But that in itself was not enough to get a job done that I considered to be, frankly, impossible. I tried to tell him so in words he might understand.
“Those are merely books,” I said. “It is only research and history. Practically, there is little there of use. Necromancy and demon summoning are only primitive methods of trying to understand the mysteries of the Outer Realms, and I have never encountered a single report that suggests any such attempts were ever successful. Let it go, Churchill. There is no foolproof way of summoning a thing from the Great Beyond, never mind getting one to do your bidding”
“I am not asking for it to be foolproof,” Churchill said. “I am only asking for it to be done. Your country needs you, man. Will you refuse it in its hour of need?”
He did not know me well enough to realize that appeals to base patriotism wouldn’t wash with me. My country was of little consequence compared to the immensity of the Beyond. But, still, it is my country, and Mr. Churchill is a most persuasive gentleman.
I also had a feeling that if I did refuse him, I might not be making a return journey home from this boat shed. I have seen the shark beneath his smile, and his ruthlessness would not allow his secret to be out and abroad and not under his control. I would have to brazen it out with a brass neck until I could get a clearer idea of how I would need to play it to satisfy his demands.
“What manner of spook do you require?” I asked calmly, as if I knew what I was about.
*
He laughed at that, and hid the shark away. He did not fool me though; I knew it still swam in the depths, waiting to surface when required.
“I knew you were a man of sense,” he said. “Come, let’s seal our deal over a drink and a smoke and we can discuss it further.”
He led me to a small office that was more like a foreman’s hut at the back of the shed beyond the submarine propellers. The space was crammed with carpentry tools, blueprints, cameras, and ledgers. And I was not in the least bit surprised to see my box of defenses on the floor amid the clutter, and two tall piles of my books on the table in a space that had obviously been cleared for them. It appeared that Churchill didn’t only know the contents of my library; he had the run of the whole bally house.
At least he hadn’t needed to have his chaps rifle my liquor cabinet or smokes drawer. He had a tall travelling valise at his side, one of those expensive leather and brass jobs I’ve had an eye on for myself. He opened it to expose, not books or clothes, but a well-stocked range of liquor in tall decanters, some expensive crystal glasses, and a long wooden cigar box.
He winked at me as he saw my astonishment.
“Perks of the job, old boy,” he replied. “One must travel in style, if one must travel at all.”
He poured me some rather fine single malt I hadn’t had before from Orkney, and passed me a Cuban cigar that was thicker than my thumb and twice as long, before clicking his glass against mine.
“To business,” he said after swallowing most of his scotch in a single gulp. I merely sipped at mine. I had a feeling I had a lot of work ahead of me, a feeling that was amplified considerably as he outlined his requirements.
“It has to be strange enough to spook the Huns,” he said, “yet not so bloody weird that it’ll frighten my men. I’m going to have to have some crew aboard when we take this thing out of here. They’ll be needed to get it back into waters where it can be found.”
“And what about the original German crewmen? How will their absence be explained?”
“Absence?” Churchill said, and again I saw the ruthless shark under the mask. “Oh, they won’t be absent. We have them on ice in a shed not a hundred yards from here. When we’re ready, we’ll get them back on board and send them off with their boat.”
I was less and less keen on this whole business by the second, but I was in too far now to back out.
“I will need to spend some time with my books,” I said. “This is not something I can undertake lightly.”
Churchill nodded. He poured another large measure of his scotch and topped up mine, although I had as yet scarcely touched it.
“I thought you might say that,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything. The chaps outside are at our beck and call at all hours.”
He went and sat in the chair across the table opposite me and was immediately lost in his thoughts, a fug of cigar smoke surrounding him like fake ectoplasm at a séance.
It was time for me to get to work.
*
I sipped at the scotch and smoked the cigar as I checked to see what Churchill had thought were the books I might require for the task at hand. Not for the first time, he surprised me with his perspicacity and breadth of knowledge. He had indeed thought of everything, from the Key of Solomon to De Vermis Mysteriis, from several medieval grimoires to my working copy of the Sigsand mss. Of course, as I have said, I considered the bulk of this material to be of historical curiosity value only. I had read them all before, but never with an eye to considering them as in any way practical.
I took the time it took me to smoke the cigar to clear my mind of my own preconceptions, and then set about looking for something I thought might have a chance of working, given my talent and expertise, and a large amount of good luck. I had a feeling that I was going to need it.
*
I ploughed through spell after spell, annoyed at myself for agreeing to a course that took me so far from my natural instincts to defend against the very things I was going to attempt to raise. Much of the kind of ritual spellbinding I was perusing is, of course, superstitious mumbo-jumbo; dead men’s hands, blood from a pregnant mare, the skull of a dog killed at a crossroads; all stuff and nonsense. And besides, procuring any such items in time for Churchill’s purposes was going to prove problematic, to say the least. I aimed for something that might be simple, but effective, which proved to be another problem; the old coves responsible for writing these things didn’t really go in for doing anything the easy way.
