Sifting Through The Sand - SCP Foundation

What happens when Frankenstein and a werewolf fight Nazis and genies over the occult remains of a mummy? A lot of dead Nazis, and a crashing flying saucer.

Anorrack

Sifting Through The Sand

Authors: Anorrack

(7809 words)

Sister article link here

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The Coast of Malta, July 20th, 1942

The sky was dark and clouds shook from the shrieks of the dive bombers and the detonation of munitions across the island. Italian Folgores buzzed like mosquitos overhead, sucking the RAF dry, while German Junkers swarmed Malta like flies on a carcass. The island's AA-batteries and ships were bent, battered, and broken like shattered rotten bone, oil permanently staining the harbors a rainbow slick like so much bubbling rendered fat. The vulture of Kesselring circled above Malta, waiting for the island fortress to finally die and pick its scraps.

The Axis continued their bald-faced daylight raids against the island's white cliff faces and towns and airfields, bombing churches while devout prayed for food, sinking supply ships within arms' reach of those starving. The Brit's foothold in the Mediterranean was loosening. Spitfires were flying counter-attacks off runways scarred with potholes and dud bombs. His Majesty's soldiers were patching their boots with used tires and carpenter's nails. Rumor was they were halving the rations again.

The lingering taste of rock-dust and blood coated a woman's tongue as she wound through the intricate city streets, one of the few that was fool enough not to take shelter when the siren sounded. Even though she was foreign to Malta, even though she didn't know these alleys or causeways, she had a purposeful step to her stride, following a familiar trail left by an unfamiliar man. The smell of pipesmoke, of scribbled-over pages, tea leaves and other indescribable things guided her. It guided her down narrow crooked steps worn by centuries of footsteps, across a near-dry canal where a thin stream of gray water wound around rubble, and under the arch of an old stone bridge, right to where her quarry was waiting for her, his scent heavy in the air — the scent of the occult.

"They didn't tell me you'd be so hard to find."

The lanky man's face was briefly illuminated by the strike of a match as he relit his pipe. "And here I was under the belief that I was of a conspicuous make."

The woman stuck her hand out, which the man took in a firm shake, flicking the spent match into the turbid trickle of the canal before doing so. "Jackie Rosales. Pentagram, War Department."

The man shot a sly smile at Rosales at that final word. "But of course, Ms. Rosales. Joseph Placidus, British Occult Service." His accent was faintly German, tinged with a British inflection. His hand was dry and smooth, like warm marble. "Tell me, if you will, what is the Prince of Darkness?"

Rosales' lips curled. "But a gentleman, of course."

"Correct, not that a simple codephrase could verify the identity of a stranger."

The woman's smirk grew. "I would have to agree with you." She reached into her trench coat's inner pocket, and withdrew a small clamshell travel mirror, opening it to reveal a piece of ripped parchment, which she presented to Placidus.

The man sighed, reached into his boot and withdrew a silver folding knife etched with ward-dispelling runes and brute-force enchantment-breaking sigils — a knife meant to kill wizards. Placidus sliced open the pad of his thumb and imprinted it onto the parchment, with Rosales quickly following suit. Upon the touch of blood droplets from them both, the paper sizzled and spat and burned up in an instant, confirming both of their identities.

Rosales sidled alongside Placidus under the shelter of the bridge as a Ju 88 shot overhead, handing him back his knife. "I suppose the BOS is slightly more trusting than the Pentagram."

"Those sticklers at the head office are… fond of their old traditions."

As he slotted the knife back into his boot, Placidus offered her a puff of his pipe, which she declined. He sucked on the stem ruefully, staring at the brickwork on the underneath of their cover. "Now then, with introductions out of the way, we can get right to the meat of the matter." He glanced at Rosales briefly. "You handle well on a full moon?"

Rosales' eye twitched with annoyance. "Wrong myth. I won't be a problem. The dossier said you were a magician."

"The dossier lied, then. I'm a philologist, not a thaumaturgist. I work with dead languages, my dear."

She sucked her teeth. "What is a linguist doing behind enemy lines?"

"Dead languages make for wonderful codes. And, may I add, Ancient Egyptian is a dead language."

"Touché. Does that make me the brawn, then?"

Placidus puffed an O-ring of smoke before checking his watch. "I wouldn't be so sure, I have just as many tricks up my sleeve as you, and as you are smart enough to track me, I figure both brawn and brains are fairly split. Now we must make haste for the boat. Wouldn't want to be late for our date with death."

The pregnant clouds finally broke water, and a downpour came in their wake, giving new life to the nearly dry canal and soaking them both to the bone as they left their brick shelter. The roaring of engines and explosives gave way to thunder and lightning as the storm warded off the worst of the Germans' advances. Jackie grimaced. "At least we can hope for sunnier skies in the desert. And maybe a more friendlier environment than a warzone."

The Valley of the Kings, Egypt, August 5th, 1942

The valley that hosted the souls of five hundred years of glorious, bronze-clad empire, that sheltered the scions of the dynasties of the New Kingdom from tomb robbers and gods, shaded under the ever-watchful gaze of Al-Qurn, the pyramid-mountain, had been consumed in a sandstorm of unprecedented strength and scale.

