The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,102
field, his black SS uniform hidden under a ragged gray blanket. The field, unlike much of the wasteland of the Jungfern Heide, had been recently mowed; in places, the bare ground showed signs of fire. The moon was a few days past full, bright as a beacon in an almost cloudless midheaven. A bomber’s moon, they were already calling such conditions in London.
At Commando headquarters in Lochailort they’d given him a collapsible ladder, a lightweight steel alpinstock with rungs folded into it on either side. The wall was higher than the ladder’s six-foot length, but not by more than a yard. He’d picked his spot carefully that afternoon, where the bulk of the old coach house would screen him from the sentry who would in all probability be stationed by the kitchen door. Once he was over, his uniform would almost guarantee anonymity—he’d thankfully disposed of the eyepatch, boot, and four-day beard that had constituted his disguise—and he made the jump down, taking the stock with him and stowing it out of sight in the bushes, without a sound.
The house was dark. There was a tiny chink of light around a blackout curtain in the front hall, where a guard would probably be dozing; another guard stood by the back door. Like a specter Saltwood glided through the dark laurels, forced open a dining-room window, and stood listening for a moment to the silence of the house. A chair creaked in the front hall. Looking through the dining-room door, he saw a Storm Trooper sitting in a hard-backed chair beside a lamp in the front hall, reading a lurid-covered paperback novel and moving his lips slightly with the effort. Tom slipped the garrote from his pocket, disposed of the man without trouble, took his keys, and manhandled the limp body into the bottom cabinet of a built-in china hutch where nobody was likely to look. Folding the wire garrote back around its wooden handles, he stepped quickly over to the “temple” doors and, with his pocket flashlight shielded behind his hand, had a quick look around to make sure it was no more than it seemed.
It wasn’t. A black-draped inner sanctum straight out of the Benevolent Protective Association of the Rhinoceros Lodge, a Rosicrucian’s lobster-supper dream complete with a closetful of white, black, and scarlet robes and a louring stench of old blood and charred meat that even the whorehouse incense couldn’t conceal. He wondered what they’d sacrificed. Jemal Nightshade, a slow-spoken Negro who’d worked beside him in the West Virginia mines, had confessed one night over a couple of drinks to offering chickens to the loa back in Port au Prince—a goat, if the family could afford it.
Did they really believe this stuff?
Saltwood remembered those bone amulets and shriveled little skin bags hanging around von Rath’s neck, and shivered unaccountably. Evidently twelve years of being force-fed the opium of the masses in Lutheran Sunday school hadn’t been completely eradicated by the big doses of Voltaire, Marx, and Hobbes he’d had since, he thought, hugging the wall as he climbed the stairs to keep his weight from creaking the risers. The lab, at a guess, would be in one of those two locked bedrooms upstairs, or in one of the attics...
In the darkness, the sense of the infernal in the place was stronger, revolting him as none of Jemal Nightshade’s talk of veves and legba ever had. When it came right down to it, Nightshade’s voodoo had never struck him as being that different from old Tommy Wu’s ginseng Buddhism or the sight of those old Spanish women in Saragosa, crawling over cobblestones with bleeding knees to kiss a pillar in a church. Come on! he told himself. All this is just to make people think they’re crazy... And anyway, let’s not talk about evil after you’ve just added that Storm Trooper—not to mention that Merced County “special deputy” the orange growers hired to bash the migrants—to your body count in Spain.
You’re here to do a job.
A wavery thread of candlelight marked the bottom of one of the locked upstairs doors; the other room was dark. Tom entered that one first, gingerly trying key after key in hair-prickling silence, then stepping cautiously inside and flashing the light quickly around. It was a laboratory, all right—an absurd wizards-kitchen straight out of L. Frank Baum, stocked with everything from mandrake roots (in a wooden box labeled with Teutonic thoroughness) to a collection of revolting mummy fragments, undoubtedly looted from every museum from