Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  It were dark now, and cold, and rain came down. I didn’t know if the smaller man had followed me out the back of Dom’s house. I were barefoot, coatless, my bag and the diary in Dom’s bedroom, and I stumbled down the alleyway and onto the road, thinking, I have to go back, I have to help Dom, her dad, get the diary —

  I saw a vehicle slowing and pulling up alongside the road. A jeep. Mud splattered up against the wheel arches.

  I hadn’t slept the night before, and it were late, I reckoned, no one out on the roads to help me as I stumbled and fell into the gutter. Flat on my front, rainwater bubbling at my face. Somewhere car doors opened. Feet, voices.

  “Quick. Get him in.”

  “The girl?”

  “Later. Hopefully. If we at least get one of them —”

  Green parkas, hoods up. A man and a woman. They bundled me into back of the jeep, and then we were away, just as a shiny black car turned the corner.

  * * *

  Reckon I must’ve passed out, or summat, cos I can’t rightly say what happened for a few minutes. Next I knew I were waking up, coming round, jeep banging along one of the back roads above the woods on top of the city, rain coming down and window wipers thumping and orange lights of the city blurry in the distance. I could hear the man and the woman talking in the front —

  “We should get out of the city —”

  “We can’t afford to lose Turner as well —”

  “The radio. Try to get some news —”

  And the radio came on in a burst of static, and the woman cursed, rolling the dial — flashes of adverts and talk and music, I heard a fragment of mum’s record —

  “Nothing,” the woman was saying.

  “Damnit.”

  “Let’s get Turner back. He’s been through it.”

  “Hey,” I said, leaning forward.

  They turned, the man briefly before looking back to the road.

  “You okay?” the woman said.

  “Let me out of this car,” I said. “I gotta find Dom.”

  “Your friend? They’ve got her.”

  “Who are they?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “This isn’t the time,” the man said, like he was tired. “I need to get some kip too.”

  “Stop this car and let me out,” I said.

  The man did stop the car, but he turned to face me after, and summat in his face made me sit tight. “Listen pal,” he said. “You’ve not got shoes or coat. The city’s crawling with Visitors. Sadie’s right, they’ll have your friend, and maybe we can get her back, but for now you need to come with us. Or you could get out and walk back into town down that road in your socks. What do you reckon?”

  * * *

  They were from the Organisation, obviously, and Sadie who’d pulled me out of the gutter were related to the Sadie in Mr W’s diary, and the bloke, Joe, his great grandfather had been in the house with Mr W’s grandfather the night of December 12th 1940, the night they’d found aliens in a Derbyshire cellar and killed several Nazi soldiers, others escaping into the hills —

  But I hadn’t quite put it all together at that point. Not sure that I still have, you want the truth. It’s proper strange.

  In the morning I sat with Joe and Sadie in the bar of the pub we’d slept at — the landlord Tony were in on it, I guessed, part of this Organisation — eating bacon and eggs and drinking tea and looking at the rain lashing the moors outside, and listening to Joe and Sadie telling me what they knew, what I needed to know —

  Like Mr W’s mother had written him in 1964, we were not alone in the universe, or this world. Like Joe and Sadie and others before me, and like Dom and Kyle, I’d gone sixteen years without knowing it. And then the visions come —

  “Sometimes you just dream it,” Sadie told me. “Sometimes you write about them. Sometimes you draw them —”

  “They get you in the end,” Joe said.

  He hadn’t seen his dad for years either. He didn’t know if he were still alive or not. And Sadie’s mum were catatonic in a nursing home in Mansfield. She’d grown up normal, she said. But every thirty years or so, the visions come, and then —

  “It’s happening again,” Sadie said.

  “This rain,” Joe said. “I don’t trust it.”

  “What do they want?” I said.

  “Search me,” Sadie said.

  “This thing,” Joe said, leaning forward. He hissed the word: Cthulhu.

  “Steady Joe,” the landlord Tony said, coming over and collecting the plates.

  Joe watched him head back to the kitchen. “It’s outside our knowledge,” he told me. “Some say it’s the devil… Hitler… Stalin… bin Laden… that it can split itself, divide into millions. That it was here before the world, before time —”

  “Some say Cthulhu’s not the enemy,” Sadie added. “That the enemy is mad folk who try to make a pact with it.”

  “Have you seen it?” I asked them.

  They shook their heads.

  “Few have,” Joe said.

  * * *

  They’d found me boots and a coat, and I’d got my socks dry, and had some kip, and after we’d eaten, Joe said him and Sadie were going back into Sheffield, scout around, see what they could find out. I wanted to go too. They shook their heads.

  “Stay here,” they said. “It’s safer.”

  “I need to check up on my mum,” I said. “And Sam’s dad — and Kyle’s —”

  “Give us the addresses,” Joe said. “We’ll look into it.”

  I walked out to the jeep with them. The rain had fallen off for now, but watery grey clouds rushed in the sky, and black birds flocked around the church tower over the road, and the English flag on the tower flapped in the wind.

  “How does this end?” I asked.

