by Kim Newman
‘Took my bat and ball and repaired to Cheyne Walk. It was a relief, really – not having to feel anything any more.’
He made her angry again. It was all very well to sneer at Onions and the government and the bloody dome. If he’d done anything in the last twenty-five years except stare at white walls and feed the cats, she might have been more inclined to sympathise.
‘Good point,’ he said.
He had picked up her thoughts. It was like ice-points in her heart.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, genuinely. ‘We’re just in tune. Fred knew we would be. You haven’t tumbled yet.’
‘But I will?’
‘Don’t be peeved. It’s not so terrible. What harm can I be? I’m a bitter old recluse, totally ineffectual and probably on drugs.’
She didn’t want to laugh, but his boyish look of querying innocence tickled her.
‘That’s better. You were a smiler, not a pouter.’
It was true. She had always been photographed showing her teeth. She thought that was why the agency made a fuss about them.’
‘Besides, I’m here, aren’t I?’ said Jeperson. ‘I could have thrown a pillow over my head, but I’m on the way to Skerra like the rest of our merry band.’
‘Have you been to the island before?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly.’
IX.
The Blowhole was the highest point on Skerra. It looked like a volcanic crater, but the file said it was man-made, a vertical shaft sunk from the levelled-off plateau abutting the cliff into the water-carved caverns below. Steps hewn into the rock wound around the hole, though a Post-it note on the page advised against attempting any descent without climbing gear.
Adam Onions, big orange suitcase fetched from the Sea King, stood at the lip of the Blowhole and pointed his torch down.
The ‘steps’ were a wet-looking groove around the shaft. However, a ladder – orange rope and silver treads – dangled, secured to the rock by pitons.
‘“Arne Saknussemm, His Sign,”’ quoted Jeperson.
‘Beg your pardon?’ said Onions.
‘Voyage au centre de la terre, Jules Verne,’ explained Sewell Head, the trivia champion, ‘1864, expanded 1867; translated, anonymously, into English as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1871.’
‘Also a film with James Mason,’ Kydd added.
‘I’m so glad that’s cleared up,’ said Onions.
Head scrunched the wrapper from a large bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, held it over the Blowhole, and dropped it. Weighted by silver foil, it spiralled downwards, then an underground gust caught it and disappeared. For a moment, Stacy didn’t know why her spine prickled. Then she realised the chocolate wrapper had been sucked rather than blown.
It had started to rain. The wind was so fierce that pellets of water came at them horizontally, or even from below.
‘We should get out of this weather,’ said Persephone Gill. ‘Seriously.’
‘So speaks the classical Queen of the Underworld,’ said Jeperson.
‘Also known as “Proserpina”,’ footnoted Head.
‘Our business is down there, Adam,’ said Jeperson. ‘It is why we’re here.’
Onions made show of thinking it over.
‘Until we find out what happened to Captain Vernon’s team, I don’t think we should risk—’
‘We won’t find out by standing up here catching our deaths,’ said Jeperson. ‘I deduce from this ladder that the estimable Captain and his hardy tars are quite likely down below.’
‘They were ordered to stay—’
Jeperson silenced him with a look.
‘In case you’d forgotten, we’re the professionals in this field. We’re the psychic detectives, the occult adventurers, the ghost-hunters. And this hole leads to a haunted place. It’s where we should be.’
Jeperson bent to grasp the ladder and get his foot on a rung. His moon boot slipped, and Kydd grabbed his arm.
‘Thank you,’ said Jeperson. ‘Nearly a nasty accident.’
With Onions’s torchlight on him, Jeperson made his way down the Blowhole. The reflective strips on his poncho shone red.
Kydd followed.
Onions reluctantly surrendered his torch to Stacy, which meant she’d have to go last. Before descending, Onions fastened a rope to his suitcase and lowered it to the temporary custody of Kydd. Once the others had touched bottom, Stacy dropped the torch, which Onions managed to catch.
By the time she was at the foot of the ladder, the others were arguing about underground breezes. Though shielded from the worst of the rain and wind, there was a definite air current.
Onions played torchlight across ancient rock.
