The Dulwich Horror and Others
Date: 2015-11-15 14:29:51+00:00
Description: nspired by the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, this stylish new collection of adventure stories fizzes with wit and invention. They can be enjoyed separately, but read them in one sitting and the pieces fit horribly together into a larger and more terrible nightmare. † These tales constitute David Hambling’s initial foray into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction. The fertility of imagination, the crisp character delineations, and the smooth-flowing prose that we find in these seven tales leave us wishing for more of the same, and Hambling will no doubt oblige in the coming years. For now, we
Publisher: PS Publishing

THE DULWICH HORROR & OTHERS

by

DAVID HAMBLING

Foreword by S. T. Joshi

For Caroline, of course

Foreword

In the decades—long history of pastiches of or elaborations on the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, one of the most interesting phases was what might be called the “British invasion” of the 1960s, precisely paralleling the British invasion of American rock music led by The Beatles and other bands. In our realm, such writers as Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Colin Wilson led the charge. Campbell, at the tender age of fifteen, submitted his earliest Lovecraftian tales to Arkham House’s August Derleth, who quickly resolved to publish them in a book; The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) appeared when Campbell was eighteen, although these early tales could hardly have presaged the titan who would emerge in the following decades—a titan whose collected weird writing may now surpass Lovecraft’s own in overall substance and merit. Lumley, a decade older than Campbell, began publishing his Lovecraftian work in the later 1960s, and by the 1970s was writing fast-paced adventure novels such as The Burrowers Beneath (1974) and The Transition of Titus Crow (1975). Wilson, a respected philosopher, had spoken harshly of Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream (1961), and was challenged by Derleth to write his own Lovecraftian tale; he did so with The Mind Parasites (1967) and other works. In later years, such distinguished British writers as Neil Gaiman, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, and David Langford have contributed to the ever-growing universe of Lovecraftian fiction.

We can now add David Hambling to that list. A well-known journalist who has written for the Guardian and the Economist, Hambling has produced, in the volume you now hold, some of the most distinctive and intellectually challenging neo-Lovecraftian stories in recent decades. In a sense, Hambling fuses the best elements of his British predecessors—Campbell’s deep knowledge of Lovecraft, Lumley’s thrilling narrative pace, Wilson’s philosophical depth. Along the way, Hambling makes more than a few tips of the hat to such writers as Arthur Machen, Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Bernard Russell, and a number of others.

Let it not be thought, however, that Hambling’s work is a mere echo of his predecessors. These tales are not simple pastiches; they are genuine and provocative elaboration’s of the themes, motifs, concepts, and imagery found in some of Lovecraft’s greatest tales, from “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to The Whisperer in Darkness,” from “The Dulwich Horror” to “The Shadow out of Time.” Hambling’s journalistic experience has no doubt contributed to the acuity of his character portrayal, and his profound knowledge of science and philosophy allows him to hint at Lovecraftian cosmicism while simultaneously conveying the emotional plangency of human beings brought face to face with their own insignificance.

And just as Ramsey Campbell took Derleth’s advice and fashioned a British analogue for Lovecraft’s constellation of imaginary New England cities, devising the distinctive Severn Valley towns of Brichester, Severnford, and Goatswood, so Hambling has enlivened the South London suburb of Norwood with a series of narratives that stretch from the later nineteenth century to the present day. It is certainly convenient for Hambling that the town of Dulwich—so close in spelling to Lovecraft’s central Massachusetts village of Dunwich—is in the general area. The tale that opens this book, “The Dulwich Horror of 1927,” is not only a take-off of “The Dunwich Horror,” but it deliberately alters the spelling of Lovecraft’s baleful Whateley family, since Hambling knows that the spelling Whatley is more typical of British usage.

These tales constitute David Hambling’s initial foray into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction. The fertility of imagination, the crisp character delineations, and the smooth-flowing prose that we find in these seven tales leave us wishing for more of the same, and Hambling will no doubt oblige in the coming years. For now, we can sit back and relish a brace of stories that not only evoke the shade of the dreamer from Providence, but which that dreamer himself would have enjoyed to the full.

—S. T. Joshi

INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO SOUTH LONDON, MR. LOVECRAFT

The high point of Norwood park gives a spectacular panoramic view of London. The BT Tower, the wheel of the London Eye, the dome of St. Paul’s are spread out in front of you like toys, with a growing cluster of new skyscrapers: the Gherkin, Shard, Cheesegrater, and the rest. But look closer. A trick of contours, lighting, and terrain darkens the stretch between you and the City. It’s as though there were shadows, reaching out from Norwood. It can be a persuasive illusion.

Norwood, once the great North Wood, has a dark reputation. The area now overlaps Dulwich, Gipsy Hill, Penge, Crystal Palace, and Sydenham. It was a sparsely inhabited forest until the nineteenth century, whose trees sheltered gypsies, smugglers, highwaymen, and fugitives. But there have always been a few settlements, some dating back to prehistory. The area at the top of the hill is Penge. This place name sounds strange and comical to modern ears because it’s a Celtic original, predating the more familiar Saxon names that dominate the rest of England. Londinium was a new city created by the Romans at the river crossing, but the Celtic settlement of Penge or Pen-Ceat, “Hilltop-Wood,” was here centuries earlier.

The past comes bubbling up here from great depths. There are spas and springs and wells, many of them going back to mediaeval times or before. They were sacred to pagan gods before the saints took them over. There is the River Effra—another Celtic name, of unknown etymology—a buried tributary of the Thames which has run underground since Victorian times. You can still follow the course of the Effra and hear it rushing and gurgling beneath manhole covers and gratings.

The ancient shadowed wood has seen its share of dark dealings, and they form one strand that links these stories. But something else also joins them together.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is hailed by many as the greatest writer of horror tales in the twentieth century. He took up where Edgar Allan Poe left off and brought science into the horror genre. Many of his stories feature the “Cthulhu Mythos,” an invented mythology of bizarre and terrible beings. These are not supernatural, but so alien as to seem so, inhabiting the planet long before man came along. Some of them remain, dangerously easy to call up or disturb by accident. Lovecraft encouraged other writers to take up the Cthulhu Mythos, and there has been a living and growing (not to mention writhing and seething) body of stories ever since.

Lovecraft was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, a part of the US which prides itself on its antiquity. His stories feature old houses and family lineages with dark pasts. From a British perspective this is all wrong: in America, history barely runs back more than a few centuries. Anything truly eldritch belongs in the old World, where you can go back a thousand years, and then another thousand years, and keep going, a place where building work turns up worked flints, where the genes of the locals can be traced back to the Palaeolithic.

Lovecraft was proudly Anglo-American, with English-born grandparents, and wrote fondly of his imagined homeland and his Anglo-Saxon forebears. His roots are here, and Lovecraft’s weird creations are well reunited with their true source.

There are also reasons for wanting to update his Mythos. Lovecraft was an enthusiast for modern science and a keen astronomer, incorporating the latest discoveries into his work—continental drift, now an accepted fact, was still a controversial new theory when he used it in At the Mountains of Madness. Most of those who followed him have, sadly, ignored the science element and instead presented routine horror dressed up in Mythos clothes, an approach untrue to the spirit of Lovecraft.

Science has, of course, moved on a bit since the 1920s and 1930s. In some tales Lovecraft refers to Piltdown Man, then believed to be the missing link between humans and apes. In fact, Piltdown Man was a hoax fabricated out of a human skull and the jaw of an ape, but the fakery was not discovered until 1953. Many other new discoveries also affect the Mythos and just need the hand of a writer to weave them around it.

Finally, Lovecraft’s works are marred by racism. This was not unusual for his time and class, but it makes uncomfortable reading for a modern audience. You should not have to apologise for reading a book, and the Mythos does not need references to ‘inferior races,’ or the anti-Semitic asides that infest Lovecraft’s work. Similarly, female characters are largely ignored in his works, and they deserve their chance.

Hence these seven tales, each inspired in different ways by Norwood and Lovecraft. The seven can be read individually, but they also fit together with recurring themes and characters. Like a jigsaw, when combined they present a bigger and more dangerous picture.

THE DULWICH HORROR OF 1927

Dulwich, South London

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will
be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

—Charles Mackay, “Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds”

And even madmen manage to convey

Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

—W. H. Auden, “The Useful”

I

That lost world of 1927 is a Fantastic dream, an impossible place. You can imagine distant worlds and alien landscapes, but you cannot imagine England as it was in my youth. Change breaks over the world like waves on a beach, erasing the sandcastles which seemed so solid. But even in this age of miracles, this account is published as fiction. If I called it a memoir, you would discard this book as the work of a lunatic. But if you will read it as fiction, then please read on. And you may well find yourself asking whether these horrors truly are wholly imaginary.

What a brave, fresh, vital time it was to be alive! How proud we were of our new era. We were too young to remember the war to end wars. Whatever a handful of free-thinkers might say, few truly doubted that mankind was the apex of creation, that Earth was the sole abode of life, and that Britain was its crowning glory. Order, logic, and timeless values prevailed. We basked in the sun and ignored the shadows.

Now the Empire that astonished the world has gone. Scientists assure us that humans are a mere twig on the tree of evolution, and astronomers listen in to radio waves from the universe, expecting signs of other civilisations. Darker, much darker forces are moving in the world than we dreamed of. The land fit for heroes is set to be obliterated in another war, and what comes out of the rubble will not be bright or gay. We can only hope it will be human.

Let me take you back to the perfect summer, that last mad summer of my youth. Here is a picture of us in Dulwich Park, enjoying one of our frequent picnics. Tom took the picture of course, Tom the famous photographer, his talent obvious even in a banal group portrait. He captured me with cruel exactness. I’m smiling as though I have just delivered some nugget of wit and wisdom, gesturing with an empty champagne glass. My hair is wild, I sport the tortoiseshell glasses and worn tweeds of a radical intellectual, and at my side is a leather satchel bulging with my latest reading. How often had I produced a volume mid-conversation, deftly opening it at a bookmarked page with “Well, according to Gödel …”—or Watson, or Marinetti, or whichever new idol I had discovered that week. How tolerant my friends were.

Tom arranged us for the picture; looking now I can see how carefully it was done. Jovial George is there at the centre of the group. He is seated on a wicker hamper, grand and in charge as always, a bottle of champagne in each hand. George had been middle-aged since he was fourteen. Jessica is close behind me, a healthy and athletic girl, serious behind her spectacles. Beside her is Sophie, sleek and plump, cigarette holder in her outstretched hand, smiling wickedly at Tom as though she knows something—which doubtless she did. Sophie knew everything. And there is Daniel, our pet mathematician, stooped awkwardly, with Daisy; she is in the corner, but her beauty is a magnet that traps the eye after you have scanned the rest. There were a couple of dozen of us all told, but the seven of us were a group within a group. The others might have thought they were in the frame, but Tom cut off those surrounding us to unidentifiable feet and shoulders. We were the ones that counted, and how we knew it.

All old photographs of young people have a bittersweet savour: “Oh, if only we had known then…” This is worse; this is a group smiling on the deck of the Titanic, like the formal photograph my father showed me of the officers in his regiment taken in 1914. He counted them off:

“A sniper got him. He died going over the top. He was killed by a shell during a bombardment. He was caught on the wire. He just disappeared…” he said, going through the whole row. Except that nothing as clean and quick as machine guns scythed through my friends, nothing as friendly as a human foe.

We were in a hurry; we were fast people living in a streamlined age. We wanted to set the world to rights as soon as possible. The General Strike of ’26 had been a thrilling diversion: it changed nothing, but proved that change was in the wind. We did not know whether the answer was electrification, socialism, or spelling reform, and we pursued them all. Pacifism, the unconscious, and the latest findings of anthropology were all grist to our mill. We devoured the latest journals greedily, argued over Futurism, the New Woman, vitamins, and aeronautics. We expected knowledge would bring enlightenment. We did not think it would lead to undreamed-of horrors.

We all believed in something.

We were George’s people, and his passion was political. He saw, as many did, the need to break out of our national paralysis. He spoke approvingly of the young Communists in Russia, the Italian Fascists, and the Kuomintang in China. He said it was not their ideology but their youthful drive he admired, the drive that England so badly needed. Any idea would do for him, so long as it blew in the direction of the new; he could catch its wind in his political sails. He was a true opportunist at a time of enormous opportunities. We all believed he would one day be Prime Minister.

Tom believed in the power of photography. He thought that the gaze of the camera would uncover the truth which would set us all free. If only there had been a cine camera at the Crucifixion, there would be no arguments or religious dogma; how different the world would be. Wars, injustice, and poverty would be impossible when people could actually see what was happening for themselves.

Jessica believed in the power of the built environment. Better housing, better cities would change us all, and women in particular. She was a powerful swimmer and a ruthless tennis player, and wanted women to become strong and vital and independent so they could mend the world. That would need more swimming pools and tennis courts, as well as workplace nurseries and rooftop gardens.

Daniel, of course, believed that ultimate truth could only emerge from mathematics. He only believed in numbers. He had a remarkable talent for killing debate stone dead with a well-directed statistic or mathematical aperçu.

I believed more than any of them. For me, the great achievement of the age was Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, published a decade or so earlier. That towering work built the foundations of a new rational world by showing how pure mathematics could be used to support logic. My dream, which I hardly dared to speak aloud, was that it could be taken much further. From this first foundation a whole unassailable logico-mathematical empire could spread out, conquering law, politics, economics, art—the whole span of human activity. Just as fire and the wheel had transformed our world, so could this blazing new intellectual torch. I could see a future where rational thought annihilated greed, ignorance, and stupidity. What mattered was the drive forwards: the enemy was dogma and rote learning…Forgive my rambling. Even now I still feel an echo of that old thrill. Even though that dream died forever with my friends.

Daisy, dear, pretty Daisy, believed that we were all fantastically intelligent and wonderful. She wanted to be an artist and had some skill at calligraphy, but lacked coherent views on art. She was not an original thinker and never had an idea of her own, but believed implicitly in the rest of us.

As for Sophie, it was harder to say. She had perhaps the sharpest brain, and the sharpest tongue, of any of us. She was always quickest to say when anyone was talking rubbish, which we very often were. She could argue a case in any field, artistic or scientific, and from any side. Her rigorous interrogation kept us on our toes. She was the only one who seemed to escape unharmed, but who ended up suffering the worst of any of us.

A pack of lawless intellectual hooligans, our contempt for anything old or simply not modern was breathtaking. We thought we were the terror of the establishment. We were all poised somewhere in semi-employment as we sought those magic doors into the world that would surely open for us. In the meantime we threw cocktail parties and drowned out dissent with jazz records on the gramophone. The more we drank the wittier and more perceptive we became.

I had come down from oxford and was engaged as a tutor at Dulwich for a few months. George had arranged it; his father was on the board, and he wanted to keep the group of us together. I was considering my future. A doctorate was in the cards, but settling on a Ph.D. topic was a substantial undertaking.

In the meantime I was a tutor, a remedial teacher really, for boys who were failing exams. Dulwich was the perfect place for us. It exists in a kind of bubble, an exquisite arrangement of lovely architecture and lawns set in the middle of the South London suburbs. The school, with its expanses of smooth cricket pitches and stately Victorian Gothic buildings, might have been placed there by some godling who wished to transplant a piece of the Home Counties to this suburban wilderness. Dulwich is a world of its own. Or perhaps we all live in our own isolated bubble of perfection at that age. I was no great hand at teaching, but once out of the classroom and chatting to someone nearer their own age, the boys proved capable enough. Most of them were bored at school, but the slightest spark of enthusiasm seemed to ignite them. Once I showed them how Newton’s equations could be used to predict the trajectory of a space rocket, or how probability theory applied to gambling, they took off on their own.

I rented a room from Mrs Hall, a motherly woman in her late fifties. Mr. Hall was a retired sailor. They had two grown daughters in North London and a number of small grandchildren who were close to Mrs Hall’s heart and whose pictures overflowed the mantelpiece. They were pleasant enough lodgings. Everything was, you might say, shipshape and Bristol fashion. To me the décor was rather late Victorian and cluttered with unnecessary knickknacks, down to the sampler proclaiming Home Sweet Home over the fireplace. I would have liked something more severely modern, but it was comfortable and I suppose home-like.

Mrs Hall cooked me a full breakfast every morning, ironed my shirts, and generally made a fuss of me. I was even allowed my own key, for those occasions when I came back late and merry from some gathering. Mr. Hall said little but was friendly enough in his way.

A large parrot completed the family group. There were many odd souvenirs of Mr. Hall’s seafaring days and this was one, like the ebony elephants and inlaid Chinese boxes. It was a red macaw called Long John, and he was to play an unexpected and dramatic part in my narrative. He was allowed to fly freely round the house, and his perch was moved from room to room so he could be with the Halls. He occasionally emitted loud squawks and random words to punctuate the conversation.

I was nervous of that parrot with his scaly legs and long claws. He would look at me fixedly, blinking slowly, reminding me of an old Latin teacher I had who had that expression when formulating some stinging remark on a slow pupil. That beak looked wicked, and I jumped every time he shifted towards me. He was usually inconspicuous, but squawked like a klaxon at odd intervals. Mr. Hall was inordinately fond of him and told me the parrot was a good talker.

Mr. Hall had acquired the parrot in his seafaring days from a bar owner in São Paulo, a Russian who lived in fear of pursuers whom he dared not name. The parrot was his sentinel; Mr. Hall said it could bark like an Alsatian if it saw a burglar. Regular contact with sailors in the bar meant it had also learned profanities in every language on earth.

“If you swear, he could swear back to make your ears drop off,” he said proudly. “Swear at him in Hindoo or Eskimo and he’ll give you it right back in the same language, with some extra.”

I did not see much evidence of intelligence. Mr. Hall would hold up a peanut and Long John would say “Pee-nut!” quite distinctly before it was given him, but those were about the only words I ever heard him utter. Mr. Hall thought this proved his superiority.

“But he’s a wise old bird; he knows when to keep his trap shut,” said Mr. Hall. “He could tell you some tales, he could. But he don’t.”

I was even rude enough to tell him about the Russian Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes: show the parrot a peanut and you get one reflex, swear at him and you get another. It was all perfectly mechanical. But Mr. Hall just smiled indulgently and said again that the parrot was a wise bird and probably a hundred years old.

In the evenings when I wasn’t out with our set we would sit companionably in the front room. Mrs Hall would iron or darn, or more often knit small garments for the grandchildren. Mr. Hall smoked his pipe and perused the Illustrated London News while I picked through the latest work and read out occasional snatches to illuminate and educate them. They must have thought the pretensions of this young gentleman very amusing.

After a few weeks I was on quite friendly terms with the Halls. I should not have been surprised by Mrs Hall’s invitation to come to church on Sunday. Caught without an immediate excuse, I accepted the offer politely, little realising the vortex that I was allowing myself to be drawn into. Though perhaps events would have turned out as badly if I had never agreed to go to that accursed spot.

I told my friends the next evening while we were gathered round in our usual snug at the Crown public house. Even the girls were with us—yes, we were shockingly modern. But the locals did not seem to mind, but regarded us as some variety of exotic foreigner.

I was met with a general roar of amusement and outrage.

“William, you coward!” hooted Tom. “Where’s your Rational Atheism now?”

“It’s in the nature of an anthropological investigation,” I said, rather coolly.

“Observing the rites and rituals of the tribes of South London,” said Jessica. “It’s easier than going to Samoa. And maybe it’ll be good for your soul.”

“I dare say you won’t find ’em so much different from the Home Counties,” said George. “Just a bit low church for you, maybe.”

“I dare say they won’t be different at all,” said Tom.

“Pevsner is scathing about the church—it’s 1880s build of course,” said Jessica. “But there was an older settlement around there, and churches are often built on Roman temples. So it might just have some pagan roots.”

Jessica’s knowledge of architectural history was compendious.

“Pagan roots?” George raised an eyebrow, causing his monocle to fall out. It was a movement he was practising for comic effect. “You think there’s a coven of Druids there practising the old Religion, like those Welsh fellows?”

“Your namesake was a Druid,” Sophie chipped in. “There was a whole order of London Druids. They got up to some shocking things.”

“Mystic Celtic twaddle,” said Tom. “That Welsh chap in his nightgown is a palpable fraud. And if you can find one single pagan survival in Dulwich, well, I’ll eat my hat.”

“Quod projectus chirothecam!” George declared.

We all looked at him vacantly.

“The gauntlet has been laid down, the challenge made,” he translated. “Will you take it up, William?”

“You’re wagering I can’t find one single example of pagan survival at this church?” I asked. Ecclesiology was not my field, but I was familiar with Durkheim and Graebner, cultural diffusion and inertia. The earlier culture would of necessity leave its imprint on those that came after. There must be something to see, if only the odd carving or Christianised holy well. Also, there was something tickling at my memory, a newspaper story that hinted at pagan practices in Dulwich. I noticed it because it was in the news when I was thinking of taking up the post, and the name caught my eye.

“I should say I could.”

“And the wager is for a hat,” announced George. He had a knack for making things up as he went, and always sounded so reasonable that everyone else would go along with him. By the time you caught up with yourself and started asking questions, George had moved on. “Are you gentlemen agreed? Shake hands on it then.”

I was game—I was damned if I was going to back down. Tom was not going to give way either, and we shook hands over the table. And so it happened that we were both of us damned.

“Who’s the referee?” asked Jessica.

“We’ll form a jury and adjudicate,” said George. “In the event of a tie, the chairman’s vote decides it.” Needless to say, he had slipped on the mantle of chairman.

“We’d better drink to your expedition to darkest Dulwich, old man,” said Tom, good-naturedly rising to buy a round. “You just mind out they don’t turn out to be cannibals.”

II

With my mission in mind and intellectual honour at stake, I looked forward to church on Sunday morning. I had skimmed everything in the school library that touched on pagan influences in the church, and I was armed and ready.

I would like to say that a dark cloud hung over the church, that ichor oozed from the walls, that the niches in the walls were filled with blackened images of obscure saints mutilated in ghastly martyrdom. Those would have been the conventional signifiers.

Instead there was a smell. Many churches have their smell, but this one was different. It was not the drains, as you might expect, nor stale incense, nor even that clinging dampness which hangs like a miasma in so many churches. This one was on marshy ground, and a certain swampiness might have been expected. But it had the smell of a gymnasium, of human sweat, but mixed with something fishy and clinging. It carried a disturbing intimacy about it, worsened because it was not entirely unpleasant: the half-noxious perfume of an attractive stranger in your face in a crowded railway carriage. You could not escape it.

Apart from the smell, I was troubled by shadows, odd flicks of darkness seen from the corner of my eye that moved on the edge of vision.

During the dull sermon—haven’t we heard enough about Lot’s wife yet?—I entertained myself by taking an inventory of the crowd. They were the usual suburban lot I would have expected, and a credit to this deeply conventional borough.

But there was something peculiar about them. I picked out one old man who was the picture of dementia and thought he must be a prize specimen, until I saw another just like him in the row behind. The pews were a shocking display of senility and degeneration. Some stared open-mouthed if not actually drooling, clutching their hands convulsively as though wringing out washing, or staring up in vague ecstasy. Could there be some asylum nearby within the parish boundary? Or did the place have some special attraction for the insane?

I shook the vicar’s hand afterwards and congratulated him on the turnout. I asked if he knew of any antiquities nearby.

“Are you a journalist?” he asked sharply.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m just an interested scholar. I—”

He had already moved on to talk to an elderly couple. Afterwards I made a circuit of the church grounds, my feet squelching on the wet turf, finding nothing of interest. There were gargoyles on the corners, oddly flat, angular things, but they were too high to see properly. A man approached me, raising a hand in salute.

“Morning, sir,” he said. He was past middle age; his coat was army surplus, and I guessed he was as well. He had the upright bearing of an old NCO, and the red nose of a man who liked a few drinks, and a few more after that. “Can I help you?”

“I was just looking around,” I said. “I’m a visitor.”

“I’m Dunning, the churchwarden,” he said. “I was wondering, seeing as how Vicar was a bit short with you, and how you’re looking around, whether you might want some assistance.”

“I’d heard there were some ancient remains here.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But I might be able to help you, perhaps for a small consideration.”

When I looked at him blankly, he carried on.

“It’s just that, given the events what occurred, you won’t find anything on your own. And the vicar doesn’t encourage it. But we’ve got a few minutes while he’s busy with parish business, and a full-guided tour, well, that’d be worth two bob of anyone’s money, wouldn’t you say?” Dunning held out his hand, as bold as anything.

I dropped the coins into his palm. Satisfied, Dunning led me briskly around the side of the church.

“We’ve had one or two visitors round since Mr. Whatley’s demise,” said Dunning.

“Whatley?”

“The gentleman what died in the pit,” he said. “Isn’t that what you were here for?”

“I’m interested in archaeology.”

“And so was Mr. Whatley! You might say that’s what did for him.”

This Whatley had been a local eccentric. He was an old man who lived in a broken-down house near the church and was often seen shuffling round its grounds. He had a long beard and wore a filthy overcoat. He looked like a tramp but had money, and produced old sovereigns from an endless store when he needed to. He lived with his grown-up daughter, a shy woman who was rarely seen. She seemed to live in a kind of trance, and never did housework or anything else that anyone knew of.

Whatley’s chief obsession was a battered, greasy old book. He spent much time poring over it, but jealously closed it if anyone else tried to look. The book had been passed down from his father, and his father’s father, who had a reputation as a wizard of sorts. People said the Whatleys were settled gypsies, the remnant of the old encampment at Gipsy Hill. Whatley’s grandfather could find missing objects, cure animals, dissolve curses, or lift the evil eye. Or so people said. Dunning thought the old man made a decent living from the gullible.

Whatley claimed the site of the church had been sacred since ancient times. There had been three barrows there called “Druids’ Mounds,” which had been levelled when the church was built in the 1880s. There was supposed to be a king sleeping in one of them, but Dunning said the mounds were just dirt. Whatley did not resent the loss of the barrows, but hinted darkly that only his family had the knowledge, passed down in the mouldy book, to control the dark forces held deep under the ground.

A few years previously Whatley had claimed that the “stars were changing” and the end times were coming. Whatley’s outlook changed too and he became malicious. He would stand on the street, jeering at passers-by and telling them they were all doomed, and that they would all be swept away when the seals were opened. More than once he was picked up by the police, blind drunk, claiming to be John the Baptist or possibly Joseph of Arimethea—he wasn’t sure which.

Whatley became obsessed with the grounds of the church, probing at the turf with a metal rod, looking for something.

“Plenty of times I had to warn him off,” said Dunning. “But there wasn’t any harm in him, and what could I do? He started creeping back in the middle of the night, and he kept poking and poking around everywhere.”

“But what on earth was he looking for? Buried treasure?”

Dunning explained that Whatley was searching for something described in his book, something buried since before the barrows, something important and dangerous. But his maps were useless because the barrows had gone and he had no other landmarks to help find the exact spot. By this time I had walked with Dunning to a lean-to beside the church which was evidently a tool-shed. He went inside and came out a minute later with a shovel and an electric torch.

“Well then,” said Dunning. “Can you see it yet, what Whatley found? Look very close now.”

He was enjoying my bafflement. I scanned the churchyard again and shook my head.

Dunning took two paces forward and used his shovel to lift a section of turf perhaps two feet square, a little paler than the rest of the grass. Under it was an old signboard used as a cover. Dunning lifted it to reveal an open manhole. I could see a solid floor several feet below.

He gave me a hand as I lowered myself through the opening, gingerly because I was not dressed for scrambling about. I dropped the last foot or so and found I was on a low stone plinth. He passed me down the electric torch.

I stepped down, and as my eyes adjusted I saw I was in a pit, or more properly a small stone chamber. It was about eight feet across and barely high enough to stand up in. The walls were stonework, smooth stones of all different shapes and sizes fitted together precisely without mortar.

The first thing that struck me was that the acoustics were all wrong. That place swallowed up sound. Many years later I was shown around an anechoic chamber, and it had a similar effect: a total deadening of sound, and a feeling of pressure on your eardrums. Except that sounds were not totally muffled; instead there were a few odd echoes, as though from a much bigger space.

As I moved the beam of the torch the place seemed to shift slightly as though seen through water, and for a moment I felt dizzy. There were no true horizontals or verticals. Then as I turned around I saw that it was not just a chamber but a tunnel disappearing off into the dark. My jaw dropped, but before I could grasp what this meant the perspective jumped and I found I was looking at a blank stone wall.

The chamber was empty, with smooth stone all round, the only feature the low stone plinth in the middle. As I looked more closely, the walls seemed to be daubed with faint markings in greenish chalk, but the light from the torch was too faint to distinguish them.

“Very curious, ain’t it?” Dunning called from above. “That’s where I found old Whatley, lying right where you are. He was dead, dead as a doornail.”

The chamber was perfectly clean, and in spite of the damp outside it there was not a drop of water. But it was an uncomfortably close place, like being in a tomb or a coffin, and so very alien and disorienting. I signalled to Dunning, and he gave me a hand and hoisted me out.

“What is that pit?” I asked, dusting myself off. “Who made it—it’s not part of the church surely?”

