Tales From Beyond Tomorrow: Volume One

by Catton John Paul

  Blake, Ford and Miss Browning tied the two unconscious men to the bulkheads, fastening their limbs to the webbing with belts and electrical leads. The Landship rumbled slowly on, with the air getting more and more difficult to breathe. Every time the cabin swayed as the tracks crunched over some obstacle beneath, Blake wondered if they had rolled over the corpse of a horse or a man, grinding it down deeper into the mud.

  "We're here," Kelsey shouted. He brought the iron-clad to a clanging halt and Blake took a cautious look out of the porthole. There was no sign of the gas cloud. Blake opened the door and the small group ran across the liquid-brown detestable mud, crouched over, towards the parapet of the nearby trench, dodging shrapnel, sniper bullets and clods of earth thrown from the explosions. They groped their way over the parapet and down into the trenches of Damnation Corner, reeling like drunkards.

  They ducked through a low, narrow doorway into a bunker where three men sat around a table holding what Blake recognized as another Ultra machine. They all stood up as the new arrivals entered. None of them wore uniforms; instead, they were dressed in stained overalls and plain black caps.

  "This is Doctor Morley," said Kelsey, introducing a heavy-set, bearded man. "Next to him – Langan, and Severini." The two men reminded Blake of shipyard workers, not scientists.

  "It's good to see you again," said Langan to Kelsey, "but I think we may have to move quickly."

  "Now listen," Blake interrupted. "I thought you said that you brought us here because you were working on an explanation."

  Kelsey frowned. "We are. This team has been analyzing the gas." He turned to the others and said quietly, "The Corporal is William Lennox Ford."

  The others nodded. "We've managed to find Wittgenstein…"

  "But we've lost Moseley, Macke, Sant'Elia, Owen and Rosenberg."

  Kelsey nodded.

  "What about the Angels?" Ford asked.

  Morley shook his head. "Well, what about the Angels?"

  Blake stepped forward. "You know perfectly well what we're asking. Are they real or aren't they?"

  "They are both," Severini said, his face expressionless. "That is all we can determine."

  Blake sensed a change in the atmosphere in the room; or perhaps, he had only now become aware of something that had always been present. It was like a sound, just at the threshold of hearing, or a smell, a fragrance that strained at distant memory. Morley turned, looked at the stout wooden door behind him, then looked at Kelsey.

  "Why don't you judge for yourself?"

  "You've done it?" Kelsey said, his voice even more animated. "You've really done it?"

  "Are you sure it's safe?" asked Miss Browning.

  Morley shrugged. "We're not sure of anything. But the men here might be more cooperative if they get a close look at what we're dealing with."

  Kelsey rubbed his hands together. "Yes. Yes, we must. Captain, follow me – sorry. You are in charge. If we may be permitted…"

  Blake glanced at Ford, and Jessup, who were clearly waiting for him to do something. His boots clacking on the warped planks, he walked slowly to the door at the back of the room and opened it.

  He stood at the threshold and looked inside.

  Five

  Although the shelling outside did not stop, the room inside felt…silent. Sound was muffled, hushed, as if in respect for the thing that broke the laws of science and reason. Blake heard faintly the thunder of detonations overhead and the low exclamations of the men and woman behind him. He smelt the tang of carbolic and cordite that hung in every hole and warren he had ever crawled through. As his hand rested on the door jamb, he was aware of a wooden splinter pricking his thumb.

  He struggled to understand what he was looking at, but his eyes protested, his mind refused to cooperate.

  In the centre of the room stood a black metal cabinet, eight feet wide and six feet tall, with scores of small drum wheels set into the front. A bulging mass of colored cables trailed down to make a thick loop in the middle of the oil-stained floor, and above it was…the Angel.

  Although it had a human shape, Blake couldn't properly register it in his sense of vision. It was nothing more than an assemblage of transparent planes, shapes, and colors, perpetually changing and rearranging, as if they were continually shifting in and out of existence. It cast light on the floor beneath it, a brilliant, trembling light that emerged from somewhere deep within its essence.

