Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths and Other Stories

by William Meikle

  An army of undead stood between us and the properties behind which Logie Baird’s shed had stood. The Colonel stayed true to form and remained unwavering on the goal. He had the men form a tight wedge around the vehicles and charged us into the throng.

  If I had not quite realized how many had died over London’s long history, I was to get a reminder that night. Well-dressed Victorian gentlemen in fine funereal garb, bewigged Cavaliers, Roman soldiers that were little more than skeletons, and armored knights from the age of chivalry: all were arrayed against us there on that blasted Heath.

  We burned them all, until the flame-throwers finally gave out. Then the Gatling guns came into their own, blowing a path through the crowd that we were able to drive through, tossing corpses aside like rag dolls as we did so. We went straight through Logie Baird’s hedgerow at twenty miles an hour, bounced and rattled across his garden and came to a screeching halt on top of the ruin of the shed. We had no time to think. The Colonel had his men arrange themselves in two circles around us, even as one of the Gatling gun positions was completely overrun by the dead. Gunfire and screams sounded all around.

  “How long?” I shouted as Challenger cranked the dynamo.

  “Five minutes,” he replied. Blue sparks flashed around the Tesla coil.

  “Is it supposed to do that?” I shouted.

  “It must be some effect for the resonant vibration,” Challenger yelled in response.

  The gunfire seemed to get fainter. I wondered if maybe I had finally been deafened by the thunderous noise. Then I looked round me. The air had grown misty, the defending soldiers only darker shapes in thick fog. I saw muzzle flashes and heard, distantly, the sound of guns, but it was all at some remove from reality.

  “Challenger?” I said.

  I looked at where he had been standing on the truck, turning the dynamo crankshaft. He was no longer there. Instead, he stood on what had been the roof of the shed, staring at a spot over my left shoulder. I turned …

  … and looked straight into the face of the Professor’s dead wife.

  ~6~

  She walked past me without a glance, heading straight for the Professor, who stood, arms open, waiting for her.

  I checked my watch. We had scarcely a minute to spare. I jumped up on the truck and began to crank the dynamo. “Challenger!” I shouted. “I need you to throw the switch.”

  He seemed oblivious to my entreaties. There was now no more than five yards between him and the specter of his wife, and he only had eyes for one thing.

  More dark shapes came forward in the mist.

  “Thank the Lord,” I said, thinking it was squaddies coming to my aid. The phrase stuck in my throat as a dozen of the undead appeared instead.

  “Challenger!” I screamed. And this time he took note. He saw my predicament and started to move toward me. At the same time the specter reached for him, misty arms circling his waist. He pulled against her, his face a mask of agony and despair. It took all his strength, but he finally broke free and, staggering as if punch-drunk, headed for the truck and the switch that would turn on the coil.

  One of the undead beat him to it. It clambered up onto the truck bed, reaching for me. I knew I could not stop cranking, so tried to keep it away from me using only my feet, a course of action that could not save me for long.

  Challenger had other ideas. He stepped up behind the corpse—a man of some forty years, dead at least that long—and tore it apart with his bare hands, kicking the head away as if it were a soccer ball. He looked down below us. His wife’s specter was moving toward us again.

  “Let’s get this job done,” Challenger said. With tears blinding him, he threw the switch.

  A blue sparking web of electricity surged over and around us, filling the sky in an explosion of light and energy. A shock crashed over us like a thunderclap and I fell into darkness.

  I woke eight hours later to thin sunshine coming through the flaps of a tent. I lay on a cot in a makeshift hospital on what was left of Blackheath. Of the hundred men who had left the Green Park stockade, only eight of us had survived the night. Poor Challenger had almost joined those lost, being mistaken for a dead-again corpse and condemned to a mass grave before waking just before they started to throw quicklime over the bodies.

  We were both up and about again by nightfall, and as the stars came out overhead, we were to be found standing amid the ruins of Logie Baird’s shed, sharing a bottle of Scotch with the Scottish inventor.

  “To tell the truth,” Logie Baird said, “I never thought it would work.”

  “Maybe now you’ll stop meddling in things you don’t understand,” I said, and looked to Challenger for confirmation. But my old friend was lost in thought, staring at the spot where we had last seen the specter of his wife.

  “She is waiting for me,” Challenger said. “I don’t know how I know, but I know.”

  “Just don’t be in a hurry to see her,” I said, trying to raise a smile.

  Challenger did not reply.

  After that night, he never spoke of her again.

  A Rock and a Hard Place

  My meeting with Challenger that late summer lunchtime was a far more somber occasion than most of our visits to the George in the Strand. We had arranged it several weeks before, and as usual I looked forward to my old friend’s larger-than-life company.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw him. He was hunched over a table, cradling a pint of ale and a Scotch—which was unusual in itself as he normally saved the hard liquor for after supper—and he was dressed in his best black suit.

  “Have a drink with me, Malone,” he said. “I’m saying goodbye to an old friend.”

