We both slowly came to a halt and stood facing each other; but even knowing what he was getting at I made no reply. The old man saw that I knew and nodded an affirmative. “Oh, yes, Julian. In the long-ago era of sailing ships, men from the west would sometimes come across cannibal tribes in the South Sea Islands, and these savage people had a term for the enemies they roasted for food. They called them—or the flesh they ate off them—‘long pig’, because that’s how we taste, apparently. Now I don’t know if they ever tried ‘short pig’, if you follow my meaning, but what could be more tender or pure than—”
“—Yes, I do understand, Henry,” I cut him short. “There’s no need to torture yourself any further.”
“But what horrified me most,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me at all, “wasn’t the thought of those monsters at their repast, no, but wondering what the young men who fathered those babies—what they themselves, or for that matter the mothers—could be living on in the Twisted Tower! For what other source of… of food could there possibly be in that dreadful place? And what kind of inhuman, bestial people could bring themselves to do something as terrible as that in the first place? Surely they would rather die first… you’d think so, anyway.”
“Yes, you certainly would,” I replied, even though he hadn’t meant it as a question.
Henry could barely stifle his soul-wrenching sobbing as he turned away from me, staggering and yet in some superhuman way seeming more determined than ever, windmilling his arms and only just managing to maintain his balance as he went splashing along the drowned, rusty tracks.
I caught up with the old man, caught his arm to steady him before he could trip and hurt himself, and said, “But there are all kinds of men, Henry. Most men couldn’t do that, I think, but as for those who can, what choice do they have? They can reap what they’ve sown, as it were—if in this case you’ll excuse such a metaphor—and eat or starve in the absence of any other choices, and that’s all. But you know, some men, women too, are very adaptable; and in desperate times and situations the survival instinct in people such as these will quickly surface, and they’ll soon become inured, accustomed to… to whatever. Yes, that kind of person can get used to almost anything.”
But yet again he may not have heard a word I said. And instead of scolding me for my “logical” approach to what he had told me—however sickening and disgusting that approach must surely have seemed to him, if indeed he had heard anything of it at all—he once again began to babble about his youngest daughter, Dawn:
“You’ve never seen a girl so lovely, Julian. Only thirteen, or was it fourteen years old?—I don’t any longer remember—when the world went to hell—growing up almost entirely underground, in that dark, damp basement we called home. What chance for poor Dawn, eh? Never had a boyfriend, never knew a man; her dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty wasted in the gloom of a cellar. And all she ever saw of the outside world on those occasions, those very rare occasions when, at her pleading, I would take her into the light of day, was the sullen sky and the shattered city… but we could never stay for long… not even crouching in the rubble … there were terrible things in the poisoned sky—Shantaks, I’ve heard them called, and the faceless Gaunts—and it was never very long before they would glide or slide into view, scouring the land as they searched… searched for… for what else but us! For mankind’s devastated remnants! For the scattered handful of human beings who remained!
“But my Dawn… she was everything to me… as her mother before her, and her poor sister. But they were taken, all three, and what have I now—what’s left for me?—except the hope of a measure… however small a measure… of revenge!”
It seemed to me the old man was waiting for an answer, and so I shrugged and obliged him, saying, “Well since you ask, it seems there’s nothing left for you Henry, except that small measure of revenge. So you’ll do what you have to, and for that matter, so will I.”
“So will you?”
I nodded and said, “There’s nothing much left for me either, Henry. So just like you I’ll do what I have to—” And I had to bite my tongue as I almost added, ‘—to survive’.
The Shoggoth light ahead of us was very much brighter now, and in order to change the subject I pointed it out to my companion. “Look there, it’s almost daylight up front! Or as daylight used to be, I mean.”
“I see it,” he answered, as his sobbing gradually subsided. “Another fifteen to twenty minutes and we’ll be there. Piccadilly Circus… or ground zero, if you prefer.”
“Hmm!” I said. “But I always thought that term described a point on the ground directly beneath the explosion—not above it.”
