Chimera

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

The novel that inspired the headline-grabbing ITV series starring John Lynch, Kenneth Cranham, and Christine Kavanagh. A terrifyingly plausible journey into the disturbing nerve-centers of medical science where our secret future is formed today. When Peter Carson is invited to the pioneering Jenner Clinic by one of the lab assistants, he's naturally intrigued. But when he arrives at the remote site in the Cumbrian fells to find police roadblocks and official silence, he realises that he's stumbled onto a story that will do him no good at all. Dr Jenner's work matters to the government. Enough to warrant unlimited funding, high security, and the best technicians in the country. But something has gone badly wrong. The project that has no room for mistakes has produced a result so terrible that it must never see the light of day. And now the evidence must be destroyed, whatever the cost.

Release date: February 5, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 287

Sample

M Francois de Menthon

Prosecutors’ Office

Palace of Justice

Furtherstrasse

NUREMBERG

12 August 1945

I will do my best to supply the information that you have asked me for. It is not, as you tactfully suggest, so difficult to remember; I only wish that it was. The difficulty is in the retelling.

You ask me where I was when I heard the explosion. I was by the gas-chamber elevator, helping to load an old woman onto our iron trolley. Two of us were working where one could have managed; she was naked and starved, and no weight at all. Her hair had been cropped to make felt for German boots, and her teeth had been jerked for their gold.

The explosion was close by, and it banged the soot off the crematorium walls. Petrov and I had either end of a plank which we used to lift the bodies on to the wagon, and we held it as we tried to listen over the throb from the drawing fans which heated the brick ovens. The tiny windows were still rattling in their frames when the gunfire started.

I looked across at Petrov, but he was no more certain than I was. He was nineteen, almost the same age as me, but he looked much younger. He shrugged, and we tipped the plank so that the woman rolled on to the trolley with the two children. Then we stepped over the rails and put our weight behind the carriage to start it rolling toward the incinerators.

I know it sounds commonplace. It was commonplace. I’d lost count by then of the number of corpses we’d rolled into the ovens, the grandparents and the children and the skeletal musulmans from the Auschwitz KZ across the railway track.

We were Sonderkommmando, pressed labour for the SS, alive and fed only as long as we worked. I’d had four months in the Kommando of the living dead, and my only tears were for the burnt-flesh odour of the ovens.

A siren had started up, somewhere on the Birkenau side of the camp. Still the gunfire went on, peppered here and there with louder blasts and an occasional hoarse command. Two of the SS men were at a window, trying to get some sight of what was happening, but I doubt if they could have seen much more than a haze of smoke over the pine trees.

We got the trolley on to the turntable in the middle of the Krema, and I looked around for an order; without an order, we couldn’t know which oven was the next to be loaded. But the SS were preoccupied, and one by one the incinerators were being left unattended as the labour group started to gather at the far end of the chamber. The acting guard commander was a man called Voss, and he was still at the window. If the smoke hadn’t been so heavy, he would have been able to see that the roof of the number three crematorium had been blown completely off.

Petrov and I were too conspicuous, out there in the middle of the floor. I left the wagon on the turntable, and Petrov followed me over to where everybody seemed to be heading. There was a group of indecisive men growing around Spalinsky, the Russian work boss, and we joined it. I suppose it was inevitable—Spalinsky was one of those who cursed and schemed in the dormitory loft at nights whilst the rest of us were quiet and resigned. Most of the Kommando worked their little rackets and tried not to count off the days towards the final bullet; Spalinsky spread hope like a disease.

The rumble of the fans in the chimneys made it difficult to hear what was being said. I caught some of the threads of the conversation as they ran like rats through straw; rebellion, revolt—do we break out the hidden weapons and fight now, or do we wait? Can we make it through the wire, and if we make it through the wire can we make it to the river, and if we make it across the river will the SS find us in the forest?

I didn’t join in. I had a bad feeling, and I realised what it was; for the first time in months, I was afraid. I could manage it when I’d had no future worth thinking about, but now the days ahead were opening up again.

And days were all we had as a Kommando; we’d served our time, and we were due for extermination and replacement. All we could look forward to was a march into the woods behind the number five crematorium, a moving line for a small-calibre shot in the back of the head and a common grave. And still, there were arguments.

