by Pat Kelleher
MATHERS ROUSED SLIGHTLY, his brow furrowed as he listened intently. He couldn’t hear it anymore, the constant whisper of Skarra. It had gone and he didn’t know if it would ever return. He felt an unassailable grief so profound he wanted to howl. Then he felt the wind on his face. For a fleeting moment, he caught sight of the faint scent spectre of Jeffries, a supercilious smile on his face, as he turned and waved before walking away from the edifice and dispersing on the breeze.
As the breeze blew, all his cares blew away on it. He forgot Jeffries. He remembered a vague feeling of sorrow, but not why. A moment later, he no longer even remembered that. All he knew was the wind. He turned to face it and waited.
THE COLUMN OF air pushed ahead of the creature and ruffled the curtain of foliage behind them.
Chalky was whimpering with fear. Gutsy muttered to him in calm tones.
“We’ve got bombs. We can kill it,” suggested Pot Shot.
“If we don’t bring the tunnel down with it, it’s still going to block our way back,” said Atkins. “No, we’re going to have to lure it out of the opening.” He peered out of the gaping hole at the surrounding rock. Above, there was a large overhang, that looked impassable. The top of the cliff was seventy or eighty feet above them, but seemed too sheer to climb. Around the opening, however, were small trees with spreading root systems, holding them to the cliff face, that might hold a man? There was only one thing for it.
Atkins swung back in. “There’s a small ledge to the right, and creepers that should hold our weight.”
“Should?”
“Best I can do.”
Gazette shook his head. “I’m not bloody going out there.”
“Well, that creature is headed this way whether we like it or not. Jump or be pushed.”
“Let’s do it,” said Gutsy, reaching out and grabbing a root. The plant creaked, but held, as he stretched out for another further along. “Well, if it’ll hold me... You follow me, lad,” he called to Chalky, “and just follow the advice of me missus when she’s getting undressed—don’t look down. Many’s the time I wished I’d followed her advice, son, believe me. Brr.” He shook his head vigorously until his jowls wobbled.
Gazette edged out. “I hate heights.”
Pot Shot, Porgy and Mercy scrambled out over the other side.
“You too,” Atkins told Chandar.
“But what about you?” the Chatt asked.
“Oh, I’ll be joining you shortly, don’t you worry.”
The Chatt scuttled out with a cockroach-like speed that startled Atkins as he watched it use the invading roots to scurry up the passage wall and out of the tunnel mouth. He shuddered, then checked that his men were out of the way.
He ran back down the passage a short distance, intending to bait the creature. He fired a couple of rounds, not imagining that he’d stop it, but just to goad it. The bullets buried themselves in the oncoming flesh with sucking thwups. “Come on, then, you ugly bugger. Come and get me.”
He turned and ran. The great glossy wet bulk, spraying its lubricating oily mist to ease its way, barrelled towards him. He could see the opening ahead. It wasn’t far, but it was further than he wanted it to be. He had grossly underestimated the speed of the thing, and its blind, instinctive need for food. It began to put forth thin tendrils that flailed blindly, closing the distance between them.
As he raced towards the end of the tunnel, he saw Mercy’s face and arm silhouetted against the light. “Run!” he yelled.
How the hell did he think that was going to help? Of course he was bloody running.
As he pounded the last few yards, Atkins felt a tendril wrap round his puttee. No! He was so damn close. A couple of yards shy of the tunnel mouth, he took a deep breath and bellowed his rage and fear, putting everything he had into one last, desperate lunge. He leapt through the curtain of foliage.
For less than the space of a heartbeat, he hung in the air. He saw the blue sky ahead and glimpsed the awful fall to the jungle below, before strong hands grabbed his webbing and swung him aside.
Another heartbeat. He crashed into the cliff wall with a force that winded him; one of Chandar’s precious amphorae shattered in its pouch. He saw Mercy’s sweaty, grinning face and grabbed instinctively for the roots in front of him.
A heartbeat later the newly birthed creature, oiling the tunnel as it came with its greasy black vapour, shot out, arcing into space, glands on its body spraying Atkins with the disgusting stuff as it passed.
