by KW Jeter
"Arthur Redivivus, eh?" His features, even in the dark and mist, sharpened with excitement. "By God, you are the man I wanted!"
I restrained myself from asking if he often had difficulty in finding people to listen to his nonsense. "I say – do you recognise the area we're in? This damned fog–"
"Never mind that," he snapped. "Keep your mind on the important things."
"My dear sir. I am damp, tired, and my feet are beginning to hurt from this endless perambulation. Nothing strikes me as more pressing than the immediate relief of all three conditions."
"Damn your petty mind," the Pale Man said with some heat. "Cavities of blood and horror yawn beneath your steps, and all you worry about is the condition of your shoe leather."
Clearly there was to be no getting around the fellow's monomania, and my patience was exhausted. "Good night," I said determinedly. "Our paths separate here. I am for home and bed – wherever they are – and you are free to seek out some other poor soul upon whom you may vent your ravings. Time Machines! Morlocks! King Arthur, indeed! Bosh, is all!" I turned on my heel and stalked away from him.
"Find your way home, then!" I heard him call after me, with the sardonic humour that had been brewing all along breaking at last into cruel laughter. "You'll have another conversation with Doctor Ambrose after you've learned a few things!"
In Hell, I thought angrily. I turned around to make some cutting retort, but his form had already vanished into the dark night and fog. Suddenly, the taste of his tobacco burning in my briar became cloying upon my tongue. The fumes clotted sickeningly. I pulled the pipe from my mouth and dashed it to the ground. From the bowl the burning shag spilled, hissing and spitting with a dull red glow like the larger fires I could see through the mist. I ground the loathsome cinders under my boot, then – my heart filling with a sudden, unreasoning fear – hurried blindly away from the spot and into the darkness that swelled around me.
2
The London Battleground
Damnable fool, I thought as I strode on. Did I mean my odd companion of late or myself? No matter. Anger, as it will, had replaced fear. A whole evening behind me wasted on such nonsense, and now I had a few more hours to look forward to of floundering about in the clammy fog before I found myself in my own warm home. Without bearings I pressed on, cursing myself and all the other doltards the English race produces.
Mercifully the fog began to thin and lift. Soon I could see the stars' pinpoints of light through rifts in the scudding clouds overhead. A three-quarters moon broke through and further illuminated the scene. My relief at being able to see around me, though, was soon chased away by a growing dismay.
The section of London in which I found myself was completely unrecognisable to me. Indeed, I was appalled to discover that such an area even existed. Were our municipal authorities really so lax as to allow it? I saw now that the buildings beside which I had been walking were actually nothing but ruined shells, great walls of brick and stone shattered into jag-topped pieces surrounded by mounds of rubble. Twisted pipes and charred, broken timbers poked out of the debris like skeletal fingers. What horrendous disaster could have struck this quarter and left me so unaware of its having happened?
And when could it have happened? Even now I could see that tangled clumps of weeds had burst forth in the crevices of the rubble. The whole area, as far as my eye could detect in any direction, gave the impression of violent destruction, overlaid with years of abandonment and neglect. For thirty years, as child and man, I had lived in London and never been aware that its boundaries contained such a monumental landscape of collapse.
Had I wandered so far in the fog as to have entered an area somehow forgotten by nearly everyone in the city? For a moment I feared that the images of ruin were all disordered hallucinations brought upon me by the sinister tobacco – if that's what it really was – of Dr. Ambrose – if that was his true name. But then I was confronted with a shoulder-high isthmus of broken stone that spilled across the road. No other route lay before me; I was forced to scramble and pick my way over it. The sharp edges of the stones against my palms convinced me of the reality of my surroundings. Wherever this was I had strayed to, it was as undeniable as the tear in the knee of my trousers inflicted by one of the shards.
On the other side of the rubble's barricade I could discern more clearly the distant fires I had first glimpsed through the fog. I had mistakenly thought them to be small and nearby – the contained, productive furnaces of factory work. Instead, I saw now that the nearest was some miles away and engulfed. a large, multi-storied building. Even as I watched, one of the outer walls cracked from the heat and fell away, revealing the pulsing white heart of the conflagration. Columns of turgid smoke billowed upwards, uniting in the sky with the dark outpourings from the further blazes.
My God, I thought, appalled. Some calamity had broken loose upon one of the inner sections – of the city as I had wandered about. For a moment my legs nearly trembled out from under me and I fell back against the sloping rubble I had just crossed. In fear and awe I gaped at the scene ahead of me. It seemed as though I was gazing into one of the fiery circles of Hell itself. In my breast bloomed the desire to creep into some dust-lined pit of broken masonry and hide myself from the sight of the flames. I suppressed the shameful fear as well as I could and regained my feet. Hampered by darkness and the street's mounded litter, I hurried toward the burning buildings – both to render what assistance I could and to regain my bearings in the city.
Before I had gone more than a few hundred yards I found the ruined nature of the district I was in assuming the aspect of some forgotten battlefield. Raw-edged craters pocked the street's surface, with curved segments of ruptured water and sewer conduits glinting dully from pools of stagnant water. I threaded my way cautiously among the pits, fearing the misstep that the dim moonlight made likely.