The storm squatted within the valley like a skulking monster of ancient times, lashing out with crackling lightning and howling winds at all that came near. A good ward against prying eyes, for only the foolish or the suicidal would voluntarily venture into a storm of this magnitude. The questing, corrosive sand bricked engine blocks and suffocated the unprotected, filling their lungs with the dead weight of dense particulates. The tempest was capable of flipping vehicles and shattering airfoils, with even the most surefooted of men losing their balance in the haling windstorm, quickly to be covered and buried in the sand, joining the rest of the entombed dead in their eternal slumber.

A figure, wrapped in heavy garments staggered into the haze from a trench barely protected by flapping canvas, straining against its pitons to fly into the tempest. The cloaked figure grasped a rope guide, and used it to find their way to a large boulder, jutting out of the sand like a crooked tooth. The rock formed a lee against the wind, a small shelter within which the figure could relax, as he fumbled with the buttons on his trousers and the gun slung on his shoulder. The red band on his arm marked him as a target, if there was anyone around to see him.

The guard hummed an off-key drinking song as he relieved himself, the whistling winds nothing but a background noise at this point. Being stationed in the valley for several weeks, guarding the dig site from any idiotic enough to try and stop them, the storm that drowned out all detail in featureless brown murk had become a bland object to remark upon, simply an unnoteworthy element in the landscape like the architecture of Berlin or the rolling hills before the Swiss Alps.

So blasé was he, that he failed to notice a change in the texture of the wind, a twist of shadow in the otherwise flat light. The sound of footsteps behind him was muffled by the storm, and he was still humming that off-key song when three hundred pounds of feline flesh suddenly came crashing down upon him, cratering knees into the dirt and bashing his skull upon the rock. The air was knocked out of his lungs, and he struggled to breathe from the fall and the weight bearing down upon his body.

The layers of wrapped cloth around his crew-cut fell away from the impact of the fall, and he felt hot breath upon the back of his shaved, bloody head, and the wet touch of teeth as a circlet of sabers ensconced his skull. He could not reach his gun, fallen just out of reach, he could not breathe, he could not speak, all he could manage was a noiseless scream before the jaguar bit down, shattering his skull and pulping his brain to fluid.

Deeper, underneath that flapping canvas tarpaulin, after the trench that gave way to an antechamber, through the cracked floor and ancient wards, past the false tomb of Akhenaten, past the shattered tomb guardians, down a winding tunnel burrowed deep beneath the valley, and past a pit of enchanted brazen spikes was a small room.

The side room had been host to a skeleton trap made of a dozen beloved eunuchs and a hundred dessicated asps, ready to envenom and bludgeon any would-be tomb robber, but the animate skeletons had been crushed to powder by the Nazi archeologists as they came through. Now, the room was filled with a small cot and lantern, both coated in hoarfrost and glittering ice. The cot was marked by a small indentation, an invisible weight in the shape of a human body, unseen teeth chattering and breath fogging as the djinn chanted without stopping as they had for weeks, powering the sandstorm raging above.

The chanting hitched as shouting could be heard, the winds faltered as gunshots were fired, and the voice died entirely as the death-screams of Nazis echoed through the tomb-complex. The indentation disappeared from the bed, and small footsteps melted into the frost as the djinn peered through the door, only to be met with the slit-pupil eye of a growling big cat.

The djinn retreated from the door, only to be pounced upon by the jaguar, maw wet with blood and saliva, claws digging into soft skin.

A small voice, a child's voice, rang out. "Hayır! Hayır!"

The jaguar blinked with surprise and withdrew from the child, ceding the floor to a man with kind eyes and a smoking pistol.

Joseph Placidus spoke softly in Turkish. <Why are you here, child?>

The voice trembled, but the unseen eyes were hard. They had seen much. <They said if I make the storm I can go home. I want to go home.>

Placidus grimaced, his hand a white-knuckled fist. Djinns were strange creatures, mundane humans robbed from cradles and twisted by secret, arcane arts into thundering gods of creation and destruction, their only limit being their free will and the commands that bound them. The language for each djinn was unique, bespoke, tailored to each djinn by their creator like a shoe for a foot. One needed to know that language in order to command them. <What is the language I must use to aid you?>

There was shouting and scuffling footsteps further down the tunnel, more soldiers alerted by the fighting above. It took a few moments for the child to respond, unsure if they could trust a violent stranger. But their voice was firm when they finally spoke. <Babylonian-Mekhanite logic functions.>

The soldier's frown deepened, but he nodded. Now Placidus was the hesitant one, trying to remember old lessons from a ticking, whirring tutor. <define (Master [self] function) —> (servant [djinn] command):: at 6 undo previous Master function, at 12 protect servant, at 18 goto start.>

"Verdammt!" Five more guards rounded the corner, MP28 muzzles gleaming and fingers on the trigger. Without a second thought, the child djinn raised an ethereal hand, and with a twitch of a finger twisted the laws of reality within a eight meter cubed region of local space-time, changing base molecular functions and altering the structure of certain proteins, disallowing the existence of desmosomes and disintegrating the chemical bonds between cells. Synapses dislocated and nervous systems atomized before being able to transmit a sensation of agony to the liquefying brain, meant that Germans could not even feel pain, vocal folds sloughed and larynxes disintegrated meant that the soldiers could not even scream as they were reduced to a bubbling protoplasm.

