Anno Frankenstein Read online

  They passed beneath red banners bearing the swastika symbol of the Nazi party and the eagle and wreath of the Third Reich, along with other pennants emblazoned with the warped Vitruvian Man emblem of the Frankenstein Corps. The flags flapped in the bitter breeze that howled along the chilly corridor.

  “There’s something else you should know about the prisoner, sir.”

  “And what’s that?” Kahler asked, striding away along the passage, tugging at his jacket to straighten it, making sure he looked as smart as possible. The heels of his gleaming jackboots clicked on the stone flagged floor.

  “Well…” The messenger hesitated.

  “What is it man? Spit it out.”

  “He is… disfigured.”

  “Disfigured?” Kahler turned his hawkish gaze on the young man once more and gave him a withering look. “I have been commandant here at Castle Frankenstein for the past two years, corporal. I have seen all the horrors that war has to offer. It would take a very great deal to disturb me now, I can assure you.”

  “Nonetheless,” the messenger pressed, “his appearance is… unsettling.”

  Kahler smiled, a cold, unsettling thing. It was the smile of a man inured to the horrors of war and who now found the prospect of being horrified properly for the first time in years almost appealing.

  “Have you seen him then, corporal?”

  The youth hesitated before giving his carefully considered response. “No, Colonel. But I have heard the others –”

  “Enough then; your concerns only serve to make me more curious,” he said. “So come, let us give this prisoner that which he wants and see for ourselves the horror of his appearance.”

  COLONEL KAHLER AND the corporal made their way at speed through the warren of corridors and laboratories that made up the fortress-factory.

  D Block was the name now given to the dungeons located under the central keep of Castle Frankenstein, although most of those stationed at the facility referred to it by another name: Hades.

  Once the seat of a powerful noble family, the castle was the place where one man had broken the bounds of human constraint and created life, usurping the power of God. But since Hitler had started on his plans for the domination of Europe, the castle had been re-built, modified and extended to house the burgeoning Frankenstein Corps.

  Since the offspring of Project Prometheus had first set foot on the battlefield and proved their worth at the Battle of Ypres, the castle had gone into full-scale production. The former medieval border fortress had turned into a factory production line, turning out half-human, half-mechanical monsters.

  Colonel Kahler’s office had once been the private apartments of the family that had owned the castle in more peaceful times. From his office, he led the way through the operations centre, which took up the rest of the eastern wing, and out into the courtyard. Kahler passed the parked up half-tracks and steam-driven trucks of the car pool while the thunderous ringing of the production line presses in the western range opposite echoed from the age-weathered walls.

  What had started out as a field trial of twenty units – twenty units that single-handedly took down an army more than a hundred times that number – had become a full-scale operation. But it had taken more than ten years to produce those initial twenty. In the two years since, Castle Frankenstein’s technicians and surgeons had constructed at least two hundred more.

  And they had never been as busy as they were now. Word was that the Führer was preparing for another big push, that Magna Britannia was ready to wade in at last with its mighty automata armies and put an end to his dreams of Aryan supremacy.

  Black against the purpling dusk, the pylons connecting the fortress-factory to the Darmstadt Dam, sixteen miles away to the west, loomed like giant steel sentinels. The esoteric energy generated by the force of the River Rhine powered the unsleeping production line, while the scientists and their lackeys worked in shifts to maintain the steady manufacture of ‘remades’ to bolster the troops at the front line.

  The products of Project Prometheus were the perfect resource, the ideal soldier, able to shrug off egregious wounds that would finish a mortal man and brutally powerful in and of themselves. And of course, if they did fall in battle, as long as their bodies could be recovered, they could be rebuilt, or their parts cannibalised in the creation of more of their kind, ready to be sent back to the front to fight for the Fatherland once more.

  Behind them, the main gates were opening as the checkpoint guards admitted another truck carrying body parts from the front, more than three hundred miles away. The smell of old blood and carrion wafted across the courtyard, catching in the messenger’s nostrils and making him wince. Kahler, if he even registered the smell at all, didn’t even blink. The young man was glad once they had crossed the courtyard and entered the keep. It was here, in the lower levels, that the flesh-crafters blended technology and anatomy and made their final improvements to the bodies that had first been stitched together on the body looms, applying thousands of volts of electricity, generated by the Darmstadt Dam turbines, to give them some semblance of life again.

  From the lightning labs the infantile remades were sent for imprinting by the Enigma Engine, after which stage they possessed all the knowledge they needed to go back to the front and bludgeon the enemy to death all over again – no more and no less – before they too were beaten down, crushed by tanks or blown up by landmines, their bodies recovered once more, to be brought back to Castle Frankenstein for the process to begin all over again.

  The technology required to reawaken the dead had been around for some time, but it had only been in the years since the last war that Doktor Folter – a leading figure in the field of necro-reanimation – had perfected what had previously been an unreliable, hit and miss procedure, with more misses than hits.

  The greatest obstacle faced by researchers attempting to create new bodies from old was not the process of having to piece them back together, for in practice that was no more difficult than assembling a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle. Nor was it the process of passing enough voltage through the corpse to reactivate its heart and get synapses in the brain firing again. No, it was the brain itself that presented the biggest problem.

