The Tunnel at the End of the Light

by Stefan Petrucha

  ‘Rash? Me?’ Emily smiled as she reached for the curtains. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘See what I can find out about the attacks,’ Lechasseur said, glancing at the paper. ‘Maybe these sub-humans are after him to join a beauty pageant.’

  She pulled open the curtains again, and the harsh light passed through the dirt-speckled glass. The joke caught in Lechasseur’s throat, for the light had illuminated the sub-heading of the article, which briefly explained how one victim of the attack, though alive, had apparently been covered in bite marks.

  Chapter Three

  Though the utter lack of a personal history had become somewhat bearable, one thing about amnesia that Emily still hadn’t grown used to at all was the way it gave her a strange, often unexpected set of sympathies. Intellectually she was baffled and more than a little annoyed by the cryptic Randolph Crest, but emotionally she felt terribly sorry for him. Moreover, her pity was based not at all on his gangly, amphibious appearance, but on what she sensed as his tortured mind. She readily understood what it was like to feel out of place and often at odds with the information in one’s own head.

  On the other hand, not all the sympathy or empathy in the world would have prevented her from doggedly catching up with him. The aura, the weird atmosphere, the je ne sais quoi radiating from him had nearly as powerful an effect on Emily in memory as it had when she had faced him in the flat. Crest had struck both her and Lechasseur like a slap in the face, and she wasn’t about to let that much of a mystery simply vanish. More than that, she was pleased that Lechasseur seemed to be trusting her more of late. His respect had grown, and the fact that he thought nothing of sending her out to gather information, made her feel oddly warm.

  Despite some minor trepidation, Emily not only found she enjoyed being out and about, but quickly realised that the easiest way to ‘tail’ her target, as the Americans might say, was to walk in the brightest sunlight available. Belying the agility he had displayed in his defensive feints back at the flat, Randolph Crest moved quite slowly, doing his best to keep to the darkest of shadows.

  Bell-sleeved duffle jackets were all the rage among the well-dressed women of the city, topped by small hats with large feathers. Of far lesser means, and never a slave to fashion, at least as far as she could recall, Emily had to content herself with a simple skirt and blouse. The outfit was actually to her benefit in the current circumstances, since it helped her to fade into the crowd.

  Not that Crest was ogling anyone as he walked. Mostly, he stared at the ground, craning his neck forward a little in order to see past his belly. With no change in stance, he wobbled from shadow to shadow, sometimes standing stock-still for long minutes at a time, waiting until the next umbra darkened to his satisfaction.

  He travelled many streets in this manner, twitching his large head left then right, eyes darting about nervously, speaking to no-one. Eventually he entered Spitalfields. As the walk progressed, it became less and less pleasant. The wide street narrowed, and on the pavement, trapped in a smaller distance between tall buildings, the sunlight shrank, the shadows grew. The buildings changed, too, shifting from larger, comfortably familiar structures, many recently rebuilt, to a series of dingy shops and dilapidated flats looking even worse than the raw plaster walls, exposed pipes and bare floorboards of Lechasseur’s home.

  The fashion-conscious women on the wider streets were long gone, and the looks given Emily by some of the destitute creatures leaning in the alleyways reminded her of the leering men she had first encountered when she had arrived, no, appeared, in London in nothing more than a pair of pyjamas. Still, she’d expected more Bohemian or academic environs for Mr Crest, and was a little surprised to realise that there wasn’t a bookstore or café in sight. What’s more, rather than heading toward the site of the V1 blast and the sub-human sightings, which might lend some credibility to his fears, they were moving further and further away from it.

  Undeterred, though the neighbourhood grew seamier still, she followed, but soon found herself with no sunlight at all to stand in. Like Crest, she took to the shadows and tried to remain unseen.