“It is not,” said Dunning. “All we know is, it wasn’t there when they built the church fifty years ago. Who built it, and why…” He shook his head. “Storeroom for stolen goods, I should say. Robber’s cave sort o’ thing. There used to be a lot of gangs around here, all engaged in burglary and the like. And who’d think of looking for the loot in a churchyard?”

“It feels like a strange old tomb, or a temple,” I said.

“Maybe to you,” said Dunning. “But one thing it isn’t is old. They surveyed all this when they built the church, and they levelled the site. They couldn’t have missed something one foot below the surface, could they now?”

He replaced the wooden board and the turf that covered it.

“Old Whatley must have had trouble getting in—his feet were never right—and he never got out. His heart couldn’t take it. So I found him here the next morning.”

“How awful,” I said.

“I was at Wipers, sir,” Dunning said shortly. “That was what you would call awful. But Whatley…he was no more to me than a fish on a slab. That was the end of him all right. But it wasn’t the end of the story.”

Whatley’s daughter showed no emotion when they told her he was dead. She just said that things were as they had to be. She had some workmen to the house in the following weeks, and it seemed she might be about to redecorate and start living more of a normal life, but she carried on as secluded an existence as before. On her occasional shopping trips, though, people noticed that she was pregnant. Of course, nobody knew who the father was, but plenty were willing to make suggestions.

The vicar went to visit her and offer help and consolation, but Flora Whatley was not having any of it. She was quite content, she told him over tea in a dingy front room. She was less dreamy than previously, more determined. Her voice was quiet but firm. She had money and did not need anybody’s help. Her family’s blood had been renewed—renewed, that was the word she used. As she went on she became more fervent, perhaps finding an outlet for feelings pent up too long. Her family would be a great dynasty and the father was none of his business. She talked herself up into a high state, and in the end declared that she was the Whore of Babylon and her son would be greater than kings, and how did he like that?

“You look to your church, Vicar,” she said. “My son will shake it to its foundations.”

The vicar was taken aback. He half thought about having a doctor examine her and rule on her mental state, but she seemed so self-possessed, and he doubted that her mild delusions would count for much. The house was untidy—a pigsty—but she had food and clothing and heating and was looking after herself well enough.

“You know how some of them get when they’re pregnant,” said Dunning. “Or maybe you don’t, being young. But he didn’t dare try to help her after that.”

Some months later the neighbours were alarmed by screams from the Whatley house in the middle of the night, and they realised that her time had come. They tried to get in to help, but the doors were locked and the windows barred and shuttered. The screams continued for hours.

Eventually firemen were summoned to break down the front door with axes. By then the house was ominously silent. The would-be rescuers found that the internal doors were locked too. There was a note pinned to the bedroom door saying that nobody should disturb her. Dunning said the note trailed off into what he called strange language.

“What language?” I asked.

“Gibberish,” said Dunning. “She was touched in the head, that one.”

When they broke that door down, they found a large bedroom with a bare floor covered with green chalk markings. In the middle was an enormous bed covered with dark hangings. Candles were still burning around the room.

On the bed lay Flora Whatley and her baby, a girl. Both were quite dead.

“The newspapers made a meal of it,” said Dunning.

“I read about it,” I said, “just a paragraph or two, but it mentioned chalk pentacles and the last survivor of a celebrated family of witches dying in a birth ritual because she refused a doctor.”

“Well, some of it was true. She was wearing all that jewellery, and a sort of robe. Vicar was there and he told me. Ritual, family tradition, who knows, but the Whatleys were a queer lot, had their own ways. Too much gipsy blood and inbreeding, not like true English folk at all.”

Flora had died after giving birth to the grotesquely deformed baby, which according to Dunning could not have lived long. Had she killed it deliberately in an act of sacrifice? He shrugged; to him it didn’t make much difference.

Everything in the arrangements suggested that it was all deliberate. She had made no effort to get assistance, even right at the end. Old Whatley’s book was open on the pillow beside her.

It took lawyers weeks trace any sort of heir. There was the house itself, and a strongbox containing several thousand pounds in gold. It eventually went to some distant cousin who showed no inclination to visit, but put the place up for sale. There had not been any takers in the six months it had been on the market.

“That’s the place there,” said Dunning, pointing out the house through the trees. “The cellar’s half full of water and it’s all rotten. Better to pull it down and start again, and I dare say someone will when they drop the price some more. And forget those Whatleys were ever here.”

That was the end of the tour. Dunning was tired, and the vicar would be back soon. He said he needed a drink, and I didn’t think he meant a cup of tea. I tipped him another shilling, and the extra penny he asked for the use of the electric torch. I went back to my lodgings, already assembling my notes and conclusions in my head.

The next week found us gathered around in the snug, and I held the floor with my account of my anthropological excursion. Afterwards it turned into open debate about who had won the bet and whether there were really any pagan remains at Dulwich. I was surprised when Jessica produced a ground plan which showed the layout of the church and the position of the old barrows. It kept surprising me how readily she took my side and how much trouble she took to help.

“What this map proves,” says George, “is that there were pagan remains before, and they’re all gone now.”

“This chamber,” said Tom. “I’d like to see that, get some photographs, I really would.”

“It’s perfectly vile,” said Sophie. “And a man died in there too.”

“The way you describe it sounds like there’s some rather clever trompe l’oeil,” said Tom. He turned over one of my pages of notes and sketched on the back. “A normal brick wall has bricks all the same size, but perspective means they look smaller as they recede into the distance. If you use stones of different sizes, with smaller ones at one end, you can get an illusion of receding in a short space the way you describe.”

“That’s a useless picture,” said Jessica, laughing. “I can’t make anything of it.”

“The futility of trying to convert three dimensions into two,” said Daniel, reviving a long-standing wrangle he enjoyed with Tom the photographer. “You’d do better folding the paper into a model.”

“But who built it?” asked George. “It’s not ancient, obviously. But the thieves’ den story is balderdash. Two hundred years ago, perhaps—Dick Turpin was from around here, and plenty of others must have had somewhere to stash their ill-gotten loot. But not in modern times.”

Daniel took two pencils and, pinching them together, made a rude compass and started making marks on the plan.

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” said George, watching him closely.

Daniel ended up by putting an X on the map.

“That’s exactly where the chamber is,” I said. “How did you know?”

“It’s at the centroid of the barrows, obviously,” he said. “You just watched me calculate it.”

“The hat is in the balance,” declared George. “Clearly a site visit is needed so Tom can get some snaps, and our architecture expert can rule on the antiquity of the stonework.”

“What about that business with the Whatleys?” asked Jessica.

“Inbreeding and incest, with a touch of witchcraft,” said Sophie.

“Awfully Gothic, isn’t it?” said Jessica. “And that bedroom, atavistic primeval cave-birthing-room?”

“The house is still empty, you say?” George asked.

“The house is all locked up,” I said. “And the vicar won’t let anyone visit the chamber; I only managed because his back was turned and Dunning will do anything for a half-crown.”

“Leave everything to me, old man,” said George. “We will get to the bottom of this. Fortes fortuna juvat, y’know—‘fortune favours the brave’ as you peasants say in the vernacular.”

Now it seemed George felt as though he had been challenged. I sensed some ulterior motive, but I had no clue as to what it might be. The question of pagan influence was not proven. Every village has its eccentric, and that stone cell now seemed less weird than when I was in it. Now it was a riddle that needed to be solved, and I devoted a certain amount of thought to it over the next few days.

III

I was not invited back to church; I think the vicar found my curiosity offensive and conveyed his feelings to Mrs Hall. Mr. Hall and I would wash up after supper each evening, he washing and I drying. Mrs Hall always objected to this, but her husband was punctilious about doing his bit.

One evening as he passed me a scrubbed plate he asked, “How was your visit to the church on Sunday?”

“Oh, very good,” I said.

“I don’t go regular myself, though the missus has always been one for it. Seems to me it’s been shaken up at that church lately. Since that Whatley business. Some of them are…touched, sort of. What did you make of it?”

“What do you mean by strange?”

He passed me another plate, and as he did so he gave me such a look that I couldn’t meet his gaze.

“Well,” I said after a moment, “I don’t know what it was like before. But there did seem to be some…well…nervous conditions among the congregation.”

“About what I thought,” he said darkly, and the conversation turned to other things.

Two days later, on a fine August evening, George led the group—Tom, Daniel, Sophie, Jessica, and I—up to the house. Like a conjuror performing a trick, he produced a heavy iron key and opened the door with a flourish. He had persuaded the estate agents that he was representing a possible buyer, a foreign prince no less who wanted somewhere close by for visiting his son at Dulwich School.

I had pictured a vast Gothic pile. But it was a poorer, meaner sort of place. The house crouched low to the ground. The windows were small and narrow, and everything was uneven. It had no recognisable architectural style, but looked as if it had been constructed piecemeal, room by room, by the most unskilled labourers. Overgrown hedges screened it from the neighbouring houses.

Feeling like an intruder, I stepped over the threshold. The house, I sensed, did not want us there.

The interior was in a bad way, the rooms empty with just odd pieces of furniture remaining. In the hallway was an old grandfather clock, run down long ago. George pointed out the odd celestial markings alongside the dial that showed phases of the moon.

The upstairs was completely derelict, and some rooms had not been used for years. The only place that showed any signs of life was the large kitchen, which looked as though gypsies had camped in it. The stone flags were well worn, and stains showed where pots and pans and cups had been left. The ceiling had been painted brown by decades of smoke and soot. A few empty bottles and crumpled papers remained in odd corners. The pantry held tins and jars with faded labels, and a few bottles of unidentifiable brown liquid.

“Not even a rat,” said George.

The bedroom was smaller and darker than my imagination had made it, with a low, beamed ceiling. The chalk markings on the floor had been largely erased by the scuffling of feet, but there were still traces of diagrams, pictures, and crude writings. I could not decipher any of it, but Tom took pictures and made notes.

Two things were notable in the bedroom. One was what at first looked like a black rug in the bay window. This was actually a hole in the floorboards, some three feet square. Down below water glinted in the blackness. The hole went all the way through, opening an entrance into the flooded cellar. At first we thought the floorboards had rotted and given way, dropping some unfortunate person into the pool below, but I saw that the ends of the boards were all sawn smooth and the hole was too regular to be accidental. And from it rose the same animal smell as from the church.

The bed was quite a piece of work. It was large and, according to George, probably late seventeenth century. The woodwork was intricately carved on every surface, but the design was unusual. Instead of the usual fruits and flowers, it was covered with the impression of seaweed, of serpents or eels, or dragons, and tentacled things like octopi or cuttlefish. It was a bed more likely to encourage nightmares than sweet dreaming.

George ran his fingers over it thoughtfully.

“An unusual piece, I should say,” he said. “English, local wood but with foreign elements in the design. Oriental influence?”

Tom pointed to the headboard where a medallion showed what could have been a castle turret. The perspective was all wrong, as though seen through a distorting lens. It reminded me of something I could not quite remember.

“The chamber,” I said at last. “The stonework had that sort of warped effect.”

“I have to see that chamber,” said Tom, setting up his tripod for a photograph of the bedstead.

Satisfied that they had seen everything, the others trooped out to go poking through the kitchen, where there might be clues to be found amid the rubbish. I remained after the others left. Something troubled me. It was as though the most obvious clue were right there and we were missing it.

Now I come to a difficult part of my narrative. Up to this point it might all have been some lark, as inconsequential as children looking for pirate treasure. But what I saw in that bedroom changed everything for me. For me and for us, forever.

Not the markings on the floor, or the meagre furnishings. Not even that peculiar opening in the floor. It was the bed. We had all looked at it, taken in those disquieting carvings.

There was something underneath the bed. I was convinced of it. I got down on all fours to have a look.

Nothing but a dark, empty space. Of course they must have looked here when Flora Whatley died. Dunning told me there had been a chest full of gold, and under the bed was the first place they must have looked.

But my conviction of something concealed grew stronger. There was not enough light to tell; it was all the same blankness. I could not hear anything. The smell was no stronger. But somehow I felt there was something there.

My eyes adjusted to the dim light, but however I turned my head this way and that I could not see anything. The candles had been cleared away and, not being a smoker, I did not have any matches. I could have called one of the others…but I did not want to look foolish.

Nor did I want to feel around in that dark, dusty space with my bare hands. Frustrated, I continued to peer into the shadowy recess, seeing nothing. I stood up, casting about the room. I saw through the open doorway into the hall, where there was an umbrella stand. A couple of umbrellas, and—the very thing!—a Malacca cane.

I was still a little embarrassed and glanced round to check none of the others were near.

“George, that is quite disgusting…” Sophie was saying from the kitchen.

Kneeling on all fours again, I saw that the space under the bed was still impenetrable. It was probably packed with trunks and hatboxes, suitcases and chests of linen. The usual sorts of lumber.

I swung the cane experimentally. It was a good, stout stick. I expected it to meet the wood or leather of a solid trunk. Instead it met with something else.

Sometimes shocks can have a physical effect, like an electric jolt. Then that plummeting sensation in your stomach. It was like seeing a stranger looking in through the window, or waking and finding a shadow looming over you in the bedroom. It was like finding an unfamiliar lump under your skin, a disturbing presence that should not be there.

That was what I felt when the stick connected with the unmistakable bulk of a living thing. My first instinct was that it must be a person, that someone was hiding under the bed.

“Who’s there?” I blurted.

It opened its eyes.

They were not human eyes, or the eyes of anything else I had ever seen. Perhaps octopi or squid have eyes like that, but they did not seem like the eyes of any earthly thing. They were big and acid yellow, with a radiating pattern but no pupil. I still do not know how I could see them so clearly, as even animal eyes do not glow without light shone on them.

Those eyes saw me, and I had the sensation that they saw through me like a needle piercing a butterfly. Sometimes when you meet someone’s gaze unexpectedly you feel a shock of recognition, so sharp that you take a breath. This was like that, but vile. It was like being seen naked by a hostile gaze. Worse, it was more like touch than sight, like having a grubby pickpocket feel over your clothing, plucking at it, soiled fingers scrabbling at your skin, picking through your organs, poking your brains.

I recoiled, rolling on the floor and scrambling to my feet, reacting in blind panic without thinking. I flew out of the room, through the hall, passing George and Tom, and was out of the house.

I was lying in a ditch when they found me.

The others were very understanding about it. George and Tom both said that they had glimpsed something too, but it had been too quick for them.

“What was it?” asked Sophie. “A cat or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said, panting. “But it scared the living daylights out of me.”

Normally there would have been a lot of joking about my active imagination and high-strung temperament. I must have looked badly shaken for the others to say nothing.

Tom, George, and Jessica went to inspect the underground chamber, carrying Tom’s photographic impedimenta with them. Sophie and Daniel escorted me to the Crown for a restorative drink. Mercifully they did not ask me about what I had seen, or even discuss the Whatley house. Instead Sophie resumed an argument about jazz, having seen a performance the previous evening. She insisted it was the freest flowering of the artistic spirit, but to Daniel it would always be a form of creative mathematics and its beauty lay in the strict patterns that underlay the apparent chaos. It was like watching a tennis match.

The others arrived some time later. The place was not quite as I described it, according to George, but had been rather interesting. Apparently George had bribed Dunning with a bottle of whisky, and they had not had any trouble. “And it helped that my uncle was colonel of his regiment during the war,” said George, winking.

“I didn’t know—”

“Don’t be an ass, William,” said George.

“I want to see how my photographs come out,” said Tom. “I want to see if they can capture that effect.”

“Never mind that—is it ancient or modern?” Sophie asked Jessica.

Jessica shrugged. “The pattern is ancient, I suppose. But it’s not British ancient.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s closest to some of the Inca ruins in South America,” Jessica said. “It doesn’t belong here. It’s been reconstructed, or re-created. Goodness knows why.”

The evening wore on and the others left one by one. Jessica seemed reluctant to go, but George, Tom, and I wanted to have a word together. We were the three witnesses, the ones who had seen the thing, and I could tell none of us wanted to discuss it in front of the others.

“I know what I saw,” said George when we three were alone at last. “But I don’t know what you saw. Why don’t we each say what we saw? Like the blind men describing the elephant to each other.”

I described it as best I could, giving perhaps a less coherent account than the one above. But it was fresh in my mind, and the vividness must have helped convey the sense of it. The others did not contest any of the details.

“I just caught the last moment,” said George. “It disappeared into that hole, dropped into the water. I saw the size of it and the—the movement, and nothing else, but the way it fell was queer. I’ve seen otters and water rats jump into the water. They disturb the surface more than that. It went in without a sound, like a knife into the water. Barely a ripple. Bloody strange thing it was too. I could hardly see it—I saw it and it was gone, like a stage effect. Quite uncanny.”

“What about you?” I asked Tom.

Tom was silent for a long time, looking down at the surface of the table.

“What did I see? What did I see?” Tom seemed to be interrogating himself. “Well, what you saw doesn’t make sense; what I saw makes less sense. I’d have to say it was something, something the texture of running quicksilver, a cable woven of writhing worms. That’s what I saw.”

He continued to look at the table, sifting through images in his mind, then looked up.

“It was a solid bar reaching across the room, between the bed and the hole, a bar made of…dark flowing milk, or seething maggots, or boiling pale moonlight. It moved, but there was no actual movement. It was there, and then it was gone without moving. Does that make sense? No,” he concluded. “That does not make sense. And that’s what I saw.”

He looked down again and shook his head so rapidly that he seemed to shudder. George put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“I was afraid you were going to tell me it was just a cat or something,” I said.

“No,” said George. “Unfortunately not, old man. But it’s gone now, and we’re out of there with no harm done. We’ve had a bit of a shock and that’s all. I think after what we’ve all been through I’d better stand us a round of brandies—and tomorrow perhaps this will all seem like a bad dream, and we can stop troubling ourselves about it.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Already the image of the thing under the bed was slipping away from me, as though my memory could not catch hold of it. Just like those dreams that you remember so clearly when you wake up, but which have completely dissolved a few hours later. It was as though my mind were rejecting the whole experience, refusing to take its imprint. Sometimes it is much easier to ignore horrors, even ones right in front of you.

IV

The next day it all seemed far more remote. More importantly to me then, my thoughts on a topic for my doctorate had coalesced overnight, and I was full of ideas that I had to write down. I was going to carry out an act of synthesis that would fuse scientific and artistic thought in a way that had not been attempted since Leonardo. It was ambitious, and I did not know where I would be able to find the missing pieces, but I could see how I could go about it. Principia Mathematica had united mathematics and logic: now I would carry the torch forward to light up every sphere of human activity into a rational whole.

I did not forget about the thing under the bed. I even jotted down some notes on the case when thoughts occurred to me. My speculations focussed on what could be proved. I toyed with some idea of marsh gas, whose presence was revealed by that peculiar smell. The Whatleys had been living with it for years: Could it cause madness and hallucinations? Was it strongest in that chamber? I thought of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and how the priestess was supposed to inhale fumes from an abyss to bring on prophetic visions. Was it now seeping into the church as well? Had it conjured up that thing under the bed?

But these thoughts were just interludes. For the most part I was working on the plan for my thesis. I just had to tease out my thoughts to full length, to unravel the mysteries that I could glimpse. And when I started writing I had my first flash of inspiration. It was as though the shock encounter had cleared some blockage in my thinking and allowed my ideas to flow freely for the first time. Instead of writing halting paragraphs and crumpling up the page, I found my thoughts running out in a steady stream.

I was interrupted by Mrs Hall inviting me, or rather instructing me, to come down and take tea with the vicar. I sighed at the distraction, but perhaps a break would be no bad thing. I sipped tea and nibbled cakes for twenty minutes while Mrs Hall chatted with the vicar about people I did not know and local events I had not heard of. It seemed rather petty compared to the grand sweep of history. I thought nothing of it, but just as I thought he was about to go, he turned to my landlady.

“I do hope you’ll excuse me, Mrs Hall,” he said. “But I have to advise Mr. Blake on a spiritual matter.”

“Of course, Vicar.” She stood up, taking the tea tray. “I’ll just be in the kitchen.”

He seemed like the usual mild-mannered clerical sort, but I knew already that there was something steelier underneath. And underneath the steel, a seriously worried cleric.

“I can tell you’re a very intelligent young man,” said the vicar. “And very well educated too.”

“Thank you, I’m sure—”

“But many educated young men are apt to fall into the sin of Pride,” he went on, talking right over me with some force. “You believe you have all the answers and nobody else knows anything. Especially not anybody as old-fashioned as a vicar.”

I smiled politely.

“I happen to know that you and your friends are making an entertainment of investigating parish affairs,” he said. “No doubt with the best of intentions. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm; in fact, I’m sure you think you can help. But matters are beyond you.”

“What matters, Vicar?”

“I talked a great deal to Isaac Whatley, and to Flora Whatley,” he said. “Their family has been entangled with terrible evil for a very long time.”

“We wondered if there might be some kind of pagan connection,” I said.

“Not pagan,” he said darkly. “Now I want you to swear to me on your honour as a gentleman that what I tell you now goes no further than this room.”

Eager to find out more, I made the declaration at once. I wondered that he had not asked me to swear on a Bible, but perhaps he had a shrewd notion of my religion, or lack of it.

“I’ve been vicar here for twenty years,” he said. “As spiritual guide and counsellor, I’ve been party to some terrible human suffering. I know my flock as well as any shepherd. I know when something is wrong. And now we are afflicted with something beyond the ordinary. Your set believes that everything can be explained by Doctor Freud; well, I’m sorry, but it can’t.”

I tried to object—I have always despised Freud—but he stopped me with an upraised hand.

“Whatley’s family were, to put it bluntly, in league with the Devil for some generations. I’m not so superstitious as to think his deformities were marks of Cain, but…they called me to the house after Flora Whatley died. I took custody of the book; what I found in it and in the house was truly appalling. Worse, the two of them succeeded in summoning something. Something which is still here.”

“What sort of ‘something’?”

“A malign influence. Something from Hell,” he said. “Something which does not belong here and which could only enter through a blasphemous rift made by Whatley. He unbound something which was bound. I don’t pretend to know how, but the Evil one has his powers. This is not something that your science and psychology can understand. This is a spiritual evil, one that can only by overcome with the grace of God. That’s why I must insist that you do not involve yourselves. There is a deadly danger here to all our souls. If people with no understanding meddle in it, the results will be catastrophic.”

“You have the book?” I asked.

“Given to me for safekeeping. I assure you it has no scholarly value at all,” he said, anticipating my question. “It is full of the most vile and disgusting filth which no civilised man should see, let alone study.”

“But—”

“I have already been offered a lot of money for it by an American woman. She talked about research work and offered me a very large sum indeed—I didn’t like her manner one bit. I had never heard of her organisation; I was rightly suspicious. I refused her and I refuse you,” he said. “Given its obscene contents, I am taking advice on whether I can burn it or if I must keep it for Whatley’s heirs.”

“What about the underground chamber?”

“It’s obvious enough that it’s a place of blasphemous worship, whatever Mr. Dunning tells you. Sometimes these people use churches, defiling the altars at midnight…this was more cunning, a way of clandestinely practising their perversions on hallowed ground. It will be cleansed and reconsecrated and then filled in with honest Christian soil. Again, I am waiting for advice on how to proceed.”

He put down his teacup forcefully.

“And, I tell you, I will not have it held up as the ‘naïve folk architecture’ that you people are so fond of. I will not have pictures published for others to copy. I will not have their unholy texts made public. We must not preach the gospels of Hell, Mr. Blake, even in the name of spreading knowledge. We must have Faith.”

“I understand entirely, Vicar.”

“I doubt it, I very much doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. “But you’re a decent young man, if sadly misguided. Now, let us pray together.”

I was sufficiently cowed to accept the offer. We bowed our heads while he called for a blessing. Afterwards I felt curiously relieved; if he wanted to take on the whole Whatley business himself, then that was his affair. I had plenty of other things to attend to. But if I could find the key to the mystery, it would have pleased me greatly to do it before that sanctimonious vicar.

The next few weeks continued the same round of activity, teaching in the day with evenings writing at the dining table, whilst Mrs Hall knitted and Mr. Hall read.

My thesis proposal rapidly gained a head of steam until it seemed to rush on ahead of me. I realised that I had been stumbling in the dark all my life, finding my way by touch, without understanding that light existed. Now the way ahead was illuminated by flashes of lightning and I could progress with ease, avoiding obstacles that I would have blundered around for weeks, finding doorways and bridges that would have been hidden to me. I hurried to capture on paper each new progression. I found myself sketching graphs and elaborate diagrams.

Unexpected connections appeared between areas of discourse, so I would skip easily from psychology to archaeology to biology and back. I wrote in English, French, Latin, and Greek; I devised symbols and hieroglyphics to convey meanings too subtle for ordinary language, like Russell’s mathematical logic. Then there were a set of rules to combine the symbols so that they could operate on one another…my work became almost wordless as I covered sheet after sheet, watching the ideas work themselves out in front of me.

In spite of my self-absorption, I realised that Mrs Hall was showing signs of eccentricity. There were curious lapses in her daily concentration. One morning I found myself confronted by a breakfast of no less than nine soft-boiled eggs, the egg-cups arranged in a perfect triangle. Everything was ironed, but curious triangular and diamond-shaped creases were introduced. Her conversation was superficially sensible, but failed to connect with reality.

However, I was too busy to make much of it, and I knew the others were also throwing themselves into their own interests with similar energy. Tom was busy in his makeshift photographic studio and his darkroom. George was speeding about on some sort of political business. Jessica was drafting grand new buildings. We were all going through an extraordinary period of inspiration, yet it did not occur to me to wonder whether there might be a particular reason behind it.

We saw less of one another than usual. Perhaps I felt I had lost face after the incident in the Whatley house; also, I was reluctant to pursue it too openly after the vicar’s warning, and that would make me look cowardly. I did a little research and jotted down a few notes when they occurred to me, but I did not feel I was making enough progress to be worth mentioning.

There were a couple of get-togethers; one was a party where there were too many other people for us to talk. The other was a noisy and exceedingly alcoholic soirée, and the first Manhattan knocked me sideways. George and I struck up a conversation, but he wisely if blurrily advised me to continue the discussion later because he wouldn’t remember a thing in the morning. I certainly did not recall much.

But there was one Saturday afternoon that had been marked in my diary for some weeks: the group of us travelled to the West End to see a matineé of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s new sensation. Sophie sent reminder notes around in the morning, and we all turned up for it.

Afterwards, when we were gathered around our usual nook in the pub, there was a brisk round of criticism. As I recall, I decried the way the film tried to marry a science fiction storyline with traditional Gothic themes. Also how woefully weak the science was altogether. Jessica was scathing about the supposed architecture of the future and how unlikely it was that skyscrapers would spread to suburbs. George found the political side sentimental and trite.

But we did not spend long on Metropolis. Everyone wanted to talk about the Whatley case.

“Now, then,” said George, bringing the assembly to order. “We have the finest set of brains in the country around this table. Let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of this little mystery.”

I realised then that he took it personally. The mystery was a challenge to him, to the team of crack advisors he had assembled. He intended it as a sort of training exercise for us, and he was not satisfied with our progress after the first round.

Tom opened the bidding by producing an envelope of photographs. He spread them on the pub table before us.

“In case anyone’s interested,” he said. “I’m afraid they didn’t come out very well.”

At first the images seemed bafflingly abstract, but I recognised them as the underground chamber. It was a challenging subject, trying to take pictures in that small, featureless space, and all he could do was point the camera at the walls. The frame was filled with close-packed stones, like peculiar paving.

“I took several prints of them, tried a few different things in the darkroom,” he said. “That trompe l’oeil effect is there in the actual place—I know because I saw it—but it doesn’t really show up.”

You can see the pictures yourself. They form the series of photographs known as Sequence III, which appears in several of the collections of Tom’s work. Of course nobody has ever been able to identify where they came from. The rocks have a partly organic quality, fitting together like parts of a living thing. They do have another curious feature. Looking at them you couldn’t tell whether they showed gigantic walls or a tiny section a few inches square. There was nothing to give away the scale. I had never seen a pattern like it, though I learned later that clouds, certain types of vegetation, and minerals have this same property.

In fact, it was only when I saw the faint traced lines of chalk that I could tell the picture showed a section about three feet across. But I could not make out what was written.

“Ah yes, the epigraph,” said Tom, when I pointed out the markings. “I’ve tried to improve the contrast so it shows up better, but I still can’t make it out. Similar to the scrawl in the bedroom, as you might expect. It’s not Roman script, or Greek, or Hebrew, or hieroglyphics.”

We passed the pictures around and examined them closely. Daniel seemed most interested of all. He took off his glasses to peer at the detail, then arranged all six of them on the table in front of him, moving them around like parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

“That’s as far as I got,” said Tom. “But don’t tell me you haven’t been making your own investigations.”

“The Whatleys have been here for a very long time,” said Jessica, opening a notebook. “As far back as records go, which is about 1450. One was hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century, which was unusual for this part of the world. They’ve always lived in that house, or one on the same site, and they’ve never had any sort of trade as far as I can discover.”

“So they’re one of the original families of Dulwich?” asked Sophie.