The limbless thing tumbled down through the air to the jungle canopy below, losing the slug-like shape forced upon it by the constraints of the passage. Freshly extruded tendrils writhed helplessly in mid-air.
Atkins breathed a sigh of relief. “Blood and sand, that was too close by—”
He felt a tug on his leg, and then a wrench that almost pulled him from the cliff. The creature still had a tendril wrapped round his leg as it fell, threatening to drag him down with it. He could feel the root he held tear from its anchorage. Wide with horror, his eyes met those of Mercy.
Mercy made a desperate grab for Atkins’ wrist, but his hand was as sweaty as Atkins’ own. Atkins slithered from his grasp.
“Only!” roared Gutsy, fumbling to free Little Bertha.
He could feel his wet clammy fingers slipping from the root. His eyes still locked on Mercy’s as he shook his head, absolving him of any blame. There was nothing more to be done.
The coarse texture of the root began to slip away under his fingertips.
With a rapidity of movement none had seen from it before today, Chandar scuttled, face-down, over Atkins’ back. The Chatt’s mandibles scythed through the tendril holding his ankle, and the creature crashed down through the canopy below and was lost from sight. Atkins felt Chandar’s vestigial claws bite deep into his tunic, gripping him long enough for hands to reach down and haul him back up.
They clambered back into the tunnel and the shocked party caught their breath.
Gutsy looked at Chandar and shook his head in wonder. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I didn’t know they could do that. Did you know they could do that?”
Slumped against the tunnel wall, Atkins looked up at his saviour. “Thank you.”
The Chatt sucked in a chestful of air. “It was Kurda,” it lisped.
Atkins nodded, still catching his breath. He regarded the Chatt for a moment. “What is that place?” he asked, waving a hand at the crater beyond the tunnel mouth.
Chandar hissed and sank down on its legs. “Forbidden. That place does not exist.”
“Well, it clearly bloody does exist. It damn near killed me!”
“It is forbidden to the Ones.”
“I like the sound of that,” said Gutsy. “Anywhere the Chatts can’t go has got to be good.”
Mercy snorted. “I wouldn’t be too sure. This world would kill you at every turn. If you ask me, there’s probably a bloody good reason why they don’t want to go there.”
Atkins got up and stepped towards the Chatt. “You’ve been windy since we came across the Gilderra enclave. When the Zohtakarrii captured us, you knew then where we were, didn’t you? You knew about that place down there, that crater.”
“It is forbidden, forbidden to speak about. It does not exist for us. Other Ones, like the Zohtakarrii, whose territory borders it, patrol to make sure no One goes in and nothing comes out. It has been that way for spira upon spira.”
Atkins stared hard at the Chatt, but its facial plate gave nothing away. It had no expression to read. He had no choice but to take what it said at face value. For now.
“Let’s get moving before another of those things decides to corner us here again.”
In the birthing gallery, two creatures were cracking the dead Chatts’ chitinous shells. Another freshly-birthed horror had fallen upon the Urmen bodies, gripping them with extruded tendrils, and sucking the meat from them, leaving nothing but ichor-covered skin and bone, like discarded greasy chicken carcasses. Such was their voracio
us appetite that they paid no attention to the Tommies.
Atkins tapped the air with a finger, pointing towards a passage on the opposite side that seemed to run upwards. They skirted the repulsive, shapeless things and, once the section was safely in the tunnel mouth, Atkins ordered Pot Shot and Mercy to throw a brace of Mills bombs into the centre. The creatures exploded in balls of flame and silent thrashing tendrils that shrivelled in the heat.
They followed the passage as it curved upwards, until Atkins felt sure they had climbed more than the hundred or so feet that would bring them back to ground level. Light blossomed in the distance, filtered through hanging foliage. With the point of his bayonet, Atkins parted the curtain of leaves and vines. “Blood and sand, not again!”
Wherever the passage may once have led, it now looked down on a large overgrown amphitheatre formed by the collapse of the entire central core of the edifice, the once raw and jagged violence of the edifice’s destruction now softened by alien nature’s reclamation, overgrown with tangles of creepers, fighting for dominance. Tree-like things clung to the shattered walls. Around them, on the now exposed and weathered walls, they could see other tunnels and runs, at various levels and angles, opening just as abruptly out into the central space.
