Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  "I believe that we are in the vicinity of - perhaps even abutting - Q-Whitehall," Brand explained, and Ness's eyebrows raised. The ex-special forces soldier was, of course, aware of the existence of the government's underground citadel, an emergency control centre rumoured to stretch as far north as Holborn, but he had never possessed sufficient security clearance to be invited in. The exact location of the facility was meant to be secret, but many said that two obvious giveaways to its whereabouts were visible by Londoners on a day-to-day basis. The first was the huge extractor fan outside, of all places, the gents' toilets in the ICA - which the ICA consistently denied had anything to do with them - and the second the fortress-like edifice on the corner of the Mall and Horse Guards Road, reputed to be the main entrance. The whole complex was also said to connect to 10 Downing Street via the nuclear bunkers situated beneath the Ministry of Defence.

  There was no access to any of these places, of course, but Brand cared very little about that, because the academic was standing outside a dusty, half-open door marked with a Q. It led to an office that no one - bar Jenny Simmons, whose footprints were visible in the dust - had stepped inside in decades.

  Brand gazed at its shadowy contents, swallowed, and entered. He felt suddenly as if he had not passed through a mere door, but through the rabbit hole into Wonderland. For months earlier, when as the last incumbent of their office he had learned that funding for Department Q had finally been withdrawn, he had wanted to remove the shelves of occult and wartime memorabilia for his own research, but to his bitter disappointment each and every piece of it had been classified as property of HMG - and naïve idiot that he was back then he had let the government take it. It was something that he had regretted ever since.

  But this. What was in this room more than made up for what he had lost. It wasn't memorabilia, it was a slice of life, utterly undisturbed since the day Alex Nestor and the rest of the team had left it. Decayed, yes - that was to be expected - but the last time the things in this room had been touched, Gracie Fields was a youngster and doodlebugs were dropping from the skies above.

  Brand gawped at files, at drawings and diagrams, and even at an abandoned teapot and cups. He picked up photographs, correspondence, and the fountain pens that had written it. He ran his hand over an old telephone and telegraph machine, imagining each ringing or clattering beneath his touch. For a moment he thought he actually did hear them, as if yesterday were only a thin veil away.

  He sniffed. My God, there was even a whiff of George or Harriet's pipe tobacco in the air.

  "Wha' is all this crap?" Mikey Ness asked, and Brand thought, no! The Scotsman had plucked some report from a desk, given it a cursory glance, and then tossed it to the floor. Brand bent to pick it up almost reverentially, noting as he did that scribbled on its margin were the letters KBO. Winston Churchill used to write that when he was authorising ongoing work, he knew. The letters stood for "Keep Buggering On".

  Brand was about to stand again when he noticed another object resting against the side of the desk leg. It was a truncheon, the favoured weapon of Department Q member Jack Strummer, and it was still covered with the dried remains of blood, skull, hair and brains.

  The discovery of this single implement broke his reverie. By God, what had he been thinking? This wasn't a visit to the cosy London of Ealing Studios and Sexton Blake, this was a return to wartime and a government department that could sometimes be as brutal as it had been dedicated. How could he have forgotten that? He had been a fool, blinded by ephemera. The fact was that while Department Q's primary remit had been to deal with the sordid machinations of Sonderkommando Thule, anyone who had the misfortune to stumble into their occult arena at the time was sometimes dealt with in equally short shrift, as had occurred with the unnecessary death of Annabeth Jardine in Boswell.

  Brand shivered. That poor woman's murder by Michael Magister had happened at more or less the same time as this office had last been occupied, he'd just realised.

  Suddenly he didn't feel quite so nostalgic.

  "Over here, doc," Ness indicated. "This mus' be the gear old sulphur slag found. Question is, wha' the hell are they?"

