Soon after, the gate came loose from the hot severed hinge and strike on its sides, and it took both men to bear its weight down to the ground. With much huffing and groaning they had lowered the gate gently to maintain the ambient silence, just in case a ruckus could summon any attention it reached by earshot.
One by one they lifted themselves into the dark space above, a place that immediately had a different feel and odor to it. Sam marked the wall again as they waited for Purdue to find the route on his small tablet device. On the screen a complex set of lines appeared, making it difficult to discern between the more elevated tunnels and those slightly lower. Purdue sighed. He was not one to get lost or to navigate in error, not usually, but he had to concede to being uncertain of the next steps.
“Light a flare, Purdue. Please. Please,” Nina whispered in the dead darkness. Here there was no sound whatsoever — no dripping, no water, or wind movement to give the place some sort of life. Nina felt her chest crushing her heart. Where they stood now there was a horrid smell of burnt wires and dust with every word uttered by her, dampened into a concise blurt. It reminded Nina of a coffin; a very small, confined casket with no room to move or breathe. Slowly the onslaught of her panic overwhelmed her.
“Purdue!” Sam urged. “Flare. Nina is not dealing well with these surroundings. Besides we need to see where we are going.”
“Oh, my God, Nina. Of course. I’m so sorry,” Purdue apologized as he scrambled for a flare.
“This place feels so small!” Nina gasped, falling to her knees. “I feel the walls against my body! Oh, sweet Jesus, I’m going to die down here. Sam, please help!” Her gasping turned to rapid panting in the pitch dark.
To her great relief the crack of a flare brought a blinding light and she felt her lungs expand under the deep inhalation she forced. All three squinted their eyes in the sudden glare, waiting for their sight to adjust. Before Nina could enjoy the irony of the size of the place, she heard Purdue utter, “Holy Mother of God!”
“It looks like a spacecraft!” Sam chipped in, his jaw agape with wonder.
If Nina thought the idea of a confined space around her was disturbing, she now had reason to reconsider. The leviathan structure in which they found themselves had a terrifying quality, somewhere between an underworld of mute intimidation and grotesque simplicity. The wide arches overhead emerged from smoothed gray walls that melted into the floor instead of meeting it in a perpendicular fashion.
“Listen,” Purdue said excitedly and raised an index finger while his eyes combed the roof.
“Nothing,” Nina observed.
“No. Maybe nothing in the sense of specific noise, but listen… there is an incessant hum that runs through the place,” Purdue remarked.
Sam nodded. He heard it too. It was as if the tunnel was alive with some sort of almost imperceptible vibration. On both sides the great hall dissipated into the blackness they did not illuminate yet.
“It gives me the creeps,” Nina said, holding her own arms firmly over her chest.
“That makes two of us, no doubt,” Purdue smiled, “yet one cannot help but admire it.”
“Aye,” Sam agreed as he pulled out his camera. There was no discernible feature to capture on the photograph, but the sheer size and smoothness of the tube was a marvel in itself.
“How did they build this place?” Nina wondered out loud.
Obviously it had to have been built during Himmler’s occupation of Wewelsburg, but there had never been any mention of it, and certainly no blueprint of the castle ever recorded the existence of such structures. The size alone proved to have had considerable engineering prowess on the part of the builders while the world above apparently never noticed the excavations beneath.
“I wager that they used prisoners from concentration camps to construct this place,” Sam remarked as he took another picture, including Nina in the frame to fully capture the size of the tunnel in relation to her. “In fact, it is almost as if I can still feel them here.”
Chapter 30
Purdue thought it well for them to follow the lines on his tablet, which now pointed eastward, using the tunnel they were in. On the small screen, the castle was marked with a red dot and from there, like a giant spider, the vast tunnel system spread out in mostly three cardinal directions.
“I find it remarkable that after all this time these channels are mostly void of debris or erosion,” Sam remarked as he followed Purdue into the darkness.
“I agree. It makes me very uncomfortable to think that this place has been left vacant and yet it has no remnants of what happened here during the war,” Nina agreed, her big brown eyes taking note of every detail of the walls and their round merger with the floor.
“What is that sound?” Sam asked again, annoyed by its constant hum so subdued that it almost became part of the silence in the dark tunnel.
“It reminds me of a turbine of sorts,” Purdue mentioned as he frowned at the strange object that appeared a few yards ahead on his schematic. He stopped.
“What is it?” Nina asked with an inch of panic in her voice.
Purdue continued on at a slower pace, wary of the square object he could not place from its diagrammatic shape.
“Stay here,” he whispered.
“No fucking way,” Nina said and hooked her arm into Sam’s again. “You won’t leave me in the dark.”
Sam smiled. It was good to feel so useful to Nina again and he enjoyed her constant touch.
“Turbines?” Sam repeated with a contemplative nod. It made sense, if this network of tunnels were indeed used by the Nazis. It would have been a more clandestine way to generate electricity while the above world was oblivious to its existence.
From the shadows ahead of them Sam and Nina heard Purdue’s excited report, “Ah! Looks like a generator!”
“Thank God,” Nina sighed, “I don’t know how long I’d be able to walk in this pitch darkness.”
“Since when are you afraid of the dark?” Sam asked her.
“I’m not. But being in an undiscovered, creepy underground hangar with no light to see what is around us, is a bit unnerving, don’t you think?” she explained.
“Aye, that I can relate to.”
The flare died too quickly and the slowly gaining blackness draped itself like a cloak over them.
“Sam,” Purdue said.
“On it,” Sam replied and sank to his haunches to retrieve another flare from the bag.
A clanging in the dark ensued as Purdue fiddled with the dusty machine.
“This is not your run-of-the-mill generator. It is some sort of contraption designed for various functions, I’m sure, but for which, I have no idea,” Purdue said.
Sam lit another flare, but did not see the moving shapes at a distance coming up in the tunnel behind them. Nina crouched next to Purdue to examine the cobweb-riddled machine. Housed in a solid metal frame, it reminded Nina of an old washing machine. The front was lined with thick knobs, each with four settings, but the lettering had been eroded so there was no way to tell what they were supposed to set.
Purdue’s long, trained fingers fiddled at the back with some wiring.
“Be careful, Purdue,” Nina urged.
“Don’t fret, dear,” he smiled. “I’m moved by your concern, though. Thank you.”
“Don’t get cocky. This place is more than enough for me to deal with right now,” she snapped with a slap to his arm that made him chuckle.