They quietened as Sergeant-Major Voss turned from the window. He saw the unattended furnaces and the idle transport trolley. No SS could tolerate discipline falling apart so quickly, not from scum like us; he marched the length of the room, making straight for Spalinsky.

The men on either side of Spalinsky fell back, but the Russian stood his ground. Voss thrust his face up close, and barked.

He wanted to know who had given us permission to stop working. He was carrying the metal-tipped cane that was issued to all the SS in the camp, and he slapped it hard into the palm of his hand. Again, he demanded why we had left the ovens.

Spalinsky started to mumble something, but he wasn’t raising his voice enough to be heard. The acting commander’s cane whipped up suddenly and came down across the Russian’s head.

The force of the blow sent Spalinsky down on to one knee, and he fell heavily against the man beside him. The skin of his forehead was split open. As Voss turned away Spalinsky came up again, and as he straightened he brought a short knife from the top of his boot and rammed it upwards under the acting commander’s ribcage.

It was the irrevocable step, the trigger to action. The instruction turned into a gurgle and Voss began to sag, his jaw hanging open as he looked down at the knife protruding from the front of his jacket, still gripped by the Russian as he took more and more of the SS man’s weight on to the blade.

I heard Spalinsky call for the oven door to be opened. Voss was pushing against him feebly, trying to lever himself off the steel. Over by the window the other SS was starting forward. He couldn’t see exactly what was happening, but he was apprehensive.

Petrov was the nearest, and he took hold of the handle that unlocked the iron door and swung it open. The fans had been on too long and the incinerators were overheating; blistering air poured out carrying soot and sparks and smoke, and most of us had to fall back. But there were three who had a hold of Voss and he couldn’t fight them off—he was clutching at his stomach as if he feared that it would all spill out if he let go. They lifted him up by the seat of his pants and hauled him into the oven.

The other SS man had covered half the distance, but he faltered when he saw the guard commander’s boots disappearing over the rollers. He was fumbling with the cover on his holster, but several of the Kommando men had already produced Walthers and Lugers.

Spalinsky was shouting for everybody to save their bullets, and four of them got to the SS man before he’d half-drawn his automatic. One of them wrenched it out of his hand, another booted him in the groin to make him co-operative, and then they hustled him to the still-open oven and pitched him inside.

There was firing then as the armed SS by the door opened up. They got a volley of pistol shots which drove them back towards the entrance, and I was just scrambling to cover behind one of the incinerator supports when a grenade went off.

We had more weapons in the dormitory upstairs, machineguns and grenades hidden in the hollow spaces underneath the bunks. Those of us who weren’t armed went up to get them; as we kicked the bunks apart we could hear breaking glass down below.

There was a man with a pistol at almost every window when we returned. I went to the nearest and offered the machine-gun that I was carrying; I knew better than to try to use it myself, even though most of those who were now loosing off shots were far from marksmen. The man at the window was one that I knew vaguely, a lawyer from Sered; he’d been through the not uncommon anguish of discovering his wife amongst the dead in the gas chamber.

He took the machine-gun and gave me the pistol, telling me to load it. The gun felt strange and flat, and it was hot. After digging in his pocket for a moment he came out with a twist of handkerchief with half a dozen cartridges knotted into it.

I managed to find the release, and ejected the magazine from the grip. While I fumbled with the bullets, the lawyer poked out more glass from the window with the muzzle of the machine-gun and started spraying the yard. The noise was overpowering, and he shook with the recoil.

He fell back after a while. I’d filled the clip and reloaded the magazine by then, and I was expecting him to take it from me. But he told me not to nurse it, to find a window and use it; as he spoke, there was an explosion close by outside which shook out any glass that was left. Everybody ducked, and a couple of men fell back with bad cuts. I saw Spalinsky get over to one of the blown-in frames and throw out a grenade; the whipcrack came a few seconds later, and for a short time the gunfire stopped.

Windows were left free as the men with wounds were pulled to safety. I crawled over to one, and tried to look outside. The courtyard was empty, and the SS men along with a handful of Wehrmacht had fallen back as far as the perimeter wall. Spalinsky’s grenade had dropped well short on the lawn over the chambers.

As I was watching, a line of grey trucks arrived on the camp road. Four of them stopped behind the Krema perimeter whilst the others drove on. The tailgates fell open and out of the first one came the Kommandoführer with a heavy-armed squad of Wehrmacht behind him. As soon as he was recognised, we started firing again; I got a couple of shots away, but I doubt that I hit anything. I was afraid that I’d lose my grip on the gun and let it fall to the cinder path below.

