“Their old servants rose up,” Watts said. “So their new ones had a best before date.” Her eyes were wild; she almost seemed to be laughing. Perhaps she was mad but, if so, it was the right place for madness.
The chamber around us fell away. The walls were still there, but the doors that Watts had felt were gaping wide. I could not see them. They spoke to a sense I had never known before, and one I would have plucked out if I could. I felt we were falling into the abyss even as we crouched there, feeble vertebrates with our bellies to the stone. Above us, the branching whips of the thing waved, beckoning, adjusting, controlling … what?
“It’s coming!” Watts cried out.
In that instant, I felt it too. One of the yawning gulfs that had opened sightlessly around us was not empty – was full, overfull even. Now it had been opened, something was rushing towards us. The wind, which had been rushing through the chamber towards nowhere, was suddenly being pushed back at us, stinking and hideous, forced out just like the air rushes from a tunnel before the train arrives.
“The … workers…” Horribly, the gurgling, sloshing voice was still recognisable as Yon’s.
The thing that we had taken for a column had gone still, not dead but waiting. Some of its tentacular limbs had broken away, and I could see thick flakes of its leathery integument peeling away from its barrel of a body. There was nothing in its stance that could be read by the human eye, but when it reached out and touched the spreading pool that had been Yon, I told myself I saw a kindred weariness, magnified over a time and a distance I could not conceive. Where were the mighty masters who had set all this in motion? What if this vegetable thing they had left to guide their endeavours was no more than a labourer itself, a lonely repairman that had waited forever and done terrible things, and in the end just for a job that needed doing.
We both heard the thunderous rush of something weighty and monstrous coming towards us with the speed and force of a locomotive, hurling itself down suddenly open passageways from where it had been pent up. Was there a city where it came from, a worker’s paradise? Not in any way we poor apes could comprehend. We heard its cry as it came close: a weird echo of that whistling, fluting call. They had no voices save their masters’.
We braced ourselves in the shadow of the branch-limbed thing as the room shook around us, and I had a blurred glimpse of something that was at once fluid and shaped into many forms. It foamed and seethed, but somehow trapped within the walls of the cave, pushing and prying just beneath the surface and driven by its own pressure to surge onwards. We felt it pass, shaking the chamber so that the walls cracked and dust sheeted down on us in a whirling blizzard. A great gate had been opened to that place where the servants had grown and swelled until they filled it, and now the pressure was tapped – tapped into the tunnels leading up into the Circle Line.
I found myself giggling hysterically and could not stop. “The train now arriving at Paddington Station!” I cried out. There would be homeward bound partiers, night-shift workers, late travellers trying to get across London. They would be lining the platform, inching past the yellow stripe as they felt the vibration of something coming from the tunnel. They would feel the air ghost into motion, but what the darkness vomited forth would not be what they sought. The thought was so horrible, such an innocuous combination of images, that I laughed and laughed until I shook.
Watts dragged me out of there. Watts got me along the tunnels even as the cracks crazed their way along the walls, obliterating Carnot’s dots, shattering the mural of the workers’ uprising. They who carved that tableau had made the revolting servants like themselves. They had not realised it was the other way around: that their claim to humanity was no more than a thin skin over a well of darkness, and that in their last moments they would return to the same substance that those elder servants knew.
What happened to the vegetal thing, the repairman, I cannot say. Perhaps it was crushed in the collapse; perhaps it fled through one of those unseen portals that Watts could sense and I could not. Perhaps it is still down there, as betrayed by its masters as its servants were betrayed in turn. I don’t know – I will never now – whether in its buried sojourn it detected our scratchings and pickings at the earth, and found a way to weave its own plans into ours, or whether we were its tools from the start, and all the lines of the underground were just tendrils of its grander design. I don’t know if everything I ever professed to be an expert in has been a lie.
