We moved faster, and I could almost hear him wincing each time our feet kicked up water that splashed a little too loudly. Then in a while we came across a narrow ledge to one side, where the wall had been cut back some two feet to make a maintenance walkway four feet higher than the bed of the tracks.
“Get up there,” the old man told me. “It’s dry and we’ll be able to go faster without all the noise.”
I did as he advised and reached down to help him up. He wasn’t much more than a bundle of bones and couldn’t be very strong, but he didn’t for a second offer that small suitcase to me or release his grip on it. And with him in front we moved ahead again; until eventually, this time without my urging, he continued telling me his story from where he’d left off. His story, along with that of the alien invasion or take-over—or walk-over—which seemed to come a little easier to him now. So maybe he’d needed to get it off his chest.
“It was those Esoteric Order freaks. At least, that was how everyone thought of them: as folks with too few screws, and what few they had with crossed threads! But no, they weren’t crazy—except maybe in what they were trying to do. And actually, that even got into the newspapers: how the Esoteric Order was trying to call up powerful creatures—god-things, they called them—from parallel dimensions and the beginning of time; beings that had come here once before, even before the evolution of true or modern man, only to be trapped and imprisoned by yet more mysterious beings and banished back to their original universes, or to forgotten, forbidden places here on Earth and under the sea…
“Well, that was a laugh, wasn’t it? As daft as all those UFO stories from more than fifty years ago, and those tales of prehistoric monsters in a Scottish loch, and hairy ape men on Himalayan mountains; oh, and lots of other myths and legends of that sort. But daft? Oh, really? And if those oh-so-bloody-clever newspaper reporters, the ones who infiltrated the church and saw them at their worship and listened to their sermons—along with the other religious groups that scoffed at their ‘idiotic beliefs’—if they had been right, then all well and good. But they weren’t!
“And when should it happen—when did it happen?—but at Hallowmas: the feast of All Hallows, All Saints!
“And oh, what an awful feast that was—Them feasting on us, I mean—when those monstrous beings answered the call and came forth from strange dimensions, bringing their thralls, servitors and adherents with them. Up from the oceans, down from the weird skies of parallel universes, erupting from the earth and bringing all of the planet’s supposedly dead volcanoes back to life, these minions of madness came; and what of humanity then, eh? What but food for their tables, fodder for their stables.”
That last wasn’t a question but a simple fact, and the old man was sobbing again, openly now, as he turned and grasped my arm. “My wife…” He almost choked on the word. “That poor, poor woman… she was taken at first pass! Taken, as the city reeled and the buildings crumbled, as the earth broke open and darkness ruled…!
“Ah, but according to rumour the very first to go was that blasphemous, evil old church! For the so-called ‘priests’ of the Esoteric Order had been fatally mistaken in calling up that which they couldn’t put down again: a mighty octopus god-thing who rose in his house somewhere in the Pacific, while others of his spawn surfaced in their manses from various far-flung deeps. Not the least of these emerged in the Antarctic—along with an entire plateau! That was a massive upheaval, causing earthquakes and tsunamis around the world! Another rose up from the Mariana Trench, and one far closer to home from a lesser-known abyss somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He was the one—damn him to Hell!—who built his Twisted Tower house here in the Zone. In fact the Bgg’ha Zone is named after him, for he was—he is—Bgg’ha!
“And there’s a chant, a song, a liturgy of sorts that human worshippers—oh yes, there are such people!—sing of a night as they wander aimlessly through the rubble streets. And having heard it so often, far too often, dinning repeatedly in my ears while I lay as if in a coma, hardly daring to breathe until they had moved on, I learned those alien words and could even repeat them. What’s more, when the SSR trapped and caught one of these madmen, these sycophants, to learn whatever they could from him, he offered them a translation. And those chanted words which I had learned, they were these:
“‘Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh I’ihu’nagl fhtagn.’ A single mad sentence which translates into this:
“‘From his house at Im’ykh, Bgg’ha at last is risen!’
“And do you know, those words still ring in my ears, blocking almost everything else out? If I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, on what I’m saying, it all slips away and all I can hear is that damned chanting: Bgg’ha at last is risen! Ah, but since he was able to rise, maybe he can be sent back down again! And perhaps I even have… even have the means with which to do it…”
It was far more than he had ever told me before; but there he fell silent again, possibly wondering if he had said too much…
Then, as we rested for a few minutes, and as I looked down from the maintenance ledge, I saw how the dirty water glinting over the rails was much deeper here, perhaps as much as ten or twelve inches. Seeing where I was looking, my companion told me:
“Yes, there’s very deep water up ahead, and likewise on the surface over-head.”
“Ahead of us?” I repeated him, for want of something to say. “But… on the surface?”
“Mainly on the surface,” he nodded. “That’s where it’s leaking from. We’re heading for Knightsbridge, as was—which isn’t far from the Serpentine—also as was, but much enlarged and far deeper now. That too was the work of Bgg’ha; he did it for some of his servitors, the kind we heard wading through that shallow water back along the tracks. There’s plenty more of them in the Serpentine, which is part of a great lake now that has drowned St. James’s Park and everything in between all the way to the burst banks of the Thames. We can stay down here for another mile or thereabouts, but then we may have to surface… either that or swim, and I really don’t fancy that!”
