Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  Tekeli-li…tekeli-li…tekeli-li…

  At length they reached a spiral ramp leading up and up to a door in the raw stone, and they passed into a city so old the stones seemed weathered like the sides of mountains. The air outside felt hot and close, like Brazil compared to London. Abel followed Tnoth through narrow alleys, then wider boulevards. As they passed through an open gallery, he glanced at the night sky. The stars there were arranged in strangely familiar patterns, patterns that looked like they might one day drift into the constellations he knew on earth.

  He did not look up again.

  They had outdistanced even the sound of pursuit for what felt like half an hour when they passed through another wide park space. Strange, mushroom-like plants grew in neat rows along pools of violet-glowing liquids. As they crossed, an arc of lightning shot from a rooftop. It speared through the knot at the top of Devon’s body and he fell gently to the earth.

  Abel stopped and turned, gliding toward his friend even as more bolts of lightning fired from the rooftops. They had not lost their pursuers. They had been led into a trap.

  “Don’t!” Knott shouted. He had paused ten lengths ahead, but only long enough to shout. “Your friend is not gone! His mind has returned to your time!”

  Abel looked once more at the body, but there was no sorrow in him for the alien form burnt and blackened, deflating as he watched. This was not the open, easy face of his Australian friend, nor the hands that had stolen treasures and punched shortas at his side. It was easier than he would have thought to turn away and continue the floating run to which he was already growing accustomed.

  He followed the others through tall, narrow alleys and through wide galleries where he dared not look again at the sky. Although this new body lacked muscles, Abel was feeling the signs of fatigue when the group slowed. A door in one sheer rock wall appeared as if on its own and a pincered appendage beckoned them inside. Tnoth led the group through, to a long, low chamber where two more of the aliens waited.

  They appeared to be friends. One was armed, the other was not, but both were watchful as far as Abel could tell. They swarmed together, surrounding Abel, Tnoth and the rest of the party.

  Abel pushed himself away. In his own body, he would have glared but he didn’t know how these eyes worked. He settled for shouting as loudly as his trumpet mouth would allow. “Okay. I’ve followed you and run from the police with you and listened to a story that would sound crazy if it weren’t for the fact that I’m yelling at you through a trumpet that is now part of my body! I’ve been a good sport! I’ve done what you asked! Now, if you want me to keep playing nice somebody has to tell me right now why my friend just died.”

  Tnoth answered. “We are trying to change the course of our future here. If we can find another time where we can start over, we can move the right minds en masse and flee this dark age. We must escape this regime. It has grown to hate all life that is different from its own. There was a time we searched the depths of time for curiosity, not for conquest. We were scientists, not soldiers.”

  “What now?” Abel asked.

  “We wait,” Tnoth said. “The alarm will pass in time, and we can move you to a safe location. You and Arlington Bowles will be with others from your time. When we have learned what we need to, we will return you. We are not monsters.”

  “Not all of us,” Knatt said.

  “You’ll return me? And Devon is there already?”

  “Yes. But we will erase your memories of this place. In our experience, few human minds are prepared to understand what you will learn while you are here.”

  “Were Devon’s memories erased?”

  “No.”

  “And if I die, my mind switches back to my real body? My home body? With all my memories intact?”

  “As far as we know, yes.”

  “What happens to the original mind? The one that was in here before I was? The one that’s borrowing me in my time?”

  “We do not know. It might expire as if it were killed while in its host body. It might be trapped in between. Nobody has found an answer to that riddle though we have searched for eons.”

  Abel thought about that as the Yithians who were in their own bodies spoke in muted whispers. A mind forever in the space between sleep and wakefulness, fully aware but unable to act in any way, living without input or distraction forever.

  Until that moment, he hadn’t known that a Yithian body could shudder.

  A hollow boom echoed through the chamber, the same battering as before. They had been found. Tnoth and Knatt glided toward the entrance, Knatt carrying a strange lighting rifle like the one that had killed Devon.

  “Do we run?” Abel asked.

  “Nowhere to run to,” Knatt said.

