CHILDREN OF THE VORTEX
SIMON CLARK
If you convince one normal, healthy individual that he is Abraham Lincoln, Picasso, or Elvis Presley, exhibit him on TV for the world’s ridicule. Convince a million men that they are invincible warriors and you will strike terror into the heart of Man….
—Dr. Hilda Lippisch, East Berlin, 1969
Isle of Rugen, Germany. Present.
WHAT IS IT, Leo? What’s wrong?”
The old soldier regarded the limestone cliff that rose from perfect white sands. His respiration quickened. Either memory or the brilliant sunlight made him screw his eyes almost shut. His tongue ran from side to side over his lips as if it were a small creature searching for a means of escape.
“Leo. Is this the first time you’ve been back?”
“You know it is.” Shuddering, he zipped his brown leather jacket up to a jaw that exhibited the prickly scarlet rash of razor bum.
“How far now, Leo?”
“I want to go home.”
“You promised to help.”
“After all these years I didn’t think it would hit me as hard as this.”
The Baltic surged over the beach with a roar that sounded distinctly ominous.
“Leo. Are we close?”
“Yes, Dominic. We’re close. Far too close!”
Anger rumbled in the old man’s normally soft German accent. Old man? This veteran soldier of the former German Democratic Republic, one of the Soviet puppet states, was only in his early fifties. Yet his white hair had molted to reveal a speckled scalp. Long-term usage of antidepressants left a glassy sheen in his blue eyes, which were apt to stare, unblinking, for so long it made Dominic uncomfortable.
Leo Fiedler awarded the tangled forest that topped the cliff a particularly long glare, then turned away, shivering. “I’m cold! There’ll be nothing to see. It was dynamited after the Wall came down.”
“Leo—”
“You see? It’s a national park now. Just a nature reserve.” His accent thickened. “Why be so damned stupid as to go back to the old places? Why dig them back up? Forget them!” The wind blew hard enough to tug away strands of the man’s silver hair. They fled along the beach. “Get me back to the mainland, Dominic. This cold will be my death.”
Dominic spoke firmly. “I know the place disturbs you, but we are under a legal obligation to investigate areas of public interest.”
“Who do you work for? Army? Interpol? CIA?”
“Leo. Once we find the entrance to the complex, we can leave.”
“And I told you that the sub base has been demolished.”
“I’m not interested in submarine pens. It’s the adjacent complex.”
Leo’s face turned gray. For a moment it looked as if he’d collapse.
Dominic pressed on. “We are interested in the Vortex.”
“No …” The man grimaced as if pains lanced his heart.
“We know you were present when the order came to terminate Vortex. You took part.”
“I wasn’t a proper soldier. Ha! They armed me with pencils; I audited military land holdings. I had nothing to do with Vortex! Now … please, take me home.” Anger turned to pleading. “I can’t abide this place. Just the smell of it makes me ill. Please, Dominic.”
Just then, a silver BMW 4x4 roared along the beach. When the vehicle stopped alongside them, three people sprang eagerly from it. Two men and a woman, dressed casually in jeans and sweatshirts. The woman’s red hair was carved brutally short. The trio grinned at each other, then at Dominic, as if they’d brought him surprise birthday presents. In a way, they had.
“Good news, Scarlet?” Dominic ventured.
“We’ve got it.” She brandished a memory stick. “The ministry biked it across twenty minutes ago.” Then she glanced at the old soldier. “Feeling off-color, Leo?”
“Get me off this devil island!” He glared up at the looming cliffs as if he expected to see enemies there. “You should leave too.”
Dominic shrugged. “I told him that we know he’s linked to Vortex.”
“Ouch.” One of the men smiled. “That must have touched a nerve.”
Dominic nodded at the memory stick. “Show us what you’ve got, then.”
Scarlet waited, an impish smile on her face, as one of her companions brought out a laptop, flipped it open, then set it down on the car’s hood. “It’s classified. But you’ve clearance to watch it, Leo.” Her green eyes were hard. “I hope you like horror movies.”
As she loaded the data, one of the men advanced on Leo. Big boned, muscular, his manner suggested that of a policeman who’d peered too much into the world’s nastier corners to be fazed by anything, no matter how bloody. “Leo. My name is Powell. This is my colleague, Larchette …” A thin, bearded man with anxious eyes nodded. “You’ve already met Scarlet. Now you’re going to see footage from the communist regime archives. You will be asked questions during the showing of the film. Do you understand?”
Frightened, Leo nodded. The wind blew, tugging away more strands of silver from his mottled scalp. Meanwhile, the surf’s roar grew louder. Waves smacked angrily against boulders. Gulls screamed.
“Best make it snappy.” Scarlet glanced at the ocean. “Tide’s coming in fast.”
“This’ll only take a couple of minutes.” To the prematurely aged man shivering there in his leather jacket, Powell announced in aggressive tones, “Larchette will video your responses. Understand?”
“How can I stop you? I’m a sick man.”
Larchette produced a digital camera. He aimed it at Leo’s face, then nodded.
