The Magicians of Night

THE ROOM WAS SMALL, smaller than the attic cell in which Saltwood had spent last night and the long, nerve-racking day before, and empty save for the wooden chair in which he sat and the mirror on the wall. Its windows, like the ones of the cell, were boarded over, the boards not hastily nailed but screwed down with proper Teutonic thoroughness and the screwheads countersunk. Since the Storm Troopers who'd searched him - none too gently - had taken his watch, he could only estimate the passage of time, but in the locked attic room with its iron military cot he'd been fed three times, and by the raw cold - what? twelve hours ago? Anyway between meal #2 and meal #3 - he'd assumed it was night. At least the bed had had blankets.

And that made today Monday, the twenty-second of September.

The day of von Ram's "demonstration."

Restless, he rose from the hard-backed chair and prowled the room again, as if he hadn't done so immediately upon being locked in. It told him nothing he didn't already know with dreary intimacy - that the room was ten feet by ten, that the bare walls had been papered once and later thickly painted in yellowish white, that the naked floorboards were stained and dirty, and that at one point whoever had owned the house had possessed a small dog, imperfectly trained. A wire screen protected the mirror, clearly a one-way window. Spying bastards.

He'd been here nearly an hour already, to the best of his estimation, and wondered how long it would be before anyone came. Boredom and tension had long ago erased most of his fear of the Nazis, even some of his dread of von Rath, and he would have welcomed almost anything as an alternative to this hideous combination of inaction and surmise.

Yesterday, as von Rath had instructed, the magician Gall and a gray-haired female SS doctor with a face like the sole of a boot had come to his cell, backed up by four Storm Troopers. They'd ordered him to strip at gunpoint and conducted a physical examination in eerie silence, never asking him a question, never even giving him a verbal order after the first, as if he were a beast whose docility was assured. And with four automatics pointed at him, he reflected wryly, it sure as hell was. In the event it hadn't been nearly as bad as being gone over by Franco's boys.

The really unpleasant part of all this, he figured, was only a matter of time.

A sharp, whining buzz made his head jerk up, while his hackles prickled with loathing at the unmistakable quality of the sound. Hornet! There'd been nests of them in the tangled creek bottoms where cows habitually got themselves hung up, and over the years he'd been stung enough to give him a healthy loathing of all insects that flew with their feet hanging down.

Black and ill-tempered, it was banging against the ceiling over his head, wings roaring in a fashion reminiscent of the Heinkels over London.

They should be nesting in September, dammit, he thought, and then, How the hell did it get in here? Then it buzzed him with a strafing run like a Messerschmitt's and he backed away, ducking and swatting with his hand. There had to be a nest in the rafters above the ceiling panels, though how it had gotten into the room was a mystery.

The hornet, fully aroused now, dove at his face, and he swatted at it again, cursing the Nazis for taking away his belt, his cap, and anything that might be used to protect his hand. He crowded into a corner as the insect whirred up against the ceiling again, where it droned in furious, thwarted circles, banging against the plaster in its rage. Finally it lighted, crawling discontentedly around like a huge, obscene fly.

Saltwood didn't budge. It buzzed and circled a time or two more, then lighted on the wall.

Cautiously Tom edged forward, flattening and stiffening the muscles of his hand. The hornet remained where it was. A quick glance around the room revealed no way it could have gotten in, no crack or chink, but the concern was academic at the moment. He moved out of his corner, more slowly, more carefully than he had stalked the guard he'd killed last night, more delicately than he had entered that poor wretch Sligo's little cell. He needed all the experience he'd picked up in Spain and all the training Hillyard had beaten and cursed into him at the Commando base at Lochailort - if he missed now he was in for a hell of a stinging.

The insect heard him and was in flight when he struck it. It made a satisfying crunch and splat on the wall.

Great, he thought, wiping his ichorous palm on his thigh. You're looking at torture by the Gestapo and what really scares you? Two inches of black bug.

But at least he could fight back against the bug.

Slowly he walked around the room again. Dammit, the bastard had to have gotten in somehow. If there was access to a crawlspace... The thought of wriggling out through a crawlspace filled with hornets wasn't particularly appealing, but neither was the alternative. And in any case he'd been over the place...