He was obviously surprised. “Quite right, yes! But since we both know what I meant, why nit-pick?” Then, looking at me sideways and slyly: “By the way, you really have got it all figured out, haven’t you?”
“Most of it.” I nodded. “But I still don’t know, can’t see, how you’ve been able in the circumstances to build any kind of device powerful enough to make all of this worthwhile. I mean, you’d need a laboratory, and the know-how, and the materials.”
Henry returned my nod. “Very good,” he said, “very clever. But don’t I remember saying that you had no idea who or what I am or was? I’m sure I do.”
“Ah!” I said. “So this is what you were getting at. Except you never did get around to telling me. So then, Henry—who and what were you?”
“I am, as you know, Henry Chattaway,” he replied. “But what you don’t know is that I have an almost entire alphabet of letters after my name, that I was twice put forward as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in physics, and that…”
He paused, and I prompted him: “Yes? And that…?” For this was the one thing I had most wanted to know but hadn’t dared ask him outright in case it gave me away. And:
“Well, why shouldn’t I tell you?” he said, as the first signs of the man-made cavern or excavation that was the main Piccadilly Circus Underground station gradually came into view up front. “For it’s too late now to do anything else but see it through: the last of my dreams come true on this long last night.”
And as we climbed up from the tracks onto the platform and I returned his small heavy suitcase to him, he continued: “Julian, I was the top man—or rather, not to make too much of it, one of them—on PFDP, the Plasma Fusion Drive Project. Similar in its way to the Manhattan Project, it was very hush-hush even though no one in the scientific community gave it a snowflake’s chance in hell, even as a theory. What? Abundant energy from next to nothing? You may recall that seventy years ago the same dream had given birth to the bombs that put an abrupt end to World War II. Not so much a dream as a nightmare, as it happened—at least until someone began speculating about the possible benefits: that maybe nuclear power could provide cheap energy for the entire world; which of course never really worked out. The fuel was dirty, dangerous, and had too many safety problems; the mutations and fatal diseases that followed on inevitably from the accidents and errors were hideous, while some of the infected radioactive regions remain hot even to this day.
“Well, history repeats, Julian. Plasma fusion was the next best hope for cheap energy, far better and cheaper and so much easier to produce… why, men might even go to the stars with it—if it worked! But it didn’t, or rather it did, except even the smallest, most cautious of tests warned of a Pandora’s Box effect. Only let it loose and it could initiate a chain reaction with anything it might touch and fuse with. That’s the only and best explanation I can give to a layman, especially in what little time we have left. But enough: we stopped working on it, and the world’s authorities—every single one of them, recognising the awesome power of this thing—signed up to a strictly monitored ban on any further experimentation… simply because they couldn’t afford not to!”
While Henry talked, his voice gradually falling to a whisper, we had proceeded from the tunnel to the platform, then to the relatively pristine stairs and elevators. The la
tter, of course, had not worked since the night of the invasion; but the stairs, completely free of rubble, had taken us to the surface, which upon a time had been a landmark, a renowned open-air concourse where many streets joined in that great circus it was named for. A far different sort of circus now.
“This place,” I said, letting my voice echo, “is looking rather empty. Not what one would expect, eh?”
“I know,” Henry agreed in a whisper, probably wondering why I wasn’t whispering too. “It’s been like this each time. You would think it should be crawling, right? Which in a way it is, if not as you might expect. Not crawling with alien life, no, but with the very meaning of the word ‘alien’ itself!”
Crawling, yes. And making one’s skin crawl, too. Even mine. It was the way it looked, its shapes and angles; its architectural features, if you could call them that; its non-Euclidean geometry.
