"Huh." I lead her along the side of the building instead of climbing the steps, and I keep an eye open for the side entrance I'm looking for. "Of course I'm interested."
"I was kidding, you know." She flashes me a grin. "Wanted to see if it would make you pull your finger out. You spooks are just so focussed."
There's a blank door set between two monolithic granite slabs that form one flank of the museum; I rap on it thrice and it opens inward automatically. (There's a camera in the ceiling of this entrance tunneclass="underline" unwanted visitors will not be made welcome.) "What is this?" Mo asks, "Hey, that's the first secret door I've seen!"
"Nah, it's just the service entrance," I say. The door closes behind us and I lead her forward, round a bend, and up to the security desk. "Howard and O'Brien from the Laundry," I say, placing my hand on the counter.
The booth is empty, but there are two badges waiting on the counter and the door ahead of us opens anyway. "Welcome to the Archive," says a speaker behind the counter. "Please take your ID badges and wear them at all times except when visiting the public galleries."
I take them and pass one to Mo. She inspects it dubiously. "Is this solid silver? What's the language? This isn't Dutch."
"It probably came from Indonesia. Don't ask, just wear it." I pin mine on my belt, under the hem of my T-shirt-it doesn't need to be visible to human guards, after all. "Coming?"
"Yeah."
THE CELLARS UNDER THE RIJKSMUSEUM REMIND me of an upmarket version of the Stacks at Dansey House-huge tunnels, whitewashed and air-conditioned, chock-full of shelves. There's a difference: almost all the contents at Dansey House are files. Here there are boxes, plastic or wooden, full of evidence, left over from the trials that followed a time of infinite horrors.
The Ahnenerbe-SS collection is in a subbasement guarded by locked steel doors; one of the curators-a civilian in jeans and sweater-takes us down there. "Don't you be staying too long," she advises us. "This place, it gives me creeps; you not sleeping well tonight, yah?"
"We'll be all right," I reassure her. The Ahnenerbe collection has about the strongest set of guards and wards imaginable-nobody involved in looking after it wants to worry about lunatics and neo-Nazis getting their hands on some of the powerfully charged relics stored here.
"You say." She looks at me blackly, then one eyebrow twitches. "Sweet dreams."
"Just what are we looking for?" asks Mo.
"Well, to start with-" I clap my hands. We're facing a corridor with numbered storage rooms off to either side. It's well lit and empty, like a laboratory where everyone has just nipped out for afternoon tea. "The symbols painted on the walls of the apartment in Santa Cruz," I say. "Think you'd recognise them if you saw them again?"
"Recognise? I, uh… maybe," she says slowly. "I wouldn't like to say for sure. I was half out of my head and I didn't get a real good look at them."
"That's more than I got, and the Black Chamber didn't send us any postcards," I say. "Which is why we've come here. Think of it as a photo-fit session for necromancy." I read the plaque on the nearest door, then push it open. The lights come on automatically, and I freeze. It's a good thing the lights are bright, because the contents of the room, seen in shadow, would be heart-stopping. As it is, they're merely heart-breaking.
There's a white cast-iron table, a thing of curves and scrollwork, just inside the doorway. Three chairs sit around it, delicate-looking white assemblies of struts and curved sections. I blink, for there's something odd about them, something that reminds me of the art of Giger, the film set of Alien. And then I realise what I'm looking at: the backs of the chairs are vertebrae, wired together. The chairs are made of scrimshaw, carved from the thigh bones of the dead; the decorative scrollwork of the table is a rack of human ribs. The table-top itself is made of polished, interlocking shoulder blades. And as for the cigarette lighter-
"I think I'm going to be sick," whispers Mo. She looks distinctly pale.
"Toilet's down the corridor," I bite out, gritting my teeth while she hurries away, retching. I take in the rest of the room. They're right, I think in some quiet, rational recess of my mind, some things you just can't tell the public about. The Holocaust, even seen at arm's length through newsreel footage, was bad enough to brand the collective unconscious of the West with a scar of indelible evil, madness on an inconceivable scale. Hideous enough that some people seek to deny it ever happened. But this, this isn't something you can even begin to describe: this is the dark nightmare of a diseased mind.
There were medical laboratories attached to the death camp at Birkenau. Some of their tools are stored here. There were other, darker, laboratories behind the medical unit, and their tools are stored here, too, those that have not been destroyed in accordance with the requirements of disarmament treaties.
Next to the charnel house garden furniture sits a large rack of electronics, connected to a throne of timber with metal straps at ankle and wrist-an electric chair; the Ahnenerbe experimented with the destruction of human souls, seeking a way to sear through the Cartesian bottleneck and exterminate not only the bodies of their victims, but the informational echoes of their consciousness. Only the difficulty of extinguishing souls on a mass production basis kept it from featuring prominently in their schemes.
Beyond the soul-eater there's a classical mediaeval iron maiden, except that the torturers of the Thirty Years War didn't get to play with aluminium alloy and hydraulic rams. There are other machines, all designed to maim and kill with a maximum of agony: one of them, a bizarre cross between a printing press and a rack made of glass, seems to have materialised from a nightmare of Kafka's.
They were trying to generate pain, I realize. They weren't simply killing their victims but deliberately hurting them in the process, hurting them as badly as the human body could stand, squeezing the pain out of them like an evil seepage of blood, hurting them again and again until all the pain had been extracted-
I'm sitting down but I don't remember how I got here. I feel dizzy; Mo is standing over me. "Bob?" I close my eyes and try to control my breathing. "Bob?"
"I need a minute," I hear myself saying.
The room reeks of old, dead terror-and a brooding malevolence, as if the instruments of torture are merely biding their time. Just you wait, they're saying. I shudder, open my eyes, and try to stand up.
"This was what the… the Ahnenerbe used?" asks Mo. She sounds hoarse.
I nod, not trusting my voice. It's a moment before I can speak. "The secret complex. Behind the medical block at Birkenau, where they experimented with pain. Algemancy. They took Zuse's Z-2 computer, you know? It was supposed to have been bombed by the Allies, in Berlin. That was what Zuse himself was told, he was away at the time. But they took it…" I swallow. "It's in the next room."
"A computer? I didn't know they had them."
"Only just; Konrad Zuse built his first programmable computer in 1940. He independently invented the things: after the war he founded Zuse Computer Company, which was taken over by Siemens in the early sixties. He wasn't a bad man; when he didn't cooperate they stole his machine, demolished the house where he had built it, and claimed the destruction was an Allied bomb. The cabbalistic iterations, you see-they rebuilt it at Sobibor camp, using circuits soldered with gold extracted from the teeth of their victims." I stand up and head for the door. "I'll show you, but that's not really why we're… hell. I'll show you."
The next room in the Atrocity Archive contains the remains of the Z-2. Old nineteen-inch equipment racks tower ceiling-high; there are mounds of vacuum tubes visible through gaps in the front panels, dials and gauges to monitor power consumption, and plugboards to load programs into the beast. All very quaint, until you see the printer that lurks in the shadowy recess at the back of the room. "Here they ran the phase-state calculations that dictated the killing schedule, opening and closing circuits in time to the ebb and flow of murder. They even generated the railway timetables with this computer, synchronising deliveries of victims to the maw of the machine." I walk toward the printer, look round to see Mo waiting behind me. "This printer." It's a plotter, motors dragging a Ouija-board pen across a sheet of-it would have been parchment, but not from a cow or a sheep. I swallow bile. "They used it to inscribe the geometry curves that were to open the way of Dho-Na. All very, very advanced: this was the first real use of computers in magic, you know."