There were more of us now. The men from the basement chambers had come up in the elevator, and there were over a hundred men crowded into the incinerator room. The ovens were still burning and the drawing fans were still rumbling; by that time the firebrick linings of the flues would be melting and breaking up to fall into the ovens.

Someone shouted that there were howitzers. I risked a look, and saw that it was true; two cannon being dragged to bear. They were going to demolish the Krema around us. It was a bad moment—we weren’t soldiers, we were students, jewellers, tailors, shopkeepers, clerks, and we’d only had a few minutes’ practice at resistance. It was Spalinsky who caught the mood and turned it.

He’d bound up the wound in his head with a strip from his shirt. He told us that two of his fellow-Russians had gone out of the back of the Krema with wirecutters just before the trucks arrived; there should be a way out for us, as long as we didn’t wait to be encircled.

The Birkenau sirens were still keening as we moved down to the coke-store corridor. Many of the Kommando didn’t know why they were moving or where they were going. Some stayed by the window with grenades, ready to set up a distraction.

A double explosion was the signal. It was followed by heavy gunfire from both sides, and the corridor crowd started to move as soon as the end door opened up to daylight. I was somewhere in the middle, and I was carried with the swell.

No SS were waiting outside; all of their firepower was on the KZ side of the building as they probably assumed it was the only route open to us. We ran for where the Russians were waiting; several layers of wire had been cut and wound back. We had to slow down when we reached the gap, because it wasn’t wide enough to take us all. The Russians were grabbing us and bundling us through, and as I shuffled and waited my turn—a couple tried to elbow in front of me, but I wasn’t going to let them—I glanced back and saw the last of our people emerging from the Krema gates. The SS on the far side of the building were still keeping up the barrage, and probably hadn’t yet realised that their fire wasn’t being returned. Then a hand gripped my shoulder and pushed me through the wire.

I’D CHEERED as loudly as everybody else as we ran from the wire, the SS on our tails and the cordon patrols and the river ahead. We were going nowhere, but we were moving. The last man at the wire turned and emptied a machine-gun at the soldiers, and they dropped him before he made it through.

We scattered. Thirteen of us made it as far as the river, the rest were probably gathered in by the dogs and the patrols. We hid in the marshes until the light started to go, and then we risked a crossing.

Spalinsky went first. I’d fixed my sights on him and stayed as close as I could, and the Sered lawyer had done the same. Petrov had stayed close to me, although I didn’t realise that he was following me until we stopped. There were also three Russian prisoners of war who had arrived in the KZ at the same time as Spalinsky, and five of the Slovak team who had come up in the gas-chamber elevator. The other was a small man named Mayerling; he used to swill the corpse wagon with water to keep it cool. We had three handguns and one machine-gun between us, and none had a full load of ammunition.

The river was low, showing yellowish mud flats. Spalinsky waded out, and the rest of us got into a line behind him. We hadn’t dared to wait for complete darkness—we’d never find the far bank—so we were dangerously exposed, and we left a deep trail in the silt. The day had been one of pleasant autumn sunshine but the water was cold, and Mayerling had to be helped. One of the Slovaks afterwards said that he’d soiled himself in fear on the way over.

We had another eight kilometres of marshland before the forest. What we would do then, nobody knew; back when the possibility of escape had been suggested, the idea had been to contact some partisans in the hope that they would take us in. But nobody knew for sure whether these guerilla groups really existed or whether they were just a piece of hopeful folklore—some of our guns and explosives were supposed to have come from outside rebels, but the lines of supply within the KZ were so well-covered that nobody could say for sure.

We kept moving, with the idea of covering as much ground as we could manage before the next light. By morning the SS and the Wehrmacht would have recovered from being stunned by the audacity of a bunch of rebellious Jews, and the search would be better-organised. We’d have to hide in the daytime, and move again at night.

It was about eleven o’clock when we reached a farmhouse, and we decided that we’d have to stop, at least for a while—we’d all been chilled in our wet clothes from the river, and Mayerling was shaking badly.

