by Pat Kelleher
All around him, the Urmen wailed in a ritual response.
Atkins heard the words with something akin to despair, and let out a low moan. He felt the weight of another prediction bearing down. It seemed that the more he struggled towards his goal of returning to Flora, the more the damned skeins of fate drew tighter in around him. Was there no way he could escape them? Besides, they promised only vague generalities, never specifics. Where was the one that could have prevented Porgy’s death?
There was another flash. Atkins glanced up out of a loophole. Another discharge. Nearer, this time. He saw the perverse lightning bolt punch up, writhing restlessly into the sky. Then came the crump of thunder.
The Urmen flinched as one, and some wailed and ululated, as if in grief.
“It’s another—” Atkins groped for the word.
“Telluric discharge,” Riley offered.
“—Telluric discharge, sir. Nearer, this time, by the looks of it.”
“They are the Anguish of Croatoan as he is punished in the underworld by Skarra on GarSuleth’s decree. His cries made manifest,” declared Ranaman.
“Tell me what you know of Croatoan,” asked Everson.
The chieftain’s face beamed with pride as he spoke, white teeth against a tanned weathered skin. “We are the devoted servants of Croatoan. We have kept the faith of our forefathers.” He turned and beckoned towards the fractured rock. “Come, I will show you.”
Everson’s eyes flicked around, “Atkins, with me. Perkins, you’d better come too. The rest of you, stay alert. Keep them covered.”
Ranaman led the Tommies to the huge split boulder that dominated the sacred space. Crepuscular fingers of light shone down upon it from the slits up in the tower above. With its blood-coloured rust stains, Atkins could well believe it was the heart of some giant.
“Behold, the Heart of Croatoan. Long has it been in the care of the Ruanach. His heart was broken when he fell and will only be healed when Croatoan is released from his prison in the underworld. And now, with your presence, as foretold by our ancestors, that time is near.”
“This temple marks the centre of the crater,” said Everson.
“The very spot where Croatoan fell,” declared Ranaman catechistically.
Everson stood close to Atkins and Perkins and, leaning in, spoke in a low voice. “This thing is composed of iron. Probably the remains of a meteor that hit the planet hundreds of years ago. It would seem that Chatt and Urman myth has some basis in fact.” He looked up into the minaret above. The domed temple, with its thin, tapering minaret, might be a representation of the ancient event, the dome being the impact of the meteor, the minaret its fiery tail.
“Iron?” said Atkins, touching the boulder.
“The reason I suspect Perkins was spared,” said Everson. “They mistook the crash of the Ivanhoe for another sacred rock falling from the sky.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow. “You’re the Man in the Moon, Perkins.”
“Come,” said Ranaman, leading them through the narrow cleft between the two halves of rock, towards the back of the temple. They could have walked round, but there seemed to be some implied ritual in passing between them, a significance of which they were unaware. There, from a niche in the wall, Ranaman retrieved the wooden casket.
“This great magic was left in our keeping also. Through it, our ancestors who sought out Croatoan communicate with us from the Village of the Dead. It has been a long time since our ancestors spoke to us. Then came the sky-being, Jeffries. He said he came from the place of our forefathers in search of Croatoan. He spoke to our ancestors and then passed beyond, following them into the underworld.”
As he spoke, Ranaman opened the casket, revealing the leatherbound book. Everson lifted it out of its resting place and set it on a shallow facet of the rock so that it was illuminated by a pool of light from the minaret above. It was definitely older than the Bleeker journal, with heavy binding and thick wrinkled vellum pages.
His anticipation grew as he traced a finger over the Croatoan Sigil, cast in iron embedded on the front. He licked an index finger and proceeded to turn the pages. The book was another journal of sorts. Many early portions were in a script he couldn’t read, but one that he recognised.
“It looks like the code in Jeffries’ occult journal,” said Atkins.
“Hmm,” said Everson thoughtfully. Here and there, he recognised the Croatoan symbol again. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Near the beginning, there was a manifest. Those sections he could read spoke of a new Virginia colony and of Croatoan. It seemed that whatever befell the missing colony, stranger and more deadly things had befallen them here.
“So they did come from Earth,” said Perkins.
“It appears so,” said Everson uncomfortably. “They’d gone looking for a new world. It seemed the one that they found wasn’t quite what most of them expected.”
Other pages spoke volumes, more so because they weren’t there. Someone had torn them out. Jeffries again, no doubt. All of which served to convince Everson that he was on the right track. He speculated on what information they might contain. There was no doubt that this book contained a factual account of the colony’s day-to-day survival, among other, more esoteric, matters. He would have liked to study it more closely, but Ranaman took the book from him and clutched it to his chest.
As the Urman led them back through the cloven rock, Everson wondered wistfully if the battalion’s own War Diary would become such a relic in the future. He had a vision of some other snatched and stranded band of people, some decades or a century hence, arriving on the strange world in strange machines, coming across the Pennine Fusiliers’ official account. He imagined them finding the remains of the trenches, reclaimed by the veldt, long overgrown and forgotten. Skeletons occupied the firesteps, standing to for eternity, their khaki uniforms rotting and their bleached bones intimately entwined with wireweed. In his mind’s eye, he saw his dugout, half-collapsed and empty, a memorial, like Scott’s Antarctic hut, and envisaged the strangers coming across the mildewed and foxed Battalion War Diary and looking at it in wonder and fear. He shook his head and dismissed the maudlin fancy. He didn’t want that to become their reality.