The cube of altered space uncurled and returned to its original paradigm, but the Nazis did not reconfigure, remaining in their new, more appropriate form. The child squeezed Placidus' hand in brief thanks, and with a rush of air their presence vanished from the tomb, from the valley, from the entire continent.

Rosales stood in the doorway, nude and painted in gore, staring at the piles of ooze and discarded guns on the tunnel floor. "We could have used that child, Joseph."

"I'm not condemning a child to more murder. Even to murder a Nazi. Besides, I wouldn't know the commands for that, and I wouldn't force him to tell me, either."

The nahual didn't say anything further, simply melting back into felinid form and padding away, smelling the trail to Akhenaten.

They came to a Y-junction in the tunnel, both paths nondescript and valid options. Both plunged deeper into the valley's ancient substrate, both likely filled with traps, both heady with the scent of Germans. Only one path led to their true destination of Akhenaten's burial chamber. A hand peeled out of the jaguar's skin to run fingers across the right-hand wall's etchings. A set of human teeth pushed out of the jaguar's throat and spoke in a strangled whisper. "Joseph, light on this text?"

A flickering torch bathed the wall in shadows and dancing light. "Hrm, typical New Kingdom curses and warnings-"

"No, the part after. The declarations of ownership. They keep repeating Akhenaten's name, but there's no cartouche."

"Well, this was a tomb meant to bury his memory, his name no longer needed to be defended."

"So why write his name at all? Damnatio memoriae." Jackie padded to the left tunnel and examined its etchings. "See? no mention of him at all. No tomb robber curses, either. The curses and spells all are directed at the occupant. Vague, left unnamed."

"Right tunnel is the red herring? His name meant to lure the curious away?"

"Most likely. Bet that tunnel has more than just one corpse at its end." The jaguar's head swayed, human teeth and human hand retreated underneath bloody gums and dappled fur. Jackie proceeded down the left-hand tunnel, Joseph following closely behind.

The tunnel delved further and further under the ground, twisting and curling like the petrified, hollow body of some antediluvian serpent until they must have been below Al-Qurn itself, deep below all other tombs and dead kings. At some points the tunnel pitched down until the floor became a leaning wall, and they had to carefully climb down, the tunnel torn and broken by some geological upheaval as if the earth itself had tried to prevent the recovery of Akhenaten's remains. They descended in silence, their travels punctuated only by the navigation of some carefully engineered traps and bursts of wind from further below, carrying the scent of the occult and zesty incense.

Their keen perception at the junction was soon rewarded, as the tunnel suddenly opened into a magnificent cavernous expanse, a beam of bleeding sunlight shooting down from a hole in the cragged roof to reveal Akhenaten's mighty burial chamber, and the Nazis that crawled within like maggots on a carcass. Upon the walls writ large were the crimes of Akhenaten against the people of Egypt, its gods and its land. Titanic snarling statues of Anubis and Osiris and Set, death gods all, arranged at equilateral points within the chamber, staring down at the center, where Akhenaten laid, to ensure he would never find rest or repose outside of the watchful eye of the gods.

The position of the tunnel relative to the burial chamber gave Jackie and Joseph a fair view of the burial chamber, and its curious arrangement. Instead of being bare but for Akhenaten's sarcophagus, the chamber possessed an entire Egyptian city in miniature, complete with temples, obelisks, and small pyramids. It was a mockery of Amarna, Akhenaten's would-be capital of Egypt in life. In death, he was condemned to rule a lifeless diorama, a reminder that all of his works were undone by his successors — the boy-king Tutankhamun, his son, foremost of all.

The burial chamber must have tapped into a natural cave formation, with a pair of underground rivers surfacing to carve a path through carefully laid channels within the burial chamber and the model city in a mockery of the Nile, the water the color and viscosity of human blood. The scarlet river had been host to a species of blind, albino crocodile, if the butchered, carelessly-laid carcasses near the Nazi camp were any indication.

A flash of light, the chime of a bell, and another burst of wind, the smell of magic and ozone thick in the air. The aftershocks of a failed ward-breach. German shouts could be heard from the tunnel mouth. "Nein! Mehr Hammer, weniger Skalpell!"

Placidus huffed, and readied his rifle. "They've found Akhenaten. They're trying to breach the sarcophagus."

It was almost too late.

Jackie skittered down the ramp from the tunnel to the burial chamber floor. She sensed Placidus behind her, trying to find a good vantage point. She prowled through the small, gridded streets of the city, padding over a bridge above the blood-stained Nile, noting a bubbling in the waters below.

A pentameter chant could be heard as she crept closer to the site of the sarcophagus, followed by another burst of wind. The bell was a C# this time, the wards ever closer to breaking.

