Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (3 page)

“I will need them before I leave.”

“Certainly, though it might take some time.” Frank laid his jacket down carefully on the dusty divan and perched like a bird on the edge of it, carefully pulling his trouser legs up before sitting.

“Do you know anything else specific about Verhaeren?”

“Let us see.” Frank pulled out a small notebook from his pants pocket, flipped two pages into it and read, squinting in the dim light. “Age: Sixty-one. Two brothers; one resides in the Congo—Jewish as well, obviously. Father was a member of the Communists. Nothing much else. Oh. No family here. Extensive trade contacts with England and America back in the Twenties and earlier... That is all I have. It goes without saying you are free to search the place. We would appreciate being informed of anything you find, of course.”

“Of course.”

Frank stood suddenly, blowing out a fan of smoke.

“Did you see the menagerie in the back?” His face found the photo grin again when he saw that Bruning had not.

“Oh, this is fine! You will like this. We expect a big turn-out for the auction, after the top men have their pick, of course.” Frank excitedly hopped his way into the dark, rapidly moving through the stacks of rubbish. Stopping he glanced back at Bruning for a moment when he reached the far wall and held out his hand.

“Can I borrow your lamp?”

Bruning joined him and handed him the lamp. Frank opened a small door in the back wall concealed beneath an old tapestry. He lifted the heavy rug out for Bruning to enter the doorway with the hand that held the lamp, its beam playing crazily around the room. When he swung the lamp away into the interior of the room, Frank’s cigarette was the only light visible, a blood-red eye on the shadow that was his face.

The damp room beyond the tapestry was musty and smelled of chemicals. Although he could not pierce the darkness with his eyes, and the light was aimed at the floor, Bruning could sense a cramped space filled with innumerable anonymous shapes. Organic shapes. Immediately he was afraid. It reminded him of too many things. Frank held the lamp up to his face and smiled again, a head floating in darkened space, and Bruning’s hand drifted to the butt of his pistol unconsciously.

Erich’s voice, one which would never speak again, came back to him there in the dark.

“The rendering of the corpse is most important, according to the manuscript. Are you sure you translated this word correctly? The chemicals required are vital. Exact proportions are necessary. Are you listening to me?”

The ghost voice laughed again, and died again, fading off into the real world like whispers of smoke.

“Macabre, no?” Frank giggled. He tracked the light around the cramped room and dozens of sets of eyes reflected back from the dark. Bruning let out a noncommittal grunt, somewhere between fear and surprise and backpedaled, falling down hard on top of something waist height.

“You caught a gazelle, I see,” Frank said and shone his light on the stuffed animal Bruning found himself squatting on. Its glass eyes, dead, glinted crazily in the lamp light. Its fur, once a warm brown, was now a yellow-grey, and one of its horns had fallen out. It was mounted on a finely-made wooden base with a small bronze plaque, and the nails which secured it groaned under Bruning’s weight. He stood quickly, wiping his uniform down.

“Taxidermy, I see,” was all Bruning could manage as he recovered his dignity.

“If anything catches your fancy let me know. Chances are I can get it for a very reasonable price.” Frank handed back the lamp to Bruning and after briskly wiping the gazelle off in a cloud of dust, sat down, lighting another cigarette. “Take your time.”

Bruning explored the narrow room with the lamp, his eyes following its beam as it maneuvered over the dozens of mounted and stuffed animals left to rot in the dark of the dead man’s building. All seemed to be of African origin.

An eyeless ibex was poised in an artificially-coaxed leap, its stuffing spilling from a wound to its torso. A maneless lion, half eaten by mites, held its head, the only thing on it untouched by rot, high and proud, its fake eyes empty and cold. Other animals were less damaged, and some were fine pieces, worth a pretty penny to any serious collector. Back in Germany, to the new aristocracy of the Reich, they would be worth a fortune.