It reminded Atkins again of when he and his brother William dug up woodland ants’ nests as boys, breaking open the mound to reveal the network of tunnels within, Flora protesting as the disturbed ants swarmed around their feet.
Looking down into the ruined bowl beneath them, it became clear that the great creatures that had pursued them through the Chatt-built tunnels, that had come out to the jungle to search for prey, were not many creatures at all, but a single many-tentacled one. The small ones they killed were merely hatching young.
In the basin of ruined tunnels and collapsed chambers, something huge and shapeless heaved and pulsed. They could see no eyes or mouth, in fact no organs or limbs of any kind other than the tendrils that fed into open tunnels like roots.
Atkins had no doubt that Jeffries could well have summoned what he saw from some demonic circle of Hell. Its existence stirred a deep revulsion, not just in him, but the whole section, and this from men who had seen bloated corpses move and writhe obscenely in the Somme mud, infested by feeding corpse rats burrowed into their putrefying innards.
This was the evil spirit that had been stealing Urmen. This was what they had come to kill.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You Have Only Once To Die...”
THE THING SQUATTED in a large ruined central chamber. The roof had collapsed around it, leaving its back, if that’s what it was, half-exposed to the elements. It was a great black mass larger than several zeppelins. The black, feathered tripe-like flesh bore a cross-hatching of scars, old and new. It had tentacles sunk into lower tunnels, like roots. Others were constantly dipping into seemingly random passage openings around it, even as others withdrew. It seemed rooted to the spot. That would explain the absence of animals around the edifice. It had exhausted its local food supply. Forced to stretch its tentacles further to find food, it had encroached on the enclave’s hunting grounds to snatch Urmen.
The thing throbbed as it withdrew a tentacle from a tunnel below where the Tommies stood. It was wrapped delicately around the remains of one of its young. Following some primitive instinct, it dangled the sloppy, burnt, shapeless mess before it, shaking it gently, trying to revive it. It created other, more delicate, tendrils to prod and probe it. After a cursory examination, they retreated into the mass. Then it drew the tendril, holding the dead creature, back into its body, and its offspring along with it.
“It doesn’t look happy,” said Mercy.
Gutsy peered down. “You wouldn’t be, either, if someone had killed your baby.”
“It just ate its dead baby, so I hardly think it’s that bothered,” Porgy declared.
“What the hell is it?” Atkins asked Chandar.
“This One does not know,” it wheezed, forcing out the words. “It—it is not mentioned in any aromapedias. It is not GarSulethmade.”
“Whatever it is, I think we’re going to need the damn tank to take it out,” said Gazette, unfazed, his mind never straying from the job.
“Hell, no!” Porgy slapped Atkins on the back. “Only here can do it single-handed, can’t you, Only?” He grinned at his mate. “Come on, Chalky’s told us all the tales.”
“Aye,” said Mercy with a grin. “Seven at one blow!”
Atkins curled his lip. “Piss off. How many bombs do we have left?”
Gazette did a quick tally. “Six.”
Atkins leant forward to get a better look at the thing, doubting that they would be enough. He stepped back sharply as the edge of the lip crumbled away beneath his feet. Several large chunks skittered down the exposed walls before hitting an outcrop, and bouncing off over the lower slopes, where some were ensnared by thickets of creepers. The rest bounded down in ever increasing arcs, before landing on the creature’s back in a shower of thuds.
A stream of tendrils exploded upwards towards them from around the fallen rubble.
“No, it’s definitely not happy,” said Mercy.
“Back!” ordered Atkins, but the section was one step ahead of him. Chandar, though, hesitated, mesmerised by the sight, until Atkins put a hand on its carapace and pulled it away.
He took a last look over his shoulder as thin black tendrils appeared over the lip of the truncated tunnel. Some had already begun searching the gaping hole where they had stood. As they explored the tunnel further, they began to entwine and merge into one, growing in bulk, thickening and expanding until one single tentacle filled the space, blocking out the light.
