The Dulwich Horror & Others

by David Hambling

  It sounded so normal when I said it. The watchman went in the direction I had indicated.

  I continued at a steady pace, not wanting to run into the other by surprise. I found myself in the main hall, passing the glass fountain and the enormous clock. I was back among the slot machines, and I saw something move. It was Paul.

  The boy was crouched on all fours behind the gipsy fortune-telling machine, peeking out at a spot in the distance.

  “Paul!” I hissed. I felt I had to whisper. “Where is it?”

  He was startled and looked around suddenly. He was scared, but had recovered most of his wits and the cunning of the hunted animal. He was holding something tightly in one small fist. I guessed it was the crystal.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s confused. It sees by radio waves, and the metal confuses it.”

  I realised he was talking about the metal of the Palace itself, the enormous iron framework supporting the glass around us.

  “Can we outrun it?”

  “Not if it sees us,” he said.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded gravely.

  Fifty feet away was a glass wall and beyond it the Park. Surely there was some way of breaking it and escaping. But that would be a noisy process, and even when we escaped we would be horribly exposed in the open park outside. Concealment seemed the safer option.

  We could go back to the studio, or find shelter behind one of the many other doors that opened on to the halls. There was one marked Crystal Palace Staff only behind me. I put my shoulder to it, and on the second try the lock gave. I pulled Paul through after me and closed it.

  An electric light revealed a corridor with offices on both sides, each with neat lettering above the door. The administration occupied a small army of clerks and secretaries, and this was one of their more extensive outposts. We could easily lose ourselves in here, and there would be other exits, so we could stay ahead if the other should happen to come closer. I relaxed fractionally; just having a closed, opaque door between me and that intruder made me feel better.

  “Where are we going?” Paul asked.

  “We are lying low,” I said quietly. I took the third door at random, flicked the light switch, and closed the door behind Paul. “It can’t search through the whole Palace.”

  We were in a small office with four desks, each with a typewriter, an in-tray, and an out-tray piled with papers. I pulled up a chair for myself and another for Paul.

  “You said it was blind but saw with radio waves,” I said in a whisper. “What other senses does it have? Can it hear, or smell?”

  He did not take the chair.

  “We can’t stay,” he said. “I didn’t explain properly. It sees through walls, with radio waves.”

  He looked involuntarily at his clenched fist. It was not us it was following, but the crystal.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my ears popped with pressure change and there was a crash as the outer door to the offices was wrenched off its hinges. A moment later the door into our room blew open, and air rushed past me. A shrill whistle rang in my ears. The contents of the desk trays flew into the air in a blizzard of paper; something like a dust devil, but made of paper, almost filled the room and ricocheted from wall to wall. It buffeted me almost off my feet.

  I took Paul’s hand and led him rapidly through the connecting door into a dark room, then a corridor and up a flight of steps. The whistling was still audible, but well behind us. I stumbled on the stairs in the darkness and lost my grip on Paul, then found him again. We raced up another flight of steps.

  I was wondering whether there was another staircase or if we would have to jump out a window when a blast of air struck. Even though it came from behind, it had the effect of sucking us backwards, like grasping tentacles made of air. I had a firm hold of the handrail on one side and Paul’s hand on the other. He wailed as the hurricane struck, and he was yanked off his feet.

  There was a great wrench, but my grip held; it seemed that I was holding Paul horizontally, and below us I could see glimmers of blue light in the darkness.

  The blast of air stopped; I slumped forward and Paul fell on to the stairs. I quickly hauled the boy around the corner and down the corridor. Something big was blundering about below us.

  The windows here admitted more light from outside. I was looking around for a weapon. I had the idea that the other looked fragile, that if I hurled one of the heavy typewriters down from above, it might injure the thing. There was a fire extinguisher by the door. Would that have any effect? Unlikely—but it gave me another idea.

  Flames are a form of plasma, electrically charged gas. I had demonstrated this in the classroom to the sixth-formers a few times. There’s a fine experiment showing how a candle flame conducts electricity, which always impresses them. Well then, a room full of flames should be enough to baffle the thing, confuse its radio-wave vision for long enough for us to get further away. And perhaps it would not like fire either.

  I took out my lighter and ignited stacks of paper here, there, and everywhere, as we went through the office. Before we left I smashed bottles of correcting fluid on the floor, one after another, and pushed Paul ahead of me.

  The far doorway filled with blue light. Then a tornado struck. Paul was well ahead of me and clear of it, but I caught more of the force. I was thrown head over heels like a rag doll and lay stunned. The room was filled with light as half a dozen fires flared up among the drifts of paper where the flammable correcting fluid had caught sparks. The blue glow was eclipsed by the glory of flame, though I could hear a whistle like a locomotive.

  I crawled after Paul and started down the next staircase, my shadow jumping crazily in front of me from the firelight behind. For a minute my heart soared with the thought that the fire might really have hurt it, or that it had the same innate aversion to fire as animals.

  There were crashing sounds as though elephants were loose in the offices— or a cannon firing blindly in all directions.

