by Pat Kelleher
“We don’t know. It appeared many spira ago,” Tarak answered bitterly, punctuating his answer with savage swipes of his sword. “We call it GarSuleth’s Curse. Ranaman believes”—Tarak faltered and swallowed—“believed that it was sent by GarSuleth in revenge for our faith in Croatoan. It chokes the trees we live off. It kills the animals we hunt. It poisons those things that eat it. It is of no use, yet it spreads like a plague and nothing is able to stop it.”
There was a dull metallic rumble as Norman, Jack and Cecil herded five recalcitrant fuel drums towards them.
“We found these caught in the shrubbery,” said Jack. “A little dented, but none the worse for wear. A few others were split, worse luck. Still, we have these. We have fuel.”
“So the show will go on!” said Norman, clapping his hands together.
Jack and Cecil set about refilling the petrol tanks in the front track horns, either side of the driver’s cabin, with the salvaged fuel. Alfie, his splinted leg proving something of a liability in the tank’s cramped interior, directed Wally, Norman and Nellie as they set about restoring the compartment and stores to some semblance of order and checking the engine.
They were soon ready to depart. Alfie clambered in through the starboard sponson hatch. Tarak made to follow him, but Alfie held up his palm.
“You can’t come with us,” he said shaking his head. “There isn’t room. You must make your own way now. You saved my life and now I’ve saved yours and where we’re going you can’t follow. But thank you for all you have done for me. For us.”
The Urman put an arm across the hatchway, blocking his way.
“GarSuleth has killed my Clan, the Ruanach,” Tarak said. His eyes narrowed as his voice hardened. “He has snared them and cocooned them in that living cobweb for food.” He looked down as his hand traced the raw, tender brand on his chest.
A voice called out from inside. “Alfie, get a move on!”
Alfie shook his head and was about to speak, when Jack’s great arm brushed Tarak’s hand aside. Alfie caught the Urman’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed as Jack pulled the sponson hatch shut. Alfie was quietly grateful that the decision to abandon Tarak had been taken out of his hands. He wasn’t sure he’d have been able to go through with it.
He heard the Urman bang on the iron plating. “I have been spared and marked by Croatoan to bring vengeance upon the children of GarSuleth,” he declared. “Take me with you.”
Alfie closed his ears to the pleading. He was doing the lad a favour. “Cecil, you’ll have to be starboard gearsman, I’ll tell you what to do,” he said quietly.
Cecil’s eyes lit up and he looked to Jack. Jack jerked his head. “Go on, lad, do as you’re told.”
Inside the cramped white compartment of the ironclad, Wally edged forward and took his place in the driver’s seat. “When you’ve got it started, come up and sit with me,” he told Nellie as he squeezed past her on the gangway. “I need a co-driver.”
“Me?”
“You can drive ambulances, can’t you?”
Nellie grinned, despite herself. Driving a tank. Since she had seen one, it was all she had ever wanted to do. She felt the same delicious thrill she’d felt when she rode her first motorcycle.
First, they had to start it.
Norman spat on his hands and grasped the giant starting handle at the rear of the compartment with the others. Norman had never quite accepted her as the others had, and held some deep-seated resentment to her presence. The great Daimler engine coughed and spluttered into life and settled into a steady roar. Nellie clambered forward to join Wally in the drivers’ seats and tried to ignore the dried blood on the gangway and walls of the starboard bulkhead.
Wally ran the engine up and signalled the gearsmen at the back.
Norman and Cecil put their tracks into gear.
The crew exchanged wary glances as the fug of the petrol fruit fumes began to fill the compartment. Nellie held her breath for as long as she could, then took a deep breath, followed by a second, more contented one.
LIKE A BLIND and bound Samson, once the source of its power had returned, the Ivanhoe roared like a territorial beast, belching smoke from its roof exhaust as its track plates began to move tentatively, slapping the ground. The ironclad gained traction and rumbled forward, ripping itself free of the remaining tangle of undergrowth, shrugging off its now insubstantial chains.
