Siege of Stone

by Williamson, Chet

  "They came from this peninsula," Laika said.

  "Right. And this is where the observers—these searchers—started to appear. Now, we have no idea of what their true forms are like, but they probably sent themselves in guises similar to the indigenous life forms so as not to alarm us, which accounts for the humanoid appearances. I first saw one of these searchers as my father. Maybe it was able to get into my mind the same way Mulcifer did. Still, there was always something alien about them, the glowing, the aura of light, the sounds. So there are our ghosts and aliens and angels."

  "And there's the reason behind the legend of the Fairy Flag," said Laika. "When the clan chiefs waved it before they went into battle, they sent the signal. The searchers came, looking for an escaped prisoner, only to find a false alarm. Still, their appearance probably scared the hell out of the enemy. But this time it was no false alarm."

  Joseph looked at the ruins of the castle and the dozens of men picking over it. In his mind, he saw again the cone of light and felt its quieting presence, quieting for all but one. "Yes," he said. "This time they saw that it was real. The cloth came to the surface through luck, or fate—"

  "Or God," Tony said.

  "Maybe. But this time they really came—physically, I mean. And they set things right."

  Laika frowned. "I just had a thought. The Fairy Flag—they learned that it wasn't cut from the piece of cloth that was dug up here. Does that mean then that there are . . . two cloths?"

  They were quiet for a moment. Then Tony spoke. "And more than one prisoner?"

  They looked down at the earth beneath their feet, and said nothing for a long time.

  Chapter 55

  When Joseph, Laika, and Tony walked back to the castle, Molly Fraser came up to them. "Stranger and stranger," she said. "I'm glad you're here to see it. The boys have been digging, and they've gotten down to the source of the blast in the cellar. Care to do a little more exploring?"

  "What do you have in mind?" Laika asked.

  They followed Molly, picking their way across the rubble until they started to descend into the crater that the bomb had produced. Joseph saw the remnants of the huge stones that had probably been the pillars supporting the castle. In the center of what remained of a stone wall, there was a ten-foot-wide opening caused by the explosion. A cold wind blew up out of it. "Behold," Molly said.

  "That's where the coat of arms was," Tony said. "Against that wall. Bomb took it right down."

  Joseph walked to the opening. Though the sunlight shone only a short way into it, he could see a tunnel heading downward. He turned back to Molly. "Anyone go in yet?"

  "No. They just uncovered it. Martin is getting some men together now to go down." She raised an eyebrow, and Joseph answered for all of them.

  "I think you'd have to clap us in irons to keep us out of that hole."

  In another few minutes Martin Leech arrived at the bottom of the crater with half a dozen armed soldiers and several MI5 people. Some of the soldiers were carrying bright electronic lanterns, and one of them handed out strong flashlights to the others.

  "I'm not altogether happy," said Leech, "over the idea of your coming down with us, but since you've been in on this from the beginning, you might be able to shed some light on things, depending on what we might find, of course."

  "We appreciate the opportunity," Laika said, without a trace of sarcasm.

  The soldiers led the way, and Leech, Molly, the operatives, and the MI5 people followed. The tunnel narrowed quickly, becoming just wide and high enough for them to walk through single file. Joseph felt claustrophobic, and was unpleasantly reminded of when he and Laika had maneuvered in the narrow space between the walls of the supposedly haunted townhouses in New York City.

  It had only been a few months before, but so much had happened since then that it seemed a lifetime. He had learned a great deal in the interim, and he suspected that he had changed as well, but he wondered if it was for the better.

  Today he had said things that he never could have imagined himself saying. He had been talking about aliens and mysterious powers and FTL travel, and other things that would have made his acquaintances connected with CSICOP and other skeptics' groups look at him as though he were crazy.

  But, he told himself, he had followed the scientific method to draw his conclusions, and damn it, it was science that had caused all these things, nothing supernatural. True, it was a science far beyond anything known to humans, but science nonetheless. At least he had that much to comfort him.