But whatever it wrought, it wrought well, for the surging tide of corrosive, malleable life that vomited out into the Circle Line did not burst its bounds, but simply surged and surged, chasing its own tail and howling out in its second-hand voices. And nobody understood what had happened, but people talked about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, and they concreted over every access point to the Circle Line. And only Watts and I know, and we do not speak of these things, not yet, not now, perhaps never. Carnot was right to burn his notes.
But I do know and, although I have given up my study and my profession, I cannot sever myself from the knowledge. So sometimes I go down to Edgware Road, one stop off Paddington, and I put my ear to the concrete and listen. And I can hear them above the rumble of constant heavy motion, all those late night travellers. I can hear their cries and screams, their last words, their suddenly interrupted phone calls. Because the servants have no words but those that are given to them, and where once they had their masters’ fluting calls, now they have ours.
Devo Nodenti by Keris McDonald
Peggy awakes, as usual, with Eustace squatting on her chest. For a moment the panic of her tangled dreams – Laurel had tried to phone but she hadn’t picked up in time; she was trying to ring back but she kept getting the telephone number wrong, her fingers stabbing the keys over and over, back to the start, do it again, seven eight zero – for a moment that panic stays with her. She can’t breathe. She looks up into Eustace’s non-face, looming down over hers as if he’s trying to kiss her, and she can’t raise her hands to fend him off or even draw breath enough to scream.
No. No! Relax! Just give it a second! Hands first!
Her fingers, which have been pinned to the sheets by paralysis until now, wake at last and twitch. They’re always the first. Then a heave of her ribcage. She sucks in breath.
Eustace tilts his head, black horns silhouetted against the pale bedroom ceiling. One might, if one chooses, read disappointment into that motion. His faceless face withdraws.
“Get off me,” Peggy whispers.
Deferential as ever, he flips backward off her torso and hangs upside down in the corner of the room like a gigantic bat, his long boneless fingers and toes clutching the plaster cornice. He’s much lighter than his black and rubbery bulk might suggest, as she knows only too well. He never crushes her chest when he sits on her, after all, though she does ache all over now as she sits up. Just like she aches every morning.
The bed sheets are soaked with sweat. She sleeps naked despite her respectable age, just because she hates the feeling of a clammy nightie clinging to her. Peggy gets up slowly, finds her slippers and dressing gown, then pulls all the bedding back to give it a chance to air. Eustace flicks out his long, wickedly barbed tail, and begins to trace the tip along the many grooves and lines in his skin. She'd call it preening, if he were a bird. His oil-black form looks like it’s been skinned to reveal the intricate musculature, or maybe built from chopped up car tyres. Yes, she saw an exhibition of tyre-art once, and it made her nod sourly with recognition.
“I expect you had a good night?” Peggy mutters as she tries to straighten her back. “Ate well, I'm guessing? Well, I'm glad at least one of us enjoyed it.”
Eustace doesn’t answer, of course. He has no mouth to speak with. No facial features at all.
Peggy decided years ago that what he sustains himself on is delta waves. That’s why she never gets any proper sleep – the deep dreamless healing sleep she craves. All she’s known for decades is the riotous circus
of REM. Frustration dreams, confused memories, nightmares, circular OCD repetitions. She almost always wakes feeling completely worn out. Right now her eyes are as dry as if she’s spent the night staring into the darkness.
Moving stiffly to the window – she’s still too young to hobble, damn it – she pulls back the curtains and lets light spill into the bedroom. Outside, the September morning is bright and sunny. Yellow leaves splotch her tiny patch of front lawn. She'll rake them up today, she tells herself, if the arthritis in her hands is co-operative.
When she turns back into the room there’s no sign of Eustace. He’s never seen in direct daylight, and for many years Peggy thought that sunlight drove him away. Now though, she’s come to suspect that he’s still there, always there … just not visible.
He is, after all, more in her head than anywhere else.