Up there, up the steps from the docs into the city plaza stood a group of a dozen Nazis, two dressed in pharaonic regalia, intoning rites in a gibberish mismash of Coptic and German, one holding a silver hammer, the other holding a golden scalpel, kneeling in front of a large granite box. The sarcophagus. At the crescendo of the nonsense words, the hammer was brought down upon the stone sarcophagus, and the wards flashed white, searing the stone and the hammer with soot. A♭. Closer now.

Hoffenreich was in lurking in the back, watching the affair with a fascinated glint in his eye. His project, years in the making, was so closed to being fulfilled.

The hammer came down. A#. The bell tolled clear, the wards shattered in a spray of ghostly glass. Jackie leapt forward. Joseph took the shot.

Splt. The forehead of the scalpel-wielding priest detonated in a shower of gore, he fell against the sarcophagus. Jackie landed on the back of the nearest Nazi and bit down, severing his spinal cord at the neck, scream dying as his throat was shredded. The Nazis shouted overlapping orders, their moment of victory turned into a moment of violence as hell rained down upon them.

Bang. Another bullet through the second priest, in the middle of a protection working, the glowing shield sputtering out in his hands. Jackie pounced on the leg of another, and with a twist of her neck, she threw the screaming Nazi down the steps and into the water. Calm red turned to frothing white as a crocodile surged out of the water with its jaws snapping shut, sinking back down into the waters below with gibbering fascist in tow. One last meal for the last of its kind.

Hoffenreich pointed a quivering finger at Jackie, spraying spittle. "Stop the intruder! Sofort! Sofort!"

Jackie rolled out of the way of a hail of bullets, a row of Horus miniatures down the boulevard beheaded by the spray. She shot forward like furred quicksilver, leaping upon another hapless Nazi, but was caught out of the air by the neck, and held up like a squirming kitten. A lumpy, crookedly handsome face leered into view, Hoffenreich's pet Falschfleischer, a corpse raised into the eternal service of the Third Reich. Seven feet tall and as broad as two coffins, fingers the size of bratwurst dug into Jackie's neck, her vision tunneling and her breath strangled. A bullet carved through the undead beast's brainpan and Jackie clawed at its face and arms, but the creature didn't so much as flinch, merely clenching its fingers all the more tightly.

Jackie couldn't maintain the felinid form any longer, and slipped back into hominid, naked and dripping with blood, struggling in vain to free herself from the steel grip of the walking corpse. Hoffenreich walked forwards, curious, heedless of the gunfire. "What is this that #27 caught? Not a pet cat, but a pet Jew? Remarkable."

Joseph pivoted. A bullet tore through the air, reaching its target faster than the sound of the rifle's crack. Its aim was true, but instead of boring through flesh, the bullet passed without a ripple through Hoffenreich's forehead, leaving a silvery streak against the stone behind him from the ricochet. The Falschfleischer, #27, dug its fingers deeper into Jackie's neck.

Hoffenreich's voice supernaturally boomed across the burial chamber. "A Yiddish boy in Warsaw just had his brains excavated from his skull from that bullet. Cease your hostility, or more will perish."

A second bullet disappeared into Hoffenreich's chest. He turned to the ledge where Placidus nested, spying the glint of the sniper scope. "A girl with club feet just had a heart attack. You are killing children."

There was a pregnant pause, but there was no third shot. Hoffenreich nodded, and #27 dropped Jackie, gasping for breath, and sprinted towards the sniper's perch. Hoffenreich raised his arms in the air, and intoned a brief German phrase, curling his hand into a fist. He leaned over to talk to Jackie, in an almost conversational tone. "That should have snapped your colleague's trigger finger. Will make this less messy for us. Now then, Krieger."

Krieger — a hulking man in uniform — stepped forward, gun in hand. The last thing Jackie remembered before stars and darkness was Krieger's grim smile and the fast approaching butt of his rifle.

Jackie's head hurt like nothing else, which was the first thing that told her that she was alive instead of dead. The second was the dual smell of greased steel and dried blood, layered on each other like notes in a disgusting perfume. Her hands were bound behind her with rough, chafing rope, and there was a digging, burning sensation on her neck, as if someone had made her a collar of hot barbed wire. Finally, there was a high-pitched squealing and thumping sound, like the heartbeat of a mechanical monster, or a poorly-tuned engine whose pistons were about to burst from their cylinders.

She opened her eyes, and was blinded by the dim light in the circular room they were kept in. The walls blurred and vibrated, curved overlapping sheets of metal spinning around them, as if they were in the center of a large centrifuge. Paired that with the horrible sounds of the engine, and the eerie lurching in her stomach from the unnatural forces at play within the demonic Germanic engine, and Jackie concluded that they must be in one of Germany's Luftplatten, soaring through the sky to G-d-knows-where.

Taking further stock, there were five Templars leering at her, Hoffenreich's pet corpse menacing above, and Hoffenreich himself, fiddling with the instruments of… SCP-8842. In the flesh. The dossier hadn't given her any photos of the Sonnenteufel, which was just as well, as any black and white photo wouldn't have done justice to the mangled, horrible offense to nature and good sense it was.

