“What is she doing here?” His voice was petulant. He had dark rings round his eyes. “She took my book.”
“But we got you another one,” Mengele said soothingly. “As you can see--” this to me “--he feels very much at home here.”
I couldn’t see what he had based that observation on. Eldershott looked at me for a while longer, a mixture of confusion and discomfort in his eyes. Then he’d seemingly had enough, and his head disappeared from my field of vision.
“What was so important about his book?” I said. “It was a textbook on military history of the world since the Coming. I had one at school.”
Mengele’s smile seemed to expand, the growth breathing on its own. “So appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”
I needed time to think. Something big was going down, and I couldn’t keep him talking forever. I needed a diversion, an opportunity to free myself before the crazy Nazi doctor took me apart for his amusement. Keep him talking, and pray.
I’d not prayed in years. I wondered if I still remembered how.
“As above, so below, Killarney,” Mengele said, and I remembered the last time I had heard that expression, my first dream about the angels. “Tell her, Dr Eldershott. Tell her about your discovery.”
Eldershott’s face appeared again above mine. He blinked red eyes. “Why don’t you just kill her?”
Mengele looked amused, then his expression changed. Hunger? Impatience? I couldn’t quite tell. His head disappeared and I was left, for a moment, staring alone at Eldershott. He was my only chance.
“Sophie.” I formed the word on my lips, whispered it at him like the whisper of an angel’s wing. “Sophie wants you to help me.”
He blinked at me rapidly. His expression changed from puzzled to eager to concerned, and he blinked again and tried to whisper something, and I shook my head, a tiny movement, and then Mengele’s face returned to hover above mine. It looked worried. The smile pulsed on his face like a cancer at the approach of a surgeon’s knife.
I threw a guess at him and said, “Are you expecting someone?”
“Enough.” That smile was clinging on, but it was losing. I wondered what had cauterised it and hoped it had been me. He turned his head. “Please turn on the electricity, Dr Eldershott.”
“The electricity, Dr Mengele? Are you sure?”
I did not like the direction their conversation was taking, did not like mention of electricity, did not like the look in Mengele’s eyes when he looked at me. That smile of his wasn’t gone, it was merely in remission.
“I’m not the only one who’s been looking for you....” I said very softly, and his head whipped back and I could only pray, pray that me mentioning Sophie to Eldershott had worked, would work, that Eldershott might try and do something, perhaps sabotage the equipment.
But it wasn’t necessary.
From somewhere far away I could hear a monstrous sound, like the cry of some vast shambling beast. It howled through the ice like a wind of frost, shaking the foundations.
Mengele shouted orders; soldiers ran, Eldershott blinked nervously, and I thought, Miracles don’t happen every day.
I thought I was safe then.
I was wrong.
As the ground shuddered beneath, Mengele took one last look at me, put his smile back into place and pushed Eldershott aside. His hand reached beyond my field of vision. I heard the sound of a switch being pulled--
Then pain, more pain than I had ever felt before, tore through my skin and my brain and my nerves and I screamed until my screams drowned away that other sound, any other sound, until I was lost in an ocean of dark liquid pain and I drowned.