He stopped, staring up at the ceiling. How he'd missed it before he couldn't imagine, but there it was - the faint, unmistakable outline of a trapdoor. It fit flush. Nailholes marked where a molding had been pulled off and painted over... Painted over? So how had the hornet got into the room?

He couldn't imagine, but didn't particularly care. The ceiling was high, higher than he could reach even at nearly six feet with long arms. He cast a wary glance at the mirror - Who knew when they'd come into that side of it to watch him get the third degree? - and fetched the chair. It wouldn't buy him much time, but anything would help.

With a roar like a thunderclap the chair burst into flames.

He flung it from him, flattening back against the wall in shock. The chair bounced against the opposite wall near the door, the fire spreading across the dry wood of the floor in greedy amber trails. Diversion? he thought, ripping off his clay-colored uniform shirt to wad over his mouth and nose against the smoke. Maybe. It'll weaken the door, if the smoke doesn't get me first. A firefighter in Tulsa had told him once that most victims of fire weren't burned but smothered. The flames were spreading fast, but he pushed back his panic at being locked in with the blaze and crouched low to the floor where the air would be better. The fire was around the door, but it was eating its way across the planks toward him as well. In the midst of it the chair was beginning to fall apart, smoke streaks crawling up to blacken the walls. He shrank back as the fire's heat seared his bare arms and chest. The blaze was all around the door - if he miscalculated his timing, flung himself at the door and it didn't give, he'd burn.

Then, abruptly as it had begun, the fire began to sink. Before Saltwood's startled eyes the flames ceased their advance, flickering down into fingerlets and then tiny tongues no bigger than two-penny nails that guttered out one by one. Within minutes, the only things left of the blaze were a huge patch of charred floor, the still-guttering chair, the suffocating heat, and the upside-down waterfall of smoke stains around the door.

What the HELL?!?

He crossed swiftly to the door, pulling his shirt hastily on without bothering to button it, and tried body-slamming the door. It didn't give, though it was roasting-hot to the touch. He kicked it, hoping the wood had weakened. It hadn't.

Puzzled, shaken, he turned back to stare at the flame still flickering over what was left of the chair. He'd seen a dozen fires in his year in the Tulsa oil fields, but nothing like that. Doubtfully he took a step toward it.

What happened then took him so completely by surprise that his mind barely registered the impossibility of it, only reacted in terror and shock. SOMETHING came at him, from out of where he couldn't imagine - something round and small and bristling with dripping scales, something with huge jaws and tiny black hands like a monkey's, something that whizzed through the air like a thrown baseball straight at his face.

With a yell of horror he struck at it, dodging back. It zigzagged crazily after him, chisel teeth snapping in a spray of sulfur-smelling slime. He retreated across the room, slapping at it in growing panic, his mind stalled with fear; his back hit the wall and the thing dove in under his block, the claws of its little hands ripping and digging in the flesh of his arm. He yelled again as it began to climb toward his shoulder, and smashed it against the wall. It bounced squishily and continued fighting its way up, its round mouth tearing tablespoon-size chunks of his flesh, its slobber and the ooze that dripped from its smashed head burning the ripped muscle like lye. He beat it again and again on the wall, shoulder numb from the impact, and still it came on. It was making for his face, his eyes...

In panic, he dove for the burning chair and shoved his arm, the thing still clinging greedily, into the center of the sinking blaze.

His shirt caught immediately, but the creature fell off, wriggling and twisting like a lizard with a broken back. Saltwood stripped off his shirt, flung it away to burn itself out in a corner, arm seared and blistered and throbbing with pain, flesh hanging in gory flaps and blood dripping from his fingers. Staggering, he fell back against the rear wall of the room, watching the creature's death agonies in the fire until it was still. A stench like burning rubber filled the room, with the hideous smell of his own charred flesh.

The secret weapon, he thought, gripping his burned arm tight against him, fighting the nauseating wash of shock and pain. Damn Sligo, damn that crazy little bastard... His breath came in ragged sobs, sweat burning his eyes, the agony in his arm making him dizzy. He had no idea how the Nazis would use this secret, these hideous things, but whatever he had experienced here, he wouldn't wish on Hitler.

