The weapons inspector was thinking it through. “Geothermal, from the volcanic fault? That’d be extremely high risk. Ask the Pompeiians. My gut says it’s the sea.”
“Waves?”
“Could be. If they’ve found a way to harness the big whirlpool, that’d be something ... exciting.”
Huge banks of Wembley floodlights hung under the bare rock roof.
The entrance doors had led them onto a railed-off metal platform that was also a lift.
“Don’t touch any controls....”
Onions issued his order while on his knees. He was entering the code to open his suitcase. Yoland ignored the dictate and picked up a plastic handset at the end of a python of insulated wire. He thumped the big button with the down arrow. Smoothly, without a lurch, the platform began to descend.
The cavern was of a size that would suit a collector of fully-inflated antique zeppelins. Natural rock formations had been shaped to accommodate the base. The floor was levelled and metalled, marked off like a runway or a launchpad. The place was littered with white mini-jeeps, uniformed bodies and hard-to-identify machines. Concrete bunkers and blockhouses surrounded the ruin of a large, rail-mounted device with a Jodrell Bank-sized circular array. There had been a major fire here—a thick layer of soot blackened a swathe of wall and roof, and half the big dish was burned through to the frame. A forklift truck had been driven into a gantry and brought the structure down.
Déjà vu made Richard’s knees and ankles weak.
He saw shadows flitting about the cavern floor, from cover to cover. Distant alarums of machine-age battle sounded: klaxons, automatic weapons fire, warning bells and whistles, shouts of pain.
The others were immune to such phenomena. For now.
His coat had been found here, covered with his blood. Any déjà vu could be down to the circumstance that he really had been here before. No, it would not wash. He was used to holes in his memory, but here there was a hole in everyone’s memory. If he had been here before, it would have made the secret history books. Limiting the circulation of information on an eyes-only basis paradoxically means preserving it.
Richard gripped the guardrail for support. He missed his white room, the neutral calm. This trip had disturbed his carefully maintained equilibrium. He had been preserved in his home; exposed to open air, he worried the decay he had staved off would catch up with him.
Everything hurt.
A colophon appeared all over the place: a yellow capital “H,” bent in at the corners to fit a white oval shield. It was huge, if half-burned, on the face of the array, and in miniature on everything else. The oviform pommels on the guardrails were three-dimensional versions of the same logo.
“What’s the ‘H’ for?” asked Stacy. “Hers?” she suggested, thumbing at the awestruck Miss Gill. “Hellfire Club? Hugeness? Hidey-Hole?”
“H’egg?” suggested de Maltby.
“Head,” said Head, touching one of the egg-shapes.
The doors had opened at the sound of Sewell Head’s cough. Had anyone else noticed that?
Yes. Head had. Naturellement.
Richard perceived he had not been entirely right about the immunity of the rest of the party. This place affected Head. Onions spent far too little time thinking about the problem of Sewell Head.
If only it were easier to concentrate.
Onions had his suitcase open. Instruments nestled in foam-rubber padding. He took off his anorak to reveal a utility belt and braces, tailored to fit when he had been a stone or two lighter. He had home-bored a frayed extra buckle-hole to loosen a harness that still cut into his tummy. Expertly, the man from I-Psi-T transferred his precious gadgets from compartments in the case to holsters on the harness. A complex doodad that resembled the universal remote for a multifunction entertainment system strapped watchlike to his wrist. Onions entered a code on the keypad, and the doodad beeped to life. Green, orange and red LEDs lit up.
“Prepared for the unknown, Adam?”
“It’s only the as-yet unqualified.”
Richard looked out at the cavern.
The wrongness of it all was nauseating, an electric thrill. With his gadgets, Onions could doubtless measure the condition as an increase in ozone levels or ambient charge or some such jargon. Richard did not doubt the physical effects were quantifiable. He just thought figures did not really help.
As they neared the bottom, he saw bullet pocks on rock and concrete.
“This was a battlefield,” he announced.
Under the thrum of the generators and the grind of the lift platform, he again heard ghost gunfire, shouts. An explosion, midair, very near.
Spectre shrapnel shot through his mind.
Stacy was at his side, holding him up. He was momentarily riddled with scraps of hot pain. Then it was gone.
“You felt something?” she asked.
“Is it all coming back?” demanded Onions.
“Not a memory,” Richard said. “Ghosts. Everywhere, ghosts.”
The others could not feel anything yet.
“I don’t have any readings,” said Onions, tapping his doodad. A lone light flashed red. “Except that. Variation in atmospheric pressure. Entirely natural phenomenon in a cave this size.”
It was what Richard had expected.
Onions cooed over his gizmo. Richard had a flash of Professor Calculus in the Tintin books—swinging his plumb bob and muttering “a little more to the west.” Of course, he turned out to be right.