  The door exploded inward under a pressure wave that threw Abel tumbling backward. Lightning flashed through the room, then a bright light that froze his mind and his body. He could do nothing as he slammed first into a wall, then to the ground.

  When he could move again, Abel’s alien body lay on the floor next to Arlington Bowles’. He heard no sounds of combat, just the groans of Tnoth and the others and the shouted orders of who were evidently their captors. He shifted from a sharp pain beneath him and found Knatt’s weapon. Knatt himself was in two pieces, one of them draped across the part of Arlington Bowles that would have been legs on a human being.

  “Hey, Arlington,” Abel whispered. The alien body spoke louder than he intended, but the sound faded beneath Tnoth’s screams of pain. Whatever kind of opponent had broken in, they were torturing the prisoners.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re from the future? From my future?”

  “Yes.”

  “You might have heard, there’s a war on. Do we win?”

  “That depends. Which side were you on?”

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  Arlington Bowles nodded his alien head once. Somewhere behind them, the screams of the wounded echoed in the long, low space. Abel gripped the trigger and lightning splashed across the floor to consume Arlington utterly. When the being was burned to ash, Abel rolled to his back and turned the weapon on himself.

  It burned.

  * * *

  The burning vanished and Abel felt nothing. He saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, experienced nothing but his own thoughts. In their absence, he wondered if Tnoth had misunderstood. If minds moved at the speed of light, he would be between for four hundred million years before he once again experienced…anything. Without a body to starve or age, or to destroy on his own, he had no choice but to experience every instant. With no watch or clock, no cycle of night or day, he wouldn’t even know how long he had drifted. For the second time in his life, he wanted to scream but had no means of doing so.

  For the rest of his life, he would never know how long his mind moved, terrified, through the dark that was the utter absence of light and heat, but no experience that followed lasted a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that time.

  His eyes opened to find evening light slanting through the windows of his apartment. For long moments, Abel just lay in his bed revelling in his own senses. The comforting sounds of Cairo drifted up from the streets below, along with their familiar reek. Even the suffocating heat of the desert was a balm.

  “Devon!” Abel shouted, desperate to see his friend after…after what? A dream? A hallucination? Had Devon stayed awake, filling the room with whatever he had smoked the night before?

  Devon didn’t answer. Above the buzz of the city outside, the only noise was a rhythmic creaking.

  Abel rolled to his feet and saw immediately the source of the sound: Devon. The Aussie had looped his belt over the beam in the kitchen and hung by his neck. He was naked, and had scratched a web of triangles into the flesh of his belly and arms. The sight nauseated Abel just as it had when he saw them on the walls of the great city. Their antique table lay on its side below Devon’s feet, one edge splintered from the impact of its fall. />
  “Not a dream,” Abel whispered. His legs went weak and he collapsed to sit splay-legged on the soft rugs he and Devon had collected together.

  The apartment felt quiet, insulated from the sounds of the living city surrounding it, as Abel sat staring at his dead friend. When a sound penetrated the silence, Abel had no idea how much time had passed.

  Somebody knocked on the door. This wasn’t a battering ram, or the quiet rap of a guest. It was the authoritative, insistent knock of a shorta who won’t go away until the door is opened. Abel pushed himself onto shaking legs, crossed the small room and opened it.

  Springbok stood on the other side. He pushed past Abel to stand at the centre of the room. A line of uniformed police filed in behind him.

  “Abel, you and…“ Springbok glanced at Devon, still swinging in the kitchen, “Ah, regrettably I see it’s now just you who is under arrest for the theft of military goods from forward depot Isinglass.” He grabbed Abel with one hand and swung him face-first into the nearest wall, pressing him there while using his free hand to pat him down.

  With his chin resting on Abel’s shoulder, Springbok whispered “Don’t panic, Abel. Come quietly and everything will work out.” He punctuated the statement with a sharp punch to Abel’s kidney. “Sorry. Have to sell it.”

