Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones

by Mark Speed

  It was Arek’s helmet.

  He wobbled on his feet with the shock, dropped his spade into the water and leaned against the Victorian brickwork of the tunnel wall for support. He looked upstream, expecting the beam of his torch to reveal his colleague a few feet away.

  Nothing. Just empty blackness. The beam of his torch could only reveal the entrance to each of the black orifices. There was no disturbance to the flow of the water – no little surges that would indicate a man wading through the current further up.

  He began breathing deeply, his heart racing. He kept his head turned upstream at those black holes, primal fear feeding him insane and impossible stories. Keeping the beam of his torch pointing at the unseeable and unknown, he leaned back and slid down the wall slowly to pick up Arek’s helmet, which was bobbing against the side of his left boot. It was a hell of a dangerous practical joke, if it was one – and not to say entirely out of character. He felt around with his right hand, grasped the white helmet and lifted it into his field of vision.

  There was a splash of blood on the inside.

  He dropped it. It banged against the side of the tunnel and floated off towards Derek, spinning wildly in the current. He lifted the safety catch off the alarm on his radio and hit the red button.

  “Derek!” he screamed. “Derek!” His colleague hit the safety cut-off on the pump and the steady thrumming petered out.

  He regained his composure. He was the senior man on the job. Arek was in desperate need of help, possibly unconscious and perhaps drowning in the sewage. Earl had had nightmares about that early in his career. He unhooked the radio and lifted it to his mouth. “Man down!” he yelled. He didn’t need to; the surface crew would already have been alerted and the emergency procedure would have begun, and fire and ambulance services would be there in minutes.

  Derek picked up Arek’s helmet as it reached him and nestled it into one of the rungs leading up to the manhole. He grabbed the big flashlight and waded over quickly to join Earl, who had regained his composure.

  “Nothing!” said Earl. “Come on.”

  He led the way as the two of them sloshed their way upstream as quickly as they could towards the two tributary tunnels. There was a wide section of tunnel where they converged, and the current moved slowly, little eddies filled with an assortment of tissues and turds.

  “Which way?” asked Derek.

  “Right. Balham and Tooting.”

  They looked up the tunnel, the beams from their head lights converging with the one from the flashlight Derek was holding. The tunnel twisted round, so they could only see twenty yards into it. All they saw was old brickwork, with yellowish fat and tissue caked around the sides and roof.

  “Arek!” shouted Earl into the void. The noise of the single word reverberated and disappeared, leaving only the sound of cascading water.

  “You sure he went up that one?”

  “’Course!”

  “He can’t have gone that far. Not without his light.”

  The unspoken questions hung between them in the heavy air of the sewer. How could he? Why would he?

  Derek splashed his way over to the entrance of the other tunnel and Earl joined him. This one was straighter, and the three beams of light gave them fifty yards of good visibility, and enough beyond that to be sure that Arek’s reflective vest wasn’t anywhere within a hundred, or a hundred-and-fifty yards. The two men looked at each other.

  They went back to the Balham and Tooting tributary and Derek took the lead, keeping his torch stretched out in his left hand to get the most light he could around the right-hand twist of the tunnel. Earl stayed two yards behind, feeling the darkness – the void – clawing at his back. He glanced over his shoulder and caught a flash of the LED from the light of one of the surface crew, who’d come down to provide back-up. It was a relief to know someone was there.

  Derek stopped. “Look.”

  Earl looked over his colleague’s shoulder and saw Arek’s spade lying in the stream of sewage. They approached the tool, still unable to see more than twenty yards around the tight curve of the tunnel. The brickwork that wasn’t covered in fat glistened in a way he’d not seen before. He reached out and ran his gloved hand over it. It was like mucus – slime. He and Derek looked at each other.

  “We have to go on,” said Derek. “Man down.”

  Earl reached for his radio and told them they’d found Arek’s spade, but not the man. He advised that another crew needed to insert themselves at the next manhole on the Balham and Tooting tributary. The tunnel straightened out and almost immediately formed a concrete cavern twenty feet to either side, fifteen across and ten high. Two large, modern concrete pipes sat either side of the old Victorian sewer. There were rungs off to one side, and at the top they could just make out a pinhole of light coming from the keyhole in a manhole cover. There was the rumble of heavy traffic on the South Circular. They knew the liquid would be a foot deep in this box junction, and no more. Derek flashed his torch around. There was no body to be seen. They went over to the rungs. They were dry. No one had climbed them.

  “I mean,” said Earl, “even if he’d wanted to, how could he have found his way across there and into one of them tunnels in pitch darkness?”

  “He’d have gone for the manhole. Waited for help if he was in trouble. Or even risked pushing the cover off. But he didn’t.”

  Derek flashed his torch around the walls again. Nothing apart from the occasional blob of fat.

  Arek had vanished.

  As they moved out into the pool, the traffic noise died slightly, then there was a grating noise and a shaft of light angled into the space, striking the pool almost dead centre.

  And that’s when they saw one of Arek’s boots.

