Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (95 page)

 
          
There
was no choice. There might be another way in to what lay beneath the house, but
Colin did not have the time to find it. Steeling his resolve, he stepped inside
the cabin of the elevator and pressed the single button.

 
          
The
doors closed. The elevator began to descend. The drop seemed to go on for a
very long time; guessing, Colin would estimate the descent at as much as thirty
feet, implying a substantial underground structure tunneled out of the raw
earth by some unknown feat of clandestine engineering.

 
          
The
doors opened. He was in a broad antechamber, with paneled walls and indirect
lighting. The carpet beneath his feet was the same deep scarlet as the one at
the Cincinnatus Group, with the addition of a heraldic phoenix woven into its
center in vermilion and gold. Directly ahead were a set of massive metal doors,
their brushed bronze surfaces gleaming in the soft light.

 
          
The
doors were ornate and cyclopean, in such mad contrast to the house above that
for a moment Colin's senses reeled. On their surface, armed and armored
knights stood facing each other in alert ranks beneath a swastika sun, raising
their arms in stiff salute to the dawning of a new day. The rays of the sun
spread from it like the wings of an eagle, and the bird-shape was visible
behind the burning disk of the sun.

 
          
The
money it must have cost to do all this. And all in secret,
Colin found
himself marveling.
It's like something out of a James Bond film.
The
thought had a certain dreadful wonder to it. How many people besides Colin had
ever seen these doors?

 
          
How
many had passed through them never to return again?

 
          
With
something approaching reluctance, Colin pushed at one of the doors. It did not
move.

 
          
Colin
looked around. There was no place else to go: at one end of the room was the
elevator, at the other, the doors. Forward or back.

 
          
He
felt over the whole surface of the doors, looking for something that would show
him the way in. He found it at last in the shield of one of the knights: its
shape was raised higher from the surface than any other shape on either door,
and its edge was sharp. Colin tugged at it, and the shield swung up like a box
lid.

 
          
1
don't see why I ought to be surprised. Our German friends were great ones for
silly gadgets.

 
          
Beneath
the shield lay a smooth black circle, obviously a lock. In the center was a
hole in the shape of a cross. Colin took out his pocket flashlight and shone it
into the opening. Tiny pin-shapes gleamed in the depths
—
the mechanism of a lock that
could not be picked.

 
          
He
took the crucifix from his pocket, holding it by the chain. He looked again at
the pattern of holes on the back, the reason for them suddenly plain. This was
why Rowan had kept it
—
because it, too, was a key.

 
          
The
cross fitted perfectly into the cavity, as if they had been made for each
other. He pushed, and felt the whole mechanism sink into the door a fraction of
an inch. There was an audible click. Beneath his fingers, Colin could feel the
door mechanism waken into life. The doors swung inward. The pendant pulled
free, swinging like a pendulum at the end of its chain. He put it back into his
pocket, wrapping it fastidiously in his handkerchief first.

 
          
There
was darkness beyond. And suddenly, with a hiss and an uprush of interrupted
sound, the lights went on. Colin caught his breath, staring out into something
he had never expected to see again in this life.

 
          
A
round chamber, its size impossible to calculate, its domed ceiling echoing the
groined vaulting of gothic cathedrals. In the center, a circular firepit, dug
deep into the rock. Surrounding the firepit were twelve High Seats, each with
the device of a medieval hero carved into its back, and hanging over each, its
battle banner.

 
          
But
the devices were the wrong ones
—
not the ones he'd been taught
—
and the illusion of
Wewelsburg, of Wolf's Lair, faded. The illumination here came from hidden
lightbulbs, false as a stage-set. This was not one of the Nazi Order Castles,
where the mad religion that Hitler and Himmler had fostered between them had
been forced to malignant flower. This was some inexact recreation, built by men
who had never seen the original. Whatever crimes had been done here, Black
Magick was not among them. Feeling vaguely cheated, Colin stepped inside and
walked down the steps.

 
          
The
room was not as big as it first appeared
—
its grand dimensions were a
trick of lighting and forced perspective. His gaze swept over the glittering
suits of armor that lined the walls of the room. Behind a drapery depicting
more racially-pure rural glories, Colin found a door marked Private in
consciously-quaint gothic lettering. It was locked, but yielded quickly to one
of Colin's skeleton keys. He opened it and went inside.

 
          
It
was a den, an obvious retreat for Hasloch and his particular cronies. The walls
were lined with books of a far less benign sort than had graced the library
upstairs. A door led out of the library off to the left; this one was not
locked. Colin opened it and found himself in a small office containing a desk
and file cabinet. There was a woman's purse on the desk.

 
          
Colin
opened it, searching quickly through it to find the wallet. He opened it.

 
          
Rowan's.
Here was hard proof at last that Rowan was here
—
or had been here, alive,
recently enough for whoever had taken her purse to have left it lying here on
the desk. But where was she? This office was a dead end.

