Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  * * *

  Frank couldn’t get Lily out of his mind. He’d had his eye on The Hare & Hounds’ youngest barmaid for months now and, last night, they’d finally kissed. It had been brief but intense, a gentle, comforting embrace that had turned into something more as she pressed herself into his arms. Now he just had to get through the day and he could see her again…

  They turned the corner onto Mulberry Road and there it was — the Nazi rocket, it’s enormous fin emerging from the ruins of the house it had levelled on impact. “It’s bloody huge!” Neville gasped beside him.

  He was right. It was much bigger than any rocket Frank had encountered before. He’d seen unexploded Doodlebugs and the newer V-2s, but this was something else entirely. They’d have to let HQ know and take their time disarming it.

  It wasn’t just the size of the thing that was strange — it had a peculiar bulbous shape, too. A circular silver hatch studded its otherwise smooth fuselage. Frank imagined a German pilot sitting inside, then chastised himself for being so foolish.

  “Come off it, it’s just another rocket.” That was Michael. Frank rolled his eyes. He loathed every moment he had to spend with his youngest, cockiest colleague. Michael was already striding boldly up to its silver hull, whistling, for Pete’s sake, while Frank and Neville held back cautiously.

  “Do you think we should get help?” Neville asked. “Get a couple more of the lads down here?”

  “No… no, it’s okay,” Frank said, with more confidence than he felt. “No point in risking anyone else’s neck. Anyway, we can manage this. Michael’s right, it’s just another rocket. Come on chaps, let’s get to it.”

  There was a sudden, loud bang, following by a mechanical whirring. Frank caught Neville’s look of shock and they shared a moment of wordless panic. “Get back!” he yelled to Michael. For once the kid did as he was told.

  The rocket didn’t explode. Instead, the hatch irised open. Frank tried to see what was inside, but all he could make out was something moving in the darkness. And then he started to scream.

  * * *

  Ned had been dozing a while when shouting from outside roused him. He ignored it for as long as he could, but the noise grew louder and closer. Yawning, he shuffled to his feet. He made his way to the window and drew back the tattered curtains. There was no glass — the bombs had made sure of that — and nothing worth stealing so he’d left them un-boarded.

  Something was blocking his view — he couldn’t work out precisely what. It was black and ruffling in the wind. His first thought was that somebody had hung another curtain on the outside of the house. It reeked! Some unpleasant combination of mould and rotten fish. He reached out through the window, but couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the fibrous material.

  Suddenly, it moved, shooting away from the house in the direction of Sidney Street. Gasping with surprise, Ned popped his head out of the window.

  What he saw confused him. It was still again — a shifting, indefinable form, hovering a few feet above ground. Thin tendrils hung limp from its amorphous form, trailing the ground, twitching rapidly. “What the bloody hell?” he gasped.

  The thing moved, slowly this time, and Ned had the oddest feeling that whatever it was, it was turning to face him. A hole seemed to form in the dark mass, revealing glittering silver pinpricks. In a rush of uncomprehending terror, Ned realised that he was looking into a mouth.

  One of the tendrils lashed out. A younger man may have been able to dodge in time, but Ned was slow and old. It coiled around his arm like a whip, rattlesnake tight and disconcertingly warm. It yanked him hard through the window, where he flailed, caught halfway in and halfway out of his house. It pulled again, and this time he tumbled to the floor, cracking his head on the hard ground. He looked up and saw the thing drifting languidly towards him. Terrified and uncomprehending, Ned began to cry. Then, in a rush of tentacles and teeth, he felt no more.

  LOCKWOOD AND SNAITH

  It was beautiful. The car was unlike anything Timmy had ever seen before — a gleaming silver Rolls-Royce. He’d read about cars like this, but never dreamed that he’d actually get to see one in real life. He drifted over, hypnotised, as it purred to a halt.

  The driver’s door opened and a man stepped out. He was tall — taller than Timmy’s dad, at any rate, and old, with a thin scraping of grey hair. He was dressed in an immaculate charcoal suit. He looked important, and not a little frightening too. He carried himself in a way that Timmy had never seen before, but would one day think of as “haughty”.