  After that point my memories are disjointed. We seemed to be running through a nightmare of offices, going through door after door and room after room. The whistling was all around us and I remember turning around dazedly, not knowing which way to go. Paul seemed to have an idea, though, and I was always chasing his receding figure.

  Then we were fleeing down a lighted corridor and we were out into the main hall of the Palace once more. There was a pall of smoke above us, and in my confusion I could not think where it had come from. The whistling was drowned out by the roaring of fire.

  Webster was there, with the night watchman. They were looking up at the fire above when we came out, as if hypnotised by the billowing smoke. They did not seem to see Paul racing past.

  “Come on!” I shouted. They looked around vaguely as though dazed. I guessed then that they had caught a sight of the other and were struggling to grasp it.

  As we were standing together, there was a powerful whooshing sound which spread from behind and beneath, and which overtook us. The thick floorboards of the Palace had been deliberately set with a quarter-inch gap between them, so any dust and litter could be easily swept away at the end of each day. I read later that this formed a highly combustible mixture, and that a mass of flammable debris had accumulated under the floorboards. The fire raced through it. Seconds later, smoke started up through the gaps in the boards all around us and ahead of us.

  That galvanised Webster and the night watchman into life.

  We hurried on after Paul through the thickening mass of smoke. As we neared the centre of the Palace we passed a group of men carrying violin cases.

  “Is there a fire?” one of them asked.

  “Yes!” I shouted, and they turned as one and rushed along with us to the main doors.

  Outside the wind was cool and sharp. It was a frosty night. We stopped, coughing, feeling that we had arrived at safety.

  “There’s a fire,” said the night watchman in a dazed voice. “I’ll get some w
ater.”

  “Call the fire brigade,” I told him.

  There was a small crowd of musicians and others. Some of them were leaning over something on the stones just outside the front door. It was Paul, lying insensible.

  “He just fell over,” said a man to his neighbours, as though we might blame him. “He didn’t even trip up. He just…fell over. Fainted like.”

  Webster and I examined Paul. Inert, he was a pathetically small figure. I looked for a head injury, but there was nothing. The boy was in a dead faint, and we could not bring him round, even with the smelling salts one of the female musicians produced. One hand was still holding on to the crystal in something like a death grip.

  “It’s breathing the fumes that causes that,” said someone. “He just needs some air.” The Palace itself was full of smoke by now, almost down to ground level, but lit up with a fierce flickering orange light.

  “Move back now,” said a police constable. Inside the transept, sheets of glass loosened by the heat crashed down one after the other. There was an almost continuous barrage of sound.

  When I turned again the whole of the transept was lit up by flame leaping up from the floor, consuming everything inside, crawling up the sides of the Palace. Down the hill there were the bells of approaching fire engines, but already the flames were beyond their power to control. Clouds of brilliant sparks billowed up into the sky like mad shooting stars. Even the sky reflected the glow of the fire, bathing the whole scene in orange moonlight, and the wind whipped the flames.

  My heart lurched when I saw something fly up from the Palace and arc toward Sydenham. Then it happened again, and I recognised flying sheets of glass: the heat was so intense that the updraught was enough to lift them. Luckily the strong winds blew them away from the crowd.

  “There’s an ambulance on its way, sir,” the constable assured Webster, who was still vainly trying to rouse Paul. “Let’s get him moved back.”

  Another sound emerged from beneath the roaring of the flame. It was a whistle which descended in pitch like a gramophone winding down, and becoming a long drawn-out groan. It sounded like the bellow of a wounded and floundering giant.

  “That must be the great organ,” said one of the musicians. “Sounds like it’s in pain.”

  “It’s the Palace dying,” said another, and there was a murmur of agreement. It certainly sounded like something dying.

  The constable had pushed us well back from the Palace by now, and we could see glass cascading down inside, when I noticed the shadows at the base of the building shifting and moving. A dozen voices cried out as they saw it too. A rippling carpet seethed out from underneath the building and swept through the crowd.

  It was an army of rats, brown rats, thousands and thousands of them, fleeing the fire. They had no fear of us. I felt them running over my feet and saw Webster brushing them away from Paul’s form. In a minute they were gone, disappearing like dark liquid.

  A minute later and the crowd parted as the police led the ambulance men through. They carried Paul off in a stretcher, with Webster in their wake. I tried to follow, but was told that there was only room for one in the ambulance. I would have to make my own way to St. George’s.

  I was shellshocked. The threat had gone and I was alone among the crowd, which was swelling rapidly. There was nothing I could do at the hospital, and anything I told them might make matters worse—or get me into trouble. I stayed with the mob for two hours and watched the show. I had seen fireworks at the Palace many times, but for grandeur and tragedy this beat them all.

  The fire engines only started to arrive after the ambulance had gone. It seems the night watchman had spent twenty minutes trying to fight the fire on his own before he called them. First a few engines arrived and then dozens, summoned from every borough of London, and Surrey as well. But by then there was a crowd of thousands and the engines had to force their way through the mass of people.

  The firemen, hundreds of them, bustled around with little effect. They ran their hoses from the pools and fountains, but the different brigades all had different connectors and it was an age before they could bring their hoses into play. They raised ladders to shower water from above, but it was a trickle into an inferno.

