To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  By the position of the sun, Forrester surmised that it was mid-afternoon when Sherston came back into view. The hillside was steep enough round about that he could make out only the grey of its roofs, like a pavilion erected upon the heights. It was a singularly dreary spectacle.

  Forrester was limping badly by then. Without the stick, he couldn’t have kept on at all, and for the last hour, his perpetual fear had been that it would snap, leaving him helpless. Yet the branch had held, and now he was within sight of cover. As on its far side, this aspect of Sherston sat upon an outcrop of rock, as if the whole summit had wrenched in one violent effort from the surrounding earth. Lichen and moss dappled the stone into a multitude of greens and browns and florid purples. Bracken grew prodigiously around its edges.

  Heading to his right would take him eventually to the main gates. Forrester’s sole choice, then, was to go left. Forging a path was more onerous than even tramping across the moorland had been since he was forced either to press through the thronging bracken or to divert over low ledges of stone. Nevertheless, he felt calmer. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, if he was at risk, he could quickly hide himself among the rocks; he’d got into the habit of looking about constantly, and there was every chance he’d see someone approaching before they saw him.

  However, Forrester knew there was a second possibility: that his growing sense of peace had more to do with his proximity to Sherston and to whatever peculiar influence the house exerted. That alternative bothered him for being another mystery heaped upon so many others, and because, if there was actually anything to it, he therefore had to doubt his own faculties. Wasn’t it odd, after all, that he should backtrack toward the one place he was determined to escape? He could relate the circumstances that had motivated him and could find no fault in his logic, but what did that really mean? He was too damned calm, that was what it meant, and he’d trusted himself more when his nerves were rattling.

  Forrester trudged on. He felt he’d been walking all day, yet the sun was only halfway down the sky. Sherston was out of sight, for on this side the rocks became low cliffs and rose quite sheer. He guessed he was close to the opposite point from where he’d scaled the wall. The notion was disheartening. All his exertions had moved him a pitiful couple of miles at most, and here he was, exhausted and starving. He’d have to seek shelter soon.

  At least I’m still free , he told himself. As long as I’m free, there’s hope. There was comfort in the thought, though less than he’d have liked. He’d expected more from his freedom than to die of exposure in the wilderness, alone and unmissed.

  Then, as he limped around a spur of hillside, Forrester saw ahead an arched opening in the rock face. Signs had been erected to either side, one stating in harsh black capitals, NO ENTRY, and the other simply, DANGEROUS!

  Nearby were the ruins of buildings. Once they’d been expansive, but now they were rotted to their bare bones, the highest extant portion not much taller than Forrester. The moors had absorbed them wholeheartedly, so that it was hard at a glance to tell they had ever been the work of men. Ferns and nettles congregated at their edges, and within, waifish trees had found lodging in the cracks of walls. The result was both lovely and melancholy, and gave Forrester pause, first for its picturesqueness and then as a potential hiding place.

  But no, it was too obvious, and even if it weren’t, he’d need half the remaining day to stamp a path through those rampant nettles. He returned his focus to the cavity in the rock.

  What he was looking at was clearly a mine entrance, though an ancient one. A track ran from it and past the decayed buildings to wend onwards down the hillside. On careful inspection, he could see that the way had been paved; there were patches where the elements had swept away the dirt to expose the older surface beneath.

  Nothing so strange in any of that. Probably this part of the country was littered with abandoned mine workings. The road held his attention because it occurred to him that it might still lead somewhere, toward a settlement perhaps, and would be easier than slogging through the calf-deep heather. Yet it was another detail that kept him staring, initially in bafflement, then with intense scrutiny.

  The ancient road had been used recently.

  He’d have spotted the tire tracks immediately had rain and wind not distorted them. In places, however, and particularly near to the mine entrance, they were unmistakeable. From the depth of the indentations, he concluded that a large vehicle had passed this way, and a laden one too: a lorry bearing men or heavy cargo.

  Had the tracks stopped at the opening, Forrester might have assumed that someone had come here to mount the warning signs after Sherston had transferred into military hands. Such was the sort of unfathomable bureaucracy the army delighted in. But no, as his eyes became used to the shade around the entrance, he saw that the tire marks led on into the gloom.

  Forrester hesitated, caught between fascination and prudence. If the old mine had been repurposed by the army, he’d have predicted that he’d find the site guarded. But there were no signs of life, and if anyone had been observing, wouldn’t they have come to question him?

  He shuffled closer. There were boot prints in the soft ground by the tunnel’s mouth, along with the discarded stubs of cigarettes. Conceivably, whoever had been here was waiting inside, but likelier they’d been ordered elsewhere, perhaps even into the manhunt for Forrester himself.

  Or so he tried to believe. The truth was that he urgently wanted to explore, perils be damned. As he’d stood watching, his memory had offered up a detail, and now it was all he could think about: the jolt in Forbes’s expression when Forrester had spoken of the underground space in his dreams. Hadn’t that been exactly the look of a man surprised at having his secrets exposed? Suddenly the prospect of uncovering whatever Forbes was hiding seemed to Forrester as crucial as, or even more important than, making good his escape.