  They didn’t know. They were going to see what contacts they could make in the city. They might need to contact London. They guessed Dom and others — Mr W, Kyle — were being held at one of their houses somewhere in the Peak, but they couldn’t guess which.

  “They move around,” Sadie explained. “Underground networks connecting the houses… who knows how long they go on for? Knock on the door, and a millionaire answers it.”

  “Stay here,” Joe repeated. “Keep low. Don’t call us unless you have to. Any problems, find Tony.”

  I watched the jeep pull away and leave the village. I were alone, no idea what to do, and the Visitors had my friends, my teacher, others like them. I spat, and went back inside, back to my room.

  * * *

  But there were nowt to do there except sit on the bed and watch telly, and there were nowt on the telly. I stood by the window looking out the window onto the street. Nowt going on there either.

  I’d been keeping my phone off to save the battery, and trying not to keep checking it to see if I had messages from Kyle, cos there weren’t. And also thinking what if Dom managed to find me online and let me know where she were? Now I turned my phone on again, but the signal were crap out in the middle of nowhere. Keeping one eye on phone I wandered downstairs, into the bar area. The landlord Tony were behind the bar on the landline, and as I passed he glanced at me, turned, stood nodding and finally said reyt to whoever he were speaking to and hung up.

  “Yalreyt lad?” he barked at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. I held up my phone. “Just need to find some signal.”

  “Aye,” he said. “Well, there’s good signal at the café up the road.”

  He stared at me. I didn’t know what else to say so I nodded and left the pub and went down the road where finally some signal popped up. Nothing from Kyle, text or online. What were the chances Dom would find me? Did she even know my second name? Finally I wrote online mesen:

  kyle mate its jordan. where r u. worried mate. gimme a shout yeah. im not at home tho. im in the peak —

  And used online maps to find out where I were.

  And then thought, wait a minute, daft sod.

  I stood. A dark car pass
ed by, windows smoky dark too and water droplets collected on the dark bonnet, and for a second my stomach went all frozen and knotty.

  Then I thought of summat else.

  I went back to my message and finished off:

  im staying at the kings head pub in ashton. room 16. come find me if u can mate.

  * * *

  If the city really were crawling with Visitors, and if they really did have houses all over the peak, I reckoned they wouldn’t take long. And then maybe I’d have a chance of finding Dom. And Kyle. And Mr W.

  I went back towards the pub to tell Tony what I’d done, and maybe he’d be able to contact Joe and Sadie, and maybe they’d all tell me I were brave but stupid, but what else were I gonna do?

  The pub were closed, front doors barred and locked, windows dark.

  Now what were going on here? It were lunchtime, place ought to be open and people coming in for butties and pints and that. I turned and looked back at the street. No one about. No lady walking the dog, no bloke in a suit running back to the office in the drizzle that’d started back up, nowt. There were a little newsagent type shop down the road. I jogged over to it and went in and a bell rang and the bloke behind the counter looked up at me from his paper.

  “Ayup,” he said.

  “Ayup.”

  I stood there like a muppet.

  “Help ye son?”

  I shook my head. “Naw.”

  Long as there were someone int village —

  The bloke stood staring at me.

  I mumbled sorry, and went back out into the rain, thinking about what I’d put online, were I totally mad, or what? I were knackered even though I’d had some kip, and not thinking properly, and —

  And then I saw her:

  Figure getting out of a car down the road. Lass in a yellow anorak.

  * * *

  “Dom!” I yelled, pegging it down the road. “Dom!”

  She were closing the car door, and turning —

  I tripped, stumbled or summat, and again fell and sprawled into the gutter and the rain. And then some mum in a yellow anorak were leaning over me, saying yalreyt love? and helping me up. It weren’t Dom after all. I felt like crying. Why’d Joe and Sadie buggered off and left me in this village on my own? I needed to get back to Sheffield, make sure mum were okay, and if the Visitors came snooping round again, well balls, I’d call the cops and —

  The mum had helped me over to a bench and got me sitting down. My head banged. I’d hit it, falling. I put fingers to my forehead and inspected them. Blood.

  “It looks nasty that,” the mum commented. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”

  I mumbled something even I couldn’t make out mesen. Inside. Bed and a blanket.

  “Nice cup of tea and a bit of TCP on that,” the mum were saying.

  A cup of tea would be reyt nice, I thought. I stood, wobbling. And then saw the woman’s car — black, shiny, smoky black windows, water droplets gathered on the black shiny bonnet —

  “Okay then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Well my house is this way,” the mum said.

  “Nah,” I said. “I don’t need to go to your house. Let’s go wherever you’ve got them.”

  She blinked. “Got them — who? I don’t —”

  She smiled, nervously. She’d taken a step backwards.

  “Perhaps you should get on home love,” she said.

  * * *

  I had a couple of quid in my wallet, enough for a cup of tea. I pulled my hood up, trying to hide the cut on my forehead. Didn’t want anyone asking questions. But there were no one else in the café, and the lass behind the counter just chattered about the weather while she got my tea. I took it to a table at the back, and sat facing the door, and sipped my tea listening to the radio and watching steam mist up the windows.

  And trying to make sense of what was happening, and trying to think what to do next.

