bothering to button it, and tried body-slamming the door. It didn’t give, though it was roasting-hot to the touch. He kicked it, hoping the wood had weakened. It hadn’t.
Puzzled, shaken, he turned back to stare at the flame still flickering over what was left of the chair. He’d seen a dozen fires in his year in the Tulsa oil fields, but nothing like that. Doubtfully he took a step toward it.
What happened then took him so completely by surprise that his mind barely registered the impossibility of it, only reacted in terror and shock. SOMETHING came at him, from out of where he couldn’t imagine—something round and small and bristling with dripping scales, something with huge jaws and tiny black hands like a monkey’s, something that whizzed through the air like a thrown baseball straight at his face.
With a yell of horror he struck at it, dodging back. It zigzagged crazily after him, chisel teeth snapping in a spray of sulfur-smelling slime. He retreated across the room, slapping at it in growing panic, his mind stalled with fear; his back hit the wall and the thing dove in under his block, the claws of its little hands ripping and digging in the flesh of his arm. He yelled again as it began to climb toward his shoulder, and smashed it against the wall. It bounced squishily and continued fighting its way up, its round mouth tearing tablespoon-size chunks of his flesh, its slobber and the ooze that dripped from its smashed head burning the ripped muscle like lye. He beat it again and again on the wall, shoulder numb from the impact, and still it came on. It was making for his face, his eyes...
In panic, he dove for the burning chair and shoved his arm, the thing still clinging greedily, into the center of the sinking blaze.
His shirt caught immediately, but the creature fell off, wriggling and twisting like a lizard with a broken back. Saltwood stripped off his shirt, flung it away to burn itself out in a corner, arm seared and blistered and throbbing with pain, flesh hanging in gory flaps and blood dripping from his fingers. Staggering, he fell back against the rear wall of the room, watching the creature’s death agonies in the fire until it was still. A stench like burning rubber filled the room, with the hideous smell of his own charred flesh.
The secret weapon, he thought, gripping his burned arm tight against him, fighting the nauseating wash of shock and pain. Damn Sligo, damn that crazy little bastard... His breath came in ragged sobs, sweat burning his eyes, the agony in his arm making him dizzy. He had no idea how the Nazis would use this secret, these hideous things, but whatever he had experienced here, he wouldn’t wish on Hitler.
Well, he thought, maybe...
And then he blinked. The pain in his arm was gone.
The burned patches on the floor were gone.
The chair was whole, lying on its side near the door where he’d thrown it.
There was no dead creature, no ashes, no little trapdoor in the ceiling... not even the smashed remains of a hornet on the wall.
The room was precisely as it had been when he’d been brought here. His shirt, unburned, lay crumpled on the floor. He looked at his left arm, and saw the skin whole with its dusting of sunburn over the thick core of muscle and bone.
He went and got his shirt, because even the heat of the fire had died out of the room and it was unpleasantly chilly, but, as he put it on, he wedged himself in the far corner and waited without moving until an hour later, when the door opened and von Rath came in.
“You were apprehended in the uniform of a Storm Trooper, bearing Schutzstaffel identification papers.” Von Rath folded his arms and tipped his head a little to one side. “It makes no difference to me or to our experiment whether you are English or German, but as Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler will point out, the penalties attached to espionage are far less exacting than those for treason to the Black Order and to the Reich.” As he spoke von Rath nodded toward the two men who had entered the room in the wake of his little knot of guards. One was a golden giant of a man, like an overweight Norse god, with the left breast of his white uniform jacket plastered in medals—Saltwood knew his face from the newspaper photograph