“Hey, you’ve done okay up to now!” I told him. “And if this warm draft keeps up it will soon dry out our trousers. That’s not much, I suppose, but it may help keep our spirits up.”
He glanced at me, if only for a moment conjuring up a thin, sarcastic ghost of a smile, and with an almost pitying shake of his head said: “Well okay, good, fine!—whatever you say, er, Julian?—but right now it’s my turn to spell you. So if you’ll just give that case back to me…”
Not for a moment wanting to upset him, I handed it over and said, “Okay, if you’re sure you can handle it—?”
“I’m sure,” he replied, as we looked around the platform. And when I looked down at the tracks I could see them glinting dully under no more than twelve or fifteen inches of water. But both of the arched exits were blocked with rubble fallen from above, making my next comment completely redundant:
“It appears there’s no way up, not from here.”
Henry nodded. “Not even if we wanted or needed one, which we don’t. Next up is Green Park, and following that—assuming we get that far—Piccadilly Circus. But Green Park is right on the edge of the water, and—”
“And that’s Deep Ones territory, right?” I cut in.
He nodded, frowned and narrowed his eyes, and said, “Well yes, I do believe I’ve heard them called that before…”
“Of course you have,” I replied. “That’s what you called them, back there where they were splashing about in the water behind us.”
Still frowning, he shook his head and slowly said, “It’s a funny thing, but I don’t remember that.” And then with a shrug of his narrow shoulders: “Well, so what? I don’t remember much of anything any more, only what needs to be done…”
And with one last look around he went on: “We have to get back down into the water. Just when we were drying out, eh? Be glad Green Park’s not far from here, only one stop. But it’s a hell of a junction, or used to be. It seems completely unreal, even surreal now—like some kind of weird dream—but there were three Tube lines criss-crossing Green Park in the old days. I still remember that much at least…” He gave himself a shake, and continued: “Anyway, for all that it’s close to the lake, it was bone-dry the last time I was there. Let’s hope nothing has changed. And after Green Park, at about the same distance again, then it’s Piccadilly Circus—the end of the line, as it were. The end for us, anyway.”
His comment was loaded—the last few words, definitely—but I ignored it and said, “And is that where we’ll surface?”
Again Henry’s nod. “It’ll make your skin crawl!” he said. And matching his words, he shuddered violently; which I didn’t in any way consider a consequence of his damp, clinging trousers. Then, when he’d controlled his shaking, he continued: “But yes, we’ll surface there, right up Bgg’ha’s jacksy, or as close as anyone would ever want to get to it!”
I waited until we were moving steadily forward again, in water that came up just inches short of our knees, and then said, “Henry, you say our skins will be made to crawl. But is there any special reason for that—or shouldn’t I ask?”
“You shouldn’t ask.” He shook his head.
“But I’m asking anyway.” Which was just natural curiosity on my part, I suppose. And whatever, I wanted the old man’s take on it; because we all see things, experience things, differently.
“As you will,” he said with a shrug, and went on: “Piccadilly Circus as was is lying crushed at the roots of Bgg’ha’s house. That great junction, once standing so close to the heart of a city, is now in the dark basement of the Twisted Tower, that vast heap of wreckage where he or it lords it over his minions—and over his human captives, his ‘cattle’.”
“His cattle…” I mused, because that thought or simile was still reasonably new to me. At least I had never heard it expressed that way before coming across Henry.
“As I may have told you before,” the old man said, “that’s all they are: food for Bgg’ha’s table, fodder for his stable.”
We were moving faster now, under an arched ceiling that was aglow, seemingly alive with luminous, swirling Shoggoth exhaust. And the closer we drew to Henry’s goal or target, the more voluble he was becoming.
“Do you know why I’m here?” he suddenly burst out. “I think you do—or rather, you think you do!”
Nodding, I said: “But haven’t we already decided that? It’s revenge, isn’t it? For your wife?”