Nine men were prostrate on the rough metal floor, heads down and palms face-up, every inch of their bodies marked with arcane and eye-bleeding sigils and runes, bloody, unholy screeds written on the pages of their skin in a combination of Nazi esotericism, Hindu-Christo-Nordic syncretic prayers, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Their ragged, chapped lips whispered an unceasing stream of esoteric mantras and unhallowed mysteries. Tangled cables of blood-crusted copper wiring emerged from holes drilled in their skulls to connect each other in a warped ritual circle which crackled with electricity and magic. Plastic and canvas tubes of all sizes stuck through their torsos, delivering blood, protein slurries, or drip-feeds of amphetamines, and removing excretions and other undesirable fluids.

In the middle of it all, above the glimmering crystalline lens array, above the circle of twitching half-dead men, floated the withered corpse of Akhenaten. The ancient mummy was suspended as if by silken thread in the center of the ritual circle, glowing with an internal light, the linen bandages cascading off his form and orbiting around his body like so many wriggling tendrils of a deep-sea creature. The inverted symbol of Aten crowned his bare skull in flickering plasma, a totem of his unparalleled divine essence, undimmed three millennia after his demise.

It was too late.

"Glorious, isn't it?" Hoffenreich, he had noticed her awake. "I had hoped that Krieger wasn't too rough with you. I would like you both to see the activation before Krieger killed you."

Jackie attempted to transform, to don the skin of Tepēyōllōtl, but the silver-barbed choker around her neck dug in even further and burned with an intense heat, forcing her to stop, patches of fur retreating beneath her skin as blood trickled down the curves of her chest. She coughed. "Bastard."

Hoffenreich clapped his hands together. "The American Jewess speaks! And here I thought you were too feral to have higher brain functions. Your Judenmagie is quite potent, I must admit, though I fear no match for our learned sciences, as that is often the case."

Jackie twisted her hands, using her fingers to feel out the rope. It was rough, and very thick, chafing against her skin. The knotwork was very well done, so the only way she was going to get out of it would be with a knife. "The Allies will stop you and your insanity. What you're doing is pure evil."

Hoffenreich pursed his lips. "Ja, everything that we do is evil. You Americans are all the same, accusing us of being such when you do the same thing. Were you not ordered to take me alive, bring me in to help your so-called United Nations? I would be doing this same work under them, as well."

She spat. "Fascist prick."

"Ah, there it is. That famous Yankee brash. A Pentagram agent, I take it? Freemason? No matter, we will find out in the interrogation chamber once we reach Castle Werfenstein."

Something shuffled on Jackie's right, and she felt Joseph stir awake, similarly bound like her. He sported a goose egg on his temple, and his trigger finger was purpled and swollen. He was as worse for wear as Jackie felt. His eyes narrowed as he took in the stitched monster looming over him.

#27 spoke in a dry, husky voice, the bullet through the brain and the mauling Jackie had given it evidently not dimming its unearthly intelligence. The patchwork creature's eyes were emotionless, flat, its tear ducts borrowed from a dry-eyed corpse. "Sorry to meet under these circumstances, cousin."

Placidus spat bloody phlegm at the feet of the Falschfleischer. "The feeling is mutual."

Rosales looked to Placidus, bemused. "Cousin?"

Placidus vented a sigh through gritted teeth. "'Joseph Placidus' is not my full name. It is rather—" he took a breath. "'Joseph Maria Casimir Konrad Michael Benedictus Maurus Placidus von Franckenstein.'"

Frankenstein.

The linguist stared with a deathly glare, fighting against the coarse restraints. "And these fascists have stolen my family's work! Used for evil!"

#27's scarred face rippled with microscopic muscle spasms, but said nothing, turning to look at Hoffenreich instead. Hoffenreich chuckled, his preened mustache twitching with schadenfreude. "You cannot steal scientific innovation, my good doctor. We all build upon the shoulders of giants, your ancestor is but one of them. How could we not take custody of his genius for Germany, for Europe?"

Franckenstein gritted his teeth. "Whatever makes you comfortable with God, Hoffenreich."

Rosales prodded Franckenstein with her foot, and glanced down at his boot, then back at him. He nodded. When no one was looking, he arched his back, as if stretching, and pulled his pant leg slightly up with his bound hands, jimmying the hidden knife out of its sheath and leaning over to Jackie to pass it off. She got to work immediately on her bonds.

Hoffenreich clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the spinning fuselage of the Luftplatte, at the circle of prostrate men. "That I am, my dear doctor. That I am." He looked over his shoulder to Franckenstein. "You and your Jewess are quite brave, you know. Would make for a very good pulp fiction. 'Two brave souls fighting against the odds, against the coming darkness.' Yes." He turned and leaned down to meet Franckenstein, eye to eye. "But we are not the darkness, doctor. Quite the opposite, in fact. And today, Egypt will know that truth."

With a curt nod from the Nazi scientist, the aperture below the lens array whined open, and hundred-mile-an-hour winds filled the bomb bay. Jackie could see lights from a highway, homes and towns below. The chanting from the lobotomites became more fevered and frantic, and Akhenaten glowed brighter, his linen wrappings flapping violently in the gale. Jackie accelerated in her sawing of the ropes, strands snapping and giving way. Franckenstein wrestled against his own bonds, his teeth clamped together in an ugly sneer. "What are you planning, Hoffenreich?"

