Biology tells that that unless some extraordinary constraint is applied, a species always expands to fill its habitat. I suspect there must be as many others in the skies fifty miles above us as there are fish in the sea.
They descend only seldom to the surface; certain reports of blue lights and strange winds in mines make me believe they may sometimes go underground to great depths. I believe they have their own network of shafts and tunnels which sometimes intersect with our own. It is possible they have their own catacombed cities or hives, somewhere deep in the earth.
My concern—and here I speculate—is that, as ‘Paul’ suggested, they swarm periodically, like so many other creatures which breed en masse. Their bodies may be largely made of carbon extracted from the atmosphere, but they must require other elements and they must breed. When the time is right, they will descend like locusts in a great devouring swarm. They will bring down destruction far greater than any aerial bombardment we can presently imagine. The sky truly will fall.
Knowledge of the others would cause great distress and mass panic, but it would be needless. The others will be doom for humanity, but it is a remote doom. Their breeding cycle must be a matter of thousands of years, perhaps linked to solar cycles. There is no historical record of such an event happening, except perhaps in some of the fragments of myth in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and similar writings. I also puzzle at a certain passage in the Book of Revelation which is too similar for coincidence. They are terrible, and the mere sight of one is deeply disturbing, but mankind should have some centuries at least before they trouble us.
I ran into Webster on the street two weeks later. It could hardly have been a chance encounter, but he feigned surprise at seeing me. This was an entirely different Webster from the one I knew before. His easy hail-fellow-well-met manner had melted away, his attitude had stiffened. Before he acted like the lord of all he surveyed; now he seemed as awkward as a schoolboy in the teachers’ common-room.
“Blake,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “I never thanked you for helping me with Paul. I’ve no idea what was wrong with him, but you certainly helped cure it.”
But his eyes were cold above a fixed smile.
“I’m glad I could be of help,” I said. “Is he well?”
“He’s just the same little scamp as before,” said Webster, in the same tone of stage jollity. “Though he can’t remember anything that happened while he was acting strangely.”
“I suppose we’ll never know what happened,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve recovered yourself. I never had a chance to talk to you about—about what we saw.”
“I didn’t see anything,” he said. “What did you see?”
“I don’t know,” I said, put on my guard by his question. “But there was a dreadful whistling, and these blasts, and I—I thought I saw a thing in the air—”
“I didn’t see anything,” he repeated, and I saw the spasm that took hold of Webster’s face even though he looked down at his feet. I looked down also. His shoelaces had been tied oddly.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said a third time in a thick voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring it back to you—”
“Nothing to bring back,” he said, looking up again, his expression under control. “I think you must have been confused by the flames and the smoke, like those night watchmen.”
“I suppose you’ve been busy broking stocks,” I said to change the subject.
“No, I’ve been…” he stopped dead before continuing awkwardly. “I’ve been indulging in a hobby of mine for the last few weeks. Research, going round a few libraries here and there. Talking to some people.”
“Good Lord, Webster,” I said. “Time was, you wouldn’t be seen dead in a library. You always said books were for chaps who were no good at sports. I thought you had people who did that sort of thing for you.”
“No,” said Webster flatly.
“So what have you been researching?” I asked.
“This and that,” he said.
This was even odder. Men with obsessive interests, whether it’s family genealogy or the development of steam locomotives, are always keen to share them with others. Usually you can’t get them to shut up. I saw then that there was a tiny swastika badge in his lapel.
The silence grew and I was about to end this peculiar encounter when he unexpectedly took me by the arm and spoke rapidly.
“By the way, Blake, as I’ve run into you, I remember now there was just one thing I wanted to ask about, just a little thing. You know Paul had a little piece of crystal, about this big?” He held thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Do you know what happened to it?”
“Paul had it in his hand,” I said. “Why do you ask? Are you going to re-assemble the apparatus?”
Webster tried to laugh, but the effect was more like a cough.
“Oh, I don’t set any store by that nonsense Paul made up. I just want it as a keepsake,” Webster said.
“But wasn’t it all nonsense?” I asked.
“Of course it was,” he said, gripping my arm tighter. “It was all nonsense.”
“Did he tell you his story about ancient civilisations then?” I asked.
“Do you know where the crystal is? Do you have any idea?”
“If he doesn’t have it, perhaps it fell out of his pocket when he was lying on the ground,” I said. “Or in the ambulance.”
“I’ve searched,” said Webster. “The ambulance, the hospital, every scrap of clothing. I’ve put out advertisements with a reward of fifty pounds.”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “Maybe it would be easier to find another crystal. Dig one up as you did with the first one?”
The grip on my arm became painful as the anger flashed through him.
“They’ve all gone!” he snapped. “Taken. That was the last one.”
“Calm down, old man,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I think of anything. I’m sure it’ll turn up.”
He released my arm, aware at last that he was making a scene, and forced a genial expression.
