“Don't be afraid, Daniela,” he said in a wheedling voice. “I'll protect you.”
Protect her from what?
He tried to ignore the small voice of skepticism, but here in the dark it was hard not to be nervous. The visions of his future as a lovable hero-next-door were still intense, but fear was fighting back against optimism. He resolved to go back and call the police if she continued to head further into the tunnel.
Then the flashlight’s beam found her. She was crouched down, dark hair falling over her face. He reached out to touch her on the shoulder.
“Daniela?”
She turned her head, and he saw her pretty, pale face smiling up at him. She stood and reached out, taking his hand, playfully pulling them closer together. It was his fantasy made real, the attractive woman suddenly finding him desirable.
Why is she doing this in a tunnel?
Again, he quelled the small, troubling voice as Daniela started to unbutton his jacket. She worked quickly with long, clever fingers, and in seconds she had stripped him of his jacket and shirt. She bent down and started working on his pants. They fell around his ankles.
“Oh God,” he breathed.
The flashlight beam wobbled, played over the tunnel wall. It picked out a leg, a hand, a glimpse of a face. The small figure was pale, dressed in a cleaner's overall. It looked a lot like Daniela but before he could focus on her, the stranger dodged to one side, heading behind him.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “You brought a friend?”
No, the skeptical voice warned, she came alone.
He turned the flashlight down again and saw Daniela. She looked up at him with what might have been a grin. It was hard to tell, as what should have been a face was a now elongated muzzle. The eyes were small, dark, deep-sunken. But it was the mouth that made him gasp in terror, held up a hand to ward off the sight. The mouth was lined with dozens of needle-sharp teeth. The creature hissed at him.
“Christ!”
He reeled back only for sinuous fingers to wrap themselves around his throat from behind. A moment later slender legs wrapped themselves around his waist. The weight of his assailant sent him staggering, and he fell to his knees. One kneecap connected with a rail and the pain blinded him for a moment. His flashlight skittered away, stopped, cast a useless patch of light on the wall.
“Help!” he screamed, clawing at the talons gripping his throat.
The first creature, the false Daniela that was not killing him, did not respond. It was too busy gathering up his discarded uniform.
I only wanted to be a hero.
Bittersweet, it was his last thought.
***
Denny awoke after a night of disturbed sleep, with only the vaguest memories of her dreams. Her face in the bathroom mirror reminded her of a former college friend who had dropped out thanks to a serious meth problem. She had interviewed the girl as an assignment.
“I didn't even get the fun a drug habit can bring,” she grumbled, stepping into the shower.
A few minutes later, she felt refreshed, and took her first sip of coffee. As she was waiting for her breakfast oatmeal to be microwaved she checked her phone. Frankie had sent her a video of a Wiener dog dressed in a fire truck costume chasing an angry cat around an apartment.
Some things never change, Denny thought, smiling.
She moved on to news feeds. Inevitably her browsing around the Russian video had produced a rich crop of craziness. Some algorithm had decided she was interested in not only Bigfoot sightings and sea serpents, but also conspiracy theories about lizard people from outer space. One 'revelation' claimed the Queen was just such an alien. Denny chuckled, then swiped on to the next item.
CALI FISH KILL BAFFLES SCIENTISTS
She frowned at a picture of people on a beach picking their way among mounds of silvery corpses. Skimming the story, which came from a mainstream source, she could see that it was mysterious but not obviously related to the paranormal.
Fish kills? Hardly my cup of tea.
She scrolled down, stopped, stared. There was another image, this time of the sea taken from the air. The caption read 'A Coastguard aircraft was in the area when the strange incident occurred'. Hundreds of dead fish drifted on the blue ocean. Flocks of gulls were circling, though none seemed to have alighted to feast on the corpses. The angle was shallow, the plane had clearly been some distance from the focal point of the mass death. However, Denny felt sure that there was an unusual symmetry to the drifting carrion.