Tarak watched the tank for a moment, touched the brand upon his chest once more in a silent oath, and then, as the iron behemoth moved off, he ran lightly up the back of the port track to crouch behind the raised driver’s cab, like a barbarian astride a prehistoric mount.
“T HEY’RE COMING!” ATKINS heard Pot Shot’s warning shout. “They’ve bought it, they’re following us.” His gangly form came racing along the path, his lanky legs dwarfing Gazette’s strides as the sniper tried to keep up with him. “And I bloody wish they weren’t,” he said as he passed Atkins.
“Shut up, you daft ’a’porth. They’re just walking mushrooms.”
“I hate mushrooms.”
Atkins shrugged his shoulders in an attempt to make the electric lance backpack sit on his back more comfortably. It didn’t work. Behind him, Mercy wound the crank handle to build the charge. Atkins could feel the whirr of the magneto in his chest as Mercy’s efforts pressed it against his back. Atkins hefted the lance in his hands, his fingers fidgeting over the trigger pads. The end of the lance sparked. Mercy patted him on the shoulder. “You’re good to go, Only.”
The tide of grey filaments crept silently towards them, over the rocks and through the jungle floor detritus.
The grey dead men followed, their halting advance accompanied by the soft puffs of bursting fruit bodies and the muffled falls of creatures as they succumbed to the choking spore clouds, and whose desiccating bodies fed the ineluctable advance.
“Gas hoods!” ordered Atkins, pulling his own down over his head. He was soon cocooned inside the damp, close flannel hood once again, his vision, hearing and breathing impaired, the metallic copper tang of the return valve in his mouth.
He had a moment of doubt as the hooded soldiers with their blank eyes and red proboscises began to stumble forward in their masks. Napoo, bandanna tied over his nose and mouth, fixed him with an accusing glare, and Atkins felt abashed. Perhaps this had been a bad idea. Still, it was too late now. His repugnance for this stuff, and what it had done to decent men, drove him on. And, beyond all of that was the persistent thought of Jeffries, and above it all, Flora.
“We should be able to keep ahead of it,” warned Everson, as they moved through the jungle ahead of the slow wave of mycelia as it burrowed through the decomposing humus beneath their feet. “But not so far ahead that we lose them,” he reminded them.
“Shouldn’t be too hard. They move like they were wading through Somme mud anyway,” said Mercy.
Gutsy turned and watched their slow, implacable advance. “Still gives me the willies.”
The Fusiliers moved on at a fast walking pace, checking every so often to make sure the things were still following them and that Hepton was still with them, refusing as he did to give up any of his equipment. They needn’t have worried.
Atkins caught sight of something out of the corner of his eyes. He couldn’t be sure whether it was really there or just a smudge on his mica eyepiece. He stopped and turned his whole head. Something grey slipped between the trees to their left.
“Blood and sand. They’re trying to outflank us.”
More glimpses of grey to the right.
He listened for the drone of the aeroplane, but it was difficult under the hood. They just had to stay alive until the next telluric discharge occurred. Atkins had eagerly acceded to Tulliver’s plan since it meant Jeffries’ trail would still be within reach. Now he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of it.
More grey figures appeared to their right and left, and with them came the grey-white carpet, as more fruiting bodies burst around them li
ke a barrage and yellow-white clouds of spore blossomed like subdued trench mortar explosions. The cloud of spores billowed and settled, the turbid mist drifting around their legs in whorls and wakes as they passed.
It was the silence of the advance that unnerved Atkins. It lent an air of unreality to their predicament, as if he were watching it unfold in a picture house. He could almost imagine the melodramatic piano accompaniment.
Atkins heard the crackle and caught a brief flash against the tree trunks as Tonkins fired his electric lance. For a moment, the spore cloud parted and the creeping white carpet was repulsed, as if he had dropped soap into oily water.
He forged on, trying to stay ahead of the rising tide of spore cloud. “Have you charged me?” he bellowed at Mercy.
“What do you think I am?” retorted Mercy with a good-natured bawl. “A Lyon’s Tea Room Gladys?” Mercy walked straight into Atkins’ back as he came to an abrupt halt. “Oi! Watch it, Only!”
