“Here what,” St. Cyprian said.
Cold tossed him the notebook. “Here,” he said. “He is coming here.”
“What—when?”
“Now,” Cold said, checking the clip on his automatic. He seemed to experience no difficulty from his wounded hand, or the holes in his belly. “The cellars…where,” he asked.
“Through the kitchen,” St. Cyprian said. He strode to the fireplace and took down the ancient sword. The air had changed while they spoke. There was strange electricity in the air now, like that which heralded a storm. He drew the sword with a flourish and gestured with it. “Lady and gentleman, shall we?”
“We trust him?” Gallowglass said.
“No, but do you feel that?” St. Cyprian said as he led the way towards the kitchens. “There’s a pressure in the air.”
“That’s just the flat! There are always weird humours and strange noises,” Gallowglass said, as they entered the kitchen. “This place makes more noise than Soho on a Saturday. I just thought it was haunted,” she added.
“It is, but this is different,” St. Cyprian said. He looked at Cold. “Isn’t it?”
Before Cold could reply, the house trembled. As one, all three of them looked towards the door to the cellar. “Ladies first,” St. Cyprian said.
“Not even if you paid me,” Gallowglass said.
St. Cyprian grunted and yanked the door open. A stink like a burst sewer pipe wafted out. He gagged and grabbed Gallowglass’ hand before she could pull the light cord. “Don’t; the gas main might have ruptured. Grab a torch,” he said. Gallowglass nodded and grabbed an electric torch off of the shelf just behind the cellar door. She clicked it on.
The stone steps that spiralled down were slick with damp. That was natural, given their proximity to the river. The house trembled again, nearly pitching him down the stairs. St. Cyprian took the torch and started down as the trembling faded. “London is built over the bones of at least four other cities. Beamish’s notes imply that there’s an ancient temple somewhere below us, though whether it was Roman or Briton or from some older culture, he didn’t know. Drood and Carnacki investigated once, but didn’t go too deep. Understandable, given what happened to Beamish.”
“The roots of this place go deeper even than the warrens of the corpse-eaters,” Cold said, his voice echoing hollowly in the darkness.
“Ta for that, you creepy bastard,” Gallowglass said.
“Be polite,” St. Cyprian said. The cellar proper was small, being little more than a stone landing. Beamish had had it excavated soon after he’d purchased the place, revealing the ancient wells and apertures down below at the bottom of a second set of crude steps that wound down towards the river. Ever since Beamish’s last expedition, the wells had been capped off, but the other apertures were open. The smell was stronger here and wafting up from the river. The ancient paving stones that marked the floors around the wells were now cracked and bulging, as if something had pushed them up from below. Too, strange chalk markings, freshly made, were revealed in the play of the light.
The smell clung to everything; it was in every particle of water and every metre of oxygen. St. Cyprian let the light play across the chalk markings, trying to discern their purpose. They had been made recently enough that he could smell them, despite the stronger, nastier odour. “That way leads to the Thames. It’s an old jetty, used for-”
“Smuggling, once upon a time,” a hoarse voice said. St. Cyprian and the others snapped around, pinning a dark, hunched figure with the light. A hand, clad in a stiff, cracked leather glove that was covered in chalk dust, rose to protect the speaker’s eyes. The light of the torch caught and was reflected in the facets of a strange crystal held in the man’s other hand.
The house trembled again, and dust and mould sifted down in thin curtains. The slick floor creaked and rasped and the waters of the river splashed loudly as the effect of the disturbance rippled outwards. A tarnished and battered pocket-watch was pulled from a ragged waistcoat pocket and flipped open. “Not much time now,” Sir Edwin Drood said. He coughed, and something red speckled his thin, blistered lips. In the light of the torch, he looked malnourished and sickly. Sores dotted his aesthetic features, and the handsome moustache and raven hair displayed in his portrait upstairs had gone the colour of dirty ice. His eyes were red-rimmed and blotchy and he held himself as if he were exhausted. He looked at St. Cyprian. “Thomas?” he said.
St. Cyprian swallowed. “Carnacki’s dead,” he said.