  It wasn’t that irreversible decomposition set in inside the brain within moments of death, for the remade Prometheans did not need to be particularly smart and only fifty per cent of the grey matter was required for a body to be able to function again. No, the problem lay in the fact that the freshly reanimated Prometheans were like newborn babies, in that their minds were blank slates, wiped clean of their memories, like the tabula rasa spoken of by Aristotle.

  Incidents in which the childish monsters had run amok, trashing whole laboratories in their tantrums, had set the project back time and again and almost resulted in the plug being pulled on Project Prometheus altogether.

  But in the end, as was always the case, war accelerated the search for a solution – necessity truly being the mother of invention – and the process now known as imprinting had been developed.

  Twenty-four hours was all it took. One day in a chemically-induced coma, inside an imprinting helm connected to an Enigma engine. After that time you had another malleable, obedient super soldier, ready to send back to the front.

  Kahler nodded in acknowledgement at a scientist-surgeon – the man’s lab coat brown with blood stains – before trotting through another archway and down a flight of stone steps into the bowels of the building.

  The ever-present thunder of the machinery was muffled by the stones of the keep down here, but it was still there, more felt in the bones than an audible sound. As they went deeper and deeper into the dungeons of C block, however, even that began to fade.

  The messenger took over then, leading the way, eventually stopping before a heavy iron door. The single guard on duty stood to attention on seeing Colonel Kahler, his rifle gripped tightly in his hands.

  “I take it the prisoner is in here?”

&nbs
p; At a nod of the messenger’s head, the guard sprang to open the door. Kahler paused to check the load in his Mauser; it was always best to be prepared.

  The door opened with a steel groan and the guard stepped aside, admitting Kahler to the cell beyond.

  “Colonel,” the guard suddenly piped up, “I should warn you that –”

  “It’s alright private, I’ve already heard,” Kahler said dismissively. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to lose my dinner over a few war wounds.”

  The guard looked as though he had been about to say something else, but thought better of it. But Kahler had caught the look of remembered horror in the man’s eyes.

  As Kahler entered the musty cell beyond, the figure seated in the middle of the chamber remained facing the opposite wall, his back to the Colonel.

  The light levels in the cell were low. The sky showed purple beyond a tiny barred square high in the wall.

  By the light spilling into the cell from the passageway behind him, Kahler could see the man was wearing a tatty suit that had seen better days. It was scorched at the elbows and the breast pocket had been torn off. His head and shoulders, however, remained in shadow.

  “Ah,” the prisoner said in meticulous German, although his precise diction did not entirely mask his British accent, “would that be Colonel Wolf Kahler deigning to meet with me” – adding – “out of curiosity, no doubt.”

  “I am Colonel Kahler, commandant of this facility,” Kahler confirmed.

  The prisoner was toying with something in his right hand; something small, metallic and locket-shaped.

  “Excellent. Excellent.”

  Unfolding his legs, the man turned around, although he didn’t stand up, and his face remained hidden in shadow.

  “And who might you be?” Kahler asked, adjusting his grip on the pistol in his hand.

  At that the man rose to his feet – clearly taking care not to make any sudden movements – and took a step forward into the light.

  Kahler looked into a face that was more bone than flesh.

  Behind him the messenger gasped, and he heard the splatter of vomit on the stone-flagged floor.

  Colonel Kahler swallowed hard as he felt his own gorge rise. But he was unable to tear his gaze from the face – the debrided nose, the blood-shot, lidless eyes, the lipless mouth, the cauterised flesh of the hairless scalp.

  “You won’t have heard of me, Colonel Kahler, but I’ve heard of you. My name is Daniel Dashwood, and I’m here to win your war for you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Spymaster

  LONDON, ENGLAND, 1943

  THE GENTLEMAN CUT a dash as he strode purposely along Whitehall, cane in hand and opera cape tight around his neck, with top hat firmly in place. The skies above the capital were thick with clouds, great grey sponges that had soaked up half the world’s oceans, which they were now emptying onto the city streets.

  The click of his heels on the paving slabs was deadened by the splash of puddles. Water ran in torrents along the gutters, carrying with it the last of autumn’s leaves and sodden shreds of yesterday’s news.

  The man glimpsed the headline on a scrap of disintegrating newsprint. It read:

  WAR

  One simple word that spoke volumes.

  He knew the date without having to check it: 1 September 1943. It had been all over the papers and street-corner broadcast screens, not to mention every radio station, only the day before. It had been brewing for months, of course, if not years. Ever since the Nazi menace had first reared its ugly fascist head a quarter of a century earlier. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, had capitalised on the German people’s dissatisfaction with how they felt their nation had been treated in the aftermath of the First Great European War to achieve his own aims for power and dominance. But Britain had been watching, and none more closely than the spymasters of Department Q, hence the reason for the gentleman’s jaunt through the deluged streets of London, from Mayfair to Whitehall, at the behest of Mr. Churchill himself.