The shattered walls of the buildings along the sides of the road had become more grotesque in their appearance, reduced even closer to their elementary fragments. With my brain reeling and my heart oppressed by the sights that surrounded me, I pressed on and caught at last in my nostrils the smell of burning that was spreading through the night air like a disease.
Soon I could taste the ashes in my mouth. A subtler, more noisome odour was intermixed with the burning wood and singed brick. A smell such as burning pork might give. Noises – dull, muffled explosions and a sharper, rattling sound like rapid drumbeats – came to my ears from the direction of the flames. These grew louder as I hurried through the devastated landscape.
My mind was so filled with dire conjectures of what calamity had struck this section of London – earthquake, insurrection, God only knew – that I failed to see the rim of the largest crater until my boot crumbled its edge. I fell and slid partway down its rough slope. At the same time I saw three bright scarlet lines cut the darkness over my head, and from behind heard a stuttering crack of rapid gunfire.
An irrational wave of temper swept over me and I raised my head over the rim of the crater. "I say," I shouted at my unseen marksman. "Are you aware you're shooting at a British citizen?" The half-destroyed walls echoed with my words, but gave no answer. "I demand to know–"
I suddenly felt myself grasped about the legs and pulled down farther into the crater, tearing my waistcoat against the rough stones. "What the hell are you doing?" demanded a hoarse woman's voice. At the same time the air above the crater was suddenly crossed and re-crossed with scores of the glaring red trails, while a clattering volley of gunfire sounded from all sides and chips of masonry danced off the walls along the street.
Safe below the hail of shots, I twisted around on the pit's slope and confronted this new personage. I saw a young woman of slight build with closecropped dark hair. Her fine-boned features were obscured beneath streaks of black grease on her forehead and cheeks. Dressed in a man's rough trousers and jacket, with a belted leather harness crossing her shoulders and waist, she crouched in front of me, cradling some
odd type of rifle across her knees.
What this woman and her strange garb signified, I had no idea. By this time so many disorienting events had battered my mind that I felt nothing further could surprise me. "My dear woman," I said, raising my voice. "I find this incredible. We're surrounded by maniacs with some type of Maxim gun up there. What in God's name is going on?"
She stared at me, her eyes drawing into slits. "Something wrong with you, buddy?" she demanded. "And where'd you scavenge those funny clothes?"
"I– I don't know what's wrong." I said weakly, taken aback by a voice so belligerent in a woman – the most shocking thing so far. "I feel a little dizzy. And these were good tweeds before all this madness started."
The gunfire ceased and the crater's interior lapsed into darkness. She turned toward the sky. "We'd better move out," she said. "Before they start flinging in grenades."
"Grenades?" My God, I thought. A war has broken outright in the heart of London. I fancied myself well up in the news of the day, but I had heard of no diplomatic crisis that could have precipitated this. Had the Kaiser or Czar gone mad and ordered their secret agents – of which London was full, everyone knew – to instigate some wave of assassination and bombing? Filthy brutes, I seethed to myself. Whoever they are. Bringing their infernal devices into the heart of a civilised nation's capital instead of out among some peasants and savages where they belonged.
"Come on," said the woman. "Lost your gun? Here, take this." She unsnapped a leather holster on her belt and extended a dully gleaming shape of metal to me. I took it and felt the grip of some unfamiliar make of pistol fill my hand. Automatically, my fingers curled around it.
I am no soldier and must confess that, up to this point, my acquaintance with a battlefield had been limited to reading war correspondents' dispatches. But here, in London, to see the ugly face of destruction… I felt as outraged at this violation of the proper order as an astronomer would upon seeing the planets break from their orbits and dance into the sun. I confess that my blood pulsed with a giddy excitement at the chance of placing a bullet into the hearts of whatever scoundrels had invaded – without even proper notification of intent – my homeland's green and sacred soil. God and queen must love a patriot, and there's no patriot like a man with a gun in his hand. I put away whatever qualms I had about the situation in which I had found myself. Whoever this indelicately garbed woman was, I had no choice but to follow her crouching figure to the bottom of the crater.
My tweeds were even worse soiled by the time I had half slid, half-stumbled down. My boots splashed into several inches of muddy, scum-topped water. "Over here," whispered the woman. The dark outline of her hand motioned me to follow. I glanced nervously up at the rim of the crater, saw nothing but the stars and moon overhead, then went along behind her.
I watched as she knelt down and pried up a large broken section of cement, then assisted her in sliding it a few feet away. A jagged hole, slightly wider than a man's shoulders, was revealed now, broken through into some form of tunnel beneath. I surmised it to be a sewer conduit, as a dampish, corrupted smell wafted from the aperture. I looked at it dubiously as the woman slung her rifle behind her by its strap. "Come on, jack," she said. "In you go."
The hole's repugnant aspect held me at its rim, but then we both whirled around at hearing slight scuttling noises behind and above us. My first flush of courage had been tempered by caution. I stowed the strange pistol in my coat pocket and lowered myself feet first into the hole.
