The thing that was Sophie Stockard stood in the centre of the room, perfectly motionless. She looked like a figurine carved out of driftwood, a still and fragile thing in the middle of chaos.
Filling my vision was the structure. Crude swastikas were carved into it, and angels’ wings; it was a circle of strange metal, and I should have been able to see through it to the wall behind but I couldn’t. Instead, the air inside the circle vibrated and hummed, acting at times like a mirror, at others, like opaque glass. Rows of machinery were lined up on each side of the structure; Sophie faced the humming circle, and opposite her was Mengele.
He was holding a gun to Eldershott’s head.
As I approached them, Sophie’s head swivelled towards me and that horrible voice said, It is time. It was the voice I had heard in Paris when Metatron had died, the same as I’d heard in Lubyanka; the same, I was beginning to realise, as I’d heard in my dreams; the voice of the giant in the land of the angels.
And out of the same mouth came Sophie Stockard’s own voice, piercing through the noise--“Help him! He mustn’t die!”
Whatever Sophie had been doing had momentarily stopped, it seemed. Fallen blocks of ice and broken, smoking machinery paid witness to the powers she had unleashed.
There were men in smocks working on the machines, and more of the identical blond soldiers watching them, guns at the ready. The air in the giant mirror hummed and twisted in impossible ways.
“One more move from you and he’s dead,” Mengele said. His voice carried in a suddenly silent hall.
He pushed Eldershott towards the bank of machines. The gun kept pointing at Eldershott’s head. Mengele had surgeon’s hands. They remained steady. “You have to finish what you’ve started, Dr Eldershott. Please, you must open the gateway.” Behind him, soldiers began to stream into the room in silence, row upon row of blond, large men in uniforms on which the swastika and wings were clearly displayed.
Mengele’s face twisted in sudden hatred. “How many years?” he shouted at the unmoving Sophie. “How many years since you brought your own petty war into ours? For years my people have worked to create a new, better world--before your creatures came. Your fallen angels. It is you who are responsible for the defeat we suffered, and it is you who will now pay the price.’
Sophie’s face underwent a strange transformation as if two opposing forces were battling inside her, but neither of them seemed inclined to talk just then.
Mengele kept ranting. “You thought you could dump your losers on us, that you could carry on living in savagery with no care in the world. How long has it been since heaven was last challenged?”
He didn’t look as if he expected an answer. People like him so seldom did. But he got one.
The war lasted many eons, the terrible voice said through Sophie’s lips. Those who challenged us were defeated. It seemed less cruel to send them to a physical prison than to have their essences snuffed out like candles made of human fat.
“I could have taught you a thing or two about that,” Mengele said.
I knew I had to do something quickly. I saw Eldershott begin to rock, Mengele’s gun still trained on him. As he rocked harder, he began to sing. It was a high, reedy voice, the sound of a human sacrifice. The notes and the words made no sense, but I could feel their impact, see it in the gathering intensity of the shimmer that was the gate. I looked at Eldershott with new eyes. Thought back--
An academic, really, Turner had said, almost apologetically. Cryptography, though you couldn’t tell to look at him, good solid work but he wasn’t that important.
Cryptography. That, and an interest in angels. What code had he cracked? What door had he opened in the process?
The answer was before me now.
The gateway shimmered and changed. Beyond it, faintly, I could see pale blue skies, a whitewashed beach and in the distance, as small as birds, far-off angels in flight.
He had discovered the gateway to the world of the angels. Mengele had called it heaven, but I wondered if it really was. And if so, who was the giant who had visited me (or had I visited him?) in my dreams? The one who now seemed to possess Eldershott’s girlfriend?
And what were the Nazis planning? An occupation of heaven?
I was about to charge him, terminate Eldershott as I was supposed to, try and end this.
But then the Archangel Raphael materialised in the centre of the hall and everything stopped.