at the speed they were going it seemed to me there was a good chance they’d punch right through the roof, through the castle and out the other side. I admired their ambition, but I was determined to be more cautious. If only because I couldn’t believe the castle was utterly without defences.
The flying machines were all over Schloss Shreck now, sweeping back and forth and opening up with every weapon they had, blowing holes in the outer walls and whole chunks off the battlements. They buzzed the castle like angry wasps while the golden Drood army closed inexorably in on its target. We got in really close . . . before gun emplacements opened up the length of every wall, and huge guns with terrible long barrels took aim on us, all of them blasting away in a massive broadside, slamming into the targets laid out before them. They’d been waiting for enough of us to come within range. Droods in their armour were protected; but the flying machines weren’t.
The autogyros went first, blown out of the void. Their engines exploded in clouds of black smoke and steam, and lovingly maintained fuselages were raked with bullets. Many of them burst into flames. Golden pilots were flung from their doomed craft, clutching helplessly at nothing as they fell into a void without end. They were still alive, but we had no way of reaching them. I wondered how long they’d fall, and how long they’d live. . . .
The Spitfires banked and rolled at incredible speed, blasting away at the gun emplacements, but they were too few against too many guns. The bullets couldn’t broach the planes’ force shields, so the castle produced guns that fired strange energies that crawled all over the Spitfires, opening up holes in the shields for the guns to fire through. Some exploded, some lost power and some spiralled away into the void like wounded birds. The remaining Spitfires saw there was no point in pressing the fight any longer and turned away, plunging into the void to rescue the fallen. Strictly speaking, they shouldn’t have done that, but family looks after family.
The energy guns then targeted the flying saucers, and they exploded silently one after another in sudden outbursts of unnatural colours.
The rest of us fell on Castle Horror, drawing in our wings to add more speed, but bullets and vicious energies still found us, beating against our armoured breasts, unable to break through. We fell like Furies and hit the castle roof like a rain of golden ammunition. Solid stone shattered under the impact of our golden feet, and many of us ploughed right through to whatever lay below. Some manoeuvred sideways at the last moment and swung round to hit the castle walls dead-on. There were huge stone gargoyles and stylised stone eagles everywhere, and they made good handholds. Soon we were swarming all over Schloss Shreck, opening up holes in the roof with our golden fists, scrambling over the walls like golden beetles, ripping guns out of their emplacements and throwing them into the void.
New weapons fired up through the roof, hitting us with unfamiliar energies. Some were blasted up into the air by the impact; others were knocked off their feet. Droods staggered this way and that as vicious energies crawled all over us, fighting to get in. But our armour held.
I smashed a hole through the roof until I had an opening big enough to drop through. I jumped down into the dark, and I was inside Schloss Shreck. Molly dropped down beside me. None of the attacks had even come close to touching her. We’d arrived in an attic full of junk, most of which I kicked out of the way as I hurried through it, looking for a way down into the castle proper. I could hear more Droods forcing their way in. Molly grinned at me like a naughty child trespassing somewhere she knew she wasn’t allowed. Behind my mask, I couldn’t help smiling, too. It felt good to be striking back at the enemy at last.
I found a trapdoor and a ladder that led down into a wide stone corridor, and soon we were moving swiftly along the castle’s upper floor. Solid stone walls, marble floors, all on a big enough scale to make mere humans feel small. A heavy quiet hung over everything like a shroud. Everywhere I looked there was Nazi regalia: huge flags and hanging banners, blocky black swastikas, eagles with grasping clawed feet, even giant portraits of stylised Aryan youth and soldiers from the 1940s. It was like moving through a museum to history’s worst nightmare, a paean of praise to Hitler’s Nazi Germany: the centre for a celebration that never happened. Molly sniffed loudly.
“Been a while since anyone redecorated here.”
“Nothing’s changed, because this is when the Satanists were a real power in the world,” I said. “This has all been preserved from when they last had a chance of winning. Satanists have always been strangely sentimental. They love the past because that’s when they were what they think they should be. Do me a favour, Molly. All this Nazi shit is getting on my nerves. Do something destructive about it.”
“Love to,” said Molly.
She snapped her fingers, and every single flag and banner burst into flames. The sound of crackling fires was pleasantly loud in the quiet as Molly and I strode cheerfully down the burning corridor.
We descended through stone galleries, wide passageways and long, curving stairs, until finally we found ourselves in a great open hall. Still no sign of anyone. We moved slowly forward, my golden feet hammering on the marble floor. In the middle of the hall lay a large circular table surrounded by what could only be described as thrones. The walls were hung with idealised portraits of men in medieval armour, in symbolic settings. All of them bore swastikas on their breastplates and shields.
“Hitler and his inner circle always did have this strange fascination with tales of King Arthur and his knights,” I said. “Surprising, really, given they had absolutely no understanding of chivalry. Der Führer was supposed to have a layout like this somewhere under the Berchtesgaden . . . like a twisted Camelot. Which would actually be a really cool name for a new indie band.”
“We need to keep moving,” said Molly. “I can feel Isabella’s presence not too far from here . . . but I’m starting to feel something is terribly wrong.”
“Then let’s go find her,” I said. “Lead the way, Molly.”
She turned back the way we’d come, leaving the hall behind us, chose a new direction without hesitation and started down it. She set off at a fierce pace, her face creased with worry, and soon she was running down the corridor, her arms pumping at her sides. Driven on by an urgency only she could feel. I ran alongside her, my armoured feet scarring the marble floor. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another Drood since I entered the castle, and I couldn’t even hear any sound of fighting or destruction. I reached out to the Sarjeant-at-Arms through my torc, but couldn’t get an answer. Presumably the castle was jamming our communications. I tried Ethel, but I hadn’t heard a word from her since we entered the Timeless Moment. Presumably she was still back on Earth, haunting the place where the Hall had been, waiting for our return. I wondered how long she’d wait. . . .