  How could it be there? It couldn't be. How could it be alive? Kelsey must have been mistaken. But how could he be mistaken?

  Blake stood there, staring at it, getting nowhere, his mind dazed and shocked.

  " – solutely no question about it," Sevrini was saying. "We ran into it early this morning and the Ultra machine managed to restrain it."

  "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable." Kelsey's voice was distant, as if he was speaking from the bottom of a well. "Captain, are you familiar with the theories of that new scientist, Albert Einstein?"

  "I've read…a little," Blake croaked. "In the newspapers."

  "Back at the Home Front, we've been working with some of his theories on sub-atomic particles, and we've come across some highly unusual quantum events. The findings suggest that our universe is inherently unstable, Captain. No vacuum is completely empty; it's full of particles and antiparticles that are constantly coming into being and then cancelling each other out. We think these…Angels…are a sign of a quantum fluctuation, tunneling through space and time and interacting with the matter and energy of our universe."

  "It's like the War itself, Captain," Miss Browning added. "One nation, then another nation, then another, all impacting upon each other until they reach the point of catastrophe. Collapsing like a line of dominos."

  Blake tore his eyes away and looked down at his uniform. He opened a button on his jacket and refastened it. He straightened his tie, and his cap, with shaking hands. "All I want is the answer to one simple question," he said quietly, "before I get sent back to Blighty as a basket case. Is this thing real or isn't it?"

  He was aware of Miss Browning moving to stand behind him, looking into the room. "Reality or unreality has no clear distinction in our present circumstances, Captain."

  "The only way we can define this thing is as an infinite succession of events, that has created a form of continuity in space," Kelsey added.

  "It might help to consider the classical work of Christian theology, The Cloud of Unknowing," said Morley. "Whatever you do not know is dark to you, because you do not see it with your spiritual eyes. For this reason, that which is between you and your God is termed not a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing."

  Blake put as much sarcasm into his voice as he could. "Thank you. That was most helpful."

  He turned around, looked at the survivors of his own squad. "So what do we do now? Just tell me and I'll go along with it."

  "We're taking measurements off that thing there, and now we need to analyze the gas somehow. We've set up a lab in a room down the tunnel, for safety. We need another man."

  "Jessup, go and help them."

  The Sergeant's mustache twitched. "Yes, sir."

  "And what do we do?" Blake asked.

  "You can keep an eye on that." Kelsey pointed into the room before he closed the door, and moved toward the lab with his team.

  "Dr. Kelsey?" Blake called.

  "Yes?"

  Blake looked at him shrewdly and felt a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth. It was the first time he had smiled in days.

  "Are you an Angel?"

  Kelsey turned back and returned the smile.

  "No, Captain. I'm from 1942. All five of us are."

  Blake nodded. It made as much sense as everything else did.

  Six

  As the war raged on overhead, Blake and Ford sat down on folding chairs by the room's one wooden table. They sipped water from their flasks, wishing it was whisky, and tried not to think about the Angel in the room next door.

/>   "Permission to speak, sir," Ford said.

  Blake waved a hand dismissively.

  "Sir…do you think that's true? What they said? That – thing is actually coming for me?"

  Blake stiffened. "I don't know. I don't know anything any more." He looked straight at Ford. "I used to think this was Judgment Day, Corporal. The trumpets would sound and the world would end. Then, on the days I went back on leave to Birkenhead, I found it was business as usual. This damned war seems on the verge of destroying everything but then it just keeps going on and on."

  "How do you do it, sir?" Ford asked.

  "Do what?"

  "Keep your sanity."

  Blake laughed. "I can't say that I am exactly sane at this moment, Corporal. But I just think of my parents, my sister. I think of meeting a nice girl one day and settling down. That's all I can do."