It had four legs—or was it three? Maybe five?—all leaning inward, or was it outward? Something like the once dizzy and dizzying Eiffel Tower, but a twisted version, and what we had surfaced into was the base of one such leg that used to be Piccadilly Circus. The rest of the legs were green-misted and vague, half-obscured by distance, submarine-tinged Shoggoth light, and the intervening shapes of anomalous buttresses, columns and spiralling staircases. And adding to the confusion nothing stood still but appeared literally to crawl, each surface flowing and changing shape of its own accord.
As for the staircases: some had steps as broad as landings, others with steps like frozen ripples on a pond, but rising, of course, and a third type with no steps at all but smooth, corkscrew surfaces of some glassy substance, sometimes turning on clockwise threads and other times winding in reverse. And all of them stationary, at least until one looked at them.
We were dwarfed, Henry and I, made minuscule by the gigantic scale of everything; and screwing up his face, shielding his eyes as he peered up into reaches that receded sickeningly into skyscraper heights and vast balconied levels, Henry said, “That must be where the life is: Bgg’ha’s throne room, cages to house his prisoners, dwelling areas for them that serve him. The monster himself will sit high above all that, dreaming his dreams, doing what he does, probably unaware that he’s any sort of monster at all! To him it’s how things are, that’s all.
“But as for his underlings—the flying creatures, and Deep Ones, and Shoggoths that build and fashion for him, varnishing their works with a slime that hardens to glass hard as steel—I have to believe that a majority of them… well, perhaps not the Shoggoths, who are more like machines, however nightmarishly organic—but by far the great majority of them, know full well what they are about.”
“I think you’re right,” I told him. “But you know, Henry, we’re not too small to be noticed. And I can’t imagine that we would be welcome here; certainly not you, suitcase and all! You need to be about your revenge, Henry, and should it work—to however small or enormous an effect—then, while you will have paid the ultimate price, at least your physicist friends may be aware of your success and will carry on your work, assuming they survive it. So why are we waiting here? And why is that awesome weapon you’re carrying also waiting, if only to be put to its intended use?”
It was as if he had been asleep, or hypnotised by his alien surroundings, or maybe fully aware for the first time that this was it—the end of the long last night. For him, anyway—or so he thought.
And he was right: it was the end of the road for him, but not as he thought. “Yes,” he finally answered, straightening up and no longer whispering. “The others who helped me put it all together, they will surely know. They’ll see the result from the skeletal roof of the museum. When the explosion takes this leg out, the entire tower may rock a little… why, it could even topple! Bgg’ha’s house, brought crashing down on the city that he has destroyed! And that, my friend, would be acceptable as a real and very genuine revenge! By no means an eye-for-an-eye—for who has lost more than me?—but as much as I could hope for, certainly.”
“The roof of the museum?” I repeated him as he headed for a recess (an outcrop, stanchion, corner or nook?) in the seemingly restless wall. “What, the Victoria & Albert’s roof, whose cellar was your home?”
“Eh?” He stared at me for long, hard moments… then shook his head. And: “No, no,” he said. “Not the Victoria & Albert, but the Science Museum next door, behind that great pile of rubble that used to be the Natural History Museum.”
“Ahh!” For at last I understood. “So that is where and how you and your team built it, eh? You used materials and apparatus rescued from the ruins of the Science Museum, and you put it all together… where?”
“In the museum’s basement,” he replied, as the wall seemed to enclose us in a leadenly glistening fold. “Those massive old buildings, and their cellars, were built to last. We had to work hard at it for a long time, but we turned the Science Museum’s basement into our workshop. And after tonight, when they’ve seen the result of my work, they’ll make the next bomb much bigger—big enough to melt the entire city, what’s left of it…”
And that was that. Now I had all that I needed from the old man, all that I’d been ordered to extract from him. Wherefore:
You can come for him now, I told the Tower’s creatures—or certain of them—fully aware that the nearest ones would hear me, because I knew they would have been listening out for me. But meanwhile:
We had entered or been enveloped in a fold in the irrationally angled wall, a sort of priest’s hole in the flowing, alien cinder-block construction. And there in a corner—I’ll call it a corner anyway, but in any case “a space”—was Henry Chattaway’s device, its components contained in four more small suitcases arranged in a sort of circle with a gap where a fifth (the one we had been keeping from damage during this entire subterranean journey) would neatly fit. The cases were connected up with electrical cables, left loosely dangling in the gap where the fifth would complete the circuit; while a sixth component stood central on four short legs, looking much like the casing of a domed, cylindrical fire extinguisher. In series, obviously the cases were a kind of trigger, while the cylinder—the bomb—would have contained anything but fire retardant! And affixed to the cylinder at its domed top, standing out vividly against the metal’s dull gleam, sat a bright red switch which, apart from the warning manifest in its colour, looked like nothing so much as an ordinary electrical light switch. The cylinder and its switch—a deadly however inarticulate combination, as the bomb had recently been—told a story all their own, but one which was now a lie!