A wry smile squirmed to life on Hoffenreich's thin lips, and he stood, smoothing his flapping greatcoat and donning dark welding goggles. He had to shout to be heard over the high-altitude winds. "We have been following the Nile north for the past three hours. We will be within range of British supply lines in five minutes. Cairo within ten. Soon, the British forces in Cairo will face a new dawn, a German dawn, as we unleash the holy power of the sun upon their soldiers and tanks and aeroplanes, and break the British Lion for good!"

With a defiant roar, Jackie freed herself from her bonds and ripped the silver circlet from her neck, instantly transforming into a bruised and bloodied jaguar, the knife clattering to the ground, just out of reach of Franckenstein. The sudden shift in weight caused the Luftplatte to pitch and turn on its axis, its unholy engine whining and sissurating to compensate, to try and return to a state of fragile equilibrium. #27 fell to one knee, faring far better than the other Templars, whom all fell fully to the floor but a single unlucky one, tripped over the beryllium bronze cables and fell out of the Luftplatte's aperture, screaming the whole way down.

Hoffenreich staggered to his feet, his goggles askew and his mustache unkempt. He pointed at Jackie and spat with hatred, "Kill her! Kill the Jewess before she destroys the Wunderwaffe!"

Two of the Templars, twins, one marred with a jagged duelling scar across his face and the other with a crooked, squashed nose, stomped across the steel floor towards Jackie, drawing fencing sabers from their scabbards. In their haste one of the twins kicked Joseph's folding knife in his direction, which Joseph leapt upon and began cutting his bonds with haste while they were distracted.

Jackie unearthed a feral growl as she padded around the bomb bay, keeping the twins in full view. The flying saucer's engine whined and groaned as it over-corrected, pitching the other direction, knocking one of the brothers off balance for a split-second, but long enough for Jackie to bolt forward like furred lightning, lunging with claws outstretched to take his neck between her jaws, splattering the contents of his jugular across the cabin.

His squash-nosed brother wailed, lashing out at the skittering cat with his frantic swipes of his sword, lit aflame and smelling of brimstone. "Mein Bruder! Mein Karl!"

Hoffenreich backed away from the bloody melee, grabbing one of his subordinates and throwing him at the Sonnenteufel. "Go, now! activate the machine, while there is still time! Cairo will burn! mgah'ehye ahagluz ah mgn'ghft!"

The lobotomites' chanting grew louder and the light ever brighter and Akhenaten's skull and bones became transparent as they emitted a holy light that had not been seen on this Earth since the pharoah's near-apotheosis upon the steps of his palace within the dread city of Amarna before his assassination at the hands of crypto-Atlantean apostates. There was a roar that dwarfed even the sound of Jackie's jaguar form as a ball of incandescent plasma formed in the center of the ritual circle, a miniature sun birthed from the unholy combination of German thaumaturgy and Egyptian divinity. A sun, a golden unborn egg that would soon hatch with a birthing cry of fire and flame and devastation, a force that would soon be unleashed upon the Allies in Egypt, and thenafter the entire world.

Joseph finally cut himself loose of his bonds and leapt to his feet, his face heating and skin tightening from the glare. Jackie had been able to take down the second twin and tear him to bloody shreds only moments before she had been blinded by the glare, stunned and knocked out of her jaguar form yet again. She scrambled to the side and tackled Hoffenreich, pinning him to the floor, who was screaming and biting and shouting obscenities in his native tongue.

#27 lumbered to Joseph, staring impassively down upon him. The two were scions of the same family, one through natural sciences and midnight love-making and one through occult secrets and midnight horror-making, though one family all the same. Joseph spat blood again and spoke. "Listen, cousin. Come away with us. Leave this war behind, come to London, meet the family. They would love to see you and hold you, as a cousin. As a nephew. A brother."

The corpse-turned-science experiment was unmoving, unblinking. Finally he spoke, his voice but a whisper from the grave. "I will not betray the intent behind my making, cousin. I am sorry."

Franckenstein felt a pang of sadness twist his gut to knots, the deep grief at the impending death of a close relative. "No, I am sorry."

The linguist said a word from the long-forgotten language of Parabolic A — a language killed but not yet dead — and #27's dessicated ear-drums popped with a subsonic bang. Reeling from the shock, #27 attempted to raise a misshapen fist, but faltered as Franckenstein kicked the undead man towards the Sonnenteufel, tripping it over the suspended bronze cables and directly onto the lens array, the weight of the goliath cracking the fragile blue lenses into splinters. The ghoul raised its over-sized revolver level with Franckenstein's chest, its finger squeezing the trigger. But the gun didn't fire, not before the beams of godly energy from the miniature sun enveloped the falling modern Prometheus, not before the water within its leathery skin boiled in 0.18 seconds, not before the water vaporized in 0.62 seconds, and not before the water expanded to fill the volume, popping catgut sutures and splitting skin in 0.88 seconds.

Faster than sound, faster than thought, the stitched corpse exploded in a gory, steaming show as fluid became gas and whole became parts in less than a second, super-heated viscera raining down and searing friend and foe alike, the steam explosion flash-boiling the lobotomites and launching the mummy of Akhenaten straight through the roof and the cockpit of the Luftwaffe, killing the infant sun in its cradle.

