The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Anything to do with dogs. Or the Hound. Or maybe the Shuck.”

  “Okay … you sure? Right, then. I’ll have a nosey and call you later on tonight. That good?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  *

  Nerves didn’t begin to describe it.

  Mike couldn’t sit still, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even drink. He’d tried a beer to take the edge off, but it turned to sewer water in his mouth, and he had to spit it out. It was the same with food. The curry he’d bought from the place on the corner sat, uneaten, on his Ikea table. He’d tried one mouthful but couldn’t swallow it. He didn’t have the energy to throw it in the bin, either.

  There was nothing but rubbish on telly, so he went to his tablet and brought up the Ghostquester site again. He’d already poked through pretty much everything it had to offer, but by this point it wasn’t about what he hoped he’d find any more. It was about shutting up that little voice hiding behind his eyes, the one that wouldn’t stop screaming.

  The videos on the site were a laugh, at least. Ghost hunters chasing through abandoned houses, some of them in pretty decent nick, all things considered. While they were poncing around for the camera, he was looking for signs of damp or other decay.

  “You can’t trust your eyes,” the bloke in the video was saying for the umpteenth time, as he navigated some post-war bungalow. “The things that live inside the fourth dimension, inside time, they can’t be seen, and they usually can’t see us. But if someone creates a weakness, then they can see us, and they won’t stop, they won’t ever stop…”

  Mike shivered, and in shivering realised he’d been napping. The spasm woke him up.

  His tablet was silent. The room was cold, very cold, and he rose to turn the heating on. He had to pass the window as he did so – and glimpsed it.

  The Hound splayed across the wall opposite, caught in mid-leap, its eyes firmly fixed on something above it.

  Firmly fixed on his apartment. On him.

  *

  No Hound, no Shuck, but Nuttall’s archive was a very strange artefact indeed.

  It would have puzzled the hell out of his peers, Maidah was certain. The Victorians liked their Neo Greco, their Renaissance Revival, their Romanesque, their Queen Anne. Anything that looked old and could be added on to make it look even more impressive, that was meat and drink to a late Victorian, early Edwardian designer. But they wouldn’t have known what to do with a Gherkin, a Walkie-Talkie, or a Strata Tower, spiky, angular, proud winner of the Carbuncle Cup and excoriated by architects all over the country.

  Nuttall would. The designs in his notes, though clearly of their time, embraced concepts she found difficult to believe he could conceive. The materials alone would have been beyond him, never mind the style. Yet there it was, in elaborate detail.

  Though “Hound” never once appeared in Nuttall’s notes, another word did, and that often: Tindalos. She had no idea what it meant – but it obviously meant a great deal to Nuttall since it recurred on every third or fourth document, and often with that strange stretch of algebra or whatever it may have been that she remembered seeing on the egg-smooth walls in the pub’s store room.

  “Found what you were looking for?”

  Maidah nearly jumped out of her skin. “Ma— Mister Hughes?”

  That gentle, shit-eating grin.

  “I’m afraid the more important papers are in my office. I wanted to make sure nobody saw them but me. I was reasonably certain no one else cared about poor old Nuttall and his experiments, but I never saw sense in leaving too much up to chance.”

  Maidah’s phone began to ring.

  Hughes waited while she checked the number. “Perhaps you ought to take that.”

  *

  Mike frantically scrolled through the pictures he’d transferred to his tablet. The pictures he’d taken of that strange mathematical formula. Perhaps it would save him; whoever built that room must have thought it was important. It was a slender thread but at that moment he’d have put crosses on all the walls and hung garlic from every window if he thought it would do the slightest good.

  He looked out the window.

  The Hound wasn’t on the wall any more.

  It had moved on.

  *

  “They inhabit time,” said Hughes. “That’s a poor way of putting it, but language doesn’t really help when describing this kind of phenomena. Ordinarily we don’t notice them and they don’t notice us, but under certain conditions those of us in this humble reality can force a breach. To my knowledge they have been observed at least three times since Nuttall’s experiment, and those are only the examples I’m aware of. It’s likely there have been other breaches. I sometimes wonder, if we can force a weakness on our side, can they force one on theirs? Are they more aware of us than we would like to think?

  “Of course, we can’t really see them. Our minds make sense of it by interpreting the image in a way we can understand. That’s when they’re some distance away. When they come closer, you see them for what they really are. Or at least, so I’ve always believed. Nobody has ever been able to report back after the event.

  “But the inspiration! The designs! That’s what Nuttall was after, why he went digging around in the past, with his drugs and incantations. Or what he thought was the past, anyway. That sort of thing appealed to his Victorian mind, you see. He thought he would discover, and steal, the ideas of fellows like that old Roman Vitruvius, and the other classics. He wasn’t expecting to find what he did: a strange, alien existence, with impossible, beautiful angles, designs beyond anything he could comprehend…

  “Of course, it’s different for us. The things he couldn’t build, we can, and they’ll laud us to the skies for it. Tindalosian inspired, utterly unique designs. Do you want to be the next Foster? The next Hadid?”

  Maidah accepted the call.