Bruning pushed his way past a single-legged ostrich, almost sending it tumbling to the floor. Behind the first wave of animals, a second sea of tarp-covered shapes filled the darker recesses of the room. An antelope concealed beneath a paint-spattered canvas stared dully back at him, watching his careful progress through the trophies. Another, larger profile turned out to be two small baboons, mounted on a single stand, standing at attention, their humanlike hands delicately held at their sides, like proper gentlemen.

“What is in the crate?”

Bruning’s light had discovered a man-sized shipping crate in the furthest corner of the animal filled room, stepping up to it, crowded in by the many shapes behind him, Bruning could make out the faded English words “Jermyn/England” in the thin blue-white light of his lamp. Closer examination located four other stamps on the box in different faded inks, including port stamps from Equatorville, Rabat and Antwerp, each dated within a five week period of 1913.

“Crate? I did not see it. Another piece of the ‘hunter’s art,’ I should think. We did not even know it was there.” Frank stood and pushed his way forward to see Bruning’s prize.

“Obviously.”

After placing the lamp on top, Bruning gave a solid tug on the frontispiece of the crate, which appeared to have been loosely hammered into position years before, as if it had been opened hastily and just as hastily shut away from the world again. A rusty screech of nails cut through the silence of the room, drawing Frank in closer slowly as Bruning moved the large section of wood aside, carefully balancing it on the head of a long-dead okapi. Within the shadow of the crate something rested, that much was obvious, but the light from the lamp failed to penetrate the darkness of the container. Only visible was the edge of the wooden base with its fine bronze plaque, layered in years old dust.

“What is it?” Frank climbed past the baboons and peered into the shadow of the box.

“A moment.” Bruning retrieved the lamp from the top of the box.

The creature in the crate was kin to man, that much was obvious. More so than anything known to science. Something in the arch of its forehead as it rose over the intelligent wide-set eyes spoke of secrets, of cities, of things mankind thought all its own. In between the time of the first of the great apes and the coming of humanity this thing and its kind had risen and ruled, more than ape, less than man, and had been left in the jungles to rot by its descendants centuries ago. Of all this Bruning was sure. There was no way to question such a belief, it was just there, along with the stuffed beast, the dust in the air, gravity. The truth had come to him in a box in the home of a dead Jew and now could not be discounted. A new horrible fact had plunged into his world, shredding hope and comfort as it fit violently into place, as real as the thing in the bunker at Offenburg that had almost sent him to a madman’s grave.

Standing in a defiant pose, the creature held an arm above its brow heavy head. In its large hand a crudely carved wood club was poised for a blow which would never fall. Its pale white hair, a fine haze of which covered its whole body, was so short that the pink and yellow skin beneath it was clearly visible. In places, bald spots, caused either by poor taxidermy, rot, or nature, left small portions of the beast’s anatomy bare.

The face, contorted in an artificial scream of rage, was broken by an oblong and altogether wide mouth filled with flat teeth like a man’s, over which the thin, long nose ending in a flare of nostrils was perched, too delicate to ever be born of a gorilla. Something in the stance of the beast implied intelligence; the way the club was gripped, the casual ease of the forefinger and thumb wrapped about the haft of the cudgel, the shifted weight of the front and back leg, all of these added up into a very disturbing vision of what the creature would look like seconds before it split your head down the middle and feasted on your corpse. Perhaps these details were little more than the taxidermist’s artistic vision, but Bruning did not think so. It was easy to picture how such a creature could use such a weapon, how it could fashion such a weapon.

Even now Bruning saw them, a clutch of the beasts hunting in tandem in the damp interior of some antediluvian jungle, swinging clubs, using tools, building fires. Perhaps even more.

Perhaps even now, in a world at war.

Frank stepped forward, his eyes shining with something like greed. Leaning down he dusted off the wooden base of the creature and read from the bronze plaque out loud in accented English:

“Male Specimen, Unknown Primate Species, Called Chimbote in the N’Bangu Dialect. Recovered in Thule, Belgian Congo. 1913.” Frank let out a long and low whistle. “Fantastic. I have never seen anything like it. What do you think it is?”

