This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning.

“And now, frau,” said the lazy-eyed Nazi squad leader. “You will die.”

“Before you pull those triggers,” Maia said, backing up against the altar of the ebony skull. “There’s something you should know. Something about this artifact that your commandant wants so badly.”

The two Nazi soldiers looked up from their rifles to the squad leader. The squad leader made an impatient gesture with his shotgun. Her shotgun—he had impounded it from her when she had first entered their camp. The thought still made her flush with anger.

“The thing you need to know about this skull is,” she reached behind her and placed her fingers around its cool, hard sides. “It’s booby-trapped.”

She lifted it suddenly, feeling the tiny hair that was tied to its base pull tight and then snap. For the first time in her life, she prayed that the trap would still work, that the tripwire mechanism hadn’t aged too badly.

Then the ground lurched underneath their feet, and she smiled. This ancient culture—the Atlanteans—they built their devices to last forever.

The two foot soldiers stumbled against the quaking walls of the small altar room, their rifles momentarily forgotten in their hands. However, the squad leader was not distracted for as long. Even as chunks of the ceiling began to fall all around them, he leveled the shotgun at her.

Maia feigned a throw of the skull, thrusting her hands towards him but without carrying the priceless artifact along for the ride. Her gambit worked: the squad leader, perhaps acting on pure reflex or perhaps too terrified to allow his commandant’s prize to shatter, brought his arms up in an attempted catch.

The ruse bought her enough time to slam her shoulder into his sternum, but her weight wasn’t enough to knock him down. Skull tucked under one arm, she grabbed her shotgun and gave it a twist, hoping to wrench it free of his grasp. She got it pointed past her, but could not loosen his grip any further.

They vied over the weapon as the ground beneath them shook and the walls around them crumbled. The other two soldiers had regained their footing, but their rifles were too long to be wielded easily inside the cramped confines of the tiny room. Maia managed to spin them around so that she was closer to the door and the squad leader was between her and the soldiers.

If she let go to flee, the squad leader would blast her in the back before she could take a step out the door. If she stayed there, the other soldiers would take her down with their rifles. Through the opening, she heard a snapping and a popping sound, followed by a wet crash. The bridge that offered the only safe passage over the magma pool was collapsing. She would lose her chance of escape if she didn’t act fast.

A slave boy went from cage to cage, undoing the locks and collecting the chains. Although Jack now had almost completely sliced through one of the ropes that held his cage together, he burst through the opened door and made a grab for the chain as soon as the slave-boy had removed it. If this was an arena, Jack wanted a weapon, and a solid iron chain would do for a start.

“Halt!”

His hand tight around the chain, Jack turned to see a line of Nazi soldiers with their rifles steadied against the arena’s stone wall. It was clear that they didn’t want him to have that chain, and he couldn’t argue with a firing squad. Begrudgingly, he allowed the links to slip from his fingers so that the wide-eyed slave boy could scamper off through a small doorway that sealed with a resounding clank behind him.

“Why don’t you just shoot me now and get it over with?” Jack shouted to the Nazis.

Sergeant Schmidt stood up and smiled wide enough to show off his missing tooth.

“Because,” Schmidt said. “Shootink iz more paperwerk. Also: less amusink.”

Schmidt made a motion with his hand and a portcullis at the far side of the arena cranked open. Beyond it was a large shadowy cell. Something was moving inside—something big and dangerous. Through the shadows, Jack could just barely make out the flash of a yellow chitinous shell, silhouettes of long, spider-like legs that moved chaotically, and the glint of a stinger slick with venom.

Jack kept his eyes on the darkened doorway, as he called over his shoulder to Schmidt: “Is it too late to get you to shoot me?”

Although the bars of his cage were made from a strange wood that was as hard as iron, the thickly-woven rope that bound those bars together was not. Jack had slipped his belt off and worked at sawing against the ropes whenever he thought his guards’ backs were turned. His belt buckle was not especially sharp, but he made good headway by jabbing the prong into the fibers and tugging them outward. If they had left him unsupervised for another few minutes, he might have been able to fray his way to freedom.

