Strindberg's Star (35 page)

Don undid the hinges of the Masonite and pushed his way into the passage that led to the cozy compartment of the sleeping car.

I
t still smelled stuffy in here, like old sleep, and he fumbled his way through the darkness until he managed to turn on the porcelain lamp above the lower bunk.

In the soft light, he could see that everything was as they had left it about a day ago: the crumpled bedspread and on the small nightstand the open laptop. Prints from his boots were visible on the wall-to-wall carpeting, and now he unlaced them and sank down on the bunk with his head in his hands.

When he returned to the memory of the shadow clambering on the wall and Eva Strand’s faltering body, the gravity of her situation finally got to him. Her desperate waves for him to get away, and how she had disappeared, dragged into the darkness of the hotel.

Don reached across the computer keyboard, and it hummed to life with a whispering whirr.

He felt the points of the
seba
star in his inner pocket, above a small, folded piece of paper. The shoulder bag’s tempting pantry full of chemical calm … But there was no time for sedatives now, nor could he just throw himself down on the bunk and close his eyes
forever. Instead he turned his eyes to the monitor, which had finally woken up.

D
on tapped in the codes he had once taught attorney Eva Strand, which led to the server that stood in a concrete room under the deserted station at Kymlinge. The idea had been that they would both be able to communicate with Hex if something unexpected happened. And this situation was not a development that Don had counted on, in any case.

When he made contact with his sister’s server, the smiley face lit up, and the corners of its mouth indicated that Hex was actually home this time.

But when the happy face had died away and he entered his sister’s mirrored desktop, nothing looked the way it usually did. Instead of a crucified Microsoft CEO there was only a black window in which a lone white cursor was blinking in front of an arrow-shaped bracket:

>_

Don’s tongue was dry as he listened for sounds outside the car, but he could hear just the clatter of trucks and shouting voices from the new freight train, which was starting to be unloaded.

He hit
RETURN
and wrote a first message.

>anyone there?_

The vertical cursor just continued its slow pulsing. Finally Don impatiently wrote another line:

>anyone there?

>sarah? hex?_

In a cellar in Kymlinge, someone hit
RETURN
. Then he could see the letters blink up, one by one:

>no time, it_

The cursor remained, pulsating.

It took almost ten minutes before his sister came back:

>better now what_

He began to type:

>you have to move the freight car, eva gone_

This time the dialogue moved quickly:

>someone else on the drive can’t access

>who?

>don’t know clever has

>we have to help eva

>left a

>we found strindberg’s star

>_

The blinking light of the cursor. Then, in Kymlinge, his sister wrote:

>i know you found the star_

Don’s rough tongue moving in his mouth. Then he gathered himself and wrote a single symbol:

>?_

But Hex was gone.

O
utside the car, there was a sudden rustle. Silence followed, and after that, something that could have been a light knock on the metal exterior.

When the steps moved again out there, disappearing in an abating crunch of gravel, Don slowly turned his eyes to the screen. A flickering white line of letters:

>don. they have left a message here for you_

T
he matter had been settled on a foggy day in November 1933.

The seventeenth-century castle in the small Westphalian city of Wewelsburg would be taken over by the SS and converted into the ritual headquarters of all the rapidly proliferating Schutzstaffeln. According to the plans, the north tower of the castle would form the central hub of a future Nazi-dominated world. The project came to be called
Mittelpunkt der Welt
, the Center of the World.

One might think that such a crucial decision would have been made by the leader of the SS himself, Heinrich Himmler. But it was actually put forth by a different, by all accounts even more insane, person.

*

A
s the head of the SS and the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler was the shadow prince of the Third Reich. It was his responsibility to take care of all racial and ideological controls, and it was his men who made sure that the ovens in the concentration camps burned steadily.

Himmler had been weak and delicate as a child, with such poor balance
that he had never learned to ride a bike. In addition, he had problems with his airways, which caused his voice to become locked into a shrill pitch, and it often cracked with a piercing sound. With his frail body, he became a persistent bookworm, and he loved the German myths and fairy tales. Even as an adult, Himmler considered each word and phrase in them to be true. He thought he saw traces of an ancient Aryan civilization everywhere in these legends. He took it for granted that it had originated in ancient Atlantis, which had sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic despite its highly advanced technology.

After the National Socialist election victory in 1933, the SS leader began to search for a fitting place where he could advance his theories. He wanted to create an SS college, where the main subjects would be German mythology, archaeology, and astronomy.

Around this time, an older man showed up at Himmler’s office out of nowhere. The man introduced himself as Karl Maria Wiligut, and he would soon have a crucial role to play.

Naturally, Himmler tried to investigate his background, but the only thing the SS men found was that Wiligut was financially well-off and had powerful contacts in the German and international weapons industries. What most impressed Himmler was that Wiligut claimed that his Aryan blood went back more than
220,000 years.
An ordinary SS officer only needed to prove his lineage back to 1750—a trifle in comparison, less than 200 years.

Karl Maria Wiligut claimed to be descended directly from the Old Norse god Thor. To prove this, he went into a trancelike state wherein he made contact with his “memory of his Aryan forefathers.” From this bank of knowledge, Wiligut related the true history of the Aryans. At first Himmler was taken aback, but after a few hours, his surprise had been exchanged for abounding enthusiasm.

A
ccording to Wiligut, the history of the world began 228,000 years ago. At that time, the population consisted of dwarfs, giants, and
dragons, and there were still three suns above the earth. The godlike Aryans were also there, of course, led by Wiligut’s family.

Through the millennia, Wiligut explained in his trance state, the Aryans had created everything of any worth. Christianity, for example, was actually of German origin, but had been distorted by Jewish exploiters. Jesus was really the Aryan god Balder, who had moved to the Middle East at some point in the dawn of time.

