by Pat Kelleher
Atkins pushed on into the gloom beyond the penumbra of sunlight, at least knowing that the end of this mission was in sight. All they had to do was kill the creature that had gone to ground here and they could return to the encampment. They had rifles, Mills bombs; they even had a couple of flares. If that lot failed, they had the tank. They could blow this entire ruin sky high if they had to. Either way, it ended today. After that, Mathers was Lieutenant Everson’s problem.
There were several tunnels leading off the antechamber. Napoo knelt and examined the dust on the floor, while Nellie held the torch for him. It was easy to spot the footprints left by the tank crew. “This way,” he said, leading them across the dusty floor. The party fell in behind him, bayonets at the ready. Atkins looked back at the bright entrance, the hard outlines softened by translucent hanging fronds and back-lit by the sun, and turned back to face the dark. He shuddered. He hated these places.
The tunnel they entered sloped up perceptibly. Roots and creepers had slithered on in advance of them long ago, affixing themselves to the floor and walls, and they had to watch their footing. Eventually the tunnel began to level out. Their torch flames guttered in a soft breeze.
In places, the luminescent lichen, that Chandar told them used to sit in niches lighting the passages, had grown wild and unkempt, giving an opalescent glow to the tunnels.
Here though, the trail was lost. Something had swept along these tunnels so frequently there was no dust trail left to follow. It must be the creature, Atkins realised. There was a hardened black sheen to the walls here, as if the oily residue it left behind had dried. There was no way of telling which of the branching passages the tank crew had taken.
They moved cautiously along a passage. The further they went without incident, the more anxious Atkins became.
Openings yawned in the passage walls. They all had to be checked out. Some were adjoining tunnels, others chambers, empty and bare.
Porgy thrust his torch into another room as they passed, while Chalky lunged forwards in an “on guard” stance with his bayonet. Holding the torch high, lighting the gloom with a flickering orange glow, Porgy cast a glance around the small chamber. There was another passage exiting on the far side. He edged across the room and along the short passage beyond, holding out his torch to illuminate a second chamber.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Only, you’d better come and take a look at this!”
THE TANK CREW had no idea where they were, but they followed Mathers, who seemed to know which way he was going. They didn’t need torches. They could see well enough, thanks to the synesthetic petrol fruit fumes that now flooded their bloodstreams. Their footsteps produced colours and flavours that rippled down the Chatt-made circular tunnels.
Mathers led them deeper into the labyrinthine tunnels of the ruin, taking switches and junctions without a second’s pause until, deep in the ruined edifice, they came to an empty chamber. Alfie could not see anything remarkable about the chamber, there was nothing to indicate why they might have stopped here.
“This will do,” said Mathers. “We don’t want any interruptions.” The crew turned to Alfie. Their looks were not pleasant. Alfie edged back towards the chamber entrance, but the others surrounded him. “What’s all this in aid of?” he croaked. “I thought we were going to kill this evil spirit, this devil.”
“We are, but first we have some business to attend to,” said Mathers. “You.”
“Me, sir?”
Alfie felt a surge of fear drive into his limbs, ready for flight. Too late. Frank and Norman seized him by the arms and held them out at his sides, as if he were being crucified. He struggled but they held him fast.
“Sorry, old bean,” said Reggie, with a weak, apologetic smile. “It’s for the best.”
“I don’t understand, sir. What have I done? What have I done to any of you? I’ve followed your orders, sir. I’ve helped keep the tank running. I’ve kept your secrets.”
Mathers shook his head in disappointment. His voice was calm. “True. You are with us, as you have been since Elveden. Your mind, however, is... elsewhere.”
Without effort, Alfie’s thoughts turned to Nellie. Was that it? Was that what all this was about?
Mathers stepped towards him. Bruise-coloured auras rose from his mates on the convection currents of their own body heat, and collected gently in the dome of the chamber above their heads.
He looked up at Mathers, who now stood over him in his rain cape, the leather and chainmail mask inscrutable. “Sir, what’re you doing?”