A drop of a few feet landed me in a shallow rivulet of water. I stepped back and looked up through the hole, waiting for my female comrade to drop through. Her heavy booted feet and rough-clothed lower limbs appeared, then she descended no farther. Her body twisted violently around. At the hole's perimeter I could see another figure, obscured by darkness, lunge at her from somewhere above.
Their combined weight crumbled away the rim of the hole, and the woman fell another few inches, dragging her assailant partway down with her. I grabbed her feet in order to help pull her through, but to no avail. She was held fast by the figure grappling with her. One arm freed itself and groped blindly behind her for her rifle, but it was wedged hopelessly between her and the edge of the hole. I could see her other hand pushing against one of the assailant's fists, in which a long, bayonet-like blade struck off the moon's light as it strained toward her neck.
Her boots broke from my grasp and kicked against my chest. "What the hell are you waiting for?" she shouted. "Get him!"
I brought the pistol out of my pocket, knelt, and with a hand and eye steady from many grouse shoots, aimed at the narrow section of her attacker that was open to me. Nothing happened when I pulled the gun's trigger. "Come on! Come on, dammit!" she gasped as I fumbled in the sewer's darkness for the pistol's safety release. A tiny lever on its side moved under my thumb and I brought the pistol back up to fire.
As my finger pulled back on the trigger, the woman, instead of keeping her head away from the attacker's blade, lowered it and pushed desperately with her brow against the other's fist. I could make out every tense ligament of her face now filling my line of fire. Too late to stop the shot, I jerked the pistol up as it fired.
The flash from the weapon's muzzle dazzled my eyes, and the sewer tunnel echoed deafeningly with its roar. I peered upward, dreading to see which of them had intercepted my shot.
The woman's body slumped lower, then fell to the tunnel's sloping floor. The other figure slid through as well, landing heavily in the shallow water and not moving as the woman raised herself to her hands and knees.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
She nodded as she slowly regained her breath. By the scrap of light from the hole in the sewer's arching roof, I watched as she stood and unfastened a short tubular object from her belt. A click, and a flaring beam of light shot from one end of it. A peculiar sort of lamp I thought it, but undeniably useful.
I stepped close behind her as she went up to the corpse of her assailant and played the beam of light over it. The skin of my arms and neck contracted in horror as the body's details were revealed by the bright circle travelling over it. My mind raced back to the memory of a fantastic story of a Time Machine and the adventures it produced, told in a warm, well-lit parlour only a few hours – it seemed ages! – ago. My eccentric host's very words leapt into my thoughts… this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing… it was a dull white, and had strange, large greyish-red eyes… flaxen hair on its head and down its back… I shivered involuntarily when I realised that the corpse on the sewer floor before me was the very image of my story-telling host's imaginary Morlocks! Indeed, as I stared at the dead thing, its large eyes still glaring at us, the word imaginary shrank from my thoughts. I stood aghast, bereft of sense as would be an Alpine traveller, who, upon the lifting of a snowstorm, finds himself poised on the very brink of a bottomless precipice.
As we examined the creature's vile carcass, I noted a few significant differences from those details that the Time Machine's inventor had described to his dinner party. Our host had given his audience the impression of a much smaller creature with a thin-shanked, spidery appearance. The one before us now was of the stature of a short man built wide across the shoulders, with corded muscles filling out its sinewy arms. The flaxen hair was clipped short, and the creature was garbed in a one-piece, utilitarian garment, crossed with leather straps like my companion's, but stained with blood from the fatal wound my shot had given him. A rifle similar to the woman's lay under the corpse, while the bayonet was only a few inches from the creature's outflung hand.
My study of this apparition was ended when the woman doused the light. The beam disappeared with only a slight click from the tube she held. "A scout," she said. "We'd better move on before the rest of his squad comes after."
I helped her drag the pallid corpse away from where it would have been visible from above. Then, into the complete darkness and stale must of the sewer tunnel, I followed after her. As I slogged throu
gh the shallow water, my mind flicked from thought to thought like the beam of light my companion produced to light our way.
The remembered words of the mysterious Dr. Ambrose taunted me. Clearly he had not been the babbling lunatic I had surmised him to be. A figure of knowledge and power I saw him now; but what knowledge? What power? By his agency, I was certain, I had been translated from my quiet London haunts into this dark vista of struggle and death. A fragment from Matthew Arnold… as on a darkling plain! Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night – crossed my thoughts. But what did it signify? Was all this some covert invasion that had erupted in the midst of England of which Ambrose had some advance knowledge? Was there a connection between his pallor and the much ghastlier whiteness of the Morlock I had slain? Could this Ambrose perhaps be an agent of the Morlocks disguised as a man of this time, and drawing me into some devious plot? For what purpose?
Such was the anxious tenor of the musings that absorbed me as I tramped through the damp sewer tunnel. I longed to ply the woman ahead of me with questions – she certainly didn't seem to wonder at these proceedings – but refrained. Simple survival dictated my silence for the moment. Dreadful conjectures of war and disaster sweeping over English soil filled my breast.