  The man stepped away from Abel and ran one finger along the splintered section of the table. “Pity,” he said without a glance at the body swinging just above his head.

  Abel felt the impulse to run, but he couldn’t gather himself sufficiently to form any kind of escape plan. Instead, he stood and watched Devon swing from the ceiling. His eyes tracked the nauseating triangular patterns in his friend’s flesh until a burlap sack pulled over his own head blocked them from view.

  Rough hands led Abel blind down the creaking stairs and shoved him into a vehicle. This journey in the dark felt hours long, but was a blink of an eye compared to his time in the void. When it ended, more hands rushed him across sand, then concrete and then pushed him into a chair. Somebody pulled the hood off his head.

  Abel blinked against a sudden, harsh light blazing directly into his face. He could make out a wide, meticulously clean space. A shadow approached him through the glare. When it passed in front of the light, Abel recognized the figure: the Yellow Man.

  “Abel….Roxa…” the Yellow Man’s voice was slow and deep, the words spaced as though he were remembering each with difficulty. “I…have…questions…for…you.”

  He leaned his face so close Abel could feel his breath. His eyes were deep and very old.

  CONCERNING RUDOLF HESS, MR. BUCKLE AND THE BOOK

  By Paul Cunliffe

  PART ONE

  IN May 1941, on a full moon and with the conjunction of six planets in the constellation of Taurus, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, took off from an airfield in Augsburg-Haunstetten in his modified Messerschmitt Bf 110. He was a superstitious sort, believed the rare astrological alignment a good omen, but he was also a cautious fellow, so he took a twenty minute detour at the Frissian Islands to avoid British radar before beginning his trip across the North Sea. His ultimate destination was Scotland. His intention was to conduct peace talks with the 14th Duke of Hamilton, to avoid a war on two fronts via a ceasefire with the British. After parachuting down into a field, he was discovered by a ploughman who handed him to the Home Guard who then delivered him to the police. Arrested and interrogated by British Intelligence he was deemed unsound of mind, of no real use for information or propagandist purposes. He spent his days in a prison camp until, after two suicide attempts, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Wales — the locals called him the Kaiser of Abbergavenny — and there he stayed until the end of the war when he was shipped off to Nuremburg and sentenced to life imprisonment for war-crimes.

  That is what the history books will tell you about Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. I am yet to come across one that so much as hints at the truth. None ever mentions his visit to the Savoy Hotel in the winter of 1942, for example, and they certainly don’t recount how he met his end on the banks of a forgotten river beneath the streets of London.

  Yet I know these things happened, for I witnessed them with my own eyes.

  * * *

  It began for me, not with that beetle-browed rogue Hess, but with a tall grey man by the name of Mr Buckle and that blasted book. I was interred myself at the time, a resident of HMP Pentonville in North London, held on charge of looting. Three months into my two year sentence, I was just about settling in at the ‘Ville’ when I was rudely awoken one morning, handcuffed and escorted from my cell to the Governor’s office. The Governor was nowhere to be seen. A lean balding man wearing round spectacles and clad head to toe in grey was sitting in the Governor’s chair, smoking a Dunhill cigarette. He had set his pristine, felt homburg on the desk and had a file of papers and a notepad in front of him. The guard unfastened my cuffs, ushered me inside and closed the door, leaving me alone with the grey man who looked up, though did not stand to greet me.

  “Good morning,” he said, his voice a charmless baritone with the monotonous delivery of a Tannoy announcement. “My name is Mr Buckle and I am with the War Office. I’d like to ask you some questions. Please take a seat. Smoke?” He opened his cigarette case and, although I did not smoke, I took three and put them in my shirt pocket. Tobacco was in short supply on C Wing.

  “What sort of questions?” I asked, lowering myself into the chair opposite him. Buckle did not answer, instead he set his spectacles on the end of his nose, opened the file and peered down at the various papers disarranged in front of him.

  “You are the one they call Worth, yes? The thief? Cracksman, pick-pocket, cat-burglar, con-man,” he took a breath, then added, “Forger, black-marketeer, smuggler?”

