by Pat Kelleher
He traced his fingers over the iron sigil of Croatoan on the book’s cover. The crater had been caused by a meteor impact, and he had seen the proof for himself in the broken Heart of Croatoan. It had clearly inspired the myths that had been woven into both Chatt and Urman mythology. For all the Urmen’s belief in Croatoan, the underworld and some Promethean punishment by a dung-beetle god, he couldn’t bring himself to believe it, although some small part of him began to wonder. It was certainly enough to bring Jeffries all this way.
How many other groups of humans had been displaced from Earth? There were stories and legends of mass disappearances throughout history. What if all the Urmen were merely descendants of displaced survivors, subsisting like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden? And if they were, what did that say of the Pennines’ chances? He coughed and dismissed the thought as best he could. There would be plenty of dark, lonely nights in which to dwell on thoughts of that nature.
He looked around at the jungle-filled crater and idly fingered the scrap of khaki and the Pennine Fusilier button. If he had petrol fruit liquor, could he, too, see Jeffries’ trail as Mathers had done? He withdrew his hand quickly, overcome with an irrational fear that Jeffries might somehow sense him through it. If the Chatts were insistent that nothing enters and nothing leaves this place, then returning might be problematic. Then again, so could leaving. They might as well try to find Jeffries’ trail while they were down here.
RILEY AND TONKINS wandered idly over the metal, newly exposed by the telluric blast. The storm, or whatever it was, seemed to have passed now, and although the blasts continued, they had rolled into the distance beyond the crater.
Thinking aloud, Riley held forth on various electrical theories, wondering whether he could stabilise such power, to charge not just an electric lance, but also perhaps an electric cannon. Tonkins’ only contribution to the discussion was, “I reckon you could have powered all the electric lights in London from that.”
Riley mulled that over for a moment, before going to check over the electric lance packs.
HEPTON SAT BY himself, ignored by the others, his hands shaking, two fingers extended by force of habit as if holding a cigarette he wished he had, but didn’t. He caught himself doing it and clenched his fist. It still trembled.
TURNING HIS MIND from Porgy, all Atkins could focus on now was Jeffries. Whatever Jeffries was after, whatever he wanted, he had come down here by himself to get it. By himself. Atkins held that thought for a moment and shook his head in disbelief as he recalled the men they’d lost getting this far. Jeffries had done it by himself. Whatever else he hated about Jeffries, the man possessed a self-belief and determination that he found hard not to envy. Whatever it was he was after, Jeffries was a driven man. But now, so was Atkins.
His mind turned to Flora. He would go to hell and back for her. Now it looked very much as if he would have to do just that.
Unfortunately, it meant taking his mates with him.
Talk to someone, Nellie had said. There was no one to whom he could talk. No one that would understand. His mates wouldn’t. They thought he was a decent, honest chap. He’d gone out of his way to show that he was, to himself if to no one else, to prove himself penitent.
Silently, he renewed his vow to return home, and thought of those who wouldn’t. Jessop, Lucky, Ginger, Nobby, Prof, Chalky, Jenkins, Porgy and, yes, even Ketch; he wanted their deaths to mean something.
He feared Everson might get cold feet. He hadn’t come this far to give up now.
He approached Lieutenant Everson. “Sir, we shouldn’t stay put too long,” he advised, glancing warily at the surrounding scrub. “We’re still going after Jeffries, aren’t we?”
Everson was leafing through the ironbound tome.
“This mission has been a complete shambles, Atkins,” he sighed quietly. “We’ve made peace with one colony only to start a war with another. Quite frankly, if I go back to the camp empty-handed, I think the men will lynch me.”
“It won’t come to that, sir. We have our second objective.”
“Are the rest of the men up to it?” he said, glancing over to the weary Tommies. It seemed that he had asked much of them, over the past few months. Dare he ask more?
“They will be, sir. The Black Hand Gang hasn’t let you down before. If that man knows the way home, I’d follow him into Hell itself.”
“Well, it looks as if that’s were we’re going. But I don’t think we need worry. We’ve been there before. Remember Wipers?”
