“You talk too much and too loudly,” I told him. “And if I really should be as afraid of this place as you make out, then what in God’s name are you doing here?” Before he could answer I shook another Marlboro from its pack, lit it, took a drag and handed it to him. I had no reason to antagonise the old boy.
“God’s name?” he turned his head and stared at me where we sat amidst the rubble, on the remains of a toppled brick wall; stared at me with his bloodshot eyes—his sunken, crying eyes that he’d rubbed until they were a rough, raw red—before accepting and sucking on that second cigarette. And: “Oh, I have my reasons for being here,” he said. “Nothing to do with God, though. Not the God we used to pray to, anyway; not unless I’m here as His agent, sort of working for Him without really being aware of it. In which case you might think He would have chosen a better way to set things up.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense,” I told him, “and you’re still much too noisy. Won’t they hear you? Don’t they sometimes patrol outside the Bgg’ha Zone? I’ve heard they do.”
“Patrols?” He took a deep drag, handed my smoke back to me, and went on: “You mean the hunters? And do you know what they hunt? They hunt us! We’re it! Meat!”
He took back the cigarette, and after another drag and a sly, sidelong glance at me from eyes still bloodshot but narrowed now: “Anyway, and like I said, I have a good reason for being here. A damn good reason!” And he balanced a small, battered, heavy-looking old suitcase on his thighs, using his free hand to hug it to his belly.
“But as for right now—” he continued after a brief moment’s pause, while the look he was directing at me became rather more pointed, “—I reckon it’s your turn to state why you are here. I never saw you before, and I don’t think you’re from the SSR… So?”
“The SSR?”
“The South Side Resistance, for what they’re worth—huh!” he answered. But I wasn’t really listening. Having taken back my smoke again, I was watching his veined right hand moving to rest on the gun at his bony hip, as again he asked, “So?”
“I stay alive by moving around,” I told him. “I don’t stay too long in any one place, and I live however I can. I go where there’s food, when and where I can find it, and cigarettes, and on rare occasions a little booze.”
“The old grocery stores? The shattered shops?”
“Yes, of course.” I nodded. “Where else? The supermarkets that were—those that aren’t already completely looted out. In the lighter hours, the few short hours of partial daylight when those things sleep, if they sleep, I dig among the ruins; but stuff is getting very hard to find. Day by day, week by week, it’s harder all the time, which is why I move around. I ended up here just a couple of days ago. At least I think it was days; you never can tell in this perpetual dusk. I haven’t seen the sun for quite some time now, and even then it was very low on the horizon, right at the beginning of this… this—”
“—This long last night?” he helped me out. “The long last night of the human race, and certainly of Henry Chattaway!”
Then he sobbed, and only just managed to catch it before it leaked out of him, but I heard it anyway. And: “My God, how and why did this bloody mess happen to us?” Craning his neck he looked up to where black wisps of cloud scudded across the sky, as if searching for an answer up there—from God, perhaps?
“So—er, Henry?—in fact you are a believer,” I said, standing up from the broken wall and dropping my smoke before it could burn my fingers. “What do you reckon, then—that we’re all career sinners and paying for it?” I stepped on the glowing cigarette end, crushing it out in the red dust of powdered bricks.
Controlling his breathing, his sobbing, the old man said, “Do you mean are we being punished? I don’t know—probably. Come with me and I’ll show you something.” And getting creakingly to his feet, he went hobbling to a more open area close by, once the corner of a street—more properly a junction of twisted blackened ruins and rubble now—where the scattered, shattered debris lay more thinly on the riven ground, and only the vaguest outlines of any actual street remained. Of course, this was hardly unusual; for all I knew the entire city, and probably every city in the world, would look pretty much the same right now.
And after tugging on the sleeve of my parka while I stood glancing here and there, only too well aware that out in the open at this once-crossroads we would be plainly visible from all points of the compass, my companion finally let go of me to point toward the north-east. So that even before my eyes followed the bearing indicated by his trembling hand and finger, I knew what I would see. And:
“Look at that!” The words were no more than a husky whisper, almost a whimper. And more urgently this time: “Look! Just look at it, will you! Now tell me, isn’t it obvious where at least one of those names comes from?”
He was talking about the Twisted Tower—a “mile-high monstrosity” he’d called it—where it stood, leaned or seemed to stagger, perhaps a mile and a half away, or two miles at most. But matching it in ugliness was its almost obscene height… a mile high? No, but not far short; with its teetering spire stabbing up through the disc of cloud that had been lured into circling it like an aerial whirlpool or the debris of doomed planets round the sucking well of a vast black hole. It was built of the wreckage, the ravaged soul of the crushed city; of gutted high-rises; of many miles of railway carriages twined around its fat base and rising in a spiral, like the thread of a gigantic screw, to a fifth of the tower’s height; of bridges and wharves torn from their anchorages; of a great round clock face recognisable even at this distance and in this gloom as that of Big Ben; of a jutting tube of concrete and glass that had once stood in the heart of the city where it had been called Centrepoint… all of these things and many more, all parts now of this Twisted Tower. But it wasn’t really twisted; it was just that its design and composition were so utterly alien that they didn’t conform to the mundane Euclidean geometry that a human eye or brain would automatically accept as the shapes of a genuine structure, observing them as authentic without making the viewer feel sick and dizzy.