  He wasn’t alone. His partner was a woman, shorter, with bright auburn hair in a tight bun. She gave Timmy a cool smile and the pair went on their way, heading towards the crowd of military policemen and gossiping onlookers.

  Intrigued, Timmy started to follow, but the woman stopped sharply. Turning on her heel, she raised a hand. He stood stock still and she laughed, before tossing a coin to him. “Clear off, lad” she said in an incongruous Yorkshire accent. “And keep your mitts off the car!”

  Timmy looked at the coin in his hand and gasped. Half a crown! He did as he was told. If he couldn’t follow these interesting strangers, he could at least spend some more time with the beautiful car. He plonked himself down on a crumbling red brick wall, and gazed at it, enraptured.

  * * *

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  Lockwood’s eyes were alight with excitement. “Incredible engineering, just look at it!” He rested his hands on the still warm hull of the rocket. One of the MPs who had let them into the crash site started to say something, but Cordelia hushed him quickly. It was important not to interrupt Lockwood at times like this, not for fear of losing vital insights, but because he would gripe and moan on the way back to HQ about his concentration being broken.

  Her colleague circled the missile eagerly, getting down on his hands and knees at one point to look at it from below, muddying his suit in the process. Cordelia took measurements and made notes in her journal. Of particular interest was the hatch — it was slicked with a viscous ooze.

  Withdrawing a container from her bag, she set about scraping a sample of the slime into it.

  “This is different to any rocket I have ever seen before,” Lockwood announced, leaping back to his feet.

  “That’s it?” said Cordelia. “We’ve been here 20 minutes and that’s your big insight?”

  Lockwood curled his lip in mock indignity and thumbed his nose at her.

  “Come on pal, it’s a V-2 rocket!” the MP declared, unable to contain himself any longer. “You chaps must have seen hundreds of them!”

  Lockwood turned and eyeballed him malevolently. “This, pal, is not a V-2,” he snarled. “Look at it!” he gestured grandly. “The shape… it’s all wrong. Much too large! No this… this isn’t a rocket at all — at least not of the type that we’re used to. This was carrying something.”

  The MP scratched his chin in puzzlement, considered responding, but settled for muttering to himself instead.

  “Can you show us where the bodies are?” Cordelia asked, resting a gentle hand on his arm. There was no point in alienating the locals, after all. He nodded and led them through the rubble to a small clearing, where the corpses lay beneath a dusty tarpaulin.

  “Such a shame. Good lads, all of them. Poor Mickey Sanders. He was only 19. Bit cocksure, y’know, but he had a decent heart.”

  “And you saw it, did you?” Lockwood knelt down and pulling the sheet away from the men. “The thing that killed them?”

  “Not me pal, Millie Taylor and Mr Parker. Probably half a dozen more too. They said it was horrible! This big black monster that ate the lads clean up!”

  “Well that’s evidently nonsense,” said Lockwood, irritably. “Given that their bodies are right in front of us.”

  “Well anyway. They reckon old Ned Fletcher was killed by it too. He was found a few streets away. But he was pushing 80.”

  “Interesting. You have their addresses?” Lockwood pass
ed his pen and journal over to the MP and turned to face Cordelia. “And what do you think killed them?”

  She stepped back from the cadavers and looked at him thoughtfully. “Truthfully, I don’t have the faintest idea. It’s not killing for hunger — at least not solely.” She gestured towards one of the uniformed bodies. “It’s partially devoured this one and simply killed the others. We have to assume it came from that rocket.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Alright then, Lockwood. What do you think?” she sighed.

  “I think that whatever did this is still on the loose in London — and bound to kill again!”

  “You could try and sound a little less excited.”

  He beamed. The effect on his sallow features was slightly unnerving. “But I have been so very bored, of late, Mrs Snaith.”