Even by moonlight it was obvious that the farm was poor and run-down. There was a barn that stood some distance from the main buildings and stables, along a track that was waist-high in weeds at some points and which passed through a broken fence on the perimeter of the yard. Twelve of us stayed whilst the lawyer went to take a look.

For some reason I was afraid of geese as the lawyer led us back, but nothing squawked or flapped up from the grass. The barn was a timber-framed structure that had started to warp and sag with neglect; the planking in the doors was split and they were jammed open.

Inside, it smelled of goats and old straw. There was a four-wheeled buggy filling most of the lower level, jammed in with the filthy cow stalls and leaving us no room to get around. One of the Russians found a ladder nailed to a crossbeam overhead, and by this we were able to get into the comparatively dry hayloft.

As we were getting settled, Spalinsky asked if we had any doctors amongst us. It was a futile hope because everybody knew that Mengele took all the doctors for his own uses, putting them to work on an odd range of projects that he’d concocted with a particular interest in any twins or dwarves that arrived at the camp. Spalinsky’s head had opened up and started to bleed again, so I admitted that I’d had less than a year in medical school before I’d been taken away.

The lawyer had the idea of going to the yard to get water. Petrov wanted to come along, but Spalinsky said no; so it was the lawyer and me.

We found a bucket in one of the cow stalls. It was dented and the handle was broken, but at least it wasn’t holed. I remember the strange, hard feel of the ground as we walked towards the farmhouse, beaten dirt that had packed down solid. There was no gate across the yard, where the dirt became ruts and tracks. We could hear horses stirring in a low shed by the main house, but otherwise nothing.

The pump was in a lean-to where the firewood was stacked. I held the pail and the lawyer tried the handle; it made a rusty grinding noise, and the pump did no more than give a couple of dry coughs. When he swung it again the noise was less but the water was still no more than a trickle, and it didn’t look clean. I emptied it away, and just got the bucket under the spout again in time for the rush of water that came with the third swing.

The lawyer checked the house before we moved out. The shutters were still up and there was no light showing through. We carried the pail back between us and managed not to lose too much. About two-thirds of it went for drinking when we got it up into the hayloft, and I used what was left to clean up Spalinsky’s head. The cleanest piece of rag that I could find was the twist of cloth that had held the pistol cartridges; everything else was filthy with river water. Besides the mud, the Vistula was a common dumping-ground for the crematoria ashes—all of our clothes and the striped burlap worn by two of the Slovaks would be stiff and rough by the morning.

I’m sure that I must have made a very rough job of Spalinsky’s hurt, but he didn’t complain. I remember feeling proud at the idea of having some identity within our group, and I suppose it was this dangerous glow of self-esteem that carried over to an hour or so later when everybody else was asleep and our water supply was nearly finished.

I decided that the bucket needed to be refilled, and that it was up to me to do it. Me, our doctor, hardly out of my teens and without training or skill—but then I couldn’t lead and I couldn’t fight, and against the brutality that I knew the rest of the Kommando would be suffering on the far side of the river, I needed to feel that I was earning my place in the group.

When I was sure that everybody was asleep, I put the handle of the bucket over my forearm and climbed down. The little water that was left was cloudy with blood and dirt, and I emptied it away outside the barn door. I was almost halfway to the yard when I heard voices.

I got into the long grass by the path—the cover wasn’t as thick as I’d hoped, but there was nowhere else to go. Even though I pressed myself down I could still see the path as far as the yard, and the moonlight picking out the details of the SS uniforms.

It was a small party, but a heavily armed one. There were dogs straining at the ends of their leads, and tagging along behind them was a man in rough peasant’s clothing—the farmer, I would assume. He must have heard the lawyer and me at the pump, and then waited for us to go before he slipped out to look for a patrol.

I was conscious of the sparseness of my cover, and the possibility that my prison-pale face would show through the grass. It was autumn cover, very dry and brittle, and I had to be careful not to make a noise as I turned my face to the ground and
tried to flatten myself into the earth. I could hear boots on the hard ground, and the breath of the dogs as they came down the path only a few yards away. And then I heard one of them yelp as it broke from its leash and came floundering towards me.

The sound was throttled off as the handler took the strain and then let the dog pull forward under control. I hugged the ground harder, and my skin crawled as I waited for the animal’s breath to fan my neck. As soon as the patrol knew what I was, there was a good chance that they’d let the dogs have me; there were slower agonies back at the camp but they existed in an indeterminate future, while this was a terror of the moment.

