Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  The Visitor stared at Dom. He said nothing, but took his phone out again and adjusted the screen and inspected it. He looked at Dom. Then me. Then he nodded.

  “It is by the bison tonight,” he said as we passed.

  * * *

  We stood in some panelled study. Cold hearth and oil paintings and leather armchairs. And everywhere, stuffed animals. Goose and pheasant and dog. Bear and lion and bison. Bristles and feathers cold in the cold room. Glassy eyes stared down at me.

  And then, a thump as if one of them had moved —

  Dom shone the torch in that direction. One wall were taken up mostly by a tall aquarium, the depths of it green and murky, and right at our eye line a pike, malevolent and grinning. Its fins twitched and its black eye gleamed at us. Dom went right up and tapped the glass smartly and the bastard fish turned and swam off.

  “Be good with chips,” she said.

  I stood still. I turned and looked at the bison, and the panelling behind it —

  “Dom —”

  “Here,” she said, leaning over the stuffed creature and putting her palms on the panelling, sliding it back —

  “If it’s by the bison tonight, where does this go other nights?” I said, looking at the dark steps leading away.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Somewhere we don’t want to go.”

  I followed her, under the bison and into the tunnel, onto a set of rails like them in London on the tube. What the? She clicked the lighter on and told me to stay by her. I weren’t about not to. I wouldn’t have come down here on my own for owt. But there were people I cared about down here. But what were we going to do, find them and walk out of there? But Joe and Sadie were coming. They’d know what to do. But it looked like Dom knew what to do. I thought about when we’d first met, not three days ago, her waiting on the road like she knew I were coming. What else did she know? Had she been here before? There were things I knew, things I’d seen in dreams or maybe in real life, some other life, but I didn’t understand them, and again my guts started knotting —

  Voices sounded down the tunnel ahead of us. Shouts and calls in some language I didn’t know —

  The light clicked out and Dom grabbed me. “Here,” she hissed, and pulled me into some alcove in the wall, “Your hood,” and her arms across my chest, “Don’t move —”

  Torchlight swung down the tunnel, and two Visitors passed, boots thumping the way we’d come, and urgent talk —

  — die Organisation —

  We waited until they’d passed.

  “The Organisation,” I said. “Dom, that’s Joe and Sadie — are they behind us —”

  She was watching the way the Visitors had gone, frowning.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Let’s keep moving. It’s not far.”

  She moved away from me, and stepped back into the main tunnel. Then she clicked the light back on and turned and looked at me.

  “It’s not nice either,” she said.

  * * *

  It weren’t, either. The tunnel led into a long, low room, all concrete and metal pipes and air shafts, like bowels of some remote factory. Grey and chilly and hard. In the middle of the room were some ancient wooden block, its surface scrubbed and pitted and grooved, the wood stained with something dark and purplish —

  And the walls of the room lined with glass cylinders, seven foot high and three foot wide, each filled with a pale green liquid, at the foot of each a thin digital display —

  There were a hundred, two hundred maybe. There were tiny versions of the beasts I saw in my nightmares, winged and tentacled and terrible. There were things I didn’t recognise. There were humans. There were parts of humans — severed arms and severed legs and halved brains. Embryos and genitalia. A skeleton.

  A man with a crowd of tentacles where his mouth once were —

  None moving. Dead, or preserved, or in suspension — I didn’t know.

  My stomach knotted.

  And then an idea appeared in me, barging out of the gloom —

  “Dom,” I said. “The torch —”

  “Jordan —”

  “Give us it —”

  I grabbed it off her, and switched it on, and ran along one side of the room, playing the torch up and down. Dom stood watching me. She put her hand under her hat to her forehead.

  I found them. My friend and my teacher, naked and hung in green fluid. Their tubes labelled with their names in many languages. And then — a man labelled TURNER —

  I turned. “Dom, what’s happening here — what — you said they were safe, didn’t you —”

  But —

  She were stood like her feet had put down roots, shaking, staring at me —

  “Jordan,” she moaned.

  Her hands at her forehead. Her whole face shaking. Her eyes glazed over. A pale liquid dribbling out of her mouth. She pulled one hand away from her forehead and part of it came with, molten and stringy like hot plastic —

  And in the shadows behind her summat moved, and the loud crack of a gunshot sounded in the chamber, and Dom dropped to the floor.

  * * *

  He, the Visitor, were standing behind where she’d been, lowering a pistol and holstering it. He stepped forward, and leaned over her body slumped dead on the floor, nodding carefully. Then he looked up and regarded me.

  “Apologies, boy. Your friend, I believe.”

  I still had the torch. I aimed it at him. Thin sandy hair, ugly acne scars on his forehead. I thought he might come for me, but he didn’t. He stayed where he were. Then he took a phone out of his pocket, inspected it, nodding. “We have your other friends,” he told me. “My colleague will be here shortly.”