As she stands in the shower, with her eyes closed against the flow and the prick of shampoo, Peggy can see Eustace quite clearly in her mind’s eye, lying couchant on the pink bathroom mat. He – well, it; he has sex organs no more than he has a face, but Peggy has given him a name and with the name has come some sort of spurious gender – even resembles a great dog sometimes, if he tilts his head back to disguise the curve of his horns against his bulk, and he moves on all fours as is his preference. His body is so dark and gnarled and cartilaginous that it’s hard to make out his true outline. Only when he unfurls his wings do you realise that what you'd taken for a muscular hunched back was nothing but membranous skin, and see for the first time how skeletal he is, how barbed and demonic.
She'd had some vague idea that a name might help make him less horrible, or at least more bearable. Is that so weird? Some people give their tumours names, she’s heard.
It’s easier if she thinks of him as dog. A big silent dog that follows her around from room to room. Faithful, in his way.
Cave canem, she thinks, remembering the black-and-white photograph of the little statuette of the hound on the cover of the paper she'd held out, fifty years ago, to Rory DeAngelo.
*
“What the hell is this?” she asked.
“Oh, you’ve got a copy?” He smiled as he glanced at the title under the University’s coat of arms: Report on the Second Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. That title was a direct nod to the original Wheeler excavation report of 1932; a little archaeological joke. “It looks splendid, doesn’t it? The Society of Antiquaries are printing a précis next month.”
“It looks splendid for you, Rory. Where the hell’s my name in it? I’ve read every damn word, and I don’t get a mention.”
He cocked an eyebrow, bemused. “Well, I did write the paper. Of course I’m the one credited.” His silver hair managed to be perfectly coiffed, even in the midst of a wet dig on a hill overlooking the River Severn.
“Huh? I was the one who sat up at night and typed up every note!”
“Yes, you put in a great deal of the leg-work. I’m very grateful.”
“I was the one who found the votive statue.” She flicked the photograph with nails that had dark rinds of dirt engrained so deep under them that no amount of hand-washing under the cold tap of the community hall would ever get it out. “I was the one who first suggested to you that we were looking at a bloody temple abaton.” She was trying to keep the rage out of her voice, but it wasn’t working. “Why don’t I get credit?”
“Peggy, darling, you will.” He looked pained by what was clearly a childish display of temper – he’d never liked displays of emotion, after all. “All in good time. You’re only twenty-one, and I’m sure you have a splendid career ahead of you, but let’s face facts. Who’s going to take any notice of a girl postgrad trying to suggest the existence of a hitherto-unsuspected cultic practice here in Britain? You need my name. My experience. My gravitas.”
“I need the credit, for my work and my ideas!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll put in an excellent word for you for your next position. I’m on your side, Peggy, and you need that in this field.”
“You…” Her mouth flapped.
“I think you forget how competitive archaeology is as a study, and how important word of mouth is in establishing your reputation. There are so many bright-eyed young girl-archaeologists out there, just desperate for the chances you’ve been offered. The recommendation of your Professor is gold-dust at this stage, Peggy.” He smiled benignly. “Now let’s not quarrel over trivial matters. There’s so much work that’s still to be done. We only have a week left on this dig, remember.”
Brushing a little dust off his knee, he rose and strolled out of the hut. Somehow he always looked immaculate, even when wearing overalls. Even when everyone around him was covered in mud. Peggy, hardly remembering to breathe, watched him stroll across to the principal trench in the central shrine, where the undergrads were on their knees scraping the mud with trowels. The watery sunlight turned his silver hair to a halo.
She watched Alice, a first-year student, look up as Professor DeAngelo paused to squat at the lip of the trench and talk to her. She held up a tray of her finds – Peggy knew exactly what sort of thing was being found here: Romano-British pottery and coins, bronze pins, maybe a little lead petition scroll begging the aid of the local god Nodens – and the look of pleasure on Alice’s young and eager face as she gazed up at the handsome older man was visible even from here.
*
In the shower, Peggy opens her eyes.
Damn him. That creepy cradle-snatching bastard. That thieving son of a bitch.