Everyone else—except Head, who was chewing placidly on a cud of fudge—craned over the low guardrail and peered out at the cavern, looking for movement where there was none.
“What’s that thing?” Stacy asked. “The giant satellite dish?”
“A transmitter,” said Yoland. “It was gimbal-mounted, and on those rails. A nice bit of workmanship, if obsolete. Now, nanotech is sexy. Next generation isn’t worth gasping at unless it’s tinier than the last. But once upon a time, your equipment had to bemonumental to attract funding.”
“What did it transmit?” asked Stacy.
“Two-year-old episodes of sitcoms you didn’t watch on their first run,” suggested Richard. “Championship dwarf-tossing from Glamorgan? Those radio broadcasts that teach alien invaders to speak English with BBC accents?”
Yoland shook his head, but did not venture an opinion.
As they neared the cavern floor, the corpses were more obvious. Skeletons in white “H”-on-the-left-tit jumpsuits. “H”-logoed dome hardhats chin-strapped to clean skulls.
Kydd whistled. The aircrewman was the only one among them who had served in a shooting war.
“Those people have been dead for a long time,” said Stacy.
“Decades,” Richard agreed.
The skeletons had died clutching automatic weapons with foldout tube-frame “H”-stamped stocks and unfamiliar horizontal magazines.
“Did they turn on each other?” asked Stacy. “I see only one type of uniform.”
Among the jumpsuits were a few dead people in lab coats, full-skirted like spaghetti western dusters, and oversized peaked caps. Not officers, but technicians, scientists, supervisors.
“The other side took away their dead,” deduced Richard.
“The winners,” said Yoland.
“Not necessarily. Whatever happened here isn’t finished. If it were, our presence wouldn’t be required.”
“That’s what I like about you, Jeperson,” said Onions. “Always reasons to be cheerful.”
“If you think I like making ominous pronouncements ...”
Onions’ belt beeped an interruption. He examined himself to find the gadget that had sounded out of turn.
The lift platform was level with the cavern floor. The dish towered hundreds of feet above them, lights shining through holes where plates were missing. Fighting had been fierce around the lift-bed. Many skeletons were spilled about, dusty brown-black stains on their uniforms, obvious bullet holes in skulls.
�
�It’s a mess,” said Head intently. “It should be tidied.”
For Head, Richard realised, “H” stood for “Home.”
The lift sank below the floor. Yoland looked at the control handset and found nothing besides simple up and down buttons.
They descended several further levels.
Suddenly, it was dark. Then light again. As the lift sank, circuits connected. Overhead strip lights tried to come on. Some panels buzzed and flashed and died; others sparked dangerously. Whole sections lit up perfectly, as if installed yesterday.
Richard had a sense of corridors winding into successive layers of labyrinth. Admin offices, supply areas, living quarters, cafeterias, recreation facilities, laboratories, lecture halls, testing grounds, museums, toilet facilities, information storage. No bare rock, but metalled walls, rubberised floor, heating and ventilation ducts (note to infiltrators: suitable for crawling through). Framed pictures were designed to seem like windows, the sort of touch you only got after expensive consultation.
They were deep underground, deep under the sea. Below the seabed, probably. He had a sense of enormous weight pressing in.
Without so much as a judder, the platform stopped.
Here, it was more than warm. The atmosphere was humid, tropical. Richard doffed his sou’wester and poncho, then unzipped his flight suit, which came away in sections. Underneath, he wore thigh-flied scarlet buccaneer britches and a lemon-yellow bumfreezer jacket buttoned to the throat, with an explosive cravat of red lace. He plumped the black silk rose in his lapel.
“Fab threads,” said Stacy satirically.
Others followed his example and took off their heavy-weather gear.
The Detective Sergeant wore brown corduroy trousers and a zip-up matching waistcoat.
“Very practical,” he commented.
She took an onion-seller’s beret from a pocket and tucked her hair into it.
“This is my arresting outfit,” she said. “Your average villain tends to leg it if a bloke with size eleven boots gets within spitting distance, but he’ll hang about like a prat if someone blonde asks him the way to Acacia Avenue. Most bollockbrains still give out bullshit directions after they’re cuffed and in the van.”
The guardrail automatically folded into the floor of the platform.
Ahead was a plate-glass barrier, studded with white star-shaped opacities. Beyond was a reception area and a corridor. With a hiss, the glass was withdrawn into the ceiling. No one wanted to step under it—the glass would make a very serviceable guillotine.
A concealed sound system began to tinkle; “Aquarius” from Hair played in the style of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
Miss Gill mewed surprise, then said “It’s not exactly Chris de Burgh.”
“Why did Chris de Burgh cross the road?” asked Stacy. Miss Gill shook her head. “To get to the middle. Boom-boom.”
Yoland and de Maltby laughed, and Onions looked impatient. Miss Gill took the joke as a personal dig, which Richard assumed Stacy intended. Head, he noted, was puzzled. That was worth filing away.