Mathers nodded. Frank and Norman forced Alfie to his knees, still holding his arms out straight at his sides. “I’m offering you a chance to recant, Perkins, a chance to rejoin the fold, as it were.”
“But I never left, sir.”
“You’re forgetting, Perkins. I can see you. You’re confused, afraid. You have to let go.”
Mathers nodded at Wally.
The cockney stood behind Alfie and pulled his head back with a hand on his forehead.
Alfie continue to struggle, but to no avail. “No! Whatever you’re doing, sir... don’t!”
Mathers reached under his rain cape and retrieved his hip flask. He took the top off. Alfie felt Wally’s calloused fingers on his nose and briefly smelled the cigarette-stained tips before they pinched his nostrils shut. Alfie struggled, refusing to open his mouth. Mathers stood and waited patiently. The moment Alfie opened his mouth to gasp for air he poured the petrol fruit down his throat.
“Receive the Sacrament of Skarra,” he said, in reverent tones.
Alfie coughed and spluttered, but Wally clamped his hand over his mouth until he swallowed. He felt the spirit burn down the back of his throat, bringing tears to his eyes.
Then his world exploded.
Frank and Norman let go of Alfie, and the gearsman slumped back on his heels. Briefly, the world was afire, all his senses screaming. The chamber was a shifting kaleidoscope of unnameable colours, bringing vertigo and nausea. Unfathomable shapes of sound danced at the periphery of his vision. He paused, dry-retching. He took deep breaths, one hand braced against the floor, until the vertigo passed. Like a newly struck Lucifer, the initial flare of sensation died down and the world settled, more or less, but brighter and keener than before, as the undiluted petrol fruit coursed through his system.
“You see the world the way I do,” he heard Mathers say, or was that smell? “Transubstantiated by the grace of Skarra.”
He looked towards the taste of Mathers’ voice as he stood over him holding out a hand. Alfie reached out, took it, and found himself hauled to his feet through a dizzying wave of vertigo. It took a moment for his new world to reorient itself.
Alfie looked round and saw Mathers. And he saw the things within Mathers. The lieutenant put a finger to his chainmail, where his lips were. The meaning was clear. Shhh.
WITHOUT A TORCH, Atkins edged cautiously down the dark passage, towards Porgy’s light, emerging into another, larger chamber.
He drew an involuntary gasp at the tableau he found there. Around the chamber were four mummified human corpses; dry, taut skin stretched thinly over bone, brittle hair still attached to the skulls, perfectly preserved in the arid atmosphere of the edifice. It was clear from their sizes that they might be a family. Two small bodies, children, lay in a crude moss-stuffed mattress on the floor, clinging to each other, as if in their sleep. One was a boy, dressed in a nightshirt, the other, a girl, in a dress. The body of a man, sat on a rough chair, slumped over a makeshift table constructed of rough-hewn planks. He was dressed in a shirt and trousers, with braces. The remains of a once full and bushy beard now straggled wispily from his chin. On the table was an oil lamp. The body of a woman lay sprawled on the floor, as if trying to drag herself towards the children. Her hair was tied in a bun at the back of her scalp and she wore an ankle-length skirt and a blouse. The skirt and dirty white underskirt had ridden up to expose the shrunken and desiccated legs and feet still laced in worn leather
boots.
A dark and terrifying thought began to uncoil in Atkins’ mind. His mouth went dry, and he suddenly found it hard to breathe, as if all the air in the chamber had been sucked away. It felt as if he were standing on the edge of a vertiginous black chasm.
Porgy came back from a brief exploration of further chambers beyond that one. “There are three more chambers like this one. Bodies in each of ’em.”
“Like these?” Atkins said in a hoarse croak, his mouth dry with fear. “Yes, poor buggers.”
He felt his stomach screwed into a knot, as tight as that he felt when about to go over the top. A cold sweat broke out all over his body, chilling him. He shivered as he numbly followed Porgy into the next chamber; he could hear the pulse of blood in his ears, and his heart beat loudly in his chest, straining to burst out of his ribcage.