  She shook her head in exasperation. “Come on. Let’s go and talk to the gawpers.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, and Cordelia was driving out of the city. She was enjoying herself, despite the morning’s events and the now miserable weather. In the countryside, she could almost forget that there was a war on. It just seemed absurd. Passing through tiny villages, unchanged for decades, the horrors of the city felt like images from another life. Only the occasional roar of Spitfires overhead served to remind her of the truth.

  They had returned to HQ shortly after interviewing the witnesses. That had proved to be, in Cordelia’s opinion, a complete waste of time, full of pointless local gossip about one of the dead sappers ‘carrying on with the lass from the Hare and Hounds’. The only potentially useful information they’d gleaned was that both the witnesses described hearing a peculiar ‘whistling’ just before they’d seen the creature — and promptly fled.

  Still, in contrast to most of his mornings — which were usually defined by surliness due to his erratic sleep patterns — Lockwood had been fully animated and eager to talk over the case. She had sat back and let him get it out of his system.

  Cordelia had expected to spend the rest of the day typing up her findings and organising the clean up of the crash site. It was imperative that the rocket — whatever it turned out to be — was taken into safekeeping as quickly as possible. Things were bad enough with this creature on the loose without whispers of a new Nazi super-weapon dragging the city’s already shaky morale down even further. Instead, Lockwood had surprised her. After a lengthy phone call to goodness knows who, he had handed her a slip of paper with a name and address scrawled on it in his crabby, near unreadable, handwriting.

  The name was Rupert Carstairs. Lockwood had been vague on who Carstairs was, or why he was relevant to their investigation, simply saying that he ‘may have some interesting insights’. But then that was one of his many annoying habits. Even after working closely with him for the last three years, she still hadn’t quite decided if he was abrupt and difficult by nature, or if he took a perverse pleasure in making life as difficult for her as possible.

  The address was a manor house, about forty miles out of London. The Rolls pulled up next to a small stone gatehouse. Inside, an elderly man gave her a cheerful wave before beginning the slow process of opening the iron gates. Evidently she was expected.

  The house was breathtaking — an imposing 18th century manor, it reeked of inherited wealth. A man — Carstairs, she presumed — stood waiting by the front door, leaning on a walking stick.

  He was tall, but his hunched posture diminished that. His gaze was cast downwards, looking up only briefly as she approached. He was clean shaven, somewhere in his late thirties. Handsome too, she thought, absently — and felt a flush of muted guilt. He greeted her with a brisk shake of the hand. “Miss Snaith, I take it?”

  “Mrs, actually,” she said.

  He nodded. “My apologies. Do come on in.”

  He led her inside in silence. The house was eerily quiet. Cordelia had anticipated a wife and children, perhaps more servants, but as Carstairs led her through myriad empty rooms, she realised that he lived alone. The furniture was covered in thick layers of dust. Cobwebs clutched at lamps and windows. The building had a sense of slightly gothic decrepitude. She half expected to find Miss Havisham lurking in some darkened attic. She wondered if Carstairs was a widower.

  Journey’s end was a beautifully ornate lounge and a red leather couch. Like the rest of the house it was musty and unloved. The only sign that it was used more regularly than the rest of the building was a pile of recent newspapers stacked high on a small table.

  Carstairs gestured for her to sit and walked over to a drinks cabinet. Clicking it open, he pulled out a weighty-looking decanter and two glasses. Cordelia shook her head. “Mr Carstai —”

  “How is the city?” he interrupted.

  “As you might expect. In ruins. People are still dying every night. They’re calling this ’the baby Blitz’.”

  “Tragic,” he nodded, pouring himself a large brandy. His hands, she noticed, were shaking. “I sometimes look out from one of the balconies and watch the flames on the horizon. Such a shame. A historic city. I do hope there is something left of it when all of this ends.”

  “I’m more worried about the people, Mr Carstairs.”

  “Of course,” he nodded. “I’m sorry, that must have sounded terribly callous. It has been a… difficult few months.”

  “For us all,” Cordelia replied, curtly.

  “Yes, yes.” He rubbed his hands together, anxiously. “Again, my apologies. I haven’t spoken to anyone aside from Gregory and the bloody doctors since my debriefing. I’m afraid my manners are perhaps a little rough.”

