Wilson was frowning. I knew what he was thinking: surely this guy doesn’t think we’re that stupid? Or is he really a straight-up guy who hasn’t even thought about cheating?
“I trust you, Doc,” I said. “Problem is, I don’t get paid to trust. So I guess you won’t mind me staying here and seeing the test through.”
“If you like,” Dr. K. said. “It’s not so congenial here, but a stay can be arranged. I will have to ask my associates.”
“What’s it to them?” asked Moran.
“They too have kindly provided me with this working space and some technical assistance,” said Dr. K. “They are the landlords of this establishment.”
“You working with hillbilly moonshiners out here?” asked Wilson.
“Call them that if you like.”
“I ain’t staying here overnight,” said Ricca. “But if Jones keeps an eye and says it ain’t rigged, that’s good enough for me.”
“Me too,” said Moran.
“Looks like you volunteered to keep watch for all of us,” said Wilson. “Do we get to meet these associates of yours, Dr. K.?”
“Well now…” He scratched his chin. “I suppose that’s up to them.” He gave a meaningful look down to the end of the room where the doorway opened on to darkness and more tunnels.
A hooded figure stepped forward noiselessly out of the shadows. I heard sharp intakes of breath. Moran drew his .45, Ricca pulled out a revolver, and Cristillo raised the Tommy gun. What I thought were lab coats hanging up were really Ku Klux Klan robes, topped off-by that tall, pointed hood with slits for eyes. That sort of fancy dress should have been comical, but coming out of the blackness the effect was pretty spooky.
“What is this?” demanded Moran. “Klan in Vermont? That’s crazy.”
“My associates do not wish to be identified,” said Dr. K. “The outfit is convenient for concealment.”
“It’s for Halloween,” said Ricca. “Hey, pal, what’s with the ghost suit?”
“He can stay,” said the robed figure, ignoring the others and pointing at me with a white gloved hand. His voice was blurred, as though he had something in his mouth. Now I could see there were several others behind him.
“Thank you,” said Dr. K.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Wilson, stepping forward and holding out a hand. The figure shrank back from him.
“You have to go now,” he said, and it took me a minute to make out the words. He backed away from us on silent feet until he faded away into the dark as though he was on rails.
“Local outfit?” asked Wilson.
“They won’t give you any competition in Chicago,” said Dr. K. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think our hosts would like you to leave, except you of course, Mr. Jones.”
He showed me a camp stool, and a locker with bottles of water. I could keep the lantern, but the electric light had to go off to save the batteries. Dr. K. instructed me that I must not leave the chamber on any account.
“There’s a bucket under a cloth over there for your natural functions,” he said before I could ask. “I will escort the others and rejoin you in just a few hours. And please, I advise you not to talk to them. Especially do not agree to anything.”
The others trooped out and, with a cheerful wave, the doctor cut the light, leaving me alone in the dark with just a lantern.
If you’ve ever faced the prospect of a night inside a giant anthill crawling with strange bugs, not knowing how to find your way out, you’ll have some idea how I felt. Otherwise you have no idea. I listened to the muffled sound recede and fade entirely, then I shoved my worries firmly to one side and set to work checking out Dr. K.’s laboratory. Some of it was easy to make out, like the boxes of canned food and salami, and a box crammed with bars of real Swiss chocolate. There was clothing, all of it the doctor’s, a camp bed, and other basic necessities.
I found a wooden box containing a Luger, well cleaned and oiled, at the bottom of a cardboard suitcase full of clothes. The ammo was peculiar: the lead bullets had been carefully replaced with a white, chalky material with a chemical smell.
There was a portable office. It was locked, and it took me all of five minutes with a piece of wire to get in. There were letters in German and a handful of family photographs, showing a smiling Dr. K. with a sturdy woman and a couple of blond children, ‘Lübeck 1925’ written on the back.