TULLIVER CAUGHT GLIMPSES of the tower through the trees before him. The only sound breaking the silence around him was the crack and slap of the undergrowth and Hepton’s inveterate cursing as he lumbered along, carrying his bags, boxes and tripod.
He squinted through the thinning canopy overhead. His petrol-fruitenhanced eyes caught an area of the sky that seemed to shine a little brighter than the rest, as if it had been polished and worn through wear. Another bright flash arced its way into the sky. Interesting. It seemed his heightened senses could pick up a building discharge.
It was followed a few seconds later by a rolling boom, and in the distance, he could hear whoops and howls of alarm. However, around them, but for the persistent creep and creak of the parasitic creepers that pervaded the jungle, they were cocooned in an area of silence.
As they pushed on, Tulliver, curious, exercised his newfound skill, spotting other shiny patches of sky and finding that each built to a lightning bolt. So intent was he on honing this new skill that he stepped out of the undergrowth and almost onto the end of a bayonet, as Mercy and Pot Shot spun round to meet his unexpected arrival with cold steel.
“Halt! Identify yourself. Friend or—fucking hell, sorry, Mr Tulliver, sir!”
Something came crashing through the undergrowth, huffing and snorting. The two Tommies swung their rifles towards the sound.
“Christ, no!” said Tulliver, his hand pushing Mercy’s rifle barrel down. “That’s Mr Hepton.” Then he sniffed and waved his revolver in the general direction of the noise. “Then again, kill him if you want. I shan’t bloody blame you.”
Hepton stumbled into the clearing and, upon seeing the Fusiliers, proceeded to divest himself of his baggage and equipment, dumping it on the ground at his feet.
Mercy and Pot Shot looked at each other.
Hepton stood there, waiting. “Well?”
“Jenkins is dead, sir.”
Hepton threw his hands to the heavens and rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Bloody typical!”
“Where’s Everson? I’ve something he needs to see,” Tulliver asked, patting the wrapped package under his arm.
“This way, sir,” said Mercy, leading him into the temple.
“Are you going to help me?” snapped Hepton at Pot Shot.
“Can’t sir,” said Pot Shot, straight-faced. “I’m on guard.”
Muttering and huffing, Hepton glared darkly after the pilot before shouldering his load, unaware of the gossamer-fine white threads spreading silently through the damp soil and leaf mulch at his feet.
INSIDE THE TEMPLE, Tulliver saw Everson, standing at the centre along with Atkins, a tanker and an Urman, lit by shafts of sunlight converging from slits in the tower above. They served to illuminate two halves of a huge boulder. Around them, a host of Urmen sat or knelt, watching them with rapt attention as if trying to burn the moment into their memories.
The doors of the temple crashed open behind him as an irate Hepton dragged his equipment inside, almost tripping over an Urman, who shuffled out of his way.
“Bloody fuzzy wuzzies!” he muttered.
Tulliver shook his head and ignored him.
The Lieutenant looked up from his rocky lectern. “Tulliver! Thank God. Is your machine safe?”
“As safe as it can be around here,” said Tulliver, irritated that Everson’s first thought was for his bus.
“What about the Alleyman?”
“Werner?” said Tulliver. “Crashed, but not before he showed me something I think you ought to see. It concerns the wall we found in the canyon. I’ve reason to believe that it may be part of something much bigger altogether.” Tulliver unwrapped his package. “Werner told me he’d seen a pattern etched across the landscape. I think the canyon wall and the crater strip are part of it.”
Everson raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. We’ve managed to send a Morse signal along the Strip back to the canyon earlier. They seem to be made of the same metal.”
“Really? Thanks to Hepton, unbelievably, now you can see, too.
Werner took this negative plate from thirteen thousand feet. We got the Chatts to mix up some sort of developing fluid.”
“It’s not perfect. We didn’t have anything with which to fix the image,” said Hepton. “It’s not my fault.”
Tulliver passed the negative plate to Everson, who held it up in a shaft of light.
He frowned with concentration as he studied the image. “What am I looking at?”
Tulliver took him through it, pointing out the tracery of geometric lines across the landscape, clearer for being reversed.
“They look like some kind of roadways across the landscape, or some sort of sacred geometry, perhaps; see how they radiate out from various points,” he said.
“Reminds me of Jeffries’ pentagram on the Somme, sir,” said Atkins, peering at the pattern.
“That occurred to me, too,” admitted Tulliver. “It’s more than that, Everson. If you are right about the wall and the Strip, it would seem to indicate some sort of superstructure underpinning the landscape. The Chatts believe it to be a kind of geomancy, divine proof that GarSuleth wove this world for them. And another thing, these reverse lightning bolts—”
“Riley calls them telluric discharges,” said Everson.
