You see? I said everything would be all right, didn’t I?
“And then you killed her,” Rittenkrett said. His hand reared back, and drove the ice pick into the exposed underside of Michael’s left arm.
This little pain was nothing.
“Are you British?” The ice pick slid into his right arm. Rittenkrett gave it a twist.
“Are you American?” The ice pick went into his left thigh.
“Are you Russian?” There was a pause, and then Rittenkrett drove the ice pick into Michael Gallatin’s right testicle.
“Oh,” said Rittenkrett in the aftermath of the teeth-gritted scream, “I think that hit something!”
His audience, frocked in darkness, laughed.
Rittenkrett nodded to whoever was handling the ratchet.
Clack…clack. Two turns. Agony upon agony. A mist of sweat and a new flow of blood from Michael’s nostrils. The next turn of the ratchet would tear his shoulders and legs from their sockets.
“I’ll ask again,” the Ice Man announced. “Are you British?”
The ice pick pierced Michael’s side, and more blood spooled down.
“Are you American?”
The ice pick went into his right cheek. Rittenkrett let it sit there vibrating for a few seconds before he took it out.
“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett’s hand poised in the air. The stub of the cigarello in his mouth glowed as red as his face.
The ice pick entered the loose flesh between Michael’s penis and scrotum.
“Oh, I missed!” said the Ice Man, and he pulled the pick out and jammed it into the left testicle.
His audience applauded at that one. It did go on at length.
Rittenkrett paused in his performance to take a drink of water and flame a fresh Indianer. “What’s the reason for not speaking, sir?” he asked as he returned to the sweating, blood-pocked figure on the rack. “I’m just asking you your nationality, that’s all. Who do you work for, that kind of thing.” He took his position and lifted the pick. “Let’s start again, shall we? Are you British?”
The pick swung down and entered Michael’s left leg just above the knee.
“Are you American?”
Into the upper chest, where it turned on the collarbone.
“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett lifted the ice pick high. “You know, sir, whoever you are, it’s futile. You’ve lost. Not just you, but your entire effort. Because I hear it on great authority that the scientists are only a few days away from having the Black Sun, and when that is complete no force on earth can stand against the Reich.”
Light gleamed from the bloody tip.
A drop of blood fell, and hit Michael on the forehead.
It was in his mind.
The Black Sun.
Only a few days away.
Something that had wanted to go to sleep, that had yearned for the peace of sleep, now stretched its muscles and opened a fierce green eye.
The Black Sun.
What in the name of God could that be?
In spite of himself, in spite of all the little pains that had merged together to make one pain huge and terrible, he knew his duty just as Franziska had known hers. In the flash of an instant it brought him back from the edge. It cleared his head.
He knew who he was, what he was. And why he was.
Michael looked up at the Ice Man and spoke.
In a hoarse, nearly inhuman rasp. And in English.
“I wish…you hadn’t said that.”
“He said something!” Amazed, Rittenkrett looked around at the others. “I think it was English! Uthmann, come over here! Don’t you speak English?”
“I’m about to kill you,” said Michael Gallatin, prisoner of the Gestapo and wrenched out upon the rack.
“What?” Rittenkrett leaned down toward him, the cigarello gripped between his teeth on the left side.
What the Ice Man could not possibly know is that there was more than one perfect package in this world.
Fourteen
The Soul Cage
“Kill you,” the major repeated. Except now it was mostly a snarl, because the change was upon him.
One benefit of practice is, indeed, perfection. It comes only after many hundreds of attempts. And through Michael Gallatin’s lifetime, it came from his practice of controlling and guiding the transformation sometimes three or four times a day, in all weather, in all positions both solemnly immobile in the cathedral of the forest and running at full speed as if to beat Satan’s own locomotive on the underworld tracks.
He was by now very good and very fast at opening his soul cage and letting Hell loose.
Several things happened at once, in rapid succession. There were the crackings of bones and joints and the wet slidings and rearrangings of sinews that might have been taken for the work of the rack, but it was not. Bands of black and gray hairs rippled across the pick-pocked flesh. The face seemed to dissolve, to be replaced by a second, darker face that had been hidden beneath the mask of the first. It, too, was battered and bloody as the first one had been; the man’s wounds were also the beast’s. Fingers warped and toes warped into claws. Fangs exploded from bleeding gums. Ears burst forth fur as they lengthened like strange flowers. The ribcage shivered and changed shape. The torso altered, the spine shifted, the neck thickened, the shoulders grew muscles like pulsing gray ropes and then the black hair scurried over them and across the chest and groin where the pierced testicles tightened. The pain was exquisite. The pain was a religious experience, because through it Michael Gallatin was reborn.
All this happened in a matter of seconds. It happened so fast the black wolf streaked with gray was there on the rack before Axel Rittenkrett could cry out around his cigarello or step back from the blood-dripping muzzle that now snapped up at his face. The fangs caught cheek, nose and forehead. Then the wolf’s head thrashed side-to-side in a blur, the muscles standing out in its neck, and very suddenly Axel Rittenkrett really did have, as Franziska had said, two faces.
Both of them were red. One was streaming blood around torn and twitching facial muscles. That side had no eye, because the eye was crushed between the wolf’s jaws like a hard-boiled egg and swallowed. It had a gaping hole where the nose had been, because nose went very well with eyeball. In fact, much of the whole side of the face had gone down the gullet. A smoke ring red with gore burst from the mouth. The teeth clacked, like the sound of a rack’s ratchet or white shoes on a checkerboard floor. And Rittenkrett’s shoes were, alas, no longer the color of virgin snow.
Michael Gallatin tore the Ice Man’s throat open with his next snap and thrash, and perhaps it was due to the wolf’s rage or his strength or his purpose returning, but the Ice Man’s mangled head was ripped off and went rolling across the stones like a large red rubber ball. It rolled past the shoes of Sigmund, who like the others in the room were for the moment truly ice men: frozen in absolute, apocalyptic horror.
As the merely human stood stunned, the monster of miracle’s hind legs slipped out of the loosened bindings. One rope on the right foreleg had to be gnawed off, the matter of a few heartbeats, but the left foreleg came free easily enough. In his fever dream, Michael smelled that every man in the room had just peed in their pants. A couple of them needed their diapers. The wolf leaped to the floor, and the slitted green eyes searched for the next throat to savage.