Inside the old church, the stained glass gave only a dim light. It was a magnificent shrine, more saintly inside than the strange, demonic exterior built by Hawksmoor after the Great Fire three hundred years before. A couple of dozen figures were scattered, clustered amongst the wooden pews and the ancient rood screens. Above them, an organ gallery stood eerie and empty. Most of the men were in civvies, but a braver few wore the banned uniforms of the Blackshirts beneath trenchcoats. All were lowering their arms from the fascist salute.
Ahead of them at the pulpit, lit in many colours by the main window, stood Sir Oswald Mosley. He was tall and lean, with a heavy leather belt cinching a black turtleneck and black slacks together at his waist. As he spoke, his right arm punctuated each phrase, whilst his left hung at his side. An unusually-large blue jewel glittered on a ring on his finger.
“…the government wanted me to create something for them. Something unholy. It consumed my dear Cimmie, and I refused to do it again. My friends, I have been offered sanctuary by our friend Chancellor Hitler, and I cannot risk staying here. This country rejected socialism! It rejected reason! Now I reject it. But I will return at the head of an army of liberation and free the people of this country from their benighted, ignorant leadership!” The small congregation applauded as Mosley’s oration continued.
From their vantage point at the rear, Schweik and Confort could see Smythe and Hartington had moved into position in the shadows on either side of the stage. She signalled to Smythe. He stepped forward from the Rectory door into the light, pistol raised, to startled murmurs from the crowd. Mosley, sensing their hesitancy, paused, looked around.
“Tom! It’s Reggie. Reggie Smythe. I’m sorry to interrupt, old boy, but I’m afraid you’re caught. And quite surrounded to boot. Will you please send your chaps away and come quietly?”
The Blackshirts seemed panicked. A few moved towards the church porch, whilst others moved towards Smythe. Yet Mosley suddenly looked weary and sagged, his bombast fading. “Reggie? Bother. I was almost away from this immigrant-riddled city.” He turned to the audience. “You chaps had better scarper. I expect the police will be here soon. Stay free!” A couple of the men stepped forward, growling dissent but then Hartington and Schweik moved out of the shadows, their guns on display. The Blackshirts’ resolve melted like summer snow and they backed away.
As the last of his followers hurried out, Mosley turned back to Smythe, his anger returning. “Reggie, you idiot. Why are you working for these pigs? Don’t you know what they got me to do? They wanted a moonchild. To be born into the damned —”
“Mosley!” Schweik had stepped forward, gun raised. “Don’t say another word. Come back to Holloway.”
“Oh, the good Doctor Schweik too? What a reunion. If I can’t tell them about the moonchild, why don’t you? Why don’t you tell them about what happened to my wife, my Cimmie? You know, I rather fancy telling them all about it.”
“Mosley. You have my word you will be left alone in Holloway. But I will shoot you if I have to.” Schweik lifted the gun.
“Try.” Mosley raised his arms. “Try.” There was something unholy about the broken black clad figure posing Christ-like in front of the ancient altar, something otherworldly about his confidence. Or perhaps it was just the multicoloured light coming through the glass. Hartington muttered a prayer under his breath. Smythe was more forthright. “What’s this all about, Schweik? A moonchild?” Schweik hesitated, lowering his gun, and suddenly looked ten years older.
As they stood there, like a tableau from a stained window, the silence was broken by the sound of sirens. Distantly at first, but getting louder and closer, the wail resounded inside the thick walls. “Is that the police?” said Schweik? “No, blast.” said Confort. “That’s another air raid. Look, enough machismo. We’ve got to get to a shelter immediately.”
Yet, even as she spoke another noise began beneath the cover of the sirens, a growing hum like a hive of bees trapped in a tin can. Schweik frowned, and lowered his gun completely.
“What is that? I know that sound.” he said.
“It sets my fillings on edge, it does, Captain,” said Hartington. “Where’s it coming from? There shouldn’t be any machinery in the church. Especially not if Peabody’s lot have been here.”