  I swallowed and flicked the light to the tube I were near. “My father,” I said. “How long’s he been here?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Turner? Oh. Since before you were born, I believe. I forget such things. There are… so many.”

  I moved the light back on him. “Why me?”

  He blinked. “You, boy? There are millions like you. There always have been. Since you humans were able to comprehend abstract concepts.” He smiled. “You developed a consciousness… and there he was, the Great One. And there was the first of your kind. It is the way of such things. Lucifer and God. Do you see? This night, tonight, is merely a scene. A footnote. Your friend here? Your father? Molecules. Consider when a woman vacuum cleans a room. Dust collects in the bag of the vacuum cleaner. So much one could hold it in a fist, weigh it on a scale. But before she has finished, dust has begun to replace that dust. Do you see? You and I, boy, are nothing. There is nothing. Only the Great One.”

  “Cthulhu,” I said.

  He frowned, waved a hand. “Even that name is inadequate. Mere language. The Great One is beyond language. Do you see?”

  “This,” I said. “All this —”

  “Is for the Great One,” he finished. “All that we do. You and your friends and family, boy? Furnishing. Material. Fuel, until the great day when he returns at last.”

  He were still holding the pistol.

  “You’re going to kill me,” I said.

  He smiled. “No, boy. If I killed you now, you would be of no use. No. You will join your friends and family soon —”

  He gestured at the cylinders.

  “…But first. Material, as I said. Clay.”

  He smiled.

  “Know me, boy,” he said. “Know that Küttner remade you.”

  My guts knotting —

  But summat moved behind him, summat yellow, and summat black and heavy swung in the light —

    

  Dominika. Dom, standing over the body of Küttner and the body of herself, holding a torch like the one I were holding, summat pale and molten and stringy stuck to the handle. She frowned at it, dropped the torch, stepped away. The sound of the heavy torch hitting the hard floor echoed around the chamber. The light of it splayed across the floor, pointing to a doorway some steps behind where Dom were.

 
; “Dom,” I said, running to her. I shone my torch at her body lying on the floor. Dark bullet hole in the back of her head. And then at her standing in front of me. She blinked. She looked scared.

  “Is it you?” I said.

  She gazed at me.

  “I think so,” she said. “I can’t remember much.”

  “What —”

  Footsteps from the next chamber. I remembered: the Visitors who’d passed us in the tunnel. Or, passed me, and whatever it were lying on the floor at my feet.

  Or passed me and Dom, and now the whatever were standing blinking in front of me.

  Nah. Here she were, and suddenly I wanted to hold her and kiss her forehead.

  But we were in the bowels of this place and we needed to get out.

  And then Joe were in the room with us, saying “Jordan. Dom. Jesus. Ok. Let’s go.”

  And we went, I followed Joe into the next chamber, a chamber like the one we’d left but all the cylinders here were empty, and the body of someone I didn’t recognise were laid out on the block, laid out next to the body of some huge hairless dog, a rack of cold silvery instruments next to them. And Sadie stood in a doorway. And voices and the pounding of footsteps behind us —

  — die Organisation! —

  Sadie beckoning, calling us — “Here! Jordan, thank God you’re safe!”

  We rushed to meet her. “You first,” Joe said, nodding at her and the doorway and the passage beyond.

  “Jordan and Dom first,” she said.

  “Me first,” I said. I took Dom’s hand. “Come on.”

  “Keep moving,” Joe said. “Don’t wait for us.”

  “What?” I said, and realised he were going to close the door behind us, close him and Sadie in —

  “Wait!” I shouted —

  And turned, and called to Sadie to warn her, but it were too late, the Visitor, the smaller man, he’d appeared in the chamber and seized her, one arm gripping her waist and the other across her chest and hand at her neck and in the hand a cold gleaming blade.

  * * *

  “Do not move,” the smaller man told Joe. “I will slit the throat. You know I will.”

  There we were. Dom and I just a few steps into the tunnel. Joe in the doorway. Sadie in the grip of the Visitor inside the chamber. Voices and footsteps —

  “Dom,” Joe said. “Remember.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He slammed the door behind him, and as he did I heard a scream, and gunshots, and —

  “Run,” Dom said.

  We ran. Along the tracks, the dark tunnel, away from that place. I expected to hear the door opening behind us, yelling and footsteps, Visitors coming to catch us and drag us back to the wooden block, the cylinders, but minutes passed and we were alone in the tunnel. Side by side we ran, torch in my hand, the light of it bouncing in front of us. The air cold and damp and in it a strong stink of petrol —

  “Dom,” I said. “What do you remember?”

