Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths and Other Stories

by William Meikle

  Greenwich’s main street was a scene of panic and carnage. Two omnibus carriages had been overturned. Corpses surrounded the doors and broken windows, grasping and gnawing at the poor travelers trying to escape. Shop windows smashed, children screamed, and a lone policeman blew a whistle to which there was no reply.

  I had intended suggesting that we make for the railway station, but the section of track I could see from where I stood was already infested with the walking dead.

  “To the river,” Challenger cried as the advancing dead took notice of our presence. “It’s our only hope.”

  We had to half-carry Logie Baird between us as we made our way in haste to the quay, arriving just ahead of a throng of fifty or more of the raised dead, all seemingly intent on doing us injury. At first I thought we had merely succeeded in trapping ourselves on the dead end of the quay, for there was no immediate sign of a means of escape. It was Logie Baird who saved us by spotting a craft that was tied up below us, partially hidden from our view by having been pushed tight against the dock by the tide. We managed to descend into the boat and push off, just as the undead horde arrived on the quay above us. Two of them threw themselves at us, one missing completely and disappearing in a splash into the water, the other hitting our gunwale, almost hard enough to capsize us, before it too slid away, the skull and its black empty eyes the last thing I saw before it went under.

  We were merely drifting, heading slowly out toward the middle of the river, none of us able to take our gaze from the rows of dead folks on the quay and the obvious calamity that was taking place beyond that in the town itself.

  “Did we do this?” I said softly.

  Logie Baird would not look me in the eye, but Challenger had a determined look on his face.

  “I think we did,” he said. “And it’s our duty to put a stop to it. But first, we need to find out exactly what it is we have done, for nothing in our experiments suggested this possible outcome.”

  He turned to Logie Baird for confirmation, but the Scotsman had his head dead, lost in either concentration or grief, I could not tell which. Challenger finally stopped surveying the scenes on shore and took to the oars.

  “We won’t get anything done bobbing around out here,” he said, and started to propel us with long fluid strokes upriver with the tide.

  “What’s the plan, old chap?” I asked.

  “Whitehall,” he said. “That’s where they’ll try to control this outbreak from, and that’s where we need to be.”

  Challenger rowed, Logie Baird kept his head down, and I smoked a pipe of the tobacco I’d bought just that morning, a scene that now seemed in the distant past, a time before the world had taken a lurch into the impossible. My thoughts kept returning to the scene in the shed just before the outbreak, and I kept trying to remember the sequence of switches I had pushed and dials I had turned in my panic to save Challenger. If I could only remember, then maybe I could shed some light on the whole thing.

  As it turned out, Logie Baird had been having much the same thoughts, or at least had been working toward the same end. The Scotsman finally raised his head. His eyes looked red and watery, as if he had been crying, but his voice was steady.

  “It was focusing the field that was the problem,” he said, matter-of-factly enough, as if discussing a particularly thorny question of mathematical theory. “We made it so narrow that it set up a sympathetic harmonic oscillation in the Earth’s field around the affected area.”

  As ever with these scientist types, I had only the most basic grasp of what they were talking about at any one moment.

  “Surely there is no way that such a field would be stable enough?” Challenger said. He had downed oars for a rest, and was lighting up one of his foul cheroots.

  “I have a friend in North America who would tell you otherwise,” Logie Baird said. “And it is to him we must turn for a resolution. I must get to a telephone immediately.”

  “What’s the plan?” I said.

  “We must counter the effects,” Logie Baird said. “And to do this we must nullify it with a dampening field.”

  “Like a Faraday cage?” I said, and Logie Baird smiled grimly.

  “Exactly. We’ll make a scientist out of you yet, Malone.”

  I did not tell him that I had learned of the idea from one of my friend Carnacki’s dinner stories, and that the uses to which he had put the apparatus were far from being scientific, at least in the sense that Logie Baird saw it.

  “How do we go about generating this dampening field?” Challenger asked. “We can hardly wire up the whole of South East London.”

  “I don’t yet know the how of it,” Logie Baird replied. “That’s why I need to get to a telephone.”

  It turned out that Challenger did not have to row all the way to Whitehall. We were hailed from Tower Bridge as we attempted to pass under it. A dozen armed men stood on the bridge high above us, rifles aimed in our direction. We were ordered to the northern shore, and once there we were not allowed to get out of the boat until we had proved to the soldiers’ satisfaction that we were not actually dead. After our credentials had been established, we were allowed to pass. We could see from our position on the north side of the bridge that the whole south end was barricaded off.

  “We’ve got every bridge over the river covered,” the Colonel in charge said. “And so far we have no reports of any outbreak north of the Thames. God help us if that happens.”

  Those words stayed with me all the way to Whitehall, and for quite some time afterwards.

  ~4~

  The corridors of power were in a frenzy of organized chaos. Challenger tried every trick he knew to get us to see the Home Secretary, and I tried to use any influence I had through my position as a reporter for The Express. In the end it was Logie Baird who got us a meeting. He did so by simply whispering in the ear of a senior aide. The man went pale, and ten minutes later we were shown in to meet the minister.