The noise increased abruptly, from a hum to a whine and then a roar. Smythe turned, back towards the old rectory door. “Oh! I think it’s —”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The iron-banded rectory door creaked once then flew in one piece towards him, picking up his body and throwing it like a ragdoll into the gallery, where it landed with a savage crunch. The same blast of force disintegrated the church’s roof beams on impact and toppled them, vanishing Hartington in a cloud of wood dust and shingles. Another giant roof timber started to fall towards Mosley, only to be intercepted by something glistening, which folded away as soon as it appeared.
The whole interior of the church was still reverberating with the blast, as two figures stalked through the doorway, obscured by the dust.
The one at the front was of average height, in a gray coat and matched fedora, with what looked like a hunchback beneath his coat. In his hands he was clutching a pair of studded metal discs that were buzzing louder by the moment. He barked an order in German and his companion, a giant in a dark coat and hat, made for Mosley, grabbing him from the podium as if he was a child and running back to the rectory. Schweik was the first to recover, firing a snap shot at the great figure, which pinged off the old stone above his head. The figure in grey angled the plates towards him and Schweik stopped firing immediately.
The sound of the black-clad giant’s footsteps faded into the distance, cut off by the booming slam of the outside door. There was a moment of quiet. Hartington’s dusty hand extended from under the rubble in the centre of the room, and he could be heard faintly groaning. There was no noise from where Smythe’s body had landed. In the distance, air-raid sirens still wailed, accompanied now by the distant duelling crumps of AA guns and bombs. Flames from the toppled candles started to spread across the podium.
The remaining figure advanced out from under the gallery towards Schweik. He spoke English with a subtle German accent.
“Herr Mosley will have the Atlanteans to thank for his escape. Such a miracle of ancient technology, these devices. Drop your gun and kick it over.”
“You would be working for Nachtwölfe, then?” said Schweik, bending to place the gun on the ground. He glanced at the rubble. Hartington’s large hand was working its way towards a lump of brick. Schweik carefully placed his gun by his foot and kicked it as near to the hand as was subtle.
The German ignored his question and the gun, and waved one of the plates at Confort, standing stunned in the main entrance. “Excuse me, Madam. You should comfort the groaning one. He may be injured. I am certain that your other friend is dead. Very dead.”
“Stay where you are, Miss Confort.” said Schweik. “He just wants us closer together. The plates can’t hit us both at once otherwise.” Confort shook her head and hurried forward to Hartington.
“Ah, you know the device’s limitations. You must be Doctor Schweik, then? I have been briefed on you too. Well, Herr Doctor, you must know then that they are almost fully charged. Fortuitously, you are the only one still armed and standing so I will deal with you first…” He swung both his plates towards Schweik and the buzzing again rose to a crescendo.
At that moment, a small figure dropped from the balcony onto his head. Peabody’s impact sent the German’s arms skyward, releasing the plates’ charged blast into the three hundred-year-old roof. There was a sound like thunder, sending timbers and tiles flying into the sky, and Schweik diving for cover.
On the floor, miraculously unharmed amongst the falling debris, there was a one-sided struggle between the two men, the strength of a trained soldier just outweighing the vicious tricks of the East End urchin. The German went for a combat knife, but Peabody bit down hard on his wrist, f
orcing him to drop it. The German wrestled back, narrowly avoiding a knee to the crotch, before knocking Peabody flat with a depleted force plate. Standing, the Nazi dropped the plates, reached for his pistol and aimed quickly at the stunned urchin. Shots rang out.
The German looked confused for a moment, glanced at his gun, and toppled forward, onto the writhing spiv. A hard-faced Confort dropped Schweik’s pistol and urgently turned to Hartington.
Schweik looked down at the scrawny figure of Peabody, trapped writhing under the heavy body of the dead German. “Mr Peabody, I think you may be something of — how do you say — a diamond in the rough. Let me help you up.”