No, she hasn’t forgiven. Not even after all these years.
If she forgives him, she’ll have to accept the guilt that she’s held off at arm’s length for five decades.
Wrapping herself in a towel, she sits upon the toilet lid to comb out her wet hair and muster her strength. Everything takes so long these days, even getting dressed. Between her arthritis and her exhaustion, each step in the process is a hurdle to be clambered. What she really wants to do is make a cup of tea and go back to bed for the day, but she can’t let herself off that easily. Nigel is due to visit later on with wife and children in tow, so she has to be ready. She enjoys seeing her only grandson, though she can’t find quite the same enthusiasm for the three children, each of whom takes it in turn to be variously sulky, hyperactive, and riddled with germs. At her age, the prospect of catching even a cold is daunting.
Searching for her vitamin C tablets, Peggy pauses with the bathroom cabinet open, looking at the bottles of pills within – stock-piled from decades when Valium and sleeping tablets were handed out like sweeties. Not that they’ve ever brought her the true unconsciousness and rest she craves, just longer nights of seething frantic visions.
She picks up a brown glass bottle and shakes it gently, listening to the rattle within. Easy, she thinks. It would be so easy. “But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” she quotes out loud. “Aye, there’s the rub. Isn’t that right, Eustace?”
At the corner of her vision, Eustace twists his boneless neck quizzically to invert his head altogether. He’s companionship of a sort, she tells herself, and isn’t that something? At least he responds to her voice, and sometimes she can convince herself that he understands the words. Plenty of people her age are all on their own, with only memories for company.
*
Too wound up to sleep that night, fifty years ago, she wandered out among the low walls of the Lydney Park excavation while everyone else went back to their ex-army cots in the village hall. The stars were muted behind high and hazy cloud, but the moon was full enough to cast black shadows from the trench walls. All was silent. In the valley below the bluff, the broad slick of the Severn was a pale wedge driven like a spearhead into Britain’s guts.
Back in the fourth century, she brooded, when the stone temple was built over the old mines to replace whatever rustic fane had served the native Britons, this must have been a magical place. The uncanny wave of th
e Severn Bore had processed up the face of the river twice a day. The earth had yielded iron ore, an extraordinary treasure wrestled out of those dangerous low tunnels. The old gods had still lurked in the woods, and joined with the new Roman deities to create strange hybrids.
Nodens, now, he was amongst the strangest. Archaeologists couldn’t agree, even now, what he'd been a god of. The Romans identified him with Mars, with Neptune, with Silvanus, with Mercury – which suggested everything from warfare to sailing, forestry to the afterlife. Nineteenth century scholars had glossed his name as Lord of the Deeps, or Lord of the Abyss. A young Professor Tolkien – yes, that one – had analysed it and suggested he was cognate with the later Irish god-hero Nuada of the Silver Hand and the Welsh Nudd, and that it meant snarer, catcher or hunter. The hard archaeological evidence hinted at an oceanic nature – but also at a strong connection with dogs, which might mean hunting or might mean healing, given the symbolism of the time. A curse tablet found here in the 1880s had aimed at bringing back and avenging a stolen gold ring. And that long row of little cells right there, at the back of the main temple – that was the building Peggy had identified with the famous Abaton of the medicine god Asclepius. A place for patients or petitioners to be put into a drugged sleep – enkoimesis – for the purpose of incubating a visionary encounter with their god.
Peggy wished bitterly then that she could have a dream that would lay out the solution to all her problems.
“Bastard,” she said under her breath, sitting down on a low wall and leaning back against a stone. It felt cold through her canvas trousers but she didn’t care. She'd had a pint of Guinness at the pub – all she could stomach of both the fluid and the company of her fellow diggers – and now she felt heavy-legged and queasy. Tears burned the backs of her eyes. Her anger was a hot stone buried under her ribs. If she'd had a sheet of lead – and any faith at all in dead gods – she could have quite happily cursed DeAngelo.
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 12