  “I do a bit of work on the side for the MOD,” Logie Baird said to me as we went in. “I find that knowing some of their dirty wee secrets helps to oil the cogs of power when I need something.”

  Once the meeting got going, Logie Baird did most of the talking, and not even Challenger could get much of a word in edgeways past the voluble little Scotsman in full flow. He explained the situation most succinctly, without exactly taking any of the blame for causing it.

  “Are you saying this can be fixed?” the Home Secretary said. A burst of gunfire from outside punctuated his words. “The South Bank is a war zone. We think that most of the living population is hiding behind locked doors. But there is no way to check short of a full armed incursion, and I am loath to attempt that if you can offer me another option.”

  “I just need to make one telephone call,” Logie Baird said.

  Needless to say, he got it. I only heard snatches. He was talking, via the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, efficiently transcribed and transmitted at each end, to another scientist named Tesla, but most of what I could hear from Logie Baird went straight over my head. There was talk of helical resonators, the ubiquitous vertical voltage gradient, and non-radiating electromagnetic field energy.

  As I say, I scarcely understood every second word, but Logie Baird was smiling when he put down the telephone.

  “Gentlemen, we have work to do,” he said.

  Challenger and I spent the next two days kicking our heels and waiting for a call. Logie Baird had promised we would be in at the end of things, but there seemed to be no such end in sight.

  North of the river, life went on much as before, although the city was rife with rumor and not a little dread. Sporadic gunfire echoed through the streets day and night from the direction of the Thames bridges.

  McGuire was almost beside himself with rage at the fact that a List D notice had been slapped on the whole affair, meaning I couldn’t even get into print what had happened to us in Blackheath. He assigned me to tail Logie Baird in the hope that a story might break fro
m that quarter, but the Scotsman was hidden away inside a newly built, heavily fortified military compound in Green Park. Challenger and I stood outside it on the second night but saw nothing but blue sparks and arcing electricity before retiring to the George for some much-needed refreshment.

  We were halfway down our third pints and getting started on setting the world to rights when a young army sergeant came in at a run and walked straight over to us.

  “Begging your pardon, sirs. You’re wanted straight away in Green Park.”

  Challenger was up and moving almost before the Sergeant finished speaking. I took my time a bit more, finishing off both beers before joining them out on the pavement.

  The young officer seemed most keen on getting us into a waiting truck, and I saw why seconds later. A squad of soldiers ran past us, heading East, toward the sound of frantic gunfire.

  “It’s spreading,” the Sergeant said, his face pale. “It’s north of the river.”

  The truck driver wasted no time in getting us to our destination. Challenger and I were under a tarpaulin covering in back, but we could see enough out of the rear of the truck to know that massive troop deployments were underway in the area. More worrying still, the sky was a throbbing red far off to the east. A large part of the city was in flames over in that direction.

  The armed guards at the compound’s entrance waved us through. We disembarked and were led into a large tent. It had obviously been acquired from a circus, for there were painted figures of performing animals prancing across the canvas. It was almost enough to draw my attention from the floor below.

  Almost.

  Logie Baird stood in front of a cage. Inside that were three reanimated corpses; one little more than a skeleton, one in the stages of advanced decomposition, and a third, in a soldier’s uniform, obviously deceased very recently, perhaps even in the past hour or so. Seemingly oblivious to the dead in the cage, he came forward to greet us, a wide grin on his face.

  “I do believe I’ve done it, Challenger,” he said. “I’ve cracked it.”

  He waved a hand. Two trucks rolled in to the tent, one from the left, one from the right. Each carried what looked to be a massive dynamo and a large coil of some silver-colored metal. Each truck had a soldier turning a large crank on the dynamo.

  “Now!” Logie Baird shouted.

  A switch on each truck was pulled.

  Blue lightning sparked from each coil, creating a hemispheric bubble of electrical discharge over the cage containing the dead. It proved impossible to see what was going on inside the bubble. The air crackled, I smelled ozone, and my hair rose up on end.

  “Enough!” Logie Baird shouted.

  With a last fizzle, the sparking stopped. The tent fell quiet.

  The bodies in the cage, dead once more, lay on the floor, unmoving.

  Challenger applauded, but stopped when the bodies in the cage started to move again, feebly at first, then with more purpose.

  Logie Baird grimaced.

  “There’s just one slight problem.”

  We went outside for a smoke, and Logie Baird tried to explain what had just happened.

  “I temporarily nullified the field,” he said. “And it worked exactly as Tesla had predicted.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Challenger asked.

  “The problem is that the main field is still resonating, centered on the shed in Blackheath. Tesla believes, and I agree with him, that we have to take one of the coils to that site, and start it up right over the top of the shed. We need to do that before we can stop the resonance completely. Otherwise these … things … will just keep coming back.”

  “And that means getting through however many of the dead have risen between here and there?”