We went down and down, from floor to floor, until we were forced to a sudden stop by two massive solid-steel doors that blocked our way, twenty feet high if they were an inch, and almost as wide. I pulled at one of the doors, and it didn’t budge at all. There were three separate locks, each the size of my head. I grinned behind my mask, placed both golden hands flat against the doors and pushed hard, till my golden fingers sank deep into the steel. And then I pulled. . . . The three locks exploded, one after another, and Molly had to duck behind me to avoid the pieces that flew through the air like shrapnel. The doors surged outwards under my implacable strength, and when I finally had a big enough gap I let go and walked between them into a hall greater than any I’d seen so far, overwhelmingly huge, hundreds of feet long, full of the strangest collection of weapons and machines of war I’d ever seen.
“I thought we’d come across something like this,” said the Armourer.
I spun around, startled. Molly jumped and made a loud squeak of surprise, and then tried terribly hard to pretend she hadn’t. The Armourer was standing there, in his armour shaped like a lab coat, of all things, looking around the hall with great interest. I slapped him hard across the shoulder, and the sound echoed loudly.
“Sorry,” said the Armourer. “Impossible to communicate in this unnatural place. Still, you have to admit this is really impressive. This is where the Nazis stored all their secret superweapons that were going to win the war for them. All the things they never got a chance to use, because Laurence shut the place down and trapped it here. Look at it all. . . . I’ve read about some of this, but never expected to see it with my own eyes. Prototype flying saucers, massive drilling machines to enter a city from underneath, tanks the size of railway engines, and look at that! A lightweight wooden airplane, to cross the Atlantic and drop their crude nuclear bombs on New York and Washington.”
“A balsa-wood airplane?” said Molly. “Oh, come on . . .”
“Howard Hughes built something similar for the Americans,” I said. “The Spruce Goose. Never put into production, but it did fly. . . .”
“All right, I’ll give you a wooden plane,” said Molly. “But Nazi flying saucers, in the forties?”
“Word was the Nazis had access to a crashed alien starship,” said the Armourer. “Some of the best Nazi minds broke their hearts trying to reverse-engineer it. Imagine trying to build a stardrive with vacuum tubes and slave labour. . . . Still, who knows what they might have achieved, given time? They nearly had the atomic bomb before we did. They were getting desperate enough to try anything towards the end. I don’t even recognise some of the things they’ve got here. Oh, Eddie, we have got to take this back with us! This is all of major historical importance!”
“First things first, Uncle Jack,” I said.
“I have to find Isabella!” said Molly. “She’s in trouble; I know she is. . . .”
“Of course you must,” the Armourer said immediately. “Lead the way, my dear.”
And so off we set again, hurrying through one oversize passageway after another, all of them built to impress or at least intimidate, until finally we found ourselves facing another closed door. More solid steel, with the word
Verboten
etched deeply into the metal. I kicked it open and we hurried in . . . to find ourselves standing at one end of a long, narrow hallway full of strange equipment, all of it covered in a thick layer of ice. Row upon row of tall glass cylinders stretched away before us, disappearing into the gloom, each thickly crusted with frost. The overhead lights came on one by one as we stood there, revealing more and more cylinders fading off into the distance. Each one had a blocky equipment panel at its base, sparkling with its own layer of hoarfrost. I moved in close for a better look. It was all blinking lights and heavy levers, and handwritten labels in German. The Armourer moved slowly down the centre aisle, trying to look at everything at once. Molly stayed with me, shivering and hugging herself.
“It’s freezing cold in here. Even after all these years. What were they doing?”
“Storing something,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “I wonder what. . . .”
“Specimens of some kind?” said Molly, fascinated despite herself.
“Cryogenics chambers!” said the Armourer. “Crude, but functional.” He leaned in close to one cylinder, brushing the ice away with his forearm. “Animal species . . . of a kind.” He looked at the control panel. “My German’s a bit rusty, but if I’m translating these labels correctly, what we have in these cylinders are . . . werewolves, Nosferatu, dragonkind, changelings . . . and a whole row of cylinders marked ‘Alien.’ I think this was some crude first attempt at bioengineering, presumably inspired by whatever they discovered in that crashed alien starship.”
“Can you tell what species the aliens belong to?” I said. “We may need to contact someone’s embassy.”
The Armourer cleared more ice from a cylinder and took a good look at what was inside. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t recognise this. Which is interesting . . . because I could have sworn I knew all the aliens allowed access to this world.”
“They were creating monsters in here,” I said. “Typical Nazis. Were they trying to create some new form of shock troops, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” said the Armourer. “Or perhaps they were . . . experimenting. They did so love to experiment. On things, and people . . . Welcome to the House of Pain, Dr. Moreau.”
“Can you make any sense of the control panels?” I said.
“No,” said the Armourer regretfully. “Too technical.”
“Hold it,” said Molly. “You want to wake these things up?”
“I was thinking more about putting them out of their misery,” I said.
And that was when the whole place shook, and the lights flared up brilliantly as though hit by a power surge. All the cylinders began to moan and vibrate in place, humming loudly like so many glass tuning forks. Whole chunks of ice fell away to shatter noisily on the floor. Frost on the instrument panels began to steam and melt and run away. It became increasingly possible to see what was inside the cylinders, and I soon wished I couldn’t. Too many things that should never have existed, made from pain and horror. This was nothing natural about any of them; they were patchwork things, horrible combinations of man and animal, shaped into living nightmares. All slowly waking up. Mouths opened, revealing jagged teeth. Fingers opened and closed, clutching at nothing, or tapped and clattered against the inside of the cylinders. Eyes opened, full of pain and rage and madness.