For a moment, Stacy assumed Captain Vernon’s initial report had been a complete wind-up. This was just a hole in an island.
Then Sewell Head coughed.
And the rock walls parted with a metallic clang.
Bright, artificial light struck them blind.
ACT II: HEAD OFFICE
I.
After the murderous wind and rain topside, the cavern was pleasantly temperate.
Though rusty on cutting-edge tech, Richard Jeperson had seen the inside of enough military-industrial complexes to recognise the installation under Skerra as private enterprise rather than government. It was designed first to impress visiting shareholders, then to be a work environment.
Once the party had stopped exclaiming and clattering, he heard the thrumm of big engines somewhere below.
‘Just heating and lighting this must suck an enormous wattage,’ he mused. ‘And we’re well off the national grid. What d’you reckon, Yoland?’
The weapons inspector was thinking it through. ‘Geothermal, from the volcanic fault? That’d be extremely high risk. Ask the Pompeiians. My gut says it’s the sea.’
‘Waves?’
‘Could be. If they’ve found a way to harness the big whirlpool, that’d be something… exciting.’
Huge banks of Wembley floodlights hung under the bare rock roof.
The entrance doors had led them onto a railed-off metal platform that was also a lift.
‘Don’t touch any controls.’
Onions issued his order while on his knees. He was entering the code to open his suitcase. Yoland ignored the diktat and picked up a plastic handset at the end of a python of insulated wire. He thumped the big button with the down arrow. Smoothly, without a lurch, the platform began to descend.
The cavern was of a size that would suit a collector of fully inflated antique Zeppelins. Natural rock formations had been shaped to accommodate the base. The floor was levelled and metalled, marked off like a runway or a launch-pad. The place was littered with white mini-jeeps, uniformed bodies and hard-to-identify machines. Concrete bunkers and blockhouses surrounded the ruin of a large, rail-mounted device with a Jodrell Bank-sized circular array. There had been a major fire here – a thick layer of soot blackened a swathe of wall and roof, and half the big dish was burned through to the frame. A forklift truck had been driven into a gantry and brought the structure down.
Déjà-vu made Richard’s knees and ankles weak.
He saw shadows flitting about the cavern-floor, from cover to cover. Distant alarums of machine-age battle sounded: klaxons, automatic weapons fire, warning bells and whistles, shouts of pain.
The others were immune to such phenomena. For now.
His coat had been found here, covered with his blood. Any déjà-vu could be down to the circumstance that he really had been here before. No, it would not wash. He was used to holes in his memory, but here there was a hole in everyone’s memory. If he had been here before, it would have made the secret history books. Limiting the circulation of information on an eyes-only basis paradoxically means preserving it.
Richard gripped the guardrail for support. He missed his white room, the neutral calm. This trip had disturbed his carefully maintained equilibrium. He had been preserved in his home; exposed to open air, he worried the decay he had staved
off would catch up with him.
Everything hurt.
A colophon appeared all over the place: a yellow capital H, bent in at the corners to fit a white oval shield. It was huge, if half-burned, on the face of the array, and in miniature on everything else. The oviform pommels on the guardrails were three-dimensional versions of the same logo.
‘What’s the H for?’ asked Stacy. ‘Hers?’ she suggested, thumbing at the awestruck Miss Gill. ‘Hellfire Club? Hugeness? Hidey-Hole?’
‘H’egg?’ suggested de Maltby.
‘Head,’ said Head, touching one of the egg-shapes.
The doors had opened at the sound of Sewell Head’s cough. Had anyone else noticed that?
Yes. Head had. Naturellement.
Richard perceived he had not been entirely right about the immunity of the rest of the party. This place affected Head. Onions had spent far too little time thinking about the problem of Sewell Head.
If only it were easier to concentrate.
Onions had his suitcase open. Instruments nestled in foam-rubber padding. He took off his anorak to reveal a utility belt and braces, tailored to fit when he had been a stone or two lighter. He had home-bored a frayed extra buckle-hole to loosen a harness which still cut into his tummy. Expertly, the man from I-Psi-T transferred his precious gadgets from compartments in the case to holsters on the harness. A complex doodad, which resembled the universal remote for a multi-function entertainment system, strapped watchlike to his wrist. Onions entered a code on the keypad and the doodad beeped to life. Green, orange and red LEDs lit up.