* * *
In the Finchley bunker, the atmosphere was grim but George was businesslike as ever. Peabody, Confort and Smyth stood and the heavily-bandaged Hartington sat as George debriefed them. “We’ll be sending condolences to Smythe’s family naturally. He was an ass, but he died in service to his country.”
“What the hell was that about, George?” said Confort, “This should have been a simple recovery mission. First, Nazis, then that device.”
Schweik shook his head. “The hubris, to bring Nazis over here and Nachtwölfe at that. Hitler must want Mosley very much.”
“Yes, with good reason.” George looked at the reports on his desk. “We’ve not been able to find the plates you described —
“The brave Mr Peabody might be able to help you there.” said Schweik.
“You won’t see them until I’m convinced you’re on the right side.” Peabody shifted from foot to foot. “Government’s never done much for me yet — and especially nothing good.” George looked irritated and amused in equal measure.
“Sir.” Hartington lurched up, his bandaged bulk looming over George. “We have questions. What is the moonchild? What did Mosley do? And what was that protecting him? Was that another device?”
“Ah. He talked about that, did he? Well, I suppose Captain, Doctor Schweik is better placed to talk about that. Doctor?”
Schweik walked to the front of the room, and George made room for him behind the desk. The Easterner coughed and spoke in a monotone. “The moonchild is a concept. A white magician called Cyril Grey came up with it before the First World War. It… There are things almost beyond human comprehension. They are creatures, not merely alien, but of fundamental otherness to us. Colossal in scale or intangible or made of pure power.”
“Sound like fairy tales to me.” said Peabody.
“They are, mostly. So thinly-bound to our world, that they may as well be. Yet there are ways in which their existence crosses over with ours. And Grey realised that there are means by which we can enforce that crossing over, bind them and their power to us. I have studied these ways. The moonchild is one such way.”
“This does not sound very Christian.” said Hartington. “I am not sure you are a good man, Captain Schweik.”
“And what army are you a captain in, anyway, Schweik?” asked Confort.
“Why, an army that doesn’t exist any more. My country is gone, swallowed by the Nazi war machine. Now I am just a scientist who made decisions he regrets. Shall I continue? Mosley was almost royalty — his cousin is the King, you know? We wished to repeat Grey’s experiments, and Mosley ensured that we had support from on high. I believe his plan was to offer this power to the government, if it succeeded, in return for movement on his socialist programme. He volunteered his wife Cimmie to be, a — uh — a vessel. For the moonchild. It was very noble of him. More so of her.”
“I will not detail the many ways it did not work. At first, all seemed well. But it wasn’t. We passed her death off as peritonitis. But the dreadful stink and swelling and the thing that we …killed… I regret it all. I wrote a report damning the experiment completely, begging for it never to be repeated.”
Schweik looked down again, chewing at his fingernails. “It touched Mosley, somehow, the thing that came through, though it didn’t survive the transition. It broke him, broke his faith. Not that there wasn’t darkness and hate there before. But there is something else, something dark that protects him now. You saw the way that he was shielded in the church — something that can snatch away bullets, knives, a falling mountain.” His voice became guttural. “It is the gatekeeper and the opener of the gate and the gate itself.”
The room dimmed and felt colder as he spoke. The policeman and the spiv glanced at each other, mute with incomprehension. “After my report, the government would have no part of it, no time for Mosley. Thank you, but no thank you. With his wife’s death, and social and political rejection, Mosley turned. He founded his own political party, which merged with the fascists. He remarried — but instead of royalty attending his wedding, this time it was in Goebbels’ Berlin apartment, with Hitler as principal guest.”
George spoke from the corner. “He is not ours now. He thinks if he goes over there, they will raise him high for the invasion, that they will make him king. But the Nachtwölfe know what he has, what he can offer, and that is more valuable to them. They will take that first, then they will see if they can still make use of him. After all, anyone who rules these islands in Hitler’s name will certainly need more than human protection.”