With the intense smell of brine in his nostrils, Dominic gathered with the others to watch the laptop perched on the car’s hood. On screen, silver numerals counted down: 3, 2, 1. B/W footage of a featureless room. No windows. A man sits to a piano. He plays—tuneless, discordant, an absence of melody. The camera operator is no expert either. The frame lurches left to reveal an attractive woman of around forty. She wears a clinician’s white coat, carries a clipboard; long hair is pulled tight back from her face. Pianist remains in shot. Hunches shoulders, plays faster. An expression of ecstasy transforms his face.
Coolly professional, the woman addresses the viewer. “I am Doctor Lippisch. Senior MD, Project Vortex. Here you see subject seventy-two-stroke-nineteen-a, aged twenty-four. Upper mind successfully erased. Reindoctrination as musician. Subject had no musical training. Now, however, he is convinced that he is both a brilliant pianist and a renowned composer. Note: playing is discordant, totally unmusical, yet he believes he has written a beautiful sonata. Subject underwent C2 procedure: ECT, drug therapy, audio-corrective stimulation …”
As Dr. Lippisch continued her lecture, Powell fired questions at Leo: “Do you recognize that woman?”
“Never seen her before.”
“Lippisch? Know the name?”
“You’re going to get wet. Here the tide is fast. People have been swept away.”
“How do you feel watching such a grotesque experiment? That man’s brain was wiped, then reprogrammed.”
“You think I’m intimidated by the tide, so you make me stand here. I don’t fear the ocean. I wish I had the guts to drown myself in it.”
“So you know something of Vortex?”
On screen, Dr. Lippisch seizes papers covered in delusional scribble and rips them apart. In grief, the pianist howls. “Don’t! My music!” Heartbroken, he sobs as she tosses the scraps into the air.
Leo’s glazed eyes were melancholy. “I know nothing of the scientific process. I was only there at the end.”
On screen: Images of floating paper crash to black. Next: Dr. Lippisch in the same room. Instead of the piano there is a line of potted ferns on the floor: an attempt to create an outdoor scene. Three men in infantry fatigues crouch down. They hold AK-47s, which they point at the blank wall.
First soldier: “Enemy sighted.”
Second soldier: “Permission to fire, Sergeant?”
Sergeant: “Short bursts. Keep them pinned down.”
They rise above the tops of the ferns. Aim, fire. They mime recoil, but the guns do not discharge.
Dr. Lippisch steps screen center. “Three subjects medically unfit for military service. Twenty-two days of C2 has produced what you see here. Three men who believe they are soldiers, who genuinely believe they are on the battlefield. They hear gunfire, see shells detonate. Now watch.” Off screen someone hands her a pistol.
Powell demanded, “Do you know the three men?”
Leo regarded the incoming waves. “We should get away. It’s not safe.”
“Vortex was based adjacent to the submarine pens. Why?”
“You can’t interrogate me like this. You’ve no right.”
Dominic felt stirrings of pity. Leo was agitated to the point where tears glittered in his eyes. Nevertheless, Dominic found his gaze drawn away from this brusque interrogation to the screen where Dr. Lippisch cocked a revolver. He’d heard legends about films that documented grisly communist-era experiments. However, he couldn’t believe that the old regime hadn’t incinerated the reels before reunification of East and West Germany. They’re evidence of crimes against humanity, for God sakes. Even on this sunlit beach the first gunshot was startling.
Dr. Lippisch coolly shoots Soldier 1 in the back of the head. Though he slumps into the ferns, the others continue to fire—pretend to fire, that is. The docter aims at Soldier 2. He pauses, sensing something amiss. Lippisch fires. The bullet penetrates the top of his skull, then exits through his mouth, smashing his teeth. The round embeds in a wall, leaving a black mark.
Lippisch taps the surviving infantryman on the shoulder: “Sergeant? Where are your two comrades?”
Even though he looks around, he doesn’t see the two men lying dead close by. Crisply, he states, “They’ve been redeployed to another part of the line.”
“Don’t you see them?”
“No, miss.”
“If I told you that I saw them lying dead at my feet, how would you respond?”
“My response is that you are lying, miss. I see only two enemy dead.”
“Look closer. Aren’t those your comrades, Gruber and Istryn?”
“I know my comrades, miss. These are strangers. Gruber and Istryn moved off to support an assault on the enemy position. They are—”
Lippisch doesn’t wait for him to finish. Turning to the camera, she states, “Picture an army of men such as these. Loyal, determined, fearless. They are incapable of self-doubt; nor can they comprehend the death of their fellow soldiers. If comrades die, the survivor truly believes they have merely been redeployed elsewhere.” She smiles. “I take ordinary farm boys, prisoners, mental patients; I transform them into artists, scientists, warriors. Ladies and gentlemen, give me mortal clay; I will give you supermen.”
“That’s what I call an advertising pitch.” Scarlet smiled. “Lippisch could sell condoms to cardinals.”
On screen: The sergeant is suddenly puzzled. “But I’m not outside. This is a room.” He stares at the assault rifle. “Why am I holding—”
Lippisch fires into the man’s eye.
“Oh my God …” Larchette, camera in hand, freezes.
