Grail: Excerpt

[May, 1945: Corporal Albert “Al” Castle is walking alone by himself, in the woods, up a hill, outside a village on the outskirts of Stuttgart, Germany.]

Al stops walking for a moment. Bends down, picks up a chunk of rusting grey-painted steel, heaves it — side-armed, whizzing like a boomerang — into the darkness at the side of the road. He plunges one hand back into his jacket pocket and with the free hand shines the flashlight about.

Where the heck is he, anyway? Way the heck outside the town, anyway — he doesn’t think he’s ever been on this stretch of road, even in the daytime. A dog barks; somewhere distant, a diesel engine roars into life.

He shuts the flashlight off. Now he can see that he’s really pretty high up in the hills outside the town; below him, along the town streets and farther off, in Stuttgart itself, the flood-lit circles gleam like swollen pearls in a necklace. Probably ought to think about heading back down now…

He turns, and that is when he sees the factory.

It is on the other side of the road, back behind the trees so he almost can’t see it, illuminated by a single sputtering floodlight. Somehow, miraculously, it seems to have survived all bombing. As he approaches it, crunching along on the long long driveway, it grows steadily like a vision in a fairy tale, a house of candy and gingerbread.

No one seems to be about; no lights seem to be on inside any of the several buildings.

He is standing now at the gate in the high, barbed-wire electrified fence, alongside a vacant guardhouse. The gate is mangled, hangs off what used to be hinges, its wooden and steel posts having obviously been leveled, pressed down flat under the wheels of some heavy escaping vehicle and now leaning out in the direction of the road. Off to the left, perhaps fifty yards away, are two buildings — one of brick, two stories high, living quarters for the workers maybe?; and another longer building, a hangar-sized shed of corrugated metal, huge door in the front, a garage? On the right, a little nearer, are first a cluster of small identical wooden buildings, windowless, for storage perhaps, surrounded by their own ring of barbed wire, watched over by a guard tower on stilts.

Behind that little cluster of storage sheds or whatever they are is another two-story brick building, more imposing than the one on the other side of the compound — more official-looking somehow, perhaps it’s just the flagpoles (now empty) lined up before it as though standing at attention. An office building, Corporal Castle guesses. Administration.

Opposite him, all along the back of the factory compound, reaching not only off to the left and right but also up in a steep wall, is some kind of geographic anomaly — a sheer ridge, like eyebrows, perhaps the very peak of the hill he’s been climbing. Set into the face of this miniature mountain, easily thirty yards wide, is the cinderblock and steel wall of the factory itself. The whatchmacallit, the… the mill.

Al looks about, remaining at first by the guardhouse.

“Hello?” he calls out. “Hello! Anyone here?”

No reply but a soft echo, hereherehere.

He shines the flashlight into the guardhouse, across the central open area, in the direction of the, the living quarters and the garage, across the face of the factory, onto the brick of the office building. Everywhere, it seems, is this goofy little meaningless logo, three interlocking circles — looks like a deformed pretzel, or the Ballantine beer insignia.

“Hello!” he calls out again, louder this time (hellololo).

Still getting no reply, he walks out into the compound, past the storage sheds, towards the office building to the right. Crunch goes the gravel beneath his feet. Looking as he is for signs of movement anywhere in the compound, in the buildings, in the guard tower, anywhere, swinging the flashlight this way and that, he does not notice the fresh tire tread marks upon which he walks.

Now he is at the office building. Its windows, he can see now that he’s up close, have all been shot or blown out. He stands on tiptoe outside a shattered ground-floor window, shines the flashlight inside, looks around. Busted glass all over the floor, a couple rocks, bricks, toppled file cabinets, looks like a ton of stray paper; bullet holes, too, some.

“Hello?” he calls out, tentative, and his voice flies into the room, does not echo but stops, dead, muffled by all the destruction. Looks like, hmmm, looks like a long streak of, is that really dried blood there on the floor or just paint? On one wall the same stuff, a sloppy skull-and-crossbones.

Al wishes for a moment that his friend McGraw were with him — McGraw would already be inside, ripping open closets and desks in his never-ceasing search for schnapps, Nazi flags, Lugers, whatever.