Atkins shuddered at the memory. “That I do, sir.”
THERE WERE ENTRIES in the book that, if they weren’t allegorical, very clearly pointed to a gateway, an entrance to the underworld and the Village of the Dead.
They moved off out along the Strip, that the Ruanach clan referred to as the Road of the Dead, heading towards the crater’s far wall, every so often marking their route with a chalked 13/PF on a rock or tree trunk, for the Ivanhoe to follow.
Wearing the Lightningwerfer, as Mercy had christened the electric lance pack, Atkins took the lead with Mercy as his winder; Everson followed, with Napoo occasionally scouting ahead. Pot Shot and Gazette eyed the jungle either side of the Strip, while Riley and Hepton struggled along like pack mules under knapsacks and kitbags of gear, but at least the going was firm, and Tonkins with the second Lightningwerfer brought up the rear with Gutsy.
Knowing now what was beneath his feet as they walked, Everson thought about the wider context of the mysterious lines on the landscape. He knew there were megalithic roads that scarred the landscape of Britain, but nothing there suggested any kind of giant structure beneath the surface like here. Who built it, and what was it for?
TREES TOWERED HIGH either side of the wide ribbon of scrub, spreading their thin spindly foliage out over the Strip and dappling the scrub beneath with dancing shadows. The tough shallow-rooted plants clung fiercely to the thin soil, reinforcing the image of an ancient, overgrown, long-disused road.
As the crater wall rose up before them, the vegetation became thicker. A grove of gnarled scab trees stood in their way, choked with the pallid creepers that infested the crater.
Mercy and Gutsy whirred away on the magneto handles, making sure that Tonkins’ and Atkins’ electric lances were fully charged. Atkins would rather have his Enfield in his hand—he trusted it more than this alien device—but knew as long as the magneto didn’t wear out and there were hands to wind, he didn’t have to worry about ammunition. Here, though, the electric lances came into their own: they spat and burned through the snarl of plants, sending small ugly creatures scurrying for new cover.
As Napoo slashed away at the last of the lianas and vines and they broke through the last of the undergrowth, they saw the far wall of the crater, towering six hundred feet above them. They clambered over moss-covered boulders down into an old stone-strewn dell, where huge buttressing tree-roots supported trees that must have been centuries old. At the base of the crater wall, a vast yawning crack split the rock, its mouth barred by a writhing mass of the pallid creepers that reached out to choke the surrounding vegetation. The size of the cavern mouth dwarfed the Tommies; it could have taken three or four battlepillars abreast.
A single valiant shaft of sunlight shone down through the scab trees behind them, attempting to penetrate the gloom beyond the entrance, but it fell on nothing within that it could illuminate. The light was swallowed whole and snuffed out, engulfed by the immensity of the black void beyond, a void that seemed to brook no examination from without, forcing those who gazed into it to take what lay beyond on faith.
Looking into that black gulf for too long gave Atkins an unsettling sense of unease and nausea. There was nothing within the obsidian darkness on which to focus, and strange unearthly shapes and colours swam in his vision, until he was no longer sure whether they were a trick of the mind or not. It was only when he looked away that reality reasserted itself.
Impressive though the entrance was, it was certainl
y more natural than their imaginations had led them to expect. Atkins had envisaged demons with flaming swords guarding it, perhaps, or giant lintels carved from the rock face and inscribed with unspeakable glyphs, standing on weathered, ruined Doric columns of great size. Or something darker, exuding great age and malevolence: vast forbidding blackened doors of charred bone, and niches of skulls.
“So that’s it?” said Mercy. “The gateway to the underworld? Can’t say that I’m impressed. I was expecting something a little more—”
“Fire and brimstone?” suggested Gutsy.
Mercy shrugged. “Well, yes, I suppose. A little less woodland dell, more Welcome to Hell, as it were. Although I’m not complaining. To be quite honest, I’m a little glad it ain’t.”
“Evil has a banality all its own,” said Hepton, eyeing the entrance warily. “I wouldn’t let your guard down.” He made the sign of the cross and, a little self-consciously, Tonkins followed suit.