  There was another impulse beyond that, though, something profound and instinctual. Forrester could feel its pull on him, yet he couldn’t examine it. Whenever he attempted to, the sensation vanished, only to return the instant his thoughts strayed on. All he could say for sure was that he wanted badly to investigate.

  Without meaning to, he had been taking tentative steps, so that now he was upon the threshold. He hesitated one last moment, snared by the apprehension that he was blundering into danger, dubious that a secret of any worth would be left unprotected.

  The compulsion was stronger than the doubt. He had been denied answers for so long. Forrester stepped into the darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  J ust within the entrance, in an alcove, was a metal cabinet. The doors were fitted with a clasp, but the padlock hung loose from one fixture. Inside were half a dozen brass oil lamps. All were brand new, without a scratch or a speck of dirt. Forrester took one, found it full, and lit the wick using a box of matches he discovered tucked in one corner. Cheerful orange light spilled through the passage.

  The convenience disturbed him: first the guard’s absence and then this cabinet left open, without which he couldn’t have hoped to continue. Could this be a trap? But to what purpose? If Forbes wanted to catch him, there was no need for subterfuge. More likely, the men here were simply not taking their roles seriously. He’d seen as much with the sentry outside Sherston and the searcher on the moors. If they knew the truth and hadn’t been fed the spy story given out to the public, then probably they were too busy congratulating themselves on an easy duty well away from the front to worry about properly secured locks.

  The tunnel went on for a long way. Its downward slant was so slight that only when Forrester looked back toward the entrance and saw the daylight pressed into a thin, high segment did he realise he’d been descending at all.

  Then, so abruptly that he nearly stumbled, the floor’s angle steepened. Forrester paused. He’d been presuming this underground shaft was an abandoned mine, and the ruined buildings outside seemed to corroborate that theory. Yet he was coming to suspect tha
t the tunnel was not man-made, or not in its original form. The walls were too irregular, and the ceiling was too high. There were signs of work, though, ancient scratches in the stone that must have been inflicted with picks, and in places the roof had been propped and reinforced.

  Setting the lantern down to inspect the dirt at his feet, Forrester was surprised to note that the vehicle tracks he’d identified outside continued. Here, with nothing to disturb them, they were as clear as if they’d just been made. And there were other, older depressions, which after some consideration he put down to cart rails long since torn up.

  What concerned him most, however, was his direction: inevitably he had to be heading beneath Sherston. For an instant, Forrester pictured this subterranean corridor depositing him outside his old room, and with that, the whole enterprise took on the surreality of a lucid dream.

  But no, he wasn’t sleeping, or if he was, then his slumber was so deep that acknowledging it couldn’t draw him back to wakefulness. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling, not of being asleep as such, but of being upon the verge. He was filled with an almost narcotic calm, yet at the same time he didn’t feel drugged or even unalert. Forming worries was simply impossible. Even the knowledge that he’d retreated step by step toward the very spot he’d fought so vigorously to escape gave him only momentary pause.

  Forrester took up the lantern, and the globe swung on its handle, casting his shadow in elongated distortions across walls and ceiling. He hefted his stick and began down the steeper decline.

  In this section, the passage did not run straight. Within a few feet, it swerved, once gently and then, soon after, quite conspicuously. Here, too, there were branching side tunnels: some were mere alcoves, while others ran on, though he couldn’t ascertain how far. Forrester had no inclination to explore. There was an obvious risk of becoming lost, but regardless, he felt he should be following the tire tracks, which were visible along the main shaft.

  Again, he thought that the vehicle must have been heavy, to have dinted the hard ground so. And it appeared to have been towing a trailer: the second tracks were evident wherever the two had turned. At any rate, he doubted the automobile could have passed anywhere but at the centre of this largest passage. Already its roof must have been practically scraping the ceiling.

  He carried on. After a minute, he became fully aware of something he’d been noticing half-consciously, a difference in the property of the light. He put it down to imagination at first, but as he passed through another gentle curve, the change grew more readily apparent. The effect was as though a gas flame were intensifying by degrees from yellow toward blue, and brightening all the while. As an experiment, Forrester took off his jacket and covered the lantern. Sure enough, he could still faintly discern the walls.

  The glow was concentrated ahead. As he watched, its shade shifted subtly, from a fragile blue-green to a richer, more aquatic tint. He knew, with a thrill of stopped breath, where he’d seen its like before. This was the same light he’d witnessed during the raid, which he’d tried and failed to describe to Forbes.

  Forrester reclaimed his jacket but left the lantern. There had been a decisive shift in his mind, though he couldn’t explain its precise nature. He wasn’t mad; it was partly that insight. He wasn’t mad and never had been. All that he’d seen had been real. He had encountered something, out there in No Man’s Land. A new weapon, or—

  No. Not a weapon.

  Because he had never in his life felt such tranquillity. Nothing built by man and intended to do harm could ever produce such a reaction. In fact, beneath the shroud of calm draping his thoughts, even to conceive of violence was discomforting.