“Actually they’re not Dulwich at all,” said Jessica. “The house is outside the bounds of the medieval village. Dulwich was tiny then. These people were living in the woods, still in about the same place. The first reference is a man called Watlye living ‘by the barrows.’”

“The Druids’ Barrows?” I asked.

“I imagine so, but they weren’t called Druids until the late eighteenth century. Before that they were called the Devil’s Barrows. They were supposed to be Saxon, but they’re probably Neolithic with some intrusive internments from later on. The Whatleys discouraged antiquarians. Oh, and as an architectural note, there’s an underground chamber in Greenwich, which they think was a Neolithic chalk pit, with a picture of a horned deity of some kind.”

“Underground devil worship everywhere,” said George.

“Speaking of which, the early Whatleys were colliers, charcoal burners. There was quite a gang of them in the forest of Norwood, and they had a reputation for being pagan if not actual devil-worshippers.”

“Hearsay,” said Tom, “but rather suspicious hearsay.”

“There was a man called Matthews who lived in the woods nearby who was known as the Dulwich Hermit. He was killed by a gang of gypsies, never officially identified. The Whatleys were high on the list of suspects.”

She turned another page, scanning down her notes.

“Oh yes. The parish records indicate the Whatleys are even more inbred than you might think. There’s a steady stream of cousin-to-cousin marriages in that house. And several birth records with unnamed fathers. Oh, and they seem to have had hereditary deformities. Club feet, or no feet at all. As a matter of interest, all the famous fortune-tellers at Gipsy Hill also seem to have had deformities…it’s as though they were trying to breed themselves into a particular strain. Household eugenics.”

“So,” said Sophie, “does that mean that William’s intruder under the bed was some mad, deformed cousin who’d been locked in the attic for the last twenty years?”

“On another tack,” said Jessica, continuing down her notes. “Oddly enough, the land for the church was actually donated by Isaac Whatley, who was keen to have a church built on that spot. But there’s no indication as to why. He wasn’t religious, since he didn’t have much to do with the church before then, or even after it was built.”

She closed the notebook and looked to me to continue.

In my turn I described my conversation with the vicar, and my own thoughts on marsh gas and its possible effects. I was surprised at how much I had gleaned about decay products, anoxia, and the density of methane when it came to discuss it. I did not like to give the vicar too much credibility, but somehow a struggle with the forces of darkness seemed to fit much better with my subjective impressions. But that would be abominably unscientific.

“As for his idea that the Whatleys had summoned a fiend from Hell—well, I certainly saw something abnormal, and Tom and George will vouch for me,” I said. “But it was more of an animal than a demon, to my mind. And I do wonder that my brain was most affected when I was kneeling on the floor, where gas might be most concentrated, with that hole in the floor.”

“I’ve been making a few enquiries,” said George. “But it’s hopeless. Can’t tell you a damned thing.”

He glowered as though the whole thing were a personal affront to him. George knew everyone, from beef barons in Argentina to diamond merchants in Hong Kong to gangsters (he claimed) in Chicago. He was on first-name terms with earls and plutocrats, but all enquiries had failed.

“As far as I can tell,” he said, “the Whatleys might have dug a cave for a diabolic altar anytime in the last five hundred years. But we know it can’t be more than fifty years old because of the church. I took a chipping to a stonemason. He says the stone’s not local; in fact, he doesn’t know where the hell it came from. A geology professor just raised his eyebrows at me as though we’re having him on. And why isn’t that chamber full of water, like Whatley’s cellar? The place is a marsh. Sophie, did you find anything?”

“I can’t say I’ve felt very inclined,” she said. “It’s all rather ghastly if you ask me.”

George glared at her.

“If it’s witchcraft or diabolism, it’s very unorthodox,” she said with an elaborate shrug. “I dipped into a few texts, but this is a long way from Montague Summers or The Golden Bough.”

“Don’t you have some local knowledge?” asked George. “Didn’t you have family around here?”

Sophie rolled her eyes theatrically and waved her cigarette holder.

“George darling, if you believe local stories, the Whatleys were thick as thieves with the devil and had him round for tea and crumpets and roast babies every Wednesday,” she said. “But they say that about everyone they don’t like.”

Daniel was still engrossed in the photographs, and had even taken out a fountain pen and started to write on them. Tom started to protest but gave up. There was no point in telling Daniel to do anything when his brain was at work on something.

That appeared to be all, but Daisy spoke up unexpectedly.

“I have something,” she said. From her handbag she took some sheets of writing paper. None of us was expecting this. Daisy’s role was to be an audience for the rest of us; we did not expect her to contribute.

“I did some automatic writing,” she said.

I repressed a smirk and saw George doing the same. We were long past the stage of belief in this sort of hocus-pocus connection with the spirit world.

“I don’t know why,” said Daisy. “It’s as though there’s something there. You know, the way there are radio waves in this room right now, with dance music, and the music is always there but we can’t hear it? I can sort of hear it.…It’s a horrible music. And when I shut my eyes this is what I did.”

She opened the sheets of paper on the table and slid them towards Tom.

“It’s an interesting sort of approach,” he said politely, then stopped and stared.

I leaned closer to see. The sheets were covered in dense, untidy script very different from Daisy’s normal, beautiful handwriting.

“It’s the same alphabet as the chalk writing,” said Tom.

“Not all of it,” said Daisy. “If you look, it changes all the way through and sort of gets clearer. The bit at the bottom of the second page is in normal writing, but I don’t know what it means. I thought one of you might be able to read it.”

“‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’” Tom read slowly.

“Not any language I recognise,” said George.

“Code?” I suggested. “Substitution cipher of some sort?”

“That doodle at the bottom,” said Jessica, “could be a horned man, like the figure in the Greenwich cave.”

“Horns or antennae,” I said. “It looks more like he has tentacles coming out of his head.”

“Can I have this?” George asked, reaching for the paper. “I might be able to find someone who can make sense of it.”

“I don’t want it,” said Daisy with a shudder, passing him the two sheets. “I think it’s to do with that church, though. That’s why all those people are so disturbed. I can pick up the signals clearly sometimes; they’re just getting them sort of dull and distorted all the time. It bores into your brain.”

“If you look at this, it’s actually quite interesting,” said Daniel to me, still looking at the photographs. I was disappointed he had not reacted to the lure of a code to be broken. Daniel was a genius at codes. “I’ve marked six of the stones here with the letters A through F in each of these pictures.”

I stared at them, not able to see what he was getting at. Then something struck me.

“No, you’ve done that wrong,” I said, without thinking. Daniel never got things wrong. Tom agreed with me, however.

“The one you’ve marked as B is much bigger than A in this picture,” said Tom, “but in this picture B is smaller. It’s not the same stone.”

“Yes, it is,” said Daniel. “Ignore the sizes. Concentrate on the topology of it. A is a triangle, B is rhomboid, C is hexagonal; they’re always the same shape and configuration, fitting together the same way. And you can see the chalk marks stay the same.”

“But the stones are different sizes in different pictures,” I said.

“I don’t get it,” said Tom. “That’s not just perspective or parallax. The stones can’t just change sizes like balloons. It’s impossible…isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” said Daniel. “In fact, it’s rather a good illustration of what I keep telling you about trying to transfer a three-dimensional object to a two dimensional surface. It’s just that in this instance you have an N-dimensional object superimposed on three-dimensional space. Or at least a two-dimensional stone surface.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Tom.

“You’re not serious,” I said. “N-dimensional space? More likely the pattern of stonework repeats with size variations.”

Daniel shook his head emphatically.

“You went down into the chamber yourself,” he said. “Didn’t you say the walls seemed to change as you moved? That’s exactly what you’d expect.”

“Daniel, I inhabit a three-dimensional space, as far as I know,” I said. “Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I always have. I view additional dimensions as an abstract mathematical tool. Even if I did encounter an N-dimensional object, it would appear normal to me. Like a square man encountering a cube—to him it looks like another square.”

“Look at the pictures,” said Daniel. “Tom, you moved the camera about a foot between this photo and this one, and these others are taken from about three feet away, from different angles, yes? Now, you could do some really interesting geometry on the walls down there, if the walls were properly flat.”

“Can someone tell me what he’s talking about?” asked George.

“It’s just a different set of rules,” said Daniel. “Non-Euclidian geometry, squeezed into a small space.”

“Daniel thinks the chamber is a mathematical concept come to life,” I said. “Like a singular point, or a perfect sphere. It’s a place where normal rules don’t apply, parallel lines meet, and God knows what else.”

“A place that violates God’s laws,” said George, with surprising force. “A blasphemous place.”

I was reminded of Abbot’s book Flatland, in which the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world reject the notion of a third dimension as absurd and fiercely reject all possible evidence that it might exist. It might be good for George to read it, though he might take the depiction of the conservative, ignorant flatlanders who refuse to believe in a third dimension as an insult.

“Nonsense,” said Daniel. Nobody could trespass on his intellectual territory and expect to get away with imprecise language. “It’s like navigation. If you have a map, it’s a flat surface. But the world is a sphere, so actual navigation is different—the angles of a triangle don’t add up to a hundred and eighty degrees and so on, because the supposedly flat surface is actually curved through another dimension. Here we’re just seeing local distortion through another set of higher dimensions.”

“Everything is warped around the church,” I said.

“Time too,” said Daniel. “Time is simply another dimension, and the intersection with three-dimensional space varies over time. So from our perspective that chamber grows and shrinks or vanishes or reappears over time.”

“The barrows marked where it was before,” said Jessica. “That’s what he meant about the stars being right.”

“What?” George was having trouble following this.

“Standing stones, mounds, and barrows are a sort of astronomical calendar,” said Jessica. “They’re the only way ancient people had of measuring long periods of time, by the movement of the stars. They must have known the chamber appeared in that particular spot at some set interval of hundreds or thousands of years.”

“Not necessarily a fixed interval,” said Daniel. “It would be a more complex pattern than that.”

Nobody said anything for a minute.

“And that’s what Whatley was looking for all that time,” I said. “He knew the chamber would appear one day—in fact, he seems to have known roughly when. He said the time had come, and a few weeks or months later he found it there.”

“In any case it’s some sort of satanic creation,” said George. “We knew it was unnatural. You could feel it.”

“Not exactly unnatural…” Daniel protested.

“Let’s be plain about this,” said George. “The vicar is absolutely right. This isn’t some amusing curiosity. I don’t know what sort of proof you need, but the whole thing has evil running right through it. You might say that thing was from Hell, or you might call it another dimension if you want to be scientific, but I mean to find that thing and destroy it. And damn anyone who gets in my way.”

“That’s a bit strong, old man,” said Tom.

“Dammit, you even saw the wretched thing,” said George. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about. There are good Christians on one side and this—this thing on the other.”

A disturbance interrupted the conversation. We could hear confused shouting in the street and many running feet. Outside it was a fine late summer evening, but there was alarm in the air. We were carried along in a rush of people down the road and onto a side street where there was a faint pall of dust. Halfway down the road, where there was a gap in the houses, a crowd was gathering quickly.

“Stand back, everybody—please stand back!” a man in workman’s overalls was shouting. “It ain’t safe! Stand back, I tell you!”

V

It took me a minute to realise that a house had collapsed, and that was why there was the haze of dust in the air. It had folded neatly into itself, with the rubble fitting tidily into a hole that had opened underneath it so that the heaped floor tiles were level with the lawn.

“It’s subsidence,” a man next to me was explaining to his wife. “Like they have in Yorkshire with the coal mines.”

“What mines?” she asked.

“It’s an earthquake,” another man was saying. “A bloody earthquake. One minute the ’ouse was there, and then, pouf …”

Men were clambering over the ruin, trying to get into it. I gathered that a retired banker and his wife lived there and they had both been inside when it collapsed. A constable arrived and then another, and soon the able-bodied men were drafted in to form chains to move rubble away from the ruin as others dug in to it.

George, Daniel, Tom, and I helped out with the rest, taking off our jackets and passing bricks from hand to hand. It seemed a futile effort, but we had to try. And we were literally handling single bricks. The house seemed to have been shattered, every brick pulled apart from every other by some tremendous sudden force.

Sometime later, when I saw footage of the Nazi bombing in Guernica, there were similar scenes of destruction. But the damage there was not so concentrated and so intense. The effect on the house was something like an explosion, as though it had been blown apart and the pieces all gathered together.

“Did you hear anything?” George asked as we worked.

“Not a thing,” I said.

“Must have been an earth tremor,” said Tom.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s pushed the whole street out,” he said.

I paused a moment and looked in the direction he indicated. The line of the street had been changed. Instead of being straight, there was a slight bend to it.

“Impossible,” said George. “We would have felt something.”

“My God,” said Tom.

I followed his gaze but could see nothing extraordinary. He was looking out across the back garden, with its paving next to the house, carp pond, gazebo, and rose beds. George and Daniel were also mystified. Then it hit me.

“Those stones,” I said. “That stonework. It’s the same.”

What I had taken for an ordinary section of patio, with some limestone paving, was in fact exactly the same pattern as the underground chamber where Whatley died. That same regular irregularity, the same curious stone. It was an irregular oval perhaps twenty feet across.

The flowerbeds were all neat rectangles. All, that is, except the one next to the paving, which was a peculiar, bloated crescent. There was no sign of disturbance to the soil, but I knew intuitively that an hour before it had been the same shape as the others, that this distortion was the same sort of monstrous intrusion as the mysterious chamber. Its geometry had somehow inserted itself into this space, warping the rest of the garden and the house around it.

I knew now what had happened to the house, how it had been ripped apart in the transition that must have run right through it.

“Interesting,” said Daniel, adjusting his glasses. Tom retrieved a pocket Kodak from his jacket and went over to take photographs, much to the irritation of the next man down in the chain as he looked for someone to hand the brick to.

“It’ll be important evidence,” I said, moving to close up the gap.

“Who cares?” he asked. “They’re dead by now anyway, aren’t they?”

He was right of course. I don’t know what they died of, but somehow I wondered if they were dead before the house came down on them.

While we were moving rubble, there was a knot of women by the side of the house. They were clustered around a female neighbour who had evidently seen something and was sobbing and moaning. Jessica drifted in to the group to listen for a while, and afterwards came towards George and me.

“She’s not very coherent,” said Jessica in a low voice.

“Her neighbours were just crushed,” said George. “It’s not very surprising.”

“It’s not that,” Jessica said. “It was something that happened before. She was in the garden, taking down the washing. She looked up and—something happened.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She’s just babbling really,” said Jessica, looking at me. “But she keeps saying something about being seen through the window of that house. She keeps saying ‘He saw me, he saw me with those yellow eyes.’ I thought you ought to know.”

“That thing in the Whatley house,” I said. The house, the chamber, that grotesque creature, and now this.

“It’s all connected,” George said grimly, still handing bricks away from the ruin. I had never seen him so serious. “There’s evil here and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

We were quiet after that, each of us with our own thoughts. It was more than an hour before they found the bodies and took them away. The summer evening was wearing on towards darkness. George half-heartedly suggested going back to the pub, but there was no enthusiasm.

“I’ve been thinking and I want to show you something,” said Daniel, and George and Tom and I followed him. I noticed he was holding a tennis ball.

Daniel stopped by the pond at Alleyn Park Road and tossed the tennis ball in, where it bobbed up and down.

“There,” he said. “Do you see it now?”

“A three-dimensional object intersecting a two-dimensional surface,” I said, grasping his meaning at once.

“What?” said George.

“Imagine the lily pads are flat,” I said. “They see each other as circles. The tennis ball is another circle to them, but one that keeps changing in size as it bobs up and down.”

“And how does that explain anything?” asked George.

“Your creature,” said Daniel. “It’s shifting because what you see is a changing cross-section. That’s how it moves too. If you imagine the surface of the pond as being all crumpled up—”

“This is all Greek to me,” said George. “What happened to that house?”

“Warping,” said Daniel. “Stretching in the next dimension. It warps our space to make room, and some things can’t take it.”

“Bloody theoretician,” snapped George. “Can’t you tell me how to stop it?”

“We will when we can,” I said, but George was already stamping off. Tom was still watching the tennis ball. I suspected he was thinking about the implications of photographing another dimension. Daniel shrugged.

“I’ll see what I can find on extra-dimensional geometry,” he said.

Exhausted and famished, head still buzzing with strange ideas, I made my way back to my lodgings and devoured a plate of fish pie which Mrs Hall had kept in the oven for me. The Halls sat by the grate, and the parrot perambulated from one end of its perch and back to the other with long, deliberate steps.

I exchanged a few words with Mr. Hall over the disaster of the collapsing house. He had seen the rubble, but only fit young men were drafted in to help, so he had watched from the sidelines and talked to the other bystanders. He was puzzled and shaken in equal measure. He could not make sense of it. He said subsidence was unheard of around here, and shook his head at the idea of an earthquake. Surely it could not have been an explosion?

Mrs Hall knitted quietly and nodded pleasantly. I was surprised when her husband mentioned that the dead couple had both been from the church.

“That’s right,” said Mrs Hall, nodding and continuing to knit away with great energy. She had known them well and met them at church for thirty years, said her husband. But she was no more troubled by the news than if I had told her they had bought a new sofa.

Afterwards, when she went to make the cocoa, he leaned over and spoke to me sotto voce.

“She’s not well,” he said.

With a glance towards the kitchen, he held up her knitting for me to see. It had started out as a cardigan for a baby, but partway through it had degenerated, mutated. She had used a confusion of different wools, and extra arms of different sizes and shapes had grown on it. It showed signs of unravelling and re-knitting, and changes of style. I could see her mind losing its way and wandering hopelessly, repeating the patterns she knew, trying to recover the familiar but becoming ever more monstrous with each attempt.

“It’s that church,” he said.

When Mrs Hall returned with the tray, I was looking through the Illustrated London News and her husband was feeding nuts to the parrot. She went back to her knitting.

That night I lay awake. A large glass of port had done nothing to soothe my nerves, and the images of the day washed back and forth through me like a tide. Tom’s pictures, Daisy’s strange automatic writing, George looking grim… the collapsed house, that alien paving, Mrs Hall’s deranged knitting. It was all a twisted and distorted parody of the real world.

I drowsed, but I swear I did not sleep, and when a squawk sounded downstairs I was instantly wide-awake. The parrot was as good as a guard dog, and his noise meant someone was near. An undercurrent of dread washed through my soul; something fearful was afoot. I strained my ear to hear an intruder and caught a soft, unidentifiable noise from the direction of the stairs. The parrot squawked again below.

I could hear Mr. Hall’s voice. I distinctly caught the words “I’ll see to it,” and their bedroom door opening. The click of a switch, and a strip of light appeared under my door. Then nothing.

After a long minute I could not stand any more. In spite of the dread, I got up and opened the door, to find a ghastly tableau.

Mr. Hall was standing at his door in his pyjamas, and Mrs Hall behind him. They were both dumbstruck, eyes fixed on something at the end of the hall beyond. At first I could not see anything. There was nothing there. But there was something there, a living thing which I had encountered once before. I smelled it before I saw it—that vile, fishy, sweaty odour I first encountered in the church.

It would be quite wrong to call the thing invisible, but it was difficult to see. It absorbed and reflected light like any other physical object and so in that sense it was visible. It was not even camouflaged. But your eyes kept sliding off it when you tried to look, seeing around it but not seeing the thing itself. It was not my eyes, I think, but my mind which rejected it, failed to make sense of what they were seeing. It is said that Australian natives failed to react to Captain Cook’s ship because they were incapable of seeing something so alien to their experience. What I was seeing was a thousand times more alien.

I could not assign any true colour or shape to it. It was pale, with the pallor of something that shuns daylight. From what I later gleaned, I might call it something like a monstrous toad, a bloated, rounded monstrosity. Its shape was not fixed but changed constantly, like a bundle of pulsing, writhing worms. Its size was impossible. It seemed somehow both tiny and yet gigantic. If you pushed me I would say it was as big as a man, because it seemed to fill the hallway. It could not have been much larger.

It was the thing I had disturbed under the bed at the Whatley house. Now it had come here for something. It was facing the Halls.

They were paralysed in place, fixed I knew by that Medusa-stare looking through them. Mr. Hall seemed merely horrified, but Mrs Hall wore an expression of stark terror mingled with something else—ecstatic madness, perhaps? Her face was distorted out of all recognition; she did not look human at all but as though some possessing demon’s features had superimposed themselves on her.

Perhaps if I had quicker wits I would have seized a poker or a paper knife and attacked the thing. I knew that if it looked at me I too would be paralysed. Or perhaps I could have flung myself back and slammed the door on it. But then those eyes saw me, and a convulsion of space overtook me and I was rooted to the spot.

I could see a whirling stone wall spinning towards me, but it was spinning the way the world spins when you are drunk, as though the movement was all in my head. I was falling towards it and was about to be smeared on it like a fly on the windscreen of a speeding car but—

“Gachhaa! Gggaachaa! Ggggachaaa!”

The shrieking and squawking parrot flew past me, and I had a sense or a glimpse of the thing disappearing downstairs, flowing or flying rather than running. It seemed to pass through the closed front door, like a stream of grey quicksilver which ran through the cracks around the door.

The parrot continued to shriek and squawk, and the Halls were chasing after the bird, trying to catch it and calm it down. It was a few minutes before the bird was caught and quieted. Mrs Hall went to heat some milk to help us sleep, and I had a word with Mr Hall while we checked pointlessly the house was secure.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “What was it?”

“Something bad,” I said. “It’s connected with the church, but I don’t really understand how.”

“There are some bad things about,” he said. “I know, in my time I’ve seen them with my own eyes, things you wouldn’t believe. But that beat them. It just looked at you with those bloody great eyes …”

“Is Mrs Hall all right?”

“I don’t think the missus is any the worse for it,” he said. “But she’s no better. Thank God for that bird, that’s all I say. I told you he was as good as a guard dog.”

For once I could not disagree. The parrot’s feathers were fluffed up and he looked about him with a savage air.

We had our hot milk with a medicinal slug of brandy. In spite of the unsettling experience which should have left our nerves jangling for days, all three of us seemed to get over that ghastly intrusion in the next quarter-hour as we sat around sipping hot milk. As soon as the monstrous thing was out of sight, it was hard to remember it properly, hard to believe it had not all just been a dream. We talked idly about the weather, and as I went back upstairs to bed I remembered with a jolt why we were up. I wondered if the others had forgotten already.

On Sunday morning I met Jessica for tennis. We attracted a few spectators who admired her athletic grace, and those fast, powerful serves that whipped past me two times out of three. It was a warm day and I was sweating profusely after the first set. I usually won a couple of games, but this time I barely scored a point. Jessica’s speed and strength, the sheer intensity of her playing, were extraordinary. I called a halt because of the heat, in an attempt to save the remnants of my masculine pride. We sat in the shade gulping down barley water.

I told her about the intrusion and she nodded quietly, saying little, fitting her racket back in its press.

“Of course, what I was thinking,” I said, “what I was wondering…a minute more and maybe the house would have come down about our ears like the other one.”

“And the parrot scared it off?”

“I suppose so. Startled it, I imagine—the way I startled it the first time.” She was not openly sceptical, but I could tell she had her doubts about my story. Jessica had an active, calculating mind and she would have brought it to bear with some detailed questions, rather than passing quickly in to the subject of the previous day’s disaster.

We had both bought the local newspapers and scoured them for details of the collapsing house. They told us virtually nothing we did not know, simply describing the respected banker and the respectable street with no previous history of sinkholes or subsidence. The theory of a gas explosion was given an airing, but there were no eyewitness accounts and certainly no mention of monstrous eyes staring out of the window before the event.

“I think George has it, more or less,” said Jessica. “Everything I turned up has the Whatleys being linked with black magic and witchcraft since the year dot. And your vicar said the same. This is some dreadful thing they’ve called up. You know he found the meaning of that odd text of Daisy’s—it means ‘In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’ Cthulhu is a pagan deity, or a devil. He doesn’t have horns coming from his head; he has tentacles.”

“So this other place is R’lyeh,” I said. “And the thing that lives there is Cthulhu. Demons make no sense, but other dimensions, with intelligent, non-human inhabitants—”

“That’s just your way of putting it,” she said, echoing George. “But I’m not sure if George has the right answer.”

“Does he have an answer?”

She put the empty bottle in her bag and stood up, looking at me as though I were an idiot. I stood up next to her; even in tennis shoes she was as tall as I.

“George is going to fight it,” she said. “Spiritually exorcise it, or physically attack it if he can. I’m not sure if he has the right tools for the job.”

“If he’s going to hold up a crucifix and hope it shrivels up like a vampire, he’ll be disappointed,” I said. “That’s superstitious nonsense, and Hollywood made most of it up.”

“Quite,” said Jessica. “But on the other hand we do know that whatever rituals the Whatleys used were efficacious. The magic—if you’ll accept my terminology—works. Even if it goes against Christian teaching, we have to use it.”

“How…?”

“There are some ancient inscriptions from the Temple of Dagon,” she said. “In the British Museum. They’re kept locked away because they’re so blasphemous from a church perspective. I’ve been allowed to copy some, ‘for my studies.’ I wanted you to know.”

Of all of us, Jessica was the most conventionally religious. It was a terrible step for her to go anywhere near the occult.

“But Jess, that’s crazy,” I said, regretting the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. “Sorry, I didn’t mean …”

She swished her racket to and fro before tucking it under her arm.

“We’ve all gone a bit crazy the last few weeks,” she said at last. “Especially Tom. And Daisy, and poor George. Maybe I have too. I think we’re all under the same influence; we just respond in different ways. Forgive my methods, William dear, just promise that you’ll be with us. As George says, he has need for all our different strengths.”

“I don’t want you involved in anything dangerous,” I said.

“Nonsense,” she said. “You know that a woman’s place is fighting alongside her man, not cowering behind him.”

“Well, I’ll be with you,” I said. “If it comes to that.”

“I knew you would be,” she said, breaking into a sunny smile. Jessica’s smiles were rare and lovely as summer sun.

We stood there for a few seconds, grinning at each other like idiots. Bonds can be forged over the unlikeliest things, and a life-or-death struggle against alien horror may not be the strangest.

“Oh, and I want you to have a look at these,” she said, drawing a small portfolio from her bag. It contained a dozen small but intricately detailed architectural drawings.

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Do let me know what you think,” she said. “I’ve got to go. Sophie wants me for a council of war.”

With that she gave me a peck on the cheek and picked up her bag. I watched her tanned legs walking away, still digesting her words. What did she mean about a woman alongside her man—did that mean she considered herself attached to me? And about us all being a bit crazy. Did that mean she thought I had dreamed or hallucinated that monstrous thing? And what did she mean about Tom and the others being crazy?

I knew then that I had been too wrapped up in my own thoughts to notice much about the others; I assumed the rest of the group were going about their business as usual. I did not realise how deeply we were getting enmeshed.

Her drawings were splendid: Jessica had sketched out ideas for a tropical honeymoon resort. There were dozens of villas interlocking in a way that gave everyone privacy and the best views as if each couple were the only one there. The resort was arranged so that the tennis courts were tucked away, and there were private dining areas with views of the beach or the mountains.

I enjoyed a fine Sunday lunch of roast pork and two veg with the Halls, with no mention of the night’s events. The parrot was livelier than usual, and Mr. Hall kept feeding him little tidbits of crackling. Afterwards, although they had said nothing about it, a motor car drew up with one of the Halls’ daughters and her husband. Apparently it had been arranged for Mrs Hall to spend a few days away with them in Stoke Newington. She took a small travelling case and a bag of knitting with her, and waved goodbye cheerfully if absently.

“She’ll be much better away from here,” said Mr. Hall.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I don’t get on with them lot,” he said, nodding towards the departing car. “Besides, I’ve got to stay here and look after you.”

I went looking for George, but he was not in his rented rooms or any of his other haunts. I tried Tom and was surprised to find Daisy in at his apartment. She said he was busy in his darkroom and not to be disturbed.

I walked around the church and the old Whatley house. That thing, that toad-like, bloated thing, must be in there somewhere. It occurred to me that it did not like daylight. George probably intended an expedition to hunt it down, with whatever weapons he thought suitable. It would not be an easy task; the thing moved like water and I was not sure that it had any solid substance that we could harm. Its gaze was enough to paralyse you, and if it could make a solid building collapse like a house of cards, what else could it do?

VI

I spent the rest of the afternoon leafing through the Hall’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, a second-hand 1901 edition, but for once I did not need the most up-to-date information. I was looking at legendary beasts and the like for some sort of correspondence. It seemed to me that this thing could not be unique, that folk like the Whatleys must have summoned similar things in the past. It would have been called witchcraft, and the thing would be seen as some sort of hellish creature—in fact, much the same sort of interpretation that George was putting on it. And if they had been here before, then someone must have tried to slay one. So, following Durkheim and Graebner, I looked for traces of the historical truth behind the folklore, seeking ways to kill our monster.

But as a scientific guide to the biology of monsters, stories of dragon slayers are useless. I read about serpents and dragons and wyrms and wyverns, dispatched either by noble knights or humble but crafty sons of blacksmiths or foresters. Some of the beasts did evoke a little of the chill of that alien thing, but they all died a little too easily.