Beyond them, in the next chamber, Mercy held the torch high so he could see. Here was another group of people. On one side of the chamber were two bodies laid out and covered with sacking sheets. They had obviously died before the others and been laid out with the respect due to the dead. The other body had not. It belonged to a woman wearing a small white cap on her head, wisps of ginger hair escaping from underneath it over her brown, parchment-like skin. The body was sat slumped against a wall on another mattress, a tartan blanket covering her legs. Shadows cast by the torch danced in her sockets and her lips were drawn back, exposing rotten teeth. Her skeletal fingers were covered with a translucent film of skin, and they lay over a black object that sat on the blanket in her lap.
Atkins squatted down, his hands trembling, as he gently tried to pull the object from her hands. He winced as a finger snapped off, but retrieved the object. Covered in black leather, it was a book; embossed in gold on the front were the words Holy Bible. He opened it up. There was writing on the fly page in a neat copperplate hand: This gift is of Ichabod Wallace to his beloved daughter Eliza on the occasion of her marriage to James Edwin Bleeker, April 1832.
These were no Urmen. These were humans, from Earth.
Atkins staggered back to the first chamber in a daze. Unlike him, the others hadn’t quite grasped the significance yet.
“The poor little things,” Nellie said, as she draped a blanket over their small frames.
“Blimey, even you couldn’t get much meat off this lot, Gutsy,” Gazette said.
“Maybe not,” he replied, “But my wife would damn well try and sell ’em if she could. Don’t let a scrap go to waste, she don’t.”
Gazette took in the butcher’s ample frame. “So, every little bit gets used, does it?” he asked, with a wink, indicating Gutsy’s trousers.
“Get away!” said Mercy. “You know what they say about butchers’ wives, only the best cuts for them, am I right, Gutsy?”
Gutsy replied with a lecherous grin and a wink, “Oh, aye, lad.”
Nellie gave a discreet, lady-like cough. It had more power than a dozen barking NCOs and resulted in a muttered chorus of embarrassed apologies.
Chandar was in its element. To the Chatt, this was a treasure trove of Urmen artefacts. It hardly knew where to start. It had learnt, though, not to touch the bodies, however much it might desire to.
“Here,” said Porgy sombrely. “This was on the table.”
It was a journal. Atkins leafed through the diary, taking in snatches of information like a hungry man tearing at bread.
They were a party of pioneers from Oak Springs, Illinois in the United States, emigrants under the captaincy of Edwin Bleeker, travelling west on the California Trail looking for a new life in California. It seemed that they, like the British Empire, felt they had a ‘manifest destiny.’ There were eighty-six people in the party and fifty-four wagons pulled by oxen and horses. They had made it to the frontier and Independence, Missouri, where, in March 1846, they started the two thousand mile trek that would take them north towards the Great Salt Lake along the California Trail.
Atkins didn’t understand the geography, but at some point, there had been an argument as to which way the overlanders should proceed. Oh, there were names he recognised from old Western Adventure story magazines—Chimney Rock, Fort Laramie—but the rest meant nothing. Having made it to the Rock Independence in late June 1846, where the travellers had carved their names, they set off again. More names: Fort Bridger, Sheep Rock, Devil’s Gate, Salt Lake.
A guide they had picked along the way, one Barnaby Witger, advocated a short cut, the Campbell Cut-off through the Wasatch Mountains, and across the Great Salt desert towards the Humbolt River.
From the earliest diary entries, it was clear it wasn’t an easy journey, between exhausted oxen, broken axels, and deaths from cholera.
Right now, though, the events on Earth were of little importance to him. His hands shook as he looked for entries telling of their arrival here, in this place, on this world.
He flicked forwards until he found it. August 14th 1846. He skimmed through from there.
August 14th. Today a fog descended as we made our way. We lit lamps but we could barely see the wagon in front of us. It was decided we would stop and wait for the fog to lift before we continued, but we were afflicted with a violent nausea and many of our party began bleeding from ears, nose and mouth...
A violent vertigo drove our oxen to their knees...
Louisa May Franklin fell from the wagon and under the wheels...