A folder held letters from Chicago from his business partners: a scrawled note from Spencer Wade telling him to go to Newfane where he would be met by Walter Brown, and another one saying he’d be sending Edward Jones to bring back the filter. Then there were letters of varying degrees of literacy from the North Side and the others.
Three boxes acted as a bookcase, with rows of books in English and German. They were mainly chemical textbooks, but there were a few surprises, like the stack of pulp fiction, from Black Mask (“Dead Men’s Letters”) to Amazing Stories (“The Man from the Atom”). The high end was represented by Goethe’s Faust.
The laboratory section gave up a set of bound notebooks, all in the same neat handwriting, and all in German. Most of them had copious amounts of scientific notation. One was a homemade dictionary, translating from something like Arab script—words made all of Ms and Ws and Vs crammed together—into German: Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff. It was all unintelligible, until I found that he had put chemical formulae in as well. Even I recognised H2o.
Another notebook seemed to be nature sketches. There were some toadstools and fungi on stumps, but mainly it seemed to be crayfish. I guess everyone has his own interests. Dr. K. was a competent draughtsman, but the crayfish in particular looked as though he were drawing from memory and had to make up the details.
The benches and tools were not old, but showed signs of wear. A barrel was full of waste: broken glass, metal shavings, sawn-off lengths of tubing. One shelf held literally hundreds of ceramic discs, wrapped in paper and carefully numbered and labelled. They were all circular and the size of your palm, but on close inspection they had different thicknesses, different colours and textures. I gathered that getting them exactly right was the whole secret, and most of the money had gone into getting different types of disk made.
If he was a fake, he had put in plenty of homework. Or maybe he was just crazy.
IV
I heard Dr. K. coming down the tunnel in enough time to get back to the camp stool. He bustled in and started unpacking a shoulder bag.
“I have a Thermos of coffee for you from Pretski, and also—this!” He waved the chessboard in the air. “I think we should have time for a game or two tonight. You have inspected my laboratory thoroughly, I hope?”
“Nice place you got here,” I said. “For a mole. Why don’t you stay at Pretski’s at night—it’s not that far?”
“My associates prefer me to be here.” He retrieved a small box for a table and started setting up the chessboard.
“What do you need them for anyway? Any shack in the woods would do.”
“Ah, Mr. Jones, it’s not the premises, but the expertise, which is important. I have learned so much from them.”
“From a bunch of backwoods hillbilly moonshiners?”
Dr. K. shook his head. “You don’t really believe they are just hillbillies, do you?”
“What then?” I asked, watching him set up the board.
“You are a detective.” He held out two fists and I nodded at the left: he opened it and showed me a white pawn. “So use the evidence of your eyes.”
I used the same opening as before, and the game followed a similar course to our first one as I thought out loud.
“Who would have a place like this, underground, in the middle of a forest?” I thought I’d toss out a few facetious ideas at Dr. K. to see how he reacted, and maybe put him off his game.
“Those guys looked short to me—maybe they’re the Seven Dwarfs, and this is their gold mine? Or they’re a nest of German spies left over from the war? Some sort of crazy religious cult? A secr
et society? Some East-Coast Triad gang? They’ve got strange taste in décor and they don’t have much to do with the neighbours. No vehicle tracks, no footpaths around here even. Very primitive set-up, no windows, no plumbing…like cavemen. They don’t like showing their faces.” I snapped my fingers. “Got it: they’re an ancient tribe of troglodyte Indians, the remnant of an ancient civilisation. Better than that, they’re the survivors of ancient Atlantis. The locals are terrified of them; that’s why they don’t talk about them.”
“You are quite right,” he said, and continued the development with a knight. “Except for one detail. They are extra-terrestrials.”
“Spacemen? Yeah, I forgot to mention that.”
“Indeed. They have been here for many centuries, and, as you say, their neighbours have a superstitious dread of them. They are not like any terrestrial life; I believe they are actually a species of highly developed fungus.”