  They had gone what Joseph estimated to be several hundred yards, always downward, when Laika stopped and looked carefully at the wall. Those behind her were forced to stop as well, and those ahead turned and waited. "What is it?" asked Joseph.

  "Have you noticed that this tunnel isn't smooth, the way it should be if it had been formed naturally? And look at these marks. What do you think?"

  Joseph looked closely. He felt Tony against his shoulder, and saw Molly looking at the wall in front of Laika. Then Tony let out a deep breath. "That's impossible," he said. "Oh man, it can't be."

  "What do you think?" Laika repeated.

  "They look like chip marks," Joseph said. "Thousands and thousands of marks on all the surfaces, as though this tunnel were chiseled out of the rock."

  "Yeah, that's wild enough. But there's something else," Laika said. "Look closely. Look at the direction of the chips."

  "Oh no," said Tony after a moment, and then added quickly, "No no no no no. . . ."

  "From beneath," Molly Fraser said quietly. "This was chiseled from beneath."

  "Let's . . . proceed," Leech said, and Joseph noticed that his voice sounded rough, as though he were trying to speak over strong emotion. He could understand the feeling. The discovery implied a conscious act carried out over ages, and only deepened the sense of awe that had been growing in Joseph for weeks.

  He found himself wondering if Mulcifer had used a similar tunnel to get to the nerve gas. If he had, that might mean that there were more of these tunnels, hundreds of them, honeycombing the subterranean world beneath their feet. He tried to drive the thought away, and concentrated on keeping his footing on the path that was growing ever steeper.

  They had gone perhaps a mile when the leader of the soldiers called out, "Coming into an open space!"

  As Joseph stepped into the cavern, he could not hold back a gasp. It was huge. The ceiling was over fifty feet high, and the chamber itself fifty yards in diameter. The walls and floor seemed to be made of the same type of rock that they had passed through in the tunnel for the past thirty feet or so, a flat gray mineral that shimmered in places with a metallic luster. But what was so arresting about the cavern was not its dimensions nor the uniformity of its walls, but what lay in a huge pile in the middle of the chamber.

  It was a vast assortment of bones.

  The mound of yellow shards rose to a height of ten feet at its center, and covered nearly half the floor of the cavern. Most of them were so old that they crumbled into dust when they were touched, and could not be identified as belonging to either beast or man. But along the edge of the pile, they found a large number of bones that had not yet decayed. Nearly all, however, had been cracked and shattered. Among them were several pieces that had once been parts of human skulls.

  "A charnel house far below the ground," Joseph said quietly to Laika, tossing a piece of bone he had just studied back onto the pile. "Why doesn't that surprise me any more than it does?"

  "I think it's going to take a lot to surprise us from now on," Laika accurately observed. "What's the rock this place is surrounded with?"

  "Galena," Tony said, coming up to them. Then he shrugged. "I got a mineralogy merit badge when I was a Boy Scout."

  "Galena, as in lead ore?" asked Joseph.

  "Right. I've been seeing veins of it ever since we came into the tunnel. But this is the mother lode." Tony looked across the cavern at the black mouths of other tunnels leading away. "I wonder where th
ose go."

  "I'd rather not know," Laika said. "Frankly, I'd be much happier if I hadn't even known about this place."

  Leech and Molly, both of whom looked slightly nervous, came up to the three operatives. "Any suggestions as to what this might be?" Leech asked.

  "We've been discussing it," said Laika, "but we have no idea." It was a tactful lie, Joseph thought. He had all too clear an idea of what this lead-lined cavern had been, and why the bones had been there. "I would make one suggestion, however," Laika went on. "And that is that after we leave, you should have that tunnel mouth sealed up permanently. And I'd suggest that you use some alloy of lead."

  "I'd suggest," said Joseph, "that you do better than that. What kind of lead did you use in the well on Mulcifer?"

  Leech turned to one of the men from MI5. "Pig lead," the man answered.

  "I don't know much about it," Joseph said. "Is there any purer lead?"