“Good man, Blake.” He extracted a business card and wrote a telephone number on the back before passing it to me. “Scour your memory. Think back to everything you saw. Fifty pounds—a hundred pounds. Name your price! I’m relying on you, Blake.”
He shook my hand mechanically for much too long. We parted on amicable terms, and Webster continued on his enigmatic mission. I followed him at a distance and saw him enter the Horniman Museum.
As I sit at my desk I have Webster’s card in front of me. The handwriting is a good simulacrum, but not convincing when I compare it to his letter. And certainly Webster never used to write with his left hand.
I have no moral doubt that the thing which was in Paul now inhabits Webster’s body.
Was I cheated when I agreed to help ‘Paul’? He had not quite lied: the swap had been made and Paul had been returned to his body. But that did not prevent the being from launching itself again and taking over another human body, this time selected from the three present when the apparatus had been activated.
Roberts had been killed before they could take his body. I had been tried and found wanting. Webster was their chosen vessel. But what is his mission?
Perhaps, as ‘Paul’ said, he is simply gathering information, preparatory to a migration which will leapfrog humanity altogether, going from millions of years in our past to millions in our future. But I mistrust their interest in our world.
The first word of a constitutional crisis appeared in the papers three weeks after the Crystal Palace fire, and I remembered Webster’s prediction that the fascists might get into power. The King was indeed embroiled with an American divorcée, and Baldwin wanted him to abdicate. The fascists prepared for their moment.
There were too many echoes of that ancient race in the fascist movement. If they had tools in our world, then they would like the fascists: a heavily armed society, one that tramples
individuals to build its strength, one whose science is all directed towards military, one which has a fanatical belief in race. This would be their version of humanity—and a suitable weapon to wage war against the others. And ‘Paul’ had been fascinated with William Joyce.
They wanted to hasten that final war, bring it forward by hundreds or thousands of years. Strike first and strike hard, as ‘Paul’ had said, before the others could swarm. A liberal, democratic state might view the others tolerantly, might devise on a programme of mass shelter-building as had been proposed for the coming conflict. They would certainly not do anything to provoke the others and would be best advised to let well enough alone, however much this might look like appeasement. We might live in peace for millennia.
A fascist state, on the other hand, would declare a war of extermination as soon as they discovered those disturbing aliens. They could never tolerate anything which threatened their title to sole ownership of the earth.
If our science could furnish us with weapons, humanity might win a pyrrhic victory over the others, one that would leave our cities shattered and our nations ruined. The wandering bands of survivors would be easy prey for the next dominant species to rise from the ruins, the cockroach-things which will succeed us and which will act as unwilling hosts for those alien minds from the distant past.
I still hope ‘Webster’ may be thwarted in his aims. I have written a letter to William Joyce with information about Webster, couched in the language of the most vicious anti-Semitism, denouncing Webster as a spy for a cabal of Jewish bankers. Joyce might not believe all of it, but I’m sure enquiries will be made—enquiries that will set him on the trail of Webster’s Jewish business connections, his Jewish relations, and his suspiciously sudden conversion to the right-wing cause. He looks like a spy, and that will put an end to his chances of influence with the fascists, whatever he offers them.
My main hope lies elsewhere. ‘Webster’ was in a mortal hurry to retrieve the crystal and send another signal. The limitations imposed by his form of time travel must be severe. He seemed frantic, and well aware of the risk of giving himself away when he talked to me. I don’t know if he wants to transfer himself to another body, or to summon reinforcements from his era, or just to send back some vital dispatch. Whatever the reason, it is important enough for him to risk his entire mission by tipping his hand to me.
But he will not send any signals without that crystal.
Like me, he knows well enough where to find it. After the great fire that destroyed the Palace, thousands of tons of debris were cleared up with bulldozers and dumped into a landfill site in Kent. He might well find the spot and start sifting through it. A rich man like Webster would have the resources to do that. But it is not as easy as finding a needle in a haystack: that piece of crystal is mixed in among a billion shards of broken glass from the Crystal Palace. I hope and believe that it is lost forever, leaving ‘Webster’ stranded in our time and helpless to alter our history.
Editor’s Note: Edward VIII accepted abdication without a fight in December 1936, and the British Union of Fascists faded rapidly. Oswald Mosley sacked William Joyce in 1937; Mosley was opposed to Joyce’s strongly pro-German stance. Joyce fled to Berlin at the outbreak of war and joined Hitler’s propaganda ministry, making radio broadcasts to Britain under the name ‘Lord Haw-Haw.’ He was hanged for treason in 1946.
The cause of the fire which destroyed the Crystal Palace has never been established.
THE DEVILS IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Being an account of events on the voyage of the SS
Amaryllis from Melbourne to Fiji in the Tasman Sea, 1886
“I don’t want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no
other job we ever turned our minds to.”
“Let us think of the way to go to work,” Ricardo retorted a
little impatiently. “He’s a deep one.”
—Joseph Conrad, Victory
What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish:
he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind
of not of the newest Poor-John. A strange fish!…Legged like
a man and his fins like arms!
