“Sorry,” said the Armourer. “Impossible to communicate in this unnatural place. Still, you have to admit this is really impressive. This is where the Nazis stored all their secret superweapons that were going to win the war for them. All the things they never got a chance to use, because Laurence shut the place down and trapped it here. Look at it all. . . . I’ve read about some of this, but never expected to see it with my own eyes. Prototype flying saucers, massive drilling machines to enter a city from underneath, tanks the size of railway engines, and look at that! A lightweight wooden airplane, to cross the Atlantic and drop their crude nuclear bombs on New York and Washington.”
“A balsa-wood airplane?” said Molly. “Oh, come on . . .”
“Howard Hughes built something similar for the Americans,” I said. “The Spruce Goose. Never put into production, but it did fly. . . .”
“All right, I’ll give you a wooden plane,” said Molly. “But Nazi flying saucers, in the forties?”
“Word was the Nazis had access to a crashed alien starship,” said the Armourer. “Some of the best Nazi minds broke their hearts trying to reverse-engineer it. Imagine trying to build a stardrive with vacuum tubes and slave labour. . . . Still, who knows what they might have achieved, given time? They nearly had the atomic bomb before we did. They were getting desperate enough to try anything towards the end. I don’t even recognise some of the things they’ve got here. Oh, Eddie, we have got to take this back with us! This is all of major historical importance!”
“First things first, Uncle Jack,” I said.
“I have to find Isabella!” said Molly. “She’s in trouble; I know she is. . . .”
“Of course you must,” the Armourer said immediately. “Lead the way, my dear.”
And so off we set again, hurrying through one oversize passageway after another, all of them built to impress or at least intimidate, until finally we found ourselves facing another closed door. More solid steel, with the word Verboten etched deeply into the metal. I kicked it open and we hurried in . . . to find ourselves standing at one end of a long, narrow hallway full of strange equipment, all of it covered in a thick layer of ice. Row upon row of tall glass cylinders stretched away before us, disappearing into the gloom, each thickly crusted with frost. The overhead lights came on one by one as we stood there, revealing more and more cylinders fading off into the distance. Each one had a blocky equipment panel at its base, sparkling with its own layer of hoarfrost. I moved in close for a better look. It was all blinking lights and heavy levers, and handwritten labels in German. The Armourer moved slowly down the centre aisle, trying to look at everything at once. Molly stayed with me, shivering and hugging herself.
“It’s freezing cold in here. Even after all these years. What were they doing?”
“Storing something,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “I wonder what. . . .”
“Specimens of some kind?” said Molly, fascinated despite herself.
“Cryogenics chambers!” said the Armourer. “Crude, but functional.” He leaned in close to one cylinder, brushing the ice away with his forearm. “Animal species . . . of a kind.” He looked at the control panel. “My German’s a bit rusty, but if I’m translating these labels correctly, what we have in these cylinders are . . . werewolves, Nosferatu, dragonkind, changelings . . . and a whole row of cylinders marked ‘Alien.’ I think this was some crude first attempt at bioengineering, presumably inspired by whatever they discovered in that crashed alien starship.”
“Can you tell what species the aliens belong to?” I said. “We may need to contact someone’s embassy.”
The Armourer cleared more ice from a cylinder and took a good look at what was inside. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t recognise this. Which is interesting . . . because I could have sworn I knew all the aliens allowed access to this world.”
“They were creating monsters in here,” I said. “Typical Nazis. Were they trying to create some new form of shock troops, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” said the Armourer. “Or perhaps they were . . . experimenting. They did so love to experiment. On things, and people . . . Welcome to the House of Pain, Dr. Moreau.”
“Can you make any sense of the control panels?” I said.
“No,” said the Armourer regretfully. “Too technical.”
“Hold it,” said Molly. “You want to wake these things up?”
“I was thinking more about putting them out of their misery,” I said.
And that was when the whole place shook, and the lights flared up brilliantly as though hit by a power surge. All the cylinders began to moan and vibrate in place, humming loudly like so many glass tuning forks. Whole chunks of ice fell away to shatter noisily on the floor. Frost on the instrument panels began to steam and melt and run away. It became increasingly possible to see what was inside the cylinders, and I soon wished I couldn’t. Too many things that should never have existed, made from pain and horror. This was nothing natural about any of them; they were patchwork things, horrible combinations of man and animal, shaped into living nightmares. All slowly waking up. Mouths opened, revealing jagged teeth. Fingers opened and closed, clutching at nothing, or tapped and clattered against the inside of the cylinders. Eyes opened, full of pain and rage and madness.
“They’re all coming back to life!” said Molly. “Armourer, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” said the Armourer, looking wildly about him. “I didn’t touch anything! We have must have restarted the systems when we walked in here.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I said.
I smashed the nearest equipment panel with one blow of my golden fist. The light inside the cylinder snapped off, and the contents stopped moving. I made my way steadily up and down the rows, smashing each control panel in turn, until my arm ached even inside my armour. There was a series of small explosions, a few fires, some drifting smoke . . . and one by one the systems shut down. The ice was still melting and running away in streams, but inside the cylinders, eyes closed, mouths closed, fingers stopped moving.
“Are they all back to sleep now?” said Molly, when I finally finished my work and returned to her.
“They’re all dead, Molly,” the Armourer said quietly. “We put them out of their suffering. Sometimes that’s the only mercy we have to offer.”
Molly put a comforting hand on my golden arm. “You did what you had to, Eddie.”
“I know,” I said. “Lot of that happening recently.”
I looked round suddenly. Off in the distance, I could hear sounds of fighting, conflict, gunfire and explosions. It seemed the Droods had come to grips with the enemy at last. But whom were they fighting? I moved back to the open door to find out, and that was when one of the largest cylinders suddenly exploded, shooting vicious glass shards through the air.
The Armourer and I moved quickly to shelter Molly, and when we looked round it was to see freezing gases boiling out of the shattered cylinder, falling to crawl along the floor like heavy ground fog. And out of the remains of the cylinder stepped a massive apelike creature. I have to say apelike, because it was another patchwork creature, roughly stitched together from a dozen different species, not all of them apes. It was huge, a giant, nine to ten feet tall and broadly built, its piebald skin stretched tautly over bulging muscles. Its fur had fallen out in great patches. So much time and effort, just so Nazi scientists could create the killer ape of myth and legend. Its head had been shaved, and jagged scars ran across the bulging augmented forehead. Steel bolts circled the skull, sparking static electricity. Its eyes were wild, full of suffering and the knowledge of what had been done to it.