The cockatrice held my attention. It was an unnatural creature, born of a toad and a snake. It was not large, but it exuded a subtle venom that turned the countryside around it into a wasteland, and, in particular, it was difficult to kill because if you looked it in the eye, you were turned to stone. Could this be a folk memory of our creature? It was not clear how you killed a cockatrice, but one story had a knight using a mirror shield and reflecting its gaze back on itself.

That night Mr. Hall busied himself about the place. He double-locked and bolted the front door and wedged it. He even hammered in a nail so the letterbox could not be opened. He shut all the windows fast, in spite of the summer warmth. He positioned the parrot’s perch just inside the front door and quietly instructed it to keep watch. The bird did not seem troubled. He hung a heavy brass trinket, a Hindu sunwheel, on a loop of cord over the door handle.

“A bit of juju I picked up in India,” he said, almost apologetically. “It’s not Christian exactly, but it’s a matter of taking practical measures, Mr. Blake.”

“Of course,” I said.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in the Bible,” he said, “but …”

He shrugged and went to check the back door.

Our sleep was disturbed around midnight by the doorbell, then banging and hammering on the door, frantic shouting—and the angry retorts from the parrot. It sounded as though a madman were trying to get in. Mr. Hall went down, armed with a short, thick iron bar, some relic from his sailing days. He looked out through the glass. Then he put the bar on a shelf, moved the parrot into the front room, and opened the door.

“It’s for you,” he called up, and I heard Daniel’s voice before I saw him bouncing up the stairs.

“William! It’s a collapsing wave function!” he shouted in my face. His eyes had that wide-open stare of madness or uncontrollable enthusiasm. “A superposition of Eigenstates! Look at this!”

He waved a bundle of notes, then kneeled down on the floor and started spreading them out, babbling excitedly about orthonormal functions and complex conjugates.

“Is he drunk?” asked Mr. Hall. “Or just barmy?”

“It’s not easy to tell madness from higher mathematics,” I said. “Daniel, please, calm down.”

“I am calm!” he said, almost shrieking. “Look at this! The process of collapse maps right on to Heisenberg’s model, but there’s paradox—”

I let him run on in this vein, and after some time it was possible to slow him down enough to explain himself. It took somewhat longer for me to understand what he was saying. My mathematics was passable, but I had trouble telling whether half of what he said was a very advanced theory or just gibberish.

The problem that had been puzzling Daniel was the intersection of the other world with our own, which he simplified as a three-dimensional object breaking through a two-dimensional surface. If it was like a sunken castle rising from a lake, then the highest parapets would simply break the surface of the lake. Instead it was more like a vast sheet stretched tight and lowered over the castle: it was only where the sheet tore that the castle would break through. And each tear would be a small one, until their number increased, the fabric started to give, the tears started growing, and the whole thing burst through.

The tearing, said Daniel, was not just a matter of geometry. There was something else involved; that was why Whatley said he had the power to raise things from that other world, why that one house was demolished as R’lyeh started to erupt through.

Daniel’s theory, derived from the latest work in the field of electromagnetism, suggested that it was a presence of an observer that made the difference. The other world only existed as potential until someone in our world perceived it; then the shimmering abstract possibility condensed into concrete reality. Or, as Daniel put it, the wave function collapsed and the dimensions intersected each other. Science showed it worked for sub-atomic particles, and Daniel believed it could work on a larger scale as well.

Whatley was the first to see through the veil; it tore at the spot he was seeking, and the chamber appeared. The second rift happened when the house collapsed on Saturday and another piece of that other world peeked through. But what was the connection with that toad-like thing?

“Can we just look at this ‘breaking through’ again?” I said, dragging him back for the fifth time. We were in the front room now, his papers on the tables and sofa and floor around us. Long John the Macaw watched us suspiciously. “It happens when the observer sees something?”

“Yes, they see the observable associated with the Eigenbasis—”

“How? How can they see something in another dimension? I thought the whole point was that the two worlds do not coincide.”

Daniel rubbed his head and looked unhappy.

“The observer also has to exist partially in an extra dimension,” he said eventually.

“What does that mean?”

Daniel rubbed his head again, scratched his ear, then began pulling at his hair distractedly. Then he shuffled some of the papers around before putting them back. A light was dawning for me, a light through the crack that separates dimensions and holds the worlds apart.

“You’re talking about a mental dimension,” I said. “Like a mind that has been warped, or folded, into a different shape. Insane! That’s what it would look like. The way Whatley was.”

And, I thought, as many of the parishioners at the church seemed to be.

Warped by the influence of the thing that Whatley had summoned.

“A mutation,” said Daniel, brightening visibly at the thought. “A quantum mutation! Why not? Maybe even…maybe …”

Whatley would be the most susceptible to it, born with a mind apt to flex in that way. Now the rest of us were being warped too, our minds stretched out of shape into another direction.

He produced a pen, turned over a sheet of paper, and began sketching a diagram. I could make nothing of it, especially when it started sprouting annotations in Greek with subscripts.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but maybe we can get it to join up…” He stopped in mid-flow. “But if the observer dies in the process, ceases to be, it wouldn’t be valid.”

“That thing,” I said, “with the eyes. It all happens when you look into its eyes. The person sees into the other world, reality tears, they die. But the thing remains. It’s part of the process.”

“Observer observes observer,” he said slowly. “That might just work…the collapse has to take place in both directions at once, and the two worlds bring each other into existence. A human on one side and your toad on the other—who survives the experience. I wonder.…” He went back to his equations with renewed energy.

“Enough, Daniel,” I said, standing up. “It’s the middle of the night and I need to sleep.”

“I haven’t slept since Saturday,” he remarked without looking up.

“Well, go home and get some rest. You can finish all this tomorrow. You’ve done enough.”

“All right then.” He gathered up the notes and assembled them in order. He was calmer, but his brain was still working away at that problem, feeling his way around it. He was not going to go to bed. “Thank you, William.”

As he stepped out the front door into the cool night air, he turned around and looked at me anxiously.

“Do you think I’m right?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you are,” I said. “If this was all some mad dream we were sharing there would be nothing to worry about. But you seem to have proved mathematically that there really is an evil other world breaking through into ours.”

“Thank you,” he said again, reassured, and walked off into the dark.

Over the next few days I received a series of cryptic notes from George giving me updates and asking me to find out various pieces of information. Many of these were drafted by Sophie, who was evidently acting as his secretary. He was too busy to meet up, “organising the effort” as he put it, and I gathered that he was pounding the streets of Whitehall to try and gather support. Though brief, his letters never neglected to tell me to keep my chin up, remember I was from the Bulldog Breed, and keep being the stout fellow he knew I was.

On Tuesday there was a message marked “Strictly Personal and Secret” which I thought was rich even for George.

Tues 11 a.m.

Will,

Things are moving pretty fast now. Don’t know if you’ve heard the word, but there are two more houses down and several dead. DON’T TELL ANYONE. It’s being kept quiet because the Home office don’t want a panic, but those idiots won’t do anything about the REAL PROBLEM. Even the ministers are blockheads, and Scotland Yard are worse.

Gas Explosion is their explanation, and they’re giving the South London Gas Board hell—for all the good it’ll do. There were two science Johnnies poking around this morning, I couldn’t get them to see sense.

THE VICAR is part of it, a key part, I’m morally certain of that. We need to act fast and deal with him—decisively—before things get worse. It won’t be pretty, but I know I can count on you. Do nothing until you hear from me.

Semper Fortis old man,

G.

P.S. Don’t tell Daniel ANYTHING.

That afternoon when I left my tutorial room I was surprised to find Sophie waiting for me, twirling a parasol and radiating glamour. I’m not the most observant chap when it comes to women’s clothing, but even I noticed the silk stockings and the new hat.

“We need to have a chat,” she said. It was a sunny afternoon and she linked arms with me as we walked down the Common road to the playing fields. We sat under the shade of a willow tree to watch the cricket. It was like sitting inside a tent and peering out through a green veil. The First XI was playing Harrow; it was a fast-pitch and a cracking game, but with Sophie beside me, my attention was soon distracted from the game.

“Has George given you a half-day holiday?” I asked.

“I’m through with George,” Sophie said, making a face. “I don’t want to hear his horrible name. It’s a lovely day; it should be just the two of us.”

She was sitting so close that I could smell her perfume.

“You’re looking even lovelier than usual today,” I said. “What’s the occasion?”

“You, darling,” she said, and giggled. “You know me, William, always the direct approach. William, let’s run away together, today.”

“And get married?”

“If that’s a proposal, I accept. Let’s get away, go to Canada or New Zealand or somewhere. Buenos Aires—we could dance the tango. Wherever you like. You won’t have any trouble setting yourself at any university. I can help you,” she said. “And don’t worry about money.”

“You make it all sound so easy,” I said, laughing. “Just go, tonight, the two of us, and leave everything.”

Sophie nodded excitedly. “We can do it, William—darling. Just the two of us.”

I was overwhelmed, but clear thought cut through the rush of emotion.

“You want to leave all the horror here behind,” I said at last. “You think this whole place is doomed. You’d leave the others to fight that thing.”

When she saw that I was not going to agree, her expression changed and her excitement evaporated.

“George is destroying himself politically,” Sophie said, lighting a cigarette and fitting it into a holder. “He’s been trying to call in favours or beg help from everyone with any influence he’s ever known. He’s broken with his father over it. The harder he tries the more they call him loony and shut the door in his face. It’s what I call the Horshell Common Problem.”

“Horshell Common?” I said. “Ah, from The War of the Worlds.”

“Exactly. When you find a cylinder full of invading aliens in your back garden in Horshell Common, whom do you call? Until they start destroying things with their heat ray, nobody believes you.” She blew a slow stream of smoke out in front of her.

“We need concrete evidence,” I said.

“Tom is convinced he can photograph it and show the world, and then everyone will listen,” said Sophie. “Pas du tout…look at all those imaginary cities in Metropolis—they can fake anything these days. George’s latest wheeze is to go through the bishop. Apparently the bishop knows something is going on here with the vicar and the parishioners, but I doubt he’ll talk to George about it.”

“He said something about the vicar in his last note. I suppose I can see the connection, with Whatley’s book and everything. Is that what he thinks, that the vicar is the source of it?”

“Something like that,” she said. “There was another one last night, by the way. A man walking his dog in Dulwich woods. George still has his informants.”

“What makes you think it was connected?”

“The body was found by a stone construction,” she said. “From the description I think it’s more of your crazy paving.” She blew smoke. “Try explaining that one as a gas explosion.”

“You’ve heard Daniel’s theory about tears in the sheet as the other world breaks through?” I asked.

“Yes, George has grilled him thoroughly about it. George doesn’t trust Daniel, though. Daniel is Jewish, you know,” she added to my questioning look. “I know, I don’t see what that has to do with it either, but as far as George is concerned, it’s all about purity of blood and alien contamination. Daniel thinks it’s a clash between mathematical worlds rather than good versus evil, and as far as George is concerned, Daniel Knows Too Much.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the more we know the better.”

“Oh, and George took some of the Second Eleven on a hunting expedition to the Whatley house,” she said. That was her name for some of the less favoured members of our social circle. “Rupert and Philip and Jonathan. Armed to the teeth, you know, shotguns and everything.” Sophie raised her eyebrows.

“Really?”

“Truly. Of course they didn’t find anything. Just as well. As if they could just shoot it.”

“I don’t know …”

“William dear,” Sophie said, “you’re as bad as he is. If I can’t seduce you with feminine wiles, let me try and move you with logic. You do not know what you’re dealing with. Ergo, you don’t have the faintest idea of how to defeat it. Are you going to throw stones at it? That’s why I think we should pack and go far, far away.”

“Sophie, people are dying, and this thing is responsible. Doesn’t that give us rather a strong moral basis for action?”

“That’s a surprisingly naïve argument to hear from you,” she said, with a puff of smoke. “Just because the Martian invaders have a face full of tentacles and look beastly, they might still be on the side of the greater good. In a sort of Nietzschean way. What makes us superior?”

“I saw it, Sophie. It’s not just strange and alien and inhuman. It’s actual evil.” The words surprised me as I heard myself speaking. “It’s not intelligent as we understand intelligence; it reacts and responds, rather than thinking. It has purpose and that purpose is chaos and destruction …”

“I see.”

“And as you well know,” I added, “nobody ever needed a philosophical basis for defending home and hearth. I have to side with George.”

“Even though he hasn’t a clue. He’s utterly, utterly wrong about it.”

“How so?” I was surprised by her conviction.

“George wants to turn this into a race war, a war against people like the Whatleys rather than facing—things.” She blew smoke. “That’s why he’s fastened on the vicar, the enemy within. He’d rather fight people, and frankly I don’t think the real enemy is human.”

“I agree with you there.”

“And none of us has the faintest notion of how to deal with it.”

“I’ve survived two encounters already,” I said. “It can be scared off. And if Daniel is right, we could stop it by evacuating everyone away from the danger area. No more observers, no more breaking through into our world.”

“A capital notion requiring merely the assent of the local and national authorities,” Sophie said witheringly.

“Well, we’ve got to do something.”

Sophie crushed out her cigarette on the turf and looked at me without speaking. I was not sure who had won the argument.

I had never seen Sophie so beautiful, or so sad. I smelled her perfume again as she leaned suddenly closer, and we kissed for a long, long time in the secrecy of that willow tent. I had never kissed a girl like that before, never knew that kissing could be like that. It ended when Sophie broke away from me suddenly and handed me an envelope.

“Marching orders from George,” she said. “King Arthur sends for his knights to assemble for battle, tonight. He’ll probably quote Henry V’s speech before Agincourt at you, Lord help us. I won’t be with you, but …”

“Sophie?”

She turned away, standing up. I thought I heard a stifled sob, and I knew that I should not go after her. I had never seen Sophie cry—Sophie the tough, rational one. She had decided that she did not want to be part of George’s crusade. Her reasons were opaque to me. I was at least aware enough to know that the arguments she put forward were simply the ones that she thought might appeal to me.

Tues 11 a.m.

Will,

This is it, old chap—the game’s afoot!

We meet outside the church at 10:30 sharp. The vicar is holding a special service, and we’re going to finish things with him once and for all. Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. There might be a ruck, but I know you’re not scared of that. Come prepared.

As my right-hand man, I’m counting on you absolutely—we’re all counting on you—there is more in the balance than you may realise.

G.

VII

I arrived early, to find George, Tom, and Jessica already there. To my surprise, Daniel and Daisy were also present. The mood was determined and business-like. In spite of the warm evening, George was wearing a tweed jacket, which I realised was to cover the revolver tucked into his belt. He was deadly serious. None of the others were armed, as far as I could tell; Tom had a bulky press camera with a flash unit. Tom handed me an armband; we all had them, to give us some sort of official look as part of George’s plan. It also made us look like we were part of a military unit—George’s own Irregulars, I thought.

“Right then,” said George. He consulted a small notebook. “As I said, Daniel and Daisy will stay outside and keep an eye on things.”

I saw that this was his way of keeping Daniel out of it. Daisy was there to keep an eye on him, or more likely, to stop him from going anywhere else.

There was a brilliant flash of light and I was left temporarily blinded.

“Stop that!” George irritably said to Tom, who was checking his camera and loading another flash. “Daniel and Daisy out here; the rest of us go in. Jessica and Tom tell the parishioners to leave. Will keeps back and stops anyone from interfering with me while I take on the vicar myself.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to make him undo what he’s done,” said George. “By whatever means are necessary.”

“Is that gun loaded?” asked Jessica.

“I’m not the sort to threaten a man with an unloaded gun. You know that, Jess. Any other questions?”

There were none. George consulted his notebook again, as though preparing himself from a crib sheet for a debating contest, or getting ready to deliver a speech. He adjusted his tie, and we entered the church, leaving Daniel and Daisy posted outside the door. The last time I ever saw Daisy she was holding on to Daniel’s arm as if she needed his protection. He was flattered and quite distracted by the unwonted attention.

Inside, the church was lit by candles, hundreds of them. It was almost empty, with just a few people hunched in the pews. The vicar was standing in the pulpit, facing the altar and praying silently with his eyes closed. There was someone in the organ loft, and something low and I thought menacing was playing in the background.

Tom and Jessica immediately started telling the congregation to leave because of some emergency. They did not seem to be meeting any resistance; people were used to complying with instructions from anyone who seemed to be in authority.

After a minute the parishioners had been shepherded out and it was just us. The vicar had not reacted but remained in his meditative state. George looked disconcerted; he had expected to be noticed. I stood a couple of paces behind him. He coughed loudly, twice, and the vicar finally turned and seemed to wake up. He looked careworn, in a state of nervous exhaustion. He held on to the pulpit for support and looked around in some confusion. Jessica and Tom approached to join us.

“The game’s up,” George told him. “We’re putting a stop to it.”

“You?” The vicar was puzzled. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re putting a stop to your game right now,” George said more forcefully. “We know what you’ve been doing, what you’ve stooped to. You talked to the Whatleys; you knew them. She told you about their plans, and you took Whatley’s damned book.”

“I do have the book, yes,” said the vicar.

He seemed to be in a sort of reverie. Afterwards, when I had seen more men pushed to their limits, I would recognise the sort of mental confusion he was suffering.

“We know everything. How this outbreak is focussed on the church, on your parishioners. There’s a diabolic influence here that drives them out of their minds, and when they finally crack, the earth literally opens up to swallow them.”

George had overcome the awkwardness of addressing a man standing higher than himself; he took the vicar’s lack of response as defeat and pressed his advantage.

“We know how it started with the Whatleys, how they summoned that damned thing. Flora Whatley did it, when she sacrificed her child, that poor innocent baby conceived for that one thing. That was how they opened the gates of Hell. It would have ended there without you, wouldn’t it? But the temptation of the power those books offered was too much for you. Do you just use it to destroy the parishioners you hate most? Or do you really think you’re doing God’s work, helping to bring about the Apocalypse?”

“I can do nothing,” said the vicar. “Except tend my flock.”

“The bishop knows all about it,” George went on. “There may not be any laws to cover witchcraft anymore, but by God I swear you will not escape justice.”

“The creature was sent here,” said the vicar. “I understand that now. The innocent must suffer in the Final Days when the seals are opened for His will to be done. I didn’t understand that before, when they all died and nothing could stop it…” His voice trailed off into a low, hopeless murmur.

The vicar summoned his last reserves of strength, speaking louder.

“We must be humble and accept His will. We must pray. Let us pray together. We…must.”

“Is that all you have to say?” George demanded.

The vicar raised a hand and indicated to the altar.

“That won’t help you now,” snapped George.

“George, look,” said Tom.

I saw it at the same time. It was right there on the altar, squatting like a monstrous, bloated toad. Now I knew what the thing was like, I could see it more clearly. It was not transparent or translucent exactly, but your eyes recoiled from registering it properly and wanted to look through it or around it. Its pallid skin squirmed like a corpse ready to burst with maggots.

“Ibi cubavit Lamia,” said George with grim satisfaction. “Here the night-creature finds its resting place.”

“Isaiah 34:14,” said the vicar, as though scoring a point in the argument.

The camera flash was dazzling, and I thought the thing seemed to recoil. Of course, it preferred the dark, never came out in daylight. Tom reloaded the flash.

“Send it back where it came from,” George ordered the vicar, drawing his revolver. “This instant. I order you.”

The vicar shook his head sadly.

“No exorcism, no holy water, nothing drives it away…We must accept His will, though a third of the Earth perish …”

“Something else I know,” said George, “is that a demon is dispelled by the death of the one who summoned it.”

George raised the revolver and aimed it squarely at the vicar, who looked back at him mutely, patiently, as though the bullet were a blessing which he was not sure he had earned.

“This is your final chance,” said George, pulling back the hammer with his thumb. The vicar stood straighter.

“George,” I said. “That may not—”

The camera flash and the gun went off at the same time. The vicar did not fall, but groaned and slumped over the pulpit. George watched with a look of mingled disbelief, horror, and pride. He had summoned up the courage to shoot a man in the name of King and Country and God. He had overcome all the reluctance and moral scruples that held him back. It was a proof of his manhood and the triumph of his willpower; it showed he was capable of final, decisive action. To him, it was the logical, the ideal outcome: playing the hero and saving everyone, right in front of his friends.

It was also cold-blooded murder.

“Now then,” said George, turning to the altar.

I think he expected the thing to dissolve in a bubbling pool, or disperse into smoke, or sink back into the ground like Faust. But it remained unmoved.

What happened next happened quickly, with events piling on one another faster than I could understand them. It was all confused at the time, and I only managed to piece it together some months afterwards. My sensory impressions were mixed up; I did see what happened, even if I did not realise how or why or what it meant.

George calmly stepped forward, aimed carefully, and fired again, twice. The bullets struck home, but with no effect. It was exactly like seeing stones thrown into a waterfall. The surface was disturbed only for a fraction of a second.

Jessica was getting something out of her handbag and Tom was raising his camera when the thing struck George.

As before, it did not exactly move but somehow extended, translocating itself, more like a bolt of lightning that changes shape than a physical object. I don’t believe his bullets could have harmed it—not from what Daniel said afterwards—but it recognised an attack had been made and it retaliated. It passed through the spot where George was standing, knocking him over.

The thing stopped ten feet behind us, motionless again.

When I went to give George a hand up, I saw he did not have any hands.

Jessica screamed.

I stared at George, at what had happened to George, at that hideous writhing shape on the floor without comprehension.

An extra dimension gives additional possibilities. As three-dimensional beings, we could pick up a two-dimensional being like a square and flip it over, like turning a tortoise on its back. And that, Daniel said, was what happened to George. The thing struck him and flipped him through another dimension so that when he landed he was turned completely inside out.

George’s vital organs were all on the outside now, his lungs pumping like bellows, his heart still beating, his liver and kidneys flopping about among a mass of uncoiling intestines, while his brains, suddenly freed from the imprisoning skull, glistened like wet cauliflower.

Jessica recovered first. She was holding a mirror in each hand and she advanced on the thing. I heard her speaking, but it was an unrecognisable language. She was chanting and thrusting the mirrors forward, averting her eyes from the entity.

I picked up a brass candlestick, the only weapon I could see, and when I turned back the thing was staring at Tom, and he, paralysed, stared back. Then he gasped and a ripple ran through his body as the stone ran through him. His flesh burst apart, replaced by a stone copy, and my friend became a statue. The statue creaked and started to swell, and the stonework erupted further, joining with the floor and growing into a spire that ran up to the ceiling.

Tom, who had wanted to see the thing, who would not believe in it until he had photographed it, had seen it and believed. He was, in Daniel’s terms, the observer who triggered the collapsing wave state so that R’lyeh could burst through into our world.

Instead of just a floor or a chamber or section of wall, this was a tower that was still expanding, tearing through the roof of the church. This was not a small rip through which something could be glimpsed; this was the highest tower of R’lyeh breaking through as the whole fabric which constrained it crumbled away. Was it because Tom was in some way a better observer, one who could see more deeply? Or because of the place? Or just because the stars were right at that instant? These are questions I have asked myself many times since, with never an answer.

Jessica stood before it undaunted, still holding the mirrors and looking away, chanting something that did not sound like human language. The toad-thing seemed to waver before her, and something seemed to emanate from the mirrors that made the alien stonework ripple and shrink back like cobwebs shrivelling in flames. But farther from her it was still growing, breaking through into the church.

There was a terrible groan of rending stonework, and a crevasse opened in front of Jessica, splitting and surrounding her until she was standing on a single pinnacle of stone. She stopped in her chanting and the pinnacle dwindled and she pitched forward into the dark with a small cry. She fell into fathomless depths, truly fathomless. There are no bottomless pits on Earth, but where she fell appeared to be just such an abyss without end. Her cry faded and Jessica was gone forever.

I was facing the thing and I was alone and it was looking at me.

The yellow eyes grew until they enveloped the world and I was sucked into it. Our minds touched. It was a whirling phantasmagoria, a scene by Hieronymus Bosch redrawn by Escher and brought to life. I hung in between two worlds. Logical, meaningful thought was impossible, but I knew on some level that I was seeing through into the other dimension, that I too was becoming a gateway for that chaotic other world.

“Gachhaa!” I felt myself shouting the word, clinging to it like a man in a whirlpool grabbing hold of a fragment of wreckage. Because of where I was, I understood that word, I knew what it meant and it had power. It came from before the earliest human language. It meant, roughly, I AM, and it was a charm against this shifting, unstable being that thrived on chaos and dislocation. Was it from the incantation Jessica had been speaking?

The thing, the spawn of Cthulhu, could not speak or use language. But it understood language. I knew, because I was inside its mind, and it was inside mine. I believe now that this was some extension of the mental dimension that Daniel has theorised, and that this must have been what happened to the others just before their minds gave way and that other world tore through into ours.

“Gachhaa!” My feet were on the ground again; things were almost stable.

Something was wrapped around me like the suffocating coils of a python. It was metaphysical rather than physical, but it was pitting its strength against mine and I felt myself being dragged back into the vortex.

“Gachhaa!” But the word was not enough to wrench me free, and I felt myself slipping and spinning.

The thing wanted to haul me towards chaos, but I needed to fight my way back towards order, the natural universe, the world of rational logic. I needed to fight it with logic. It had no words; it thought in visual images: words were my weapons. I dredged up the words which held most logical power for me.

“One,” I declaimed. “The world is everything that is the case.”

I found my feet and pressed the advantage.

“One point one. The world is the totality of facts, not things. One point one one. The world is determined by the facts!”

It shifted and squirmed and backed away. It tried to come at me from another direction, but I was beginning to understand this mad game. I shifted too, and I struck first from another angle, striking with poetic logic.

“Night town a glass,” I declared, a sorcerer casting a spell. “Colour mahogany. Colour mahogany centre.”

The thing paused, confused, turning back on itself.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose!”

It lost purchase and tumbled backwards, clinging to the edge of an abyss which stretched away in two different directions in a way I could not comprehend. It was an abyss between our worlds. Before it could recover I struck again, hurling myself at it, with an incantation of absolute truth.

“The dialectic of relativity resolves paradoxes by abolishing absolute frames—there is no privileged view of reality!”

We plunged together and held on, sinking back into the real world, the one with three solid dimensions, in which objects have a definite outline they stick to and are undoubtedly at rest or on motion. My world, a world in which blasphemous multi-dimensional grotesques did not and could not exist. The fabric of its being was shredded, disintegrating into atoms, into something less than atoms which vanished like smoke. It could not survive for an instant when it was wholly in the world where I had dragged it by desperation and luck, and borrowed logic.

Then the church was collapsing around me with a tremendous roar. It was a waterfall of stone and wood and slate, and I got one glimpse of it before the dust and the darkness obliterated everything.

VIII

When I came round I was crushed flat. Around me everything was dark, and all I could hear was a rushing noise which seemed to be coming from inside my head. I could not move, and bright pain shot through my left leg and arm. I could not breathe properly, and when I tried to take a breath, sharp agony erupted in my chest.

Something shifted above me. I tried to call out, but it was no good. There was more shifting and a flicker of light.

“There’s someone down there,” said a man’s voice.

I lay there, half-aware, the different pains in me clamouring and threatening to submerge me, until a weight was lifted and the light of an electric torch shone on me.

“It’s your friend,” said the voice, and I recognised him: Dunning, the churchwarden. Soon there was a circle of faces above me.

I tried to speak, to tell them not to move me. But Dunning, who had been in the war, knew how to treat a casualty. I was gently lifted on to a coat and carried away from that dreadful scene. The air was full of dust or smoke, and I did not recognise my surroundings.

My injuries were severe, and I was not expected to live. My left arm and leg had been crushed, my skull was fractured, and half a dozen ribs were broken, in addition to many other minor injuries. I lay in a coma for a week.

After that I came back gradually. I have a sort of memory of lying in a white room with white curtains and sunlight streaming in which seemed to continue forever. There were presences nearby, people, and sometimes the sound of their talking drifted past me, but I never thought of making a sign or trying to speak. It was enough just to keep looking into that light, in particular the top corner of the room where the ceiling and the walls made a perfect, fixed, right-angle triangle. It was all solid and real. It was all fixed in three firm dimensions, and the shadows that swept through each day as the sun made its round were perfectly geometrical and true. That ceiling was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, and I wanted nothing more than to lie back and look at it endlessly.

My mind wandered from this firm centre, from geometry to abstracts, to time and the universe. I rediscovered the sensations of my own body. I started to taste the food that was spooned into my mouth each morning. I noticed the sensations from my skin, my eyelids, and my hands. Then I started hearing; I had not been deaf before, but I had not noticed the sounds all around me, in the way that Londoners cease to be aware of the traffic noise.

One day a nurse came to open the curtains. Some reflex action worked in my brain, and I wished her a good morning. There was no thought behind it, but a barrier had been breached and soon I was talking again and back in the land.

Daniel was my first visitor, after I had seen my parents. He had been chosen as the one to break the news to me about what had happened. He looked strained and tired, and perhaps a bit older, but still the same Daniel. I must have looked very much worse.