  He’d come from a funeral. I got the story out of him in dribs and drabs over the next hour. Over several beers and more Scotch he told me how he’d recently heard from Davis, a University chum of his, and how they too had arranged to meet for a few drinks and a chat. The meeting never happened—Davis was found dead at the foot of the cliffs of Dover just a day later.

  “He wanted to tell me something,” Challenger said. “And I was too bally busy to listen just then. I thought we’d have plenty of time.”

  The Professor was inconsolable—I have never seen him so down.

  “What was the cause of death?” I asked, almost fearfully, for any question was liable to set Challenger off when he was in a mood—and this was most certainly a mood.

  “Bally coroner said suicide. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow—Danny Davis would never do that. He wasn’t the type.”

  “No suspicious circumstances?”

  “Of course there bloody were. The man’s dead—how much more suspicious does it need to be?”

  I don’t quite know how we got to the point where I agreed to accompany him—the afternoon got a bit hazy after our third hour in the bar. But the next morning, complete with traveling case and hangover—I met him in Victoria Station, and we boarded a train for Dover.

  “So what was Davis’ profession?” I asked as we settled into a compartment and got some smokes lit.

  “He was a geologist—we were in the same laboratory group at Edinburgh. He said he’d discovered something that would consign all the textbooks—biological and physical—to history. I laughed when he told me that—he sounded too much like me.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what this might be?”

  Challenger shook his head, shaking ash from his cigarette into his beard and leaving a gray streak when he tried to wipe it away. It said much for his state of mind that he left it there—normally he was meticulous about his proud expanse of facial hair.

  “One last question then,” I said. “What do you hope to find in Dover?”

  “Answers, Malone. He spent the last six months among the rocks on the shores there—someone will have talked to him; someone will know something. And if I get stuck—well, I’ve got a reporter from the London papers with me; that should loosen a few tongues.”

  We spoke no more of
it for the length of the journey, confining ourselves to chat about rugger and Challenger’s friends—and enemies—in the Royal Society. My friend was still subdued—not so much as the previous day, but enough that there were no outbursts, no raised voice all the way to our destination.

  Our first afternoon in Dover proved fruitless. The local police were of little help, even after I showed my press credentials. Davis was a ‘‘jumper”—that was the word they used. He’d been found in the same spot as six other bodies over the past year. Three of those found were definite suicides—they had left notes—and it was assumed that Davis was another in the sorry list.

  “Every bone in ’is body were broke,” the constable we spoke to said. “You don’t get that from just falling over, or being hit by a brick—he jumped from the top, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Challenger wanted to visit the shore straightaway, but that was blocked to us—the tide was coming in, lapping at the feet of the cliffs, and would not be low enough again for exploration until early the next day.

  We did manage to find the lodgings where Davis had stayed—a neat and tidy bed-and-breakfast at the eastern end of town—and we booked ourselves in there for the night, intending to explore in the morning. The landlady—a talkative spinster of indeterminate age—made us as good a meal as you could hope to find, and kept us topped up with sherry through the evening. But all thought of sleep was swept away when she dropped a bombshell after talk turned to the late Mr. Davis.

  “I ain’t half going to miss poor Mr. Davis. A proper gent he was. Have you come for his notebooks? The police didn’t seem to want them.”

  We cleared a spot on a table and went to work. I found the dead man’s notebooks tedious in the extreme, most of them being a minutely detailed account of what seemed to be every boulder on the beach, its position, size, aspect, and surface flora and fauna. Challenger was in his element.

  “Fascinating stuff,” he said after an hour. “Don’t you agree?”

  I was about to leave him to it and head for bed when he clapped his hands with almost childish glee.

  “I think I have something, Malone,” he said. “It’s dated two days before he died.”

  He picked up one of the notebooks and read:

  “‘Arrived at AN172 at three o’ clock in the afternoon to find it had moved several feet from the night before. At a loss to explain this, as none of the other sizable rocks in the area have moved so much as an inch, and AN172 looks as if it weighs several tons. There is a smooth spot some three yards square in size on the northern aspect that was not there yesterday, but apart from that, no other signs of what happened.’“

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “It’s enough to be going on with,” Challenger replied. “It’s a mystery—a mystery he found less than forty-eight hours before dying. I do not believe in coincidences, Malone.”

  “Going out, gents?” our landlady asked the next morning after breakfast.

  “Along the east shore for a bit to see where Mr. Davis was working,” I replied.

  “Oh, you don’t want to be doing that, sirs. I told Mr. Davis many a time; that’s where the town sewer comes out. There’s a terrible stink up that way on hot days, and you never know what’s in the water. I told Mrs. Greenville the other day, I said …”

  She was still talking as we beat a hasty retreat, but we found out all too soon that she’d been right about the smell. It got noticeable as we left the promenade wall at the eastern extent of the shore and stepped down onto the rougher terrain below the cliffs. We both lit up a smoke, and that covered the stench somewhat, but all the same it was most unpleasant.

  Challenger had brought along the notebook with his clue in it. Using a map drawn by Davis, we were able to navigate our way through the rocks and tumbled rubble to the spot where the man had made his observations of the rock he had named AN172.