Quickly kneeling, Henry opened his case, reached inside and carefully uncoiled a pair of cables which he connected up to the dangling cables on both sides. And now all was in order, or so he thought, and he was ready.
Screwing up his face and half-shuttering his eyes (I imagined in anticipation of a moment’s pain), he reached a trembling hand over the circle of wired-up suitcases, his index finger hovering over the red switch… until, remembering something, he paused and glanced at me. And then, to my dismay because I do have something of a conscience after all, he said:
“I’m so sorry, Julian, but I did give you every opportunity to leave.”
“Yes, you did,” I replied, kneeling beside him and, before he could stop me, flipping open the lid of one of the suitcases. “And I’m sorry, too,” I told him. “But as you can see, I knew I really didn’t have to leave.”
His jaw fell; his mouth opened wide; he gurgled for several long seconds, and finally said: “Empty!”
“All of them,” I nodded. “Especially the cylinder—the bomb.” But even then the truth hadn’t fully sunk in, and he said:
“I don’t understand. No one—nothing, not a single damned thing—ever saw me here. Not once. And this isn’t a spot where anyone or thing would think to look!”
“You weren’t seen here, no,” I replied with a shake of my head. “But you were seen leaving—just the once, by Deep Ones at Green Park—the last time
you made a delivery. You were correct about their telepathy, Henry. Despite the confusion, the fear in your mind, or maybe because of it, they saw something of what you had been up to and a search was made. Otherwise no one or thing might ever have come in here. But once Bgg’ha had discovered your secret he wanted to know more about you and anything else you might be doing, and how and with whom you were doing it. So you see, they do care about us—or shall we say they’re at least interested in some of us—especially those of us who would try to kill them. And so I was sent out to look for you. Or to ‘hunt’ for you, if you prefer.”
Hearing that and finally, fully aware of the situation, the old man snapped upright. His eyes, however bloodshot, were narrowed now; the dazed expression was gone from his face; his gun was suddenly firm in his hand, its blued-steel muzzle rammed up hard under my chin. I thought he might shoot me there and then, and I wished that I’d called out to them sooner.
“God damn!” Henry said. “But I should pay more attention to my instincts… I knew there was something wrong about you! But I won’t kill you here; I’ll do it out there in the open—or what used to be the open—so that when you’re found with your face shot off they’ll know there are still men in the world who aren’t afraid to fight! Now get moving, you treacherous bastard! Let’s get out of here.”
But as we moved from the drift and slide of the continually mutating wall to the even greater visual nightmare of the Twisted Tower’s leg’s interior, and when I was beginning to believe I could actually feel the old fellow’s finger tightening on the trigger, then I cried out:
“Henry, listen! Do you really intend to waste a bullet on me? I mean, look what’s coming, Henry…!”
They were Shoggoths, two of them, under the direction of a solitary Deep One. They came into view apparently from nowhere, simply appearing from the suck and the thrust to glide toward us… at least the Shoggoths approached us, while the Deep One held back and kept his watery great eyes on his charges, making sure they carried out their orders—whatever those might be—to the letter. But of course I knew exactly what they had been told to do.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 37