There was a sick, liquid kind of sound that I couldn’t identify. The handler was wading through the grass, and I heard him curse. There was a bang and the dog yelped, and there was a rough blow on my back. The dog was barking loudly now and trying to get to me; at least they’ll be hearing this in the barn, I thought. I’d like to say that it was because I wished them an escape, but all I really wished for was my own rescue.

I waited for the order to get to my feet, but none came. I raised my head, and saw no jackboots; I saw the bucket a couple of feet away, where it had rolled after bouncing off my back. The patrol were moving on down the path. It was the aftertaste of Spalinsky’s blood that had saved me, distracting the dog and diverting its handler.

They shot Petrov. He was by the barn doors; Petrov my puppy, who would follow me anywhere and was following me now. I saw the farmer hurrying back along the dirt track to the safety of his house as the first shots came from the hayloft. The SS scattered and started to return the fire, and somebody must have rolled grenades through the open doors. There were two explosions, and pieces of the buggy were thrown out high; the rest of it started to burn, and the fire spread to the structure itself.

I was crawling for the trees on the edge of the clearing. The flames moved quickly to the upper storey of the barn, and as they reached it the machine-gun stopped; the ammunition must nearly have gone, because only one handgun continued to fire from inside the building. This also stopped a few seconds later, but then I heard a defiant yelling. Spalinsky was leading the last of the Twelfth Sonderkommando through the flames and onto the guns.

Whilst the attention was away from me, I got into the trees. I ran for half a mile and crossed two narrow tracks, and only when the barn was a glow in the night sky did I stop and crawl under some low scrub.

I moved slowly over the next two nights, after unpicking the yellow Star of David from my jacket. I saw no more patrols, so perhaps the fanatical obsession of the KZ administrators with roll-calls and numbers had broken down under the mass of people involved in the escape attempt. Being a Sonderkommando rather than an ordinary prisoner I was reasonably fit and adequately clothed, and in preparation for the breakout—the one we’d planned as opposed to the one that had been forced upon us—I carried identity papers and money which I had organised from the belongings of the dead. They gave me at least a superficial legitimacy, and for real emergencies I had two 140-gramme cylinders of gold from the Krema 2 foundry.

What I didn’t have, and needed, was a travel warrant. But when I reached Gleiwitz there was no special guard around the station or the railway track, and I was able to get on a freight train heading south to Dresden. From there it was my idea to get a connection to Ulm, only eighty kilometres from the Swiss border on Lake Constance. In the end, I made it as far as Schaffhausen, where the border was not so heavily guarded and I was able to slip across to Basle.

After I reached England, I heard that there had been no other successes in the escape attempt. Those who hadn’t tried to run had been forced to lie face-down in one of the courtyards before being machine-gunned. For the remainder of that first day a steady flow of bodies on pushcarts and shambling columns of wounded had poured into the camp from the surrounding countryside; the survivors were taken out into the birch forests of Birkenau and shot. My own group were brought back across the river that night. They attacked their guards in the Krema courtyard and attempted to seize their weapons, but shortly afterwards they joined their brothers before the crematory ovens.

It was the first and the only organised mass revolt in the history of the Auschwitz KZ. It shocked and surprised the SS, who
were accustomed to a docile Jewry so starved of hope that they could be led with the emptiest promises to the extent of compliance up to the moment of extinction. I brought the story out with me, but it was given only the credence of a fantasy of persecution until the KZ gates were opened to the world. There is now evidence more persuasive than words.

Henryk Liawski

Cambridge.

THE POLICE howler and the horn blasted simultaneously close behind, and when Peter Carson looked in his rearview mirror he saw the white headlamps and the flashing blue lights closing fast in the rain. There wasn’t room to pass on the narrow country road, but the saloon wasn’t slowing at all. He wrenched the wheel of the Mercedes hard over to the left; there was an angled grass slope a couple of feet high between the road and the stone wall, and the whole car tipped dangerously as he hit it and braked, tyres riding and bouncing up the verge. The Mercedes threatened to slew back on to the tarmac or else fishtail around and ram the wall, but then the police car was charging through the gap and braking hard into the next bend. The howler cut abruptly and it was gone, swallowed by the turning of the lane.

The Mercedes came to an awkward halt.. . .