  The man nodded. "Pig lead is 99.73 percent lead content. Fully refined lead can have up to 99.99 percent content."

  "I suggest you spend the extra bucks and go for the purer stuff," said Joseph. "That .26 percent of crap may be why Mulcifer was able to break through it."

  "I'll suggest it," Leech said. "We'll probably want to take some photographs in here first, however."

  Joseph looked at the black mouths of the other tunnels, then turned back to Leech. "Use fast film," he said.

  As they entered the mouth of the tunnel through which they had come, Joseph held back, shining his light on the other tunnel openings, thinking that in the deeper darkness, he might actually see something, something that might be hesitant to show itself in the bright lantern light. He shone the lights on the tunnel mouths one by one, and for a moment he thought he saw what might have been the gleam of eyes, but then realized that it was only the metallic luster of the galena that saturated the rock.

  Joseph turned, shining his flashlight on the ground in front of him, and walked quickly to catch up to the fading lights of the rest of the party. He was twenty feet up the tunnel when he heard a sound behind him, a stealthy scuttling, like a scraping of a hard-shod foot, or a rough hoof, upon the rock. He whirled about, pointing the flashlight back down the tunnel like a gun, and thought he saw something move, dart quickly out of the light's beam.

  He stood for a moment, listening, and then he grew very frightened, and thought that he would give anything for a glimpse of daylight, and dreaded the climb back to the surface through the damp and shiny tunnel. He walked backward, keeping the light focused on where he had been. Then, when he heard the footsteps and occasional voices of the others ahead, he turned and ran, ran until he was with them again.

  He talked to Laika the rest of the way up, knowing that if he did not respond, she would at least turn around to see what had become of him, and might be able to save him, should something try and take him from behind, and add his bones to the pile that now lay once more in its eternal darkness.

  Chapter 56

  Martin Leech had put an armed guard at the mouth of the tunnel and had Molly Fraser and an MI5 agent accompany the three operatives back to their cottage. They would pack and sleep there overnight, and at five o'clock the next morning they would be driven to Glasgow and put on an eleven thirty British Air flight to Dulles Airport.

  At Laika Harris's request, Leech had also contacted the CIA, and made arrangements for a Company limousine to pick up the three agents and take them directly to Langley. With Skye dead, and with MI5 having partial knowledge of their mission and its consequences, it was high time to come in from the cold, and see how much colder the reception they got would be.

  Two MI5 agents arrived after dark to relieve the first. They remained in the kitchen of the cottage, brewing tea and talking softly through the night. Molly sat with the three ops in the drawing room, and they talked for a long time before Molly finally left at eleven.

  Joseph walked her out to her car, making sure that the MI5 agents knew he would be right back. "Thank you," he said, as they stood in the darkness together. "This never could have been resolved if it hadn't been for your believing us and trusting us. Despite everything."

  "My pleasure. It certainly made my usual rounds seem terribly dull. Do you think we'll have any more visits from ghosts here on the peninsula?"

  "No. The ghosts and the aliens and everything else are gone."

  "You know a whole lot more than you're letting on, don't you? I saw your face after Mulcifer disappeared. You looked like a patzer who just realized how to force checkmate in two moves."

  "All you need to know—and MI5 too, for that matter—is that there will be no more ghosts, the terrorist threat is ended, and I don't think we'll ever see the . . . person responsible for it again."

  She smiled. "Maybe that's all I really want to know. There are a few things I wish I could forget, like that cavern." She hissed, and gave a small shudder.

  "Just make sure they seal it up," Joseph said.

  "I'll do what I can." She leaned toward him and kissed him, briefly and gently, on the lips. "It was good to see you again."

  "Same here. I wish we had had time to catch up on things, talk a bit about more than just . . . our work, strange as it's been."

  "Me too. I think about you often, Joseph. We did have some lovely times together back in London, when people weren't trying to kill us, of course. Come visit Scotland again, not on business, but for pleasure, aye? I'll make ye a haggis 'twill melt in yer mouth, laddie."

