The Feaster From The Stars (Blackwood and Harrington)
Page 19
‘That’s a fair bet,’ muttered Blackwood as he jumped down from the platform. He turned, intending to offer Sophia his hand, but she had already dropped lithely down beside him.
She looked up at Hoagland and Goodman-Brown. ‘Shall we, gentlemen?’
Dimly lit by freestanding lamps, the tunnel extended perhaps a hundred yards into the distance before curving away to the right. Although the heavy ribbing of the new steel and concrete reinforcing sections was unmarred by the grime of the older parts of the network, they still presented a deeply sinister and unsettling aspect to the explorers as they left the station behind and headed into the gloom.
‘Have you had any unusual experiences on the Underground, Mr Hoagland?’ asked Sophia.
‘Me, ma’am? Why, yes, as a matter of fact I have.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well…’ He hesitated and glanced at her. Her expression clearly indicated that she would brook no refusal, and in truth she was such an uncommonly fine-looking girl that he felt it would be unmanly to refuse to elaborate. He sighed. ‘It’s not easy to talk about; it was a most upsetting and alarming experience.’
‘I understand entirely, sir,’ she replied in a gentle voice. ‘And please believe me when I say that I have had frightful experiences myself. Sometimes… it helps one to share them.’
Behind them, Blackwood looked at Sophia but said nothing.
‘About a fortnight ago,’ said Hoagland, ‘I was working late in my office. I turned away from my desk, intending to retrieve some papers from my file cabinet, when I saw a face emerging from the wall…’
‘A face?’ said Goodman-Brown.
Hoagland nodded. ‘As if someone was standing inside the wall and had leaned forward. It appeared to be a man, perhaps in his thirties. I froze upon the spot, and for some moments we simply stared at each other. I was beside myself with fear, I don’t mind admitting, but the face continued to regard me. Eventually, I managed to ask him who he was, but he offered no answer. He merely said, ‘Help us,’ and vanished. I fled from the room immediately, and it has been all I can do to return there every day since.’
‘I understand your fear, Mr Hoagland,’ said Sophia. ‘But you must likewise understand that you had – and have – nothing to fear from any of the poor souls who linger here.’
‘That’s true, ma’am,’ the Stationmaster replied. ‘But it’s not them I’m afraid of… it’s what they are afraid of that troubles me.’
‘A wise distinction, sir,’ said Blackwood.
They continued along the tunnel in silence for a while, and as they walked, Blackwood listened intently for any strange sounds that might herald the reappearance of the lethal abnormality that he and de Chardin had heard the previous afternoon. However, the amulet in his chest continued to tingle only faintly, for which he was grateful.
Hoagland pointed ahead. ‘The tunnel comes to an end there, see?’
‘Yes,’ replied Blackwood. ‘But where is the Greathead shield?’
‘The tunnelling shield was withdrawn when digging was halted; it’s now on the other side of the new station through which we entered.’
They approached the end of the tunnel and saw that it opened into a large cavity, perhaps a hundred yards across, like a subterranean cave. It was clearly not a cave, however, for by the light of a dozen or so free-standing gas lamps arranged around the floor, they could see that it was perfectly circular, its single, curving wall covered with a patchwork of thousands upon thousands of square tiles.
Blackwood stood on the edge and saw that a ladder had been placed there, allowing access to the floor of the chamber, which he estimated to be about twenty feet below. Like the ceiling forty feet above, the floor was covered with the same square tiles as the wall, and from his vantage point, he could see that they all contained the Yellow Sign. Upon the floor of the chamber stood five large blocks of dark stone, each hewn into the shape of a triangular prism, their vertical faces about eight feet high and five feet wide. Each of these prism-like monoliths pointed towards the centre of the chamber.
As he gazed down, Blackwood could feel his amulet begin to stir, but it was like no sensation he had felt before. It was a dull throb, deeply uncomfortable, like a badly-dressed wound that had become infected. The sensation made him feel sick, and his skin crawled as though it had become host to some alien parasite.
Sophia noticed his expression and placed a hand upon his shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Thomas?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘I’m fine.’ He looked into her eyes and saw his own pain mirrored there. ‘Are you quite sure you want to be here?’ he whispered.
She gave him a weak smile. ‘No, but neither of us have any choice.’
He stroked her face gently with a trembling hand and then turned and climbed onto the ladder. Sophia and the others followed him down to the chamber’s floor, and when they had all reached the foot of the ladder, Goodman-Brown turned and surveyed their surroundings.
‘Hard to believe,’ he said wonderingly, ‘that this place was built by an ancient tribe barely out of the Stone Age.’
‘They didn’t do it alone,’ Blackwood replied as he walked slowly away from the curving wall and looked around. He pointed to the nearest of the monoliths. ‘Mr Goodman-Brown, what do you make of these?’
When the psychometrist did not answer, Blackwood turned and glanced in his direction and saw that he was standing still with his eyes closed. There was a deep frown upon his brow.
‘Walter…?’ said Sophia, moving to his side.