Behind the desk, Schweik hissed, hunched with self-loathing. “And these creatures, they are inhuman. To call the unthinking consumption of the Old One’s creations immoral or evil is missing the point. Concepts themselves are alien to many of them, let alone right or wrong, and even if they had that ability, we are so far below them to not figure in their thinking as relevant moral actors.”
“But the Germans, they are human. They grew up in this world, they know what evil is. And they know that what they’re doing is monstrous. They think they use these things as tools for their own advancement, little aware that they themselves are part of some inhuman, otherworldly agenda. With Mosley’s knowledge, they can make more of these creatures — perhaps birth them successfully — and perhaps invoke the same protection for their leaders as Mosley has now. They must be stopped.”
The room was silent. Schweik walked back to his seat and sat down again, staring at his hands, avoiding everyone’s eyes.
George strolled back behind this desk. “Now, to business. Miss Confort — you had a message. From Gladys at the Met Office. She just wanted to know how you were doing, and if you needed any help?” Confort, mutely shook her head. “Well, until we get a break, we investigate and play the waiting game.”
* * *
The waiting game was hard. They sat around that office for weeks, passing the time by playing card games and getting on each other’s nerves. Even George’s impenetrable calm started to seem slightly frayed. He scheduled training for them, and the civilians were taught to use more advanced weapons — rifles and Sten guns.
Smythe’s funeral was at a damp cemetery in Kensal Green, on the outskirts of London. It passed awkwardly, the group standing unnoticed amidst the grieving great and good.
For a fortnight Mosley evaded capture and the team feared he’d escaped to the continent, to reveal his secrets, which would allow the Nazis to perfect his creatures. The eyes of the M organisation around the country were village postmasters and harbour masters too old for war or gossiping parish priests too suited to one uniform to swap it for another. They were put on alert for figures matching the escapee’s description.
With so many eyes watching, false alarms blossomed around the country. Local MI18 operatives were dispatched to the heights of the Peak District, to the fells of Dartmoor, to fens and hills and bomb-blasted cities and farms. Each alert petered out and time passed slowly.
Late on a Tuesday, a report came from North Wales. The local eyes of Llandudno, a retired colonel and birdwatcher, had been out looking for kittiwakes and peregrines in the cable car. Through his binoculars, he’d spotted two figures matching the description tramping down the saddle of the Great Orme. The nearest M operative arrived on the Wednesday morning and confirmed the descriptions, and called urgently fo
r back-up.
And so the team found themselves waiting at Llandudno Junction in the rainy dawn of a Thursday morning. A hastily-arranged connecting service to the resort proper was coming down the track, with the view over the Conwy river to the old castle muggy in the dawn mist.
As the Victorian steam engine chugged in, a chubby man with a dark suit jumped out and shook the team’s hands hurriedly. “It’s Owen, my name.” he said in a lilting Welsh accent.
“Now come in the train before you catch your death. It’s pissing down!” He helped them with the heavy army radios and rifle cases, and ushered them aboard.
Inside the train was warm and smelled of coal and smoke. Owen lit a cigarette and led them up to the Second Class carriages. “Come on up, it’s nicer than third. Don’t put your feet on the seats in here though, the inspector will boil my head.” They sat down as the engine started backing up, pushing them back along the coastal railway. “Now your man is booked into a guesthouse by the pier — not the nicest, but not cheap either. I think it’s definitely the Mosley fella. He has that big friend with him, though he’s not come out of his room since he arrived.
“What’s he doing all the way up here?” asked Confort.
“We don’t know. There’s only fishing boats and yachts docked and I’ve put the word out with the coastguard not to let any of them leave. I’d say he was just hiding out but…”
“But what?”
“…but the landlady says he’s due to check out today.”
“Why would he move on if he was safely hidden here? Damn. Hartington, any word on back-up?”
“Yes, I got the strangest message from HQ. Miss Confort, apparently your friends at the Met Office will be joining us as soon as possible. Apparently, they’re having difficulty with a wheelchair.”
Dark Tales From the Secret War Page 13