  "You've never made a haggis in your life," he said, laughing.

  She laughed in return. "It's true, I haven't." Then they stopped laughing, and she kissed him again, holding it long enough for him to put his arms around her and hers around him.

  "Goodbye, Joseph," she said, turning toward her car. "God be with you, whether you want Him or not."

  They sat three across on the flight home, taking turns sitting in the dreaded middle seat. They slept, but mostly they talked, trying to explain the cavern and the pile of bones in a way that would let them categorize and departmentalize it so that they could mercifully forget it.

  But as they quickly learned, there was no light and breezy explanation for a cave full of bones both ancient and modern, and tunnels carved through solid rock from below. They considered the possibility that it was the place of imprisonment from which Mulcifer had come, a leaden tomb inside the earth where his cloth would sustain him. But had he been there for eons, long enough to cut his way upward one small sliver of stone at a time? If so, he must have had the patience of rain wearing down mountains.

  "The strong possibility," Joseph said, "and one that I don't like to think about, is that he wasn't alone. The two separate cloths suggest that. And could one being, even Mulcifer, kill all those creatures whose bones were there?"

  "He couldn't have," Laika said. "Remember, he'd been imprisoned by the church for over a millennium, and a lot of those bones were far less than a thousand years old." Laika looked out the window at the clouds below. "There's something else about those bones that bothered me. My old anthropology courses are coming back to haunt me. When you find bones like that, which are usually remnants of animal attack, or even bestial humans, there are always signs of eating, knife marks where the flesh has been cut or scraped off the bone, or teeth marks where it's been chewed off. There were no marks like that on those bones. Which leads me to believe that neither the men nor the animals were killed for food."

  "For what, then?" Tony asked. Laika turned a meaningful look on him, and he grimaced. "For the joy of it," he said. "Mulcifer's M.O. all the way."

  "Mulcifer's," Joseph agreed, "and those like Mulcifer. I think he was the golden boy. I think he was the only one smart enough or lucky enough to somehow get out."

  "And the rest," said Laika, "if there really are more, stayed down there. And are they down there still?" She sighed in the silence that was filled only by the low whine of the jet engines. "What were they to begin with, and what could they have become?" />
  "All the terrible things that dwell beneath the earth," said

  Joseph. "All the awful things we've ever imagined."

  "Like the Morlocks," Tony said. "In The Time Machine."

  "Lovecraft's alien monstrosities," Joseph went on. "And Richard Shaver's deros."

  "Who were they?" asked Laika.

  "Shaver was a pulp writer in the forties. He wrote these stories that he claimed were true, about an evil race of beings that lived in caverns in the earth and caused terrible events in the world above by psychic means. It was absolutely crazy, but a lot of people bought into it."

  "After what we know," Tony said, "I'd be pretty susceptible to that story myself."

  "I just hope they seal that opening up, and fast," said Laika, again looking out the window at the gloriously blue sky. "I don't like the idea of deros or Morlocks or whatever real things might be under our feet. I think I'd just like to stay up here, thank you, high above the ground."

  Tony frowned. "And high above all the questions that we're going to have to answer at Langley when we land."

  Chapter 57

  The limousine took them directly to Langley, where they were led into the office of the Deputy Director for Intelligence, the man to whom Skye had reported. Before entering the office, they were asked to surrender their arms, but they had carried none on the plane, as the agents who searched them discovered.

  Inside the director's office, they were seated in three chairs facing the director, who sat behind his desk. Two agents, who Laika Harris was certain were armed, stood behind them. Laika had on her lap the reports she had prepared on the plane.

  "Agent Harris, Agent Luciano, Agent Stein," the director said. "You seem to have caused some problems. According to your dossiers, you were to have been working in Asia and the Middle East. However, intercepted FBI reports as well as other intelligence have placed you in the United States. And now we hear from MI5 that they are returning you home after your participation in an operation in Scotland." The director leaned back in his chair and frowned. "Since Mr. Skye cannot be found to give us an explanation, perhaps you'd care to try."