Well, he thought, maybe...

And then he blinked. The pain in his arm was gone.

The burned patches on the floor were gone.

The chair was whole, lying on its side near the door where he'd thrown it.

There was no dead creature, no ashes, no little trapdoor in the ceiling... not even the smashed remains of a hornet on the wall.

The room was precisely as it had been when he'd been brought here. His shirt, unburned, lay crumpled on the floor. He looked at his left arm, and saw the skin whole with its dusting of sunburn over the thick core of muscle and bone.

He went and got his shirt, because even the heat of the fire had died out of the room and it was unpleasantly chilly, but, as he put it on, he wedged himself in the far corner and waited without moving until an hour later, when the door opened and von Rath came in.

"You were apprehended in the uniform of a Storm Trooper, bearing Schutzstaffel identification papers." Von Rath folded his arms and tipped his head a little to one side. "It makes no difference to me or to our experiment whether you are English or German, but as Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler will point out, the penalties attached to espionage are far less exacting than those for treason to the Black Order and to the Reich." As he spoke von Rath nodded toward the two men who had entered the room in the wake of his little knot of guards. One was a golden giant of a man, like an overweight Norse god, with the left breast of his white uniform jacket plastered in medals - Saltwood knew his face from the newspaper photograph he and other members of the Lincoln Brigade had thrown darts at in their quarters in Madrid. It was Hermann Goering. Had it not been for the military gingerbread decorating the other man's black SS uniform, Saltwood would have taken him for somebody's clerk - small, mild, bespectacled, and self-effacing, clutching his clipboard with a slightly apologetic air and completely overshadowed by the splendid commander of the Luftwaffe. With a shock, Saltwood realized that was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo.

After a moment he said quietly, "Captain Thomas Saltwood, Eleventh Independent Battalion." He'd been promoted after the big raid on Boulogne.

"The Commandos," von Rath said, and nodded as if pleased. "Not only the highest racial type, but trained."

The air of smugness clung to him, radiated from him; Saltwood could see by the slight dampening of his ivory-fair hair that he had gone through some exertion, but there was no sign of it in the glowing pinkness of his face. Over his black uniform jacket he still wore his hoodoo beads. Looking at them more closely - for they were almost on level with his eyes where he sat handcuffed to the same chair that had appeared to burst into flames an hour ago - Saltwood realized with a shock of revulsion that several of the disks were made of human skin stretched over what must have been human bone. They were wrapped and trimmed in gold, and written over with the kind of weird magic signs with which Marvello had decorated his blue stage robe and pointed hat, a horrible juxtaposition of the gruesome and the absurd.

Oddly enough, even those didn't trouble him as much as the iron circle, hanging alone upon its silver chain. There was some kind of disturbing optical effect connected with it, a sort of blurring, as if it were impossible to see it directly. And yet, when he looked again, he could see the buttons of the man's uniform clearly through its ring, the texture of the jacket wool, and the links of the chain beneath.

"And yet he is an American," Goering said thoughtfully.

Saltwood looked across at him. "Some of us don't need an Anschluss to tell us who our brothers are."

The big man's eyes gleamed approvingly at this show of defiance, but Von Rath said, "It makes no difference. Our purpose is not to gather intelligence but to conduct a psychological test. If you do not give us accurate answers about what you experienced we have thiopental available, but we would prefer an un-drugged subject, as much as you, I am sure, would prefer to avoid being drugged."

Saltwood glanced up at him. "You realize using prisoners of war for tests of any kind is against the Geneva accord?"

The cold face twitched in a smile that looked strangely automatic. "You are not a prisoner of war," he pointed out gently. "You are a spy. If you prefer, we will turn you over to the Gestapo, whose methods, as you will learn, are also against the Geneva accords."