  After walking down a particularly thin, lowly street, the name of which Emily couldn’t make out through the grime, Crest approached someone leaning against a building. This was a bear of a man, thick in the shoulders, a few days’ growth of beard on his face. They made an odd pair, he a full head taller than Crest. She couldn’t imagine what they might have in common. Emily got as close as she dared without being seen, and tried to listen, but there seemed to be little more than grunts passing between them.

  In short order, the conversation murmured into silence, making the rush of passing cars a few streets away the loudest sound that came to her ears. Physical contact was broken as well. The bear man resumed his slouch against the building and looked off into the distance. Crest returned to his wobbling walk.

  After a few paces, Crest turned onto an old flight of concrete steps that led down to the basement of a tall building, and soon ambled out of sight. Emily assumed he was visiting a shop, too small for her to enter unnoticed. She waited, as patiently as she could, but soon found herself edging closer and closer, hiding behind a wall, and ultimately nestling in the shadow of a particularly rank pile of old rubbish. Though the stench wrinkled her nose and threatened to make her cough, the position afforded a glimpse down the ramshackle steps, where she saw the top of a windowless door, thick with many coats of black paint. The wall beside it had no sign or number to indicated its purpose. In fact, she couldn’t imagine it was anything other than some sort of storage space. But that didn’t make sense. Crest had been inside now for fifteen minutes at least.

  This, then, she realised, still not quite believing it, was his home. How strange. The piece she’d read about him in the papers had indicated, as far as she recalled, that he was fairly well off, as poets went. She couldn’t imagine anyone inhabiting this godforsaken street of the city by choice. Still, there he was, and here she was.

  Uncertain now what to do, Emily turned back in the direction of the bear man. She considered approaching him with a question or two, perhaps pretending to be a fan of Crest’s work. On second look, though, she doubted the fellow had a clue that Crest was a poet. So she stood there, half-hidden by a pile of refuse, wondering what to do. She didn’t want to go back to Lechasseur empty-handed.

  But time wore her down. The remaining sun sank below the tops of the buildings, and the first true hints of night appeared. She was about to start the long walk home when she saw Crest’s head emerge from the staircase like a black moon rising along the cracked pavement horizon. Emily stepped further back into her hiding place and tried not to inhale.

  Back on the street, Crest shared a few more audible grunts with the bear man, then wobbled off into the gathering dark. This gave her some hope. Perhaps if the bear man left, she might be able to sneak into Crest’s flat.

  She had no such luck, however. In the next half an hour, he moved only once, to lean further back against the damaged wall, as if ready and able to melt into the immobile brick and mortar. So, finally, she decided she’d have to do nothing, or speak to him; and doing nothing was never really an option. Adding to the olfactory delights of the evening, no sooner was she clear of the smell of rubbish than she caught her first sniff of heavy spirits, an odour that grew geometrically with each step she took.

  A yard or so away from the man now, trying not to let her disgust show, she forced a smile to her lips, pointed toward the staircase and said: ‘Wasn’t that Randolph Crest, the poet?’

  The only part of the man that moved was his eyes. They shifted up just a bit to meet her own. They were so blue and bloodshot, she could see both attributes clearly, even in the near dark.

  He said nothing, so she stood there and smiled until she felt so stupid doing so, that she dropped the grin and again pointed at the door.

  ‘Randolph Crest?’
r />   The man’s fat lips parted, and he warbled. Phlegmy sounds rolled from his throat, mumbles, coughs, near words, the sense of which, if sense they had, was utterly lost on her. The gesture he made with his hand, however, was not. She hadn’t even realised he’d raised his stubby fingers until she saw them, a few inches from her face, thumb rubbing index and forefinger, making a hissing sound that she thought quite loud.

  She took out a coin, one of the few to her name, and handed it to him. The man took it, stuffed his hand into an unseen pocket, then lifted himself from the wall and walked off. Emily felt a rush of accomplishment, as though she’d just bought off one of the guards to an ancient tomb.