  "It's Literature that keeps me going, sir," Ford said quietly. "Poesy, the books I have written, and the books that one day I hope to write. And the bombing…"

  Ford hesitated, then the flow of words came, as if he had entered a trance, or had become a character from one of his own novels. "The sound of the bombing doesn't just assault my ears, sir, it attacks my whole body. It gets inside me. But after this gas business began, sir, something happened. I felt a kind of calm, a peace, in the midst of the shelling. And then I wasn't afraid any more. It was as if the bombardment had gone beyond the point of meaning, and just become part of the fabric that makes up my world. I've become used to it, sir. Sometimes…it feels like…I don't want it to end."

  Blake stared at the other man, speechless. His dry throat tickled and he took another sip of water. His nerves and his viscera were tingling; something had changed – beyond the threshold of ordinary perception.

  He realized, beneath the noise of the shelling, the humming of the Ultra machine next door had stopped.

  Blake jumped to his feet, sprinted to the door and pulled it open. The black metal cabinet stood with its wire guts spread all over the floor.

  The Angel had gone.

  "Kelsey!" he shouted! "Miss Browning!"

  A few seconds later, all six of them rushed into the room. "What's happened?"

  Blake said nothing, just pointed into the room.

  "Interesting."

  "Interesting? Is that all you can say?"

  "It's still here," said Miss Browning quietly. "I can feel it."

  "Waiting for us," muttered Kelsey.

  "Sir," said Jessup, and pointed to the back of the room, behind the cabinet.

  The air was turning a different color.

  Blake turned towards the other door and then realized there was no point. Gas was seeping beneath the jamb of that door as well, through the filthy rags used to block it.

  The gas came inching in from the darkness, floating up the far wall, defying gravity. It changed, before their eyes, into a rippling vertical sheet of liquid, with the metallic sheen of polished gunmetal. Blake could no longer feel afraid; the wall of mist had the unreal quality of a mirage, or an object seen in a dream.

  The Angels took shape within the mist.

  Blake realized, with a final shock, that he recognized them. Their faces…Weston, Hancock, Letts, Dixon .. and then Tate…they were the fallen soldiers. They were his own men.

  Although he knew their faces, they were no longer human. They were automata, made of tubes, barrels, linkages; geometrically simplified bodies. Behind the figures, the gas churned and pulsated, a whirling vortex of light.

  "No," he whispered.

  They could not escape its overwhelming pressure, but they also could not grasp it directly.

  "We've arrived at a singularity," said Kelsey, "a phase transition."

  They were moving in all around, scores of them, both British soldiers and those clad in streamlined, geometric adaptations of German, French, Canadian uniforms. Blake backed into the middle of the room until he bumped into the table, feeling his brain jerking, twisting. He wondered if he was on the brink of a stroke.

  "Listen," said Kelsey. "Don't panic. I believe this thing is intelligent, and those men are still alive. I think we can reason with it."

  Blake hardly noticed the man speak. Some tiny part of him felt concern, and worried for the men under his command, worried for Miss Browning…felt a stab of pain when he thought of his family…

  Then it came upon them.

  It surrounded them with a thick golden light, smothering them. As Blake watched, the figures of Miss Browning and the other men began to blur and lose definition, obscured by the thick panes of misty light.

  "We will just have to learn by experience," came Kelsey's voice. "Who'll roll the dice, and come with me?"

  The mist thickened, until Blake could no longer see Kelsey, Miss Browning, or any of the others. They disappeared into the blinding fog of light.

  "Whatever you do not know is dark to you, because you do not see it with your spiritual eyes. For this reason, that which is between you and your God is termed not a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing."

  "Maybe everyone in London was having nightmares, he thought; but even bad dreams couldn't be as bad as the War…"

  ONE

  Frankie was ten years old when his father told him about the Curse of the Pharaohs.

  Francis Wilfred Cooper was born in Norwich in 1914, and his earliest childhood memory was watching the men come back from France after the War. His childhood was golden; that was the color that came to mind when he remembered his youth – the sunlight, the buttercups and the daffodils in the back garden, the fields of wheat that he used to cycle past on his way to school, the grassy banks that he used to roll down, getting his knees grazed and his short trousers muddy. Even the air itself seemed golden.