No way out, Saltwood thought. He might as well find out what the hell had been going on here. If Himmler and Goering - the second and third honchos of the Reich - had shown up to watch, this device of Sligo's, whatever it was or did, was big stuff. He shivered, remembering the slashing, clawing thing chewing its way up his arm, and looked again down at the uncharred shirt sleeve, the uninjured flesh beneath, and the unburned wood of the chair in which he sat. His arm still hurt like hell. Impossible to believe it hadn't been real.

"Fair enough."

The door opened quietly, and the fat boy Baldur Twisselpeck entered, followed by white-bearded Jacobus Gall, both carrying clipboards similar to those held by the two Nazi bigwigs. Von Rath gave them an inquiring glance; Gall nodded and said, "You may question her after you are done with him."

Von Rath turned back to Saltwood. He, too, held a clipboard, but didn't bother to look at it; he spoke as if he knew it all by heart. "At ten forty-five today you looked up at the ceiling of this room, started striking at something in the air. What was it?"

"A - a hornet," Saltwood said, after a moment of fishing the German word - eine Hornisse - from the disused memories of the high plains. "It struck at my face. I don't know how it got into the room. I waited till it lighted, then crushed it."

"Have you been stung by a hornet before, Captain Saltwood?"

"Yes."

"And you suffered no extraordinary adverse effects?"

"I puff up and hurt like hell; I don't know if you Aryans do it differently."

"You are obviously of Aryan stock yourself, Captain," Himmler said in his soft voice, looking up from his clipboard and blinking behind his round spectacles. "It grieves me to hear such treason to your birthright."

"I'll tell that to my Sioux grandmother," Saltwood retorted. "She'll be flattered."

Very calmly von Rath struck him, an open-handed blow across the face that wrenched his head on his neck and brought blood from his lip. Saltwood jerked angrily against the handcuffs that held him to the chair and heard the guards behind him move, ready for trouble, but nothing came of it. He settled back, blue eyes glittering dangerously. After a moment's silence, von Rath went on, "Then at ten fifty-two you started looking around the room. What did you seek?"

"The place where the hornet got in. I can't swear to the exact time because your little cherubs lifted my watch... I wanted to know if there were going to be more of them, or if it might lead to some way out."

"And did you find the place?"

"There was - " He paused, glancing up at the corner of the ceiling where the trapdoor had been - It really had, dammit! - and wondering how stupid this was going to sound. "I thought I saw a kind of trapdoor up there, the kind that gives access to..." He didn't know the German for crawlspace, so finished with "...attics."

Goering and Himmler looked quickly at one another. Himmler asked, "What part of the ceiling? What corner of the room?"

"Left-hand rear corner as you come in the door. It was about two feet square, painted over white. I know I didn't see it when I came in."

"And when did you first see it?" Himmler asked, leaning forward, fascinated.

"Only when I killed the hornet. In fact, I was looking at the ceiling when the damn bug was flying around up there, wondering how it had got in. I'm sure - I'm almost sure - there was no trapdoor then."

Von Rath went on, "And you brought the chair over directly underneath the trapdoor as soon as you noticed it, presumably to attempt an escape."

"To see if I could get out that way, yes."

"This chair you're sitting on now?"

"Yes."

Goering was staring at von Rath with unbelieving awe; Himmler's attention was fastened on Saltwood, his moist little lips parted with eagerness, his dark eyes bright.

"And what happened?"

Saltwood took a deep breath. "I - The chair caught fire."

If von Rath had been a cat he would have purred and washed himself the way cats did when they knew they were being admired. "Did it?"

Hell, Saltwood thought, dammit, it did! "Yeah. I don't understand... I felt the heat. I threw it away - it hit the wall over by the door. The fire spread..." Once in Tulsa, Saltwood had had his boss' car stolen from him by a troop of Cherokee teenagers on bicycles. He recited his story as he'd recited his explanation then, keeping his eyes straight forward and simply recounting the events as they'd happened, ridiculous and unbelievable as they sounded, but he was conscious of the two Reichsministers whispering together, comparing notes on their clipboards, gesturing with covert amazement.

"It is incredible," Goering whispered, when Saltwood had finished. He was looking stunned. Himmler, throughout the narrative, had been gradually puffing himself up with the same kind of gratified smugness that characterized von Rath, and now looked so pleased Saltwood wished the bigger man would swat him. "Absolutely unbelievable. And the other subject..."