“How much do you remember?” he asked.

I had had plenty of time to piece together my recollections, and told him as much as I could. This was when he told me what I had seen happen to George.

“Some of the bodies were pretty ugly,” he said. “As you’d expect. I helped identify them. Including you, when they thought you wouldn’t make it.”

“Is it all over now?” I asked.

He gave a long, weary sigh and looked down.

“The two intersecting dimensional sets separated again,” he said. “Our world and R’lyeh are no longer touching. All the stonework is gone, the chamber, all that.” He sighed again. “But it took Daisy.”

“What?”

“She was in the churchyard, right next to me. Then the grass under our feet turned into stone. I leapt back; she just stood there. She underwent a translation”—only Daniel would use such language!—“getting smaller and smaller without moving as I watched. A curious thing—it was as though she was on a moving staircase. Then the dimensions realigned, everything closed up, and it was grass again. It was…remarkable.”

“She’s gone?”

“It took her. Cthulhu. Took her to R’lyeh.” He swallowed. “I…he was there, behind her.”

“My God,” I said, shaken. “George dead, Tom dead, Jessica dead, Daisy gone …”

“And you nearly dead,” he said. “I don’t understand how you could have survived. I saw you when they brought you out. You were squashed.”

“Well, thank you, my friend,” I said, nettled. “Perhaps being in the eye of the storm helped.”

“No, I did the geometry,” he said, shaking his head. “Your survival is an anomaly.”

I knew he was right, but I did not say anything. During my recovery I felt filled with an unnatural vitality, a strengthening which was more than physical health. I had absorbed something from the thing I destroyed; in conquering my enemy I had gained its strength. If I had been more of a Nietzschean I would have rejoiced; instead I felt soiled.

“At least you and Sophie were spared,” I said.

“I don’t know about Sophie,” he said. “Or me.”

“What do you mean?”

He did not reply for a long time. I would hear people passing in the corridor, a blackbird singing its late summer song outside.

“This is over for you, Will,” he said in a stronger tone. He stood up. “You did your bit. You just need to get better now. I’m sure you’ll be fine in a few months. I don’t understand how you survived, but I’m glad you did. It’s been good seeing you again, old man.”

We shook hands. That was the last time I saw him.

The only communication I had from Sophie was a short note that arrived with no return address. The wild handwriting, barely recognisable, was as disturbing as the content:

Weds

Darlingest Will,

I’m so sorry about everything. It’s all turned to dust and ashes, but still we have to jolly well keep on going, don’t we? So many funerals. I will be wearing black forever.

If Daniel didn’t tell you, we decided to stick to your story about marsh gas being the cause of it all. I added a few recherché embellishments, but it’s still yours. It’s a super story and everyone loves it—the newspapers and the police and everyone. I’m sure you’ll understand why it has to be that way.

It might be for the best if you didn’t remember anything about anything when the police ask. Assuming you do remember anything about anything, otherwise this note will seem even madder than it already is. Just forget everything.

Madly,

Sophie.

XXX

P.S. Please do NOT trust Daniel, he is dangerous. Hahaha!

A week later I learned of Daniel’s death. There had been a serious fire in his room late one night, from an unknown cause. He was never a smoker. Everyone else escaped from the building, but he must have been overcome by the smoke. His body was found, burned almost to ashes, in the middle of the room.

The news reports hinted at something more, about how the deaths of several of his friends had affected him, left him in a fragile mental state. There was no outright suggestion of suicide, and the coroner firmly recorded a verdict of accidental death. However, I know beyond all doubt that he died from the same cause as the others. Perhaps it was suicide, his death left as a riddle for us, his one way of communicating his despair.

I did not know how, but I knew those equations had linked him to malevolent forces and burned him away.

That left Sophie and me as the only survivors.

I tried to get in touch with her, but she was leading an erratic, bohemian life with a new group of friends. After some months I heard she was in a private asylum after a violent outburst—it was a choice between that or prison. Her condition evidently deteriorated and she went from one institution to another. Sophie’s family were wealthy, and they put her through a number of treatments of increasing severity. Psychology in those days was a barbaric affair, and various types of shock therapy were much in fashion.

I looked up the details of those “treatments,” which resembled mediaeval torture, with increasing despair. Such crude tools could not excise madness in one neat piece like taking out a thorn. They would destroy everything there was of her and leave a Sophie-shaped shell. If her family were lucky, that shell might be occupied by something that could walk and talk without assistance. I desperately wanted to help, but even supposing I could somehow spring her from those modern dungeons, I would be faced with a worse problem. Sophie would still be imprisoned in a violent insanity, a deeper dungeon where I could not reach her.

The whole world had fallen in.

They died, and I alone have escaped to tell you.

Perhaps I am not quite alone. The others continue to haunt me, with a weird, post-mortem existence which overshadows their lives.

Tom became a celebrated photographer soon after his death. He had submitted bundles of photographs to various magazines in his last few weeks, far more than his usual output. Instead of being rejected as usual, they were hailed as masterworks. I used to think that it was his death that did it, but it seems that his talent was being proclaimed even before they knew about his ghastly fate.

And of course some of his most famous pictures are those nudes of Daisy. I have seen her a million times on coffee tables and walls. Those eyes are unfathomable however long you look at them. Posters and prints of her never seem to go out of fashion, and there is not a photography student alive who hasn’t tried to copy some of those shots. Arguments continue over whether the images’ power lies in his photographic genius or her beauty and talent in posing and conveying an emotion.

George’s final, frantic output of letters and essays trying to rally people to his cause won him a certain celebrity too, and in his case death certainly enhanced them. The dead can’t contradict you, and dead prophetic youth warning about the fate of the country from malign alien influences will always find an audience. His works are regularly quoted in speeches of the British fascist movement. I can’t deny that his words have a certain power and that he found an unusual fluency in his final weeks. Without the context, they seem to be a straightforward appeal to traditional British values, with a shuddering dread of every alien influence that threatens them.

Jessica has found a place in the pantheon of secular saints. Being dead has been a great blessing, as it means her ideas can so easily be appropriated by others. Her soaring, dramatic designs for new cities and urban centres are breathtaking. The ideas behind them, with nurseries, schools, and hospitals fused into dwellings and offices, may one day be realised—and there may also be honeymoon resorts based on her plans. In any case, she is already a footnote in the history of architecture.

Daniel had a couple of papers published posthumously. These were a surprising departure from his previous work on set theory, and dealt with the mathematics of spaces with different numbers of dimensions. They drew little attention at the time, fortunately. I dreaded what might happen if someone realised their implications and sought to explore other worlds using this new science, what horrors they might let into our green and pleasant existence.

As for myself…needless to say, I never went back to oxford for my doctorate. I never thought of going back to university. Instead, I have taught quietly in a succession of schools, moving every few years, always staying ahead of my past. I emphasise to my students the importance of rote learning, of a methodical approach and not making wild leaps.

I too did a lot of writing in those last weeks before the disaster, fired and inspired by unimaginable forces. I wrote enough for two theses, hundreds of pages, much of it in that bizarre symbology with its terrible and inevitable logic. After I recovered, one of my first acts was to shut away the mass of paperwork in a tin box without reading it. I admit I am afraid of what I have written.

My dream, a rational culture based on Principia Mathematica, crumbled into destruction long before it could be realised. Kurt Gödel, that brilliant German mathematician, showed that there could be no solid basis to mathematical logic: the thing was riddled through with a rot, infected by the madness of recursive paradoxes. Our universe does not and cannot make logical sense; no wonder R’lyeh and the chaos of Cthulhu’s world are never more than an atom away. They say Gödel went mad in the end. I think he rejected a world which was itself mad.

The same disease which Gödel diagnosed in the universe will inevitably infest my work. That does not mean it is useless; I fear my manuscript is one of those ancient grimoires which seem like nonsense but which touches some awful and intolerable truth.

I was afraid someone might accidentally open the box and read it unknowing, so I sealed it with paper and wax. Afterwards I got a chain and padlock for it. Then I feared that a burglar might assume a locked box held something valuable, so I screwed a hasp to the floorboard and the thing is chained there under the bed: my creation, my masterpiece, my monster. Sometimes I think I hear it murmuring in the night, the words turning themselves over. It speaks to me in my dreams. Does the box move of its own accord? Is there pressure building up in it sometimes, threatening to burst it, or is that all in my mind?

Sometimes I talk to the box under the bed. It has a calming effect and reduces the pressure.

One day it might be safe for someone to read it. It might shed some light on the enemy we face, which someone someday will have to drive back again. I lie to myself that one day I will be strong enough to tackle it again. But the risk is that my papers, like the others’ works, will lead people into dangerous paths.

Daniel’s papers are the most obvious threat; luckily, nobody seems to have taken any interest in his work and it has never been followed up. But there were many hints of the hidden forces of the occult in George’s speeches too. Perhaps this was what sparked the story that we were all holding a séance in the church when the vicar interrupted at the crucial moment, causing the disaster. It has been suggested that George was involved with that enduring fascist obsession with the occult. Perhaps George did add fuel to the fire. And in Tom’s photographs, especially that sequence of the chambers, there is too much evidence of warped reality, too much to tempt the unwary into exploring dangerous alleys.

But perhaps there is a force on our side too. Daniel’s papers have been deleted and are no longer obtainable. The versions of George’s speeches you see collected these days have been subtly edited. Some at least of Jessica’s plans have been altered, and some of Tom’s photographs no longer appear in print.

Speaking of Tom’s photographs, I received an unexpected packet of them a few months after my recovery. My address was written in block letters that gave no clue as to the sender.

I recognised the first two pictures as Tom’s studio: one a blank wall, the other of Daisy posing with a camera. Then there was a picture of a group of us, taken with a flash. I recognised the scene at once: this was the picture taken outside the church just before the disaster. Someone had gone to the trouble of finding Tom’s camera in the rubble, extracting the film, and developing it.

The next shot is a blurred and indistinct abstract. I have pored over it without being able to make out whether it was even pointed in the right direction.

But the final photograph—Tom’s final photograph, in fact—leaves no doubt. This is the evidence he wanted, crystal clear and in perfect focus, the flash illuminating it as well as a battery of studio lights. This is the one piece of proof I have that shows it was all real, all terribly real.

The spawn of Cthulhu is there on the altar. Without the constant confusing movement, and without the brain’s refusal to form an image, it can be seen clearly enough like any other being.

However, it looked nothing like the way I saw it. It was grotesque, certainly, and perhaps even otherworldly, but it was horribly recognisable. It was not simply a monster from some other world. You might have said it resembled a reptile or even a cephalopod. But the face itself told a different story: the lower half was formless, with tentacles or feelers around the soft mouth, but the upper half was startlingly human.

The Whatleys had not summoned the creature, as George had always assumed. They had bred it. The child found dead with Flora Whatley was only half of the story. Flora had given birth to twins, and the one that survived looked more like his father.

TWO FINGERS

Upper Norwood, South London, 2013

The River Effra had its source in the Great Stake Pit Coppice….Today
there is no visible sign of the Effra in Norwood, but there is a circular
grating in the middle of Hermitage Road from which one can hear
the sound of rushing water of the stream, now piped underground.

—Alan Warwick, “The Phoenix Suburb”

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

—John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud”

I

It was her scream that made him do it. The scream caused all the subsequent events ending with the loosening of the ties binding that unearthly thing.

The scream affected Michael at a primal level, triggering an irresistible need to help. It was the response that threw the caveman in front of a bear to save his mate and children, and Michael could not ignore it any more than he could ignore the touch of a red-hot needle. That scream meant he had to help, whatever the cost.

He never knew Anne could scream like that. After five years of marriage Michael thought he knew all her sounds, every shriek and giggle and sob and moan. But the scream was something else, coming from a deeper place inside her. He would do anything to stop that scream. That scream was the open sesame that let him into the abyss.

It was an idiotic accident. At the end of a party, they had climbed into the car, escorted by their hosts. It had been a long enough evening for Michael, and he was looking forward to getting home and having a large whisky after an evening drinking orange juice. But Anne discovered a new topic and sat in the passenger seat talking to her friend with the car door open, while Michael and the husband ran out of conversation. It was embarrassing, then irritating, listening to the two women rattling on about some television programme. Finally, Michael said goodnight to the husband and strolled around to the passenger side where the women were still talking unconcernedly. Calling out “See you later,” he swung the door shut. It was rude, but it was late and Michael had had enough.

But Anne had been too intent on the conversation, and he had not noticed her hand resting on the door frame. When the heavy Mercedes door shut with a soft, well-engineered thunk, two of her fingers had been crushed. A second later her scream ripped through him; when his friend opened the door he could not understand the flaps of flesh hanging from Anne’s hand.

What followed passed in a blur: the rush to A&E, the long hours in the hospital, the endless comings and goings in blank corridors and consulting rooms. He kept telling Anne that he was sorry, that he would make it all right, and he meant it.

It was obvious from the start that things were not going to be all right. Before the night was over, Anne’s little finger and ring finger had been amputated. The heavy mechanism had mashed them as effectively as an industrial vice. Anne stayed in the hospital for observation, under heavy sedation. Michael went home, already intent on his next moves.

Everything was just as he had left it in the house. The quiet elegance of their home, the fusion of his money and her taste, was still the same. It was the physical proof of the affluence he had worked so hard to achieve. The tall windows in the living room gave on to a spectacular view of the City below. The Gherkin, the Heron Tower, and the others fused into a single mass of light, with the Shard standing separate. Off to the right were the shining monoliths of Canary Wharf. A whole empire of Money, illuminated by its own light.

Michael padded barefoot on thick pile carpet into his study and fired up the computer. The cabinet held sixteen different single malts. He took a bottle at random and poured a shot over three cubes of ice from the dispenser. The doctor had explained that Anne’s fingers were too badly damaged to be stitched back on, and he had given Michael a leaflet. There were several options they could explore, the doctor said in his serious-but-caring medical voice, and many people adapted well after this sort of accident. It would have been much harder if it had been a thumb and forefinger. In this case the problem was mainly an aesthetic one.

Michael had read the leaflet three times, then started surfing the Internet on his iPhone in the waiting room. The options they offered were all useless. He knew how Anne would react to being permanently maimed, and what it would do to her having to hide her mutilated hand. Appearance was so important to her. He might as well have cut off her nose.

Michael sat in his ergonomic Swedish office chair and set about finding more advanced alternatives. Finger transplants were possible, but not the sort he wanted. The only work being carried out was transplanting a toe to replace a missing finger to give some slight functionality rather than none. Replacement finger transplants from donors were unheard-of.

Michael kept going: stem cells, therapeutic cloning. Regeneration technology. Popular science articles breezily explained how lizards could re-grow tails and axolotls could regenerate entire limbs, and how this might one day be possible for humans. Emphasis on ‘one day’: at the moment it was all laboratory test tubes and tissue cultures. Actual treatment was years or decades away, if it ever happened.

Michael was not going to give up. He was not going to sleep until he had cracked it. It would never occur to him to question his first judgement, or to talk to Anne about it. He was going to make everything all right. He gulped whisky without tasting it and logged on to the system at work.

Michael sold boats. The top end of luxury boats: super-yachts. Each one was individually commissioned, designed, built, fitted, decorated, and finished to the highest possible standards for the most demanding customers. They were boats for billionaires, oligarchs, Arabian princes, and oriental tycoons. Or people who thought they deserved the same status and had the money.

If there was one thing Michael knew, it was that the rules were different for the rich and privileged. ‘Exclusive’ defined everything about the world he moved in, and there were different standards in the world of Exclusive. Every boat had secure spaces, what others might call secret compartments. They were for storing valuables, and for many of his clients it was apparent enough that the valuables would be a few kilos of coke and other recreational substances to keep the party going.

Requests for concealed doors providing nocturnal access to other cabins to carry on covert relationships with secretaries, assistants, or ‘friends’ were commonplace. So were hidden cameras in the cabins and shower cubicles. Michael had equipped floating dungeons and outfitted playrooms for orgies without batting an eyelid. A boat was so much better than an apartment or even a villa for so many activities. There were no nosy neighbours, no paparazzi, and all the legal convenience of international waters.

There were also rumours about the other features that made a boat attractive to a certain type. If the worst happened—an overdose, sex play getting out of hand, a drunken fight—then nothing was easier than pitching a weighted body overboard. No fuss, no mess, no evidence. Barely even rumours.

You could get away with all sorts of things on a boat like that. All you needed was the money.

Michael had not been born into the world of luxury. Unlike most of those he worked with, he had made it through his native wit, hard work, and plenty of luck. It started when he blagged jobs working on boats as a teenage deckhand. After that he ended up working in boatyards on the off-season and quickly gravitated to the sales side where his true talents lay.

A sign on Michael’s desk—a present from Anne—read: “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.” None of his customers cared about how much they spent, except to make sure that it was more than their rivals. If your boat was not the best in the marina, the one that everyone looked at enviously and asked about, it was not worth having.

If anyone had access to special medical procedures, ones not available to ordinary people, it was Michael’s clients. And one case in particular had occurred to him almost at once.

Two years ago, there had been an accident. Of all the bad luck, an owner, a dotcom entrepreneur called Roger Bridges, had been swimming off his yacht and caught his hand in the propellers of one of the runabouts, losing some fingers. Michael’s company had been in discussion with the lawyers about liability. Bridges was bad-tempered, ruthless, and capable of destroying the boat builders if he thought he had a case.

The matter had blown over in weeks. There was no mention of the accident in the press, and Michael had been surprised to see a photograph of the entrepreneur handing out some prize with an undamaged hand. They had talked about it in the office. Was it photoshopped, or an unusually good prosthesis? Someone found a video of the ceremony on YouTube: there was Bridges, shaking hands, giving a presentation, holding up a crystal statuette, unmutilated, just a month after the accident.

Michael called up the legal documents again and picked out the key paragraph: “first three digits of right hand were severed at the second joint.” There was no chance of finding severed fingers after an accident in the water like that. The legalese emphasised what a serious injury it was and how it would affect their client’s future life.

From there Michael did more searches, found more pictures and videos. It was easy enough. Bridges sought out the limelight as reptiles seek sunshine, and every week he was photographed somewhere different. There Bridges was clinking glasses with a supermodel, here he was autographing his bestselling business guide, and here he was playing a video game with a racing driver. The restoration of his hand was perfect in every way.

Whatever the entrepreneur had, Michael wanted it for Anne. It might have been impossible for normal people, but it could be done for the right people at the right price. It was just a matter of getting it. Michael went to bed satisfied that there was a way and that he had the will.

Selling was only half of Michael’s job. The other half was dealing with designers and boat builders, fitters and decorators and a dozen others to make sure customers got exactly what they wanted. If they asked for a three-metre Jacuzzi, they would not settle for two-point-eight metres whoever said it was impossible to fit it in. The builders had to make it fit. If the client changed everything halfway through, the builders would have to accommodate every last whim. Michael was an acknowledged expert in getting people to do things, with a finely calibrated sense of when to offer money and when to use threats or promises or just a little old-fashioned charm.

The next day Michael set about using his skills for his new mission. The first stage was to find out what doctor had treated the entrepreneur. Michael had plenty to start from: the details of Bridge’s lawyers, and the report which mentioned the hospital in the Côte d’Azur which had tended to him after the accident.

After feeling his way to the right contacts, he immediately started drawing blanks. The treatment had been so discreet as to be invisible. But there were ways of finding out.

Michael’s second track was embezzlement. This was going to call for money, more money than he could raise on his own. But he had access to funds. Every month he signed contracts worth millions. The countersigning was a rubber-stamp affair and was never questioned; trust was a key part of this business. Michael had idly wondered about fraud before, but there was never a need. Now there was a need. There was a risk of getting caught, but that wouldn’t happen until afterwards, and all he cared about was getting Anne’s fingers mended. He started setting things up and going through the lists of current contracts looking for the right opportunity.

He visited Anne in hospital, taking her the biggest bouquet he could find, with the good news that he would make everything all right. And if these doctors suggested otherwise, it was because they didn’t know what they were talking about. Sure, they were good, but they weren’t the sort of world-class specialists you needed for this job.

Anne looked terrible. She was pale and had a sunken look around the eyes. It physically pained him to see her looking so damaged and tiny in the enormous private room.

“We’ll soon have you good as new,” he said, and she looked at him with hope and admiration. Anne had always believed in him. That was what had given him his strength. She had married beneath herself, and her parents had never quite forgiven her uneducated, barrow-boy husband. But they could not deny that he provided extremely well for her.

They had started talking seriously about children. Everything in their lives was perfect; the time was right. Anne said that September was the best time for it to be born, and she already had a schedule. Michael had already started to imagine being a father. And now it was all threatened.

The first thing was to find out how Bridges had done it. Over the years Michael had acquired contacts among the rich and influential. He approached a few of them, carefully, asking on behalf of a client about a particular medical service. None of them could help directly, but one who was in software came back a few days later with the information that the Bridges had been to a place in Surrey called the Medway Clinic, and that was all he could get. They both knew the information had not been acquired legally.

A few Internet searches and one phone call established that the Medway Clinic was dedicated to cosmetic surgery of the most discreet variety. If you wanted a facelift without the world knowing about it, then the Medway could help. There was no hint, however, of any more advanced services. As it happened, one of Michael’s clients was a figure in the world of plastic surgery, the inventor of a new and lucrative technique for breast enlargement. And he had worked at Medway. The boat Michael had supplied him with was more for business than pleasure: it had a small but well-equipped operating theatre aboard, so clients could go for a week’s cruising and come back from their holiday looking years younger and not a bandage in sight.

Michael contacted the floating doctor. He handled the conversation with the skill of a surgeon performing an exploratory operation. He had to be delicate, not touching any nerves or blood vessels, but he needed to extract something. He must not do anything that might be mistaken for blackmail, but he needed to apply enough pressure to get a response. It was a nerve-wracking conversation for Michael, who was used to being phoned up for a quick chat which could see a ten-million pound deal destroyed—or doubled.

Michael had picked his approach with care. The floating doctor was sympathetic and agreed to Michael’s entirely illegal and unethical request for a small piece of information about the treatment given to a certain entrepreneur under the pseudonym Roger Brown. It seemed that the entrepreneur had only used the Medway Clinic for a check-up and aftercare. There had not been any surgery there. The challenge was finding the next link in the chain, to find the elusive surgeon.

In the week that followed Anne returned home. Her hand was bandaged, and Michael encouraged her to keep it that way. He did not want her looking at it, or thinking that she had lost her fingers permanently. Everything would be all right and she would be as good as new. He told her not to tell anyone about it.

She was on a course of antidepressants. The doctor had prescribed them on the morning after the accident, to help cushion the shock. Between the effects of the drugs and the recuperation she was practically an invalid. But it would not be for long. Michael knew what antidepressants were like, and how many people got addicted to them. He knew that she would not survive for long in this state.

He had dug some way into the case and had some crucial bits of information. At first it had been like scrabbling to dig a hole with his bare hands. Now the stones he had loosened could be used as tools to deepen the hole. He went back to the files on the entrepreneur to get examples of his headed paper. Then he assembled a brusque fax to the Medway Clinic, ostensibly from the entrepreneur’s lawyers, marked IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED. This required them to send a copy of the invoice and supporting paperwork regarding the case of the pseudonymous “Roger Brown” with a crisp query over the VAT rate paid on transport costs. Attached was an authorisation from the entrepreneur to release the information, with his signature on it.

This was the first definite criminal act that could be traced to him. But Michael was not worried. The Medway Clinic required discretion; as with the yacht business, discretion was an essential part of the service. Any attempt at social engineering by phoning up and pretending to be a relative asking for information was doomed. But a full-frontal approach by a legal firm was a different matter, especially when backed by authorisation. They would know better than to try and check with Bridges. He was famous for not suffering fools gladly, or at all, and staff at Medway were skilled in not antagonising their clients. The administrator who dealt with the fax would be unlikely to know there was anything especially sensitive involved. From their point of view, the case was just a day or two of post-operative care and not a miraculous restoration of fingers.

A few hours later there was a return fax. It was almost as brusque as the original, but polite, and provided the necessary paperwork. There was just one item that he needed to see:

“Transport between the Medway Clinic W1G and Effra Hall SE19, 3 hours, £300 + £60 VAT.”

Google turned up just one Effra Hall, and Google Maps and Street View took him there in a minute.

There was no medical facility, hospital, or clinic at Effra Hall. There was a registered business, but the company reports showed it was concerned solely with maintenance and upkeep of the Hall, a historic Grade II listed building. Michael jotted down notes for further investigation.

Meanwhile, the pieces of his fraud scheme were slotting into place. Michael had set up several shell companies, each with associated bank accounts. The scam was a simple one. It took advantage of the way the multi-million-pound super-yacht contracts included regular progress payments as well as the deposit and final payment.

Michael knew exactly how and why fraudsters got caught. They spent their money—of course, why else would they steal it?—on things that were too visible. They bought cars, or foreign villas, or even boats that they could not possibly afford. Their associates who were not as smart tried to skim money and got caught. They were shopped by wives who found out about their mistresses, or mistresses when they were dumped. Mainly, though, they were caught because they always got greedy. Having pulled a scam once, they kept doing it for greater and greater amounts. And people never got more careful, they got less careful as they got more confident with every success. Until they got caught.

Michael did not have any co-conspirators to let him down. His wife, the only one who would know, would never give him away. And no money would be spent on anything visible. Nobody would ever know or even suspect.

Some of Michael’s clients would switch their monthly payments to a company that sounded like a subsidiary of the boat builders. After a slight delay, the boat builders would receive payments from companies that looked like subsidiaries of their clients. All the payments would be made.

It was the same as damming a stream. Water stopped flowing downstream until the lever rose and it overtopped the dam. The stream then ran on as before, and nobody downstream would suspect the presence of a new lake. In Michael’s case, the depth of the dam was around two million pounds.

He was effectively borrowing money from the boat builder on a continuing basis, paying it back, and borrowing more. At some point he would have to make good the difference. But that could wait. What mattered now was that he had the money at his disposal and his plans could go ahead.

II

The next afternoon Michael guided the Mercedes down the side of a park in Norwood to where Effra Hall stood. It was in the bottom of a valley; the park, once part of the grounds, had been acquired by the local council for public use in the mid-nineteenth century. The gatekeeper’s cottage was no longer part of the property. The pastel curtains and clean stone made it look like the fashionable young daughter of the battered old remnant behind it. Even the upstart Victorian Gothic piles that lined the park gave a better appearance of stately grandeur than their ancient neighbour. He parked next to an old Landrover in the driveway.

Michael was dressed for business: charcoal-grey suit, cream shirt, and peach silk tie. His shoes were new and immaculate. He had a slim attaché case, mainly for effect. Door-to-door salesmen do not carry stylish cases.

The man who answered the door was exactly what Michael expected. He could have been the headmaster of a boy’s public school, a man whose height was emphasised by his ramrod posture. His clothing was what Michael had anticipated: the comfortable frayed corduroy and patched tweed uniform of a Surrey landowner. Old clothes did not necessarily mean poverty, but there was no scent of wealth here, and Michael’s nose was sharp. Michael knew Sir Harold was in his seventies, and he was old for his age, gaunt and with lines of care etched deep into his face. His arms were thin as sticks.

“Good afternoon, Sir Harold,” he said. “I’m Michael Nichols. I think we can help each other a great deal.”

Never start with an apology. Be pleasant, but always be one step ahead of them.

“Is this a convenient time for a quick chat?” Michael continued. “It’ll only be ten minutes. Or should I come back later?”

Don’t give them the option of saying no.

“What’s this about?” asked Sir Harold. He sounded more concerned than anything, as though he might be dealing with a debt collector. Michael could see the muzzle of a wolfhound behind him, straining to see the visitor. “The house is not for sale, at any price.”

Its market value was eight million five, Michael knew from the local estate agents. It needed a lot of work.

“It’s not the house,” said Michael.

“What then?”

“If you have a minute, I’ll explain the whole thing,” said Michael, gesturing with the attaché case to suggest elaborate paperwork.

Moving with arthritic slowness, Sir Harold led him to a drawing room where the furniture stood on clawed feet and the walls were crammed with gloomy canvases. The ceiling was painted to look like a sky scattered with cumulus, and the wallpaper imitated leaves. Michael took a minute to make friends with the wolfhound, letting it sniff his hands and patting it. Always make friends with pets.

“My wife was in a serious accident a few weeks ago,” said Michael, and went on to give an account of her injury and her reaction to it. He produced his iPhone to show some pictures of her: the wedding day, holding a bouquet, after the accident with her hand bandaged, a picture of the X-ray showing cleanly severed bones. He fumbled through other pictures to find them, as though this were not a well-rehearsed presentation.

Michael watched with a salesman’s acuity, picking up the exact moment when Sir Harold caught the connection and nodded minutely without changing expression. Watched to see which words and phrases he responded to.

“I gather you might be able to help us,” Michael went on. “And whatever it costs, I’m determined to restore her hand. Literally, whatever it costs.”

“Who told you I could help?” asked Sir Harold.

“Don’t worry, nobody broke a confidence. I had to do a lot of detective work to find you, and I have resources.”