It was Onions’ place to press on. Richard waited for him.
The man from I-Psi-T was fazed, not eager to venture further. Richard heard susurrus under the Muzak.
Ghosts.
Head made the first move and wandered off the lift-bed platform.
That jolted Onions out of his reverie. He nodded to de Maltby and followed Head.
Richard saw the pilot had his sidearm out.
“I’d put that away if I were you,” cautioned Richard. “Someone’ll only get hurt.”
“Uhhhhm,” said de Maltby, affecting not to hear the advice.
Richard shrugged. “Just trying to help,” he told Stacy.
Yoland, Kydd and Miss Gill padded after the others.
Richard hung back, mind open, all receivers alert. The place was shrieking at him now. Stacy touched his shoulder carefully.
“We’ll be left behind,” she said gently.
He looked into her face, glimpsing skull under skin. He saw for an X-ray instant the back teeth she would not sacrifice for a career, sensed the sparking synapses of her admirable brain. Fred had not assigned his minder casually. He had a spasm of fear for her. This place was dangerous.
Between seconds, he had a flash—more than a vision, it came with sound, smell, temperature. The corridor was swept by a blossom of fire. The stutter of gunfire was tinnitus, cutting through his skull. His skin broiled; his hair crisped.
“Richard,” Stacy said, snapping her fingers under his nose, “come out of it.”
He did. His face tingled; his ears rang. Otherwise, he was fine.
“Who am I?” she asked.
He knew who he was. He knew who she was. He knew where this was.
Though exposed, he was growing stronger again.
“You are an arresting woman,” he said, startling a smile out of her.
The sound system burbled “Let the Sunshine In” scrambled with “Spanish Flea.”
At least she was starting to trust him. Refreshing as it was to be treated bluntly like a mad old relic, the tonic lost its effectiveness after a few doses.
“Flaming Nora!” screamed Miss Gill.
The others were out of sight, beyond a turn in the corridor.
“That’s a call to investigate,” he told Stacy. “A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.”
“That’s from Barbarella,” she said, making him feel younger. “My Dad’s favourite film,” she added, rubbing it in that he was ancient.
Miss Gill’s scream segued into a “nails down a blackboard” laugh.
At a trot, they rounded the corner. The floor was lush as an executive suite, though the nap was moistly squishy, mouldy in patches. The carpet pattern consisted of tiny interlocking “H” symbols.
They found the others, gaping up as if at an art exhibit.
Miss Gill honked astonished laughter. You had to have unearned wealth to get away with a bray like that.
On a brushed steel plinth was an eight-foot-tall marble egg, carved with Humpty Dumpty features.
It was a monumental bust of Sewell Head.
* * * *
2
“Someone’s got some bloody explaining to do!” said Miss Gill, through snorts of aghast hilarity. “I mean, whose island is this?”
Head looked up at his own face, curious. Richard could tell the little man wanted to touch the marble but was afraid to. He had chocolate on his fingers and did not want to spoil the surface.
“You’re the pub quiz king, Head,” said Onions. “Any answers?”
Head said nothing. Onions pointed his doodad at the sculpture and pressed buttons.
“He doesn’t remember,” said Richard.
Onions wheeled on him, hostile.
“He doesn’t want to remember. Like you, Jeperson.”
“Back off,” said Stacy, protective, eye on de Maltby’s gun.
Onions, surprised, did. He wasn’t handling this well.
“I don’t remember,” admitted Richard. “It’s not a choice. It’s a condition. There is more here than we see. More than you can quantify, Adam.”
Onions huffed. An old argument was in the offing.
Stacy had stepped in for him. He squeezed her arm as silent thanks. They had an understanding now.
With her strength, he wasn’t so feeble.
Beyond the monumental bust was a sculpture garden, with Astroturf for grass and subdued lighting. A path wound between a dozen pieces, all representing the same subject—Sewell Head. Some were naturalistic, showing a younger man than the shuffling original, crudely attempting to convey dynamic presence; some were completely stylised, just “H”-stamped ovals; one was a mobile on which twenty or so transparent crystalline eggs were arranged to represent the atomic structure of an element unknown to science; another was a parody Easter Island head, egg-skull elongated and eyes exaggerated.
“I should say somebody has a big head,” said Mis
s Gill, more pettish than amused now.
Sewell Head said nothing. Next to these three-dimensional images of himself, he seemed insubstantial, as if he were the third-generation copy and the artworks the original.
At the base of a Soviet-style statue of Head heroic in overalls and hardhat was the skeleton of a woman, laid out like a sacrifice. A long white evening dress clung to bones. At first, Richard assumed her head was miraculously intact; then he realised she had worn a wax mask. The doll-face was cracked across, pinned to the skull by a black-handled throwing knife.
The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01] Page 47