“For my whole family!” he corrected me. And the catch, that half-sob, was back in his voice. “My poor wife, yes, of course—but also for my girls, my daughters! And my eldest, Janet—my God, how brave! I would never have suspected it of her, but she was braver than me. Inspiring, is how I’ve come to think of it: that my Janet was able to escape like that, and somehow managed to crawl back home again. But she did, she came home to me, and then… then she died! Not yet twenty years old, and gone like that.
“She died of horror and loathing—because of what had been done to her—but never of shame, for she had fought it all the way. And it’s mainly because… because of what Janet told me had happened to her that I’ve kept coming here. It’s why I’m here now: for Janet, yes, but also for her younger sister, Dawn, and for their mother; and for all the other females who’ve been taken—and who are still there, maybe alive even now in that Twisted Tower!”
“Still alive?” I repeated him. “You mean, maybe they’re not just fodder after all?” At which I could have bitten through my tongue as it dawned on me that it was probably very cruel of me to keep questioning him like this. But too late for that now.
Sobbing openly and making no attempt to hide it, Henry replied: “Janet was taken two months ago. They took her in broad daylight, or what we used to call daylight, on her way back home from an SSR meeting. She’d been a member since not long after her mother was taken. A boyfriend of hers from the old days saw it happen. It was those freakish flapping-rag things, those so-called Hounds. I was always telling her to stick to the shadows whenever she ventured out, but on this occasion I’d forgotten to warn her against angles. They took her on a street corner; just ninety degrees of curb that cost Janet her freedom and, as I believed at the time, her life too. But no, Janet’s captors were working for that thing in the Twisted Tower, something I hadn’t known until she escaped and got home just a month ago.
“That was when I found out about what goes on in that hellish place. Since when I’ve risked my own life five times making this trip in and out, always hoping I might see Janet’s mother, or her younger sister Dawn, and that I might be able to rescue them somehow… but at the same time making certain deliveries and planning for the future… in fact planning for right now, if you really want to know. But my wife… and Dawn… that poor kid, just seventeen years old: they’re somewhere in that nightmarish tower, I feel certain. But alive and suffering still, or dead and… and eaten! Who knows?” There he paused and made an attempt to bring himself back under control.
Feeling the need to have the old man continue, however—no matter how painful that had to be for him—I said, “Henry, before Janet escaped… did she ever see her mother, or her younger sister Dawn, there in the Twisted Tower?”
He shook his head. “Not once. Other girls, plenty of them, but never her Ma. And where Dawn is concerned, that’s completely understandable. She was taken just three days after Janet found her way home in time to… in time to die! In other words she was out of that place before Dawn was taken in.” He paused for a moment or two before continuing.
“Now, I know it must sound like I’ve been pretty careless of my girls, but that’s not so. And maybe it’s best if Dawn really is dead, because of what Janet… because of what she told me was happening to those… those other female captives.”
And as he broke down more yet, as gently as I could I asked him, “Well then, Henry, what did Janet tell you? What was happening in there, to the other female captives?”
Sobbing and stumbling along through the wate
r—sobbing so loudly I thought he might sob his heart out—still he managed to reply: “Oh, that’s something I see in my blackest nightmares, Julian, and I see it every night! But first let me tell you how Dawn was taken…
“I had left her at home while I went looking for a place to bury Janet. No big problem there… a hole in the ground, with plenty of bricks and rubble to fill it in. Necessary, yes, because there are packs of real hounds running wild through all the destruction. But then I’d gone rummaging for food in the ruins of a corner store I’d found: canned fruit and meats and such. But when I got back home with my haul—‘home’, hah!—a concrete cellar in a one-time museum, a wing of the old Victoria & Albert, I think it was… hard to tell in all that devastation. But anyway, when I got back Dawn was gone and the place had been completely wrecked. What few goods we’d had—sticks of furniture and such—were broken up, strewn everywhere, and the place was damp and stank of… oh, I don’t know, rotting fish, weeds, and stagnant water. The evil stench of the Deep Ones, yes; and they, too, are the servants of Bgg’ha, as I believe they are of all the octopus-heads…”
And there Henry fell silent again, leaving only the echoes of his tortured voice, and the sloshing of our legs through the water. But I still couldn’t let it rest; there were things he had hinted at that I would like explanations for; I wondered just how much he’d learned, how much he knew. And so:
“You said your wife was taken that first night,” I reminded him, as if he needed it. “She was taken as all hell stampeded through the city and there was no defence against the turmoil, the horror. But that was a long time ago, Henry. And weren’t these monsters slaughtering everyone and destroying everything in their path at that time? How could you possibly think your wife might still be alive in Bgg’ha’s Twisted Tower? Especially after what Janet told you about it?”