Drood’s eyelids sagged. “Oh.” They sprang open a moment later. “You’ll have to do then. Is that you, Cold?”
“Yes,” Cold said, stepping forward. “Earthly matter is not meant to travel along the Dho Curve.”
“Forgive me if I didn’t fancy jettisoning my mind into time’s screaming abysses,” Drood said.
“We tried to stop you. If you had listened…”
“If I had listened, we would not be here and this would still occur. This way, at least, we have a chance to stop it!” Drood said. He broke off into a coughing fit.
“Stop what,” St. Cyprian said. More dust sifted down. He heard a sound, like a distant train whistle, getting closer.
“I almost didn’t make it,” Drood said. “I had to time it just right, to visit Aylmer in 1874, and then the shop in Seven Dials in 1882, to give myself this,” he hefted the crystal, “and then here, now, just in time.” His eyes found St. Cyprian’s and he gave a ghastly smile. “I only left a week ago,” he said, and there were tears in his eyes. He looked at Cold. “Are they waiting? Are they ready?”
“They are,” Cold said.
“Good. Then at least it will not have been in vain,” Drood said with bone-deep weariness. He looked at St. Cyprian and Gallowglass. His eyes widened slightly as he noticed the latter. “Good heavens, a bluestocking.”
“What did he call me?” Gallowglass said.
“Perhaps not the most important question right now,” St. Cyprian said. “What’s coming?”
“They don’t have a name,” Drood said, clutching the crystal more tightly as the shaking of the floor started up again. “The Great Race drove them underground, into hibernation, but this one awoke—will awake—has awoken too soon, or maybe too late. Their basalt tombs dot the world, even after Pangaea tore itself asunder, and I mapped them all, one abominable site after another; breathing in the stinking gases of those awful jungles and smouldering lakes. What better way to root out the rot, than before it sets in? But this one—God help me, below London!—I had to make sure, my oath to Queen and God and country you see, I had to make sure!” Drood’s voice rose almost to a shriek, and with a chill, St. Cyprian realized that his predecessor’s predecessor was as broken in mind as he was in body. A week, he had said. He had only been gone a week, and yet he had aged a decade or more. He was as much a walking corpse as Cold. Drood’s eyes held his. “If it gets out, there’d be no way to stop it. I knew that and I knew I had to make sure it never escaped, never got above ground. It’d eat the world, if I let it.”
The whistle had been growing steadily louder and a foul breeze crept up insistently through the cracks in the floor and walls. As if there were hurricane building deep below and it were rising steadily towards them.
“How do we stop it?” St. Cyprian said. His grip on the sword’s hilt was painfully tight.
“We can’t,” Drood said. “We can distract it, and I can take it back—the crystal you see, it takes physical matter through the fourth dimension—I’ll take it back there, back to them and they’ll kill it, as only they can. I have prepared this place, making it a mathematical trap from which it will not escape.” He flung out a hand, indicating the chalk marks. “The hyperspatial formulas will hold it here long enough,” Drood went on. “I just need a few minutes, just a few…”
“Sounds like our sort of soiree, I think,” Gallowglass said.
“Rather, but I do think I might have preferred a Webley,” St. Cyprian said, looking down the leng
th of the sword. “Still, needs must and all that.” He looked at Cold. “I assume this is why you’re here then?”
Cold’s smile was ghastly. “Old debts, as I said. Drood helped us—and our associates—once.” The creature looked at his gloved hand and flexed it. “We have so little left; we cannot afford to discard tradition and conduct as easily as…other things.”
It was an odd moment. A brief burst of humanity from something that had, in St. Cyprian’s opinion, long ago given up any right to call itself such. Then the moment passed and the ground bucked and shuddered that for a moment, it seemed as if No. 427 were going to collapse down upon them like a house of cards. The whistle had become piercing, and the sound was a spike of agony driven into their brains. The noise was not simply loud, but wrong. It was a noise not meant to be heard by anything living on the earth then and there. The rumbling from below had taken on the thunderous regularity of a giant’s tread, where before it had been the battering of some vast beast at a door.