Because of these and even more outrageous stories, Himmler named Wiligut a major-general in the SS and gave him a senior position in the Ahnenerbe’s department of prehistory in Munich, as well as a private villa with a household staff in Berlin.

Wiligut’s immediate task was to put all of his forefathers’ memories to paper. But the old man preferred to mediate defense contracts and sent constant suggestions for construction to Himmler. Wiligut was most interested in creating a great SS castle in Westphalia, which he said was necessary in order to survive the conflict that awaited with the subhumans from the east. He claimed that his forefathers had pointed out the castle in Wewelsburg as the perfect place. The earth there was full of Aryan force lines that contained tremendous psychic energy.

In November 1933, Himmler went along with Wiligut on a journey through the wet, cold forests of Westphalia. The old man showed him Wewelsburg, which sat broodingly on a limestone cliff above the city of the same name. The castle’s walls were built in a wedge-shaped triangle. Three towers rose into the autumnal German sky, and Wiligut was of the opinion that this and nowhere else ought to be the location of the Schutzstaffeln’s ritual headquarters.

Heinrich Himmler was reluctant at first: Westphalia was far from Berlin and the political power. But Wiligut convinced him by saying that he had seen the Slavic subhumans being crushed right here in a vision. He had even brought along a sheaf of manuscripts, in greasy leather, where it was stated that the battle would take place during
the 1940s. Himmler played it safe and rented the castle for the reasonable price of one reichsmark per year.

W
hen the SS took over the keys, the castle had thoroughly deteriorated and was in disrepair. The north tower had begun to lean and was supported only by some rickety iron rods.

Karl Maria Wiligut generously offered to take care of all the practical arrangements for the renovations. Covered trucks soon rolled into the triangle-shaped courtyard of the castle. In the cylinders on the truck beds, there was a compound of materials that Wiligut claimed was the most durable the world had ever seen. With it he recast the inner portion of the north tower, but he didn’t care about the rest of Wewelsburg.

In the upper part of the tower, Wiligut constructed a circular room with a floor of light gray marble. A new ceiling was covered with white stucco, and twelve large columns were erected between the floor and the ceiling. There were blind arcades along the walls, from which eight narrow windows gave light.

Wiligut had a mosaic placed in the middle of the floor; it was in the shape of a sun wheel, and it was such a deep shade of green that it looked black in the dim light. It had twelve hook-shaped rays, and in the hub of the wheel was a disc of the purest gold.

When Himmler inspected it, Wiligut explained that this black sun,
die schwarze Sonne,
was actually made up of three entwined swastikas. But the truth was that no one really knew where he had gotten the symbol from.

D
irectly below the upper room, Wiligut built a crypt. He had the ground under the tower removed and replaced with the strange material from the trucks.

In the middle of the crypt, he built a waterless pool, which is still there today, fifteen feet under the surface of the ground. Around the
walls he placed twelve pedestals at a proper height for sitting. From there one could observe the gas pipe that stuck up in the middle of the pool. From that pipe, Wiligut promised, a flame would burn for all time.

In accordance with Himmler’s wishes, he reluctantly allowed a swastika to be cast in the hollow roof. But in the arch, alongside the spokes of the swastika, he opened up four angular holes.

These holes in the ceiling somehow distorted the acoustics down in the crypt. Once a word had been spoken, it sounded as though it were immediately sucked up to disappear into the north tower of the castle.

W
iligut left the rest of Wewelsburg’s rooms completely alone. And how the old man had planned to use the north tower never became known. A year or so before the war, he was suddenly dismissed by Himmler; the reason given was “failing mental health,” and Karl Maria Wiligut disappeared without a trace into the fog and smoke of history.

According to the neo-Nazis, the most lasting memory of him, aside from the north tower of Wewelsburg, was the SS Honor Ring, which Wiligut created for the highest officers of the SS. Himmler had been adamant that the engraving should consist only of Old Norse runes. Still, Wiligut somehow managed to include a star whose shape was strongly reminiscent of an Egyptian hieroglyph.

No one could ask the old man what the meaning of this star was, quite simply because no one knew what had become of him. But a sudden discharge from the SS seldom boded well.

D
espite Wiligut’s strange ideas about the north tower at Wewelsburg, Himmler was very pleased when he finally took possession of the building. The SS leader could now furnish the empty rooms in the main building as he liked.

Himmler had a round oak table installed in Wiligut’s upper room in the north tower. He called that room the Obergruppenführersaal,
and he had twelve chairs with pigskin seat cushions made. The twelve highest SS officers would sit in them in a Nazi variation on Arthur’s knights of the Round Table. This way they would also avoid seeing the black sun mosaic, which seemed to suck up all the light.

The lower crypt was left empty and unused because no one knew what it was for. Himmler avoided it completely, and if anyone asked, he always claimed that his lungs couldn’t handle its chilly atmosphere.

O
nce the castle came into use, it became the center of the SS leader’s two pet projects. These were the Ahnenerbe’s historical research and RuSHA, the Schutzstaffeln’s Race and Settlement Office.

The task of the Ahnenerbe was to dig up as much evidence of a grandiose German past as possible. The researchers’ first expedition was to Backa in Swedish Bohuslän, where they imagined they saw an Aryan alphabet in the rock inscriptions on the granite cliffs. That they also thought they found figures shaped like swastikas made the find even more sensational.

In the Canary Islands, they immediately found remains of what had once been Atlantis, the original home of Aryan civilization. In Tibet and the Himalayas, the researchers looked for traces of the Aryan migration from Atlantis to ancient India.

Iceland was judged to be so interesting and well preserved that it was deserving of the most expensive expedition of all. But the Icelanders never let the German scientists in, because they didn’t consider their research to be serious.