“Of course, I shoulda known,” I said, thinking of Amazing Stories. “It’s the Mushroom Men from Mars. Like walking slime mould.”
“Slime mould—yes, yes, exactly so.” He nodded vigorously. “But with a hard exoskeleton, like a lobster, to give it structure. Parallel evolution with our crustacea…they are not individuals, merely the mobile fruiting bodies of a larger underground organism. One that feeds, I think, on geothermal energy. They have advanced technology, but the ones here do not understand it,” he went on. “Perhaps they have great universities and scientists somewhere in the galaxy. But this is a remote, isolated outpost—as remote from civilisation as Newfane. They are just as ignorant and superstitious as the people in the village.” He raised his voice as though for the benefit of eavesdroppers. “They boast more than Americans about their science, but they are the worst laboratory assistants I ever had. Not one of them would be admitted into a German university, not even to sweep the floors.”
He was losing track of the game in his excitement, and I took an exposed rook with my queen.
“They are good with valves and pipes, but electricity…they don’t understand it. I have to get my own generator. They believe in the ether! Like peasants, they just keep doing the same things without understanding why. They do not understand experiment, theory, scientific method…their science has not advanced in one hundred years…not in one thousand years.”
“And these mushroom men wanted you to make moonshine?”
“After a fashion,” he said. “Alcohol is a primary fuel for their machinery. Fossil fuels are peculiar to our planet; the process of fermenting carbohydrate to alcohol is universal. The apparatus they had is very old, and when it broke they had no idea how to fix it. Amusingly enough, methanol is the biggest problem: it poisons the organic catalysts they use.”
He actually stopped and chuckled at that.
“So they had to ask me to build a new component from scratch, with what I could learn about the structure and function of the old one. It was too good an offer for me to refuse.”
“So you knew you were looking for some kind of ceramic but not exactly what,” I said. “And the mushroom men couldn’t stake you with the money, so you brought in the Chicago boys.”
“Partly…but also because my hosts lack the means to test the filter properly. So you are all here to give it the seal of approval.”
“They can’t be that dumb.” It was a crazy story, and full of holes at that.
He did not reply; he was studying the board. Eventually he moved a pawn, blocking my attack and threatening a counter-attack with his bishop.
“So now you know everything,” he said. “Those others, they’re not interested, only in the money. They are just hoodlums. You know, in German, a hoodlum is just a ragamuffin, a street boy. Here they are dangerous. Mr. Moran makes me uncomfortable. But you are not a hoodlum, you are an investigator. You would find out everything yourself, but I make it a little easier.”
I moved my queen back. “Thanks,” I said.
“It’s all supposed to be secret, but I don’t like secrets. Tomorrow we have the demonstration. Afterwards they would like me to stay here, keep my knowledge and expertise forever. I would be a part of, as you say, their brain trust. They do like brains.”
“I heard something like that.”
“Pickled brains,” he said. “You know why? Because a brain is like a wax cylinder or a phonograph record. With the right machine you can extract information from it. But I might, on the other hand …”
Dr. K. was looking down at one hand which was making a walking gesture with two fingers beside the chessboard. “‘Twenty-three Skidoo,’ yes? I do not want to be here forever.”
The bishop struck out across the board, scything down a pawn. I nodded to show I understood.
“My job is looking after Mr. Spencer Wade’s money.”
“Don’t worry, he will get a good return on his investment. The ceramic filter is worth several million dollars to whoever can exploit it first.”
We played on in silence for a while. I steadily lost ground and pieces and ended up fighting a messy rearguard action that was only going to end one way.
“Excellent,” Dr. K. declared when it ended. “Shall we play another?”