And though I had seen it often enough before, still I took a stumbling step backwards before tearing my eyes away from it. Those crazy angles which at first seemed convex before concertinaing down to concavities… only to bulge forth again like gigantic boils on the trunk of a monster. “That mile-high monstrosity”, yes—but having seen it before, if not from this angle, I had known what effect it would have on me. Which was why I concentrated my gaze on what stood in front of it, seeming to teeter or waver there as in some kind of inanimate obeisance:
It leaned there close to that colossal, warped dunce’s cap, out of true at an angle of maybe twenty degrees, only a few hundred yards or so as I reckoned it in the tower’s foreground; and instead of the proud dome that it had been, it now looked like half of a blackened, broken egg, or the shattered skull of some unimaginable giant, lying there in the uneven dirt of that vast, desecrated graveyard: the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“Horrible, horrible!” the old man said and shuddered uncontrolla-bly—then gave a start when, from somewhere not very far behind us, there came a dismal baying or hooting call; forlorn sounding, true, but in the otherwise silence of the ruins terrifying to any vulnerable man or beast. And starting again—violently this time as more hooting sounded, but closer and from a different direction—the old man said, “The Hounds! That howling is how they’ve learned to triangulate. We’ve got to get away from here!”
“But how?” I said. “The howling is from the south, while to the north-east… we’re on the verge of the Bgg’ha Zone!”
“Come with me—and hurry!” he replied. “If some of these wrecked buildings were still standing we’d already be dead—or worse! The Hounds know all the angles and move through them, so we must consider ourselves lucky.”
“The angles?”
“Alien geometry,” he answered, limping as fast as he could back down the rub
ble canyon where we had met, then turning into a lesser side-street canyon. And panting, he explained: “They say that where the Hounds come from—Tindalos or somewhere—something?—there are only angles. Their universe is made of angles that let them slip through space, and they can do the same here. But London has lost most of its angles now, and with the buildings reduced to rounded and jumbled heaps of debris, the Hounds have trouble finding their way around. And whether you believe in Him or not, still you may thank God for that!”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him, sure that he told the truth. “But where are we going?”
“Where I intended to be going anyway,” he replied. “But you most probably won’t want to—for which I don’t blame you—and anyway we’re already there.”
“Where?” I said, looking left, right, everywhere and seeing nothing but heaped bricks and shadowy darkness.
“Here,” he answered, and ducked into the gloom of a partly caved-in iron and brick archway. And assisted by a rusted metal handrail, we made our way down tiled steps littered with rubble fallen from the ceiling, now lying under a layer of dust that thinned out a little the deeper we went.
“Where are we?” I asked after a while. “I mean, what is this place?” My questions echoed in a gloom that deepened until I could barely see.
“Used to be an old entrance to the Tube system,” he told me. “This one didn’t have elevators, just steps, and they must have closed it down many decades ago. But when these alien things went rioting through the city, causing earthquakes and wrecking everything, all that destruction must have cracked it open.”
“You seem to know all about it,” I said, as I became aware that the light was improving; either that or my eyes were growing accustomed to the dark.
The old man nodded. “I saw a dusty old plaque down here one time, not long after I found this place. A sort of memorial, it said that the last time this part of the Underground system was used was during World War II—as a shelter. It was too deep down here for the bombs to do any damage. As for now: it’s still safer than most other places, at least where the Hounds are concerned, because it’s too round.”
“Too round?”
“It’s a hole in the earth deep underground,” he replied impatiently. “It’s a tunnel—a tube—as round as a wormhole!”
“Ah!” I said. “I see. It doesn’t have any angles!”
“Not too many, no.”
“But it does have light, and it’s getting brighter.”
We passed under another dusty archway and were suddenly on the level: a railway platform, of course. The light was neither daylight nor electric; dim and unstable, it came and went, fluctuating.
“This filth isn’t light as you know it,” the old man said. “It’s Shoggoth tissue, bioluminescence, probably waste elements, or shit to you! It leaks down like liquid from the wet places. Unlike the hideous things that produce it, however, those god-awful Shoggoths, it’s harmless. Just look at it up there on the ceiling.”
I looked, if only to satisfy his urging, at a sort of glowing mist that swirled and pulsed as it spilled along the tiled, vaulted ceiling. Gathering and dispersing, it seemed tenuous as breath on a freezing cold day. And:
“Shoggoth tissue?” I repeated the old fellow. “Alien stuff, right? But how is it you know all this? And I still don’t even know why you’re here. One thing I do know—I think—is that you’re going the wrong way.”
