When the angels came through into the hall, madness took hold of them. They tried to fly and failed and that seemed to drive them even madder. They came crashing into the Nazi soldiers, ripping them with their wings, with their teeth, with their hands. Some attacked the gate, trying desperately to go through, crashing as they hit an invisible wall. The rest attacked Raphael, who drove them away easily as he battled his real opponent.
You dared to abduct my subjects? You dared to raid my world with what holes you had remaining through which to breach it? It was an awful voice, a voice like the heat of a nuclear reactor. They fought inside a rapidly-growing crater, and I looked at the ceiling, worried. Cracks were appearing in the ice, caused by the intense heat.
“As above, so below,” Raphael cried, the tip of his wings nearly cutting his opponent in half. “And now our fellow humans will have all the angels they want for their experiments.” A clash of wings as bright as the sun, and I was momentarily blinded. Then: “And when they’re finished, I won’t have even begun.”
I had to reach Eldershott. The angels seemed to avoid me; for the two fighting in the ice I was forgotten, at least for the moment; and Mengele was too busy keeping his gun on Eldershott and the rest of his staff (who seemed to want nothing more than to disappear into thin air) to pay much attention to me.
I approached cautiously along the wall, trying to reach them.
“Faster!” Mengele was shouting. “Faster!”
And Eldershott was praying, and the gateway was again filling up with images, bringing into existence a world beyond our world. I wasn’t sure how many soldiers Mengele would have left when the broken angels were done with them, but I suspected there were more, somewhere, only now getting ready for their assault on heaven.
There was only one thing I could have done and so I did it; I approached the back of the gate. From that side it looked like a clear piece of glass through which I could see the rest of the hall. The structure itself looked solid, and I needed to unbalance it.
Then one of the angels flying at the screen cried, a single word, and disappeared inside the gate and I knew it was open, and that if it were to be closed it had to be now.
There were corpses belonging to the blond soldiers all round me. I went through their uniforms, picking up what I needed.
I returned to the base of the gate, and I was right: more soldiers were streaming in and the first few looked as though they were about to go through. I had to act fast.
Grenades. Take a bunch in one hand, pull the pin, dump, repeat on other side. Get the hell out of there. And counting. Counting all the time. Praying the numbers are right. Praying it would work. Praying it wouldn’t kill me.
One. Two. Three.
Four.
Five!
Explosion.
Six.
Seven!
Explosion.
The gate shuddered--
Eight. Nine. Ten.
Eleven.
--and fell, slowly, forwards.
It was even larger than I’d thought. The Nazis seemed determined to go through it en masse.
And that was what I was counting on.
As it fell, it fell towards the centre, and I prayed it would hold, prayed Eldershott would keep up the contact for just a little while longer.
And it did. And he did.
The heavy structure of the gate came crashing down on Raphael and on the thing that was once Sophie Stockard and was now more, or less, God.
And when the circle passed over them, it swallowed them, and they disappeared.
Then, with a gun I had picked up from a dead soldier, I put a bullet through Eldershott’s head.