"I have no doubt," Himmler purred, "that the results will be exactly the same."

"Bring her in," von Rath said, and Gall and Baldur, who had been standing listening, turned and left. To the SS guards von Rath said, "Take this man into the other room." As Saltwood's hands were unmanacled and he stood up, von Rath continued to his two distinguished visitors, "Other experiments can be devised, of course, using more subjects simultaneously, but I'm sure this proves..."

The closing of the door shut out the sound of his voice - the room was soundproofed.

Like the house out in the Jungfern Heide, this place - the house on Teglerstrasse, von Rath had called it - was a modestly isolated villa set in its own wide grounds, which were also walled; though, as far as Saltwood could tell from the glimpse he'd gotten by the combined moonlight and headlamps when they'd brought him here, without the fortresslike quality of the house where they were keeping Sligo. The district, where middle-class suburban villas had begun to encroach on country cottages, lay well to the northeast of Berlin's sea of industrial slums, but it was more heavily built up than the Jungfern Heide. During the day, listening against the slant of the attic ceiling, he'd been able to make out occasional sounds of traffic on Teglerstrasse itself. He wondered why von Rath had wanted separate establishments. As part of this "demonstration" of theirs?

The place was smaller than von Rath's headquarters, having, Saltwood guessed, four rooms downstairs and four, maybe six, up. His guards now escorted him to what had been an upstairs parlor, rugless, cold, and containing a plain wooden table and three more hard kitchen chairs of the pattern already familiar to him. Evidently all the better pieces of furniture had found their way into some Party official's residence. Its window wasn't covered, but it was barred; as soon as the guards had recuffed his hands in front of him and locked the door, leaving him alone, he strode over and looked out. Treetops were visible over a buff sandstone wall more decorative than functional, and the roofs of neighboring "villas." On the gravel drive below were parked two large Mercedes staff cars, a three-ton Benz LG.-3000 transport with a tie-down canvas cover, and a number of motorcycles. Storm Troopers and two minor officers in the uniforms of the Luftwaffe stood by them, smoking. Beyond, he could see iron gates, backed with sheet metal, as were those of the house in the Jungfern Heide on the other side of town. It was broad daylight, by the angle of the cloud-filtered sun shortly after noon.

Escaping over the wall with six-guns blazing didn't look like a real promising bet.

Nevertheless Tom began a meticulous examination of the room.

There were two doors - one into the hallway, the other, presumably, into another room. Both were locked - new locks, as in the Jungfern Heide house, set in the old oak of the doors. At a guess, he thought, looking at the scratches on the bare floorboards beneath the three chairs and the way they were grouped around the table, prisoners were interviewed here. A Gestapo safe house? God knew how many of those there were around the outskirts of Berlin. Easy enough for the Gestapo, or the SS, to acquire from those "enemies of the Reich" who disappeared into concentration camps. Real nice property, his mind framed an advertisement, comfortable, detached, suburban villa; privacy, security, all the modern conveniences, and a place to put the kiddies when they're bad...

He thought, as he had many times during last night's interminable incarceration in the attic cell, about poor Professor Sligo, locked in his windowless room and completely at the mercy of a fruitcake like von Rath. No improvement over whatever insane asylum they'd gotten him from.

But he'd sure as hell come up with something. Possibly not of his own free will, but SOMETHING.

He shivered again and rubbed his arm. Hallucinogenic gas? Never spend your hard-earned cash on liquor again, folks - skip all that time-consuming drinking and go straight to the D.T.s! As he never had before, he pitied old Charlie the wino who'd hung around the West Virginia mines, screaming as he tore imaginary snakes from his clothing. Christ, if that's what it's like I'm going teetotal.

And he grinned mirthlessly. Right - you'll turn down the glass of brandy von Rath's going to offer you before he shoots you as a spy.

He had to get out. If he'd been shocked enough, panicked enough, to shove his own arm into what he thought was a fire to get rid of that thing eating its way up toward his face, God knew what havoc Sligo's invention would work in the forces defending the roads up from the English beaches against the first Panzer divisions, the RAF boys going against the Luftwaffe in the Sussex skies.

