Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (7 page)

The creature warily approached with one hand held high, as the
Cthaat Aquadingen
had foretold. This sign was the ancient gesture for a parlay between humans and the creatures, and was answered in kind by Weber. In the dark of the new moon Weber, Schwelm, and Soldin watched the hunched thing approach in the loping gait of a giant frog. Although it could not be clearly seen in the cloudy darkness, it was most obvious the thing was not human—but perhaps it had been at one time.

Their conversation was short. The creature, who called itself “Claude,” asked the Karotechia men their business in an odd croaking voice. Weber rapidly sketched out their ideal of an alliance between the Deep Ones and the Reich. “Claude’s” response was concise: “Bring many others here, those you have no use for, to demonstrate a good faith. I will bring others...next new moon.” It then left as rapidly as it had come.

Weber spent the next two weeks desperately chasing down an associate in the Karotechia who was perfecting methods of killing and sterilization to be used on the vast hordes of the Untermenschen—the Jews, Slavs, and Poles, the poor minorities who had been named the enemy of the Reich. This man, Dr. August Hirt, was a Hauptsturmführer in the SS, and was completing his research work at the concentration camp in Natzweiler. He had spent almost four months perfecting a gassing technology which would be used to kill the oppressed in unprecedented numbers. The report indicated this technology was just entering widespread use in the newly-constructed death camps in Poland.

Dr. Hirt, a zealot for the Karotechia, was more than forthcoming. He diverted a shipment of thirty-seven mentally ill men and children to Cap de la Hague by the night of the 30th of April, just in time for the return of the creatures. These people, like thousands of others, were to be sent to their death under the guise of “medical euthanasia,” although these poor few met a fate more terrible than carbon monoxide gas.

On the next new moon, fourteen creatures surfaced into the lit bay of the Black Water camp, seemingly unafraid of the dozens of machine gun-wielding SS men surrounding the beach. Some were almost human looking in the klieg lights as they came up on the beach, but others were absolutely alien. These others—huge hulking beasts with greenish skin and large round black eyes—sat passively, occasionally gesturing in a strangely human manner, seemingly directing the more human-like of their brood.

Only one SS man on the beach faltered. When the inhuman creatures began to decapitate the bound, blindfolded, and gagged mental patients, the SS man dropped to his knees and vomited while screaming. He was later sent to Strasbourg Asylum. He would not be the last.

The patients were decimated by the beasts in minutes, ripped to shreds in an aberrant ritual of some sort. Weber and the others looked on in horror as the spectacle played itself out. Weber had to shout down several requests to open fire by his men, and the SS men stood their ground despite the inhuman scene.

After the bloodbath all but one of the creatures slipped back into the sea. The last to remain was almost human in aspect, and called himself “Henri.” He had stayed behind, he claimed, to work out the specifics of the agreement with the Karotechia. Henri was an ambassador of sorts, and came to live on the surface, in the camp, like a normal human without any apparent difficulty, answering the many questions of Weber and his men. Henri claimed to have been born more than eighty years before, although he appeared no more than forty, and said he had left to join his “family beneath the sea” in the year 1905. There were great secrets beneath the ocean, he claimed, more than the Karotechia could dream of, but which would be revealed to them once the pact between their peoples had been finalized.

For more than one week Henri lived among the humans of the surface as he once had. He absorbed all manner of information, asking many questions about current political conditions of the upper world. He was very interested in the methods the Karotechia had used to call his people to the surface, and how a government had come by such knowledge.

He seemed most impressed with the pagan underpinnings of Hitler’s Reich.

Henri made his people’s demands plain. They wanted no less than an entire eight hundred mile stretch of the French shore. In addition they required “surface breeding stock,” human women which they could impregnate to spawn their kind. These coastal areas would be run by the Deep Ones, who would, in exchange for women and various future concessions, bring international trade and movement on the sea to a complete halt. They apparently had the population and the ability to overwhelm any type of ship on the ocean, and Henri hinted that the boat “accident” which had occurred at the camp was a simple example of the power at their fingertips. At their command, he claimed, they could subsume huge portions of any shoreline beneath tidal waves and capsize ships with enormous winds utilizing the antediluvian science of magick, which his people had taught to the first humans.

But this would require much time for his people to organize.

Henri allowed himself to be studied and photographed by physicians, and their brief study determined him to be almost human. Except for his hideously shiny and mottled skin, the anatomical differences were minor on the outside, but X rays revealed the ghostly traces of several organs never before documented in medical texts. Vivisection was ruled out, much to the disappointment of the camp’s enthusiastic medical staff. Diplomacy, for once, came first.

The photographs enclosed in the report showed a hunched thing with cancerous skin and huge, watery black eyes. Like some enormous fish, Henri’s neck was split on either side with what could be described as “gill slits,” and something was wrong with his lower legs. Standing high on the balls of his feet, his ankles and knees had shifted in some precise but alien way, allowing postures never before seen by man. Henri’s hands ended in talon-tipped fingers, strung with a thin, near-transparent webbing to pull him through his adopted aquatic environment.

In the report’s medical study, the bizarre human-Deep One hybrid was described in the reassuring tones of science. Without wonder or fear it plainly stated: “Subject H displays abnormal constructions of the hand. These distortions are mostly in the phalangeal bones of the upper hand. Specifically the proximal and distal phalanges show gross distortion. The bones here have lengthened, and, through some unknown process, exited the skin, now serving another purpose all together as sharpened bone talons.”