  As a team of three firemen descended the ladder from the manhole, bringing more lights to bear, Earl and Derek saw that they were surrounded by pieces of their missing colleague’s clothing.

  In one corner, there was a greyish-green blob that could be mistaken for fat. It was content to remain there, digesting its latest meal – bones and all.

  Doctor How sat at his desk in the basement, with Where’s Spectrel in the form of a small black London cab behind him. The autistic When had clearly found the companionship too much and had gone home, which he knew wasn’t as bad as Where’s near-derelict house in Dagenham. He couldn’t ever understand what was wrong with his cousins; taking the path of least resistance to live lives of mediocrity.

  How’s mood was black that Saturday morning. The algorithm on his systems had thrown up the news story about the sewer worker who had disappeared the previous afternoon, and it was now a major news item. Dolt had been in contact, railing about his failure to have enforced the invasive species rules when he’d found the Plenscas breaching them for their holy week. Never mind the possibility of reimbursement for the cleaning fees, there was now a move by the Rindan consulate to sue him over the death of their consul and her husband. He couldn’t believe the gall of these beings; there were hundreds of deaths from this sort of incident every holy week in the Rindan diaspora. The Rindans might be a gentle and – if he was honest – rather wimpish-looking species, but they were notorious for their fault-finding litigiousness as the Dolts were for their bureaucracy. Whilst he rejoiced in the differences of the various species in the Pleasant universe, he couldn’t understand how some hadn’t wiped themselves out through their own idiocy.

  There was no credible way he could think of to cover up the death of this sewer worker. His inside sources – he had an intelligent program feeding him a streamed précis of all the Metropolitan Police’s communications on the subject – told him that only shreds of the man’s clothing had been found, along with his spade and his emergency radio. The latter item had been found after a second thorough search of the area, and had been corroded by acid. Official speculation had turned to the possibility of some kind of chemical leak, but tests on the effluent showed no abnormality in its pH.

  The confused hu
mans couldn’t put two and two together, and no plausible hypothesis could match the basic clues: shredded clothes, no remains, and a lump of corroded metal. The explanation was so laughably clear when one changed the term corroded by acid to partly digested and then regurgitated that he felt like calling the senior officers on the case and shouting it at them. He wondered whether any of them had seen the original Jaws movie. For the fact that the polyps didn’t have teeth, he was grateful. Their stinging tentacles and powerful, crushing gizzards were lethal, but at least they didn’t leave bits of enamel and dentine lying around.

  The rumour mill of the conspiracy theorists had gone into overdrive. The theory that had gained the most credence was that an alligator had escaped from London Zoo, and was now roaming the sewers. Quite how the warm-water reptile had managed to navigate its way from the bitterly cold waters of the canal, across the cold and fast-flowing Thames and then into the stinking and unappetising sewers of South London was a question which wasn’t addressed.

  However, once the idea had taken root, there was suddenly no end of hitherto unreported sightings over the previous few weeks, and several images of gnarled pieces of half-submerged wood in Camden Lock on the Regent’s Canal were touted as being photographs of the beast. The human mind’s gullibility and imagination never ceased to amaze him – there was a stream of eye-witness accounts of wildfowl and dogs having been pulled under and consumed by the monster over the past decade.

  The Doctor wasn’t sure whether this kind of speculation helped or hindered him. All it would take was another death and a score of dim-witted politicians would jump on the bandwagon and declare an emergency. He had no problem with receiving help from the human authorities, but he couldn’t possibly let them discover a species so obviously alien living under their noses. The polyps had to be destroyed. Their remains could never fall into the hands of human scientists.

  To Tim’s great credit, they’d been halfway to the intersection in question when the incident had happened, and they’d probably be there in the next few hours. The emergency services were still all over the area, but Tim’s great advantage was that they could play the same game as the polyp was presumably doing – lie there and pretend to be something else. Indeed, Tim was quite capable of moving themselves without being seen to move at all. They could stick to a surface and slowly move some of themselves from one end of the colony to the other without the movement being at all apparent. Even someone observing stop-motion footage of Tim would simply assume that they were a creeping slime mould, which he was – albeit a highly ordered and sentient one with a vote on the Galactic Council, no matter whether anyone would welcome them into their homes to meet their families, or accept their hospitality.

  Trinity was enjoying herself. She’d not had that much difficulty persuading the Doctor that she should leave in the early hours of the morning. She knew how much pressure he was under to resolve the problem of the rogue polyps, and her argument had been simple: they only had a fix on one of them, and there were probably two more. He’d not been at all happy because the humans were still all over the scene of the disappearance, and spreading outwards. That hadn’t bothered her in the least: she’d impressed him with an excellent brickwork pattern, then made herself look like a blob of yellowish fat. Her final point was that – in the absence of his Spectrel – he wasn’t able to let her out for any nocturnal hunting expeditions for the foreseeable future. This one was close to home, and Tim needed another predator to help them.