  Brand turned and noticed that a small workshop was attached to the office, and racked on the wall were four weapons that resembled bazookas, but evidently were not. Evidently because each of them was attached to a large machine below by what appeared to be some kind of power cable. No, not a cable, Brand realised, but a power tube, supplying the weapons not with electricity but...

  The academic stared at the machine, partially covered as it was by a dustsheet. Certain of the components that he could see seemed familiar, and he strained to think where he had seen such things before.

  No, it couldn't be.

  Brand pulled the cloth fully off the machine and ran his hand appreciatively over its dulled metal surface. He smiled to himself, as if recalling a distant, happy memory.

  "Water decomposed into its primitive elements," he recited slowly, "and decomposed doubtless by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as a fuel."

  Ness stared at him. "You ever thought tha' mebbe you spend too much time with your nose in books, doc?"

  Brand smiled. "Uh-huh. In this case, Jules Verne, 1875," he said. "They were words spoken by Captain Nemo in The Mysterious Island. Kind of stuff I grew up on. Verne wasn't to know it, but in a way his rogue submariner was predicting the discovery of Brown's Gas."

  "Brown's Gas?"

  "Just as Nemo imagined, water as fuel," Brand explained, "also known as Rhodes's Gas, Green Gas, stabilised hydrogen, HHOS or hydroxy. During the Sixties and Seventies it was discovered - some like Erich von Daniken believed rediscovered and had in fact been used by forgotten civilizations to craft many an ancient structure or ornament - in a process patented by firstly William A Rhodes and secondly a Bulgarian student, Ilya Velbor, who residing in Australia changed his name to Yull Brown."

  Brand stared at Ness awaiting some appreciation of these astounding facts, but the Scotsman was already turning pale. "Yer know tha' thing where they say you either have an aptitude for science or-" Ness began.

  "Water as fuel!" Brand jumped in. "Just think of it, man! Dirt cheap and with applications far beyond powering engines and vehicles. It can be used for diving without the risk of the bends, for the germination of plants, and for neutralising radioactive waste. It's even reputed to heal wounds!"

  "I thought you said it was a gas, not water."

  "It is, it is!" Brand fulminated. "Just one litre of water makes over eighteen hundred litres of the stuff. It wasn't the process that the two of them patented but different versions of the electrolyzer that instigates it." He thudded a palm onto the machine. "That's what we have here... an adapted version of such an electrolyzer, developed before Rhodes or Brown entered the field, two decades ahead of its time."

  "Okaaay, but why the hell would they want to develop a Brown's Gas electrolyzer down here?"

  "Because Brown's Gas has such unique properties that it has applications beyond the ecological or the medical. Burned as fuel, it has a cool flame that seems to put pure electrical energy directly into whatever material it's applied to. It is an electrical flame not a heat flame."

  "So...?"

  "So, applied correctly, it can burn through anything, up to and including stone. According to the theories of people such as von Daniken, correctly channelled it can punch a hole right through it."

  It was Ness's turn to place a hand on the strange machine. He looked at it with a good deal more interest. "These things were designed to take out our friends?"

  Brand smiled triumphantly. "I believe so, yes. I think what we're looking at are Brown's Gas Cannons. Golem Guns."

  Ness whistled. "Bu' hold on," he said after a pause. "The Clay Resource project was Department Q's own, at least partly because o' Konterman's involvement. Why would they build something to destroy what they cr
eated?"

  "Would you release a golem army without some kind of failsafe?"

  Ness inhaled deeply. "Good point. They were jus' watchin' their own backs." He paused again. "Bu' hang on, when everythin' went pear-shaped why didnae they use these things to destroy the project?"

  "Because I don't think they had time," Brand said. "Konterman would have wanted to seal the site immediately, and these weapons are not quite finished."

  "No' finished?"

  "No," Brand said. He examined various loose wires and panels, "but if we're going to stand a chance we need to finish the job."

  "Those golems could be breathin' down our necks any minute, man," Ness protested. "Do ah need to point out we're Caballistics, Inc, not the bloody A-Team?"