But finally I settled on something I found in ‘The Mysteries of the Worm,’ a binding spell for summoning a hellish entity that could cloud men’s minds and make them go mad at the sight of it. It sounded like the kind of thing that Churchill might be after, and even if it didn’t work, I had the passage right there in the book to point at, to show him that I’d at least tried.
I was, however, not quite stupid enough to walk directly into a dark place and start chanting a centuries-old demon summoning ritual. I would need some protection. I got up to check that nothing in my box of defenses had been damaged in its journey here.
Churchill looked up as I opened the box.
“Another snifter?” he said, and raised his empty glass.
“No,” I replied. ‘But I shall definitely need one when I return. I think I’ve found what you asked for.”
“And will it work?”
“We shall know one way or another in a couple of hours.”
*
It was mid-afternoon and already starting to get rather dim inside the big boat shed as I carried my box of defenses up the makeshift gangway that led to the flat, main deck of the submarine. My footsteps clanged on metal and echoed, hollow, like funeral bells, all around me. The chill I immediately felt in my spine did not bode well for my state of mind to deal with what was coming next.
I considered setting up on that open, flat surface, but Churchill would want this job done properly. I would have to descend into the bowels of the beast so to speak. That was easier said than done, for there were no obvious exterior hatches. To get inside, I had to manhandle the bally box up the railed steps of the turret, and back down the other side once I got inside. As a result, I was dashed hot and bothered before I even started to investigate the interior of the vessel.
I had enough light coming in from above me to open my box and get out the small oil lantern I carry within it. I lit it up and started to look for somewhere I could set up my circles.
It was immediately obvious that I was
going to have some difficulty. Conditions were cramped inside the submarine, to say the least, and there appeared to be no single spot of floor large enough to contain my defenses. The air inside the vessel felt heavy and slightly warm; it stank, of burnt oil and stale breath. To my left was a tall and wide bank of meters and dials I could make no sense of whatsoever, and to my right long lines of piping and wiring stretched off in both directions down the dark corridors. There was no sound save any that I was making, and even the tiniest movement, the merest scrape of sole on deck, was amplified in whispering echoes that ran up and down the length of the boat.
My lamp did not penetrate far into the darkness, and I was suddenly all too aware of Churchill’s tale of the thirty dead crewmen who had met their end, locked in this metal box under who knows how many feet of cold water. That made my mind up for me. I could possibly have spent more time searching for a better, wider, spot, but now that I was here, I wanted to get things done as quickly as possible and get back to the bottle of scotch and some living company.
As I have said, I was in a tight spot. So I improvised. I stood in the main control area, which was slightly toward the bow under the turret, and set up a pair of small circles in chalk that were as wide as I could make them in the space I had available. Then I transcribed the pentagram, noticing that there was now only just, by a matter of inches, enough space for me to stand with my feet together inside the defenses. That, obviously, meant that my valves for the pentacle were much closer together than I would have liked, with only the span of a hand separating them, but I managed to quickly get them aligned in the peaks and troughs of the pentagram, and switched on the battery pack.
The resultant hum echoed and thrummed through the whole bally vessel, and a wave of cold rushed through the corridors, a cold, damp, breeze as if a heavy fog had descended. My heart thudded faster, and my knees went to jelly before I remembered that I had stood in worse bally spots than this, facing real danger, not imagined spooks. I berated myself for letting the dark and Churchill’s story get to me.
I stepped into the defenses, lit a pipe, and composed myself.
It was time to begin.
*
I will not reproduce the spell that I used here. Even inadvertent reading of these old incantations is thought by practitioners to cause unforeseen and unwanted effects, so it is probably for the best not to tempt fate. Besides, I did not get the opportunity to finish even the first stanza of the chant.
A great wall of darkness rushed at me out of the aft corridor, and all of the valves of the pentacle flared at once, so bright I was forced to close my eyes against the sudden brilliance. I heard the valves whine, and felt again the wave of cold and damp wash over and around me. I tasted salt spray at my lips.
When I opened my eyes again, I thought the brightness had temporarily caused a problem with my sight, for although I stood inside the shining pentacle, and color washed over and around me, there was nothing but black velvet dark beyond the boundaries of my circles.
I felt the weight of the darkness press against the pentacle, as if something solid were testing itself against the defenses. Cold seeped up from the deck, gripping at my ankles and calves as if I stood in a deep puddle of freezing water, and my teeth started to chatter until I clamped them down on the stem of my pipe.
The valves pulsed and whined and the green one in particular was under a deal of strain. The darkness got darker, the cold got colder, and I felt something in my mind, a searching, questing thought, as if the dark was looking for a way inside. I knew I had to resist. I could not succumb, for if I did I would never leave this vessel alive.
