Chapter 38

The narrow metal tunnel was dark, cold and never ending. Many junctions along the way told Irma that it was a virtual honeycomb of ventilation shafts she could spend days trying to crawl through. She would find herself in such predicaments in Paris, while being a cat burglar, but in those cases a treasure of household jewelery or other booty would be at the end of the ordeal; not here though. If she was lucky she could find Totenkopf in one of the rooms she passed, then end his career and stop the morbid war production.

Neither Biggles nor Tom caught her sight. The rooms she passed were usually science labs with no-one she recognised working in them or on the slab. She had no wish to enter these rooms and risk capture until one such lab tweaked her interest if not her disgust.

Two lab coated doctors were carrying out separate cranial dissections. One was on a large slab with a horse lying on it, the other, a normal sized slab, had a human woman on it.

Anger swelled in Irma Vep. It was bad enough doing this inhumane activity to a horse, but a woman. These bastards had reduced a woman to a lab rat. Both subjects were still breathing, but they had been anethetised. The experiment was clearly observing brain activity.

Irma donned her gas mask then turned the nozzle on Jonathon Crane's cylinder. As the gas hissed into the room, she noticed the two dissectors become uneasy; each looked around for some cause for this feeling. One after the other they backed away from the slabs as if the dissected subjects had woken from their anethtesia to wreak revenge on the scientists.

Each frightened doctor pressed their back to the wall and collapsed into a ball of debilitating fear. Irma removed the louvre then entered the lab. The shivering scientists had their arms wrapped about their heads. They did not see her but, no doubt, heard her approaching and thought the still figures on the slabs had come to punish them.

Irma brought out her knife and cut the throat of each vivisectionist in quick succession, then turned off the gas cylinder. She wiped her knife clean on a portion of one white coat that was, not as yet, stained with blood.

A quick examination of the horse revealed that it had never had a bit or a bridle; its back had no saddle marks nor did its hind have any spur or crop marks. Neither of the four hooves had ever been shod. This horse could not have been wild, its coat was too well brushed.

The woman on the next slab was quite ugly. She had been washed before surgery but that did not hide a diffusion of unsightly body hair and claw marks all over her body, each seemed to be done by others of her kind. Her own fingers were tipped with filthy dark nails as were her toes. The teeth were a shocker; what was left of them were rotten and jagged, this woman had clearly spent her life chewing meat held in her hands.

A case file was placed next to each subject. Irma opened the folder to find some notes were written in French as well as German, some by Dr Tube. The woman was referred to as a Yahoo, a savage human race living on an island near the Great Australian Bight.

The horse was called a Houyhnhnm {pronounced hwinem}. A cultured and civilised equine race living on the same island as the Yahoos.

Irma decided not to ponder a place where horses are smart and humans dumb, nor did she want either subject waking up in pain from the dissection. She drew her knife and made a deep stab into each surgical cavity, thus ending the life of both Houyhnhnm and Yahoo.

She would have left the room then via the ventilation shaft, but a pile of similar case files were seen on a desk. Irma crept to the desk wondering what other evil had been done in this butchers' block.

The top file has sufficient French notes to make out the case. A German, Harry Haller has had his mind fused with the essence and mentality of a Central Asian wolf of the steppes. This experiment, if successful, can be done in thousands and allow the Kaiser's soldiers to navigate and survive the far frontiers when it comes time to expand his conquest around the world.

When she closed the file, Irma saw a wolf skull sitting on the lab shelf along with fetal jars and stuffed rodents.

Her profession taught her restraint when the impulse to scream out her disgust manifested. What she did do is hurl the unbound case file into the air. The many papers scattered then showered down on her. She seized the other case files and threw them likewise, when she finished, the room was thick with slowly falling papers. It was these that hid the many gas masked figures bearing down on her.

Guards had entered the room while she was hurling case files up in the air. When the curtain of flickering falling paper cleared they were almost on her. She bolted for the louvre, but was grabbed half-way. A fierce Savate strike sent her assailant to the floor. The two second long delay was all it took for another guard to seize her arm, she poised her free arm for another strike but it was held by yet another captor; trying the wrench her limbs free was useless their grips were strong. Irma began to kick, but a truncheon blow into her stomach took all fight out of her.

She was brought before a group of lab coated men wearing their own gas masks; one had a birdcage with a canary in it. An extended observation of the yellow avian had one scientist give the all clear. Their gas masks were removed. Totenkopf was the leader of this bunch.

"You have murdered my scientists and interfered with the almighty progress of science." He accused.

"What you do is abominable." She yelled in French.

Totenkopf turned to a bespectacled Proffessor behind him who clearly knew the Gallic tongue, but not for translation.

His next line was in perfect French. "I don't skulk in the darkness and kill people."

A guard handed the fear gas cylinder to Totenkopf; he was clearly interested in the product but soon turned his attention back to the black clad woman. In one swift move he tore off her gas mask.

Cuthbert Calculus was the bespectacled Professor, he recognised the woman's face from crime photos in Parisian newspapers.

"This is Irma Vep, a notorious cat burglar and murderess."

Irma screeched. "And I know just who to murder next."

Totenkopf was not phased by the hateful stare of the catburglar; he was a somewhat touched by her appearance; as if it resonated within his memories of someone dear to him. A command was given in German to a lab coated man to the right, who then reached into his pockets and assembled a hypodermic syringe.

Irma resumed her struggles with greater ferocity but not only could she not break free of her restrainers, they managed to hold her reasonably still while an orderly pushed up her sleeve and sterilize the typical entry point for the needle.

Totenkopf turned to Calculus. "Give her to the future man." He said in French. "I will send him his instructions.

The needle entered Irma's arm.