But Bruning could not breathe. A thousand images raced before his eyes, indivisible and fleeting, each more fantastic than the last. The shock of finding the thing in the crate continued to pound a frantic beat throughout Bruning’s fragile mind even as the facts, too many to separate and examine, filtered in past his defenses, causing a million individual ideas to connect in new and dangerous ways. Ways not meant to be contemplated by the sane.

Something inside him snapped and fell away. Thule, Bruning thought weakly, offering up the tiny word in some feeble attempt at defense to the onslaught of unwelcome pictures. Good God, Thule. The birthplace of man. Oh God. Thule. God.

The Thule legend was intertwined in the darkest myths of Nazi racial doctrine. The tradition spoke of a land of plenty inhabited by a fair-haired race of giants—the Aryans, who were destroyed in ancient times by a great cataclysm. Rampant interbreeding with lesser creatures led to the poisoning of the race through inferior blood, and finally consumed the great people, leaving their cities in ruins, overcome by hordes of barbaric half-human beasts, the progeny of their unchecked reproduction. The Ahnenerbe spoke of the Germanic peoples as some last glimmer of the genes which traced their ancestry back to that glorious kingdom. It taught that through careful selection and breeding the German people could become as the ancient Aryans were, physically invulnerable, mentally superior, and morally just. Ironically, Himmler spoke of it often, using the downfall of the Aryans to explain the purging of the Jews and lesser races from the Reich. Why the Aryans had not been “morally just” enough to police their breeding was a question the Ahnenerbe chose not to address.

Many in the Reich believed the remnants of that long-lost land could still be found, hidden in inaccessible places. The bottom of the ocean, the Antarctic shelf, the depths of the Congo...

And now, it seemed, Bruning had found proof of the legend. A proto-human beast which walked like a man.

Frank placed a hand on Bruning’s shoulder.

“What shall we do, sir?” For the first time Frank’s voice was filled with uncertainty. In the unfamiliar situation, he did as any good Nazi would. He looked to the next on the chain of command for direction. All pretense and boredom had bled from him in an instant.

Bruning peered into the eyes of the beast, the yellow-grey irises with their reptilian pupils, as if the answers to his questions could be found there, or some future could be glimpsed in the ghostly reflections on their glass.

“Frank. Do you remember what happened to Verhaeren? I assume you were involved in his ‘liberation’?” Bruning’s voice was solid, stoic and distant—different than before. It was the voice of a man who has buried all he loved and who looks forward only to revenge or death. Frank’s hand fell away from his shoulder numbly.

“Yes, sir. I remember.”

“Every file connected to Verehaeren, these books and the creature will be on a plane to Offenburg tonight, or you too will be ‘liberated.’ This is of the highest priority. Consider it an order of Himmler himself.”

Frank never hesitated and was gone in moments. In his element once more, comfortable in intrigue and death, he moved too efficiently to ever fail. Bruning had no doubt his demands would be met. What else could he do? Shoot Frank and burn the building to the ground? How could he stop the chain of knowledge which would bleed out from this place without ending his own life at the same time? For the good of mankind, all hints of this horror should be erased. But he was a footnote, not a hero. The Reich would have its way with him. If he was lucky, he would die by his own hand.

If not...

Bruning stepped back and sat down roughly, a hitching sob coming from so deep within him he shook like a rag doll. Then it was gone again as quickly as it had risen. He had come to collect one evil and had found two intertwined. Wiping his moist eyes he looked up at the rotted boards in the ceiling and tried to imagine a God who could create such coincidence. One who could construct beasts and man and everything that has ever been, and then put them in place and time, playing the universe like some great instrument, where chance was melody and fate was meter. Some great God floating serene and perfect in the center of everything, causing everything, being everything. But the vision, what he needed, would not come.