I started to recite an old Gaelic protection prayer that had proved efficacious for me in the past, mumbling through my clenched teeth, focussing all my attention on the words.
The darkness continued to press, hard, against all of my defenses. I struggled for breath, felt coldness pour down my throat, salty again, like the sea, and the dark swelled and closed in even tighter.
I summoned up all the strength I had in me and continued the Gaelic right through to its end. I called out the last words.
Dhumna Ort!
The blue valve blazed at my last shout, and all at once the blackness washed away, so suddenly it might never have been there at all. I stood there as the pentacle valves dimmed to a normal level and blood started to pump faster in my veins, warming parts that had been in danger of being frozen.
I had no need to call up one of Churchill’s favored spooks.
There appeared to be one on board already.
- 5 -
Banks stopped reading and shut the journal with a snap that caused Hynd to look up from his cards and raise an eyebrow.
“More fucking demonology bollocks and shite,” Banks said with a grim smile. The sarge went back to the card game, but Banks sat by the stove, staring into space. He didn’t believe his own oaths. It hadn’t read like bollocks and shite. And that was the problem. It had read like cold, hard fact, and he believed every word of it to be true. He still didn’t see how it applied to their situation here. But he was afraid he was getting closer to an answer, one that he wasn’t going to like.
The card game was still going strong, but Banks wasn’t in the mood to join in– besides, he usually lost to the men, either through bad play on his part, or by design to help morale. What he really needed was a stiff drink to settle his gut down, but the nearest scotch was back on the boat, and well out of reach. Instead, he made for the kit bags and began rummaging through the heap of books, notebooks, and papers that had been collected in the hangar room.
It looked like everything was in German apart from the journal he’d lifted from the oberst’s desk. He ploughed through a thick log book of the base operations, looking for clues as to their fate, reading list after list of supply deliveries, personnel coming and going. The fuel consumption figure in particular caught his eye – it was remarkably low, consider the German’s had been on site for many months. He was looking for clues as to what had befallen the base, but there was nothing in the logbook to suggest an oncoming calamity.
He moved on to what appeared to be the oberst’s personal journal, and an ongoing record of the saucer’s construction. The name Carnacki was obvious in places among the German, but Banks’ grasp of the language wasn’t sufficient to the task of deciphering it enough to get any kind of understanding.
He moved on to the diagrams and charts. The blueprints looked remarkably simple, far too simple for something that purported to be a space-going vehicle, and Banks started to wonder if the black-ops propaganda theory might not be the closest to reality. Then he came upon a package wrapped in thick waxed paper. Inside was a series of several dozen black and white photographs.
The first showed two airmen in heated flight suits. They looked alike enough to be twins, young and sturdy, clean-cut blond men with fresh-faced smiles, standing in the hangar with the shining silver shell of the saucer behind them. The second showed the saucer itself, sitting in the center of the hangar, and although there was no color, the lines and circles on the floor beneath it were definitely glowing, looking brilliant white in the photograph. The third photograph showed the two men inside the saucer, which appeared to be almost an empty shell. Banks got a shiver to see that the men appeared to be standing inside individual pentagrams, reminding him all too clearly of what he’d been reading in the Carnacki journal.
But it was the fourth photograph that caught his breath in his throat and demolished the black ops theory once and for all. Although it was black and white, and very grainy compared to modern photographic methods, the image was clear enough. It was a coastline Banks couldn’t identify, but taken from such a height that there could be no doubt, especially after a quick glance through the rest of the photographs in his hands that showed more pictures taken from a great height. The saucer had made a flight. More than that, it had made it into orbit.
He turned the last photograph over. There was a black swastika stamped in i
nk on it, and a date. It matched the date he’d seen circled in red on the oberst’s wall calendar – the 4th of January, 1942.
*
Now that he’d seen the pilots standing in the pentagrams, Banks knew he needed to finish the Carnacki journal. It was too important to be ignored, indeed might be the pivotal key required for understanding the whole matter. He went back to the stove, and back to the journal, trying to quell the growing dissatisfaction in his gut.
He took up again exactly where he’d left off.
*
Now that the darkness had washed away, and I could no longer feel any presence, every part of me wanted to step out of the circles and head up and out into warmer air, and a place where there was a large glass of good scotch waiting for me. But I knew Churchill’s mind. He would want to know more of the nature of this new thing I had found, and how it could be pressed to become an advantage in his favor. And to do that, I would have to face the thing again.
I stood still and lit a fresh pipe. The taste of tobacco did much to remind me that I wasn’t lost down here in the dark, that I was here of my own free will. I was here to learn.
The gray fug of smoke wafted away through the corridors of the vessel. My valves lit up enough of the corridors in front and behind of me to show that there was no sign of the wall of darkness. I knew, of course, that the thing had not simply departed, for it is my experience that once an entity of the Outer Darkness arrives on this plane, they settle, and they are slow to leave.
Operation Antarctica Page 4