Franckenstein pivoted on his heel and pointed a broken finger at Krieger. He shouted a snatch of prose, a garbled nonsense phrase that ground on the brain like stone on steel, and Krieger clapped his hands to his ears and howled. The Nazi twisted and cracked his neck at odd angles before drawing his service pistol and firing upon his comrades, his eyes those of a mad dog and his mouth a foaming bloody grimace.

Jackie looked up from Hoffenreich's prone form, muzzle flattening to briefly form a human face. "You said you're a linguist, not a thaumaturgist!"

"No, I said I was a philologist. Do keep up, dear Jackie."

The Luftplatte was completely unstable now, the explosion the final straw. The spinning plate was off its axis, hurtling towards the earth in a frantic rush to kiss the ground face-first. The open aperture flickered between vista as the saucer tumbled end-over-end, sand stars sand moon city clouds Nile sand stars, the dunes getting ever closer and the stars getting ever farther away.

Jackie dragged herself and Hoffenreich across the cavorite grounding strips, towards the aperture, towards the crushed and boiled and twisted corpses of the poor boys used to make the Sonneteufel, the broken brazen cables lashing and sparking above them. She shouts to Franckenstein, who makes his way towards them. "We're going to have to jump and make for the river!"

"What? That's crazy!"

"Do you have any better idea, Frankenstein?"

He gritted his teeth. "We do it on my say!"

She nodded.

Stars. They leaned out of the aperture.

Sand. They tensed their muscles for the jump.

Moon. Hoffenreich screamed dark oaths upon Jackie and her lineage.

Water. Franckenstein held onto Jackie's hand, and they thrust themselves out of the aperture of the falling saucer.

They both turned into arrow-tips, feet downwards and arms crossed, angling to hit the deep center of the Nile. The Luftplatte scraped the sky above as it shrieked down to earth, a glinting steel-gray comet bathed in re-entry fire-red.

Jackie felt the whipping wind, then freezing water, then nothing at all.

Joseph surfaced and gasped for breath, choking on the silty water in his mouth, coughing and retching as he clambered out of the water, spitting a dark mix of riverwater and blood onto the sand. He collapsed onto the sandbar, taking in shuddering breaths, drinking in the nighttime air and the stars, happy to have survived. As he was swimming to shore, he had seen the explosion from the Luftplatte's impact, He sat up, suddenly reminded of someone. "Jackie? Jackie, where are you?"

A distant yell, over the ridge. "Joseph? Over here, quick!"

He meandered over to where Jackie and Hoffenreich were, walking upstream, then following the deep drag marks of twin heels on the black soil. Hoffenreich laid in Jackie's uncovered arms and was as pale as a sheet, no breath danced past his blue lips, chapped from the desert chill. He was dead. Jackie sat there defeated, grinding her teeth at the scientist's gall to die after what they had gone through to capture him.

Joseph swung his pack over his shoulder, and rummaged within before revealing a pipe, tobacco and matches. "Drowned, hm?"

Jackie silently nodded, and shoved the newly made corpse off of her and into the sands. "Guess his protective wards never accounted for him being waterboarded to death."

The philologist took a puff of his pipe, and glanced between Hoffenreich's body and the pillar of black smoke rising from the crashed Luftplatte. More likely a dozen children died before his Sündenbocks were overloaded, but nevermind that. "Well, nothing to be done. We accomplished all we could, got most of our objectives out of the way. We did our best."

Jackie stood, despite wearing nothing but rags, there was no hint of gooseflesh upon her, she was unbothered by the desert chill. "Yeah. Yeah." She blinked, her eyes focusing on the task at hand. "Al Qusayr is a bust, never going to make that rendezvous. Onto Cairo, then?"

Joseph nodded, shouldering his pack again. "Onto Cairo."

And so they walked north, leaving the corpse of Hoffenreich and the derelict saucer as they made for the dim city lights on the west bank, lights that remained ignorant of the threat that had almost set their world ablaze.

End recall.

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Is that really what happened, 'Jackie'?

Yes sir. Of course it is.

A distant yell, over the ridge. "Joseph? Over here!"

He meandered over to where Jackie and Hoffenreich were. Hoffenreich was unconscious, whether from impact or from fright they didn't know. He was breathing, that much was fortunate. As for Jackie, Jackie looked for all the world like a bedraggled, wet cat as she sat there, squeezing the water out of Hoffenreich's great-coat, donning it to cover her bloodied, nubile form. "Glad to see you survived."

"You as well. I see your charge survived the landing intact."

She frowned, looking at the Nazi scientist's crumpled form. "About that."

"We were supposed to rendezvous in Al Qusayr, but I believe that plan has been shot."

"Should we rendezvous?"

Franckenstein paused. He sat on the sand and crossed his legs, rifling through his sodden pack to find his smoking pipe, wrapped in canvas. He mulled over the question as he struck a match, thinking about it as he held the warm smoke in his mouth. He exhaled a curl of smoke. "Those were our orders."

Rosales cocked her head. "A nonanswer."