  She’d slunk out of the house in the earliest hours of the morning in her feline form, looking more like a small puma than a large black domestic cat, and trotted a couple of miles down to Clapham. The Doctor had directed her towards a manhole in a quiet residential street, and she’d hidden under a car whilst she’d changed back into her arachnid form. She felt at ease with herself as she changed her fur to match the tarmac of the road and stepped out to the manhole cover. She stood with her eight legs around the side for a few moments, feeling the faint background vibrations of the sleeping city as a human would hear the hiss of white noise from an untuned radio. The biggest noise coming from underneath was from some overnight works on the Northern Line near Clapham North station, which didn’t concern her at all. Her eight eyes could detect nothing untoward in any of the windows of the surrounding houses. The rear of her abdomen dipped as she dabbed her spinner onto the middle of the cover. She lifted her abdomen up and a fine strand of silk thread now connected her rear end with the heavy metal plate.

  She had a final check with all her senses and then retracted the silk with her spinner, slowly lifting the plate up a touch, and pulling it to the rear. There was only the slightest of grating noises. When it was halfway out, she dabbed her spinner again and removed the silk thread. She crept into the manhole head-first and then slowly slid the cover back into place using her two rear legs. There was no audience to show off to; she did this because she was always practicing, always bettering herself.

  With the cover in place, she stood silently in the darkness for a couple of minutes. Few humans appreciated the value of stillness, in her view. She’d heard about the spiritual ones who sought an inner stillness, and had wondered at their inverted and egocentric view of the world. Didn’t they understand that the origins of this lay in the external oneness, and that was why they wanted to feel oneness with the universe? There were decreasing numbers of them who understood the external connectedness of the effective predator – the feeling of oneness with the environment which allowed the hunter not to have to ask where their prey was, but to be told.

  Now that she had the blank vibration template of the sewers in the Clapham area anything else would stand out and reveal itself. She could move swiftly now, and she did. The tunnels were an ideal shape for her – a vertical ovoid along which she could scurry silently with her legs planted on either side, a couple of feet above the fetid water. As she made her way towards the area where the disappearance had taken place she tuned in to Tim. They were almost there, and coming from the south-west. She was coming from the north. It had been a long time ago, and in a faraway place that she’d last hunted with Tim. They would both enjoy it, she was sure.

  She stopped every twenty or thirty yards to tune in for a couple of seconds. The overnight work on the Tube continued on a different tunnel system entirely. Behind that she could make out a fainter but closer hub of activity. This was what interested her. She crept forward until she reached an area of recent human activity. Even above the stench of their waste she could smell them – their sweat, their deodorants, their synthetic materials and their fear.

  Behind the human activity she could smell the polyps. Specifically, she could smell that single polyp trapped in the system up ahead. Her mandibles twitched with anticipation at the kill, and the taste of fresh prey.

  She crept forward and then stopped at the end of the tunnel, just before it connected to a larger one, spread her legs out and stood for a couple more minutes. Against her expectations, the police, aided by sewer workers, had decided to work through the night. There were about a dozen of them, and they were being loud. She knew this loudness: it was the noise of fear. The volume of the activity was there to ward off predators. Of course, the humans didn’t know that’s what they were doing because it was pure instinct on their part, driven by a primeval fear they could never conquer. She twitched with slight annoyance at them. If only they’d go away for a minute – just one minute – she and Tim could take care of this mess for them. Now she understood better why the Doctor could become so frustrated with human activity when it impinged on his own. They never understood that they just got in the way of things when they didn’t understand them.

  Still, she had plenty of time and little better to do. She checked in again with Tim. They, too, were similarly frustrated, having reached a position some twenty yards to the south of the human activity. Tim and Trinity had a little mental bitching session about the apparently constant need for humans to be seen to be doing so
mething, even if it was completely the wrong thing. Tim hadn’t picked up any scent of polyps to the south. The chances were that this one was the straggler of the group. In times of scarce resources all animals across the universe did this – predator and prey alike – they spread out and foraged individually. The two stronger polyps had headed north.

  Tim and Trinity mulled it over. Tim could creep slowly forward as the human activity kept the polyp stuck in that position. The alien was probably not in a position to move a great distance anyway, given that it was digesting the largest meal it had had in its short life. Even if the humans remained for a couple of days, Tim might well be able to send out a thin sliver of themselves to deal with it.

  There was no sense in a highly mobile hunter like Trinity standing guard when a couple of polyps were on the loose. With that decision made, she informed the Doctor and headed north on her own, relishing the prospect of a two-to-one hunt. She tracked back a hundred yards and found the scent of the other two polyps.

  The polyp slid and lolloped its way down a smooth section of sewer on its single foot, fell out of the end of the tunnel and splashed down into a pool four feet below. It hadn’t intended to splash down into the pool; it was a brainless polyp. But it would be true to say that falling into the pool was not a good outcome.

  Its simple neural circuits flashed briefly and made another connection. This was the third time it had taken such a tumble in the recent past. Now it knew that a certain kind of vibration in the air caused by falling water indicated a precipice up ahead. Or, rather than knowing, it associated the proximate sound as a possible warning of an impending fall. It would proceed more cautiously next time it heard the noise because being out of contact with a surface was not something that felt good to it.