  Aeroplanes circled overhead like vultures: some intrepid press men had decided to get the best possible view. There were detonations, one after another, from within the Palace. Someone said they were dynamiting to save part of it, but that could not be true. Nobody knew what caused the explosions, but I half wondered if one of the planes had not been a bomber. When messages can be sent across time anything is possible.

  I saw liquid glass run like water, hissing as it crossed the wet ground. The metal frame glowed red like hot coals. The flames ran up ever higher, and at last the central nave crashed down with a noise like the end of the world. And in a sense it was the end of a world.

  The two water towers remained afterwards, but the rest of it was a broken shell, the iron ribcage of a colossal dinosaur. The crowd began to disperse after ten o’clock, but I stayed on after midnight and walked home in the small hours, my brain full of fire and lightning and smoke and destruction.

  Back at my digs, I had no hope of sleeping. Instead I stayed up and wrote notes on all that had happened, notes festooned with question marks and sudden breaks. I realised that I was in effect writing a confession of having started the fire. If the police read it, I would be doomed. I knew now that eyebrows were still raised over my state of mind after the events in Dulwich nine years earlier. He’s cracked, you know, that Blake fellow. Always was a bit strange. My notes would have me condemned as a mad arsonist in no time. I wrote on.

  Eventually I fell into a kind of fever-sleep. I dreamed of an enormous chamber made of dark granite with round windows and arched doors. It was monumental architecture, the sort intended to dwarf the individual with a sense of insignificance. The decoration was stark and severe. It was foreign, more foreign than a Chinese palace or an Inca temple, but there was something in it that spoke clearly of its makers’ intentions. Here was a chamber that worshipped power. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

  In this chamber I was standing or sitting before a pedestal which held an odd apparatus of mirrors, silvery metal, and slivers of crystal. Rows and rows of crystal rods, each the size of a finger, just like the one Paul had carried; but somehow they looked different, as though I were seeing them through quite different eyes. Some part of me realised that I was seeing the nightmare world which Paul had described, and that if I looked up I would see the beings which inhabited it on banks of stone benches, gathered in conclave.

  I chose not to look up.

  I could hear them speaking—they were talking about me! I had the impression of an official gathering; not a court of law, but a government committee. I tried to speak, but the words would not come out. They were civil servants making a tricky but vital decision, and wanted to gain credit without risk. Their predecessors had failed and been punished; they could not afford to fail again. The debate was full of ringing phrases and slogans as they jousted against each other with rhetoric. The debate rolled around while I looked at the ornate patterns etched into the granite floor, patterns composed of many interlocking swastikas. It was an impressive level of detail for a dream.

  And then the silver apparatus clicked and everything faded like a radio programme when the dial is moved and static overwhelms the signal.

  IV

  The next day I taught my classes as usual. They were all on familiar topics; the lessons were on a set schedule, and I opened my mouth and the words tumbled out in the right order as though I were an automaton. I sent a note to Webster, but had no reply.

  Two days later I had a polite note from Mrs Webster. She said that Paul was quite back to his old self, thanked me for my kind assistance, and hoped that I was well. In a P.S. she noted that Webster would be indisposed for a few days. He had broken three ribs while escaping from the fire, but “no worse than he suff
ered on the rugby pitch,” she said. Mrs Webster was not as hearty as her husband, but she tried to follow his lead. She assured me that he would be in touch soon.

  I did not hear from him in the weeks that followed. I first assumed that this was simply high-handedness. I had served my purpose in helping to restore Paul, and he had no further use for me. Then I wondered whether it was because of the fire, and that he feared I would be involved in a criminal prosecution. Any association with me could be fatal to his career. But as the weeks fell away I began to suspect something else—that the nervous shock of that encounter had had a bad effect on him.

  I made some tentative enquiries, and my fears were realised. His secretary informed me that Webster was on an indefinite leave of absence and that all his business was being handled by a colleague. A mutual acquaintance revealed that he was now living apart from his family in a pied-à-terre in Chelsea and was ‘acting rather queerly.’

  I should have known better, but rather than forgetting about the events, I tried to make sense of them. I returned to my notes and made what study I could of the others. It was an absurd and hopeless task; picking at scabs is not the way to heal a wound.

  I read about magneto-hydrodynamics and T. T. Brown’s experiments with ion winds to propel a craft through the air with electricity. I read about electric eels and other creatures. I found out about vortex rings, air ejected like smoke rings of great power and range. I even made some enquiries about seeing with radio waves, addressing them to a couple of university departments. A polite man from the Air Ministry paid me a visit shortly afterwards. He came to ask questions about radio waves rather than answer them, but I gathered that it’s a topic of some interest to them. They wanted to know what I knew, and whether I had any discoveries to share.

  The others, I believe, mainly inhabit the upper atmosphere, that zone called the ionosphere, where they constantly charge and recharge themselves from the electrical forces there. It is hard to imagine us having many dealings with something as alien as the others. We will never even see them, unless our scientists find a way to penetrate the plasmonic screen which bends light around them. I believe it evolved to protect them from the harsh radiation at those altitudes, though it functions as well as a cloak of invisibility.