  "We have to try!" Brand insisted.

  "Then I'd get a move on, lover," said a voice from the doorway. "The army's on the move."

  Chapter Eighteen

  The London above might have been about to undergo a critical level security alert, but so far as Brand was concerned the London below had already flatlined and gone code blue.

  As the academic struggled to make the Brown's Gas weapons operational, the small Department Q workshop reverberated with a sound like thunder, and one that was growing louder with each minute. The sound was not that of thunderclaps, the kind that might presage a coming storm, but rather a long, deep rumble that gave the impression that the storm was already here, right on top of him and blacking out the sky.

  But it was not on top of him, and the ceiling was the only thing blacking out the sky. It was, in fact, just the opposite. This thunder came from the ground itself, and Brand could feel it travelling through the soles of his shoes and up inside, as if someone were striking his yellowed bones with a mallet. What made the feeling worse was that he knew the rumbling was not a long rumble at all, but a series of short, heavy impacts, each of which followed its predecessor before the vibration from the other had even had a chance to die down.

  caused by the explosions of earlier.

  Only this time the repeated impacts came not from explosions, but from footfalls.

  Each of those footfalls brought the thunder a stride closer to where he worked.

  No bloody wonder he was having trouble trying to concentrate.

  Dammit, Brand thought as he struggled with the insides of one of the guns. Come onnnn! He had been working for ten minutes, and one thing that didn't help was that his hands and forehead were slick with sweat, which he had to constantly wipe away with his sleeve. Another thing that didn't help - the main thing - was that he was fully and uncomfortably aware that more than half of what he was doing was guesswork. Fine, he had managed to find some partial plans in the stack of diagrams he had come across, but that was all they were - partial - and the rest he was trying to work out on a round peg, square hole basis. Hannah Chapter might call him Brainiac, but the fact was that if he knew science at all then it was as a jack-of-all-disciplines and not a bloody physicist cum tech engineer. These guns were prototypes. There was nothing else like them in the world. Here he was trying to get them up and running on the basis of what he could make fit where! Christ, if he made one mistake they'd blow up in everyone's faces as soon as the trigger was pulled.

  He cursed again as his hand slipped, gouging the flesh on a screw. He sucked the wound and thumped the rack where the guns were mounted.

  "Ah told ya, boney-cock, chomp on yer cigar an' repeat the magic words... ah love it when a plan comes together, ah love it when a plan-"

  "That isn't helping," Brand hissed.

  "Dah-de-dah, da-dee-dar, da-de-da-da, dar-de-da-da-dar."

  "Haven't you got something better to do - like helping the others?"

  "Yer said yerself, man... they've nae chance withou' these things. So wass the bloody point?"

  Brand felt a chill, fearing a repeat of Ness's Exham behaviour, and that was something that they could ill afford.

  "You can't just leave them to-" he began to protest, turning. Then he saw that Ness was being neither idle nor worrying, as he'd imagined. While he had been working, the Scot had salvaged from various cupboards and drawers in the Department Q office a number of rifles and guns of various calibres and some cumbersome but workable walkie-talkies. He stuffed most of the gear into an old backpack before tossing one of the radio sets to Brand. Then he plucked up Jack Strummer's old truncheon and slapped it down forcefully into his palm, sighing with the pain.

  "In case it disnae come together," he said with a grin, "there's always plan B." And with that, he left the academic to his work.

  Ness wound his way back along the corridor and into the tunnels proper, and then along to the junction near the Capek Construction site where the exit routes he had codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry diverged. It was a pity, he thought as he moved, that ear defenders had not been in common usage in 1945, because the further he went into the subterrain the more deafening the slow march of the golems became. It actually vibrated so loudly in some places that it dizzied his senses, and he struggled to maintain balance on his own feet, stumbling twice. The disturbing thing was that as yet the golems were still only advancing along the tunnel from the pit in which they'd been entombed for sixty plus years, and were only now approaching the main part of the system.