“I told you it was bad.” Powell nodded at the screen. “You should see the other experiments.”
“What’s wrong with his head?”
Powell shot a questioning look at his colleague. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
But then Dominic realized that Larchette was staring past the screen into the surf.
“Heaven help us,” breathed Leo as he saw too.
By now the foaming tide rolled over the sand not ten paces from them. Dominic’s scalp prickled as he saw what was being jostled by the surf. His gaze fixed on the head of the male corpse. The top of its skull had been sliced away. “What’s wrong with his head?” Larchette had been right to ask the question. Looking into the open top of the skull was like looking into a cavern. The brain, eyes, roof of the mouth, tongue had all been scooped out to leave a void. When the sun struck the face of the corpse as it floated on its back, twin beams of light shone through lidless eye sockets to illuminate the interior of the head. The top of the spinal column formed a pearly white bud at the base of the skull. Wavelets made the empty head nod rapidly as if it agreed with their feelings of horror.
Leo cried, “See! I told you not to come here!”
The twentieth century is dominated by those who own oilfields. The twenty-first century will belong to those who control the human mind.
—Dr. Lippisch, Moscow, 1972
Scarlet drove the car from the beach. In the front passenger seat sat Dominic. In the back, flanked by Larchette and Powell, Leo Fiedler slumped with an air of utter resignation. The 4x4 was scraped by branches along an overgrown highway. Rusty signs, in both German and Russian, warned unauthorized visitors: FORBIDDEN ZONE. ELECTRIC FENCES. EXPLOSIVE MINES. Dominic hoped that the military had been allocated sufficient resources to remove all the landmines. As a one-legged veteran had once dryly remarked to him, “They only have to miss the one….”
Then Dominic didn’t avoid danger so much as render himself invisible to it. He’d attended the kind of school where you grew accustomed to the sticky sensation of spilt blood beneath your shoes. To survive, he merged with the background. Dominic was neither stocky nor skinny, neither short nor tall: the kind of guy that nobody ever picked out of an ID parade. As an adult he prided himself on slipping unobtrusively into situations where he could solve his employer’s problems, then move on without anyone being exactly sure who he was. Similarly, his encounters with women were as fleeting as they were anonymous. He liked it that way.
Leo grunted. “Here it is. The road to the left leads to the complex that housed Vortex. Nothing will remain aboveground. They used dynamite by the truckload.” He sniffed. “The body of the fisherman. Why leave it on the beach?”
“The man died in an accident. We’ll notify the police once we’re done here.”
“Strange kind of accident,” murmured Leo. “If you consider the state of his head. All hollowed out like that.”
Powell shrugged. “Obviously, the man fell overboard—a boat’s propeller chewed up his skull.”
“With surgical precision?” Dominic raised an eyebrow. Powell’s arrogance had begun to grate. More than ever, he found himself on Leo’s side rather than with these three. Officially, they were his colleagues, but in name only. As for trusting them? Well …
Wanting to get this case concluded, he said, “Scarlet, can’t you go any faster?”
“Why the rush?”
Dominic kept his patience—just. “Haven’t you noticed? It’s almost dusk.”
“If we’re here after dark, promise you will shoot me.” Leo wasn’t joking.
It was obvious that the Stalin-era research complex had been obliterated. Apart from warning signs, sections of crumpled fence, and a few yards of exposed blacktop that had escaped the encroaching moss, there was little to see. Other than forest, that is. Beech trees engulfed the place. This area wasn’t open to the public, but he knew that elsewhere the Isle of Rugen was a popular tourist destination. Most visitors were happy to stroll its white beaches or enjoy a refreshing dip in the ocean that was so often a dazzling turquoise. However, some visited grim regions of the island. Such as the Strength through Joy Resort: uncannily pristine buildings erected by the Nazis for party members when they needed a break from planning dark deeds. When Hitler exited, Stalin entered. He demanded his puppet regime build submarine pens (together with other sinister installations) on Rugen. Now this was what remained of Soviet domination. A thick forest that no doubt hid many a grisly secret. Project Vortex, for instance.
The team took the opportunity during the jolting drive to roll more footage on the laptop.
“Leo. Do you recognize the man in the right of the picture?” Powell asked. “The one helping carry the dead soldier on the stretcher?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s me. Only my hair is darker.” He touched his own scalp, which shed its strands. “Dear God, I’m falling apart.”
“Can you identify the corpse?”
“Otto Neumann. My best friend. By God, listen to what Dominic told you. Soon it’ll be dark. Do you really want to be here in this damned forest when it is?”
“Why? What’s so—”
“Enough of these games.” Leo glanced through the rear window. It was as if he expected someone to be there. A someone he definitely did not want to see. “I’ll tell you what I know. Larchette, keep that little camera of yours turning because I shan’t repeat myself. After that, kill me if you wish. I shan’t mind.” He stared at the lens. “All I know of Vortex is that it took men and women, scrubbed away their minds, erased who they were, then replaced them with new identities. Vortex sucked ordinary people in, then it spat out soldiers, artists, musicians! You saw the film. Truthfully, even though I was military personnel, I only ever sat at a desk and compared title deeds with maps of military installations. When the Wall came down, we knew the communist government would fall and we were to be reunited with the West. There was total panic amongst party leaders and the generals. They were desperate to dispose of incriminating evidence. Senior Stasi appeared here on the island to terminate Vortex. You know of the Stasi? The East German secret police? Far, far more brutally efficient than the Gestapo, they had a staff of over one hundred thousand. They were rather good at repression, torture, and espionage. They even forced children to spy on their parents, and coerced wives and husbands to tell tales about each other.” He sighed.