  “Amongst other things, yes,” I said. I was trying to lighten the mood but the gloomy fellow did not seem to possess a sense of humour. He raised an impatient eyebrow at me.

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “I’m James Worth. You have your man.”

  “Good.” He locked his pale eyes on to mine, trying to get the measure of me, and I returned the favour. He was an odd looking chap, a thinly drawn charcoal line of a man and a miserable looking one at that, with a too-thin face and a fine brittle blade of a nose. His overall greyness was underscored by his pallid complexion, faded white shirt and the narrow pinstripe of his woollen suit. He eyed me with the sort of vague disdain men of his type, the sort who are born into this world with a touch of hoarfrost about their hearts, reserve for those they think well beneath them.

  “They say you’re the best in the business,” he said now, “that there is not a door on this earth that you can not open.”

  I felt a swell of pride, my reputation having preceded me. “Come now,” I said. “Only an arrogant prig would claim such a thing. I’m sure there are many doors that I can not open. I’m yet to come across one, mind.”

  Buckle nodded, looked back down at his papers, scribbled in his notepad.

  I knew precisely what he was thinking. If I were so capable, if there truly were no door that I could not open, why on earth was I wasting my days away locked up in Pentonville? Why not simply open my cell door and escape? The truth, as unlikely as it might sound, was that I had drawn the attention of some dangerous men on the outside and had decided to remove myself from their radar for a time, to let the dust settle. Prison was not so bad, and with rationing in full force, I ate almost as well as a resident of the ‘Ville’ as I had a free man.

  I did not share this information with Buckle, would not give him the satisfaction of explaining myself, and he did not seem to care. He continued looking through his papers for a time then suddenly jerked his head up.

  “Tell me about yourself, Worth,” he said. “How did you end up here?”

  I was enjoying being out of my cell, enjoying being sat in the airy Governor’s office and did not wish it to come to an end too soon, so I thought to string him along with a goo
d yarn.

  “It is a most fascinating story,” I said. “You see, my father was an American conjurer who travelled all over the world performing for the rich and famous. I could name him, I could name him, Mr Buckle, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair. He’s an old man now and the shock of finding out he has a son so late in his life, well, it could finish him off. He’s long since ceased performing, but back in the day he was one of the world’s most famous entertainers and during one of his many tours of England he met my mother. She was a talented seamstress, employed backstage at the Hippodrome, and they say she was one of the most beautiful women in the whole of London. Well, as you might expect, she caught my father’s eye and he soon took her on as his assistant and they quickly fell in love. Now, my father’s signature trick was a spectacular feat of escapology. My mother would first fasten him into a straitjacket after which he’d be covered from head to toe in a canvas sack, hoisted upside down and suspended on a rope above the audience, as high as the theatre would allow. The rope would then be set on fire and he would have to escape from the straitjacket before the rope burnt through, else fall to his death. Of course, the trick would always proceed without issue and at the very point the rope broke the bottom of the sack would open, confetti would rain down on the audience below and my father would appear from some impossible location in the theatre, the upper balcony or the stalls, unharmed and triumphant to great applause and acclaim. At least, that was how it worked until one fateful night in 1904, at the Palace Theatre in Halifax, when something went wrong with the straitjacket. Mother always insisted a rival must have tampered with it, for whatever reason as soon as father was hoisted up into the air she knew instinctively something was wrong. The escape was not proceeding at the required pace. She hurried up to the balcony but it was too late to prevent the rope being set on fire and she had to watch him struggle and count the minutes, praying to God that he could escape before falling to his death. Then she had a sudden brainwave. She called out to him and told him to swing his body, to set himself in motion like a pendulum, so that she might grab hold of him and pull him safety. This he did, rocking his body back and forth while continuing his escape. At the crucial moment, just as the rope brunt through, he freed one arm from the straitjacket, swung his body towards the balcony and my mother reached out and caught his hand. She was not a big women, not especially strong, but her love for him gave her the strength she needed and she gripped his hand and held his entire weight just long enough for…”