At which the old man seemed to freeze in his tracks, jerked to a standstill, and in the next moment turned on me, snarling: “How do you know what Janet did or didn’t tell me, eh? And how much do you know about that damned Twisted Tower? Tell me that, Julian Chalmers!”
Oh, I was glad in that moment that I had returned his suitcase to Henry, and that he was carrying it with both hands. He still had that gun on his hip, and if he could have reached for it without jeopardising the safety of the case and its contents I felt sure he would have done so. And who knows what he might have done then? But he couldn’t and didn’t, and I said:
“Henry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but those creatures in the Tower… they eat people, don’t they? Haven’t you already said as much? And it’s been a very long time for your wife. Now, don’t be offended, but in the light of your daughters’ ages, not to mention your own obvious years, it has to be my understanding that your wife isn’t a mere girl; so what good would she be, alive, to such as Bgg’ha and his minions? I mean, him and his monsters? Beasts in their stables? What use to them except as… well, except as—”
But that was as far as he would let me go, and I could tell by the look on his face that it wouldn’t in any case be necessary to finish my question.
“God damn you, Julian!” he said, turning away. “It was hope—desperate, impossible hope!—that’s all. And as for… as for poor Dawn…” But he couldn’t say on and so went staggering away through the sluggish, blackly glinting water, in the eerie light of the swirling Shoggoth tissue.
I gave him a few moments before catching up, then said: “I’m sorry, Henry, but you leave me confused. I know you’re planning some kind of revenge—in whatever form that may take—but if you were really hoping that Dawn and your wife are still alive, might not the violence of any such revenge hurt them too, not to mention you yourself?”
Yet again he came to a halt and turned to me. “Of course it would, and will!” he said. “But far better that—a quick, clean death to them, indeed to all of us—than what they could be suffering, to what Dawn if not her mother must be suffering, even as we speak!” And before I could say anything more: “Now listen…
“Did you know they take young boys, too? Young men, I mean, of your age or thereabouts? And since you appear to be good at figuring things out, can you guess what they are used for?”
“No, not really,” I replied, unwilling to disturb him further. “But in any case, maybe we should quieten it down now. I think I heard voices—some kind of sounds, anyway—from somewhere up ahead.”
The old man’s eyes focused as he looked all about, searching for recognisable signs on the old blackened walls. And: “Yes,” he whispered, as quietly as I had suggested. “Your ears are obviously better than mine. We’re only five minutes or so away from Green Park, which is one of the worst places for—”
“—Deep Ones?” I finished it for him, and he nodded. And from then on we stayed silent, creeping like mice, glad that the water level had fallen away to no more than an inch or two. And for the second time Henry entrusted his case to me…
Ahead of us, the Shoggoth light brightened up a little until it was about half as good as dim electric light used to be. Even so it suited us just fine, because Henry was right and four or five minutes later Green Park’s platform loomed up out of the shadows and gloomy distance. By then, however, those barking, gutturally grunting “voices” I had heard had faded into distant echoes before ceasing almost entirely; but still there were the sounds of some sort of laborious work going on in that subterranean burrow’s upper reaches. So we didn’t climb up onto the platform but stayed on the tracks in the shadow of the bull-nosed wall, where we crouched down and kept the lowest possible profile as we traversed the mercifully short length of the station. And halfway across that comparatively open space, suddenly Henry paused to tug nervously on the sleeve of my parka, indicating that I should look at the platform’s flagged floor.