  Once she was certain she was alone, she headed down the crumbling cement of the staircase, nearly tripping twice before she came to the black wooden door. The wood was rotting, frayed at the top and bottom, and it would have been a simple matter to kick it in, or even just push it off its hinges. Instead, she withdrew a hairpin, and, as Lechasseur had once shown her, used it to pick the simple lock.

  A wall of stale warmth, mixed with the smell of sickly sweet sweat, pressed into her face and shoulders as she stepped into the pitch black. Papers rustled underfoot and, heart racing, she fumbled inside her skirt pocket for the electric torch she’d brought. A flick of the switch, and a sickly yellow beam shed some vague light upon the scene.

  She had been right about the small, single room being intended for storage. There were no windows at all, and only one vent to the street, intended to draw off moisture, a task at which it failed abysmally. In the centre stood a familiar type of coin-operated coal stove for the winter months, though she couldn’t imagine it was ever truly cold here. In one corner, there was a bed that more closely resembled the nest of a large bird. In another, a desk, and a table with a wash basin on it.

  But the most striking thing about the place was that everywhere, covering everything, in pads, books, sheets and torn pieces, was paper, almost all of it covered with nervous, jagged handwriting. It was impossible to move without stepping on some of it; though there was so much, in such a state of disarray, that Emily felt sure she could have kicked a pile of it about without Crest ever being the wiser.

  She made her way over to the desk and pulled some of the fresher-looking sheets into the torch light. Most were letters to and from other poets and academics, some about Crest’s work, others sharing his thoughts on theirs. Nearly every one of Crest’s began with an apology for never meeting his correspondent in person, and an assurance that he held their friendship no less dear for lack of physical contact. From what Emily could make out, Crest had no friends that he’d ever actually met.

  There was a set of more formal letters from a Mr Alan Bungard, inviting Crest to give a recitation of some of his works in public at a small venue in London. Oddly, though Crest had clearly hesitated for many months, under Bungard’s gentle pressure, he had eventually acquiesced.

  There were many more items that Emily perused. A number were pieces of Crest’s poetry, some new, some appearing very old. A verse or two caught Emily’s eye:

  That it cannot speak, I know

  but have to wonder if such muteness

  Is born of deficiency,

  Or if its language, unknown to me,

  Speaks of higher plains

  And the oddly erotic:

  Dark opens in wider circles

  Trickling down my sides

  Kissing my animal body so tightly

  With her tongue

  I breathe alive another day

  And so on. Never much for poetry, Emily had no idea whether they were any good, but she didn’t think it the sort of thing she would read on her own. Having quickly had her fill of Crest’s homages to night and lightlessness, she turned the torch to the rest of the room, hoping to make some sense out of the clutter.

  It was then that a particularly large, unwieldy pile of paper caught her eye, mostly because it was stacked far higher than the natural chaos of the rest of the room would permit. He’d obviously piled it all there on purpose. But why? To protect something? To bury something? Briefly worried that she might find the skull of a literary critic, she steeled herself for a closer look.

  The top and middle sections of the paper tower seemed haphazard enough, but at the bottom, beneath a pile of crumpled pages and torn paper scraps, some of which contained no more than the first few letters of an unfinished word, she saw a singular book. The light brown edge of the leather cover glowed from the bottom of the pile. It was thick, expensively bound, but very worn.

  Crossing her fingers, she used her foot to shovel a few bits of detritus delicately to either side of the book, then kneeled and gently pulled it out. To her delight, the tower remained intact.

  With a shiver, despite the heat, she flipped through the first few pages, and soon realised that she held a diary. Later entries contained rough notes for Crest’s poems, but the further back she went, the more child-like the handwriting became, until finally it decayed into a series of unrecognisable symbols. She was just about to begin reading what she could in earnest, when the door creaked and began to open.

  The master of the house had returned.