However, the Nazis were not about to make anything easy. They wheeled him out to the center of a dirt floor beneath a wide, domed ceiling. On the outskirts of the area, a stone wall rose straight up to protect rows upon rows of benches. As the Nazis soldiers gathered in one quadrant of the seats and their chosen slaves gathered in a smaller section of benches to the back, it became clear that this would serve as an arena and Jack was meant to be part of the main event.

Three other cages were wheeled in, and Jack recognized some of the captives within. The first was the mysterious Spartan who had ambushed the Nazi slave train earlier that day. His thick wolf-skin cloak and bronze helmet covered his entire body, so Jack couldn’t see his features any better here than he had out in the jungle.

The second cage was perhaps twice the size of Jack’s, and yet its captive could barely fit inside. This was the titan of a man that had been pulling the same slave-cage that the Spartan had ambushed, and although the giant hugged his knees tightly to himself and bent his head down low, his shaggy black hair and his fayed clothing pressed out through the bars.

The third cage contained what at first appeared to be a wild animal. It was feline, with sleek black fur, a lean body, and a swishing tail. Yet it wore the clothing of a native woman, and when it ceased its nervous pacing, it sat down, cross legged, and gripped the bars with very human fingers. For a moment the yellow cat-eyes met Jack’s and he saw that the face was a perfect blend of a cat’s and a woman’s. This was not an animal, he realized with a jolt: this was a half-panther, half-person hybrid the likes of which Jack had never seen in all his years of exploring the globe.

If the molemen understood Scrumtumbler, then they ignored him. Instead, those clawed fingers forced him forward into the open chamber. It was brighter in here, with the bio-luminescent moss growing much more thickly along the cavern’s ceiling and walls.

Among the stalactites and stalagmites, the molemen went about their various chores. Some were digging new burrows, their arms blurring in the half-light. Others traveled the winding paths, seemingly indifferent to whether they walked on all fours or on their hind legs. A few lead trails of young ones behind them and a few more drove a flock of fat white grubs the size of wild turkeys. Most grouped together in twos and threes, standing so close that they almost touched snouts. It made them look as if they were sharing secrets.

His captors hauled him deeper into this cavern. The rough ceiling rose, first enough so that he could walk without stooping and then eventually high enough that he might have driven a double-decker bus through it, were it not for the stalagmites that blocked the way. The sounds of the moleman language were higher here, too, and the voices fell together now so that instead of a babble of different conversations, now they were unified in some kind of song or chant.

In the deepest part of this cavern, the stalactites and stalagmites had been cleared away, allowing Scrumtumbler to see what the chanting was about. Dozens of molemen bowed down around a huge, steel vehicle with a sharp cone for a nose.

“Hey, that’s my drilling machine!” Scrumtumbler shouted. The molemen’s chant faltered, and many of the worshippers shot fierce glares in the scientist’s direction.

“What are you fellows doing—worshipping it?” Scrumtumbler’s voice echoed off the walls. “I made that thing, you know. You should be worshipping me! I created your god, and my name is Scrumtumbler. It’s spelled S-C-R—oh, here, let me etch it on this stone altar—”

Scrumtumbler tried to pull away from his captors, but the clawed fingers clamped tightly around his arms. The chanting continued, though with a little more dissonance than there had been before the interruption.

One of the molemen broke away from the ritual to approach Scrumtumbler. Evidently, this was a shaman or a chieftain, because he wore an ungainly headdress made of bat wings and shiny stones, all cemented together with what appeared to be dried mud. Scrumtumbler made a desperate attempt to explain himself and his relationship to their new-found god, but the chieftain and his guards ignored him as they grunted and clicked to each other. A moment later, he was hauled forcibly away and thrown—quite unceremoniously—down a hole.

He crumpled as he landed and lay on the ground for a time, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. They never did. There was simply no light by which to see. So, instead, he listened. Here, the sounds of the molemen were nothing more than a distant echo. Closer by, there was a trickling of water which signified some underground stream. And there was another sound, which at first he could not identify. It was a scraping, clawing sound—not rhythmic, but persistent, like an animal chewing on a bone. No, he thought as he listened more closely, not like one animal—like dozens of animals. Or hundreds. Maybe thousands of things gnawing all around him.

He was not alone.