Still keeping low but raising my head just enough to scan the length of the platform end to end, I saw what he had seen: the large, damp imprints of webbed feet where the dusty paving flags had been criss-crossed. Then, too, I detected the stench of weedy deeps and the less-than-human creatures risen up from them.
Deep Ones! Henry framed the words with his lips, both silently and needlessly. And: Look! He pointed.
From the mouths of the entry/exit archways, rubble had been cleared away and heaped aside. The stairs and one wrecked elevator, visible beyond the archways, were also clear of debris. But from one of the exits a thin stream of water was flowing forth, snaking across the platform and over the lip of the bull-noses, before finding its way down into the well and from there, presumably, into unseen channels that were deeper yet. But even in the moments we spent watching it, so the flow rapidly increased to a torrent, and at the same time a massed, triumphant shout—a hooting, snorting uproar, even at the distance—sounded from on high. But of course we already knew that the engineering going on up there wasn’t the work of human beings.
And now Henry whispered, “Come on, let’s get out of here!”
Minutes later and a hundred yards or more into the comparative darkness of the tunnel, finally the old man spoke up again. “We were very lucky back there, fortunate indeed!”
“Oh?” I replied. “Fortunate?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Why, the fact that they had recently gone up out of the station! And that they hadn’t begun to flood the place earlier, like yesterday maybe. For if they’d done that we’d be swimming by now! Surely you know or can guess what they were doing—what they’re doing even now?”
Trudging along beside him, sloshing through inches of cold, black water, I shrugged. “Well, like you said: they’re flooding the place.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because… because they like the water?”
Henry offered up a derisive snort and repeated me sarcastically: “‘Because they like the water’? Is that all? Man, can’t you see? Don’t you understand? They’re terraforming—no, aqua-forming—the Underground system, similar to what we had planned doing to Mars before those freaks in the Esote
ric Order messed everything up! They’re making the Tube system suitable, comfortable, compatible—to themselves, to their loathsome way of life! Now do you see it? This maze, these endless miles of tunnels, stations and levels; these massive great rabbit-holes—and all of them filled with water, if not now then soon! Paradise to the Deep Ones! Subterranean temples to their master, octopus-headed Bgg’ha, with myriad submarine connections to his Twisted Tower like the strands of a gigantic sunken cobweb!”
Henry’s thought or vision was fantastic and even awe-inspiring: the entire Underground system filled with water; a vast submarine labyrinth where the Deep Ones could spawn and worship their bloated black deity for as long as the Earth continued to roll in its orbit.
Then for several long minutes we remained silent, Henry and I, as we slopped along under the swirling and gradually brightening glow of Shoggoth filth.
But eventually he said, “Well then, Julian—have you figured it out yet?”
“Eh? Figured what out?”
“Why they take young men, of course.”
“You mean, if not to eat them?”
“Yes,” he nodded. “If not to eat them. What other use could young men be put to, eh?”
Deciding to let him tell me, I shook my head. “I’ve no idea, Henry.” And beginning to sob again, however quietly, he said:
“It’s because young men are sexually potent, Julian. Just like horses in the stud farms as once were before They came. That’s what my girl Janet told me, but it’s also why she escaped and came home worn out, dying, and pregnant! The baby—not much more than a foetus, I imagine or hope, poor innocent creature—he or she died with Janet. But better that than the other. And now… and now…”
I nodded and said, “I understand—I think. And now there’s Dawn. Why don’t you tell me about her, if you can?”
“No,” he shook his head, “you don’t understand! You haven’t thought it through. But I didn’t have to, because I had it from Janet, and I’ll tell you anyway; or perhaps by now you can tell me? Why would a monstrous thing like Bgg’ha—and his monsters in that Twisted Tower of a house—why would they want children, babies, from their captives?”
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 36