“Do you mind telling me how you did it?”

“Certainly, but perhaps we can discuss my problem first.” Michael was not going to give everything away at this stage.

“I can’t help you,” said Sir Harold, shaking his head. “I’m very sorry for what’s happened to your wife, but I can’t help you.”

“You have helped others before,” Michael said gently.

There was a distant subterranean boom, as though a part of the foundation had crumbled away. Sir Harold ignored it, but Michael noted how his eyes flicked away distractedly.

“I—there were particular circumstances, which I can’t explain. I can’t help you—it really would not be advisable,” he said.

“I think you could use a million pounds, Sir Harold,” said Michael.

Financial checks and credit references were part of Michael’s business. Quite a few people started buying a luxury yacht as a way of proving they were not in trouble, and the company’s facilities for credit checking were second to none. Michael knew how badly Sir Harold and his family were doing. There was one son who had been living on a beach in Thailand for the last couple of years, another in the Army, and no means of support for the house. The older one, the Thai beach bum, had been to the same public school at the same time as the entrepreneur. He seemed to be the connection. But he had not been home in over a year, according to his Facebook page.

“I’m not denying that,” said Sir Harold ruefully. “It’s not that I don’t need money, believe me. I would like to help you, Mr. Nichols, but really—I can’t. It would be too dangerous. I don’t know how much you know about the—the—the process, but it wouldn’t be safe.”

There was a second crash. This time Michael could tell it was coming from the cellar, and Sir Harold did not mask his reaction quite so well.

“Well, perhaps if you tell me a little more about it—”

“It’s no good talking,” said Sir Harold, suddenly rising. Michael remained seated. “I truly, honestly cannot discuss the matter and that’s all there is to it.”

“It won’t do any harm to talk,” said Michael. “After all, a million pounds is a very useful amount of money.”

“Harold?” A woman had appeared in the doorway. She was Sir Harold’s age, wearing a cream sweater with a double row of pearls and a tartan skirt. She was worried. That would be Lady Mary, his wife of forty-nine years. She was also from a good family but equally lacking in assets.

“Yes, dear,” he said. “It’s all right, Mr. Nichols is just leaving.”

Michael remained seated for three seconds. It was just long enough to show that he could not be forced out so easily, but that he was cooperating of his own free will.

“Have a think about what I’ve said, Sir Harold,” he said, getting up at last. “I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

“The answer will be the same,” said Sir Harold, shepherding him towards the door.

“A million pounds,” Michael said again as they passed Lady Mary. Hearing that, she would have asked what it was about, and she might help persuade him.

Michael decided it had not been a bad start. But there was work to do.

Sir Harold’s reaction to the noises from the cellar had been to blank them out completely. Another man might have said something to explain them, or joke about the plumbing. But Sir Harold had taken the traditional English approach of ignoring something to make it invisible; well-bred guests would know to take their cue from him and not ask. It was an approach that had served for centuries and that allowed people like Sir Harold to make things like mad relatives or embarrassing lapses of decorum cease to exist and vanish from existence.

Whatever was happening in the cellar, Sir Harold did not want to discuss it. He did not want Michael even to be aware of anything there, but his approach did not work with a man who refused to play by the time-honoured rules. The noise might have suggested industrial machinery, or vehicles moving, or mine working. None of them made any sense. It was a mystery—no, a secret. And, Michael thought, no family has two secrets.

The investigation into Sir Harold was an old-fashioned affair. The man simply did not exist online. He probably did not have a computer or an email address. All the documentation was on old-school paper.

Michael had paid an agency to carry out checks, and apart from the dismal state of his finances they had not turned up anything unusual about Sir Harold. None of his family or circle of obvious contacts had any medical connection. He had an unremarkable career in the Royal Artillery; when his father died and he inherited the baronetcy, he had devoted himself to managing the estate.

Michael knew everything about the place. He had seen the floor plans, how it had lost its outbuildings and been shorn of its crumbling Georgian wings, leaving the barn-like remnant. He knew that its history went back to Sir Harold’s Norman forebears, and the site was even older. It was built by the River Effra, one of ancient London’s rivers which had been paved over and turned into a sewer in Victorian times. He knew the family coat of arms featured an angel with a sword and a Latin motto (Ense animus major—‘the soul is greater than the sword’). He knew the family’s unremarkable history, how they held a Royal charter granting privileges because of the favour of King John. They were a colourless lot, with little ambition to expand their holdings or get involved in court politics over the centuries. The nearest to excitement was one rakehell in the early seventeenth century, a certain Sir John who was said to ride wildly about the countryside, lashing peasants with his whip, accompanied by a devil who took the form of a “great black dogge.” The man ended up altogether mad, and was supplanted by his brother who kept him chained in the cellar.

It might be possible to get someone else to go in and investigate what was in the house, but that would add complications. How do you find a reliable burglar? Michael needed to find something to use against Sir Harold, and it would be dangerous for the information to be in the hands of a third party. He could approach a private detective agency, but the chances were they’d tell the police at the suggestion of anything illegal. Worse, what if they took the job on and made a mess of it? Long experience had taught Michael that rolling your sleeves up and doing it yourself was the only way to ensure anything was done properly. Breaking into houses was beyond the maddest thing he’d ever had to do in the boat business. But Michael was determined; he could still remember that scream. He could see the look on her face. He was going to do this.

His wardrobe provided black jeans, a dark sweater, a storm-proof black jacket, and some serviceable gloves. Black deck shoes were quiet and gave plenty of grip if he needed to climb a pipe. He even had a balaclava, a thermal one, essential kit when you’re sailing in a strong wind on a cold day.

Two pen-sized LED torches went in his pockets, along with the iPhone.

Michael needed some tools. From the garage he selected two screwdrivers, a chisel, a file, a flat metal ruler, and some wire cutters. Michael used the cutters to snip a coat hanger into two convenient lengths of stiff wire. He emptied the spanners out of a tool roll and filled it with his improvised burglary kit. It made a compact package he could tuck inside his jacket.

There were a couple of other things to complete his equipment. A foil pack of dog treats from a convenience store near work. And, just in case, a Japanese chef’s knife from the kitchen with an eight-inch carbon steel blade, with its own sheath. If the dog did attack him, then a knife might be his only option, even though it would ruin his chances of any deal with Sir Harold. It would be ironic if he lost a couple of fingers to the wolfhound at this stage.

Michael inspected himself in the full-length bedroom mirror. The man in the balaclava looked tough, menacing. He looked like someone who got what he came for. He nodded approval back at Michael. Right, let’s do this.

At ten o’clock he left Anne contentedly watching a box set of Sex and the City, telling her he would not be back until morning. He hated to do it, but it was necessary. She trusted him, as always. He kissed her, then kissed her again, and left.

He drove the Mercedes a couple of miles and parked up to wait. He turned the light off and listened to Echaskech playing low on the sound system, closing his eyes and not thinking about what lay ahead.

At three a.m. Michael started the engine again. The roads were quiet now; after a short drive he parked a quarter-mile from Effra Hall, in a side street he had picked out earlier in the day. Michael sat with the lights off for fifteen minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the lights and tuning in to the nocturnal sounds. There was a vehicle passing every minute or so, but no pedestrians. The street lighting was poor, but the moon was high and almost full: a gibbous moon, sailors called it.

Michael slipped past the gatehouse and walked on to Effra Hall, up the grass verge that skirted the driveway. Everything looked strange in the dark. The trees were black pillars and the garden was littered with unfathomable, hostile shapes. With an effort of memory Michael recalled that the thing in the middle of the lawn must be the sundial, that there was a hedge down one side. Something that might have been a bench crouched by the hedge.

There were windows set below ground level on one side of the house. Michael clambered down carefully and shone a light around the frame, locating the latch. Then he illuminated inside: it looked like an old pantry, and easy enough to get in, if he could open the window.

Michael had not seen any sign of burglar alarms when he was inside. It was not that sort of place.

He unrolled his toolkit and started to experiment methodically with the screwdrivers, the chisel, and the metal ruler, trying to force a gap between the window and the frame. A couple of times a screwdriver clattered to the ground. Each time Michael stopped and listened for a minute, then continued.

After several attempts he opened the window far enough to slip the hanger wire through. Michael eventually found the right shape to bend the wire to work the latch. The process seemed to take several hours; it was probably a few minutes. At last he engaged the latch, flipped it out of the way, and swung the window outwards.

Michael quickly wrapped up his tools, stuffed the toolkit in an oversized map pocket, and lowered himself into the pantry. The only light was the moonlight from behind him, and all he could hear was his own breathing and, when he held his breath, the steady thudding of his heart.

“Good,” Michael murmured to himself. He took out his iPhone, clicked a few times, and replaced it. He put his ear to the pantry door, wondering if there was an alert wolfhound waiting on the other side. Dogs usually barked first…but not always.

Outside was a corridor which stretched further than his torch could reach. Michael set off cautiously, taking one step at a time, alert for sounds.

Old pipes gurgled, above him the wooden beams groaned, the old house talking in its sleep, mumbling peaceably to itself in the dark.

The rooms down here were storage rooms, mainly empty, then a disused laundry room, others with indeterminate purpose. One had an opening like a huge shadowy fireplace, or perhaps a coal-hole or chamber for firewood. He looked closer and saw steps leading down.

The end of the corridor opened out into a wine cellar which stretched out in three directions. That was odd. The wine cellar must extend beyond the walls of the house above. The ceiling was crusted with nitrous white mineral growths, and the walls were marked with a series of dark lines from flooding. The water table must be close underfoot here. In fact, he could hear water, running continuously. The walls were irregular; they were covered with indistinct carvings which had been worn away by years of water. That must have taken hundreds of years, at the very least. The house was older than he had guessed.

Michael walked on with feline steps, and his torch shone on endless wooden racks, a few of them loaded with dusty bottles. Then there was another sound: it was exactly like a giant rubber bathmat being peeled off a wet bath. Michael froze.

The sound was repeated. It was a long way away. More stealthy than ever, Michael moved forward, flicking the light over the wine racks, the benches, looking for a place to hide if someone came. After twenty paces he found a stack of packing cases and ducked down beside them, turning off the light. It was utterly dark, deep space with no stars. All he could see were the faint nebulae of after-images dancing in his eyes.

A minute later the sound came again, and again, until it formed a continuous rhythm. Now it was not so much a bathmat as a dozen people walking across a tiled floor in flip-flops. It was impossible to gauge the distance, but it was getting closer.

Now I’m getting somewhere, Michael thought. He tried to focus his hearing on the sound, to feel its shape and substance and identity, but it was hard to make sense of it. There were rustling and slapping noises, and perhaps some gurgling beneath it. Then there was a sound like two millstones grinding together, so loud it echoed, but afterwards it was silent except for his own breathing.

He passed low openings, just under waist-high, like the big fireplace he had seen. They looked like cubbyholes or storage spaces, but the torch showed they extended into the distance before curving off. They had been carved out of smooth rock by some precise tunnelling machine.

For the first time Michael began to feel doubt. The cellars were bigger than he expected. How long could he spend wandering around them? How would he even recognise what he was looking for? And how long before the dog sensed him and came down to investigate or just barked?

Michael flicked the torch on and set off again. Another corridor or tunnel led out of the wine cellar. The place was vast. After twenty paces, and a single opening into a bare cellar, Michael stopped.

He was walking on flagstones. He would have guessed they were old, as old as the house perhaps. But there was no sign of wear. Nor was there any dust. He shone the light at the walls and ceiling and failed to find even the trace of a cobweb. The entire place was clean and dusted. He could hear running water.

Michael felt the faintest vibration through the thin deck shoes. It was like a lorry passing by on the pavement. But there were no lorries down here. The quality of the sound was odd, as though it had reverberated through endless deep chambers underground, underwater. He remembered the worn steps going down from the cellar. Just how big was this place?

Ten paces in front of him one of the flagstones moved. It was a metre square and thick as a paving slab, but it opened as though it were on a hinge until it was the height of Michael’s knee. At first he thought he was looking down into the darkness below, but then he realised he was seeing something else. Something black and lumpy poured through the opening, like asphalt being poured on to a road surface. Except that it was pouring upwards.

He watched, fascinated. Was this some sort of mediaeval defence, like boiling oil triggered by the intruder’s footsteps? It was too slow to be threatening. As the flow continued he realised it was not liquid. The black stuff moved unevenly and piled itself up instead of spreading out. The last of it came through and the flagstone ground back into place, exactly like a cat flap closing behind a cat.

Michael squinted at it, his heart pounding like a hammer. Slowly, like a snail’s horns extending, the entity stretched out glistening black pseudopods that felt their way up the walls to the ceiling. Over the course of several seconds the entire thing stretched and flowed until it was upright, forming a living wall that completely filled the corridor from floor to ceiling.

His mind shifted gears and for a moment he thought, “It’s a computer-generated special effect”—then slipped back as he realised this was reality. Then there was a sudden stab of memory: Michael was ten years old, looking into a garden pond and watching in fascination as a tiny blob squirmed and changed from a sphere to a worm.

“What you got there, Mikey?” asked his grandfather, putting down his trowel. “Well now—do you know what that is?”

Michael shook his head. The thing had formed a U-shape, attaching itself to the surface of the water and somehow finding enough purchase to inch its way along.

“That’s a blood-sucking leech. They used to have great ponds full of them here,” said his grandfather. “And that’s one of the survivors. Leeches live forever, you know, and they drink human blood.”

Michael looked up at him with big eyes.

“They farmed the leeches here, to sell them to doctors. When I was a lad there was a story that one day a boy fell into a leech pond. Before they could get him out, the leeches were all over him, hundreds of them, ten times bigger than that. By the time they hauled him out the leeches had sucked him dry!”

Michael took a step back from the pond.

“Don’t you worry. I expect it was just one of those made-up stories boys tell. Anyway, one little leech can’t harm you. Fascinating creatures,” his grandfather added, as the leech found a crevice and slipped inside, even though the crack was so narrow you could hardly have inserted a knife blade into it. Michael watched for a long time, hoping it would emerge again.

The next day Michael told all his friends at school about his grandfather’s pond full of huge, deadly, blood-sucking leeches. The teacher found him a book which explained how they were used by doctors in the olden days, and how modern doctors were using substances extracted from leeches to help with transplants. There was even a Victorian barometer filled with leeches. The pictures in the book were boring blobs; you had to see them moving to know what they were really like.

Every time he visited he would rush to the pond to look, but he never saw one again.

Without thinking, Michael was holding up his iPhone, hoping there was enough light for a video. He did not know what the thing was or what it meant, but this was surely what he had come for. This was the secret of Effra House. It was huge. Its surface rippled and pulsed; it oozed oily liquid in a way that suggested salivation. It was a lot like a leech, but even more malleable and able to change shape.

It was like an amoeba, but as big as a horse. One that could engulf a man in seconds. A leech big enough to suck the blood from an army.

Then the thing started sliding down the corridor towards him, as swiftly and smoothly as if it were on rails.

Michael dashed back to the wine cellar. When he glanced back it was gaining on him—and in the darkness he could see the thing was faintly phosphorescent, with a pattern that shifted and expanded as it moved.

He raced back past the wine racks and ducked down behind the packing cases. The thing had stopped where the corridor opened out. There were slapping and slopping noises as it adjusted itself to the room, arranging itself into a different shape. He poked the iPhone up to get a periscope view. Now the thing had reshaped itself into a glowing barrel bigger than a bear. Another flashback overtook him: Michael was a teenager, a South London boy looking over the side of a boat in the Med on his first cruise, watching a translucent jellyfish in waving seaweed, frilled sea anemones clinging to rocks. Strange, colourful, gelatinous creatures like nothing he had ever imagined.

Then the bottom half bifurcated, splitting into two stumpy legs, and it started to walk with clumsy, deliberate strides. It circled, making a heavy, spongy sound with each step. Its movements seemed random rather than deliberate, but with each circle it came a little closer. It could be like an anemone, blundering around until prey fell into its grasp.

As if in response to his thought, the top half split open like a flower budding, separating into dozens of questing feelers that stretched out, and waving slowly. It felt around the ceiling, the wine racks, the floor around it, touching everything gently, blindly.

I’ve got to get out of here, Michael thought. Part of his brain was paralysed, and all this felt as though it were happening to someone else. But underneath he was still coolly rational. Otherwise I’ll never be able to help Anne.

The knife was useless, and none of the other tools were any better. Hell, a chainsaw would be useless.

He tossed the knife across the cellar, and it tinkled on the stone. The thing ambled towards it, feelers out. One hovered over the knife as though sniffing it, then straightened up again. He tossed a screwdriver further over into the darkness, and the thing moved after it. Two of the feelers bulged and became open trumpets. When Michael threw a second screwdriver the thing lumbered over briskly, evidently able to pinpoint the sound exactly. If he moved now it would sense him instantly.

As his one remaining option, Michael tore open the pouch of dog treats and hurled the contents across the floor. A feeler touched one of the chunks of meat and stopped, then dabbed at it. The feeler opened a sort of mouth at its tip and consumed the chunk. Other feelers started to move round like a school of fish, picking at the floor.

Michael dashed from cover, flicking on the torch so he could see where he was going. He ran back through the cellar, down the corridor, past the pantry and up some steps. There was a door at the top. It did not open when he turned the handle. He looked back.

Behind him, something was moving fast up the corridor, rumbling and squelching. Just as he saw an approaching glow, the door opened in front of him: it was not locked, just stuck. He went through and shut it behind him.

The door had a bolt, which he shot. He recognised the hallway through which he had come in this afternoon. It was a good, solid door with an inch-thick bolt.

Something big and soft like a wet mattress thumped into the other side of the door.

As Michael turned, the hall light came on. Sir Harold was standing at the bottom of the staircase in dressing gown and slippers. One hand was on the light switch, the other was on the wolfhound’s collar. Taking in the scene—the burglar fleeing from the thing in the cellar—he gave a grim smile.

There was a rending sound and the iron bolt clattered on to the floor. As if a wooden door could stop something that must weigh half a ton and could shrug aside stone slabs like cardboard.

“That’s why we don’t bother with the bolt,” said Sir Harold.

The cellar door swung open and a wall of black asphalt oozed through and settled into a pile. Michael remembered his balaclava and pulled it off.

“It’s me,” he said desperately. “Michael Nichols, I saw you today—”

“I can’t let you go,” said Sir Harold. He looked frailer than ever, but he was still a soldier. If he had ever ordered his battery to start shelling a town full of civilians, this was the tone he used. The implacable firing-squad tone of an officer charged with ordering deaths. “You must understand. It’s your own fault, breaking in here.”

The thing was rippling, reaching out wide as though to embrace him. Michael was backing away, but he was in a corner.

“I just want to help my wife,” Michael said. “I had to come back.”

“You’re a damned thief,” said Sir Harold, and there was a tremor in his voice. “You wanted to steal it. Well, take it then.”

The thing flexed and reared like a snake preparing to strike. Where the head would be there were two flat projections of black horn, and Michael realised he was looking at a gigantic pair of shears just level with his neck. He had a horrible vision of his head being snipped off as easily as a gardener deadheads a rose.

“Do you know about YouTube?” Michael asked, holding up his iPhone. “I’ve just uploaded some video to it, on the Internet. I’m still recording all this.” He swung the camera around to take in the whole scene.

“People can see this?”

“Yes. Even if the camera gets destroyed, the video of that thing is already on the Internet. Unless I delete it.”

The thing had stopped moving forward but remained in place, waving, hesitant. Michael could hear his own breathing, and Sir Harold’s. The thing evidently did not breathe.

The moment of crisis passed. Sir Harold still looked angry, but he did not look dangerous. Michael put the iPhone away with slow, deliberate movements. It was vital not to screw up now.

“Please, Sir Harold,” he said. “Everything I’ve told you is true. I’m not a journalist or anything. I told you, I swore to my wife on my honour that I would find a way of healing her. Otherwise the injury will destroy her. It was my fault, and she’s the only family I’ve got. It’s my responsibility. Whatever it costs me.”

Honour, family, responsibility: these were trigger words that Michael had identified, words that Sir Harold could not help but respond to.

Sir Harold sighed, shaking his head weakly. “No, no, no, I’ve told you.”

But the thing was withdrawing, piling itself up into a barrel. It was reading Sir Harold’s intention, giving up on its prey. It melted and flowed, like a picture on a computer screen that gradually becomes sharper, until it was a replica of the wolfhound sitting patiently on its haunches. It looked like an ornament moulded out of bubbling tar. A “great black dogge.”

As Michael watched, it kept changing. Eyes like golden marbles popped up all over its surface It was reacting to the light, he realised. In the dark it did not need eyes.

“That thing,” said Michael. “It can grow new body parts, can’t it? You could give her new fingers.”

“No, no, it’s not that simple.” Sir Harold sighed again. “This is no use.” He raised a hand and the thing melted back into a shapeless mass. It flowed through the open cellar door, which Sir Harold shut behind it.

“It’s all right, dear,” Sir Harold called up the stairs. “It’s just that man from this afternoon again.” Addressing Michael: “Drink?”

Back in the drawing room they sat in the same positions as before, the wolfhound at Sir Harold’s feet. The old man was despondent, but stubborn.

“I don’t know how much you know,” he said. “Or how you found out. Do you know what it is down there? It can’t help you.”

“I have no idea what it is,” said Michael. “All I know is that someone came in here missing three fingers and they were restored when he went out.”

“That’s only half the story,” said Sir Harold.

“It’s made of stem cells,” said Michael. “It can grow new eyes or fingers whenever it needs them.”

“No! Not human ones.”

Michael let the silence grow for a few seconds.

“You haven’t seen the Charter?” Sir Harold said at last. “No? Well, as you’ve seen it and are still of sound mind, you’re entitled to know three things. Firstly, I’m the steward of that creature, and it is called Effra, though we just call it the Beast. It lives here, underwater in the cisterns and flooded chambers underneath the house. Secondly, it is a Royal Beast, with protection of the Crown and the sanction of the Church. And thirdly, you are forbidden from speaking about it, on pain of death.”

Sir Harold was bound by oath not to discuss the Beast with strangers. He did not have Michael’s supple approach of working his way round the oath, exploiting the literal limits and saying things without saying them. But seeing the thing gave Michael the leverage to get Sir Harold to talk.

“You’re taking it remarkably well,” said Sir Harold. “Most people are gibbering wrecks after seeing our Beast. There’s something terribly disturbing if you’re not used to it. That’s one of the reasons Effra has to be kept hidden away.”

According to Sir Harold’s younger son, who seemed to understand something of the biology of it, the Beast did not grow new organs instantly. Instead, it could mobilise and rearrange cells from reservoirs that circulated inside it. Bones could be formed in seconds, or broken down into microscopic particles. The cells for eyes and other sensory organs could coalesce wherever and whenever they were needed, and break down again as quickly.

The Beast could absorb other living things. It did not digest alien tissue, but broke it down and mobilised the cells, incorporating them into its own structure. In time, by some peculiar process of DNA transfer, its own cells could copy them. Imitation was a profound part of its nature; on several levels it was a chameleon which took on attributes from those around it. By absorbing cells from other creatures it could imitate them and form its own specialised organs that might help its survival.

“In the first few hours, the assimilated cells can be removed again and transplanted. Because they have the factor from the Beast, they will merge and join wherever they are transplanted: they heal without scarring, extremely rapidly. But after a few hours they get fully incorporated, become fully…Beastly.”

Michael frowned, trying to understand.

“So you need a donor and a recipient, and what one loses the other can gain—a kidney, an eye, or whatever,” said Sir Harold, gesturing vaguely. “Anyway, you can only transplant like to like—you need a donor for your fingers. Which is much too dangerous.”

“Why…?”

“The Beast can’t really be controlled. It has degenerated over the years; they say it even used to talk, like a parrot. My great-grandfather had the skill of getting it to do things, they say, but now…now it’s like a half-wild dog. It might take more from the donor than you intended, and what it takes it doesn’t give back. Your friend got his finger and thumb when he came here. But his donor lost a lot more than that—all his fingers and most of his hand. He was damned lucky not to lose more.” Sir Harold knocked back the dregs of his whisky and put the glass down with a gesture of finality.

“I’m willing to take that risk,” said Michael.

“It would have to be a woman.”

“I’ll find a volunteer,” Michael said. “Someone who’s prepared to take the chance.”

“Even if they were, I’m not,” said Sir Harold.

“I’m desperate,” said Michael evenly.

Sir Harold said nothing.

“Your son Alan knew him at school,” said Michael. “Roger Bridges, the man with the missing fingers.”

Michael remembered telling his schoolmates about the leech pond. How could any boy resist telling someone about something as amazing as The Beast, even if, especially if, it was a close family secret?

“Years later Roger remembered the story about the thing that could replace human body parts. He persuaded your son to get you to go through with it—blackmailed him? That would be his style.”

Something clunked heavily below them in the basement. Probably a stone slab falling back into place after the Beast oozed through.

“That’s about the size of it,” said Sir Harold. “It was blackmail, pure and simple. My son did some foolish things when he was a teenager, as boys do…I was tempted, I was very tempted, to let Alan take the consequences of his actions and be damned. Even though it would mean disowning him completely. I was angry enough for it. Well, anyway that man Bridges got what he wanted, but I put the fear of God into him afterwards. He never saw the Beast, but I gave him an idea of it, and he couldn’t get out fast enough. And I made it quite clear to Alan that it would never, ever be allowed again under any circumstances.” Remembered emotions played across his face: anger, humiliation, and beneath that, a hint of something more tender.

It had happened two years ago. Immediately afterwards Alan had taken off for Thailand and never returned. Dishonoured and in self-imposed exile.

“I just want Anne to be back the way she was before,” said Michael. He turned the phone over in his hands so Sir Harold would notice, would remember the video he had taken. “But you have to understand, if there’s a way of uncovering anything that can help her, I will do anything I have to in order to get it.”

Sir Harold bit his lip. “There are other dangers,” he said. “I have a responsibility, a stewardship. You have no idea how great the danger is, you have to appreciate…Effra is unstoppable. Literally unstoppable. We keep it here and it hardly roams anymore, but if it were disturbed, it could…cause chaos….” He trailed off, torn between the impulse to tell and his oath of secrecy.

“When amoebas eat they get bigger,” said Michael. “Eventually they split in two. Is that what you’re worried about?”

Sir Harold said nothing, looked at the carpet. And below them, something slithered and flopped, patrolling its underground territory.

“Look,” Sir Harold said suddenly. “This isn’t just about me and my family, or you and your wife; it’s something that could affect the whole country. You’re doing your best for your wife—nobody understands that more than I—but you have to keep a sense of proportion. What you want amounts to opening up an atom bomb with a rusty screwdriver …”

Michael said nothing.

“Perhaps,” Sir Harold went on, “you underestimate just how strong and resilient your wife really is. She’s had a nasty accident and of course she’s distraught, but—”

The look on Michael’s face silenced him.

“We’re going to make this work,” Michael said. “You have your oath, and I’m not asking you to break it. And I’m not going to tell anyone about your Beast. But my wife is going to get her fingers back, and you’re going to get enough money to keep this place going. And your son Alan—what if I got him back from Thailand?”

“What?”

“He’s supposed to be here, to take over when you retire,” said Michael. “The guardianship goes from father to son, doesn’t it? Like everything else. But he won’t, not now. Don’t need to say anything. But I will get him back for you.”

Sir Harold was shaking his head again. “If only you could…but no, he wouldn’t come.” It was almost a sob, and Michael knew then he had hit on the one irresistible thing. The old man wanted his son and heir back in the fold, to be the guardian for the next generation, to carry on the family tradition of service. The soul is greater than the sword indeed. If that’s what it took to get a deal, he would do it.

“Believe me,” said Michael, “I can persuade him.”

III

The son had been much easier to get a handle on than the father. He left plenty of tracks across Facebook and elsewhere. On the flight from London to Bangkok Michael constructed a motivation map for his targets, assembled and memorised his list of arguments and key phrases.

On the flight from Bangkok to Phuket he read the family’s Royal Charter, translated from mediaeval French. It gave away little, just mentioned that the family would continue to perform its eternal duty of keeping the Royal Beast captive for occasions when certain powers were needed by the Crown, and performing such services for such persons as the Crown dictated. To anyone who had not seen the Beast the Charter would be quite meaningless.

Then there was nothing left to do, and Michael slept.

Phuket was a beach resort, humming with tourists. Everywhere there were slight, pretty Thai girls linking arms with pasty middle-aged tourists. Flocks of backpackers perched on hotel lawns, spread out amidst colourful towels. At the local market Michael bought a T-shirt, some cut-off jeans, and the darkest sunglasses he could find. He had not shaved, and he brushed his hair back to erase the parting and give a rougher look. His skin was too pale, but the T-shirt showed his bicep tattoo and the sunglasses blanked out his eyes. As he looked in the mirror his body language changed into another register. This time Michael was not the considerate, honourable husband who would do anything for his wife. Now he was the hard bastard who does anything to get his way.

“Is your name Alan?” he said to the man at the bar. Michael’s accent was a few notches closer to his original South London, not as refined as the one he normally used these days. “I want a word with you, now.”