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I
When Mr. Butcher, chief mate of the steamer Amaryllis , stepped into the forecastle, the lively chatter among the men faded. The shadow of death could not have silenced them more quickly; and Butcher was in the place of that grim messenger.
We were standing or sitting in our berths, some in their black jackets, others bare-chested, barefoot, in coloured shirts or vests and singlets. The place was fogged with tobacco smoke. Some men had darning in their hands, while Podmore had a book open and the apprentice Hall was trying to work out knots with pieces of cord. But all had abandoned their work or reading as the conversation had sucked them as a maelstrom takes a boat. We had all been speaking at once, offering an opinion, attacking someone else’s or just yelling agreement. The ship’s cat sat sphinx-fashion on a bunk, watching through slitted eyes.
“Ly-ee-Moon’s sunk all right,” said Butcher. He spoke slowly, as though words cost him money. It was hard news for us, like landsmen hearing about the death of a neighbour. Butcher cleared his throat and went on. “The survivor’s Polynesian and don’t speak English. You there, Dublin! You was ashore in Papeete, wasn’t you?”
The man who answered to Dublin, and whose family name was O’Neill, gave a shrug. It was not a proper question, and the chief did not expect a reply.
“Come after,” ordered Butcher.
O’Neill shrugged again, for the benefit of his audience, and followed the chief back down the companionway.
They had been arguing about whether the battered lifeboat picked up from the Ly-ee-Moon meant that ship was lost. There were a dozen reasons a man might be found adrift on a ship’s boat—accidents, desertion, drunkenness, or simple stupidity—and every hand had his own stories and instances to share. The sailors had feared the worst. Now the chief had settled the matter.
“That’s the Ly-ee-Moon gone down then,” said Podmore, the sailmaker, gravely closing his volume of Bulwer-Lytton and placing it on his lap. Podmore was the patriarch of the crew, the oldest man aboard, with a long beard and grey hair tied back. His word counted for something. Even a statement of the obvious was wisdom when he spoke it. Some of the others crossed themselves or spat.
They had docked alongside Ly-ee-Moon, named for a seaway in Hong Kong, on more than one occasion, and the crews affirmed their brotherhood by getting drunk ashore. Ly-ee-Moon had sailed these seas for thirty years. The ship rolled gently and the lamps turned in their gimbals. The thump-thump-thump of the engines was barely audible in the forecastle. The black cat stretched and settled again.
“The Ly-ee-Moon was a sound enough vessel, though she was old,” said Singleton at last. “She was the fastest schooner afloat when they launched her, and still sailed well.”
“Plenty of sound ones go under,” said Podmore. “And opium ships never come to any good in the end.”
“They should never have renamed her,” said Singleton. He was a seasoned hand, tanned and worn by the weather to a finish like mahogany. “Might as well put a curse on a ship as rename it: everyone knows that’s bad luck.”
“It’s not luck when a ship’s sunk,” said Bell, one of the firemen. “Let’s not have your old superstition again. Besides, she stopped being an opium ship years ago, and isn’t Ly-ee-Moon her original name?”
“Aye, but she was SS Taihei Maru for years,” said Singleton. “And the curse stays with an old opium ship.”
“Superstition,” said Nilsen, first engineer and therefore chief of the firemen, quick to back up his man. “The fault was not in her stars, it was in her engines.”
The firemen, tenders of the ships’ burning heart, were of the mechanical persuasion. The sailors were bearded, sun-browned, and tattooed, a different tribe from the paler, clean-shaven, muscular brothe
rhood from the fiery caverns. It was the firemen’s creed that when everything was made properly and done properly, everything worked properly. Wind and weather, which every sailor watched with an anxious eye, were old history to them. The Amaryllis still had sails to supplement her engines and save the coal, but to the firemen they were mere vestigial organs, embarrassing remnants like the useless wings of an ostrich. In their religion man did not progress at the whim of the elements but by his own two hands.
“The survivor’s alive and talking, so maybe we’ll know tonight,” said Singleton. He turned to Nilsen. “And you said he was dead when he was hoisted up.”
“I didn’t say he was dead; what I said was he was more dead than alive, and not likely to live,” corrected Nilsen. He was a Scandinavian and used the English language with care. “And maybe he’ll die yet.”
“Sure, he’ll die to just prove you right!” said Charley, the West Indian cook, and the others laughed. There was a deal of rivalry between the sailors who worked on deck and the firemen and engineers who worked below on the boilers. No chance was lost to needle the other. The ship’s cook was by tradition an honorary sailor. “You’ve always got to be right, if it kills the poor man.”
“He looked near enough to death when we hoisted him on board,” Nilsen insisted.
“He’s well enough to talk now,” said Singleton. “That reminds me.” He pulled an object from his pocket and turned it over in the lamplight.
“What’s that?” asked Podmore.
In reply, Singleton tossed the object, a lead sinker in the form of an irregular pyramid, and Podmore caught it one-handed.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 25