  He had always suspected it would come to this. Once he had a taste for power, there was no way the Führer was going to give it up again so easily, or even just stop with Germany. He already had both Russia and Magna Britannia within his sights, and with those mighty powers out of the way, there would be nothing to stop him conquering the whole world should he desire it. And the Führer was the kind of man who would.

  The gentleman suddenly halted beside a pillared doorway where an old man, filthy under his matted beard and sodden rags despite the downpour, sat cross-legged in the rain. The battered collecting tin in his lap was empty other than for a broken button and what looked like a dead beetle. Putting a hand into his pocket, the gentleman jangled the change within for a moment before pulling out a coin, tossing it deftly into the beggar’s tin.

  “Thank you kindly, sir,” the old tramp said, touching the brim of his hat.

  “You’ll catch your death out here in this,” the gentleman replied, regarding the filthy beggar for a moment.

  “This?” the old man said, looking up at the sky as if he hadn’t noticed the rain until it had been pointed out to him. “This is nothing. If you’d tried sleeping rough in the depths of winter then you’d know what hardship was.”

  “Still, could be worse,” the smartly-dressed gentleman said.

  “Aye, that it could,” the old man replied, sounding surprisingly cheery. “There’s always some poor bugger worse off than yourself.”

  The tramp lent forward, shooting a couple of wary glances left and right along the rain-slicked street, before pulling on one of the iron railings that ringed the white stone Palladian building. The railing gave in his hand and, with a noise like a turning grindstone, the alcove wall behind him slid open.

  “Go right in,” the tramp said. “He’s expecting you.”

  “I know,” the other replied.

  Glancing slyly left and right himself, he stepped through the secret portal and into the passageway beyond.

  THE DANK PASSAGEWAY smelled of wet stone. The gentleman didn’t linger, but made his way along it to an elevator that was little more than a grilled metal bucket. The safety gate folded back at a sharp tug, the rusted hinges and rivets squealing in protest. The cage wobbled unsteadily as he stepped into it. Pulling the gate shut again after him, he pulled a lever at the back of the carriage and, with a jerk and a clank, the lift descended at speed down a crumbling brick shaft, black with mould and slick with running water.

  At the bottom of the shaft the elevator came to an abrupt halt. The man pulled back the rusted gate awaiting him there and stepped out into a circular tunnel. Flickering yellowed bulbs suffused the underground passageway with a dusty amber glow. The walls of the tunnel were tiled, although many of the tiles were cracked and everything was covered in an oily sheen.

  The gentleman’s rapid footsteps rang from the tiles as he made his way along the passageway deeper under Whitehall. A pattern had been picked out in the tiles: a red circle crossed with a name in white and blue.

  Department Q.

  From the tunnel, the man turned suddenly into a narrower, brick-lined passageway. The lamps were fewer and further between, here, but the man could still make out the monster standing beside the rusted, wheel-locked door at the far end.

  His heart skipped a beat and, just for a moment, his stride faltered. No matter how many times he encountered the gate’s guardian it still made him feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t explain why, there was just something about automatons that he didn’t trust.

  A small angular head sat atop a narrow body, little more than a chassis to support the monstrous pile-driver pistons of its arms and legs.

  The air here smelt of damp rust and burnt coke.

  Slowly, with careful steps, he resumed his approach.

  The atmosphere around him was suddenly thick with steam, the hiss of hydraulics and the clanking of metal joints. A baleful fire sparked into life behind the droid’s visor-plate as it rose up on powerful legs to its ful
l height.

  “Password!” the droid boomed, with the voice of a pressurised steam-engine.

  The man glanced at the yellow slip of paper now in his hand. It was the telegram he had received earlier that morning from the Department. He read the one word printed upon it again, just to be sure.

  Taking a deep breath, he said, in as strong a voice as he could muster, “Angel storm!”

  For a moment nothing happened, the automaton remaining motionless. The only movement was the to and fro motion of the glaring light visible through the slit in the visor-plate.

  The droid could crush him to paste in a second if it so chose, or, to put it another way, if he had got the password wrong, somehow, or the droid had misheard him. It had been known to happen.

  His pulse began to quicken.

  “Password accepted!” the droid growled at last and promptly deactivated, folding in on itself again.

  Letting out a relieved sigh, the gentleman crumpled the telegram in his hand and let it fall to the floor before approaching the door. Seizing the locking wheel with both hands, he strained to turn it clockwise. It was reluctant to move at first but then it gave with a screech of rarely-oiled pivots and the snap of metal bolts, the man stumbling backwards as the door abruptly opened towards him.

  Stepping through the portal, he blinked against the glare of the lights and entered the brightly lit sub-basement. Large iron pipes ran the length of the roof above his head. Between the red bricks, parts of the walls of the basement were formed of older building foundations – large blocks of rough-cut stone and what could well have been sections of the old Roman walls of London. Sturdy doors led off from the broad chamber and the whole place was teeming with bustling figures in white lab-coats and men and women in uniform. The gentleman exchanged curt nods with a few of them as he made his way through the Department’s base of operations, only stopping when he came before a grand-looking walnut-panelled door.