“Well, we’re not getting through that stuff without a little help,” said Gutsy, watching the slow-writhing creepers. He had a hand on Little Bertha, but knew it would be of little use against the mass of choking plant tendrils before them.
A bolt of blue-white energy blasted Pot Shot off his feet.
“Another telluric blast,” yelped Tonkins.
They dived for cover. Atkins grabbed the dazed Pot Shot by his webbing and hauled him behind a buttress root.
“What hit me?” he asked.
“Lightning,” said Atkins, his attention focused on the undergrowth around them. “Lucky for the rest of us you’re the tallest. Makes you a natural lightning rod.”
“Good job I wasn’t wearing me steel helmet then,” he said with a dazed smile.
Another blast followed, but it wasn’t the thunderous concussive heaven-bound telluric bolt, nor was it the half-expected blast of sulphurous hellfire.
“What the hell is it?” asked Everson, his back to a boulder for cover, as he checked the chambers of his Webley.
Mercy peered over the top of a fallen tree, behind which he’d taken cover.
Another bolt of energy arced out from the undergrowth. It was the writhing, spitting Tesla arc of an electric lance. Another licked out across the open space, scorching the undergrowth in which they’d taken cover.
“Chatts!”
“Blood and sand!” cursed Atkins. “How? I thought they were afraid of this place. What the hell are they doing here?”
“One of their balloons must have come down, like us,” said Gutsy.
“Nothing must enter. Nothing must leave,” Gazette quoted, laconically. “They’ve been abandoned. They know they’re not getting out of the crater, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Makes them dangerous.”
Another arc of energy spat across and hit a fallen log, vaporising sap and moisture in an instant and exploding the bole into a thousand firehardened shards of wooden shrapnel.
“Christ, you think?” yelped Gutsy, ducking as low as he could.
Gazette settled against a rock, nestled the stock of his Enfield into his shoulder and targeted the shadows in the grove of scab trees to the side of the cavern entrance. He squeezed the trigger.
Another bolt flashed from a different direction.
“How many of them are there?” bawled Pot Shot, pinned down behind a buttress root.
“I can’t tell, they’re leaping around, keeping us pinned down,” replied Gazette.
“Where’s Napoo?” asked Everson.
Atkins looked around. The Urman had vanished. Gutsy jerked his head upwards; Napoo was edging round a scab tree, trying to get a better vantage point to spot the Chatts.
Hepton flinched as the brief flash of another electric bolt threw his shaded funk hole into sharp relief.
There was a gunshot and a Chatt fell from its perch, in a tree overlooking their position. Gazette cycled the Enfield’s bolt and looked for another target.
There was another gunshot. A Chatt staggered through the undergrowth towards them, its electric battery backpack spitting and fizzing. It stumbled a few steps before the pack emitted a brief whine and exploded, engulfing it in a ball of white heat that left its carapace charred and smouldering as it collapsed.
“That wasn’t me,” said Gazette.
There was a snap of dry wood underfoot and the shade of a grey ashen-faced man stepped into the dappled shadow of Hell’s dell.
“It’s another fungus-man,” said Hepton, shrinking into the shadows as far as he could.
The figure stepped into the light.
“Fuck me,” said Mercy. “It’s the Alleyman.”
“Werner,” muttered Everson.
The German pilot looked the worse for wear. His smart uniform was scorched and his tunic unbuttoned, his face blacked with oil and soot; oil-filmed goggles sat atop his flying helmet and his smart polished boots were now scuffed and dulled by dust and mud.
“We meet again, gentlemen,” he called out jovially.
“If you think we’re surrendering to you and your Chatts, you have another think coming,” called Everson.
“On the contrary,” Werner called back.
Another electric white-blue flash arced towards him out of the undergrowth, interrupting him. He flinched and ducked as it earthed yards away from him, blasting a chunk out of a young Japheth tree. The trunk gave way slowly with a creaking tear. Werner began running towards the Tommies. The tree crashed to the ground and Werner flung himself into the dirt. Using the fallen tree as cover, he scrambled over to them before peering back out at the undergrowth where the rest of the Chatts were concealed. When he looked back, it was into the points of several rifles, fixed with bayonets.