Lukas Bergen’s compass no longer works. We cannot tell North from South.
...when the fog did clear the sight that met our eyes was not one we expected. Some say we must have taken a wrong turning and that we should turn back and retrace our steps, but we can find no landmarks.
...the night sky is passing strange and affords no familiarity...
He read on...
August 16th. Foul demonic beasts descended on our wagons, mauling and killing most of our oxen, dragging them away. They overturned the Marchants’ wagon, breaking William Marchant’s leg...
August 17th. This place is a hell. Hourly we cursed Campbell and Witger’s names. The Campbell Cut-off has cost us dearly. Today we lost three dear children, stolen away by winged creatures...
August 24th. William Marchant died today of an ungodly infection to his leg. We made a coffin and buried him.
September 3rd. We have found shelter, an abandoned ruin in the woods. It is better than the wagons, which we had to abandon. We could not get them through the trees...
September 9th. Isaiah Walker led a party of twelve to find help.
Dear God, the people lasted barely three months in this place. He turned the page and turned back again. There were pages missing, torn out; over an entire month, gone. He turned to the last entries, a panic rising in his chest.
October 13th. We ate the last of our surviving oxen today...
November 19th. Last night, my dear George passed away of a terrible fever. He was delirious and did not know me. The Hollands died yesterday in fearful agony. I fear that if Isaiah Walker does not return soon he will come too late. May the Almighty preserve us and see our souls safely to Paradise.
Atkins closed the book. Feeling light-headed, he shoved the diary at Mercy and staggered from the chamber. Mercy said something, but he didn’t hear it. The world had shrunk, pressing in on him, constricting him. He shoved his way past the damn Chatt, which was clicking at him. He needed air. He stumbled out into the dark of the passage and felt some small relief from the cool breeze that blew along it.
The Pennines were not the first humans to find themselves here. But after what they had just found, the thought brought little or no comfort to Atkins now. Those people had died here. They died here. There was no way home. It was a one-way trip. Everything he had clung to had been washed away. He felt bereft, adrift.
Gutsy called out from back up the passage, “Only, are you okay? It’s just that Mercy said you seemed a bit windy.”
“A bit windy?” said Atkins, with a sardonic laugh. “Ha, that’s a good one.” He wiped away the tear
s with the coarse serge sleeve of his tunic. He welcomed the rasping pain on his eyelids and cheeks. “I bloody well funked it, Gutsy. I funked it.”
“It happens to the best, Only, you know that,” said Gutsy, walking towards him. “What matters is you pick yourself up, get yourself back on the fire step.”
“Yes, because that worked so bloody well for Ginger, didn’t it?”
“Ginger had mates. So do you.”
“There’s no point, no bloody point. There’s no way home, Gutsy. I promised I’d look after Flora, but you saw yourself, there is no way home.”
“Flora? Your brother’s fiancée? Very noble sentiment, is that. You’re to be commended.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Only. You’re not the only person to have lost people! We all have family and loved ones back in Blighty. Do you think you’re the only one who doesn’t feel sick looking up at the stars? Do you think you’re the only one who doesn’t wake with a start in the middle of the night with their name on your lips? Do you? D’you think you’re the only one whose heart breaks with every dawn we see here? We’re all in the same hole here, Only. If you know of a better one, go to it!” Gutsy sighed, shook his head sympathetically and softened his tone. “Look, whatever’s going on in your head, you need to sort it. Box it up, put it away. If your head’s not here, you’re going to get yourself killed. You’re going to get us killed. And I’m not going to die because you’ve got a broken heart.”
Atkins looked at him and nodded. There was nothing more to be said. Together, they walked back to the chambers.
When they got there, Mercy had the diary open in his hands. Atkins could tell from the stunned, downcast faces of the men around him that they had all heard the contents of the journal. Even Chandar seemed aware that something had happened, even if it wasn’t sure what. Atkins looked at each of the men in turn. “We can tell no one of this. We must keep this secret. Can you imagine what would happen to morale if the rest of the battalion find out? It would tear it apart.”