‘Prepared for the unknown, Adam?’
‘It’s only the as-yet unquantified.’
Richard looked out at the cavern.
The wrongness of it all was nauseating, an electric thrill. With his gadgets, Onions could doubtless measure the condition as an increase in ozone levels or ambient charge or some such jargon. Richard did not doubt the physical effects were quantifiable. He just thought figures did not really help.
As they neared the bottom, he saw bullet-pocks on rock and concrete.
‘This was a battlefield,’ he announced.
Under the thrumm of the generators and the grind of the lift-platform, he again heard ghost gunfire, shouts. An explosion, mid-air, very near.
Spectre shrapnel shot through his mind.
Stacy was at his side, holding him up. He was momentarily riddled with scraps of hot pain. Then it was gone.
‘You felt something?’ she asked.
‘Is it all coming back?’ demanded Onions.
‘Not a memory,’ Richard said. ‘Ghosts. Everywhere, ghosts.’
The others could not feel anything yet.
‘I don’t have any readings,’ said Onions, tapping his doodad. A lone light flashed red. ‘Except that. Variation in atmospheric pressure. Entirely natural phenomenon in a cave this size.’
It was what Richard had expected.
Onions cooed over his gizmo. Richard had a flash of Professor Calculus in the Tintin books – swinging his plumb-bob and muttering, ‘A little more to the west.’ Of course, he turned out to be right.
Everyone else – except Head, who was chewing placidly on a cud of fudge – craned over the low guardrail and peered out at the cavern, looking for movement where there was none.
‘What’s that thing?’ Stacy asked. ‘The giant satellite dish?’
‘A transmitter,’ said Yoland. ‘It was gimbal-mounted, and on those rails. A nice bit of workmanship, if obsolete. Now, nanotech is sexy. Next generation isn’t worth gasping at unless it’s tinier than the last. But once upon a time, your equipment had to be monumental to attract funding.’
‘What did it transmit?’ asked Stacy.
‘Two-year-old episodes of sitcoms you didn’t watch on their first run,’ suggested Richard. ‘Championship dwarf-tossing from Glamorgan? Those radio broadcasts that teach alien invaders to speak English with BBC accents?’
Yoland shook his head, but did not venture an opinion.
As they neared the cavern floor, the corpses were more obvious. Skeletons in white H-on-the-left-tit jumpsuits. H-logoed dome hard hats chin-strapped to clean skulls.
Kydd whistled. The aircrewman was the only one among them who had served in a shooting war.
‘Those people have been dead for a long time,’ said Stacy.
‘Decades,’ Richard agreed.
The skeletons had died clutching automatic weapons with fold-out tube-frame H-stamped stocks and unfamiliar horizontal magazines.
‘Did they turn on each other?’ asked Stacy. ‘I see only one type of uniform.’
Among the jumpsuits were a few dead people in lab coats, full-skirted like spaghetti Western dusters, and oversized peaked caps. Not officers, but technicians, scientists, supervisors.
‘The other side took away their dead,’ deduced Richard.
‘The winners,’ said Yoland.
‘Not necessarily. Whatever happened here isn’t finished. If it were, our presence wouldn’t be required.’
‘That’s what I like about you, Jeperson,’ said Onions. ‘Always reasons to be cheerful.’
‘If you think I like making ominous pronouncements—’
Onions’s belt beeped an interruption. He examined himself to find the gadget that had sounded out of turn.
The lift platform was level with the cavern floor. The dish towered hundreds of feet above them, lights shining through holes where plates were missing. Fighting had been fierce around the lift-bed. Many skeletons were spilled about, dusty brown-black stains on their uniforms, obvious bullet-holes in skulls.
‘It’s a mess,’ said Head, intently. ‘It should be tidied.’
For Head, Richard realised, H stood for Home.
The lift sank below the floor. Yoland looked at the control handset and found nothing besides simple up and down buttons.