"A silly question."

"Do you think he would willingly help us? Our cause?"

"He'd help us whether he wanted to or not. The BOS knows how to compel obedience."

"As does the Pentagram, but Joseph look at this man. At what he almost did." Rosales gestured at the pillar of smoke rising from the burning Luftplatte, a greasy black that stood out against the smooth velvet of the night sky. "He is a full-throated psychopath, a virulent racist and fascist. Any tool he could be given, any project he could be assigned to, he would just twist it against us somehow. Putting him in a place of power…" She shook her head firmly, her mouth set in a firm line. "It would be like putting a loaded gun in the palm of his hand and placing the barrel against our forehead."

He twisted his jaw. "This is a treasonous line of thinking, love. What would your Foundation do if they knew of this treachery?"

"Pentagram. Not my horse, not my farm. We were never going to get our hands on him, he is supposed to be in the BOS' care. I don't think my superiors would give a single red cent whether he lives or dies."

"Your superiors will have you undergo a psychic debrief after this, correct?"

She blinked. "Yes. why?"

Franckenstein sucked on the pipe ruefully. "Our orders said not to let him come to harm."

"Yes, but-"

He raised a finger. "Let me finish. They didn't say anything about him dying of natural causes."

Her eyebrows furrowed. "Explain."

Franckenstein exhaled one final puff of smoke, and tapped the embers out of the pipe against a rock. "On the island of Lemnos, there is a cave. In that cave, the Ancient Greeks held festivals and mysteries in the name of Hypnos. The Hypnotites spoke in the language of smoke and dreams and forgetfulness. It's a bastard of a language to learn, but it helps when you need to lose something, to forget an event fierce and horrible, that plagues your waking thoughts." In this moment, he felt aged, the forgotten sands of time weighing him down. "I know another language, as well. One that will deal with our Nazi problem."

Jackie understood, and nodded. "How?"

"Help me with the prick's shirt."

Rosales quickly complied, stripping Hoffenreich until his damp chest was bare to the night breeze. The scientist's torso was decorated with small, surgical cuts, the length of a dime. Franckenstein withdrew his knife from his boot, the silver-tip glinting under the moonlight. "I may not be a doctor of medicine, but as you know, it does run in my blood."

He slowly pressed the knife against Hoffenreich's skin, the silver tip and the wards on the hilt flaring white as they shattered the ward-tattoos. The knife drew scarlet droplets as Franckenstein carefully reopened the surgical scar, dipping a finger inside to retrieve a small, wriggling mass. A glistening, cancerous teratoma in the fascimile of a screaming child. "A sineater. A Sündenbock. They redirect his misfortunes onto others. He can die without them. He will die without them." Franckenstein crushed the sineater in his fist and tossed it aside, starting on the next scar.

There were eight in all, eight crushed tumors, crumpled and discarded as Franckenstein moved onto the next, turning the white sands red with their spoiled blood.

When he was finished, the philologist threw Hoffenreich's dress shirt onto him, and propped up the scientist on a rock, staring out at the full moon, looming above the sluggish waters of the Nile. Hoffenreich started to stir, and opened bleary eyes to meet Franckenstein. The Nazi gaped like a fish out of water, trying to find the right words. "What… what did you do?"

Franckenstein shooed Rosales away, away to a safe distance, out of voice's reach. "Nothing that will bother you shortly." He turned to Hoffenreich, and sat on his haunches in front of the German. "I don't want to even speak with you anymore. You disgust me. You are a rotten-hearted, pig-fucking Ratzi. I only have one word to say to you, so you better listen closely."

Hoffenreich blinked and gawped, all sense of dignity and vainglory spent, like air let out of a balloon. "And what would that be, sir?"

Franckenstein smiled gaily, and grabbed Hoffenreich by the hair, bringing him in close until his lips brushed the scientist's ear.

There once was an Australian aboriginal language, spoken by entire swaths of the north coast of the continent. This language was infected by the misfiring of a Nazi weapon three years prior, condemning the language to a slow and painful decline rather than the explosive death Obskurakorps desired. The word that Franckenstein spoke was of that language, the infection lethal to those not fluent.

<Sleep.>

The infection reached the left anterior middle temporal lobe within 180 milliseconds, where the cognitohazard attempted to be parsed. The brain manages the first two syllables before neurons within the lobe winked out like a light. Within 190 milliseconds, the collapse in brain function spread to other regions, a cranium-wide blackout. Within 310 milliseconds, eyelids began to flutter from the misfiring nerves, the last gasps of a dying brain. Within 350 milliseconds, the heart missed a beat, within 400 fingers and toes flexed and tensed at random, the right index dislocating from the strain. At 420 milliseconds, the heart stopped receiving input and halted movement. Hoffenreich was legally dead under half a second, slumped in Franckenstein's arms. It was a more peaceful death than the man deserved.

Franckenstein let Hoffenreich fall out of his grasp, cracking the dead man's empty skull against the rocks. The philologist stood, brushing the sand from his clothes. He yelled out to Rosales, covering her ears up on the ridge and gazing at Hoffenreich's limp corpse. "Cardiac arrest! We're done here! Onto Cairo!"