“I saw it, back in the past, a great well of stone and beneath it, a cosmic nightmare,” Drood said, his voice dull. “I saw it and calculated and knew that it was here, where the Thames would soon run, where the Embankment would be built, all of that resting on the back of an abomination. It took eons for it to awaken again, but I knew, I watched through the crystal as it awoke and ravened through London, invisible and unstoppable, and I knew that there was nothing for it but to go back, to find where it came from and then see that that deep well was never unguarded, at any point in time. Brunel almost awoke it, with his digging in the deep dark; others as well. But I stopped them all, striding through time, defending the Empire at every point in its life from this moment, and now here I am again and this time—this time!—it will end. They will kill it, and they will seal its hole with their signs and ancient mathematics and it will be dead and forever asleep!” His voice rose in pitch as more dust showered down and then, there was no time for any further words as something vast and loathsome squeezed into the world all at once, from a thousand directions.
It was only partly material and exhibited a monstrous plasticity. It exuded from every corner and crack all at once, as if the solid matter of the world was as mist, and it bulled through it with inexorable surety. Even illuminated by their torches, it was only partially visible, becoming by turns wispy and horribly thick, like a paste being squeezed through a tube of varying width. As its tendrils brushed the chalked walls, it became horribly solid and it shrieked in frustration.
The whistle had spread with its arrival, becoming a series of sounds—curses, perhaps—that battered at them. Half-visible eyes, alight with monstrous intelligence and cruel cunning, glared at them even as it groped for them. It had been trapped for millennia, and though it was as far from a beast as it was from a man, St. Cyprian recognized its hunger easily enough.
In the striated lights of the torches, they fought. Gallowglass’ Webley boomed, and Cold’s automatic provided accompaniment. St. Cyprian stood close to Drood, who had lifted the crystal and was chanting, his ragged voice spitting strange formulas. Glistening tendrils stretched towards the latter like spilled oil and St. Cyprian set himself and swept his sword out. The impact of blade on alien flesh nearly shook his arm from the socket but he did it again and again, hacking at the unceasing tide of half-seen psuedopods as they sought to snuff the light growing from the crystal.
More and more of the thing forced itself into the deep cellar, its deep croaking rumble of a voice tearing at their ears. Through the nest of writhing tendrils, St. Cyprian saw Gallowglass turn sharply, avoiding a thrusting tentacle as she cracked the Webley open, ejected the spent shells and re-loaded as quickly as she could. He shouted a warning as a flurry of questing tendrils bristled towards her and she left the Webley open to draw the derringer from her pocket. The little pistol spat and then the Webley was twitched shut and she slid back, firing.
An empty clip dropped from Cold’s automatic and he stepped back as tendrils undulated towards him. Even as he slapped a new one in, the tendrils pierced the waxy skin of his face and punched through his chest and leg. Cold jerked, not in pain, but simply in an effort to pull loose. The skin of his face ripped and tore and St. Cyprian saw what lay beneath, just for a moment, and a thrill of nausea pulsed through him. Then Cold was free, the automatic was reloaded, and he was firing.
The gunfire did nothing to harm the entity as far as St. Cyprian could see. Tendrils burst and reformed like water. But it was keeping it occupied. And that was all they needed to do. A tendril skidded across his arm and a burst of red-hot pain shivered through him. His torch fell, the light spinning, catching writhing tendrils with every turn. He staggered, flailing at the tendrils awkwardly. More homed in on him, drawn like sharks to the blood. His legs were yanked out from under him and then he was being dragged across the smooth stone towards the ever-shifting bulk of the thing where it massed in one corner of the cellar, growing and spreading like mould. He lost hold of his sword as teeth without mouths gnawed on his arms and legs.
A hand fastened on his collar and halted him. He looked up to see Gallowglass, who dropped the Webley on his chest. “Shoot the bloody thing,” she yelled. St. Cyprian struggled to raise the pistol with his bloody hands. Gallowglass looked equally bad, and her jacket was in rags and she’d lost her cap somewhere. A tendril left a red weal on her cheek as she fought to drag St. Cyprian back. He fumbled the revolver up and fired blindly into the suddenly visible anemone-maw of threshing teeth.