  As he continued, deeper into the earth and toward the brightening light, the effect only increased. He could appreciate why certain mystics devoted their every waking moment to the pursuit of inner peace, and understood that their successes could never match what he experienced now. It was like an inexorable and almost tangible current, as if he were being carried rather than walking—bathed and buoyed as in the womb.

  Ahead, the tunnel opened onto a larger space where the light was brighter still, patterning the walls in shifting mosaics of blue and green. Forrester paused once more. Instinct assured him that there would be no way back from this. If he hadn’t yet been transformed irreparably, he would be if he passed this point. The conviction didn’t alarm him, since nothing could have. All the same, there remained a resisting part. And he recognised then that he was under no compulsion, that he could leave. He could make a choice. He could choose not to know.

  But he’d chosen already. He’d questioned; he had resisted. And finally, he’d turned his back on the apathy of those long months in France, the relinquishing of responsibility that he and so many others had committed to. Out there at the front, he had accepted that his existence was not in his own hands. But under the auspices of Sherston and Forbes’s ministration, he had come to believe again that his life was his own, and that he was willing to fight for it.

  That realisation had brought him here and nowhere else. He wanted the truth. Choosing to not know was no choice at all.

  He didn’t have far to go. The cave was the size of a large village church, but the rippling light, in a thousand merging shades of green and blue, made him think of an indoor swimming pool on a bright day. A few steps beyond the tunnel’s mouth, he could see clearly.

  The thing was near the centre of the cavern. Rings had been driven into the rock bed, and from them, a net of heavy chains overlapped its body, each link as big as Forrester’s fist. He thought of a fish: a tropical fish, except with a whale’s flattened head. And so huge, the size at least of an elephant. He wanted to reach out and touch its side, but he didn’t dare. He wanted more than anything to free it, for the sight of the creature bound by steel to the earth filled him with horror enough to resist even the serenity of that place. However, he had no key, nor any tools. There was another cabinet by one wall that might have contained what he needed, but this one was securely padlocked.

  The thing was rising against its chains, dragging them to their fullest extent, though there was no indication that it was straining. It simply hovered, inches from the ground, the chains pressing its surface without making the least indentation. Forrester could hardly believe that it could support itself at all beneath that weight.

  Or else, he speculated, it didn’t move in any normal way. He saw no means of propulsion upon its sleek flanks. He’d been considering the protrusion at one end as a fin of sorts, since its body was compressed and distended there, yet the manner in which the flesh sealed in a smooth curve made him think now of an amputated limb. Indeed, the more he stared, the more the fish analogy came apart. Only the creature’s outline and something about its coloration warranted the comparison.

  In every other respect, it was unlike any animal he’d seen. What made it seem most alien, or rather hardest to equate with any earthbound species, was its lack of features: he was not equipped to recognise intelligence in a being that was without even the indication of a face.

  The thing was producing the blue-green light through its skin. The impression was of small plates of luminous glass shimmering beneath a pellucid outer surface, all in perpetual motion and sliding over and under each other. No wonder his subconscious mind had snagged on the metaphor of Mediterranean seas: if one were beneath those waters, staring unimpeded toward a distant sky, the perspective might well resemble this.

  The urge to reach out his hand hadn’t gone away. He had crossed the intervening gap, though he’d no memory of doing so. He had abandoned his stick and had no recollection of doing that either. His fingers were splayed, inches from the creature’s side.

  His hand never came to rest. A flash of intuition: the brush of his fingertips would distress it, and in any case, there was no need. The contact he sought could not be achieved that way.

  Forrester closed his eyes—

  And could still see.

  Except that this was
much more than seeing. His senses did not require light, and in fact, the constraint of sight was becoming a difficult abstraction: he hung within a sphere of perception, inside which everything could be known almost as intimately as he knew himself. He had no words to describe this mode of intellection, and that notion, of describing in words, seemed as archaic as the old, restrictive senses he’d sloughed off .

  At first he assumed he was beneath the ocean. But, insomuch as he now understood that concept, ocean , it would not have felt like this: here there were tides and pressures, the brush of passing detritus, but all so subtle as to be easily mistaken for mere absence. Were his senses less intricate, this would have been nothing besides void.

  Yet within that infinite-seeming abyss, billions of far-off infernos glittered, their radiation impacting endlessly against his sense-sphere. The spectacle was rapturous in its immensity and its unfeasible detail. And he was not alone. Encompassing him, he felt the presence of his shoal, silent because they had no need of anything but silence. They had memories upon memories, they’d experienced so abundantly, and so little was ever lost.

  Now they were together. Sometimes they’d travel alone, but this was a season of journeying in unison. And out there were other life-forms also. Nearby he perceived one, colossal and fleeting, an inky blur that briefly blotted the approaching starlight and was gone. It offered no threat, and they could not have communicated, or interacted in any fashion, even had they desired to.

  His shoal had been in the deep spaces, the almost-empty spaces, for a long time. He’d never knowingly found that desolation oppressive; nonetheless, he was relieved that their course was drawing them toward a region more vivid and teeming. Already, as they stole upon its edges, the ether was growing crowded. All around them was the rubble of pre-creation, left in the tenuous hold of far-flung gravities.