 
          
Conscientiously,
Colin searched through the desk
—
the file cabinet was locked and would take him too long to
force. The desk contained a number of interesting items: a .45 automatic, a
block of hashish, several thousand dollars in cash, and a manila folder filled
with glossy professional pornographic photos that contained certain famous
faces.

 
          
By
now Colin had a certain idea of what went on here at The Hallows. The old
soul-sickness of the
Armanenschaft,
certainly, but something more
cynical and modern as well. This was a safe house for the indulgence of
terrible appetites of all sorts, all carefully recorded and noted by its
master, Toller Hasloch.

 
          
And
that would explain the curiously theatrical look of the
Temple
: it was, as its appearance
had suggested to him at first, a stage-set. Nothing real at all.

 
          
But
no matter what else Hasloch was, in his own monstrous fashion he was sincerely
devout. There was
—
there must be
—
a second
Temple
.

 
          
He
went back to the study, still carrying Rowan's purse. A little experimentation
located the secret panel that let a section of the bookcase swing out.
Boys
and their toys,
Colin thought sourly. He dragged a chair over to prop the
bookcase open and went down the short narrow passage, caught halfway between
hope and dread of what he would find.

 
          
Another
room, this one very modern but a dead end all the same. It contained a console
with a bank of screens showing the elevator, the Temple through which Colin had
entered, the driveway
—
empty, not that he had expected anything else
—
and what looked like a
couple of opulent party rooms. There was a slot beneath each screen for a
videotape; it wasn't hard to guess what they were used for, nor what use was
made of the tapes of the activities there.

           
Exhaustion pulled at him like a
subtle poison, telling him he was reaching the end of his strength. If it had
been at all possible, he would have left and returned another day, but there
was no prospect of that. His entrance had probably been recorded on one of the
cameras that Hasloch seemed so fond of; alerted to Colin's presence, Hasloch
would easily guess his purpose and move Rowan.

 
          
Or
kill her.

 
          
Colin
was not certain where the conviction that Rowan was still alive came from:
stubborn perversity, perhaps. But he knew as well as he knew the Light Itself
that to abandon the search without absolute certainty
—
to leave a fellow soldier
in enemy hands
—
would be a treason he could not live with. Better to die
here, today, than to survive on those terms.

 
          
Die
on your feet or live on your knees? There's only one true answer to that, unpopular
though it's become. , . .

 
          
The
entrance to the second
Temple
was in the show-temple
itself, behind a sliding panel opened by a mechanism hidden in the back of
Hasloch's marble throne. Colin hammered the golden crucifix between the door
and its track to jam the mechanism open, then started on his way into the dark.

 
          
The
passageway went from finished stone, to brick, to raw bedrock with wires and
pipes running along its surface. The corridor narrowed, and the roof sloped
until it was only scant inches above Colin's head. When he opened the plain
wooden door at the end of it and saw the Rune-Christ hanging on a floating
panel suspended before the wall, he was overcome with a feeling of nausea and
relief combined. His intuition had not failed him.

 
          
Unwilling
to enter the room unless he must, Colin glanced around from the doorway.
Indirect lighting washed over the ceiling from some concealed source. The
twisted tortured figure
—
perhaps the same one that had hung in the basement in
Berkeley all those years ago
—
hung upon its ashwood cross above a black stone altar,
surrounded by the paraphernalia of High Magick. The walls and floor were simple
slabs of concrete, not gilded marble, but the chamber had a power that the
finished, theatrical stage-set Colin had left behind lacked. The stench of
what was done here was almost palpable, as much an assault upon the senses as
the discovery of a mass grave.

 
          
There
were rings
—
iron rings, cast in the shapes of serpents
—
set into the head and foot
of the black altar, and its surface was marred as though something had spilled
there and then dried. Three walls were solid. The fourth was covered by a long
red velvet curtain.
Up to his old tricks,
Colin thought to himself.
Gritting his teeth, he walked across the chamber to the curtain and yanked it
back.

 
          
Open,
the curtain nearly doubled the size of the room. Colin saw a light switch set
into the wall just beyond the curtain, looking strangely prosaic and homely in
this unnatural place. Colin flicked the light on, and stepped back, wincing at
the sudden dazzle of illumination as overhead fluorescents stuttered into life.

 
          
In
the center of the room stood a long surgical table with thick leather straps,
with a cart of gleaming instruments beside it. There was a drain set in the
middle of the floor, its bright metal discolored just as the altar had been.
This was a clinic where only the blackest medicine was performed.

 
          
Everything
on this side of the curtain was bright and clinical, with racks of metal
shelving ranged along the concrete walls, yet it was also a seamless
continuation of the medieval cruelty of the altar with its tortured image. The
walls were lined with shelving that held the tools of the trade: there was a
battery with cables, lengths of rubber hose; incense and oils shelved beside
syringes and bottles of drugs. In the unforgiving light Colin could see
everything here clearly: the implements of sorcery racked beside those of destruction.