“I’m sorry?”

Alan looked at him mildly. Michael had timed it so Alan had finished his first beer and would be just starting to relax.

“It’s about your father,” said Michael. That woke him up.

They took a bench outside and Michael made his pitch. He had something in common with the Beast, he realised, morphing from one form to another depending on the environment. Sprouting extra senses and straining to pick up the slightest hint of what he was after.

He showed Alan the pictures of Anne, before and after the accident, and the X-ray of her three-fingered hand. This time the shots he casually flicked through in between were all English countryside and London streets. Anne, or the two of them, in a dappled oak woods, with friends in a pub, visiting a stately home. Home was a word Michael dropped a lot in the next few minutes.

Michael explained that he needed the services of Effra Hall to restore his wife’s fingers. He made no reference to the entrepreneur, but hinted that he had found out through some elaborate network of contacts. He showed a few seconds of video of the Beast, making it clear that he was not above blackmail or releasing the video to the media.

Michael said he had his doubts about Sir Harold’s state of health. He was an old man, a bit feeble and doddery, not much energy. Michael was unsparing with the language he used, and he could see it had an effect. In fact, Michael said, he did not know if Sir Harold was up to what he was asking, as it was going to put quite a strain on him. And if anything went wrong, well, Michael would not be pleased, would he?

He offered Alan the chance of redemption. An opportunity to save his father, save the whole family. An opportunity to come home as a hero and be forgiven, to be back in England and take his place in the family. Michael shamelessly dangled the money right in front of him. Going back to somehow keep Effra Hall together when there was no money would be a grim chore and a constant round of hard choices. Being lord of the manor with a comfortable million in the bank was another matter.

It was an easier sell than he thought. Alan was not stupid; allowing himself to be dragged reluctantly back to save the day gave him a free ticket to everything he wanted. And it was not as though he needed to stay in England afterwards. He would be able to return to Phuket whenever he liked.

Michael bought Alan’s ticket back to London the next morning.

Alan drank heavily on the flight—nerves, Michael thought, or perhaps habit—and wanted to talk about the Beast and the effect it had on his life.

“Do you know what it’s like?” he asked petulantly. “Having that thing in the cellar and not being able to talk about it? It’s a family curse, I tell you. My brother and I used to go down at night and throw chocolate biscuits for it, can you believe that? Two kids and that thing.”

Michael shrugged.

“My brother joined the Army to get away,” said Alan. “But Father’s getting older, and Mother. If only we could destroy it…but that’s not possible.” Alan looked into his plastic glass of Scotch and ice.

Michael said nothing.

“Nobody helps. The civil servants are the worst,” said Alan. “They won’t give us any money even though the house is falling down. Every ten years they have a new committee and then a review, and then the government changes and it all starts again.”

“So they know about it?” He gathered from Sir Harold that the Beast used to belong to the Crown in some way. If there was some official involvement, then Michael’s plan might be stopped. Maybe they would arrest him when he stepped off the plane.

Alan shrugged vaguely. “Somebody somewhere in Whitehall knows something, but it’s all kept top secret. They don’t want to know. They just shuffle papers and nothing ever happens. Bloody civil servants, I hate them.”

Michael looked out the window, at the flat expanse of clouds rolling by underneath them like an endless white carpet. There was no need to worry. If Sir Harold had agreed to help the software entrepreneur get his fingers back before, this would be the same. Carried out without official permission…whatever official permission meant in the tangled secrecy of laws covering ancient Royal Beasts. No wonder they preferred to ignore the whole thing.

“Effra could be a million years old,” said Alan. “It’s got to be from Earth because of the DNA, but it doesn’t fit in. It’s some sort of synthetic life-form…” He looked up suddenly. “You don’t care about any of this, do you?”

“No,” said Michael.

IV

Finding a donor would be illegal, but not so very difficult when you knew where to look. While he was carrying out this part Michael took care that that he could not be traced, shape-shifting again. He bought a second-hand car for cash, wore a denim jacket with patches and a baseball cap. He called himself Steve. He talked to a lot of women as he did the rounds, but if they remembered anything of him it would be the cap and the jacket, and perhaps the colour of the car. Nothing that could be used to trace him.

He cruised likely areas, stopping to talk to the women about the services they offered. He wanted to find out just what they were willing to do for cash.

There were plenty of girls in London, immigrants mainly, who ended up selling themselves one way or another. It was just a matter of finding the right one, a woman who was sufficiently desperate. He had to find one who did not have a pimp or a boyfriend who would cut in and make difficulties or complications. He had a series of conversations, paying them for their time, telling them about how he needed a kidney donor for his sick wife. Half the time he had to explain what a kidney was.

Most were suspicious and refused straight off. A few listened and rejected him more or less sympathetically. But others were less wary or more careless about personal safety. He could have picked from any of dozens of women with dead eyes. Women whose brains had been fried by various substances and who would do anything just to keep the supply going. Or others who had been permanently been damaged by childhood abuse and did not seem to care what happened to them. Or whose minds had drifted into instability. If he had been in a state to care, Michael might have wept at some of the sad little stories he picked through while looking for the right one.

Then he found Lena: Romanian, early twenties, with a young child and a husband who was a violent alcoholic. The husband appeared occasionally to accuse her of being a whore, have sex, and grab any money she had before disappearing again. He had been in and out of prison, she did not know where he was now. She was scared of her neighbours, who were black, and whose accents she could not understand. She was scared of Social Services who would take away her child. She was scared of the police, and of the other girls working the street. She was scared of her clients. She was terrified of her husband and what he might do to her or her daughter. All Lena wanted was to escape, to go back home, to live in peace with her little girl and forget about everything in London. Escaping would take a lot of money, and she never had enough money.

Without even thinking about it Michael slipped into the role she wanted. He was the understanding authority figure, the father confessor, the wise doctor, listening to all her problems, knowing the answer to it all.

Lena made it through Michael’s complete set of questions, ticking every box. She would have given away a kidney without a second thought, even if it meant a risky backstreet surgeon operating on her, no questions asked. She was only insistent that arrangements must be made for her child to get the money and to be cared for by her family in Romania. Then he moved on to the real issue: if it would pay what she needed, what about giving up a hand?

“How much?” she asked, without blinking.

As a trial, he picked up her from outside Crystal Palace station next day. In daylight she looked thinner and older. She was exactly on time and, as far as he could tell, sober. He took her to the Medway Clinic by an indirect route, but she was not paying attention anyway. They took blood and urine samples and swabbed her cheeks. Michael had asked for a full battery of tests, anything that might affect her suitability as a donor. Lena accepted everything they did. Afterwards he gave her an envelope containing a thousand pounds, fifty crisp twenty-pound notes. She packed the envelope away in her handbag without excitement, without counting it, and Michael was confident he had his donor.

V

A few days later, after the test results had come back and he was satisfied she was healthy, Michael picked Lena up from the same place and took a different route. He stopped at a layby a mile from Effra and handed her a paper cup with a dozen capsules in it and a bottle of water.

“Take these,” he said.

She obediently gulped the big red capsules down, one after the other.

“Now just sit back and go to sleep.”

The dose was calibrated for her body weight. The drugs were illegal, but not hard to find on the Internet. Michael would have preferred a proper general anaesthetic, but for this stage of the process that was not practical. He could not afford to have too many witnesses. He had done his research and the risk was minimal.

The Medway Clinic’s unmarked ambulance was waiting at the end of the drive outside Effra Hall.

Alan was waiting outside. In a calm and workmanlike fashion he helped Michael carry the unconscious Lena inside and lay her down on the sofa. Anne was already there, brought by the ambulance. She was on the other sofa, also unconscious, her bandaged hand lying on her chest. She looked beautiful, vulnerable, the sleeping princess in a fairy tale.

Sir Harold, looking as frail as ever, watched gravely as they prepared.

“You must stay calm,” he told Michael. “Whatever happens. This procedure is risky. We are dealing with very, very powerful forces.” He clearly had his doubts, but he knew better than to ask Michael if he still wanted to go ahead. He and Alan both pulled on thick rubber gloves as though they were going to help at a calving.

“Do it,” said Michael.

There was no visible signal, but seconds later something like a torrent of black liquid poured through the doorway. It looked different in daylight, a gelatinous mass like bunches of darkly translucent grapes compacted together. It stopped at Sir Harold’s feet, forming an egg which collapsed into a hemisphere and then uncoiled tentacles like elephant trunks from its upper surface.

Very gently, Sir Harold took Lena’s left hand in his and carefully guided a tentacle until it was in contact. He was murmuring something under his breath that Michael could not quite hear. Alan, a few paces away, was murmuring as well.

The tentacle formed a nodule at its tip which opened into a leech-like mouth and wrapped itself around Lena’s fingers. The whole body of the creature twitched suddenly, ripples running through it.

“Easy,” said Sir Harold, as if calming a skittish horse.

The tentacle swelled to take in the top half of Lena’s hand. There were small popping sounds, just like popcorn starting up. Michael realised that those must be the finger bones being torn loose one by one.

“Enough,” said Sir Harold, and the creature paused but did not withdraw. A second tentacle was now coiling softly around Lena’s wrist next to the first.

Then things happened very rapidly.

Alan shouted something, and the second tentacle melted around her arm, joining with the first into a single, seamless piece. There were things moving beneath the surface in a series of rapid, jerky actions, as though a school of piranha were boiling below the surface, or a swarm of maggots, tearing at the flesh with myriads of tiny teeth.

Another tentacle started to form, and another, fumbling around, reaching for Lena’s legs. There were more, louder pops.

The two men moved forward and Michael’s view was blocked. They were not wrestling with the creature—it was far too powerful for that—but seemed to be urging it or chastising it, more with their voices than their hands. Michael stood back, impassively.

The body of the creature split up until it was all tentacles, uncoiling and reaching. Alan and Sir Harold seemed quite unafraid of it, in spite of the way it tried to reach over and around them, pushing away the tentacles as you would the nose of a dog begging under the dining table.

Under their influence the creature subsided and flowed back again. Alan was standing by Lena, holding wads of bandaging and wiping away the black mucus, but Michael did not see him.

He was watching the older man, who had taken Anne’s mutilated hand and was coaxing a fresh tentacle towards it. Sir Harold glanced up at Michael.

“This will take a couple of minutes,” said Sir Harold. “But he took plenty of material, so it shouldn’t be so hard to get him to give some back for us.” The tentacle formed over Anne’s hand, and Michael stood rigid, fighting the impulse to leap in and tear it away. After feeling its way around, the tentacle fused on to the hand. Michael leaned closer: the tentacle was partly translucent, and through it he could see veins like a network of cracks open up and start to flow. Human cells were being drawn back to a human body.

Sir Harold held the tentacle, the tube connecting the Beast to Anne, looking for all the world as though he were milking a cow. An intuition struck Michael: of course, this thing was a domesticated animal. This was what it had been bred for.

“It took her whole arm,” Alan said from the other side of the room. “It’s a very clean job, not much bleeding; the healing factor has sealed it off. The bugger took everything up to the shoulder joint though. Jesus.”

He picked something up from the floor and tossed it to the Beast. Michael glanced round and saw it was an arm-bone—a humerus—snapped up like a dog taking a biscuit. Of course, the tentacle-trunk was too small to assimilate large bones. The humerus had been picked clean and ejected.

The tip of the tentacle in contact with Anne’s hand gradually started to change colour, becoming pink and red and white. Then the coloured part split off and the tentacle pulled away, leaving the hand with a blob of pinkish material attached. The blob seethed and ran as Michael watched, a leech shaping itself into a new form, becoming more and more recognisably a pair of fingers.

“There we are,” said Sir Harold, with a sigh of relief.

Alan was still tending to Lena, but as soon as Sir Harold’s attention lapsed another tentacle flopped out, reaching to encircle Anne’s neck.

Alan started to move, but Michael moved faster. A knife would have been useless, or a gun; even a sawn-off shotgun probably wouldn’t have had much effect. When Sir Harold called it unstoppable, he probably knew what he was talking about. A flamethrower might have worked, and Michael had thought about taking a hand-held signal flare from the boat supplies. But using one indoors was impractical, and he couldn’t risk setting the place on fire with Anne unconscious. So he had settled for the one weapon he could carry in his pocket that might have been of any use.

He jammed the device against the tentacle and squeezed the trigger. There was a little crackle and the tentacle snapped back suddenly, stung by a jolt of fifty thousand volts from the electronic stun gun. The Beast was suddenly back to being an egg-shaped blob, quivering and rippling and forming eyes to see this new threat, ominous black shears materialising and preparing to strike.

Before the Beast could make its next move, Michael had scooped Anne up in his arms and raced out of the room, out of the house. He carried her down the drive to the waiting ambulance. The paramedics were calmly professional as they laid her down on the stretcher, checking her breathing. His eye went automatically to her hand, to her new fingers which looked raw and pink but otherwise normal.

He went back to the house. The Beast had gone back into its labyrinth under the cellars and down to the river. Alan had finished cleaning up Lena. Her entire arm was gone, but, as he had said, there was virtually no blood: the skin had re-formed over the wound and there was just one ragged section where it had not joined up.

“That was a bloody stupid thing to do,” Sir Harold snarled. “The thing could have gone berserk and killed us all. It can decapitate you in a second just by reflex—that’s what it does. It takes heads off. When it’s threatened it can go wild.”

“We could have dealt with Effra ourselves,” said Alan. “It was just trying it on, trying to get what it could. But—anything could have happened after what you did.”

“No harm done,” said Michael coldly. “Except for her,” he added, indicating Lena.

“This isn’t micro-surgery,” said Alan. “All along, you were warned and warned how dangerous it was. It could have been worse, for all of us.”

“Let’s get her to the ambulance,” said Michael. “She needs blood.”

Michael was already calculating how much money he would need to dispense and to whom he would need to drop a word of explanation. All this could be smoothed over, nice and easy. Everybody was still on board, nobody was going to crack and ruin things. Lena was, after all, still alive. That was a welcome bonus: he had only half expected that she would survive the experience, and had already written her off.

It was a beautiful afternoon, with sun streaming in through the window into Anne’s room at the Medway Clinic. There were three bouquets of flowers along the windowsill; any more would have looked excessive, but they made a lovely show. Even more lovely was his wife, and Michael’s eyes were fixed on her face as she came around from the anaesthetic at last.

“Morning,” he said brightly. “Have a nice sleep?”

She blinked at him, and before she could speak he lifted up her left hand and slipped the wedding ring on to her restored ring finger. Her ring had been bent and scratched in the accident, but Michael had retrieved it and the jeweller had done a good job.

“Oh my God,” said Anne, staring at her hand. She held up the other one next to it, flexed her fingers, turned it around, looking at it this way and that. There was no scar, no stitches. “Oh. My. God. I don’t believe it.”

“How does it feel?”

“Incredible. Just like it was.” She looked at her fingertips: even the fingerprints were perfectly matched. “I can’t believe it, it’s magic. You said you’d do it, and you did!”

Then she burst into tears, sobbing like a child while he held her for a long, long time.

Anne could not stop looking at her hand, and even weeks afterwards he sometimes saw her holding up her hand and flexing the restored fingers. Then she caught his eye and laughed merrily, flapping her hand in front of her.

“What a clever husband I’ve got,” she said.

“Just stupid with car doors,” he added.

“Oh, don’t be so miserable,” she said, and they kissed. And everything really was just as it had been before. Their perfect life was restored, regenerated, made whole again.

He told Anne a little about how it had been done, after she was sworn to secrecy. He told her that Lena had donated her fingers for money, but did not describe her eaten-away body. He had only seen Lena briefly the day afterwards, almost completely recovered. He drove her home and carried her case up to her flat where her sister was looking after the daughter. But he checked the next day to make sure the taxi had taken her to the airport and the two of them had flown back to Romania. She had plenty of money, and realistic papers for the tax authorities which explained her windfall as compensation for a road accident. Whether she could hold on to the money, or keep her mind together, did not especially bother him.

At least Lena’s daughter might have a better life. Not that Michael was troubled either way. Lena had fulfilled her function and had received her due.

There was also the matter of the fraud at the boat builders, and the two-million-pound hole in the accounts he was hiding. He would have to continue juggling payments from week to week. But Michael had some ideas about that. His was a business where an extra million pounds here or there would not necessarily kill a sale; it was all a matter of picking the right client at the right time and applying the right pressure. He could take his time, would take his time and do it right.

Effra Hall had been revitalised. The deal had been a success for them. Father and son had been reunited and the place was solvent once more. They would pay off some debts, finish repairing the roof and start restoring the rest of the house. But a million pounds does not go as far as it once did. Before long they would come to the obvious conclusion: with another million they could really get on top of things and secure the future. They would have to start looking for another client for their special services. As it happened, Michael was able to put them in touch with an American oilman whose son had just lost a foot to an IED while serving in Afghanistan. One thing led to another.

If you get away with something once, you think you can keep doing it.

The Beast had grown fractionally. It had also changed. For the first time in generations, it started to form hands and whole arms, crystallising solid bones that fitted together into functioning limbs. It flexed its hands, felt around, patted the walls and the floor. Sometimes the hands were human-sized, and sometimes bigger. It could extrude several at once and reached out to explore its surroundings in a new way. It learned how to pick things up and handle them with new dexterity, exploring the human world.

Effra moved just slightly further away from Sir Harold’s control. Further operations to help more patients would see it getting slightly larger and slightly more capable each time. Slightly more independent. Roving further and more boldly.

The River Effra lets out to the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge; the iron gratings are visible at low tide. This is the site of the oldest known structure in London. There are the remains of wooden piles driven into the riverbed, believed to have supported a ritual platform of some sort. It may have been used for sacrifices. As with other sites nearby, a number of detached human skulls have been found.

However, it is not easy to get close to the site these days. The secret intelligence service, known to the public as MI6, built its towering new headquarters right over the outfall of the Effra. Their defences include a range of sensors and alarms in the Victorian sewers beneath their complex. There are thick iron bars to prevent anyone getting through the sewer, but nobody relies on them. As with other sensitive sites, there are underground patrols to prevent spies from planting devices beneath the building. The two-man patrols, mainly SAS and SBS veterans, wear wetsuits and use infra-red goggles. They are armed with modified 9mm Glock-17 pistols which can fire underwater. These men are trained in the application of deadly force. They are in no way prepared for what ranges further and further down the course of the Effra.

The resulting destruction will be described as a terrorist attack. Of course no details will be released beyond the raw count of dead and seriously injured.

Anne’s new fingers had been expensive; in the end, very expensive. That would not have made any difference to Michael. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

THE THING IN THE VAULT

Chicago, 1927

Undoubtedly the [hard-boiled detective]

stories had about them a fantastic element.

—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

We are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices
than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

I

You want to know what happened to Moran?

He’s gone, brother, and he’s not coming back. That’s all.

Moran was a gangster. They all go down sooner or later.

You want more? I could spin you a line about client confidentiality, or I could just play dumb, but you already know something about it. That doesn’t mean you’re going to believe any of this, but I may as well set my story down for you. Nobody else will listen, and if it helps your ‘research’ then take it and welcome.

Back then I operated out of a one-room office in the Home Insurance Building. It’s a pretty smart address; I did jobs for the insurance company a couple of days a week in place of rent. The arrangement suited everyone and I got a kick out of seeing Edward Jones: Investigations on a brass plate in the lobby.

It was wild times in the Windy City. Sure, the stories are exaggerated, but it is true that the gangs ran everything, including the police. If you wanted real help with a case, you needed a private detective. I got plenty of work. I saw gruesome sights in Chicago—as bad as anything on Vimy Ridge a few years earlier—but nothing to what I’m about to relate.

The problem is, sometimes I wake up in the dark and I can’t move. It’s like being nailed into a metal coffin, and that hammering is the sound of my heart. I’m paralysed, shut away, and it’s the loneliest, most godforsaken place in the world. I want to scream, but I can’t. It goes on and on, as things do when you’re in a flat panic. Then, when I’m half-crazy, I snap the light on and look at the ceiling, breathing hard. I lie there and try not to think of anything until dawn.

When I got an invitation to a certain address in Lincoln Park with fifty bucks enclosed and more berries promised, I didn’t think it was about a missing poodle. But money talks. I put on a new necktie, to show what a high-class operation I run, and stopped for a shoe shine on the way. Lincoln Park is a charming neighbourhood, if you have a million to spare. There are plenty of big trees. The only poor people are the ones raking leaves outside the mansions.

A coloured flunky let me in with polished condescension. He held my hat and coat with the tips of his fingers and disposed of them rapidly. He might be hired help, but he was a part of this fine establishment. I was just a plumber, called in to sort out the mess. He led me past a lawn smoother than most pool tables I’ve played on, and into a big glass room that was tacked onto the side of the mansion. A conservatory, they would have called it. The furniture was bamboo, upholstered in yellow silk. You’ve never seen so many potted palms in one place. The place was warm and smelled of plants.

I felt like something from a department store that had been ordered on approval, just so the customer could take a look before sending it back. “So that’s what a real live private detective looks like.” I figured I’d earned my fifty bucks.

“Good morning, Mr. Jones,” said a man, rising from an arm chair. “I’m Spencer Wade.”

Wade was the picture of tanned good health, looking like he’d just come off the polo field. He was living testimony to the benefits of a life of steak, hearty exercise, and plenty of relaxation. He was a little over six feet tall, with a powerful handshake and sincere blue eyes. He was a youthful thirty and made me feel like an ancient thirty-five.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked. Then, after a hesitation: “Or perhaps something stronger?”

“Contrary to the popular notion, men in my line don’t usually hit the bourbon until after twelve, Mr. Wade,” I said, deadpan. “Coffee will be fine.”

He waved the flunky away with an order for two coffees, and we sat down on either side of a glass-topped bamboo table.

“Nice place.” It was like sitting in a jungle clearing. “Now what’s on your mind, Mr. Wade?”

“I’m glad you like the house,” he said. “My grandfather built it. He was a smart man, made his money in railroads—he was the one who introduced Wade-Hooker Valve Gear, you know—and used the profits to diversify into other fields. Father carried on the business, but he took early retirement last year. He and Mother cruise the Caribbean now, for his health. So I’m left running the whole shebang.”

Wade was working hard on his likeable guy routine. I nodded to show I appreciated the effort.

“But it’s different these days. Investment is a minefield. The stock market is jittery, nowhere is safe. A fellow doesn’t know where to put his money.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s tough times all over.”

He nodded at my wisdom.

“I’ve had to be quite nimble on my feet the past year, looking out for business opportunities everywhere. Cattle in South Africa, for example. Cobalt mining in Bulgaria—that’s another one I tried. Baltic Sea shipping…you get the picture.”

I did get the picture. I saw those blue eyes facing the crooks, scam-artists, and shysters who infest every rat-hole of our fair city and come out in packs when they smell money. I wondered how much he’d lost and if he’d actually bought the Brooklyn Bridge yet.

Our coffee arrived. I smelled it before I heard the footsteps, and the flunky might have been a trolley for all Wade noticed him. The coffee was black, with milk in two tiny white jugs, and a couple of pixie-sized cookies. Wade leaned closer to me. There was a heavy gold signet ring on his pinkie, with a wavy double-W symbol on it.

“There’s this one fellow I have an investment with. That’s why I called you. To make sure his operation is all on the level. See if his apparatus is for real, no tricks or anything, and get it back to me without any slip-ups. I mean,” he said quickly, “it’s not that I think there is likely to be any trouble. A fellow just likes to be reassured when there’s a lot of money at stake.”

I sipped the coffee. It was top quality. So were the cookies. I was sorry to have to turn him down.

“Mr. Wade, you don’t need a private detective,” I said. “You want an investment advisor and a courier.”

“In this case, I do need a private detective. Dr. K. is not your typical inventor.”

“What’s his line of business?”

“Chemical refining,” said Wade. “He has a new technique which could be of great benefit to industrial chemistry.”

“He’s turning lead into gold.”

“Nothing like that,” said Wade, reddening a little. “Just, well, filters.”

He was vague about exactly how he had met this Dr. K. All Wade really knew was that Dr. K. was German. I couldn’t tell whether they had talked about the science, which was over Wade’s head, or whether Wade was taking it all on trust. They did, however, talk about money. Wade explained that there was a lot of money in making dyes and paint dyeing and synthesising paints, fuels, and all sorts of things. He thought Dr. K. seemed to be on to something big.

“Does he have a real name?”

“He prefers to stay anonymous,” said Wade. “His apparatus is top secret. He has a patent pending, but these things take years and he didn’t want to wait. All he needed was a few thousand dollars to get it all working together. After that, you can just put the chemicals in and—it filters them.”

“Sounds impressive. But science isn’t my strong suit.”

“I’m not looking for science,” said Wade, tapping his temple with a forefinger. “I’m looking for smarts.”

“Maybe I’m good enough to see if you’ve been had,” I said. “But why a cheap operator like me? Why not Pinkerton’s? Or how about Continental? I hear they’re pretty hot.”

“I prefer someone with a more flexible approach.”

I looked at him and he looked right back at me.

“Now why would that be?” I asked.

“You’re a man of the world, Mr. Jones, that’s why I’m hiring you. You know how things are these days. Dr. K. moves in an irregular world, with irregular people. That’s the best way to make big money these days: being unconventional.”

“I get the picture.” It was a picture of crooked deals and dirty money, with Uncle Sam well out of the frame.

“There’s nothing off-colour,” Wade said; “I’m not suggesting that at all. It’s just not quite…Main Street. I want you to go visit his laboratory and make sure he’s done what he says, no funny business. Then bring back the formula, or whatever it is that makes it work. He’s at a…place outside the town of Newfane, Vermont.”

“Never heard of it.”

“A backwater,” he said, just a little too quickly. “Now I want you to get that formula back to me as soon as you can. Wire it back if possible—there’s a post office in Newfane—I don’t care how many words, how much technical jargon you need. Express delivery might be safer than carrying it.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

An awkward silence fell over the jungle.

“I should probably mention that there are other parties with an interest in Dr. K.’s business,” he said. “Other investors…some of them may be aggressive.”

“I see,” I said, nodding slowly. Now it all added up. “That would be from one of our city’s famous business outfits—or more than one?”

Wade shrugged vaguely, as though the question were in poor taste, but it was all I needed. Dr. K. had sent an invitation for Wade and the others to come to Newfane. So the actual assignment was to go to Newfane, meet up with Dr. K. to check his progress, verify that the device worked, and then bring back the specs. If he didn’t have the goods, I was to attempt to get back any part of Wade’s investment, if possible. Preferably without any blood on it.

We shook hands at the end of the meeting. He had forgiven my bad manners. Perhaps it was all he expected from a private detective.

“I’m sure you’ll do a good job, Mr. Jones,” he said, passing me an envelope. “All the details you need are in here. Keep one eye on Dr. K. and one eye on the other fellows, and don’t let any of them pull a fast one. This could be worth a lot of money…I’ll see you get your cut.”

When I walked out, I didn’t know who was the bigger sucker. He had put money into a scheme that sounded about as straight as a fish with legs, but I had agreed to help him. Both of us should have known better.

Back at the office, there was a woman waiting for me. She had taken it upon herself to sit in my chair, manicuring her nails with a tiny file. When she saw me she finished her thumbnail, inspected it, then put the file away inside a little case that went into her handbag. She was in no hurry. It gave me plenty of time to look at her, and I wasn’t in a hurry either.

She was in her mid-twenties and could have stepped right out of the movies. Her complexion was flawless. If there was a blonde hair out of place I couldn’t see it, and I checked pretty thoroughly. Her eyes, when she looked up at me, were cool and blue. The sort of eyes that wanted you to compare them to sapphires or clear pools or something sappy like that if you looked into them too long.

“I’m sorry, I’m in your seat,” she said.

“Maybe we can share it,” I offered, leering at her.

She pointed to the chair on the other side of the desk, the one without the swivel action and the padded leather upholstery.

“You’ve taken the Wade case,” she stated in a business-like tone.

“That would be between me and my client,” I said. “If I have a client. Maybe you could tell me who you are?”

“My business card is on the desk.” I leaned over to pick it up. Transnational Development Services, Inc., with a Boston phone number. No name, no address, just a little corporate symbol like a wheel with four bent spokes.

“Whatever Wade’s paying, we’ll double it,” she said. “Cash up front. We want you to throw a monkey wrench in the works. Make sure Dr. K.’s invention never gets finished.”

“Maybe it’s already finished.”

“Then you’ll sabotage it. Burn the place down, whatever it takes.” She was a cool one all right.

“Firstly, Miss Transnational Development Services,” I said, tearing the business card in half, “I’m a detective, not a saboteur or an arsonist. Secondly, I’m already on a case and I don’t switch sides for money.” I tore the pieces in half. “And lastly, even without the first two, I don’t take on jobs for anonymous parties with no explanation, however appealing they look.”

Another tear, and I tossed the shower of pieces toward the corner bin.

“I didn’t realise I was dealing with the last honest man in Chicago.” She said it with half a smile.

“Too bad,” I said. “But that’s the way I do business. Shut the door on your way out.”

“I can’t explain now, but when you get to Newfane you’ll see how things are, and they’re worse than you imagine. You might want to change your mind about which side you’re on.”