Bruning tried to imagine such creatures, and found that even with the photograph in front of him of Henri and some of the more alien of his kind, he could not. They were gruesome, misshapen things, whose bodies had been twisted by dark forces beyond human understanding from human to something else, something more. They were there, real in the klieg lights and in the reports, but still, Bruning had no frame of reference. Of their reality he had no doubt; but this fact, which should have been terrifying, seemed insignificant and far away, like something repeated to him in a dream.

In their study the doctors had already taken the stance of racial superiority, a foolish mistake. Weakness which obviously did not exist in reality was created on paper to unconsciously salve the bruised ego of humanity. The doctors looked at the things, poked them once and said: Here is a known quantity. If the creatures had not exploited this naiveté yet, they most certainly would in the future.

Although the future of Black Water seemed assured, the diplomacy had dragged on now for more than nineteen months. Dozens of “exchanges” later, the dialogues between the creatures and the Karotechia remained unchanged. Nothing had been resolved, and the agreement between the two peoples had come no closer to completion. It became clear that the beasts desired women, and the Karotechia would not hear of using any except those of the various underclasses, which even now were a precious commodity in the Reich. Despite the surplus of Untermenschen in the Nazi camps, there were few females to be found. And it was totally against SS racial doctrine to allow such a thing to occur, using the Untermenschen as breeding stock; but the war in Africa had already turned, and Weber opted to ignore the rules once more in the hopes he could save it all in one bold stroke.

Weber and his men searched in vain through the mental sanitariums, hospitals, and concentration camps of the Reich for female “patients,” but had little luck. Many of the female Untermenschen were executed outright due to pregnancy, lack of strength, or advanced age. Those that survived were too few to be useful. Most of the mentally or physically infirm had been executed months before during the end of the medical euthanasia program, leaving those hospitals open only to war casualties from the Eastern front. The handful that survived the cleansing were usually living at home and would be too difficult to round up in numbers.

Ironically, many of the others they managed to locate in state care had been sterilized by Hirt’s own processes and were useless as “breeding stock.”

In the reports it was conspicuously absent who came up with the plan to take control of the town Marise. Only four miles from the Cap de la Hague camp, this small town was a favorite gathering place for the enlisted men with day passes for rest and relaxation. A large array of coastal defenses were being built to the north of the town by Wermacht construction crews and it fell to the Cap de la Hague SS division to police Marise for the Maquis, the French Resistance, and defend against terrorist attacks. No one in the Reich outside the Cap de la Hague command had to worry about the poor little town of Marise. Its disposition was their responsibility.

On the morning of November 4, 1942, this isolated town found itself in the grips of an evil far more insidious than the Third Reich. The report was brief and sobering. Under orders from Oberscharführer Weber, a detachment of twenty-four SS soldiers rounded up the men of Marise, force-marched them to a field two miles distant, and shot them, burying them in a ditch which had been dug for a latrine by Wermacht construction crews. The bodies were counted, and of the forty-four men who were thought to have lived in Marise, only thirty-two had met their fate in that ditch. The others, it was believed, had run off to join the Maquis.

This left only the women and children to account for.

The women and children were brought to the Cap de la Hague camp and separated on November 5, 1942. A compound to hold the children was hastily constructed and maintained on one side of the camp. Formerly used as a library and offices, it now held a half a dozen finely appointed childrens’ rooms, which were run by a German nursing staff. The women lived in another, smaller building surrounded by wire, and although their surroundings were less than luxurious, they were fed and cared for with uncommon decency. Weber made it clear from day one: the children would be kept safe if the women complied with his demands.

Contact with the Deep Ones continued to this day, every month on the new moon, but something in the exchanges had shifted. The creatures seemed more cooperative and excited, and worked diligently to provide the Karotechia with “good faith” proofs of their own. On November 10th, 1942, one of the Deep Ones brought identification from thirteen Luftwaffe pilots who had been lost over the channel. He claimed his people had been collecting debris such as this for many years, and that they had access to all kinds of sunken technology—and valuables.

On November 8th, 1942, fourteen women were exchanged for thirty-five bars of British gold recovered from a wreck in the channel. These women were subdued by the creatures through unknown means, and were fitted with some sort of living jellyfish-like helmet which engulfed their heads, surrounding each woman’s face like a balloon. They were then led into the water, most never to be seen again; a few were found washed up on shore dead the next day. The Karotechia believed that these living “helmets” allowed the women to breathe underwater, and that portions of the Deep One cities were pressurized with air to keep surface slave stock alive. Barter and trade were attempted by the Karotechia to gain possession of such a “helmet.” All offers were refused by the creatures, who would only say, “Soon you will have all you need.”

In addition to the gold, the beasts brought along extensive information about the stretch of the Cornwall and Dover coasts of England as a “gift of good will.” The creatures informed Weber and his associates that soon, the leader of the Deep Ones would come from far away to make the pact between their underwater nation and the Reich a reality. The report hinted that the leader of the Deep Ones, a being called “Dagon,” was thought by Weber’s team to be planning to to appear in less than twenty-nine days, on the next new moon.

Bruning closed the file and opened his eyes. Beneath the wing of the plane, roads spread out like arteries bringing the cancer of the Reich to the defenseless towns of France. Men, tanks, guns, infecting everything like a disease, turning children into soldiers, metal into bullets. The great engines of the Reich converted flesh into prosperity, at the cost of lives. It was like some terrible machine that never should have been, sprung into existence by its own accord, finding nourishment in death. Around him, in him, Bruning could feel the pulse of that machine. Events too large for him to consider blotted out the world, and as he sat and tried to piece together his part in the charade he realized that soon he would be on that beach. Alone with his secrets, he would see those things as they shambled from the waves in the dark of the new moon. He could see himself there already, frozen with fear—he would stand by as Weber gave the world away to things older than mankind.