But then, no, Al thinks; he’s glad that he’s left McGraw back in town. Al is not here, he thinks now, for this office building, for booze or souvenirs. He’s here, he begins to realize as he lowers himself from tiptoe and turns away from the brick wall, for the factory itself.

He walks to a door in the side of the wall projecting out from the face of the mountain. Achtung! declaim signs everywhere, in that weird Gothic script, and where there’s no weird Gothic script there’s that weird three-ring sign. Everywhere, stuck on the fences and the cinderblock and the door here and even on a sign on a steel post hammered into the mountainside, everywhere the three rings and sometimes also, in smaller lettering, the accompanying words FRIED. KRUPP A.G.

No one about, still. Or is there?

“Hello?” he says yet again, not really wanting any longer to get an answer. “Hello?” He plays the beam of the flashlight over the door before him.

Behind him, high up on a wooden pole, the compound’s only functioning floodlight flickers, buzzes and sputters in Prussian irritability, and goes out.

Corporal Albert Castle, U.S.A., combat veteran, a representative of America’s brave victorious fighting forces, recoils from the sudden darkness pressing in on all sides. Sanctuary this way, his instincts tell him: at the end of the beam of yellow light originating in his clenched hand — the end fastened as though nailed there, on the doorknob of the entrance to this factory. The door itself, he sees now, is not latched nor even shut all the way, a narrow ribbon of blackness running its full length along the edge closest to the doorknob. He steps forward, reaches out with one hand, and pushes on the door. It swings open.

“Hello?” again, then oh Jesus Al, you’ve been hello-ing all around this place and for all you know there are only Krauts up here, what the heck is Kraut for “hello” anyhow?, riffling frantically through the meager card file in his head of German words and phrases he’s picked up, guten tag, guten nacht, auf wiedersehen, chokolat… all the time inching forward slowly, the flashlight beam not really helping much now, then he is over the threshold and through the door. Some kind of steel catwalk beneath his feet, wall to the left, pipe railing to the right, and then apparently absolutely nothing at all beyond that.

Involuntarily, “Hello?” one last futile time.

No echoes. His voice goes and goes and is gone.  Silence, blackness, except for the boom of his pulse in his skull and the increasingly frail-seeming little wisp of a flashlight beam.

Al turns to inspect the wall by the doorway. Got to be a light switch here somewhere, darned if I’m going to move one foot further into this place with just a flashlight… yeah, here, big steel lever attached to a sheet-metal box with cables running out of it, he raises the lever and behind him blooms a light as though of the sun, then he switches off his flashlight and turns to look at—

Jesus H. Christ and all the apostles and saints.

Spread out before him is the factory, extending back and back into the mountainside for what must be, Jesus, must be two, three hundred yards. Mounted directly into the rock overhead are steel beams from which are suspended light fixtures the size of B-17 ball turrets, hundreds of them, and beneath this harsh steely apparently infinite and geometrically precise grid are hundreds of — well, machines, machines the size of LSTs and aircraft fuselages. Cast steel, forged steel, gleaming stainless steel formed into a hundred drill presses, lathes, milling machines, metal-working hardware for a race of giants. The ones he can see way out there against the distant opposite wall are so far away that they seem tiny by contrast, like Erector-Set constructions viewed across the breadth of a living room floor. Christmas ornaments. The empty aisles among the ranks of these behemoths stretch back and away perhaps to merge somewhere out there, converging in the shadows; it’s like one of those Renaissance paintings illustrating the principles of perspective.

Al raises the flashlight to his face, pushing with it against the bridge of his steel-rimmed government-issue eyeglasses, which immediately snuggle up high on his nose.

Jesus H. Christ. What sort of place is this, correction, was it? What the heck did they make here, all this metal, Jesus — did we really beat these people…?

Suddenly from outside is the sound of a vehicle engine, running and then shutting off. A pause, then — crunch, crunch, crunch — the sound of footsteps on the gravel. Getting nearer? Oh God.  Al flattens himself against the wall alongside the door, looks up, thinks maybe he should turn out the lights, his right hand going down to the .45 holstered over his hip…