  Chapter Four

  At about the same time, Honoré Lechasseur, now somewhere between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner, straddled his bicycle and eyed the police-guarded entrance to the abandoned, and now partly destroyed, Constitution Hill station. There were three bobbies outside, doubtless more within. He figured it was more a show of force to calm the public than a strategic decision. It was apparent from the newspaper article that there were many other ways in and out – otherwise the attacks would have been stopped easily. As it was, with miles and miles of tube tunnel interconnecting all London, the Subterraneans, as the papers had dubbed them, were free to surface anywhere.

  The bigger question was whether or not these creatures had any connection at all with Randolph Crest, beyond the crazed poet’s imagination. Lechasseur had hoped that if he surveyed the scene of the blast and the locales of the attacks, his time sensitivity might react to something, perhaps even in the same way it’d reacted to Crest himself. So far, there had been nothing, and he’d taken to staring at the bobbies, hoping one of them might have been inside at some point.

  Even this proved fruitless. His powers, still dizzying, were also still hopelessly beyond his control. The only thing he’d been able to see were the fried eggs and tomato that the man had enjoyed for breakfast. It was clear that Lechasseur wasn’t going to be able to get inside the blast area, either via the obvious entrance or via his own, more subtle and indirect means.

  Finally, one of the officers, in between regularly shifting his weight from the heels to the balls of his feet, took notice of Lechasseur and furrowed his brow warily. Lechasseur managed a slight grin, tipped his hat in greeting, then rode off, rattling off the facts in his mind as he pedalled.

  That the V1 explosion had somehow ‘awoken’ or ‘freed’ these creatures from somewhere underground was never in doubt – the timing coincided completely. There was either a family of four or five of the creatures, or that was the size of one of their hunting packs. At night, they came out from the tube tunnels or the sewers, or whatever other dark underground places were available, found food, living or otherwise, then went back to wherever home was.

  Though their sorties could hardly be described as peaceful, the creatures generally seemed less involved with cannibalism and more interested in acquiring more socially acceptable sorts of food, particularly sweets. Most of the sightings had taken place near food shops and restaurants, anywhere that something edible could be found. The worst damage that had been done was to a sweet shop, which, in the space of a half hour, had been completely stripped of its wares. The hapless owner, who’d been present unpacking stock, was hospitalised with a chunk of his thigh missing.

  The descriptions made these foraging attacke
rs out to be humanoid, though somewhat shorter and far more muscular than men, but their behaviour was completely animal. Lechasseur found himself comforted by their beastliness. Animals were predictable, understandable. They ate when hungry, and attacked usually only when backed into a corner. Humans, on the other hand, particularly those like Crest, were not only unpredictable, they were capable of the most insane cruelty. He’d seen enough of that during the War.

  Slowly, pretending leisure, he rode around the block. He was out of sight of the police now, scanning the alleys and gutters for anything unusual. A glint of something silver on the ground caught his eye in the dim glow of a street-lamp. He almost thought nothing of it, but with little else to do, he dismounted from the bike and went down on his knees for a closer look. It was the foil and torn paper from a chocolate bar wrapper, half-wedged in a sewer cover. Nothing suspicious. Or was it?

  Recalling the Subterraneans’ affinity for sweets, Lechasseur idly pulled at the wrapper. It came free with a tug. Though the light was dim, it was obvious that the tears in the foil and paper had been caused by chewing, as if a dog had been given the bar fully wrapped and hadn’t quite been able to distinguish between the covering and the contents.

  Lechasseur stood and looked around. The sewer cover was opposite an alley behind the blast site. Wheeling his bicycle alongside him, he went into the alley and, after a few yards, spotted the remains of another, similarly mauled chocolate bar. Further down, there was another. The alley ended in a brick wall, too sheer and high to climb, and with no visible entrance. With nowhere else to go, he walked back to the street, stood in the pool of light beneath the street-lamp and took a closer look at his prized detritus. The wrappers were shredded, nearly eaten themselves, with not a drop of chocolate remaining.