“Here on the island, regular troops were smart enough not to get involved with concealing human experimentation: they swapped uniforms for civilian clothes and simply returned home. I, and my fellow pen-pushers, were foolish enough to accept triple pay to tidy up some loose ends. What those loose ends were, we hadn’t a clue.” Leo glanced uneasily about the forest. Shadows there were altogether darker as dusk crept down onto this remote corner of the island: a place that no longer appeared part of the human world.
“Go on.” Scarlet tensed with anticipation. “You saw Vortex?”
Leo shrugged. “New Year’s Day, nineteen-ninety—we assembled in the Vortex block. Already, filing cabinets had been emptied into the yard, papers set on fire. The place was a mess. Its permanent staff had fled. It was left to us poor bloody clerks to bring an end to Vortex. Clearly, there weren’t enough Stasi officers to do the job themselves. Already, most of them had deserted too. They knew we wouldn’t have the guts to see it through, so they gave us bottles of strong Danish beer along with little pills that, they said, would give us stamina. Little and black they were, like berries that grow on juniper bushes. They ordered us to swallow them. Ack, bitter as aspirin! Within ten minutes my heart was racing—everything twinkled with silver stars. Amphetamine, I guess. Probably with a bit of acid, just enough to make everything unreal so we wouldn’t be troubled by our consciences. Then they issued guns, and we went to work.”
“What then?” Powell demanded.
“I should be asking you a question. You’re so smart, but you’ve missed something blindingly obvious … something under your idiot nose.”
“Leo. I ask the questions.”
“Then be it on your head.”
“What did you do once you were issued weapons?”
“We formed into squads of ten. The first squad was sent into the subterranean levels of the building to terminate the experiment.”
“And?”
“Do I have to spell it out? They never came back.”
Dominic shivered. The sun shone blood-red through the trees. Shadows fused, pooled, spread. Time to go … it really is time to go …
Leo suddenly took pleasure in this, as if he was close to springing a surprise on them all. “So the Stasi commander sent in the next squad of pen-pushers, toting their submachine guns. The drug made them laugh, a screaming laugh. To those men it became the most hilarious thing in the world. Those were strong drugs, huh?” He nodded, seeing it all again in his mind’s eye.
Gently, Dominic urged, “Tell them everything, then we can leave.”
“Only after he’s shown us the Vortex site,” Scarlet countered. “Once we get a fix, the excavation team can do the rest.”
Leo groaned. “Why must I keep stating the obvious? The squads entered the complex. They never returned. Three officers went down there to find out what was making our soldiers vanish. One officer came back. His face was missing—only the eyes stared out from this red, dripping mask. We were high. We laughed like maniacs as we emptied our guns into his belly. Ha, the Stasi had a bellyful too.” He chuckled. “They raced out to their big black cars, fled back to the mainland. I realized then that someone had a video camera—no doubt for the benefit of the top brass. They could see Vortex destroyed without having to actually step on tainted ground—at least, that’s what they hoped. Eventually, a couple of us ventured into the first of the underground levels. Believe me, they went on for kilometer after kilometer. With big silver pipes that made whooshing noises. As we stood there … wondering what the hell we should do, we heard a humming sound. That sent us crazy … we fired into the tunnels … then I realized it was the elevator rising up through the levels to our floor. The doors opened. I found my friend Neumann. We carried his body out on the stretcher. You’ve video of us doing just that.” He paused, smiling. “But I wonder why you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”
“And what’s that, Leo?”
“Look at the footage again of the corpse on the stretcher. See the state of his head. Now cast your mind back to the corpse washed up by the tide. Then compare the two.”
To end Vortex is madness. See the films I have made. Visit my test subjects. Whatever it takes, find a way to continue this research—for I can give you absolute power over the human mind.
—Dr. Lippisch, 1989
Within five minutes of leaving the car, Leo pointed to the setting of the long-gone building that had housed Vortex. Now there were only beech saplings and stinging nettles. Hemlock gifted the evening air with a bitter scent. Scarlet wielded an aerosol to mark pink streaks on the turf where the walls and entrances had once stood. Soon, yet more weed-covered mounds of rubble were marked with splashes of fluorescent pink. Powell, still wearing his grim seen-it-all-before expression, employed a handheld electronic device to record the exact GPS coordinates.
Larchette, however, obsessed about the dead fisherman and footage of the corpse Leo had helped carry on the stretcher. “They had the same wounds,” he insisted. “Both had undergone the identical surgical procedure. Their brains had been removed. It must have happened to the fisherman only hours ago. How can that be when this place was dynamited back in nineteen-ninety? Is there—”
“Larchette,” Scarlet interrupted. “We can speculate later over a beer—you clearly need one.”