Rushing down the tunnel, it expanded further until the walls began to crack and shudder under the pressure of its passing.
Atkins ran for his life.
THE GREAT IRON hulk of the Ivanhoe sat where they had left it, hunkered in the clearing, waiting patiently like a faithful beast.
Exhausted, the tank crew staggered towards the waiting behemoth.
Norman, Reggie, Cecil and Wally set down their coverall loads of Chatt jars and stretched. In the daylight, Mathers’ swollen face looked much worse than they had imagined.
“And I thought impetigo from petrol fumes was bad,” Norman remarked.
“How comes he’s the only one that’s got it, though?” asked Cecil.
“Officer in’t ’e? They’ve got more sensitive skin than us lot. Known fact, is that.”
“The sooner I’m back in the Ivanhoe, the better I’ll feel,” said Wally.
“Best get the tank started up, then, I reckon,” said Jack.
Nellie patted Napoo on the forearm. “Thank you.”
With a faint smile, the Urman gave a grunt of acknowledgement and nodded as she left his side.
He squatted down on his haunches, looking decidedly uncomfortable. He was wary of the lieutenant, but just as cautious about the tank. Although aware that men operated it, he was convinced that there was sorcery involved. Alfie approached the Urman, “Thanks for looking out for Nellie—I mean, Miss Abbott.”
Napoo looked up at him. “She is a good woman.” It was a threat as much as a statement of fact.
“Yes. Yes, she is,” replied Alfie, sensing that he had outstayed his welcome. He made for the tank. His path took him past Nellie, who was splashing water from her canteen on the back of her neck. She was relieved to see that Alfie’s eyes had almost returned to normal. He wanted to tell her about the thing inside Mathers, but changed his mind. “Will you check the lieutenant out, again? He doesn’t look too clever.”
“Do I tell you how to tune your precious engine?” she remarked.
“Yes, actually.”
She beamed as she made her way over to check on Mathers, who seemed to be enjoying the soothing wind on his face. “Then I’m much too good for you, Mr Perkins.”
Norman saw her examining the lieutenant. “We just need to get the engine started up,
is all, Miss. Once the Sub can take a drag on the fumes he’ll be top o’ the bill again,” he insisted.
“Top o’ the bill?” said Nellie. “He’s had so many turns he’s a regular Marie Lloyd. It’s not those blessed fumes he needs, it’s rest and proper medical attention.”
Frank intercepted Alfie on the way to the tank. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To start the engine, if three of you lazy buggers’ll lend a hand.”
Frank shook his head. “I don’t think so, Alfie.” He leaned in. “You may have won the lieutenant over, but he’s not quite himself at the moment. Me and the lads? We ain’t decided on you yet, you and your sweetheart. You see, we was all cushy ’til she and them Tommies showed up. The Sub’s scheme has all gone to pot since then. You was never for it, was you? I reckon you’ve been sabotaging us all along. You stay there, with your lady friend.”
“What the hell’s got into you, Frank?”
Frank crossed to the tank and noticed an oily stain on the grass under the sponson. “Bloody hell. Perkins. I knew it. Look like something has been leaking here!” He went to open the sponson hatch. His forehead creased with disbelief as he tugged at the handle. “It’s stuck.” He pulled at the handle again.
“Put some oomph into it!” jeered Cecil.
The door resisted, then came free with a sticky, sucking sound. He toppled backwards onto his arse, causing a ripple of belly laughs across the clearing.
Frank’s brow buckled under the weight of incomprehension as he sat staring up at the open hatchway.
Something slick and black filled the tank compartment. Something with the texture of tripe.
Tendrils whipped out from the mass, wrapped around Frank’s head, and yanked him into the tank. He didn’t even have time to scream.
1 SECTION RAN hell-for-leather down the narrow sloping tunnel, almost stumbling down the incline. Cracks and rumbles accompanied the sound of tide-sucked shingle behind them, as the creature’s extruded limb ploughed after them, shattering the walls as it went. All the while, the passages resounded to the ultra-low keening rumble that made Atkins want to loose his bowels.