  “I think we’re nearly there,” she said. “Joe told me. They came in this way. They found me. They had to explain quickly. They’ve been plotting this for weeks. That’s why they were in the city. And we just walked into it.”

  She held up a lighter. The lighter. Heavy brass in her fingers.

  “We have to be quick,” she said.

  The way out were just ahead. The rungs leading up.

  “Go first,” she said.

  “Dom —”

  “I’ll light the trail and be right behind you.”

  “Let me do it.”

  “Get on those rungs Turner. I’m older than you.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I was seventeen last month.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks. Now go on.”

  I swallowed. I climbed the rungs, enough to leave Dom room to get on, and shone the torch down to her.

  “I’m right here,” I called.

  “Me too,” she said.

  But then I saw: someone else were there, too.

  * * *

  The third man. The third Visitor. He’d crept up in the darkness behind Dom, and now he had her, hand clamped over her mouth, and pinning her hands behind her, and he shouted up at me: “Stay where you are, boy! Wait until I am out of sight! Then go home! You are too young for this!”

  I froze on the ladder. He weren’t holding a knife to Dom’s throat like the other had with Sadie. He needed her for summat. And he didn’t need me. He’d already started backing down the tunnel, back towards Küttner and the chamber and the huge hairless dog and —

  — blanket, bacon butty, cup of tea —

  I jumped off the ladder to the floor of the tunnel and ran at the Visitor holding Dom, and did the only thing I could think to do: throw myself reyt at them, hope for a new idea if I managed to knock him over —

  — he were shouting “Stay back boy!”

  — and he grunted as Dom got an elbow somewhere painful —

  — and she shouted “Jordan!”

  Torch knocked somewhere paces away. The three of us sprawled on the floor of the tunnel. Stench of petrol. The lighter. The third man smoking outside school, and —

  I pulled up and threw myself at the third man and plunged my fist into his forehead.

  * * *

  Like plunging my fist into glue. He howled, and my fingers knocked against something hard and bony, and I pulled my fist out, jumped back, summat on my hand molten and stringy like hot plastic. Dom were nearby. The two of us backed away, and looked at the Visitor prone and floored, shaking and screaming —

  We looked at each other. She held up the lighter. I nodded. We both went to the ladder, and Dom kneeled, and clicked the lighter on, and lit a trail of petrol all the way back where we’d come.

  * * *

  Another pub. There’d be Visitors, we reckoned. We didn’t know if we’d be any safer sat in a pub — I were thinking now that the landlord of the other place had betrayed us somehow — but it were better than running about in the rain and dark outside, and we both needed to sit down and get oursen together. Dom went to the bar. I sat in a corner, by the fire and the window, back to the wall, watching the room in front of me. Somewhere in the Peak, small village pub, just a few blokes gathered at the bar talking about the fire. There’d been another fire the year before, plastics factory out on the way to Manchester. Arson suspected. Drugs. Organised crime. And now this. Won’t be any factories left soon.

  Dom came back with pints. We sat and supped. Rain beat at the window.

  “What now?” I said.

  “We need to stick together,” Dom said. “Your mum. We’ll take her to my house.”

  “Yeah. The Organisation. We need to find them.”

  “Right.”

  The pub had the radio on, and I recognised the song, mum’s song —

  “Dom,” I said. ‘Who — what’s that girl that looks like you back there —”

  She closed her eyes. She opened them and looked at me. “I don’t know what they did to me,” she said. “Do you know what I remember? I remember finding you. And a stuffed bison —”

  “There’s a stuffed bison in your house. And there were one in this place —”

  “And I remember waking up on that wooden block, and Joe leaning over me —”

  “Dom, how do I know it’s you?”

  She put her pint down. She looked at me and we both leaned forward and we kissed in the corner of that pub. It were like I’d been waiting since the world were still forming, before the first humans, before maybe even anything that knew anything, for that to happen. And now here we were.

  And then Dom pulled away and said, “How do I know it’s you?”

  And a bloke at the bar yelled ere yare Tony, change the radio will ya, and a voice called reyt, and the song cut out —

  — and into it cut static and hiss and dead air and then —

  — a voice —

  — Cthulhu fhtagn…

  … Cthulhu fhtagn… />
  … Cthulhu fhtagn…

  Table of Contents

  Dark Tales from the Secret War

  Introduction

  Shadow of the Black Sun

  Bloodborn in Sarandë

  Der Albtraum

  Terror of Tribeč

  In the Shadows of the 603rd

  The King in Waiting

  Servant of the Dark

  The Heart of the Sea

  Danger Nazi U.X.O.

  In the Flesh

  Amid the Sands of Deepest Time

  Concerning Rudolf Hess, Mr. Buckle and the Book

  The Curse of Cthulhu