Slowly Werner put his pistol down on the ground and raised his hands to shoulder height, not wanting to present more of a target to the remaining Chatts.
“Tulliver said you crashed,” said Everson.
“My machine crashed. I survived, which is more than can be said for my uniform,” Werner said, indicating his torn and scorched tunic. “My tailor will be furious.”
“They were firing at you.”
“I knew my alliance with the insekt menschen was at an end when I came down in the crater, that I would be outcast and untouchable to them,” he said with a shrug. “I no longer have my machine, so I am of no further use to them. They will not let me out of the crater now. They let nothing out unless it is to kill it. They would leave me here to die, and I do not want to die, Lieutenant.”
“None of us do,” said Everson.
“I am alone,” admitted Werner. “You have your battalion. I wish to put aside our enmity. I wish to be... human again.”
They ducked as another flurry of electric bolts crackled through the air. The remaining Chatts had moved to cut the Tommies off from the cavern entrance.
Werner snatched up his pistol. Nobody stopped him.
Gazette squeezed off another couple of rounds. Normally, he’d look for a muzzle flash and target that spot, like any good sniper, but here the blue-white brilliance of the electric bolts left irritating afterimages blotting his vision. The Chatts fired and moved, springing across large spaces with inhuman speed, never firing from the same place twice.
“You know what?” said Gutsy, shouting over the miniature thunderstorm that raged briefly around them, “I’m beginning to look back on the days when I could kill Chatts in the hundreds using just a candle with some nostalgia!”
He pulled a safety pin from a Mills bomb and lobbed it into the writhing tangle of creepers that contorted around the cavern entrance. The explosion ripped and shredded it like barbed wire, throwing Chatt limbs up into the air in graceless arcs.
“They will not let us go,” said Werner. “Nor can they leave themselves. They are dead to the colony. All they can do is carry out their overriding chemical decree; nothing must enter, nothing must leave. They will die to fulfil that precept.”
“Well I’m sure we can oblige,” said Everson through clenched teeth.
“Are you really going to trust a Hun, sir?” asked Mercy, eyeing the German with deep suspicion.
“No, Evans,” said Everson firmly. “I’m going to trust a gentleman.”
TULLIVER CIRCLED THE crater, looking for signs of another telluric blast, but it seemed that the land storm was moving away.
He hadn’t known about Werner’s Albatros for long, but the sky seemed an emptier, lonelier place without it. As he spiralled down, he could see a haze of smoke hanging above the Zohtakarrii edifice. One of their balloons still floated above it on a winch line, on watch.
As he flew lower, he turned round and jabbed down with a gloved finger. He wanted the padre to keep a look out for the Fusiliers. Behind his goggles, the padre nodded in acknowledgement.
Tulliver spotted the deflated remains of a Chatt balloon hanging ripped and torn in the boughs of a tree below. Then, out of the corner of his eye, towards the crater wall, he noticed faint patches of air shimmer briefly. They erupted with the brief short crackle of electric lances. It looked like the balloon’s passengers had survived.
He flew lower, risking the whipperwills, but they seem to have been shocked into sluggishness by the sheer violence of telluric storm. He flew along the Strip towards the crater wall. There he saw more polished patches of air shine amongst the overgrowth round the mouth of a fissure, birthing more crackling arcs of electric fire. As he circled, Tulliver saw the Fusiliers pinned down by constantly-shifting fire. They couldn’t get a fix on their enemies, but he could.
He brought the bus lower and flew along the Strip towards the fissure in the crater wall, waiting for the patches of strange air to appear again.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered as the Strutter closed on the crater wall. Areas in the undergrowth began to shine, and he fired. From deep within the undergrowth, there came a brilliant flash and a rising puff of white smoke like a photographer’s flash powder.
He pulled on the stick and banked away sharply, climbing away from the looming crater wall.