Furry hands dragged Scrumtumbler down a lightless tunnel. He tried to resist, but he could not see his captors well enough even to understand what kind of creatures had seized him. But he could feel their long, curving claws clamped around his arms and his legs, holding him with a not-so-subtle threat of doing far worse if he got away.

Their path twisted and turned in the darkness. Scrumtumbler began to feel more than disoriented: he became positively dizzy, and began to lose even the notion of which way was up. The closed spaces around him made the sounds of their feet echo back at them from all directions, and underlying all that sound was an ever-present clicking and creaking that conjured images of bats and centipedes and nightmare things following him in the dark.

Suddenly, Scrumtumbler saw a blue-green splotch of light ahead. At first, he assumed that he must be hallucinating, yet as he drew nearer he could see that it remained fixed in its position, and even illuminated the next turn of the tunnel. As he drew nearer he realized it was the moss on the walls—it glowed with a dim, bioluminescent radiance that allowed him just enough light to make out shapes around him.

His captors were not animals, or at least not fully so. They were furry, with long, rat-like snouts, small black eyes, and rounded ears which at times pressed flat against their heads and at other times swiveled around as if nervously hunting for sounds. Yet for all their animalistic features, they walked upright, like men. Their thick arms ended in formidable claws that looked like they could rip tunnels through solid rock, yet there was also an opposable digit, a thumb, which undoubtedly indicated the ability to use tools and manipulate objects.

The clicking and the groaning increased and Scrumtumbler realized that this was not an ambient noise, but rather intentional sounds from the mouths of his captors. It was language. For the first time in his life, he wished that Professor Limefellow were nearby to translate.

They pulled him onward, past the end of the hallway where the tunnel opened into a large underground chamber braced by countless limestone pillars.

“Listen,” Scrumtumbler said breathlessly. “I doubt you fellows can understand me, but I’m still hopeful that you can pass along a very important message. If anyone else comes down here, you tell them this: I discovered you first.”

If Kate had brought her stein into the room, she would have dropped it onto the floor.

“The Thule Society?” she exclaimed, anger and disbelief fighting for control of her tone. “You’re telling me that Professor Scrumtumbler worked for the damned, dirty Nazis?”

Professor Reinhardt smiled sadly again, and the wrinkles around his eyes made him look more grandfatherly than ever. “Hitler’s government can be very persuasive. Your professor became involved with them before any outsider could have seen how corrupt the regime truly was. Once he went in deep enough, he recognized the evil. As did I. As will, I believe, all of the German people. Someday.”

Kate studied him with her one good eye. She felt unbalanced now, just like the time her stabilizer froze during a barnstorming exhibition. Professor Reinhardt was muddying everything up—it was supposed to be black-and-white. It was supposed to be good-versus-evil. Life was so much simpler when viewed through a single eye, because everything was neat and flat. Depth made everything much more confusing.

“You’re trying to justify an evil cause,” she said, more to convince herself than to convince him.

Reinhardt shrugged. “Perhaps. But I believe that the German people will suffer greatly for our mistakes. In the mean time, some of us are working to fight that evil. Your Scrumtumbler was one of those men. He stole information from them, information about the Hollow Earth. That is why he designed his drilling machine—he wanted to beat the Nazis in a race to inner-space.”

“I only care about one thing: how to get him back safely. So he can keep building me airplanes, of course.”

“Of course. Which is why I have given Dr. Scott information on Castle Vevelsburg. It is a Thule stronghold only a few hundred kilometers west of here. They have been researching a means to open a passage to the Hollow Earth.”

“Why should we trust you? How do we know we aren’t just walking into a trap?”

“I can offer no proof to satisfy your mind until your heart is ready to accept it. You may choose trust, or you may choose fear. But I have one other thing to offer. A gift—something entrusted to me by Professor Scrumtumbler.”

He bent down to unclasp the latches of the large suitcase. Then he gestured to indicate she should have the honor of opening it.

“What is it?”

“This is what the professor designed for the Nazis. But he gave them an inferior model and then, later, he burned the blueprints. This is the only existing advanced prototype.”

“And why are you giving it to me?”

“Perhaps I am hoping that you will realize that a Nazi and a German are not the same thing.”

She squinted at him for another moment before turning her attention to the box. When she opened it, the light glinted off the contents. She gasped and all prejudices fell away from her mind.

