The pilot gazed through the semi-transparent surface of the sphere, then turned to the right and pointed out across the dark ice. "That way."
Although he had not anticipated having to make his egress from the Outpost using such a ponderous mode of transport, Schadel had planned ahead. Because he didn't know the exact location of the secret Antarctic facility, he had arranged for several rendezvous points ringing the continent. It was a huge undertaking, involving almost half of the Third Reich's clandestine submarine fleet, but with the very fate of the world in the balance, no expenditure of effort or money was too much.
Content with his victory, Schadel commenced removing the theatrical make-up that had given him the face of a recently deceased FBI Agent named Thomas Fuller. His name was not Schadel, any more than it was Fuller, but the German word was the equivalent of his chosen nom de guerre: The Skull. He barely remembered his real name; it was a forgotten relic of his half-forgotten past. Everyone who knew him by that name believed he was dead and he was content to let the name remain where it was, adorning his cenotaph in the cemetery of his family manor in the English countryside.
One upon a time, he had thought to call himself "the Great Beast." In his youth, he had dallied with the occult. Following a disturbing encounter with a gypsy fortune teller, he had sworn allegiance to the powers of darkness and set out upon the Left-hand path. In hindsight, it had been a rather juvenile thing to do, but then he had been little more than a boy at the time; a rebellious, spoiled young man, seeking an antidote to interminable boredom of his privileged upbringing. Yet, what had begun as mere thrill seeking had led to discoveries beyond his wildest imaginings.
He had trekked across the Himalayas, learning the secret of astral projection from yogis in high mountain monasteries. He spent a fantastic night in the Pyramid of Cheops, on the Giza Plateau in Egypt and nearly died in an ill-begotten quest to find a lost city in the Amazon Basin. But all of that was merely prelude to what he discovered when he gained access to the archives of the Trevayne Society in London and read the prophecy of the Child of Skulls.
At first, he did not grasp its full import. He took it to be symbolic, like the Book of the Apocalypse. He did not seriously entertain the notion that the Child of Skulls might be an actual person, much less imagine that it might actually refer to him. But all that changed with the coming of the Great War.
There were many in those days who believed the End of Days had come; that the Four Horseman had been set loose upon the world, as first the war and then the pandemic Spanish Influenza, cut a bloody swath across the world. At the time however, the young man's attention had been focused elsewhere.
Because he was the son of a Lord of the Realm, his commission as an officer was obligatory and while he had little interest in pleasing his father, death in No Man's Land was preferable to being cut off from his family's wealth. Not that he had to worry about being sent to the trenches. A polyglot and an experienced world traveler, he spent hardly any time at all in uniform and was instead tapped to work in military intelligence; he was to be a spy. The assignment suited him well, for he had spent his entire life deceiving those closest to him. Then, one summer day in 1915, everything changed forever.
He had been sent to Ludwigshafen, to sabotage and if possible, destroy one of the major facilities being used to produce chlorine gas weapon cylinders. So successful was he in the craft of espionage that no one suspected that he was responsible for the gas explosion that killed half-a-score of chemical plant workers and released a toxic gray-green cloud that rolled across the Rhine and made everyone in the nearby town of Manheim sick for several days thereafter. No one suspected him because he was one of the victims.
He had come to the plant posing as a textiles merchant, intent on purchasing a quantity of dye. Chlorine was a by-product of dye manufacture, so the plant served dual purposes. During his visit and tour of the facilities, he had excused himself just long enough to plant several small explosive devices, all set to detonate many hours later, when he was well away. But something had gone wrong. Perhaps one of the timing clocks had malfunctioned or perhaps a curious plant worker had discovered one of the charges and inadvertently set it off. Whatever the cause, he had been caught in the ensuing death cloud.
The training he had once received from Indian yogis saved his life. When he heard the blast and saw the miasma rolling toward him, he put himself in a trance state, where he could survive for more than an hour on a single lungful of air. He woke from the trance when they came to retrieve the bodies, glimpsing the gas-masked face of the firemen in that single lucid moment before the pain consumed him.
It was eight weeks before the hospital staff finally let him see his reflection. While he had escaped the kind of internal damage most often associated with poison gas exposure, the chlorine had left him horribly disfigured. His hair was gone, the follicles permanently destroyed and not so much as an eyelash remained. His skin had been bleached bone white and the flesh beneath and even the relatively soft cartilage of his nose and ears had wasted away.
Those who would later have occasion to deal with him would believe that he hid his true face beneath a skull mask; in truth, the skull was his true face.
Yet, even as he feigned despair at the changes wrought upon his flesh, what he saw in the mirror was not the tragic outcome of misfortune, but a vision of what was to come… of what he was prophesized to become.
He was content to remain in Germany. His time was divided between learning how to use theatrical cosmetics to hide his damaged appearance and researching ancient lore in the libraries of Nurnberg. In less than a decade he had become both a master of disguise and a master of occult lore. And as his adopted country was ground under the heel of the Treaty of Versailles, he discovered fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of the coming destruction of which he was destined to be the chief architect.
He worked always through proxies, identifying men whose frustration — either at the current state of affairs or simply at their own impotence — had led them to the brink of taking radical action. It required only a gentle nudge to set such men in motion and only a few whispered suggestions to guide them. He found his most willing acolytes in the membership of the Thule Society, a group of pampered dilettantes playing at being magicians; he understood such men very well and knew exactly what was required to start them down the path. But manipulating men who were already given to the pursuit of mysteries and mysticism could only take him so far. Fulfillment of the prophecy would require controlling minds on a massive scale and that could only be accomplished by seizing political power. This too proved far easier than he would have imagined thanks to the dire economic circumstances and smoldering fires of resentment resulting from Germany's defeat in the Great War, as well as an ancient and abiding tribal hatred of the Jewish race.
In all that he set out to do, he was successful; all of the pieces were in place and yet something was missing. It was within his power to unleash Hell on earth, but his ultimate goal was to become the Lord of Hell itself. His occult studies spoke of ancient civilizations that possessed the means to open the door between worlds and he sent forth his acolytes into the far-flung corners of the world in order to possess their secret. Much to his dismay, while his archaeologists returned empty-handed, his spies in the U.S. government revealed that the key was there… or rather, in the hands of Dodge Dalton.
He regarded the length of metal in hands. Though he had possessed it only a short time, he intimately understood how to unleash its energies, but now a new obstacle had arisen in his path. While he at last possessed the key, he was unsure of where to find the lock. The untimely arrival of soldiers at the Outpost had prevented him from delving into its secrets, but he did not doubt the answer could be found elsewhere.