‘There is a great and terrible power in this place,’ Goodman-Brown said. ‘Normally, I need to make direct physical contact with an object in order to apprehend its nature and history. But here… here the impressions flow through me like a great tide. Good God! What kind of place is this?’
‘We were rather hoping you could tell us,’ said Blackwood.
‘It seems that the power here – whatever it is – is amplifying my abilities. It is connected to Carcosa… through some mechanism I don’t understand.’
‘Tell us what you are experiencing, Walter,’ said Sophia.
‘It’s difficult to put into words,’ the psychometrist replied. He had put his hands to his temples and was slowly massaging them, as if he were suffering from an intense headache. ‘There is space… deep, infinite… a vast swathe of stars… a distant world, ruined and forlorn in the great emptiness, all but consumed by something awful which fastened itself upon it in the dim and distant past. But there is something else…’
‘What else?’ prompted Sophia. ‘What…?’ She hesitated and then sank suddenly to her knees.
Blackwood rushed to her and took her in his arms. ‘Sophia! What is it?’
‘I… can feel the lake around me,’ she said breathlessly. ‘As if I am back on Carcosa. I can feel the waters surrounding me.’
‘But you are not there,’ he said, taking her face in his hands. Her skin was damp with sweat, and when he placed a hand on her forehead, he could feel that she was burning with fever. ‘I’m taking you out of here.’
‘No! We can’t leave, not now. We… we have a job to do, Thomas. I’m all right – really I am. Speak… speak to Walter.’
Blackwood glanced up at the psychometrist, who was still standing beside them, with his eyes closed and his hands rubbing incessantly at his temples. ‘All right, Goodman-Brown,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this over with. Tell us what you are sensing, and be quick about it!’
‘A song,’ Goodman-Brown said.
‘What?’
‘I can hear a song, echoing through the infinite vault of space.’
‘The song of the Hyades,’ Sophia whispered, her head resting against Blackwood’s shoulder. ‘Songs that the Hyades shall sing… where flap the tatters of the King… you remember, Thomas…’
‘Yes, the Song of Cassilda. But that is just a poem.’
Sophia shook her head weakly. ‘No, it’s much more than that.’
‘Sophia
is right,’ said Goodman-Brown. ‘The stars of the Hyades are singing, but it is a song like none I have ever heard before: a sound which is not a sound… an emanation, rather, drifting through the void of space, from the stars which look in anguish upon the ruined world of Carcosa.’
‘What does all this mean?’ asked Miles Hoagland in a tremulous voice, as his eyes darted fearfully about the chamber.
‘Quiet!’ ordered Blackwood. ‘Goodman-Brown, continue.’
‘The Anti-Prism is here, somewhere. Even in its dormant state, it is not completely inert. It is waiting… waiting for a connection yet to be made, while the Hyades sing. They are calling for help… yes, I can feel it – they are calling for help, as they have done for millennia.’
‘If they are calling for help,’ said Blackwood, ‘who or what are they calling to?’
‘Something out there,’ replied Goodman-Brown. His voice was now as breathless as Sophia’s. ‘There is something out there… out in the farthest reaches of the cosmos, much farther away than Carcosa… my God, Blackwood. It’s something of which even the King in Yellow is terrified!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I can feel the abomination’s fear and the desperation of the Hyades. They are calling to this… other. They are begging it to come and deliver them from the King in Yellow.’
‘He’s right, Thomas,’ whispered Sophia. ‘I can feel it now. The King in Yellow is hiding in the Lake of Hali… hiding. He is not merely preparing to travel to the Earth; he is preparing to flee here!’
At that moment, the air cracked with a thunderous report which echoed around the chamber. Goodman-Brown cried out. Blackwood glanced at him, and saw a dark red patch spreading rapidly across his white shirt directly over his heart. Without another sound, the psychometrist collapsed to the floor and lay still.
‘God in Heaven!’ cried Hoagland. ‘He is shot!’
Instantly, Blackwood was on his feet with Sophia in his arms. Without looking back, he sprinted for the nearest of the black stone monoliths as more shots rang out, shattering the tiles inches from his racing feet. He knew without looking where the shots were coming from. There was only way in or out of the chamber: the newly built tunnel through which they had come. In the instant before he dived behind the stone, he caught a glimpse of a figure standing above, in the mouth of the tunnel.
‘Hoagland!’ he shouted. ‘Take cover!’
He heard running steps, another shot, a cry of pain, and then silence.
Damn and blast! he thought, taking his revolver from his pocket and checking to see that it was fully loaded. He risked a quick peek around the edge of the monolith, and saw that their attacker was now halfway down the ladder. He would have put a bullet through his back, had not two more figures appeared in the mouth of the tunnel, each with his own weapon. One of them fired at Blackwood, and it was only by the merest fraction that the bullet missed his head. He ducked back behind the monolith.
‘They’re Exeter’s men, aren’t they?’ Sophia said.
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ he replied. ‘Three of them, at least… possibly more.’
‘What are we going to do?’