“Is this…” She had to clear her throat before she could finish her sentence. “Is this as fast as I think it is?”

“Captain Boone,” Dr. Scott said to her as he emerged from Reinhardt’s library. “He wants to see you now, Captain Boone.”

Kate grimaced and studied the doctor’s innocent face. She guessed that it probably hadn’t occurred to him that their host may have already alerted his superiors. Even as they walked down the hallway, a platoon of Nazis might be encircling the quaint little house.

Nodding, Kate made her way into the library. Like the rest of the house, the library was trim and tidy, with wood paneling and tasteful alpine-rustic furnishings. Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves. The fourth wall contained a painting of a snow-capped mountain and an ornate clock, the kind powered by a web of miniscule gears and hidden springs to make a wooden bird pop out and sing while miniature wooden skiers spin around the base. The sight of that clock made her want to strap Reinhardt into her co-pilot seat and do barrel rolls until he screamed.

Professor Reinhardt sat directly below the clock, a large, scuffed leather suitcase at his feet. He smiled at her in a way that made his white eyebrows rise up on his tall forehead.

“I have a gift for you,” he said.

“Does that gift involve turning us over to your Thule buddies or your Nazi masters?”

He shook his head sadly. “Please do not assume that all Germans are Nazis. Our people suffer greatly under Hitler’s rule, and if we ever go to war…” he seemed unable to speak the unspeakable.

“I’m not here to talk politics,” Kate said. “Someone swiped my professor. I aim to find out who, and I aim to get him back.”

“I can help you with both of those things,” he leaned back and fumbled in his pocket for an wooden pipe and a pouch of tobacco. He glanced up at her and seemed to change his mind. “Professor Scrumtumbler was a good friend of mine. A most unreliable man, but nonetheless a good friend and a valuable professional associate.”

“You’re a scientist too?” she asked. “Did you know him through that Prometheus Club?”

“I? No, frauline, I am not a member of the Order of Prometheus. I am an archeologist by training, which is not the type of science practiced by the Order. No, I knew Scrumtumbler during his association with a different organization, one that throws a broader net across the academic disciplines. I knew Scrumtumbler when he belonged to the Thule Society.”

Kate leaned over the small kitchen table and anxiously tapped her holster. She didn’t trust the man called Erich Reinhardt and she didn’t enjoy being a guest in his home. The others might have been taken in by his little-old-man demeanor, but all she saw was a German, and the last Germans she met had been firing fifty caliber shells in her direction.

It was Dr. Scott who had insisted that they come here. After refueling in Rio, she had flown them for a day and a night across over the Atlantic. (This one’s for you, Ms. Earhart, Kate thought as she caught sight of Africa on the horizon.) They touched down in Egypt and then turned north, crossing into Austrian airspace by night. Throughout the flight, Dr. Scott had assured them that Reinhardt was trustworthy because he, like Professor Scrumtumbler, was a member of the Order of Prometheus. But he was also a member of the Thule Society, and Kate wasn’t ready to trust anyone who had willingly joined that fuehrer-hailing pack of academics and thugs.

Reggie and Clem were currently reclined on the old man’s couches, happily snoring away their supper of bratwurst and home-brewed hefeweizen. They didn’t seem to think that Reinhardt’s nationality was an important detail, which blinded them to the possibility that if this little old man could be a double agent working against the Thules, he could just as easily be a triple agent working for them.

Kate sniffed her portion of the dessert strudel. She had eaten dinner, but only after seeing her host take a bite of each item. Reinhardt had retired with Dr. Scott immediately after serving the strudel, so she had not witnessed him sample it. For all she knew, it was laced with knock-out poison, and that’s why Reggie and Clem were sleeping so soundly right now. Then again, a long flight and a large meal would put anyone to sleep, so maybe it was on the level.

She leaned in and sniffed the dessert. It smelled sweet and delicious and she was tempted to take a bite. Just to test it. Just to see if the strawberry jam was as scrumptious as it seemed. But then she reminded herself that this was the confection of her enemy.

It might as well be sauerkraut, she thought as she pushed the plate away from her.

“Aaaa.. aaw…” Celeste managed to squeak despite von Wartenburg’s mystical command. Dumb galoot, she thought as she glared at him. You grow up with as many brothers and sisters as I did and ain’t nobody gonna stifle your voice.