  We stood at the base of one of the tallest cliffs, the whiteness bright enough to be dazzling as the morning sun bounced off the chalk face. There were indeed plenty of large boulders strewn in our vicinity—but none that matched the size of shape of AN172. There was only a circular depression in the rubble—a clearer spot with mainly sand and broken shell underfoot, but no sign of any boulder, and certainly not one that weighed several tons. A trail, some four feet wide, seemed to lead away from the spot, heading further east, and towards the cliff. Although the tide had softened the shore and shifted the sand, we were able to follow quite readily.

  Challenger led and I came up behind, cigarette clamped firmly between my teeth, breathing through my mouth as the stench got steadily worse. We discovered why as we turned around an escarpment and entered a small bay—this was obviously the source of the noxious odor. Raw sewage poured from a four-foot wide outlet, draining onto the shore. At high tide the sea would take the effluent away readily enough but for now it puddled and pooled near the cliffs. Large boulders—or at least that is what I took them to be—were clustered around, as if protecting the area around the outlet from the sea. A stray dog, the thinnest and most mange-ridden I have ever clapped eyes on, picked among tatters of something that did not bear too close inspection, and the whole site had an overwhelming air of decay and corruption.

  “There’s nothing to see here, Challenger,” I said, more in hope of getting him to see sense than in any expectation he would listen to me.

  Indeed, he had just stepped closer to the outlet pipe when one of the boulders moved.

  The stone—or, as it now became apparent, the shell—lifted, and a tentacle, almost snakelike, but with the snap and strike of a bullwhip, struck at the dog. The animal retreated with a yelp, backed away, and was hit from the opposite direction by two more tentacles from another of the “boulders.” In seconds the dog was down, writhing and yelping piteously as half a dozen of the tendrils wrapped around it and squeezed.

  The sound of its bones cracking amid terrified howling was almost too much to bear, but it was thankfully brief. With a final snap that echoed in the cliffs above the dog’s spine broke, and silence fell. The tentacles retracted, and a dozen boulders of various sizes moved closer to the pipe by several feet, clustering more tightly around the outlet. Everything went still. Once more it looked like a field of boulders strewn before us, the only difference now being the broken body of the poor dog lying in the pool of effluent.

  Challenger moved a step closer to the nearest boulder and put out a hand before I could stop him. Almost immediately, the shell lifted and a tendril snaked out, whipping round the Professor’s left ankle and tugging, hard enough to pull Challenger off his feet and send him in a heap into the rocks. He cried out in sudden pain. A second tendril whipped out, and he managed to roll aside so that it snapped harmlessly in the air, but the one round his ankle tugged again, and he slid on his back, being dragged closer to the shell that was rising up as if in readiness to swallow him.

  I did the only thing I could think of—I stepped forward, bent and grasped the tentacle, trying to unwind it from Challenger’s ankle. Even as I bent I felt something whip around my waist and drag at me. I was thinking of the dog, and the speed at which it had been taken.

  Challenger bellowed, and with a mixture of brute force and sheer power of will tore the tentacle from around his ankle and with a mighty heave pulled it from its source. He threw the thing away with a curse, then gripped me. We were quickly into a tug of war against the tentacle that had me round the waist, but our strengths combined were enough to pull me free, ripping the tendril from where it was joined to the body of the beast beneath the shell. I shucked the dead thing off from around my waist and stamped hard on it to make sure it stayed still.

  “Come on, Malone, come away!” Challenger said. I didn’t need to be told twice.

  We staggered back, bruised and bewildered, until we were beyond the range of any attack, but it seemed we had already been forgotten; the things shuffled forward again into a tight group against the outlet pipe. It was clear that the flow of efflue
nt was starting to back up inside the pipe and that only seemed to cause the creatures to group even tighter. As we watched, a shell lifted—I caught a quick glimpse of a pink, segmented, almost shrimp-like body beneath—then it went up the pipe into the darkness. Another followed within seconds.

  We hurried back to town as fast as our bruised bodies would allow, intending to raise the alarm with the local police.

  “What the devil were those?” I managed to pant as we skirted a patch of boulders that looked suspicious.

  “Some kind of crustacean,” Challenger said. “Or perhaps a mollusk? Or maybe a new incipient species. There’s only one thing certain: they are feeding on our waste. We need to cut off their food source, and quickly.”

  Unfortunately, the police could not be persuaded—we were taken as cranks, our story being too unbelievable for them to take seriously.

  “Come now, gents,” the Sergeant in charge of the front office said. “I know that you would like to think that your friend’s death was not a suicide, but making up fairy tales about monsters will not help your case.”

  Had I not put a hand on his shoulder, Challenger might have leaned across the desk and hauled the man to the shore to see for himself.

  “Look, we’re wasting valuable time here. We need to get the authorities involved.”

  The Sergeant tapped his badge.

  “We are the authorities, sir. Now please, move away—or shall I have you charged with breaching the peace?”

  “That’s going to be breached soon enough,” Challenger muttered.

  “Is that a threat, sir?”

  “No—it’s a promise.”

  We might indeed have been treated to a night in a cell, had the first screams not risen up from the seafront.