Having climbed down from the platform, he was striking out along the rusting tracks on a heading that my sense of direction told me lay toward—
“The north-east!” he said, as if reading my mind. “And I warned you that you wouldn’t be safe coming with me. In fact if I were you I’d follow the rails going the other way, south. And sooner or later, somewhere or other, I’m sure you’d find a way out.”
“But I’m not at all sure!” I replied, jumping down from the platform and hurrying to catch up. “Also, it’s like I said: you seem to understand just about everything that goes on here, and you’re obviously a survivor. As for myself, well I’d like to survive too!”
That stopped him dead in his tracks. “A survivor, you say? I was, yes—but no more. My entire family is no more! So what the hell am I doing trying to stay alive, eh? I’m sick to death of trying, and there’s only one reason I haven’t done away with myself!” By which time the catch was back in his voice, that almost-sob.
But he controlled it, then swung his small, heavy, battered old suitcase from left to right, changing hands and groaning as he stretched and flexed the strained muscles in his left arm, before swinging the suitcase back again and visibly tightening his grip on its leather handle.
“You should let me carry it,” I told him, as we began walking again. “At least let me spell you. What’s in it anyway? All your worldly possessions? It certainly looks heavy enough.”
“Don’t you worry about this suitcase!” he at once snapped, turning a narrow-eyed look on me as his right hand dipped to hover over the butt of the weapon on his hip. “And I still think you should turn around and head south while you still can, if only… if only for my stupid peace of mind’s sake!” As quickly as that he had softened up again, and explained: “Because I can’t help feeling guilty it’s my fault you’re here, and the deeper we get into the Bgg’ha Zone, the more likely it is that you won’t get out again!”
“Don’t you go feeling guilty about me!” I told him evenly. “I’ll take my chances like I always have. But you? What about you?”
He didn’t answer, just turned away and carried on walking.
“Or maybe you’re a volunteer—” I hazarded a guess, though by now it was becoming more than a guess, “—like that first one who went in and came out screaming? Is that it, Henry? Are you some kind of volunteer, too?” He made no answer, remaining silent as I followed on close behind him.
And feeling frustrated in my own right, I goaded him more yet: “I mean, do you even know what you’re doing, Henry, going headlong into the Bgg’ha Zone like this?”
Once again he stopped and turned to me… almost turned on me! “Yes,” he half-growled, half-sobbed, as he pushed his wrinkled old face close to mine. “I do know what I’m doing. And no, I’m not some kind of volunteer. What I’m doing—everything I do—it’s for me, myself. You want to know how come I know so much about what happened around here, and to the planet in general? Well, that’s because I was here, pretty much in the middle of it; the middle of one of the centres, anyway. And you’ve probably never heard of them, but there was this crazy bunch, the Esoteric Order or some such. They had their own religion, if you could call it that, their own church where they got together, and their ‘bibles’ were these cursed, mouldy old volumes of black magic and weird, alien spells and formulas that should have been destroyed back in the dark ages. Why, I even heard it said that…”
But there he paused, cocking his head on one side and listening for something.
“What is it?” I asked him. Because all I could hear was the slow but regular drip, drip, drip of seeping water.
Then with a start, a sudden jerk of his head, the old man looked down at the rusting rails, where three or four inches of smelly, stagnant water glinted blackly as it slopped between the track’s walls. And: “Shhh!” he whispered. “Listen, damn you!”
I did as I was told, and then I heard it: those faintest of hollow echoes; a distant grunting, muttering, and slap-slapping of feet in the shallow puddles back where we had come from. But the grunted—or gutturally spoken—sounds were hardly reassuring, and definitely not to my companion’s liking.
“Damn you! Damn you!” the old man whispered. “Didn’t I warn you to go back? You might even have made it in time before they came on the scene. But you can’t go back there now!”
Just the tone of his hoarse voice was almost enough to make my flesh creep. “So what is it?” I queried him again. “Who or what are ‘they’ this time?”
“We have to get on,” he replie
d, ignoring my question. “Have to move faster—but as quietly as we can. Their hearing isn’t much to speak of, not when they’re up out of their element, the water—but if they were to hear us…”
“They’re not men?”
“Call them what you will,” he told me, his voice all shuddery. “Men of a sort, I suppose—or frogs, or fish! Who can say what they are exactly? They came in from the sea, up the Thames and into the lakes and wherever there was deep water. It was as if they’d been called… no, I’m sure they were called, by those crazies of the Esoteric Order! But true men? Not at all, not in the least! Their fathers must have mated with women, definitely—or vice versa, maybe?—but no, they’re not men…”
Which prompted me to ask: “How can you know that for sure?”
“Because I’ve seen some of them. Just the once, but it was enough. And you hear that slap-slapping? Can’t you just picture the feet that slap down on the water like that? Good for swimming, but of small use for walking.”
“So why are we in such a hurry?”
And once again, impatiently or yet more impatiently, he said, “Because they can call up others of their kind. A sort of telepathy maybe? Hell, I don’t know!”
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 34