  When he was ten years old his parents took him on a day trip to the British Museum in London. He stared up in awe at the colossal stone faces of Pharaohs with exotic names such as Amenhotep and Ramesses, unreadable weathered expressions in granite, limestone, and quartzite. He goggled at the bas-reliefs of unearthly gods with their heads of birds, jackals and crocodiles, and frowned at the tantalizing hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone.

  "Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922," his father had told him the day before they went to London, "and four months later, Carnavaon had died from a mysterious infection. By the end of 1924 six other members involved in the expedition had died. Some folks say…" Dad lowered his voice, rolling his eyes for effect. "Some folks say it was the curse that did it, reaching out from the tombs of the dead…"

  "Oh, give over," his mother had chided. "You'll scare the child."

  On the contrary, his father's words, and the arcane masks of the ancient gods, sparked an obsession with Egyptian mythology that was to stay with Frankie for the rest of his life.

  Not that Frankie said anything about that to the Medical Board when he applied to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

  It was December 1940. Christmas in wartime. Holly and barbed wire. Tinsel around the rim of a tin hat. Sandbags around the church walls, and papier-mâché coffins down in the crypt.

  Everyone used euphemisms and jokes to describe the Blitz because the reality was too horrific to contemplate. Every day, as Frankie cycled from his digs to St. Bart's, he passed a fish and chip shop with wooden boards nailed up to replace the blown-out windows. Last week, there'd been a hand-painted sign on the planks saying –

  THANKS TO HITLER, CHIPS ARE LITTLER

  This week the sign said –

  BECAUSE OF HESS, THE FISH IS LESS

  It made him Frankie chuckle, and that's what it was all about, wasn't it? You had to laugh. Because if you didn't laugh, you'd sit down and cry and never stop crying.

  Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run,

  Don't give the farmer his fun, fun, fun,

  He'll get by

  Without his rabbit pie,

  So run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run…

  Frankie had
a room in a Victorian brick house at one end of a terrace of six. These were the lodgings of the lab assistants, on Bury Street, near Leadenhall Market, a short bicycle ride away from the nurse's homes and hospital wards that nestled in the city's bosom, and a few streets away from the mighty edifice of St. Paul's Cathedral itself. Frankie's residence was a musty narrow room with a cracked window at the top of three flights of creaking wooden stairs, and it had damp in the winter and it never got enough sunlight, but to him it was paradise. Every time he swung himself onto the bed to put his feet up and stare out at the grey rooftops before he closed the blackout curtain, or listened to Tommy Handley (It's That Man Again!) on the crackling crystal wireless, he had the same, inescapable feeling; this was where he was supposed to be.

  Before the war, when Frankie met people they often asked him why he'd taken up a job as a pathologist's assistant in the coroner's office. "How can you stand it?" they asked, furrowing their brows. "Dealing with blood and death every day? Ooh, you poor dear."

  Frankie would just shrug the question off – "Well, someone's got to do it!" – and then change the subject. Nobody wanted to hear the grisly details of what he actually did in the labs on a regular basis, and that suited Frankie fine. There was beer to be drunk and nice girls to run after.

  Then after the War started, questions were superfluous. Frankie applied to join the armed forces, but he was in a reserved occupation. He was "doing his bit" and "helping the War Effort". Say no more.

  At the end of 1939, many of St. Bart's wards were closed down for the Duration, and most of the nursing staff and patients had been evacuated to the Home Counties. A hundred and thirty three medical staff remained at the three main hospital buildings in Smithfield. One of them was Frankie.

  Although the number of staff had been reduced, the number of hospital beds kept on climbing. At the beginning of December there were over sixteen hundred, with each ward having at least sixty beds. The main task of the wards that remained open was to receive air-raid casualties. Only the lower floors were in use, and the windows had been fortified with sandbags and sticky tape. Bomb blasts had already seriously damaged the Nurses' Home on the east side, the student's quarters and one of the operating theaters. The windows of the Pathology Block in Giltspur Street had been completely blown out.