Larchette fired anxious glances into the forest. “We don’t know what happened to those test subjects. Leo told us the execution squads simply vanished. Except for the guy recovered from the elevator. He—”
Scarlet snapped, “That’s enough.” Even as she spoke, they heard a soft thump, one loud enough, nevertheless, to make birds in the trees screech in alarm. Dominic’s three colleagues exchanged puzzled glances.
“Sounds like a big door being slammed shut—underground.” Leo chuckled. He’d taken satisfaction from Larchette’s unease. “Someone just left the house. In a temper. A steaming rage.”
Dominic shook his head. “That’s no door.” He raced back through the trees. By now, the sun had sunk behind the uppermost branches to stain the ground with shadows that stretched out like so many limbs, eager to seize unwitting victims. “Damn.” He stopped dead. The big 4x4 had been waiting on the track to take them home. Now that would no longer happen.
Larchette howled, “I knew it was going wrong. I knew it!”
In the growing gloom, the car stood on its roof. Four tires, slashed to shreds, pointed forlornly at the evening sky.
Powell frowned. “Somebody’s playing tricks.”
“Tricks?” Leo smiled strangely. “This is no prank.”
Scarlet seized his arm. “What do you mean?”
“You’re in danger. Dreadful danger. Don’t you understand?”
The sunset’s bloody light gushed through the leaves.
Larchette trembled. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
“How, you idiot?” Powell bellowed. “Someone flipped the damn car!”
Leo chuckled. “See? This place unmans the strongest. Even Herr Powell is frightened now.”
“Frightened.” Powell sneered. “I’ll do the frightening.” He drew an object from under his fleece. Dominic saw the gunmetal black of a revolver.
“Useless.” Leo’s chuckle turned manic. “A child’s toy.”
“Quiet.”
Leo pressed on, eyes bulging as memories flooded him. “My comrades went rolling into Vortex armed with AK-47s, those big, fat curving ammo clips full of armor-piercing rounds. Consummate widow makers. Yet only one man returned. With his brains scooped out. Hah, how will your little pistol save you? How—”
Powell slapped Leo hard.
He wiped blood from his mouth with grim satisfaction. “I am right, Herr Powell. You are frightened.”
Powell raised his fist. “Stupid old—”
“Enough,” Dominic barked. “Leo’s no fool. You should be listening to him. Because right now you’re the stupid ones. You’re blundering round like you’re playing spies in your own backyard. You’ve absolutely no comprehension about what happened in this place. The experiments! The atrocities! Even worse, you haven’t realized something is continuing. There’s an aftermath. Some agency is still at work in this forest. Can’t you get the fact into your thick heads? People flipped that car. They shredded the tires. Therefore, someone wants to trap us here: they have plans.”
“He’s right.” Scarlet drew a handgun from a concealed holster. “Start watching each other’s backs.”
“This is connected to the fisherman, the one with the …” Larchette pressed the top of his head as if to check that it was still intact. “My God. We might be next.”
“We could turn the car?” Powell suggested.
“Even if we can, how would it run on flat tires?”
“Walk,” Larchette stammered. “Start walking now—we’ll reach a road, at least.” He pulled out his cell phone. “The police can have cars waiting for us.”
As he pressed the keys, his bearded face quivered. “No signal. Damn, damn! Try yours, Scarlet.”
It took moments to confirm that cells were useless in this remote quarter.
“Either shoot me or follow me,” Leo told them. “But this is the way.”
Renewed hope made Larchette eager to be friendly. “How long, Leo?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“Then we should just make it before it gets properly dark,” Scarlet observed.
“So?” Leo smiled. “You’re trusting me with your lives?” The smile broadened. “Deliciously ironic.”
The light turned deeper crimson: a congealed quality that became streaked with black as shadows lengthened. Rich, earthy scents of fungi thickened the air. Dominic noticed that the woodland crowded in as they moved away from the demolished complex. Here, a thick loam allowed trees to sink their roots deep underground. He pictured pale tendrils snaking down through dark, moist soil to penetrate Cold War bunkers. For all the world, it felt as if they’d crossed a threshold. They’d entered an alien landscape of dense, primeval forest. Here, the dead might sing melancholy ballads. A phantom wolf could swallow up the moon to bring an end to humankind. Or so it seemed to Dominic.
As they walked, a jittery Larchette sputtered, “It can’t be far now, surely? See? This is the old route to the highway.”
But the abandoned road had skinned over with moss. Brambles engulfed it, forcing detours. Boughs overhung it to form a tunnel that was so devoid of light that sometimes they stumbled. A cold wind, born in the Arctic, ghosted through the foliage. Timbers creaked. Twigs plucked at the strands of an old wire fence until it sounded as if a lunatic guitarist was serenading them with jangling metallic discord as they found themselves once more swallowed by an army of trees.