  Coming out of the wall… Mike’s voice was tinny and far away. The angles in the wall!

  “Of course,” said Hughes, “I know how to keep it at bay, at least for a while. In time it may lose your scent, or get bored. Or not. My understanding of their psychology is limited. But you can’t save him. Why not save yourself?”

  *

  Third death linked to Angell Street animal.

  The death of a local contractor has been linked to the recent Angell Street killings, according to a statement from a police spokesman. The man was found unresponsive in a King Street apartment, early this morning. It has been confirmed that his injuries are congruent with those found on the bodies of the two Angell Street victims. The spokesman confirmed that a detailed forensic examination of this scene is taking place…

  *

  The wall was freshly plastered. Smooth as an eggshell, the store room in the basement of The Hound had been restored to its former condition.

  “How long will I have to stay here?”

  Maidah was shivering, but not from cold. The things Hughes had made her do … no, she’d agreed to it, to all of it, but still … and there would be more, she knew that. She knew that smile. She saw it in her dreams.

  “Impossible to say, my dear. But I would estimate two to three weeks, to be on the safe side. So long as this room is kept intact, the breach point is sealed, which means it can’t break through here. It can stalk around, make a fuss, but it almost certainly can’t get back through this point. Of course, if it is aware of other weaknesses nearby it may try there and then attempt to return here, so it’s best you stay put for a while.”

  His gaze lingered.

  “No clothes, of course. Might form an angle, you see, and then what would happen?”

  She hid herself behind her hands, knowing it wouldn’t do much good.

  “Not to worry. I’ll bring food and supplies. Time will go by quicker than you think. After that, of course, we’ll have to discuss your future within the firm.” He smiled. “I’ve always liked the idea of having an apprentice.”

  Somewhere far in the distance, a dog wailed it
s hatred at the unfeeling stars.

  The Branch Line Repairman by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Labourer’s Tale

  It amazes me how swiftly people have come to trust the London Underground after the incident, but then the beating heart of City commerce has an urgency to it that not even the inexplicable can slow. I myself will never venture down there again, not with what I know and what I saw.

  And of course nobody goes on the Circle Line, and they have sealed every access way with concrete, and they think that is an end to it.

  But I have gone in the small hours to Edgware Road Station, and I have put my ear to the new and hastily-painted wall, and heard the rush and shunt of constant motion. I have heard the voices of all those who never escaped, crying out forever.

  *

  My name is Patrick Chillet and I was a historian. The focus of my study was always the London Underground, its construction, its socio-economic context, all the footling minutiae of its expansions that form the carcase on which we specialist academics feast. It is not a trade I can, with all conscience, still espouse. I know the deeper history that makes a mockery of everything I ever wrote.

  There were always rumours of irregularities concerning the construction of the Underground, but none that could not be accounted for by embezzlement, rivalries and incompetence. The root cause of the Underground was plainly the influx of commuters who choked the roads in their grim desperation to reach their places of employ each morning, and equal desperation to flee them every evening. As early as 1830 the first plans were laid, though the Metropolitan line would not open for another three decades. We will never know just how the project was suborned. Somehow I think they simply dug too deep. They found, beneath the bustle of London, a strange quiet like the sound between stars, and they were lost. I have stood down there, and heard that sound.

  Maintaining the Underground has always been a constant battle. In particular, there always seem to be major works around and beneath Paddington Station. It is a fact I had given little significance to until I was contacted by one Raymond “Teddy” Leary.

  Leary was employed by Unigraft Labour, which had been brought on site as additional labour in an attempt to bring the works back on schedule. You might recall the considerable discontent and media coverage about the frequent delays this work caused. What nobody raised at the time was the actual purpose of the works. Nobody appears to have asked, and I myself did not wonder. Living in London, such inconveniences are so engrained that we accept them, as if they were the judgment of an arbitrary deity.

  Mr Leary was not a Londoner. He had come to the capital seeking his fortune from Boston, Lincolnshire, and perhaps was simply less accustomed to take the ways of the City in his stride. He was also a man with a history of drink and psychological instability and, by the time he came to see me, Unigraft had dispensed with his services. No doubt it was at least partially for an opportunity to air his grievances that he sought out someone – as he felt – “in authority”. I do not know why a specialist historian fulfilled this criterion for him, nor how many other “authority figures” he tried before someone directed him to me.

  As it was, I was regretting agreeing to see him within minutes. I had to endure a great deal of acrimony concerning his employers and his working conditions, none of which was of any relevance to my studies, so that eventually I suggested he seek out some firm of solicitors, or else the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, who might better be able to assist.

  He had, it transpired, already exhausted these options. They would not take him seriously, he explained with a confidential air. There were things he had seen, down in the works, that nobody was talking about.

  He then began to complain about the workforce employed by the main contractors, who had been on the job from the start. They were a stand-offish, clannish lot, by his estimation. They worked in silence, never sharing a joke or a cigarette, never going to the pub after hours.