The pattern was blurred, but still quite discernible. It was roughly star-shaped. Denny imagined a Black Star dying slowly, drifting down to the surface and poisoning marine life as it sank, slowly dissolving, into the depths.
“Strike two,” Denny thought. “One over the Pacific, one in Russia.”
She was dressed and ready to go when she remembered the notepad beside her bed. She glanced over, saw that it had apparently been moved. When she checked, she found a few scrawled words slanting down the page. They were hard to decipher, but she thought she recognized 'chamber', 'cocoa', and what might have been 'queer'.
“Great,” she muttered, tearing off the page and shoving in her jeans’ pocket. “Now I'm setting myself puzzles.”
***
Sir Lionel Bartram sat in the back seat of his ministerial Daimler and checked his watch. Timandra was late. This was not unusual. He had not hired her for her punctuality. But Bartram still felt mild resentment that his personal assistant should take his tolerance so much for granted.
After all, he thought, the girl's getting more out of this than I am.
He checked his phone. She had not replied to his last message. Or any of the previous three. Bartram leaned over, looked up at the apartment building through the limousine's bullet-proof glass.
What on earth is keeping the little fool? Has she overslept?
Bartram suddenly thought of Timandra sprawled luxuriously in bed, next to her a young, handsome, virile man. The unwelcome thought was followed by a far worse one. Like most career politicians, Bartram was a risk taker, like a compulsive gambler. He knew it, but could never control his urges enough to be wholly safe. Timandra was just the latest of a string of young mistresses. None of her predecessors had gone to the press.
But in these days of Twitter and online shaming, she doesn't need to.
“Would you like me to go and ring the doorbell, sir?” asked his bodyguard, turning around in the front passenger seat.
Bartram thought he detected a slight hint of mockery in the police officer's voice. The man might well have sensed Bartram's discomfort. As a minister with a security brief, he could hardly travel without armed protection. But between the bodyguard, the chauffeur, and various civil servants he was left with little time to enjoy Timandra's company.
“No,” he said brusquely, “I'll do it, I need to stretch my legs.”
He distinctly heard the officer sigh and felt a mild rush of pleasure at forcing the man to get out into the freezing cold. Bartram picked his way carefully over the icy pavement and jabbed at the door buzzer. After a moment, there was a click.
“Is that you, Tiger Pants?”
Without meaning to, Bartram looked around to see if his bodyguard had overheard. The man coughed, covered his mouth with a fist.
I'll get him replaced, Bartram thought, then turned to put his mouth close to the grille of the intercom.
“You're running late, I have a meeting with the Home Secretary at ten. I need to prepare–”
“Come on up, darling.”
There was a buzz, a louder click, and the door opened.
“I haven't got time–” Bartram began.
He hesitated. His mind was suddenly flooded with amorous thoughts. He saw Timandra in the special outfit he loved so much. He remembered many previous moments of delight. Again, his gambler's instincts rose up, the thought of opportunistic shagging all the more tempting because it was so reckless.
“I'll be down in a few minutes,”
he called over his shoulder as he pushed the door open. “You wait in the car.”
The old busybody who lived on the ground floor was just opening her front door as he tried to sprint up the stairs. He gave her a curt nod, secretly wishing she would expire from heart failure. She was one of many loose ends in his affair with Timandra.
Far too many loose ends. I will get caught at this rate. But oh God, it's worth it.
***
“So, this is weird,” said Davenport. “Check it out.”
Jim Davison watched the poor-quality video of a woman mopping an Underground platform. He could not make out the sign from this angle, but assumed it was Hobs Lane. They were in Davenport's office, a small cubbyhole that seemed little used, as befitted a top field agent.
“Weird, as in somebody actually working hard for a living?” Gould remarked after half a minute. “I suppose you could sell this as some kind of art installation. Good feminist angle.”
“Keep watching. Our contact at the Scotland Yard passed this along first thing. Surprised they got the footage this quickly, given all the cutbacks.”