“I have only one further question for you,” he said sternly. “Have any of your companions mentioned an ancient artifact, or have they spoken of a culture that once called itself Atlantis? You may speak now.”

She was certain he threw in the last sentence to cover for his spell’s inability to bind her voice.  “Aaaa… awright, buster,” she demanded as her words came flooding back to her. “Nobody shuts me up like that. What’d you do to me?”

“You will answer my question now.”

“Wrong, buster, you’re gonna answer my question. You can order me to shut my yap, but you can’t force me to talk. See what I mean? So you tell me how you do that voodoo you do and then maybe I’ll stop being too mad to sing like a canary.”

Von Wartenburg, as expressionless as ever, used a key to open his gun case. He selected a luger, loaded it, and turned back towards her. The pistol wasn’t pointed at her, but it wasn’t quite pointed away from her, either.

“I compelled you by means of the Atlantean language,” he said. “Every creature on this planet is neurologically evolved to understand and respond to that language. Perhaps even a simpleton such as you can see what that implies about the power of these ancient ones. Now, before I demonstrate the full might of these words, you will tell me if you ever overheard your betters speak of the Atlanteans.”

“You got a politeness problem, you know that?” Celeste shook her head. “But, in answer to your question: nope, I don’t think so. That is, Professor Scrumtumbler kept talking about his theory that some people from the olden-days built something he called the Hollow Earth. But he was expecting to find a big cave, I think. Not this place.”

Von Wartenburg’s eyes narrowed. “How did he know of the existence of the Hollow Earth?”

Celeste shrugged. “He theorized it, I guess. You know: he just made it up.”

Von Wartenburg snorted and slid his luger into his belt pouch. “Guard,” he called. “Take this one to the brig. I have business to attend to below.”

Although this military zeppelin was much larger than the luxury airship she once took from Hollywood to New York, Celeste was beginning to discover that it lacked all of the amenities of its civilian counterpart. The interior hallways were lit by naked bulbs instead of elegant electrical lamps. The deck was bare metal instead of plush carpet. The chairs were hard and rigid instead of soft and cushioned. The worst thing, aside from the pervading smell of oil and iron, was the color scheme, which couldn’t even be called a color scheme because everything was gray. The walls were battleship gray, the floors were gunmetal gray, and the uniforms were storm-cloud gray. The only thing that wasn’t gray was the commandant, who wore all black from his leather hat down to his polished boots.

“Why are you here?” von Wartenburg demanded. He spoke in English, his words showing almost no accent and even less emotion.

“I’m here because your goons grabbed me in the jungle and, listen, none of this is our fault. It was those monsters out in the jungle that killed your men when all we wanted was—”

“Silence,” von Wartenburg barked.

“But it wasn’t our fault! That bigger monster that came after me didn’t like my screaming. Also, there was a bear. Did I mention the bear?”

“SILENCE.” This time von Wartenburg spoke in that strange language of his, the one that he had used on Celeste in the cargo bay to force her to drop her knife. Just like before, she understood it perfectly even though she had never heard the word until that moment. Also like before, she was powerless to resist the command. She tried to protest, but when she opened her mouth she could not make even a squeak.

“I had hoped that your physical beauty indicated superior breeding,” von Wartenburg said with all the emotion of a doctor discussing birth defect statistics. “But now I see that you lack the intelligence of a common sow.”

While she worked her jaw in mute frustration, he pushed back from the desk and strode to the window, a small porthole that overlooked the ancient city below. Grabbing a desktop microphone, he spoke commands that were echoed across the jungle through the zeppelin’s PA system. When he was satisfied that his soldiers below were carrying out his orders, he set down the microphone and strode to a decorative glass case containing a selection of German-made pistols.

Celeste strained against the invisible strings that seemed to bind her larynx. “Aa…,” she managed. “Aaaa…”

It was hardly louder than the squeak of a mouse, but it made von Wartenburg’s eyes widen a fraction of an inch. With such an impassive face, he might have made a great poker player, but Celeste had studied human expression for too many years to miss the clue. It told her that von Wartenburg was surprised she was able to get out any sound at all. Although she had uttered nothing more than a syllable, it proved that she could resist his sorcery and defy his will.