Blackwood considered his options. In another few moments, the man who had shot Goodman-Brown would be across the chamber and upon them, while his fellows remained at their vantage point in the tunnel mouth, ready to fire down upon Blackwood the instant he appeared from behind the monolith.
‘I won’t lie to you, my dear,’ he said. ‘We’re in a bit of a fix.’
‘That much is painfully clear, Thomas. But what are we going to do?’
Blackwood sighed.
There was only one thing he could do…
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Servitor
Charles Exeter could feel the thoughts of the King in Yellow stirring in his mind – or at least, those mental emanations which were subtle enough not to cause screaming insanity in the moments before the blood in his brain began to boil. He was still in his Knightsbridge apartments, having left word at the offices of the CSLR that he would be working from home for a few days and should be considered unavailable. He reflected that ‘working from home’ may have been the greatest euphemism in history, referring as it did to the growing frequency of communications from Carcosa.
The King in Yellow was growing restless: Exeter could feel the impatience in the thoughts worming their way through his mind. The entity wanted to be away from Carcosa and upon the Earth; he was ravening for a new world on which to feed, and Exeter felt a mixture of terror at the form which that feeding would take and elation at the thought of the rewards that would be his when the entity arrived to claim his dominion.
Exeter went to his study, sat himself in his favourite armchair and closed his eyes.
I am here.
Yes.
I have checked. The prisms are aligned with the centre. All that is required now is for the Servitor to discharge its contents.
Exeter followed the command. Using a part of his mind which he had never suspected he possessed, but which the King in Yellow had revealed to him and taught him to master, he called out silently to the thing that prowled the Underground, bidding it to leave its subterranean lair and manifest itself before him.
The mental substrates, of which the spiritualistic medium is keenly aware and which she is able to access, flared to life in the dark recesses of Exeter’s brain and transmitted the psychic signal. The King in Yellow had taught him the words to use – words which no human vocal chords could enunciate, but which the properly-trained mind could express silently in strange modes of thought, akin to arcane and abstract mathematics. In his more jaundiced moments, Exeter called these modes of thought ‘the mathematics of damnation’. He didn’t like the phrase, didn’t much care for the connotations, especially as they applied to him, but it had stuck in his mind, and in fact it appealed to the same rebellious part of his personality which had brought him into possession of more than one fortune.
Sitting back in his armchair, his eyes still closed, his breath coming in strong, deep draughts, Exeter transmitted the blasphemous mental formulae, and then waited.
Outside in the crowded streets of Knightsbridge, those who happened to glance heavenward at a certain moment saw something rather strange in the overcast sky. It was not enough to cause consternation or panic; hardly enough, indeed, to merit a word or two of bemusement to a companion or a fellow passerby, but it did cause several citizens of the metropolis to scratch their heads, figuratively if not literally, and continue about their business marvelling at the complexities of the English weather.
A few might have commented in passing on the curious phenomenon later, to friends or work colleagues, or to their families when they returned home that evening. If pressed for a description, some might have likened it to a small tornado or a waterspout – albeit one which was so tenuous and translucent that it could hardly be said to have been visible at all; a wisp of swirling air that seemed to ripple up from the ground and snake across the sky towards the top floor of a certain large apartment building.
Exeter opened his eyes and watched as the air in his study began to twitch and stir, as if with a heat haze. The disturbance gradually grew more pronounced, plucking papers from his desk and whirling them around the room, while the air began to whistle and sing in strange, unearthly tones.
With a mixture of terror and satisfaction, Exeter watched as the miniature hurricane slowly abated, coalescing into something which he could not describe, even though it hung in the air in full view before him. All he knew was that it was vast – far larger than the room in whic
h it had manifested, and yet it was contained in its entirety within the room, as though the three dimensions of space had been stretched to accommodate it.
The thing which had driven Alfie Morgan to madness floated before Charles Exeter, and the railway magnate felt his own mind starting to buckle under the pressure of its alien aspect, its sheer otherness. Were it not for the presence of the King in Yellow’s thoughts in his mind, reinforcing it in the manner of a scaffold shoring up a sagging building, Exeter knew that he too would have been driven to screaming insanity by the sight of it.
Exeter didn’t answer, for he knew it was true: the human mind was like a cobweb, and the Earth was like an ancient house whose atmosphere was perfectly still, perfectly tranquil. Not a breath of wind stirred in the house, while outside in the depths of space and time, storms of alienness raged with such unimaginable intensity that the mind of humanity would never be able to withstand them, would be annihilated at their first touch.
How arrogant of this pipsqueak race to believe that there was any place for it beyond the confines of its tiny world! Its destiny was not to expand into the cosmos and explore the multitude of worlds rolling silently through the void: it was to provide sustenance for the godlike beings who dwelled there. Beings vast, ancient and ineffably powerful.
Beings like the King in Yellow.
Exeter became aware of vague shapes moving within the thing which floated before him. The shapes moved rapidly forward towards the surface and back into the centre, as though carried by powerful convection currents, and although they were difficult to discern – appearing as little more than disturbances within the churning mass – Exeter could perceive that they were faces, misshapen, anguished, silently screaming.