Mystery of the Amber Room

Chapter 25

Sam stumbled behind the tyrant with the scrawny frame. From a laceration right below his right eyebrow, blood was trickling down his face and stained his shirt. The thugs were holding him by his arms, dragging him along to the large boat that was bobbing on the Gdynia bay water.

“Mr. Cleave, I expect you to comply with our every command or else your friends will be blamed for the death of the German Chancellor,” his captor informed him.

“You’ve got nothing to pin on them!” Sam contested. “Besides, if they play into your hand we are all going to end up dead anyway. We know how sick the Order's objectives are.”

“And here I thought you knew the extent of the Order's genius and capabilities. How silly of me. Please, don't force me to make an example of your associates to show you how serious we are,” Klaus snapped snidely. He turned to his men. “Get him on board. We have to go.”

Sam decided to bide his time before trying to summon his new skills. He wanted to get some rest first to make sure it would not fail him again. They roughly dragged him over the jetty and pushed him onto the unsteady vessel.

“Bring him!” one of the men ordered.

“I shall see you when we reach the destination, Mr. Cleave,” Klaus said genially.

‘Oh God, here I am on a fucking Nazi ship again!’ Sam bemoaned his fate, but his mood was hardly docile. ‘This time, I am going to rip their brains apart and make them kill each other.' Oddly he felt stronger in his ability when his emotions were negative. The darker his thoughts became the more powerful the tingling in his brain felt. ‘It is still there,’ he smiled.

He had grown used to the sensation of the parasite. Knowing that it was nothing but an insect from the youthful days of earth made no difference to Sam. It gave him an immense power of mind, probably hotwiring some abilities long forgotten or yet to be developed in a distant future. Perhaps, he thought, it was an organism specifically conditioned to kill, much like the instincts of a predator. Maybe it diverted energy from certain lobes of the modern brain, rerouting it to primal psychic instincts; and since those instincts served survival, they were not out to torment but to subdue and kill.

Before shoving the battered journalist into the cabin, they had reserved for their captive, the two men who handled Sam stripped him naked. Unlike Dave Purdue, Sam did not struggle. Instead, he spent the time inside his mind, locking out everything they did. The two German gorillas stripping him was odd, and from what little German he understood, they were taking bets on how long it would take the Scottish runt to break.

“The silence is usually the denial portion of the descent,” the bald one smiled as he pulled Sam's briefs down to his ankles.

“My girlfriend does that just before she throws a fit,” the scrawny one remarked. “100 euros that he'll cry like a bitch by tomorrow.”

The bald thug gave Sam a stare of intense scrutiny, standing uncomfortably close to him. “You're on. I say he tries to escape before we make it to Latvia.”

The two men chuckled as they left their prisoner naked, tattered, and seething behind the mask of his straight face. When they closed the door, Sam remained motionless for a while longer. He did not know why. He simply did not feel like moving, although his mindset was not at all in chaos. Inside he felt strong, capable and powerful, but he stood still right there to just take in the situation. The first movement was that of his eyes alone, studying the room where they had left him.

Around him, the cabin was far from accommodating, as he would have expected from cold and calculating masters. Cream colored steel walls met in four bolted corners with the floor cold and bare under his feet. There was no bed, no toilet facilities, and no window. Only the door, bolted around its edges in a similar fashion as the walls. There was but one lonely bulb weakly illuminating the miserable room, leaving him with little sensory stimulus.

Sam did not mind the deliberate lack of distraction, because what was intended to be a torture method courtesy of Kemper was a welcome blankness for his hostage to engage into fully focusing on his mental abilities. The steel was frigid, lending Sam the choice of standing all night of getting his buttocks frozen. He sat down without much consideration for his quandary, hardly impressed by the sudden coldness.

“Fuck it,” he said to himself. “I'm Scottish, you imbeciles. What do you think we endure under our kilts on an average day?” The chill under his genitals was certainly not pleasant but it was bearable, and that was what was needed here. Sam wished there was a switch to turn off the light above him. The light was disturbing his meditation. As the boat rocked under him, he closed his eyes, trying to lock out the throbbing headache and the burn of his knuckles where the skin had ruptured during his fight against his kidnappers.

Gradually, one by one, Sam locked out small inconveniences such as pain and cold, slowly sinking into more hefty cycles of thought until he could feel the current in his skull escalate like a restless worm waking in the core of his skull. The familiar surge coursed through his brain, and some of it oozed into his spinal cord like trickles of adrenaline. He felt his eyeballs heat up as the mysterious lightning filled his head. Sam smiled.