They descended several further levels.
Suddenly, it was dark. Then light again. As the lift sank, circuits connected. Overhead strip lights tried to come on. Some panels buzzed and flashed and died, others sparked dangerously. Whole sections lit up perfectly, as if installed yesterday.
Richard had a sense of corridors winding into successive layers of labyrinth. Admin offices, supply areas, living quarters, cafeterias, recreation facilities, laboratories, lecture halls, testing grounds, museums, toilet facilities, information storage. No bare rock, but metalled walls, rubberised floor, heating and ventilation ducts (note to infiltrators: suitable for crawling through). Framed pictures were designed to seem like windows, the sort of touch you only got after expensive consultation.
They were deep underground, deep under the sea. Below the sea-bed, probably. He had a sense of enormous weight pressing in.
Without so much as a judder, the platform stopped.
Here, it was more than warm. The atmosphere was humid, tropical. Richard doffed his sou’wester and poncho, then unzipped his flight suit, which came away in sections. Underneath, he wore thigh-flied scarlet buccaneer britches and a lemon-yellow bumfreezer jacket buttoned to the throat, with an explosive cravat of red lace. He plumped the black silk rose in his lapel.
‘Fab threads,’ said Stacy, satirically.
Others followed his example and took off their heavy-weather gear.
The Detective Sergeant wore brown corduroy trousers and a zip-up matching waistcoat.
‘Very practical,’ he commented.
She took an onion-seller’s beret from a pocket and tucked her hair into it.
‘This is my arresting outfit,’ she said. ‘Your average villain tends to leg it if a bloke with size-eleven boots gets within spitting distance, but he’ll hang about like a prat if someone blond asks him the way to Acacia Avenue. Most bollockbrains still give out bullshit directions after they’re cuffed and in the van.’
The guardrail automatically folded into the floor of the platform.
Ahead was a plate-glass barrier, studded with white star-shaped opacities. Beyond
was a reception area and a corridor. With a hiss, the glass was withdrawn into the ceiling. No one wanted to step under it – the glass would make a very serviceable guillotine.
A concealed sound system began to tinkle, ‘Aquarius’ from Hair played in the style of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
Miss Gill mewed surprise, then said, ‘It’s not exactly Chris de Burgh.’
‘Why did Chris de Burgh cross the road?’ asked Stacy. Miss Gill shook her head. ‘To get to the middle. Boom-boom.’
Yoland and de Maltby laughed and Onions looked impatient. Miss Gill took the joke as a personal dig, which Richard assumed Stacy intended. Head, he noted, was puzzled. That was worth filing away.
It was Onions’s place to press on. Richard waited for him.
The man from I-Psi-T was fazed, not eager to venture further. Richard heard susurrus under the muzak.
Ghosts.
Head made the first move and wandered off the lift-bed platform.
That jolted Onions out of his reverie. He nodded to de Maltby and followed Head.
Richard saw the pilot had his side-arm out.
‘I’d put that away if I were you,’ cautioned Richard. ‘Someone’ll only get hurt.’
‘Uhhhhm,’ said de Maltby, affecting not to hear the advice.
Richard shrugged. ‘Just trying to help,’ he told Stacy.
Yoland, Kydd and Miss Gill padded after the others.
Richard hung back, mind open, all receivers alert. The place was shrieking at him now. Stacy touched his shoulder, carefully.
‘We’ll be left behind,’ she said, gently.
He looked into her face, glimpsing skull under skin. He saw for an X-ray instant the back-teeth she would not sacrifice for a career, sensed the sparking synapses of her admirable brain. Fred had not assigned his minder casually. He had a spasm of fear for her. This place was dangerous.
Between seconds, he had a flash – more than a vision, it came with sound, smell, temperature. The corridor was swept by a blossom of fire. The stutter of gunfire was tinnitus, cutting through his skull. His skin broiled, his hair crisped.
‘Richard,’ Stacy said, snapping her fingers under his nose, ‘come out of it.’
He did. His face tingled, his ears rang. Otherwise, he was fine.
‘Who am I?’ she asked.