  “Exactly. And coordinating our efforts so that the switches are thrown at the right time, and being on site to attend to any sudden emergencies, and …”

  “I catch your drift, old man,” Challenger said, although I wasn’t sure I had. “You’ll need to be here of course, at the business end. And you need a volunteer to go to Blackheath. Of course I’ll go. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  It took me several seconds to understand Challenger’s meaning.

  “You’re not serious, old man?” I said.

  “Never more so, Malone. It’s my mess. I’ll be the one to clean it up.”

  “Our mess, you mean,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it. “I was the one to throw those switches, after all. Count me in.”

  Challenger slapped me so hard on the back I almost fell over.

  “Never fear, Malone. If you die, I’ll make sure you stay down.”

  Somehow, that thought did not fill me with glee.

  ~5~

  We were ready to move out less than an hour later.

  The sheer scale of the operation allayed many of my worries about the journey ahead of us. Challenger and I were in a truck carrying the Tesla coil and dynamo. Ahead of us was a flatbed truck with two Gatling gun mountings and operators, and I knew a similarly armed vehicle traveled behind us. On the ground we had supporting troops on foot, almost a hundred of them surrounding the trucks. Half of the men carried flame-throwing units, and the others were armed with rifles. All of us were volunteers, and if we did not exactly know what we were heading into, we could make a good guess at it. There were few smiles, and no banter, as we left the stockade.

  And it did not take us long to discover that our journey was going to be more fraught than anticipated. Our intention had been to journey as far as possible on the north side of the river before attempting to cross to the affected south side. But the infection had spread faster than anyone thought possible, and we had barely reached Trafalgar Square when we saw the first lurching figure in the street. That one was dispatched cleanly enough with minimal fuss, but the Embankment proved another matter entirely. We had to fight for every foot of headway, the air filled with smoke, gunfire and the stench of burning flesh as our defense fought off waves of attacking undead. All the while our driver, Davis, a wiry Welshman, kept up a constant flow of smokes and chatter. It was all nervous energy of course, but it served to distract our attention, if only momentarily, from the carnage outside.

  Amazingly, we did not lose a single man for more than an hour.

  Our troubles really started at London Bridge.

  The throng of undead had been growing denser as we passed through the Cannon Street area and approached the river from the north and west. Our fears were confirmed as we turned onto the Bridge Road. The barricade at the south end had been overrun, and the road across the bridge itself was a seething mass of the dead.

  The Colonel who had been put in charge of the operation was in the truck ahead of us, and I saw him bark out orders. I expected him to give the bridge a wide berth to the North and that we could cross the river some way further to the east, but it seemed he had other ideas. He had his squaddies who carried flame-throwing units line up the width of the road, and then proceeded to have them try to burn their way across the bridge. Flaming bodies threw themselves at the thin line of attackers, in such a mad mêlée that several were forced off the bridge by sheer weight of numbers to fall away in flames to the river below. The squaddies kept up the wash of fire, inching forward over the charred remains left behind. From their vantage higher up the Gatling gun crew in the truck ahead of us strafed over the heads of the flame-throwers, blasting chunks of burning flesh from the throng of the undead. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach if truth be told, and it appeared that Challenger was of similar mind, for when I looked around it was to find him wiping a tear from his eye.

  For a full five minutes it seemed the Colonel’s plan would be completely successful, but that all changed when the fuel tanks started to give out. It was unfortunate that it happened to two men at the same time. Before they had a chance to back off and let others take their place the undead surged forward, as if by instinct intent on attacking this new weak spot. The men on that side stood litt
le chance, and half a dozen fell almost immediately before the flame attack could be brought back to full strength. The going became slower after that.

  Our line of vehicles moved into position to inch along behind the troops, and I was all too aware that our wheels were crushing burned bone and flesh underneath as we passed. The stench was overpowering, and we were forced to roll up the windows. Even then it took Challenger’s cheroots to finally allay the assault on our nasal passages and throats.

  The next half hour was one of the longest of my life, almost as bad as the ones I spent cowering in makeshift shelters in the trenches of the Somme. But finally it was over, and a path had been cleared all the way across to the south side of the bridge.

  London Bridge Road heading south was filled as far as we could see in the darkness with a mass of the undead, but we were able, with some difficulty and more of the Colonel’s slash-and-burn tactics, to take a left turn onto the road along the riverside. Here the horde thinned out. We were able to make better time, and the troops alongside us had to break into a gentle trot to keep pace.

  Challenger checked his watch, and I did the same. Logie Baird would be throwing the switch in Green Park at three in the morning precisely. We had a little over three hours to get to our position, and many miles and many more undead to get through before then.

  I cannot find it in me to describe the trials and tribulations that we endured in the hours that followed. If you have been to war, you will understand, and if you have not, trust me: you do not want to know. Suffice to say that we burned a fiery swath through southeast London, leaving little in our wake but ash.

  We lost men at every turn, particularly as time grew short and the Colonel’s tactics had to take a more risky turn. Even with pushing the men as hard and as fast as was possible, we arrived at the edge of Blackheath with scarcely twenty minutes to spare before our deadline was up. As the trucks crested the hill and rolled onto the Heath my heart sank at the sight.