Dominic noted that his three “colleagues” were well equipped. Soon they produced slender flashlights to illuminate the path. They trudged on as a rising gale cried through the wilderness. Flanking the way were steel signs that were slowly dying of rust; nevertheless, he could make out Russian words that must have spelled out ominous warnings. Beneath that runelike text, etchings of death’s heads underlined the threats of danger. Dominic glimpsed domed skull shapes gazing out from the bushes. These morbid, decaying objects were concrete machine gun posts intended to protect the military complex in the time of yore. Twin slits in the front, from which the guns would have been fired, resembled eye sockets that imbued the domes with a cold, hating stare. Trespassers weren’t welcome.
Larchette was worried. “Surely, it can’t be far now—hey!” He whirled round as if tracking an object that moved swiftly through the trees. “Did you see that?”
“For pity’s sake, man, get a grip.”
“I did see something,” Larchette protested. “A flash of white … like bare skin.”
“If you go chasing elves, we’ll never get out of here.” Powell marched away along the overgrown track. “You’re a coward, Larchette. And that’s the word I’ll use in my report. You’re fin—”
This time Powell stopped short. His anger vanished completely when he uttered, “I hope you’ve got strong stomachs.”
“We’re dead,” Leo predicted with grim satisfaction. “As good as nailed into our coffins. As good as eaten by worms.”
What blocked this weed-choked roadway to the outside world was a chain-link fence, ten feet high and topped with razor wire, clearly erected when the Cold War base was abandoned. This, however, hadn’t triggered Leo’s macabre statement.
Everyone stared at what adorned the steel mesh. At what had so grimly fruited there in the bone-chilling northerly. Their eyes absorbed every detail of the dozens of corpses that had been strung from the wire. From the tiny corpses of sparrows, to crows, to rabbits, to the bloated cadavers of reindeer that swung heavily—blood-filled pendulums that sprinkled maggots into the grass when the wind blew.
“Look at their heads,” Scarlet breathed. “Every single one of them.”
“Just like the fisherman back on the beach, eh?” Leo enjoyed himself now that he detected fear in his interrogators. “So? What does this evidence tell you? Are you sure you will be going home to your families, after all?”
Perhaps forty creatures hung there: tiny birds to man-sized deer. Each and every one mutilated. Probing beams from flashlights revealed that the tops of craniums were missing; the brains removed; eyeless sockets formed windows to redly vacant skulls.
The cold seemed to blow right through the five as if eager to tug souls free of all too mortal bodies. Tree trunks groaned deeply while beneath the endless clawing of the branches, the domed concrete bunkers stared coldly, sullenly, as if knowing what awaited the foolhardy as nightfall sent forth its invasion of prowling shadows.
A gunshot split the air. “There it is!” Smoke poured from Larchette’s handgun. “You must have seen it!” Screaming, he ran into the bushes in pursuit of the flitting form.
Powell had seen it. Anyone could tell just by the expression on his face. Aghast, he backed off, then fled.
Dominic called to Scarlet and Leo, “Get back to the beach. We can follow the shore to …” He didn’t finish the sentence. A spider scuttled out from the bushes.
“Oh, dear heaven.” Like a frightened child, Scarlet’s hand found his.
Because it wasn’t just any kind of spider. There in the light of Scarlet’s flashlight Dominic saw a crude spider shape. Only it was far too big, perhaps ten feet in diameter. Pale, almost hairless—flesh pulpy. Quite simply, the creature had been assembled from naked human beings, eight men arranged in such a way that they lay facedown with the tops of their heads touching. Skulls had been top-sliced to reveal the brains. Then the craniums had been fused, while some abhorrent surgical technique extended the spinal columns so they were bonded together. Sutured scalps formed a yard-wide knot of unruly hair in the center of that raft of flesh. With their heads conjoined, the men were forced to cooperate as they moved on all fours. They ran on the palms of their hands and soles of their feet, like monkeys trained to perform some weird dance with the crowns of their heads touching. Frequently, they moved sideways—giant, soft-backed crabs, their backbones pressing against skin, each rib visible in their straining bodies, bare buttocks clenching-unclenching as they moved.
“They’re dying,” Dominic whispered. “They must only be able to survive like this a few days at most.”
Already, the face of one man had turned a bruised purple. One eye had closed, the other bulged out, sightlessly, as red as a ripe cherry. A crash from their right heralded the arrival of another of these composite creatures. The eight pairs of limbs moved in a mad scramble, yet every so often the conjoined brains of the individual men must have bonded in perfect synch. Then legs moved with undulating precision, just as the millipede ambulates with a smooth, wavelike motion that carries it across the ground, while the arms that now protruded from what amounted to the underbelly of the beast supported its center where the eight heads were fused. When the gales stopped mauling the trees, a sudden quietude allowed the sound of the fused men to reach Dominic’s ears. Each surgically joined man grunted, panted, or whimpered with pain.
He shot a glance back at the creatures adorning the fence. Bizarre trophies, or raw material for new experiments?