Atkins raised his electric lance. “We’ve got company.”
“Bloody hell, how did they move fast enough to get in front of us?”
“Does it matter? They’ve got us surrounded.”
Ahead of them, two more grey ambulated corpses emerged shambling from the woodland, a carpet of grey filaments laying itself down before them. Even with the cankerous growths and the blighted features, it was with horror and dismay that Atkins recognised one of them and let out a groan.
“Porgy!”
THE STRUTTER ROARED into the air, the landing wheels clipping the tree tops as Tulliver continued to climb. A few whipperwills cracked and snapped after it, but he left them behind as the aeroplane banked away.
Tulliver circled round the crater at a couple of hundred feet, out of range of the whipperwills. He could see the tower of the temple and the cobweb shroud of fungus threads draped over it. He pointed down for the padre to see. It looked like a cobweb-covered bride cake. From the air, the extent of the fungus became clear, draping through the trees. The extent of its growth was far worse than it looked from the ground. He was glad the Fusiliers didn’t know. In his head, he was already calling it the Havisham Effect.
In the distance, beyond the crater, great plumes of telluric energy blasted into the sky. He saw the shiny patches in the air, far off, as distant energies built, but nothing over the crater. He circled over the Strip again.
Every now and again, through thinner canopy, he’d catch flashes down below as the Tommies’ electric lances flared. At least he knew where they were.
Oil spattered from the engine and built up on his goggles. He pulled them off as he scanned the crater jungle for any sign of imminent telluric build up.
As he banked round again, he saw it, out of the corner of his eye: a patch of air that shimmered as though worn through. It was on the Strip’s edge.
ATKINS COULDN’T BRING himself to disassociate the thing before him from his friend. To him, this shambling grotesque was in some way still Porgy, and therein lay the danger.
“Porgy, it’s me, Only,” he shouted though his gas hood.
“Then do him a favour and fire!” yelled Mercy from behind him as the things that had been Porgy and Jenkins lumbered towards them.
The mould-ridden men showed no sign of recognition. Anything that was Porgy was long gone. The advancing carpet of fungal threads forced Atkins and Mercy back.
EVERSON HEARD THE drone of Tulliver’s engine overhead, and could see him circling above through the leaves and waggling his wings. He’d found a telluric build up. If they were to have any chance of defeating these things, of staying alive, they had to follow him.
“That way!” he bellowed though his gas mask. “Atkins, Tonkins, break out, follow Tulliver! We may only have one shot at this.”
Atkins tore his attention away from the shambling things that were once Porgy and Jenkins, and joined Tonkins as they concentrated their electric fire. Blue-white bolts danced and flicked across the white-carpeted ground, vaporising a path through the thick fungal shroud that surrounded them.
Behind them, fruiting bodies began to swell as the Talbot-thing and the others followed, now keeping their distance beyond the range of the electric lances, paralleling their advance as they spread out in a skirmish line behind them. Like beaters, thought Everson bitterly.
“There!” said Pot Shot, pointing in the sky, where Tulliver was circling tightly.
The Tommies forged towards the spot beneath him, and broke out of the trees onto the scrub-covered Strip.
As they set foot on open ground, Everson waved the aeroplane away. Tulliver waggled his wings in acknowledgement and side-slipped out of the turn.
“I guess this is the spot, then,” said Everson.
From the edge of the wood, the Talbot-thing and its ghastly grey section appeared and staggered silently towards them.
Something in the air changed. Even under his mask, Atkins could feel it. At their feet, the thin rocky mantle began to crack, exposing the metal beneath as the telluric charge began to build.
Napoo, trusting to his nature and innate sense of survival, would not stay. He fled to safer ground beyond the Strip.
The grey-faced Fusiliers shambled towards the small group. The creeping wave of mycelia stopped, its advance stunted by the discharge, but the twisted Tommies kept coming. The fungus that animated them was drawing on more and more of their tissue to fuel itself and the bodies shrivelled with every step as it sought to reach fresher hosts.