  There were nowt else, I reckoned, apart from looking back in at the pub and finding Tony and waiting for Joe and Sadie. Or, somehow finding my way back to Sheffield and going home and making sure mum were okay and getting to school like none of this had ever happened.

  Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe this were all a dream and any minute I’d wake up in my own bed, under the blanket, and stretch and yawn and think about a bacon butty and then later on remember the weird dream about the monster with wings and tentacles —

  I blinked. I had dreamed of that thing before, I knew it. Massive great demon the size of buildings, sleeping in dank green caves deep beneath the earth. And stone slabs inscribed with awful letters. And soldiers with eyes burning red. And ugly black towers hunched on the sides of mountains. And prisoners in glass tubes —

  I stood up. Dom and the others.

  I went to the bogs at the back of the café, and inspected my forehead. It were a graze, really, and the blood had stopped. Nowt else wrong with it. I took a deep breath. I needed to go and find my friends.

  But when I went back into the café, one of them had already found me.

  * * *

  She were saying no time, no time, let’s go, we have to go, and running off out of the village so I could barely keep up, along back roads looking over rivers and the edges of hills and past another pub where one yellow light shone in the evening, finally the road narrowing so there were no cars and no people and no houses. It were dark now and raining again and the rain spattered the leaves and a wind came and shook the trees too. Dom’d got a torch from somewhere, fat black thing size of her forearm, but she didn’t switch it on — “Gotta be careful, they might see us —” and we stumbled on into the night for best part of an hour. I got that she’d managed to escape, and found my message online, and found her way to the village — but they had my friend and teacher, and her friend too, and she needed my help, and the Organisation were on their way —

  “You’ve seen them? Joe and Sadie?”

  “Yeah,” she said, adjusting her hat again. She were wearing some beanie hat pulled low over her forehead and now and again she adjusted it and pulled at it and scratched under it. We’d stopped and stooped by a stone wall where the road rose up and overlooked a valley. “Okay look,” she said, pointing. A reservoir, a pair of helicopters, dark shape of a house. “See that house there?”

  “That’s where they are?”

  “Nope. That’s where the tunnel is.”

  Over the wall, and down a damp ferny slope, past signs saying ‘PRIVATE’ and through barbed wire fencing.

  The dam at the edge of the reservoir, turreted building marking the boundary, and onto the path. Keeping low we ran across. Weak light from somewhere hummed on the surface of the water and the water creaked in the rain and —

  I stopped. I saw it. I had dreamt it. Great leathery beast rising mouth first from the deep, the suckered tips of tentacles next, emerging obscenely, curling their way into the night like blind animals, a pair of cruel eyes rolling open, black water rolling off them. Them eyes blank and empty but witness to millennia. To all of time. To a churning soup of bacteria and atoms. To the earth sloughed in ice. To the birth of Christ. To Europe on fire —

  “We got to go,” Dom were saying. “Come on.”

  “I can see it Dom.”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “It’s like it’s down there. It’s everywhere.”

  I were thinking, it’s like when we dream bad dreams, we dream of it, but it takes different shapes, and when our bellies knot in fear, it’s behind us, and when we think dark thoughts, it’s inside us —

  Cthulhu fhtagn

  I felt like I might sway and fall and fall beneath the water and sink to the bottom like I were made of stone. And then, a tentacle in the deep —

  I shook my head. I stepped forward. Dom were staring at me.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  * * *

  The house were surrounded by rhododendrons, and Dom led me right into the centre of the deepest thicket.

  “Th
e house is locked,” she said. “This is the way in.”

  “Dom, how —”

  “Shush,” she said. “I need to find —”

  Some sort of hatch buried in the ground. Twists of a wheel, and it were up, scrape of stone and steel, and Dom clicked the torch on, tucked it into the waist of her jeans, dropped into the hatch and onto some ladder sunk into the walls. “Follow me,” she called up, already moving. “Watch for the light. Close the hatch after you.”

  I didn’t have a choice. I followed her, and found the wheel on the other side of the hatch, and swung it shut, and made my way down to where the light were. White beam coming up to get me. Dom in the shadows behind it. She held the torch right at my face as I approached —

  “Bloody hell Dom —”

  “This way,” she said.

  “A tunnel?”

  “Not yet. Okay. Wait.”

  The light went out. Pitch oily black. I stood, stomach knotting —

  “Dom!”

  Another light, much dimmer, flickering — a cigarette lighter — Dom in a stone archway —

  “This leads into the house,” she whispered. “There’ll be guards. Don’t say anything.”

  “Dom —”

  “Shush.”

  I followed her along a dark passage, up an unlit flight of stone steps, until she clicked off the lighter as dim lamplight seeped around a corner. There were just one guard, a Visitor in a dark overcoat and a dark gun strapped under his arm. Nowhere to sit and he just stood by a door under one weak light fixed to the wall, engrossed in summat on his phone. But he heard us approach, and he slid the phone away and straightened up and regarded us.

  Dom spoke before he could.

  “I have Turner,” she said. “I am taking him to Mr Küttner.”

  That name — it were like hearing a corner of a song in Maccie’s, and thinking reyt, what’s that tune now —