Five more of the creatures emerged from the forest onto the weed-choked road. The largest moved clumsily, one of its component parts long dead. Its limbs hung limp, while the other bonded men tried to compensate. The bloated corpse painted a black trail of slime across the grass. Another conjoined creature had also mastered locomotion, so each man moved with graceful precision: it seemed as if the multilimbed creature danced lightly through the dark toward them. Grunts of exertion turned into excited snorting as sweating torsos heaved upward to allow the faces, which were normally turned down toward the ground, to glimpse the intruders. With a cry, Larchette burst from the trees. In one hand he held the flashlight, in the other the pistol. Screaming, he raced toward one of these whirling stars of human flesh, their legs radiating outward. He fired into the press of bodies. With a roar of agony erupting simultaneously from eight mouths, it rose up onto two pairs of legs. Limbs writhed in the air, resembling the tentacles of some nightmare octopus. In the beast’s center, eight faces of those conjoined men were clearly visible. The skin along the hairlines had been stitched. Now, stresses of the facial skin tugged features out of shape. Sixteen misshapen eyes glared in both fury and agony at Larchette. He fired his last two rounds into the center, where eight skulls met to form a single structure of bone. While the creature howled, its freakish companions cried out in dismay. Then the wounded beast slammed down onto the turf, feet kicking wildly at the ground until toenails were ripped clean away. A moment later it lay still.
The creature nearest Larchette pounced. As he lay beneath it, it began to resemble a huge pale fist that rested palm down on the earth. What its sixteen hands did to violate Larchette, Dominic had, mercifully, no way of knowing, but the man screamed in terror for a long, long time before his voice trailed into despairing, gulping sobs … then, at last, silence.
Dominic didn’t know when he began running. Or where. Only that he ran alone through the nighttime forest. Pale tree trunks, phantom sentinels, darted by him. Cold gales provoked the branches to claw at his head as he ran. Twigs plucked the fence wire. Metallic notes punched his eardrums. Torrents of air raked the grass as if invisible claws were tearing at the earth in fury. He blundered by the skull-shaped domes of concrete bunkers, their gun slits watching his desperate scramble with mute amusement. Behind him, the stitched-together conglomerations of men followed. Once, he called out to Scarlet In answer, the storm raised sounds that aped scornful catcalls.
On returning to what had once been the site of the Vortex buildings, he saw that running was a waste of time. A dozen of those fleshy man-crab creatures waited for him. Some had raised themselves onto two sets of legs so that limbs radiated like the petals of a sunflower. From its crowded center, a cluster of faces peered out, all those glinting eyes fixed eagerly on Dominic.
When they rushed Dominic, he didn’t fight. In the face of those odds, what was the point? Powerful hands seized his limbs, then deposited him onto broadly muscular backs where they held him with strong fingers. Coarse body hair pricked his face. Man-sweat, spiked with hormonal excitement, filled his nostrils. As his consciousness retreated from the horror of it all, they carried him away. Like riding a dogsled, he thought dreamily. Low to the ground. Fast, smoothly fast … gliding …
Any regrets, Dominic? Despite the surreal journey through the dark forest, he found himself musing on his life. He’d no regrets about his clandestine profession. But he felt a sudden, profound sadness. All those casual encounters he’d enjoyed at hotels … Why couldn’t he have invested time in nurturing a meaningful relationship? Yes, he had one regret as his life neared its end: he wished he’d mated emotionally with a woman.
As he rode on the backs of the conjoined men who scrambled crabwise, he pictured himself opening the door of his increasingly lonely apartment to find, instead of emptiness, a smiling face. “How was your day, my love? Did you do anything special?” Briefly, he struggled to free himself. One of the beast’s hands gripped his throat. Above him, the stars appeared to spill out of the sky: falling, falling … they flowed through his skull until his brain was filled with fire.
Grainy VCR color footage. A superimposed date: 03/03/1991. One of the fleshy man-crab beasts lies dead on a tiled floor. Fluids leak from the corpses. Dr. Lippisch addresses the camera. “I don’t have anti rejection drugs. So within days, these beautiful children of mine wither and die. But see what I have done. I can fuse separate individuals into a single, coherent being. I reprogram their minds, so they believe this is how they are meant to be.” She laughs. “See the torso, then legs … how they radiate outward like the limbs of a starfish. I name this creation Man-Star. A wordplay on monster, of course. Man-Star, my Man-Star … But one day this Man-Star race will be perfect.”
—VCR anonymously mailed to Leipzig University
To Dominic, it seemed a long, long night. One of absolute darkness. Then there were the dreams … of blood, of restraint, screaming … nightmares … They stained his soul …
At last: LIGHT. A light that drove incandescent torrents through his eye sockets. As he tried to force himself fully awake, he realized that a woman in a white coat stood near him. Silver streaked her long hair. As she held a clipboard, she addressed a camcorder set on its tripod in the room’s center. “I am Dr. Lippisch, Senior MD, Project Vortex. Here you see my latest subject, aged thirty-three, a healthy male. Drugs, which I have at last acquired, will prevent the subject’s immune system from rejecting my surgical grafts. Composite brain is healthy, tissue pink, arterial blood flow satisfactory. Students, watch carefully. The abdomen wall is already clamped back in order to receive a very special passenger.”
Dominic turned his head to one side. There on a line of tables lay Scarlet, Leo, Powell, and Larchette. The tops of their heads had been neatly sliced; empty skull cavities revealed that the brains had been removed.