  “There was this one bloke,” he told me. “We were digging deep, all sorts of pipes and cables, nobody knew what for – he just went down, keeled over. Thought he’d had a stroke or something, I did. Didn’t make a sound with it. They took him away smartish, all his mates, and none of them saying anything. Only…”

  I waited, but I had to prompt him. The sight had plainly upset him.

  “Only, when they picked him up, it was like there wasn’t a joint nor bone in his body. It was like he was a sack of lard.” He shuddered, and needed a strong cup of tea and a cigarette before he was ready to go on.

  “Had the man been electrocuted?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen that, and it weren’t that,” Leary assured me. “When he went down it were like he was tired, just … run out of steam. But he never got back up.”

  There was more, as well. Leary said the works had broken into older tunnels beneath Paddington Station – his description placed their architecture squarely in the mid to late nineteenth century. Except he claimed they were, “Big, big so you could’ve driven a truck through ’em. They led from down there up towards the main line – you could feel the shake when the trains went by.” He recalled the cold of those elder tunnels clearly, and other peculiarities, that had finally led him to call in sick and not come back. “There was a breeze,” he told me. “All the time, but it was blowing in, deeper down, where we didn’t go. And there was this, like writing on the wall – like, marks.”

  “Graffiti?”

  He shrugged. “Real old. Like that blind stuff, Braille; like someone had got a jackhammer and pounded all these dents in patterns in the wall. And stars.”

  “Stars?”

  He fidgeted with his cigarette packet. “Drawings like stars, or maybe starfish, they were, in with the dots.”

  That, then, was the testimony of Mr Leary. It is to be recalled that he had a history of alcohol abuse, and had when young been in and out of institutions, correctional and medical, but there was an undoubted conviction in his words. It was enough for me to write to Transport for London asking if a historian might have access to the Paddington works to see these carvings he spoke of. I received no reply.

  I have since attempted to locate Mr Leary, but he expressed an intention to return back north, having acquired a peculiar horror of London in general, and what lay beneath it in particular. Thus far my enquiries have found no trace of him.

  The Carnot Expedition

  Mr Leary did leave me one souvenir of his visit. From his phone, he mailed over to me a graphics file showing the peculiar graffiti he had uncovered beneath Paddington Station. The lighting was poor and the resolution low, but I could make out curiously grouped clumps of impressions, indeed like some system of Braille. There was one star-like imprint as well, which appeared to contain an almost leaf-like pattern of veins and branches. It reminded me of nothing so much as the test of a fossil echinoderm. I wondered if the Victorians had planned some odd, abstract mural.

  With my curiosity engaged, I took the photograph to some of my colleagues to see if any of them had seen anything of the like before. In truth, I was anticipating something fairly mundane – if not merely decorative then some notation of Nineteenth Century architects perhaps. I copied the file and sent it to various institutions with an interest in the civil engineering of the period, and later events suggest that my curiosity was noted in other places beyond the circle of my immediate enquiries.

  I ended up travelling to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden to meet a young American scholar named Emma-May Watts, out of Chicago. Miss Watts was ostensibly working on a new biography of Charles Yerkes, the speculator and financier whose efforts had made large sections of the London Underground a reality. However, as she happily confessed, she had become side-tracked within days of arriving in London, and had been pursuing her own tangential studies ever since.

  She had sent me a very brief email to say that she did indeed recognise Leary’s inscriptions, and when I met her she was as good as her word. With a slight smile, she presented me with
photocopies of what appeared to be rubbings of very similar designs.

  “Where did you get these?” I demanded.

  “What would you say if I told you they appear in the passageways beneath the Pyramids, and in the stone-lined tombs of the Orkney islands?”

  I goggled at her, aghast, and she fairly collapsed in laughter. “Oh Doctor, your face!” And that was my first real introduction to the somewhat mercurial nature of Emma-May Watts.

  When she had gotten over her mirth at my gullibility, she went on, “It’s good that you at least entertained it for a moment though, because if you want to learn about this,” and she waved the photocopy, “then it’s a wild ride, believe me.”

  “But what are they, then?”

  “Carnot’s Dots,” she explained, or evidently she felt it an explanation.

  After a blank moment, though, I did feel a faint tugging in my memory. “Do you mean Carnot?” spoken to rhyme with Poe.

  She shrugged. “Well, I only saw it written down and I liked the rhyme. You’ve heard of Gideon Carnot then?”

  I had, but little more than that. The name surfaced as a footnote in transport history, principally because of his eccentric fate. After the Metropolitan Line had been opened in the 1860s and proved such a profitable success, work had begun on the District, and the two together would eventually pave the way for the Circle Line that would link all the major rail terminals in inner London. Carnot had been a secretary of the Board of the District Line, and his personal story had been almost totally lost in the shadow of that organisation’s considerable pecuniary woes.

  “Didn’t he…” I racked my brains “…end up in an asylum?”

  “He did indeed.” Watts grinned wolfishly. “I’m going to have to swear you to secrecy, Doctor Chillet, because – well, I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish the book on Yerkes, but Yerkes has been written about so much there’s scarcely room for another commentator anyway. But Carnot, Carnot,” mimicking my pronunciation, “is another matter, and I have some primary sources that nobody’s ever had access to before.”