Davenport jabbed a finger at the tunnel mouth. Then Jim saw it, the way the cleaner stopped, seemed to listen. Although the angle was poor, he could just make out that she was speaking. Then she walked along to the end of the platform, and after seemingly pausing to listen, climbed down onto the tracks.
“Bloody hell!” Jim half-expected to see her killed instantly by the voltage, then remembered that the current would have been turned off.
“Malpas Abbey, yes?” Davenport said. “Underground gateway? This could be another one. And you know how those creatures can lure people in. Make you see people you love, or want to bonk! And put ideas in your head.”
“Yeah, all that's true,” Jim conceded. “But in Machen, the gateway was at the top of a hill in a forest. And remember Gould's account of his sister being taken. That was pretty much at sea level. So, you're reading a hell of a lot into the behavior of a woman who might just be, I dunno, mentally ill? Or a part-time rat collector?”
“Keep watching, mate,” Davenport said, looking pleased with himself. “It gets better.”
The cleaner went into the tunnel, vanishing into the darkness. Davenport wound forward just over six minutes. A figure appeared in the tunnel, gradually became clearer. Even in the poor-quality footage, the person was clearly wearing the cleaner's overall, jeans, and sneakers.
“Hard to tell if it's exactly the same face,” Davenport remarked. “But what a neat trick if they are coming through down there.”
Jim leaned back in his chair, and his head connected with a filing cabinet. He swore, partly at the pain, partly at the problem.
“How the hell could we investigate the Tube network without drawing too much attention? We can't close the Thames Line, or even part of it. At least half a million people must be using it every day.”
Davenport nodded at the screen.
“Do it at night. Nobody about except security and cleaners. We tell them it's counter-terrorism, make it very clear that they're to tell no one. Then some of them will blab to their mates, partners, whatever, and that's our cover established.”
“Rather you than me,” Jim replied. “Not keen on enclosed spaces, myself.”
Davenport gave a knowing smile.
“Oh come on!” Jim protested. “I did Malpas Abbey, then that mayhem in Machen. Isn't there some other idiot who'll stick his nose into monster territory?”
“You're looking at him,” replied Davenport. “Hey, it's probably nothing. But we're keeping it to ourselves for now, right? Just in case. And who better to probe this particular mystery than someone with time in the field?”
Jim conceded, with bad grace, and the two began planning their investigation. As before, Jim found himself growing enthusiastic about the assignment once the practical issues had to be tackled. He brought up a map of the London Underground system on his laptop and pointed to the Thames Line.
“Okay,” he said, “first thing is tunnels tend to go in two directions. So we've got Hobs Lane, suspect area, right. But at the other end of that tunnel is Wyndham Road. That's nearer to the heart of the city. And if they kept going the other way, they'd get to Wimbledon Common – it's not that far for things that move as fast as Interlopers.”
Davenport made a skeptical sound.
“Yeah, but nothing's been reported at Wyndham Road,” he observed.
“Because nothing's happened?” Jim riposted. “Or because the Interlopers have done a far better job at covering their tracks? Like Gould always says, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“Quite the little Poirot, aren't we?” Davenport said, but Jim could tell his colleague was impressed. “So we need to check security staff at both stations.”
They agreed to start at Hobs Lane and work their way along to Wyndham Road that night. In the meantime, checks were to be carried out on the night security force and the cleaners. Forster, Davenport explained, had squared it with Benson as a special operation that nobody else need know about.
“What about backup?” Jim asked. “Two guys is one less than sensible.”
“Not many people available,” said Davenport. “Most of them are down in Herefordshire, preparing for another venture into the Machen gateway. But we'll still have a couple of guys positioned outside each station. They'll come in if we call them via the emergency radio system.”
“Are we gonna be armed?” Jim asked. “And please don't let it be Tasers or gas.”