“Hold your positions,” yelled Everson.
Atkins and his Black Hand Gang shuffled nervously. They’d been here before, repelling German attacks on the trenches; you hold your nerve, try not to funk it. It didn’t get any easier.
Small crackles of energy flickered about their feet.
“Hold it.”
Hepton danced a jig as ribbons of energy snapped and flared around his boots. “Christ, talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire!” he said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
“No, just you if we’re lucky,” muttered Mercy.
Discharges of blue-white energy rolled across the ground, building in strength.
“It’s coming!” hollered Riley. “Hold steady, son,” he said calmly to a fidgeting Tonkins.
Hepton broke and ran, lugging his tripod, camera and film canisters.
Energy began arcing up from the exposed metal around them, striking out at trees.
“Hold it,” Everson called.
The Talbot-thing stopped and the others lurched to a halt alongside it.
It wasn’t falling for it.
Atkins wasn’t going to let this happen. This had been his idea. These things had to die, if only so the men themselves could rest in peace. He pulled off his gas hood and stepped from the defensive ring.
“Atkins, what do you think you’re doing!” bellowed Everson.
Atkins ignored him and walked towards the grey men.
“Porgy. Porgy, it’s me. Only! You remember me? Porgy!”
The ashen-faced soldier turned its head and stepped towards Atkins, pulling free of the mycelia that wove into the ground around it. The others began doing the same. The fungus, overcome by an imperative for survival, lurched towards him.
As energy began to build beneath his feet, Atkins could feel the thrum of it through his boots. About him, tongues of lightning lashed out at the trees.
The Tommies could hold their position no longer.
“Run!” yelled Everson. They didn’t need telling twice. Atkins took one last look at the fungal effigy of Porgy staggering towards him, its grey skin almost shrivelling against his skull as the fungal canker that possessed it sought to extract every morsel of energy from its decaying host.
A huge bolt of telluric energy roared up from the ground, shattering the thin shell of rock over the metal below. The concussive wave threw Atkins and the others off their feet as a blast of heat washed over them. It threw everything into sharp relief, like all the Very lights in the world going off a
t once.
Atkins turned his head and squinted through his lashes against the light. He saw the silhouettes of fungal Fusiliers caught in the blast, consumed as the huge white beam jagged up into the atmosphere, like some electric beanstalk. Their faint outlines grew fainter and more indistinct against the increasing brightness until there was nothing left but a painful angry white light, spitting and crackling.
Suddenly that, too, was gone.
Ears ringing with the blast, half-blinded by the brilliance, the Tommies staggered to their feet. They wandered round dazed, waiting for their senses to return.
Where the blast had erupted, there was now an exposed circle of metal, one of those nodes Tulliver had talked about, a planetary junction, an intersection of geometric alignments.
Of the animated corpses, there was no sign. They had gone. Beyond the metal, the fungal carpet lay blackened and charred. It crumbled to dust with a soft satisfying crunch beneath the boot.
For minutes afterwards, the decaying afterimages of the men haunted Atkins, but eventually, they faded, too, as the ghosts of the dead ought to.
Atkins blinked away the last of the images and the tears that came with them.
“Goodbye, Porgy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Hellfire Corner”
AFTER THE TELLURIC blast, it took a while for Atkins’ senses to return. His vision was mottled, and his ears buzzed with phantom swarms. Temporarily deaf and blind, he was not in the best condition to go stumbling round a cruel, capricious jungle. None of them were.
Gutsy, Gazette, Mercy and Pot Shot sat quietly, each lost in his own thoughts, waiting on orders and watching the exposed metal warily, as if no longer trusting the ground they stood on.
At least here, at the seat of the blast, the thunderous flash had panicked the animals into flight. It should be a while before they picked up the courage to return. The Tommies would be safe for the moment.
EVERSON LET EVERYONE take a breather while he took stock and decided on his next course of action. He turned his attention to the book they had taken from the Ruanach temple, as best he could with the fading afterimages obscuring and distorting his vision; the book that had come from Roanoke, all the way from Virginia.