No wonder Mayfair wanted Sligo destroyed - and no wonder Intelligence wouldn't believe the rumors they'd heard.

Having made a circuit of the room, he went back to the second, inner door. Hinges on the other side, dammit - in any case he didn't have so much as a belt buckle to pry them out with. He didn't have a cigarette, either, and was feeling the need of one badly. As he knelt to examine the lock he became aware of voices in the other room, the faint creak of footsteps, and the dim, protesting groan of an overburdened chair.

"Damn it, Captain, it's unbelievable!" came a booming voice he recognized as Goering's. "I wrote out those instructions myself! Even Himmler didn't know what they were going to be until I made them up! And you on the other side of Berlin, miles away... For him to see them in that kind of detail..."

"It is... quite commonplace," von Rath's soft voice said.

"I only wish you'd had this perfected a month ago! Because of the damned British air cover, Hitler's been vacillating on the invasion plans for weeks! We're down to the last possible days - and if he puts them off again we might as well forget it until next spring! Dammit, I keep telling him I only need four clear days..."

"You shall have them now." Von Rath's voice was clearer, then softer as if he were pacing; Saltwood bent his head, listening, knowing if he could only get this information back to Mayfair somehow... "And as you see, you will no longer be troubled by the RAF. I am sorry about the delay - it was a question of accumulating - ah - sufficient strength. We came to Berlin as soon as we could. If the invasion itself can be launched on the twenty-fourth - "

"The day after tomorrow?"

Holy Christ! He wondered if he could make it to Hamburg, get in touch with the radioman there - to hell with getting himself taken off, if he could just warn them...

"Is it possible? Is that time enough?"

There was a long pause. "Just," Goering said at last. "The forces are assembled, the landing barges are ready... We've been on standby, then standdown, then standby again since July. All we need is to convince our Fuhrer that such an enterprise will, in fact, succeed."

"After the demonstration you will have this afternoon, believe me, you need have no fear."

"Damn it, Captain..." The chair creaked again, and Goering's voice got louder. Saltwood could almost see them standing together, overweight Thor and darkly shining Loki.

"You will have your four days of clear weather," von Rath promised again, his voice sinking low, "and the wherewithal to blast the RAF from the sky. And in return..."

Boots thudded in the hall. Saltwood was on his feet and over to the window in one swift move as a key rattled in the lock. He had a brief glimpse of three Storm Troopers, guns pointed, in the hall as the door was opened and a woman shoved unceremoniously in. Then the door banged, and the lock snapped again.

Not a woman, he thought, taking another look - a girl.

She looked about twenty-two, her pointy white face framed in hair that was frizzed electric from her red ears to her slender shoulders, and above that, along the part, dark and luxurious brown-black with highlights of mahogany. Her eyes, taking in the black uniform pants and boots he wore, the clay-colored regulation shirt with its Deaths-Head emblems, were soot-dark and filled with spit-cat hate.

"Don't jump to conclusions," Saltwood said. "I'm an American - a Captain in the M09."

In English she said, "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," he replied in the same language with as flat a mid-western accent as he could still conjure to his tongue. With a shock he realized she was American, too.

"So who pitched for Cincinnati in 'thirty-eight?"

Saltwood stared at her, appalled. "I don't know, I always thought baseball was a Christly dumb game! I mean, Jesus, paying two bits to watch a bunch of guys in knickers stand around in the sun all day and scratch and spit?"

She perched one slim haunch on the corner of the table and shook back her particolored hair. "Some American!" But the hate was gone from her eyes.

She dug in her pocket for cigarettes and a lighter - she wore some kind of ill-fitting uniform, short-sleeved white blouse, gray skirt, and sensible shoes wildly at odds with the voluptuous figure beneath. As he took the smoke she offered him he saw her nails were bitten to the quick.

"You have any idea what's going on around here?" he asked, raising his manacled hands to take a thankful drag. "Those hallucinations... That - that hornet, and the fire... that thing that flew at me through the air..."

"What?" She blew a line of smoke. "You missed the trapdoor?"