Suddenly, there was light. And not just light, but heat and a smell, like a garbage scow in summer or a humid jungle. The tendrils retreated and the whole polypus mass began to shudder and thrash like an animal caught in a trap. Its whistling voice rose in pitch. Drood stepped after the retreating tendrils, holding the crystal up in one hand, and his other held a battered, corroded looking stone. Gallowglass helped St. Cyprian to his feet. The world had gone soft around them, and now the cellar was like a thin muslin curtain and another world—another time, pressed close about it. Alien shapes moved dimly through Cambrian fog, clutching bulky tools. A foul-smelling mist clutched at their feet and it burned their flesh and lungs.
“Out we go,” Drood said. He glanced back at St. Cyprian and said, “I’m sorry about Thomas.” There was an ache in his eyes. An eternity of horror was contained in his frail frame. Edwin Drood had lived a dozen lifetimes on the Dho Curve, running through time in a week that never ended. He was dying, his death played out across untold millennia, but in dying, determined to do his duty.
And then, in one moment of thunderous silence, the crystal flashed once more. When the light faded, Drood was gone, and the thing with him, leaving behind only the faintest odour of ancient eons to mark the memory of them. The cellar had settled; perhaps even rearranged itself somehow. Even the chalk marks were gone, scoured from the walls by whatever force had ripped Drood and the nightmare polyp out of the present and sent them hurtling into the past.
“What happened?” Gallowglass said quietly, one arm wrapped around her ribs. She was hollow-eyed and pale and snatched her Webley when St. Cyprian handed it back. She clutched the revolver like a talisman.
St. Cyprian didn’t reply. He limped towards the far wall. It had been covered in spider-webbed cracks before, when the thing had emerged. Now it was solid again. Everything was solid.
“It sleeps,” Cold said, holding his torn cheek shut. “It is dead and sleeping. As it should be.” He looked none the worse for wear, despite his many wounds.
“What does that mean?” Gallowglass demanded.
“It means that Sir Edwin Drood has done his duty,” St. Cyprian said, bloody hand pressed to the wall. “Even as he has always done it, and always will do it, for God, Queen and Country.”
Josh Reynolds is a professional freelance writer whose work has appeared in such anthologies as Historical Lovecraft, Steampunk Cthulhu and World War Cthulhu. He has also contributed to a number of media tie-in fiction lines, including Games
Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 lines, as well as Gold Eagle’s Executioner line.
Story illustration by Raven Daegmorgan.
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Books (Misc.)
by Steven Prizeman
Carson had always been strange when he was alive, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised he was strange dead. Dead two weeks and getting stranger – although strange in a very Carson way. Anyone who knew Carson would know what I meant by that.
We met at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. We’d been studying there more than three months before I was sure Carson was his first name, not his second. He was Carson James: some people called him Carson, some James. That was like Carson. Not secretive: enigmatic. It wasn’t a pose, it just seemed to come naturally to him. The way he dressed, spoke, looked at you – everything. He smoked cigars. Smoking was common enough among students back then, but smoking cigars wasn’t. That was odd. In anyone else, it would have seemed affected, but with Carson you’d just think: “Well, that’s Carson!” It was probably those cigars that killed him in the end. Throat cancer, metastasizing to the lungs: dead at 46. Anyone could join the dots.
He always smelt of cigars – stank, some said, unkindly (because he did rub some people the wrong way, Carson). It was part of his aura. Just like the books. The occult books. They added to the aura, no doubt. It was easy to get the wrong idea – most people did. But he wasn’t some whacked-out New Ager or a tormented soul on a spiritual quest – let alone a Satanist, Goth or would-be vampire. Those guys made him laugh. No, with Carson it was all about the books. Just the books. The alchemical diagrams, the engravings, the black letter text, the endpapers, the bindings. He loved all that. They got him a reputation, though, and not a good one. Sometimes he’d play up to it – he could be a joker, Carson. I guess that didn’t do him any favors either.
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