Secrets of the Galactic Reich

From the journal of Lt. Randolph Grey

Château de Chuchotements, La Rochelle, France, December 1944

 Teeth gritted, heart thudding in my chest, I kicked the door completely off its hinges. With Woods right behind me we burst into the room, guns raised...with no-one to shoot at. Aside from three Bosch paintings and crimson drapes over a ceiling to floor gothic window, the room was empty.

"Strange," muttered Woods, glancing around at the grey stone walls.

I nodded. "Why lock this room if there's not a thing in it?" I walked over to the window and pulled the drapes aside to see the troops on the dewy field far below the castle, rounding up the last few German soldiers in the morning half-light. I gave the thumbs up sign to the Group Captain, letting him know the castle was now searched and safe.

"Mmm. Doesn't make much sense," Woods replied, wandering over to a painting and pulling a cigarette from his top pocket. "Not sure I like this picture, Rand."

"It's Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed," I said.

 

He considered it. “It looks like…a bunch’ a devils off to the moon. Well, they’re welcome to it.”

 

“It’s not the moon, it’s a tunnel. It’s the path to heaven, if memory serves.”

Woods pulled out a match to light his cigarette. He struck it. It blew out. He struck another. It blew out. He looked up at me, a picture of slight confusion. "Now why would....?"

I was already hurrying across the room to stand beside him. I put my hand to the wall adjacent to where he had struck the matches, and yes - there was a breeze.

"Look for a crack in the wall," I told Woods, and within seconds we had found one.

Woods looked at me. "You don't think....?"

 

“….there’s a hidden doorway? I don’t know. There’s something behind here, I’m certain of it.”

"So what now old boy?"

After ten minutes, bruised shoulders and sore feet were all we had to show for our efforts. Maybe there’s a leaver, we thought. Yet the room was so sparse, any such item would be evident already. The only place to hide it would have been behind the paintings. So we looked there as well – and found nothing.

 

Woods let out a deep breath. “We should go down and rejoin the others.”

 

Determined as I had been, I found myself nodding in agreement. The Group Captain outside would be wondering where we were. Besides, the thought of a warm plate of food and some sleep was much more appealing than a gloomy French castle.

 

“Keep the painting though. Souvenir,” grinned Woods as he walked out through the door. I looked down at it and began to follow him.

 

Then I noticed the writing.

 

Across the bottom of the painting was a short sentence. It was dark grey paint over only a slightly brighter grey sky, but it was just visible. And I knew Bosch didn’t add text to his paintings. Especially not in Latin.

 

I found Woods descending a stone staircase and rushed past him, still holding the picture. “Oh, now you hurry, you thief,” he called. “Oi, the front door’s the other way!”

 

“I’m going to the library!” I yelled back. And a minute later I had found it. We had searched it earlier of course – a huge cavernous room with shelves to the ceiling, immaculately tidy. I found a Latin to German dictionary and sat at a huge oak desk to decipher the painting’s message.

 

“You are an odd one,” said Woods as he sat down to help.

 

 

Fifteen minutes later, after Woods had explained to the Group Captain what we were up to, he and I returned to the empty room. It was about seven o’clock in the morning now. There was only slightly more light but the room looked different to me. Illuminated.

 

We couldn’t decipher the whole sentence. There were some very strange words in there. But we found the words ‘turn the rail’, and that was clue enough. Standing on Wood’s shoulders, I reached up and grasped the curtain rail at the top of the huge windows. It was unusually far away from the wall. I pushed it , and it slid cleanly back into the wall.

 

And just like that, the other wall suddenly split in two and revealed…..nothing. Nothing except darkness. Impossible to tell what was in there or how big the space was. But there was something in there.

 

Woods helped me down and handed me a torch. We only had the one. We found the walls, floors and ceiling were all of the same stone as the rest of the castle.

 

It was a tunnel.

 

“You first,” offered Woods.

 

I stepped in, expecting it to be clammy. Expecting rats. Instead it was silent and airless. We pressed on down the tunnel. Woods had shouldered his riffle but held his pistol by his side. By now we had preceded thirty metres and still nothing appeared out of the gloom ahead.

 

“Big tunnel,” said Woods.

 

“Big castle,” I replied.

 

“At least it’d be hard to get lost in here.”

 

Then finally something appeared in the torch light. It was a heavy wooden door. Written on it, the phrase, “Geburtsort des galaktischen Reichs.”

 

“Birthplace of the Galactic Reich.” Translated Woods. “What on earth…?”

 

Together we managed to pull the heavy door open. We stepped inside. And even in the silent darkness, with only a single torch beam to illuminate our way, we saw enough in seconds to make us wish we’d never set foot there.

 

Suspended from the ceiling was a globe, a model of the earth. And next to it, a model of the moon. But the moon was emblazoned with a huge swastika. All over the moon’s surface, miniature bunkers and zeppelins and tanks.

 

Woods stepped back, aghast. “Surely…..surely not…”

 

As he moved away, he backed into something with a thud. I spun the torch around and found a face in the light. The strangest face I have ever seen. The face of a beautiful woman, and yet with a bizarre piece of machinery over one eye, like a cross between a monocle and half a pair of binoculars.  Her hair was not hair, but thick wires which trailed down her body and plugged into the chair she was sitting in. As I lowered the torch, I found the chair was more a strange throne, with symbols I did not recognise carved into it.

 

The woman – if that’s what she was – did not move. Neither Woods nor I either.

 

“It’s a model, Rand,” whispered Woods.

 

He was right. I let out a deep breath I hadn’t even realised I was holding in.

 

“Let’s get out of here, Rand. These Nazis are crazy.”

 

I was just as eager to leave if not more. But I knew this was not something that should be ignored. I swept the torch round, and found a huge table with enormous maps of the lunar surface, blueprints of structures and vehicles and weapons. In the very centre of the table was a folder marked, ‘Zeitgatter’ – Timegate.

 

The folder was empty, with every page torn out roughly as if in a hurry.

 

Finally I cast the torch to the far wall of the room. I shuddered as the light picked out the face of an enormous stuffed alligator.

 

Suddenly Woods and I let out nervous laughs. A stuffed croc was an odd thing to have, perhaps, but it paled in comparison to everything else in the room.

 

But then I shone the torch down.

 

The alligator was standing upright. It must have been seven foot tall. And it was wearing a huge cloak that covered it almost completely, with only its huge mouth poking out. 

 

Woods uttered something between a curse and a prayer.

 

We had all heard tales in the barracks of Hitler’s obsessions with the occult, of German flying saucers and passages to the hollow core of the world. But what insane plans had we stumbled upon in that room? What was that woman with wires for hair? A giant alligator that walks like a man? And plans to conquer the moon itself?

 

As we slammed the door and hurried back down the dingy corridor, neither of us spoke a word. And we didn’t speak again until we reached the troops outside, informing the Group Captain of what we’d seen.

 

He looked at us in disbelief, but sent a squad in to extract everything. 

 

And suddenly it all came out, all the tension and dread that had build up in me from the moment I set foot in that room. “They’re up to something, Captain. Something bizarre, something sinister, something I thank goodness I don’t have to deal with. And whoever does – God help him.”