“You’ve done this before,” I said as we set off again, because it was obvious that he had, and fairly often and recently. That explained how he knew these routes so well.
He nodded and replied, “Five times, yes. But this will be the last time. For you too, your first and last.”
“Or maybe not,” I answered. “I mean, you never can tell how things will work out.”
“You young fool!” he said, but not unkindly, even somewhat sadly. “You’ll be right there in the heart of the Bgg’ha Zone, in the roots of the Twisted Tower, that loathsome creature’s so-called ‘house!’ And I can tell you exactly how things are going to work out for you: you won’t be coming out again!”
“But you did it,” I answered him. “And all of five times—if you’re not lying or simply crazy!”
He shook his head. “I’m not lying, and I’m not simply crazy. You’re the one who’s crazy! Listen, do you have any idea who I am or why I’m really here?”
I shrugged. “You’re just an old man on a mad mission. That much is obvious. I may even know what your mission is, and why. It’s revenge, because they took your wife, your family. But one small suitcase—even one that’s full of high explosives—just isn’t going to do it. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon is ever going to do it.”
The look he turned on me then was sour, downcast, disappointed. And: “Have I been that obvious?” he said, pausing where the ledge stepped up onto an actual platform. “I suppose I must have been. But even so you’re only half-right, and that makes you half-wrong.”
The Shoggoth light was suddenly poorer, where the mist writhing on the tiled, vaulted expanse of the ceiling was that much thinner. Our eyes, however, had grown accustomed to the eerie gloom and the fluctuating quality of the bioluminescence, and we were easily able to read the legend on the tunnel’s opposite wall:
KNIGHTSBRIDGE
“My God!” my guide muttered
then. “But I remember how this place looked in its heyday: so clean and bright with its shining tiles, its endless stairs and great elevators, its theatre and lingerie posters. But look at it now, with its evidence of earth tremors and fires; its blackened, greasy walls; its collapsed or caved-in archways and all the other damage that it’s suffered. And… and… Lord, what a mess!”
A mess? Something of an understatement, that. The ceiling was scarred by a series of broad jagged cracks where dozens of tiles had come loose and fallen; some of the access/exit openings in the wall on our side of the tracks had buckled inwards, causing the ceiling to sag ominously where mortared debris and large blocks of concrete had crashed down; and from a source somewhere high above, a considerable waterfall was surging out of an arched exit and spilling into the central channel, drowning the tracks under a foaming torrent.
As we clambered over the rubble the old man said, “I think that I—or rather that we—are probably in trouble.” And I asked myself: another understatement? How phlegmatic! And meanwhile he had continued: “Like everywhere else, this place is coming apart. It’s got so much… so much worse, since the last time I passed through.”
Which was when he began to ramble and sob again, only just managing to make sense:
“There’s been so many earthquakes recently… if the rest of the Underground system is in the same terrible condition as this place… but then again, maybe it’s not that bad… and Hyde Park Corner isn’t so far away… not very far at all… and anyway, it was never my intention to surface here… there’s water up there… too much water… but there’s still a half-decent chance that we’ll make it to Piccadilly Circus down here in the Underground… I’ve just got to make it to Piccadilly Circus… right there, under the Twisted Tower!”
Feeling I had to stop him before he broke down completely and did himself some serious harm, I grabbed his arm to slow him down where he was staggering about in the debris. And I shouted over the tumult of the water: “Hey! Old man! Slow down and try to stop babbling! You’ll wear yourself out both physically and mentally like that!”
As we cleared the heaped rubble it seemed he heard me and knew I was right. Shaking as if in a fever, which he might well have been, he came to a halt and said: “So close, so very close… but God! I can’t fail now. Lord, don’t let me fail now!”
“You said something about not intending to surface here,” I reminded him, holding him steady. “About maybe having to swim?”
At which he sat down on a block of concrete fallen from the ceiling before answering me. And as quickly as that he was more or less coherent again. “I wouldn’t even try to surface here,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders. “No reason to do so. And anyway there’s far too much water up there—and too many of those monsters that live in it! But we must hope that the rest of the system, between here and Piccadilly Circus, is in better condition.”
“Okay,” I said, grateful for the break as I sat down beside him. “Piccadilly Circus is our destination. So how do we manage it? And will it mean we have to get down in the water?”
Swaying a little as he got to his feet, he looked over the rim of the platform before answering me. “Are you worried about swimming? Well don’t be. The water here isn’t nearly as deep as I thought it might be… I think it must find its way into the depths of the shattered earth, maybe into a subterranean river. So even though we won’t have to swim, still it appears we’ll be doing a lot more wading; knee-deep at least, and maybe for quite a while. So now for the last time—even though it’s already far too late—I feel I’ve really got to warn you: if you want to live, to stand even a remote chance, you have to turn back now. Do you understand?”
“I think so, yes,” I told him. “But you know, Henry, we’ve been lucky so far, both of us, and maybe it’s not over yet.”
“I can’t convince you then?”