His colleague reached down behind his small desk and Jim heard the sound of a locker being opened. Davenport took out a semi-automatic pistol, checked the ammunition clip, put it down on the desk, muzzle pointed away from both men.
“Short range weapons with stopping power,” Davenport said. “I know you'd prefer a shotgun, pump action?”
Jim murmured his assent, looking at the gleaming Beretta. Numerous movies about a zombie apocalypse came to mind.
Shoot 'em in the head, he thought. That's the only way to be sure.
“Check with you later,” Davenport said, rising to offer his hand and signaling the meeting was over.
“Right, I'll check out some body armor as well as the twelve-gauge,” Jim said, and after a brief handshake, he set off back to the training section. As he made his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Victorian building, he passed some familiar faces, nodded, shared a joke with one.
Any one, he knew, might in theory be an Interloper. They still did not have an infallible way to tell them apart without taking a blood or tissue sample, followed by a test lasting an hour. It was impossible to test everyone every day.
If they're in London, in force …
The thought would not complete itself. Jim was rather glad of that.
***
After climbing two flights, Bartram was wheezing a little. As soon as he arrived outside the second-floor flat the door swung open, and there she stood in all her glory. He was wheezing a little from his exertion but the sight of her perked him up. In her Perspex stripper heels, Timandra was nearly a head taller than Bartram. She glanced past him, raised an eyebrow.
“He's waiting downstairs,” Bartram explained. “We don't have long, but I couldn't resist you my – ow!”
She reached out for his tie and pulled him into the apartment, slamming the door with her near-naked butt. Her hands were busy with his clothes, her full lips seemingly fastened onto his mouth by suction. Bartram felt a twinge of alarm. She had never been so assertive before. More often she had been coy, a shy creature he could mold to his needs. There was no trace of that girl now.
“I say!” he spluttered, more in surprise than protest.
She stopped kissing him and held his head in her hands, looking down into his eyes.
“Don't you like this? Isn't it what you always wanted?”
“Oh yes,” Bartram sighed, realizing that this confident, passionate lover was indeed what he had always fantasi
zed about. It would have been unmanly to admit to her that he wanted her to take control, dominate him, make him her slave. His entire political career had been based on traditional values, especially concerning 'a woman's place'. But now it was happening, being dominated was more pleasurable than anything he could have imagined.
Timandra practically hurled Bartram onto the bed and straddled him.
“You're sure they won't come prying, knocking on the door?” she demanded, her voice much huskier than normal.
“No, they wouldn't dare!” he replied.
“We have plenty of time?” she insisted.
“Plenty, Oh God yes!”
There was a mirror on the ceiling above the bed. It had come with the apartment, which he had taken over from another member of his party when their mistress had moved on. While Bartram did not particularly enjoy seeing his short, flabby body exposed, there was something wonderful about watching Timandra writhing on top of him.
If anything, she looked more beautiful and sensuous than ever. Lately, Bartram had noticed his young mistress becoming slimmer, more 'buff' as the young folk called it. He had not said anything but found the obsession with fitness unappealing if it sacrificed curves for muscle. But there was no trace of that now. Her hourglass figure reminded him of the fantasy women of his boyhood, when his first sexual awakening had led him to his father's stockpile of well-thumbed magazines.
Bartram peered more closely at Timandra's face, and was reminded of a girl in one of those long-defunct publications. The shape of her lips, the expression in her eyes, all echoed the soft-porn starlet. The resemblance was striking, yet he had never noticed it before.
Funny how the subconscious plays tricks, he thought. But that explains why she turns me on, of course. Fantasy of youth and all that.
By now, Timandra had managed to remove all of his outer garments while continuing to kiss and caress him. He noted with approval that she had suddenly become far more skillful in the arts of seduction. She flung his socks into the corner of the room and then sat up, looking down at her sprawled paramour. Again, Bartram could see himself clearly in the ceiling mirror. He could not pretend to himself that he looked like a stud, lying there in baggy Y-fronts and vest.
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