  She felt a pang of empathy then. Whoever Carstairs was, he was clearly damaged. She sensed an opportunity to move the conversation in a more productive direction. “Yes, you were serving behind enemy lines?”

  He nodded. “Indeed, for many years. Since before the war, in fact. Readjusting to life in this country has been difficult. I grew rather attached to the people there.”

  “Not too attached, I trust? They are the enemy after all.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Is it such a surprise? They have suffered because of the Nazi regime almost as much as we have.” He lapsed into silence again and studied his hands.

  “My partner tells me that you had a unique experience over there.”

  He nodded. “You might say that. I wondered if I was going mad, to tell you the truth.”

  Cordelia nodded. “That’s common with these kind of events.”

  He looked up at that. “These kind of events?”

  “You might be surprised by the number of peculiar occurrences of late. The enemy has been employing some unusual methods in their attempts to win the war.”

  “Indeed? That is very worrying.”

  Cordelia drew out her notebook and pen. “Can you talk me through it?”

  He gave her a slightly pained smile. “Straight to the point. I had hoped there would be time for more pleasantries…”

  “I’m afraid more lives are at risk with every moment we wait,” she said. “Please…”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” he said. “Very well Mrs Snaith. Very well. But we should start at the beginning. The first thing you need to know is that my name is not Rupert Carstairs.”

  THE SPY’S STORY

  “My name — my birth name, that is — is Oswald Hirsch. I was born in Stuttgart, but my family emigrated to England in 1909 when I was two years old. Being a German living in this country — especially one with wealth — has never been easy, so I changed my name. I am an only child and my parents both passed away when I was young. They endured the same prejudice that I have. They would not care that I have shaken off my old identity.

  “I was recruited by the Intelligence Service when I was 18. A German who is loyal to the King must be very valuable, though I doubt I will be of much use to anyone anymore. In 1935, I was dispatched to Jena and told to wait for my orders. During that time I infiltrated the party, but I did not fight. I am a rather talented artist,
if I do say so myself, and made a good living as a propagandist. I am not up to the skills of the great Mjölnir, but I was treated with respect and admiration, for the most part. And then new orders came though and it was time to shed that skin.

  “I was, of course, aware of the V-2 programme and the construction site — a terrible place known as ‘Mittelwerk’, near Nordhausen. One man would not be enough to deal with all of the horrors there — though I would have dearly loved to try. Still, those were not my orders. Instead, I was required to head to a second location, 24 miles south of Mittelwerk. It was referred to as a “black site”. Nobody knew what was being developed there, except that it was connected in some way to Von Braun’s rocket programme. The speculation was that it was some kind of experimental division. My job was to locate the site, infiltrate it and report my findings back. This would be near impossible for most agents but — if I do flatter myself — I am not most agents.

  “Still, Nazi patrols are not to be trifled with. I took the slow route to my destination in the Thuringian mountains, spending days alone in the wilderness. I let my hair and beard grow out. I dressed in cheap, badly fitting clothes and didn’t wash. Soon I had cultivated my desired image: that of a filthy vagrant.

  “The region is so beautiful, it was not an arduous trek. I slept wild, making my bed in bushes and trees and earthen holloways. I mentally took myself back to my childhood days camping in the grounds of this very house. I quickly came to enjoy it.

  “For the most part I avoided people — though of course that wasn’t always possible. On the few times that I did interact with others, I was treated with suspicion and a degree of fear — quite the contrast to my previous life. It was a risk, of course — if I was caught then I faced being rounded up and marched into one of the Nazi’s hellish camps. Thankfully most people were content to let me aimlessly drift on my way.

  “I was a day out from the black site when I ran into trouble. I was refilling my canteen with water. I think, perhaps, I’d become a little too accustomed to my own company. In recent days I’d been dreaming more and more about coming home. About the estate and whether it was still intact. I was lost in my reverie, when I heard the sudden crack of branches nearby. I reacted quickly, grabbing my kit and ducking into the nearest cover.