Dr. Lippisch walked quickly to the camera, tilted it so its lens would capture images of Dominic strapped to the operating table. Then she switched on a TV bolted to a tiled wall. In vibrant detail, it revealed Dominic as he lay there supine. Naked. Bloodstained. Belly slit from ribcage to pubic hair. The mouth of the wound gaped huge and red as steel S-shaped clips tugged back the flesh. His stomach now formed a great crimson cave of a thing. A gory void. A roomy vault from which arteries, expertly clamped, protruded.
At that moment Dominic understood many things. An epidural killed any sensation below his collarbone. (Lippisch: “See the regular rhythm of the diaphragm. All is well”) What’s more, he knew that the woman—utterly insane—had remained in the bunker after the fall of communism. There, she’d secretly continued Operation Vortex. She had built her Man-Stars. (“Watch how I insert the grafted matter into the space once occupied by the right kidney. Now I connect blood vessels, which once fed that kidney, with the carotid and jugular stubs of the conjoined brains.”) Worse, he would know what it was like to carry the brains of Leo, Scarlet, Powell, and Larchette in his belly. And for those four moistly pink brains to be fed by his own lifeblood. (“Viewers, please check the website for updates. I fully expect this subject’s nervous system to gradually connect with those of the brains implanted in his abdomen. Soon, he will establish communication. The integrated brain in his stomach will talk to him via his own neural highway…. Just imagine the nature of such a conversation!)
Lippisch was mad, of course. Completely delusional. An opinion proved when she accidentally caught the epidural embedded in his upper spine; the long loop of tubing had been left to hang carelessly down to the floor, and her foot had done the rest. Once the needle had popped out, his healthy liver stopped efficiently filtering the drug from his bloodstream. Pain was quick to show its unwelcome face. Within moments, the agony of the vast surgical wound in his stomach became a Pentecostal fire. Unconsciousness stayed cruelly at arm’s length, so he felt the nettle-like sting of the scalpel part yet more muscle. Then came the cold mass of his companions’ brain tissue being forced through the gory hole into his abdomen. Dr. Lippisch happily sang a Bavarian folk song as she operated. Dominic’s scream carried upward through the clay to the surface. Momentarily loud enough, it made Lippisch’s monstrous creations pause in surprise before they slid back into the all-engulfing shadows of the forest.
Success is sweet indeed. And with that success, even I am transfigured.
—Dr. Lippisch
“What is it, Dominic? Are we close?”
“Yes … too close.”
“Are you frightened?”
“Terrified. If you believed me, then you’d be terrified too.”
“Show us the site of the Vortex compound, then you’re free to leave.”
How similar the replacements to Powell, Scarlet, and Larchette sounded. They looked the same too. HQ must use the same recruitment template. The woman was a career-driven ice maiden. One man appeared queasy at the sight of everything here on the beach. The third wore a permanently bitter expression.
“You haven’t asked to see my scar,” Dominic began. “I can prove—”
“We’ve been through that,” said the woman. “An old surgical wound proves nothing.”
“Show us the Vortex site.” The queasy man switched on his digital camera. “You will be questioned and your responses filmed. Do you understand?”
Dominic grimaced. “Follow me.”
He led them up the beach, over piles of seashells that were as white as fresh snowdrifts, to a break in the dazzling cliffs, for which Rugen is justly famous, then he guided them into the forest. There, its silent, shadowed interior embraced them.
The bitter-faced man spat questions: “You came this way with Scarlet, Powell, and Larchette?”
“Yes.” The twelve-pound brain mass inside Dominic’s stomach grew hot, itchy; it began to pulsate. His inner companions were full of anticipation.
“You found the site of the Vortex lab?”
“As you will see for yourselves.”
Overarching tree branches formed a tunnel of near darkness.
“Do you know the nature of the Lippisch experiments?”
“Oh, yes, indeed.”
Dominic led the way. Contentedly, he rubbed a big, tightly full stomach. Behind him, a white-coated figure fell in behind his little, unsuspecting party. Hair tied severely back, she walked silently with a clipboard hugged toward her chest. When she lifted a hand, her Man-Stars sidled out of the undergrowth. The trio hadn’t yet noticed they were being stalked by naked men conjoined at the head, their long, pale legs stepping in unison through the gloom. But they would see them soon enough, when it was far too late to do anything about it.
“When the Man-Stars make their move, I’ll let you watch.”
“What was that you just said?” asked the nauseated-looking one.
“Oh.” Dominic didn’t turn round. “Just talking to the inner man, so to speak.”
When Lippisch’s Man-Stars launched themselves on his three new “colleagues,” that’s when he turned to watch the one-sided struggle. As he did so, he found himself recalling the increasingly lonely hours at home; the pointless encounters with strangers in airport hotels; the click of the hotel room door, closing on a woman whose name he’d already forgotten. “Be sure you don’t injure the female,” he told the Man-Stars. “Dr. Lippisch has promised me a bride.” He smiled fondly. “A bride with brains.”
Dominic began to laugh. A huge, hearty laugh that scared the birds from the trees. This, he knew, was the start of a beautiful new world.