“To go back? No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I want to do that. And the truth is we all have to die sometime, whether it’s at Piccadilly Circus under the Twisted Tower or back there where those—those beings—were splashing about in the water. I mean, what’s the difference where, why, or how we do it, eh? It’s got to happen eventually.”
“As for me,” he said, letting himself down slowly over the rim of the platform into water that rose halfway up his thighs, “it is a matter of where I do it, where I can be most effective. My revenge, you said, and at least you were right about that. But you: you’re young, strong, apparently well-fed, which is a rare thing in itself! You probably came in from the woods, the countryside—a place where there are still birds and other wild things you could catch and eat—or so I imagine. So for you to accompany me where I’m going…” He shook his head. “It just seems a great waste to me.”
There was nothing in what he’d said that I could or needed to answer; so as I let myself down into the water beside him, I simply said, “So then, are you ready to move on?” And since his only reply was to lean his bony body into the effort—for the flow of the water was against us and strong—I added, “I take it that you are! But you know, Henry, pushing against the water like this will soon drain you. So may I suggest—only a suggestion, mind you—that you let me carry the case? If you want to do the job you’ve set yourself, well okay, that’s fine. But since I’m here why not let me help you?”
He turned to me, turned a half-thankful, half-anxious look on me, and finally reached out with his trembling arms and gave that small heavy suitcase into my care. “But don’t you drop it in the water!” he told me. “In fact don’t drop it at all—neither that nor bang it around—or damage it in any other way! Do you hear?”
“Of course I do, Henry,” I answered. “And I think I understand. I’ve seen how you take care of it, and it’s obvious how crucial it must be to your mission, however that turns out. Perhaps as we move along you’d care to tell me about it… but it’s also fine if you don’t want to. First, though, if you don’t mind, could you get my cigarettes and lighter out of the top pocket of my parka?” For even though we were well above the water level, still I was hugging the case to my chest with both hands. And I explained: “The water’s very cold and a drag or two may help to warm us up—our lungs, anyway. So light one up for yourself and one for me.” And when he had managed that: “Thanks, Henry,” I told him out of the corner of my mouth, before dragging deeply on the scented smoke.
He smoked, too, but remained silent on the subject of the suitcase… in particular its “secret” contents, as he seemed to consider them.
As already more than hinted, I thought I might know about that anyway but would have preferred to hear it from him. Well, perhaps there was some other way I could talk him into telling me about it. So after we had waded for another ten or twelve minutes and finished our cigarettes:
“Henry, you asked me a while ago if I had any idea who you might be,” I reminded him. “Well no, I don’t. But it might pass some time and keep our minds active—stop them from freezing up—if you’d care to tell me.”
“Huh!” he answered. “It’s like you want to know everything about me, and I don’t even know your name!”
“It’s Julian,” I told him. “Julian Chalmers. I was a teacher and taught the Humanities, some Politics and—of all things—Ethics, at a university in the Midlands.”
“Of all… all things?” Shivering head to toe, he somehow got the question out. “How do… do you mean, ‘of all things’?”
“Well, they’re pretty different subjects, aren’t they? Sort of jumbled and contradictory? I mean, is there any such thing as the ethics of politics? Or its ‘humanity’, for that matter!”
He considered it a while, then said, “Good question. And I might have known the answer once upon a time. But then I would have been talking about—God, it’s c-cold!—about human politicians. But since the actions and mores of humanity no longer apply—”
At which he had paused, as if thinking it through. And so:
“Go on,” I quickl
y prompted him, because I was interested. And anyway I wanted to keep him talking.
“Well, the invaders,” he obliged me, “and I mean all of them—from their leaders, the huge, tentacle-faced creatures in their crazily-angled manses, to the servitors they brought with them or called up after they got settled here—all the nightmarish flying things, and those shapeless, flapping-rag horrors called Hounds, and not least those scaly half-frog, half-fish minions from their deep-sea cities—not one of these species seems to have ever evolved politics, while the very idea of ethics might seem as alien to them as they themselves seem to us! But on the other hand, if you’re talking human politics, human ethics—”
“I don’t think I was,” I said, quickly dropping the subject as another maintenance ledge came into view on the left.
We couldn’t have been happier, the pair of us, to get out of the water and onto that ledge. And more than mildly surprised, we were relieved to discover that a welcoming draft of air from somewhere up ahead was strangely warm!
“Most places underground are like this,” the old man tried to explain it. “When you get down to a certain depth the temperature is more or less constant. It’s why the Neanderthals lived in caves. It was the same the last time I was here, which I had forgotten about, but this warm air has served to remind me that we’ve reached—”
HYDE PARK CORNER
He had let the legend on the brightly tiled wall across the tracks finish the job for him, precisely and silently.
“So, what do you think?” I asked him, as we moved from the ledge onto the Underground station’s platform. “How are we doing, Henry?”
“Not good enough,” he answered. “We should be doing a whole lot better! My fault, I suppose, because I’m not as strong as I used to be. I’m just too frail, too weak, that’s all, and I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s what happens when a man gets old. But that’s okay, and I can afford to push myself one last time. Because this will be the last time; my last effort in the long last night.”
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 35