We played chess for some hours. We ate crackers with cheese and pâté, and the apples Dr. K. brought from Pretski’s. We finished three games and he won two; the third was a long drawn-out stalemate. We talked about science and philosophy and life in the universe—or at least Dr. K. did, and I listened. He was what you might call a monomaniac. Dr. K. was perfectly normal when he was talking about politics, or French wine, or how Chicago had changed since the World’s Fair. But get him on the topic of mushroom men and he was off into outer space faster than a rocket ship. I wondered if it had started out as a joke or a fantasy of his, and it just grew and grew down here in the darkness—like a mushroom. Until he couldn’t see the joke anymore and it all made perfect sense to him. It happens. Crazy people aren’t crazy all the time—you just have to know how to handle them. I’ve spent worse evenings. I don’t think I’ve spent weirder ones.
Afterwards the doctor took the camp bed. I had said I would stay up, keeping one eye on the stills. I was used to long surveillance jobs, and even sitting on the dirt floor was more comfortable than most. At least it was indoors.
You could hear the low flame burning in the lantern, the bubbling of the two boilers. The air was dead, stale, witness to the fact that whoever made these tunnels didn’t know much about air circulation. Sometimes you could hear distant scrapings. It sounded like machinery or something further down in the tunnels.
Then there was a distant chanting somewhere below. I could not make out words however hard I tried; perhaps there weren’t any. I thought again about secret religious cults. Those robes with the pointy hoods were the same ones they wore in Spain. It still didn’t make any sense.
“Superstitious peasants,” muttered Dr. K., rolling over. “Always praying instead of thinking.”
The chanting continued in bursts for an hour or more: hymn followed by psalm and then maybe some preaching. It was the craziest thing I ever heard. I drowsed and drifted without ever quite falling asleep. Then I heard a noise nearby and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Someone was creeping up on me. I moved fast, turning up the lantern just in time to catch a flash of white ducking back into the tunnel entrance.
“What is it?” asked Dr. K.
“One of your friends,” I said.
“That is unusual.” He looked troubled. “Perhaps they are keeping an eye on you? I will talk to them tomorrow.”
The rest of that long night passed uneventfully. The stills bubbled. Dr. K. snored like a hog. The blackness pressed in on me.
In the morning he yawned, and chuckled to see me blinking back at him.
“Still awake, Mr. Jones? I do admire your determination. You would make an excellent assistant. I could have you watching chemical reactions all night.”
He left to collect the others. I stretched, then did some exe
rcises to get the kinks out of my arms and legs, back and neck. I washed my face in a bucket of water and regretted not bringing a razor. The doctor did not seem to have one, and I felt like I’d grown two days of stubble overnight.
I breakfasted on crackers and cheese and was feeling a little fresher by the time Dr. K. led the others into the lab. Cristillo had his Tommy gun with him again. It seemed like an unnecessary amount of hardware. Unless they had something in mind which involved the rest of us not getting back to Newfane.
I took the chance to go outside for a smoke. The light hurt my eyes, and it was cold and fresh after the closed-off dirt walls and stale air inside. The birds sounded good. Yesterday it seemed as if the forest had none, but this morning there appeared to be dozens of them singing their hearts out. Out here in the clear daylight it all seemed so simple. Why had I been so worried about being down there all night, when there was nothing to it?
Wilson stood with me, pumping me for information about what I had learned from Dr. K.
“He’s a loon,” I finished. “But he might still be a good scientist.”
“How’s that?”
“I once had a case from a guy who swore he was the true king of France. He thought Napoleon’s secret agents were trying to murder him,” I said. “No kidding. He’s an insurance executive, and he’s one of the smartest cookies I ever met. Never missed a trick, or made a bad deal. Back in the war, his platoon was hit by some French ’75s, and that’s the only way he could make sense of it. He still checks under the bed for French spies every night. One part of his brain is on the fritz, but the rest is all OK.”
“Dr. K. is smart all right. We traced him back to New York. He was doing pretty well until his partner burned the factory down for the insurance and pulled a disappearing act.” Wilson snorted a laugh. “Seems you can’t trust anybody these days.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 17