“—these telluric discharges seem to emanate from points where these lines converge and intercept. Here and here, for instance,” he said quickly pointing out nodes on the rapidly darkening glass plate.
“If you ask me, there’s a much bigger mystery at the heart of this than mere Chatt theology. I’d stake my life on it.”
“Hmm.” Everson nodded thoughtfully. “The Urmen believe these telluric discharges are the agonies of Croatoan, imprisoned and tortured in some Chatt version of Hell.”
As they studied the image on the plate, Tulliver felt a faint tingling in his hands. He lifted his arm, inspected his palm, and turned it over.
The hairs on the back of his hand stood on end, as if a static charge were building. He looked at the rocks and noticed out of the corner of his eye, in the cleft between them, the same kind of peculiar shine; as if the air had been polished to a high patina and worn thin in the process.
He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.
“John,” he said in measured tones, “I think you should step away from the boulders.”
A faint intermittent buzz started to issue from the two halves. “He’s right, sir, better step back,” said Riley, foregoing military conduct and grabbing Everson’s braided cuff.
By now the other Urmen were moving back, all except Tarak, who watched the proceedings with growing concern. Ranaman held the metal-clasped book, mesmerised by the sudden activity, as small writhing threads of white-blue energy began to spit between the two halves. As they built in a crescendo of power, crackles of energy leapt from the rock to the walls of the dome like Tesla arcs.
“The Heart of Croatoan begins to beat!” cried Ranaman, his voice filled with wonder and triumph, his hair now billowing out with collected static.
“No!” cried Riley, dropping to the ground. “Get down and for gawd’s sake take off yer battle bowlers if yer wearin’ ’em!” Bolts of energy, attracted by Ranaman’s proximity, leapt across the space and earthed through him, jerking him like a crazed marionette.
He let out a strangled scream that cut off abruptly as the bolt vanished.
He dropped to the ground, a broken puppet, as if it had been all that was holding him up. The book skittered between the two halves of rock.
There were moans and screams from the Urmen, who got up and stampeded for the temple doors, knocking the crouching Fusiliers and tankers aside.
Tendrils of blue-white energy spat out from the split rock to lick the inside of the dome before dying down as if someone had turned a dial, leaving one or two stray arcs that still sparked and spat intermittently between the halves.
Everson looked back past Ranaman’s body to the rocks. The fallen book lay in the cleft between them.
Everson made to go back and get it, but Perkins grabbed him. “It’s too dangerous, sir.”
“We need the book, Private!”
Tarak hesitated for a second, and then bolted past Ranaman’s body towards the sacred rocks.
“No, son!” yelled Perkins.
Tarak knelt low by the rocks, stretching his hand out to reach the tome. Fingers flexed as he strained to reach for the book. Small arcs of energy snapped angrily about it, like electric teeth. Undeterred, Tarak edged into the cleft and grasped the book firmly. As he retrieved it, clasping it to his chest, a bolt of energy arced out and struck the book, propelling him back across the chamber.
Perkins began to drag himself on his belly and elbows across the dirt floor towards the Urman.
Then, from outside, the shouts and screams began, accompanied by the sound of rapid rifle fire.
INTERLUDE FOUR
Letter from Lance Corporal Thomas Atkins
to Flora Mullins
6th April 1917
My Dearest Flora,
Still no blessed tank. Would you believe it? We did meet up with the RFC chap, though. Not blagged a go in his aeroplane yet, then again, I’ve been a bit busy. Still, when all is said and done, we had a grand ride in a hot air balloon. You could see for miles. Who says the Army is all hard work and no play?
Having said that, we’ve come down to earth with a bit of a bump now. The place where we are now is completely overgrown, it’s worse than your dad’s vegetable patch. I think we might have to do a bit of weeding.
Mi
nd you, we do actually have all the modern conveniences— and your Mama worries about us poor lads at the Front. We have Electricity at the moment. All I need is a smoking jacket and an armchair while I read my book and look at photographs and I’ll be right at home. I know my Grandma doesn’t hold with it, and I can see why. I very nearly did have a smoking jacket! The Company Quartermaster Sergeant wouldn’t have been too happy about that.
Ever yours,
Thomas
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“The Sullen Ghosts of Men...”
ON THE FLOOR of the temple, Alfie shook the prostrate Tarak by the shoulders, as the indoor lightning played over his head. Splayed on his back, Tarak still clutched the book tightly to his chest.
“Lad? Lad!”
The youth groaned.
“He’s alive. Nellie. Nellie!”
Nellie came over on all fours, the medical knapsack swinging at her side from one shoulder as she sought to avoid the tendrils of energy that spat from the rocks. Needing to do something, Padre Rand went with her on all fours.
Nellie checked Tarak’s pulse and breathing. He was still alive, but unconscious.
She gently prised the book from the lad’s grasp, and as she did so, she gasped.
The padre made the sign of the cross. “Dear Lord, the poor man,” he said under his breath.
Seared into Tarak’s chest, from the iron design on the front of the tome, was the Sigil of Croatoan.
STAYING LOW, TULLIVER scrambled over to the temple wall and, with a wary glance back at the arcing rock, raised his head to look out through a loophole.