  As he trotted past the mouth of said tunnel, he snapped a look into the darkness, and growled in disbelief. These bastards couldnae be quiet if they wore slippers and walked on tippytoe, he thought. Och no. No' a' fookin t'all.

  The Scotsman threw himself down behind a stack of railway sleepers that Verse, Chapter and Simmons were already using for cover, and handed out the walkie-talkies and weapons he'd collected - a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol respectively, keeping the Thompson sub for his own use. Each of them racked or prepared their weapons, but took no further action right then. A degree of timing was called for here, they all knew, if they were hoping to make a mere dent in the opponents that they faced. They had to let the traps they had rigged inflict some damage on them first.

  If the traps inflicted any damage at all.

  The foursome watched the golems as they reached the junction and began to emerge from the shadow, teeth clenched against the overwhelming pounding of the earth and ribbed concrete around them. That their teeth were clenched could not, though, disguise the fact that each of them, the demoness included, were moved to swallow hard and repeatedly as a result of what they saw.

  Because the golems were exiting the tunnel two by two, as if they were passengers disembarking from some giant ark, and though the tunnel could, theoretically, have accommodated a train, these things filled it from its floor to its shoulder-hugging vaultings, their heads ever so slightly stooped against the highest curvature of its roof. Built with legs - with arms - as broad as Verse's torso - and with torsos that were in turn almost as broad as the four of them together - they were moving mountains made apparently of tar and shale that loomed oppressively and unstoppably over all before them.

  God, the look of these things, Lawrence Verse thought. Dark and glistening but solid with it, these were neither clay golems nor stone golems, but something more agile and powerful than either, as if the vile coating they had received - their Samedi's Skin - had somehow interfered with the change that their kiln firing would naturally have caused in them. That coupled, perhaps, with the influence of the unformed.

  That was the worst thing, not so much obvious in the physique of the creatures as in the expression on the faces. Almost Neanderthal in appearance, their grimly-set slits of mouths and stubbed broad noses combined with a projecting forehead to accentuate tiny, deeply set eyes that glowed dully red with a brooding malevolence. It was said that golems did not possess true souls - only the ruah, the breath of bones - but there was something beyond the basic animation of ruah here, a burgeoning intelligence that was at once both dark and hungry.

  The Formless One.

  He could sense that its eyes were staring at him and the others.

  Groani
ng bassly, the two golems who led the destructive parade began to move towards them, footfalls booming as they came.

  "Nobody move," Verse said.

  Nobody did. They all knew that this was going to be the acid test of both their traps and the golems' resilience, and they had to bide their time.

  Wait. Just wait.

  The first of the traps they had prepared sprung as the two golems moved past the centre of the junction area, a great slab of concrete swinging down from the roof where it had been suspended on a vibration trigger awaiting the arrival of something heavy enough to cause its release. The slab swung down and impacted with the golem on the right, ramming the behemoth off its feet so that it staggered and collided with the golem to its left, sending that in turn crashing into the wall. Both the concrete slab and the wall surface shattered, but while both creatures seemed momentarily stunned, neither went down. After a second, they groaned once more and resumed their advance.

  Strike one, Verse thought.

  A second trap sprang, this time a collection of sleepers like those behind which they hid, wired together to form a battering ram-like device that punched out from the wall. Again, though it knocked some golems sideways, they continued to advance.

  Strike two.

  Next came a vicious arrangement of spikes, and Verse shook his head as two impaled creatures simply pulled themselves away from the metal and batted the trap away.

  Three strikes and out.

  But the golems were nearer now, and this was where their timing came in. They could all only hope that together the traps had weakened them to some degree. He nodded to the others and together the four of them stood and delivered a volley of shots into the giants' chests and heads, giving them everything they'd got. Pistol and rifle cartridges, and shotgun shells began to pile on the floor around their feet.