He proceeded to briefly capture the roof and walls, which were, as expected, filthy, muddy and dusty. Sam's weary legs waded through the frigid shallow water that covered the floor of the tank. “Please, let this be mud.” Carefully he withdrew the blueprint from his jacket, taking care not to drop it in the muck or tear it. It was, after all, in itself, a relic of the Second World War.
From the diagram, and from what Virgil had explained, there was a square on the outside of the tank, a few meters on in the remainder of the tunnel leading to the sea front. With faded blue pen this particular unmarked square was reiterated several times, leaving it far darker than the rest of the drawing. Sam took a screen shot of it and paused his camera to continue on. When he reached the other side of the tank to enter the next chute, Sam tripped over what felt like roots under the water. Luckily the water was not deep enough to submerge him or his camera, and since he had safely slipped the blueprint back into his jacket pocket, it too was spared any damage.
But what did upset Sam was what his flashlight revealed at the edge of the tank's exit, that which he had fallen over. “Jesus!” he screamed, falling backwards a few times before he could recover his posture and get his camera.
“What is it?” he could hear Nina shouting down.
“I–I will show…just wait, I'll show you when I get back up,” he answered with a stutter of shock. His finger kept missing the Record button until he stilled himself and tried again. After a shaky setting of the Zoom function, Sam successfully included all the ghastly bones into his frame. “Fucking hell,” he muttered as he moved closer, seeking the slippery floor with his feet this time as he gradually advanced. “Military uniforms,” he remarked as he closed in. “Guess who. Just as we thought. Foot soldiers of Himmler who died down here looking for the very goddamn thing I am looking for.” Sam captured the horror of the last moments of what looked to be four men.
Their mouths were agape and their orders still in their hands. Two had gunshot wounds to the head, apparently self-inflicted. Disturbing evidence of cannibalism came out on some of the bones, where Sam discovered teeth marks. Upon the wall next to the third man were the words 'verfluchte Erde.' What gave Sam a chill was how well preserved the writing was. It was as if it had been written by one of those bony hands mere minutes ago. With the insinuation that the earth is cursed, written by a dead man, Sam was beginning to feel genuine terror in his heart. Prompted to put aside the feeling of sinister fate approaching him, he thought to speak to the viewers he was recording all this for.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, what gives me a better chance of survival than these blokes? The fact that I am not a fascist does not seem to absolve me from the same fate, does it?” he huffed, exhausted and cold, not to mention quite shaken. Sam was thankful that he got past the bones, but it only escalated his fear of what was waiting in the dark.
Chapter 27 — The Fear of God
Purdue was not aware that several days had elapsed since he’d been flung into the oubliette and forced to listen to the brutal murder of the man who’d kidnapped him. Between the pain and the starvation, he was uncertain where the true agony had been born, but after all the cries for help Purdue realized that the worst anguish came from the knowledge that he was wasting away where he would never be found.
“You Scots are certainly a cold-blooded bunch,” he recalled Mother saying to him at some point during his ebb and flow of consciousness during the most recent hours of his incarceration. Her coarse voice had drifted through the air holes in his prison, so that she could better torment him while he suffered a slow death. “I have heard so many old legends of Scottish castles and their masters, Mr. Purdue; stories that were so perverted I could not help but feel… inspired… by their methods.”
Purdue could not utter a sound that did not constitute wailing in pain or the effort of begging for food, therefore refraining from provoking the deranged old woman and coming to the receiving end of more malice. For days now he had witnessed, only by ear, the habits of the supreme matriarch of the Black Sun organization. She drank incessantly, so heavily, that he was amazed by her resilience, especially at her ripe age.
What terrified and repulsed him the most was Mother's idea to drop the limp corpse of Jonathan Beck unceremoniously into the oubliette with Purdue. The night before, after he’d heard the cadaver's bones break under the velocity of his fall from the trapdoor, the malefic matriarch invited Purdue to feast on the corpse if he became too ravenous, or suffer his company and stench. She loved talking while she drank herself into an immobilizing inebriation Purdue construed as some false psychological attempt to drown her guilt for all the malevolent deeds she’d ordered and exercised.
“I like, especially, how your lairds killed their own children over land,” she spoke with snide reprehension, draining the bottom of her fifth bourbon that Purdue knew of. “What left an impression on me, though, is the way in which the genetically inferior men of your breed locked their wives in towers to waste away from hunger for bearing daughters.” She let out an unearthly cackle of ridicule. “Mein Gott! What a bunch of barbaric idiots your ancestors were! Did they not consider that their seed determined the gender of their children, that they in themselves were responsible for the horrid female offspring they so loathed? Probably not. Even if they did, they would have overlooked their error on account of some masculine rule.”
He could hear her pacing with those long, gracious legs, and follow her position by the sound of her baleful speech. “You know, Mr. Purdue, I am no feminist, but misogyny has always kindled hellfire in me. And to punish women for the deeds of men solely for their sex has cultivated a special hatred for those Jewish systems of oppression over women. That book that instills more evil than any, that book compiled by the Roman hypocrites, it only reiterates that the Führer was the true Messiah.”
From there on Purdue's mind began to fade again. The pain had relinquished its power to that of hunger-born fatigue. Somewhere in his head he could hear Mother carry on. “This is why I’m leaving you in my oubliette, to wane like the wives of your ill-begotten forefathers and their pious villainy…”
The lanky body of the trapped explorer, ex-Renatus of the Order of the Black Sun (by some work of trickery) and enemy of all Nazi sympathizers, rolled over next to one of the massive iron spikes on the floor. He was too weak to even acknowledge the threatening gangrene in his leg. After all, he was not going to make it to the amputation before his frail heart surrendered.
Where he lay, curled up and delirious, Purdue pondered upon the type of pen he was snared in. Oubliette, he thought, searching his knowledge for the definition of the thing. 'French…oblier, right? Oublier is to… like, to… forget. It is to forget. How goddamn apt they… to forget…
“I am… forgotten,” Purdue murmured before his eyes refused to open and his mind shut away reality.
Maria and Sylvia drove from the train station in Dalmally, heading toward Oban. Sylvia had arranged with her husband, Dr. Lance Beach, to transfer the money as Maria had instructed. She could not even revel in her husband's elation at hearing her voice while the gun bruised the tender skin of her temple, but she hoped to soon be reunited with Lance. He wept with happiness when she first spoke to him, and even if Maria put that bullet in her head right now, Sylvia would die happy at having heard his affectionate voice.