The tether formed in his mind's eye as he tried to lock on to Klaus Kemper. He did not have to locate him on the ship as long as he spoke his name. After what seemed like an hour he still had not been able to latch his control onto the tyrant in his vicinity, leaving Sam weak and sweating profusely. Frustration threatened his control as well as his hope at the attempt, but he kept trying. Finally, he had exerted his mind so much that he lost consciousness.

When Sam came to it was dark in the room, leaving him uncertain of his state of being. No matter how he stretched his eyes, he could not see anything in the pitch dark. Eventually, Sam started to question his psyche.

‘Am I dreaming?’ he wondered as he reached out in front of him, his fingertips left unsatisfied. ‘Am I under the influence of that monstrous thing right now?’ But he could not be. After all, when the other took control, Sam usually witnessed what was happening through what felt like a thin veil. Resuming his previous endeavor, he extended his mind like a seeking tentacle into the darkness to find Klaus. Manipulation was an elusive pursuit, it appeared. Nothing came of it, apart from distant voices in a heated discussion and others in clamorous laughter.

Suddenly, like a lightning strike, his perception of his surroundings disappeared, making way for a vivid memory he had not been aware of before now. Sam frowned as he recalled lying on a table under dirty lamps shedding pitiful light in a workshop. He remembered the extreme heat he was subjected to in the small workplace filled with tools and containers. Before he could see more, his memory yielded another sensation his mind had chosen to forget.

Excruciating pain filled his inner ear while he was lying in the dusky hot place. Above him, a dripping mess of tree sap spilled from a barrel, barely missing his face. Under the barrel, a large fire crackled in the wavering visions of his reminiscence. It was the source of the intense heat. Deep in his ear, a sharp sting provoked him to scream out in agony as the yellow syrup dribbled onto the table next to his head.

Sam caught his breath as the realization hammered itself into his mind. ‘The amber! The organism was caught in the amber that old bastard was melting! Of course! When it melted, the bloody thing was free to escape. It should be dead after all that time, though. I mean, ancient tree sap is hardly cryogenics!' Sam bickered with his logic. It had happened while he had been half conscious under the blanket in the work room — the possession of Kalihasa — while he had still been waking from his ordeal on the cursed vessel DKM Geheimnis after it had spewed him out.

From there, with all the confusion and pain, things grew murky. But Sam did remember the old man rushing in to stop the spilling yellow goo. He also recalled the old man asking him is he had been expelled from hell and who he belonged to. Sam had instantly answered ‘Purdue’ at the old man’s inquiry, more of a subconscious reflex than actual coherence, and two days later found himself en route to some distant, covert facility.

It was there that Sam had made his gradual and difficult recovery under the supervision and medical science of Purdue’s handpicked team of physicians until he was ready to join Purdue at Wrichtishousis. To his delight, it was also there that he was reunited with Nina, his inamorata and object of his ongoing joust with Purdue over the years.

The whole vision lasted only twenty seconds, yet it felt as if Sam had relived every detail in real time — if the concept of time even still existed in this distorted sense of existence. From the fading recollection, Sam's reasoning returned to an almost normal range. Between the two worlds of psychic wandering and physical reality his senses switched like levers adjusting to alternating currents.

Once more he was in the room, his sensitive and feverish eyes assaulted by the meager effort of the bare light bulb. Sam was lying on his back, shivering from the cold floor underneath. From his shoulders to his calves the skin had gone numb from the unyielding temperature of the steel. Footsteps approached the chamber he was in, but Sam elected to play possum, again disappointed by his ineptitude to elicit the furious entomo-god, as he named it.

“Mr. Cleave, I have enough training to know when someone is faking. You are no more incapacitated than I am,” Klaus rambled indifferently. “However, I also know what you have been trying to do, and I must say, I admire your boldness.”

Sam was curious. Without moving, he asked, “Oh, do tell, old boy.” Klaus was not amused by the snide imitation Sam Cleave used to mock his refined, almost feminine, eloquence. His fists almost balled up at the journalist's impudence, but he was an expert at composure and held his form. “You tried to steer my thoughts. Either that or you were just adamant to be on my mind like the unpleasant memory of an ex-girlfriend.”

“Like you know what a girlfriend is,” Sam mumbled amusedly. He expected a blow to the ribs or a kick to the head, but nothing happened.

Dismissing Sam's efforts to rile up his vengeance, Klaus clarified, “I know you have Kalihasa, Mr. Cleave. I am flattered you deem me a prominent enough threat to use it on me, but I have to implore you to resort to more restful practices.” Just before leaving Klaus smiled at Sam, “Please save your special gift for… the hive.”