I shook my head.

“We could help you out of a jam.” She slid another business card over the desk with a manicured finger. “Take it in case you have to call.”

“If it’s war between you and Wade, I don’t want your card on me. Besides, I’ve a good memory.” I recited the number back to her from memory; showing off to women is a vice of mine.

She rewarded me with another half-smile. The whole smile would be quite something.

“We’ll be in touch,” she said, rising from the chair and picking up her handbag in one sinuous move, then sashaying out. She did not close the door behind her.

I thought about following her, decided against. It was too early in the case to start getting side-tracked. Besides, there was something heavy in that handbag, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s not to mess around with dames who carry a gun.

I spent the rest of the day making inquiries about Wade and Newfane and a few other matters relating to the case. Newfane was not such a quiet little town: three unsolved deaths in the last couple of years, presumed homicides. All of them from out of town, all the investigations ended right where they started. It seemed the locals were not too talkative.

Later on, when I was looking through my mailbox, I found an article cut out of a science magazine. It was headlined “Slime Mould: Roving Fungus on Patrol.” I skimmed the first few paragraphs. It described a kind of gummy mould that oozes around the forest floor, sweeping up junk. I’ve met some slimy characters in my time, but this did not connect to anything. If it was a coded warning or clue, the code was too cryptic for me.

II

The next day I took the early train from Chicago to Burlington, and a series of motor buses from there all the way out to Newfane. As I went on the buses got older and crankier, the towns got further and further apart, the roads ran higher into the hills, and the trees got bigger. Newfane was the end of the line. I got out of the bus behind an old couple returning from a day trip in the glitzy metropolis of Manchester, population two thousand.

The bus turned around and went back down the road. Wade’s instructions told me to check in at Pretski’s Rooming House, where the doctor would meet up with us.

The main street was the only paved road; after that it gave out onto farm tracks in all directions. Newfane was a farming community of a couple hundred people, mainly farmers. The houses were clapboard, and so mossy they could be growing out of the wooded hillside. Frilled toadstools sprouted from the deep shade under every house. There was a white church, a store, a battered schoolhouse, and that was it. Newfane might have been picturesque once, but I doubted it. The place had a hunched-over, awkward feel as though it were an unwanted intruder in the Vermont forest.

There was nothing that advertised itself as Pretski’s Rooming House. I walked up and down the streets with my valise—which took all of ten minutes—without finding anything of interest. There were two skinny hunting dogs on a front porch and some barefoot kids running down the street. The only other person was a fellow in overalls leaning against a wall. He watched me after I came off the bus, but slunk away when I went to ask him where Pretski’s was.

I walked around a little. There were more dogs, and signs of them: food bowls, dog houses, chains, and hasps. Almost every house seemed to have one. Dogs and locks. Country places leave their doors and windows wide open, but in Newfane everything was shut up tight. I stopped by one house to inspect a pattern of holes in the clapboard. Buckshot, if I’m any judge.

It was a poor place. The only sign of wealth was the fancy roadster parked outside one house, a car which didn’t belong there. My guess was that it marked Pretski’s.

I’ve been around some. I was born in Chicago, but I grew up in South London; I guess everyone has their story. I spent time in Paris, in Munich, in San Francisco. I’ve never seen another place like Newfane. Call it cursed, or haunted, or whatever you like, but there was something flat wrong about that town. I guess I know the reason for it now.

I dropped by the store. It looked the same as the other houses except for a sign, so faded that you could hardly read the name: “Hooker’s Hardware & General Store—Groceries & U.S. Post office.”

Inside a man in dungarees stood at the counter. He had spread a bucket of nails out in front of himself and was sorting them into piles. He was moving slowly, a man with a whole day to fill up. I was halfway across the room before he looked up and nodded at me. He did not seem surprised or curious. City folks were as rare out here as hen’s teeth, and a stranger in town had to be as hot a story as Isaiah Smith’s cow drying up, but in some places it’s not polite to be inquisitive.

In among the hanging rows of brushes and mops and buckets, there were a few pairs of boots. The streets were muddy, and I figured that unless Dr. K.’s lab was on Main Street, I was going to need some better footwear than the city shoes I was wearing.

“I’ll take a pair of those hunting boots please—size eleven.”

He got them down using a stick with a hook on it, and I asked if he knew where Pretski’s rooming house was.

“Pretski’s?” he said after a pause. For a moment I thought he was going to tell me he’d never heard of the place. “Place with the green roof, next down but three.” From the sound of it he did not care for Pretski. “You’d better try these on.”

I unlaced my shoes.

“Goin’ into the woods?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. I took a few turns up and down the store in the boots, which fit well enough.

“Looks like good hiking country. It’s safe enough hiking here, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” he said. Then he added, “But don’t be out there at night.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said with slow emphasis, “then it ain’t safe.”

I thought about three unsolved killings and did not bother to ask what he meant.

“The boots are fine, I’ll break them in.” I took a note out of my billfold. “Say, do you know a German fellow lives near here, a doctor?”

“Everybody knows him,” said the storekeeper.

“Regular customer of yours, I guess,” I said. “Is it dangerous for him out there in the woods?”

“Folks like him always think they’re safe,” he said. “Then one day they don’t come back.”

The storekeeper slapped my change down on the counter. I was with the German, and he did not approve of either of us. He was already counting out nails again before I reached the door.

I followed the storekeeper’s directions, watched by the man in the overalls. As I thought, Pretski’s was the house with the car parked out front. It was the same as the other houses, without even a faded sign. But the man who opened the door, short and balding, assured me that he was Pretski and this was his rooming house. There was no need of a sign, because everybody knew where it was. Pretski said his place was mainly for hunters in season, but he put up city folks on business too.

The house had a one-storey extension out back, a corridor with six single bedrooms, a shared washroom with cold water, and an outhouse in the yard. Pretski charged four dollars a night, meals were another dollar, cash payable in advance, or sleep in the street.

Pretski told me he had known Dr. K. since he showed up about a year ago. The doctor stayed out yonder—jerking his head toward the forest—but would be back tomorrow.

“He’s got a log cabin out there?” I asked.

“I don’t know nothin’ about it,” said Pretski, shaking his head as though I’d asked about some place beyond Timbuktu. “I don’t know a thing about them out there and that’s the truth.”

“You know that fellow in overalls that loafs around Main Street?”

“That’s Walter Brown. He won’t tell you nothin’ either, so don’t ask. You’re in here,” he said, opening a door. The room had a bed and a window, a bare wood floor and faded brown wallpaper. The only other things in it were a wooden chair and a strong smell of mildew.

“It’s not the Palmer House Hotel,” a deep voice said behind me. “But it’s the best place in town. Because it’s the only place in town.”

He was a big guy with a jutting chin and skin pulled tight over his face. I’d put him at about one-eighty pounds and not much fat at that. He crushed my hand in his.

“James Moran,” he said with a big smile.

I took in the suit, the gold tie-pin, and the gun, not too discreetly holstered at his armpit. His accent aimed for something toward Long Island, and his hair was cropped short instead of slicked back like most of them. But he had Chicago mob written all over him. I just knew that back home he probably went by Big Jimmy, or some such.

“Ed Jones,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“You’re out in the boondocks to meet Dr. K. too,” he said. “Welcome to the club. I’ll introduce you to the other members. Jones—don’t think I know the name.”

“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Representing a certain party from Lincoln Park.”

“A Sherlock, huh? Whaddya know.”

“You’re from a business interest in the North Side, I guess?”

The Irish gangsters all belonged to the same mob in those days, and Moran didn’t sound like an Italian name to me.

“You figured that out quick—you really are a Sherlock,” Moran said, beaming and slapping me on the back hard enough to make me stagger.

That was James Moran all over. Big and loud and throwing his weight around. Chicago was full of them. The sort who shoved you out of the way to show they could, who thought any practical joke was funny if someone else got hurt. A few years previously Jimmy Moran must have been the class bully, and he hadn’t changed a bit, except for the gloss he was trying to put on it. Prohibition meant good times for guys like him.

“You’d better meet Wilson,” he said. “He’s not much to look at, but the outfit thought enough of him to send him here.”

Wilson was a quiet, grey-haired man with a moustache. We interrupted his reading an old copy of Life magazine in the dining room downstairs. He was wearing glasses and a sober necktie, and I might have put him down as a librarian or a bookkeeper. But his eyes were too quick and alert, and those shoes were handmade and brand new.

He made me before our hands touched.

“Jones—say, aren’t you the fellow with the big fancy office in the Home Insurance Building?” He winked at me. “You’re a ways from the Second City.”

“I go wherever I get paid to go,” I said. He had a point, though. My license was only good in Illinois, so they’d better not catch me doing any P.I. work here. “Don’t I know you from someplace?”

“Well, do you, don’t you?” he asked playfully.

I scrutinised him while gears and cogs in my memory slowly fell into place.

“Didn’t you used to run Three-Card Monte on LaSalle Street some years back?”

I did not know whether Wilson would pretend not to understand, act outraged, or just deny it outright. Three-Card Monte—or ‘Find the Lady’ to the suckers—is a card scam they do on the streets. Its practitioners are generally on the lowest rung of Chicago’s tall ladder of crime. Wilson smiled broadly, his eyes twinkled at the recollection.

“Sweetest game in the world. I had a ball playing that scam.” He sighed. “But you know how it is. You move up in the world and you end up stuck behind a desk. Or being sent out to the boonies.”

“You think this is the boondocks?” asked Moran. “Hell, this is nothing.”

Moran started to tell us about how he chased some fellow who owed money a thousand miles to a village in Canada. Whatever you said, Moran would top it and keep on going.

Dinner was served at six, and that was when we met the other two, a couple of boys from the South Side. They had come in the fancy roadster parked outside. Neither of them looked much over twenty, but in times like those days you didn’t need experience or maturity to get ahead. All it took was a talent for violence.

Phil Ricca was the boss, the one with more brains. Louie Cristillo, with the knife scar over one eye, was his slow and steady sidekick. There wasn’t that much in it for smarts between them, though. Neither one was a criminal mastermind; they were strictly foot soldiers.

The four gangsters all got along well enough. This was in the days before the Syndicate and big-time organisation, but the gangs knew how to co-operate when there was money in it. They might start cutting each other’s throats again the next day, but they could ceasefire for profit.

The five of us sat around the small dining table, eating. The meal was a stew with dumplings and potatoes, cooked up by Pretski’s silent wife. The gloom was settling down outside. It was dark out there, and the quiet was disconcerting.

The two Southsiders had come back from an unsuccessful angling expedition to the local creek. They thought they’d pass the afternoon catching a few fish, and the shopkeeper had sold them a couple of rods. Now they had nothing to show for it except muddy shoes and pants, and stories of the ones that got away.

“The bait that guy sold us was a dud,” complained Ricca. “These hillbillies see a guy in a good suit, and the first thing they think of is cheating him. Why, I oughta teach him a lesson.”

“Yeah, right,” said Cristillo. “We oughta teach him.”

“You gotta know where to fish,” said Moran. “You can’t just go anywhere and expect them to bite. What sort of fish were you planning on catching?”

“Ones that swim,” said Ricca. “What do you know about fishing anyhow?”

“Oh, I’ve caught a few in my time,” said Moran. “Rock bass, bluegills, walleye in season. Plenty of catfish, of course—some fly fishing, too, when I get a chance—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ricca. “Big deal.”

Outside the night had stealthily closed in, and was now pressed up against the window panes, a big black thing surrounding us on all sides. You could practically feel it pressing on the roof. The only sound was the creaking and rustling from the trees, and the sound of our forks on crockery.

“Stew’s good,” said Wilson, helping himself to a little more. It wasn’t bad, if you didn’t mind having your meat chewy. Maybe Wilson, like me, had memories of an Irish grandmother who made it the same way.

“It’s all right for this joint,” said Moran. “But I could take you to some places in Paris where they serve the best boeuf bourguignon in the world. Now that’s a real stew.”

“Paris, France?” Wilson asked, winking at me.

“Sure, I was there during the war,” said Moran. “Guess you were too old for that one, Wilson. How about you, Jones?”

“I was with the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” I said. “What about you?”

“Seventh Infantry,” said Moran. “That’s the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army, in case you boys didn’t know. That’s where I learned to use a machine gun. The Lewis Gun weighs twenty-eight pounds fully assembled, but if you’ve got the muscle, why you can tuck it under your elbow and mow down Krauts like sprinkling the lawn.”

“Is that right?” said Ricca.

“One in each hand, that’s why they call him Jimmy the Gats,” said Cristillo, mocking. “The big-shot war hero.”

“You guys don’t know what real fighting is,” said Moran.

“Oh yeah?” demanded Ricca.

Challenging Moran to a bragging contest was a mistake. Once he got started on his war reminiscences, they just rolled out one after the other. We heard about machine-gunning row after row of advancing Germans, crawling through mud to lob grenades, hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. Wilson and I prodded him along a little to keep him going, while the others dropped in frequent remarks. Moran was enjoying himself whether or not we were listening. Mainly, I was not.

I was sizing up the place, the people. Moran’s accent kept slipping, but I could tell how he saw himself. In five years’ time he could be Spencer Wade’s richer neighbour, taking him fishing on the yacht and fixing to marry his sister. Cristillo and Ricca were punks who would blow every cent they made and wouldn’t last long. They were the type who’d push one time too many and get stabbed in the back in a bar someplace. Wilson, though, he was a survivor if I ever saw one. He’d be in the game forever. If he ended up in an old folks’ home, he’d be the one card-sharping at bridge, running a black market in cookies stolen from the kitchen, and lifting cigarettes from the matron’s handbag. Just for the devil of it. Wilson was only happy when he was putting one over on the other guy.

Moran’s tales of blood and glory were purely second-hand stuff from cheap fiction. But when he explained how to kill a German sentry silently by garrotting him from behind, he seemed to know what he was talking about.

“You’ve gotta use a strong piece of wire, pull it tight in one move,” he told Ricca. “And be ready for a lot of blood. It ain’t a clean job.”

I don’t know about France, but I know there were a few stiffs in Chicago who got theirs from a garrotte. Right after the war, Moran ended up on a scheme which allowed ex-officers to go to oxford University, of all places.

“I ran with a pretty swell crowd in oxford, you know. Some of them were lords and other members of the elite of society,” he said, as if it were a phrase he had read. “There was one smart guy who’ll probably be Prime Minister of England one day.”

Oxford might have seemed tame, but that was where it fell apart. Moran had gotten mixed up in some business with stolen Turkish rubies and the deal turned sour, forcing him to leave on the next boat. Moran wound up back in Chicago, a broke war hero—he said—who just wanted what was coming to him. He was looking for a new racket when Prohibition started. His particular skills of talking big and cold-blooded killing were in demand. Moran never looked back.

When Moran finished, an owl started up a block or two away. Not that they had blocks here.

“Jeez, listen to that,” said Ricca, disgusted. “This really is the back of beyond. I hope it’s worth it.”

“It could be a sweet deal,” said Wilson. “If our Dr. K. really has the goods, out in the woods.”

“We gotta go out there?” said Cristillo.

“Sure,” said Wilson. “He ain’t going to bring it here in his pocket. We’ve got to go out in the woods somewhere. See if he’s the real deal or a con artist. I’ve seen scams that look a lot like this set-up.”

“Takes one to know one. But if he’s trying to pull something, he’s just one more dead Kraut,” said Moran.

“I heard guys disappear in those woods,” said Ricca.

“Three cases in two years,” I said. “Last ones were two G-men looking for moonshiners. I guess the moonshiners didn’t want to be found. Case never solved.”

“That’s what I heard. And you know who the other one was?” Ricca was looking at me. “A private dick. Only thing on him was a business card in his pocket from Boston. Quite a mystery.”

“No mystery about me,” I said.

Ricca turned to Moran. “And when they found the bodies, the G-men and the gumshoe,” said Ricca, “the skulls were sliced open and the brains were scooped right out. Just like a pumpkin. How d’ya like that one, North Side?”

“I don’t scare easy,” said Moran. “If there’s trouble, we’ll see whose brains end up on the floor. But you fellows don’t have to come if you’re afraid.” He pushed back his chair. “Now, who’s for a drink?”

He produced a bottle of brown liquid from his bag and shouted to Pretski for some more glasses.

Pretski came in to ask why and looked uncomfortably at the bottle.

“This ain’t no Chicago speakeasy, mister,” he said. “I don’t want any illegal drinking in my house.”

If he had been in Chicago at all, he would have known better than to say no to a gangster, especially in front of others.

Moran was a big man, but he moved fast. He stood up, one hand moving in a long arc that passed Pretski’s face with a sound like an axe striking wood. Pretski rocked back on his feet with a grunt. Moran had a gun in his hand, a big .45 automatic. Pretski stepped back, stunned, as blood trickled from the cut on his temple.

A less confident man would have pistol-whipped Pretski again. Moran placed the pistol on the table in front of him and sat down.

“Just bring five glasses, friend. Six, if you’d care to join us.”

Pretski looked blank, but moved quickly when Moran turned. Moran was that type of guy. Pretski brought the glasses and placed them on the table with hands that trembled, without saying a word.

“Thank you, Mr. Pretski,” said Moran, and started pouring.

There are two types of liquor in the Second City: imported bootleg from over the border, and moonshine made in garages and sheds. The bootleg is the good stuff, but it didn’t take long for some wiseguy to realise that it went further if you mixed it with a little moonshine. Then a little moonshine became as much as you could get away with, and the product went downhill fast. These days the genuine item was harder to find than a ham sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah. Labels meant nothing; there was a lively trade in empty bottles, and I can personally guarantee that nothing which says Scotch on the label has ever been within a thousand miles of a set of bagpipes.

We toasted the Volstead Act, the source of all the money in Chicago. I’d tasted the stuff they were shipping from the North Side before and I was ready for it. It still felt like it was taking the enamel off your teeth, though. Either Moran was a poor judge of hooch, or getting the good stuff was harder than I thought.

“Got quite an edge,” said Ricca to Moran. “You oughta sell that with a wood rasp to smooth it down.”

“And how,” said Cristillo.

Ricca brought out a bottle too, the South Side’s own brand, and we tried that one. There was some debate on the finer points, but however you cut it, the stuff was just as rough as Moran’s.

“Aw, who cares what it tastes like?” said Cristillo, downing a second shot. He was an easy-going sort, I decided.

“See if this changes your mind,” said Wilson, unscrewing a hip flask as if he were laying down a trump.

Wilson’s brew was mellower. If you didn’t mind the aftertaste of shoe polish, it could have passed for a halfway decent bourbon.

“Not bad,” said Moran. “How much does a case of it go for in your neck of the woods?”

Then talk turned to business, and everyone took to bragging about their operation. I felt like the odd one out, a temperance preacher in a bar. The boys were doing a good job of shutting out the night, but I could feel it pressing around, and their mood was brittle. None of them showed fear, but I could feel it.

I was the first one to turn in; hanging around too late was beginning to feel too much like snooping. In places like Newfane, when night closes in you’re left in a little bubble of light all alone in the dark. And when you turn that light out you start to hear the noises: the murmuring of a million trees. To a city boy used to hearing traffic, it can be unsettling.

The sheets felt slightly damp, and that mildew smell crawled up your nostrils.

Around three o’clock I was woken by dogs barking. When I looked out the window the only lights were stars. More dogs barked: it was as if someone were moving down the street, setting all the dogs off one by one as they went. I could almost make something out, a darker smear in the darkness, but too indistinct. I decided it must be a wolverine looking for garbage. A wolverine or whatever the hell it is they have in these places.

I thought about getting up to use the outhouse, then thought better of it. I haven’t been afraid of the dark since I was five, but there’s such a thing as needless risk. Besides, when you do stakeouts, you develop a strong bladder. But someone else had been woken up too, and I heard the creak of a door and heavy footsteps as one of my neighbours went out. I held my breath, and he was back two minutes later. That would be Moran. None of the others felt like going out either.

III

I was up early the next day, poking around a little and exploring Newfane. There wasn’t much to see, but I figured I was getting paid to investigate. I came back soon after, and Pretski’s wife served a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of weak coffee. Wilson was up too, and Moran had gone out for some target practice with his .45. The others didn’t show much interest in rousing themselves just yet. Noon is an early start in that business.

I passed the morning playing checkers with Wilson for dimes. We won about half the games each. I wondered if he was waiting for the right time to suggest raising the stakes to fifty bucks and slaughter me.

“Good morning, gentlemen!”

A man was beaming at us from the doorway, hanging up his hat and removing a knapsack from his back. Dr. K. was not a tall man, maybe five foot seven, built like a circus strong man. He had broad, powerful shoulders and a thick neck, with wrists like my biceps. His ruddy face was topped with a mass of dark hair which matched his thick beard, and when he put on half-moon reading glasses he looked the part of the European professor. He still had a strong German accent, but his English was practically flawless.

“Pretski,” he said to the landlord, handing him a bundle wrapped in a kerchief. “I couldn’t resist picking a few mushrooms. Have your wife cook these in butter with my breakfast.”

Pretski went off obediently with the bundle, and the doctor turned to us. He clicked his heels when he shook hands and seemed genuinely happy to meet us.

“I have been in the jungle too long,” he said, looking down at himself. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I stink too much for civilised company.”

His eye fell on our game.

“Draughts—but does either of you play chess?” he asked. I nodded. “Set up the board, and we will play.”

Pretski had already prepared a hot bath in one of the other rooms, and while Dr. K. was soaking a hearty breakfast was laid out on the table, plate by plate: crisp smoked bacon, fried eggs, and a stack of fresh pancakes, with a side dish of fried mushrooms. And to follow, a wedge of apple pie with a dollop of whipped cream. Pretski’s wife kept coming and going, finishing by solemnly laying out a pot of fresh coffee and a jug of canned orange juice. There was enough to feed any three men.

“Looks like he’s on the deluxe boarding plan,” murmured Wilson, deftly lifting a strip of bacon between his thumb and forefinger while rearranging the rest with a pinkie to cover the gap. He bit off a piece of bacon and winked. “How do we sign up to that one?”

Dr. K. bounced into the room, pummelling his hair with a towel which he tossed over a chair. He poured coffee, then moved a white pawn.

“Your move, Mr. Jones,” he said.

I pulled up a chair and made my move, which he countered rapidly. He ploughed through his breakfast and continued to play while carrying on a conversation between mouthfuls.

“Are those mushrooms safe?” Wilson asked. “How do you tell?”

“Some fungi are dangerous, some are delicious,” said Dr. K. “The coward goes hungry, the fool poisons himself, and the wise man eats well and grows strong. So the others have arrived also?”

“The gang’s all here,” said Wilson. “When does the show start?”

“I have a few things to attend to,” said Dr K. “I have been away for some time. Pretski! When can my laundry be ready—by this afternoon?”

Pretski was a different man around the doctor. He came in and meekly assured him that it would be all ready by two o’clock. He was not entirely changed, though; when Wilson asked for a cup of coffee he just said “You wish, pal” and went out.

Our pawns battled it out in the middle of the board, and I moved a knight forward. He moved one of his knights in response.

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” said Dr. K. with a smile. “Chess and life are always so difficult when you do not know the other man, no?”

“Same for everyone,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you,” he said, leaning closer. “I am the wandering Jew—but I am not Jewish. You know the story of Faust? Well then, you know me. I am Heinrich Faust!”

“Faust, who made a deal with the devil?” I said.

Dr. K. was silent, then moved his knight again and looked up.

“Exactly. Like him, I am a scholar, a man of learning, who wants to find out everything, and who resorts to a pact with the devil,” he said. “And so you find me living in the woods and working my experiments like an old wizard. That is my story—what is your story, Mr. Jones?”

“Just another sorry gumshoe. You must have read all about us.”

“A smart gumshoe,” he said, taking a pawn. “But perhaps you think I’m playing games with you?” He gave a great big ho-ho-ho laugh. If the beard had been white instead of black he could have been a muscular Santa Claus.

“So now we’ve met, how about giving us a name?” said Wilson.

“If I gave you a name, it would be a lie,” said the doctor. “My name would bring me trouble. I prefer just to be K., and deceive nobody. K. because I work underground with the Kobolds.”

“Are those your associates?” I asked. “I’d worked out you weren’t doing it all on your own.”

“My associates in the woods will not be any trouble to you. Like kobolds— gnomes, you say—they stay out of sight. The people here prefer not to deal with them.”

After breakfast Dr. K. went off to the store and post office, leaving the game unfinished. He came back with a stack of letters, some magazines, and several small packages. He called to Pretski for writing paper and a fountain pen and sat at the dining table, working through his correspondence. After first arranging his mail into neat piles he started scribbling out replies. The postmarks showed some of the letters came from Europe, and even from the other side of the room I could see there were sketches of equipment.

The two Southsiders were stirring now. Moran stuck his head through the door, and Dr. K. stood up to greet him formally. He said we would be heading out in an hour or so.

It took a little longer for Dr. K. to complete his correspondence and for the others to get ready. We assembled outside Pretski’s like a group of hikers, Dr K. stuffing a few apples into his knapsack.

“I just want you to know,” said Moran to the doctor. “If there’s any funny business, the first bullet is yours. I don’t miss.” He said this in the tone another man would say he had brought an umbrella if it rained.

“Of course,” said Dr. K., smiling. “No funny business.”

Dr. K. was in the lead, swinging a walking stick; for a short man he moved pretty fast, even with a full pack on his back. Moran was right behind him. Then came Ricca and Cristillo, looking about warily. Cristillo carried a long coat with something inside it. You can disguise a Tommy gun that way walking half a block in Chicago, but for a hike in the woods it looks ridiculous. I was after them and Wilson trailed at the rear.

We took a path leading uphill which turned into a track, which turned into a deer track and then no track at all. The domed hills were crowded together and we kept changing direction.

It was a moist, humid forest, glistening green moss everywhere on the dark stones. Underfoot it was soft and spongy; brooks trickled down every fold in the landscape. The trees were a mixture of oak and pine and I don’t know what else. It smelled earthy and woody. Fungus sprouted from fallen trunks and old stumps: vivid orange growths, masses of tiny grey stems like a pixie forest, old-fashioned red and white toadstools. Enormous mushrooms stuck up through the forest floor. The whole place was rank with mould. Spencer Wade’s bill was going to include some dry cleaning.

“Stop!” ordered Moran, and we all froze.

Moran had his automatic in his hand. He scanned the forest behind us and over on the left.

“There was someone over by that tree,” he said after a minute.

“Possibly a deer,” said Dr. K., looking back over his shoulder.

“Let’s take a look,” I said. I ambled over to the spot he indicated and examined the ground. There were marks, but nothing that could have been left by a boot or shoe. Hooves maybe. “I don’t think it was a person.”

“You an Indian tracker?” said Moran. “I tell you, I saw someone.”

“We’re being watched,” said Ricca. “I can feel it.”

“Creepy place,” said Cristillo, fingering his Tommy gun.

“Please, let us carry on,” said Dr. K. “There is nobody here. ‘Nobody except us chickens.’”

We trudged on, but the others were wary now. I noticed how few birds there were in the forest. The hanging Spanish moss and encrustations of fungi had the look of a dark fairy tale. Dr. K. stopped to let the rest of us catch up.

“We’ll never get there at this rate,” muttered Ricca, eyeing the shadows around the tree trunks.

“But we are here already,” said Dr. K. “Welcome to my little laboratory in the woods.”

I couldn’t see any buildings, just more trees and rocks and hillside. Dr. K. pointed with his stick to an opening twenty yards ahead of us about four feet in diameter. He lit a lantern and stooped to go through it.

“Down the rabbit hole, gentlemen.” His muffled voice came back to us. “Into the underworld!”

“Well, how d’ya like that,” said Moran. “A secret underground lair.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Ricca. “We’re going in there?”

None of us liked it, but we all filed in after Dr. K. I expected rock walls or perhaps brickwork, but when I got a chance to stop and examine them, it appeared to be just compacted vegetable matter and dirt. It reminded me of some of the bunkers from France; it also reminded me of being inside an anthill. You had to stoop as you walked.

Enormous tree roots erupted from the ceiling; some of the walls were wet and some of them were practically fungus gardens. In some places things ran along the walls which might have been ducts or pipes, but which looked organic, as though they were also roots. When I looked back I saw there were regular patches of faint luminescence on the ceilings—again, some sort of fungus. The air was stale and thick with mildew.

The tunnel made sharp turns, branched and branched again. Dr. K. carried on without pausing.

There were few signs of human occupants. I glimpsed some vague forms like stacked melons in one side chamber, and what might have been racks of bottles in another that caught the lantern light. Then we came to a row of white lab coats hanging along one wall. An incongruous oak dresser sat in its own recess, and the tunnel opened up into a larger chamber.

“So here we are at last. One moment, gentlemen, please,” he said, putting down the lantern and disappearing into an opening. We could hear a mechanical scraping, and a second later a string of electric lights lit up the room.

“There is no proper lighting,” he said. “So I have had to put in this arrangement myself.”

The room was half industrial laboratory workshop, half underground cave. It was the size of four double garages put together. One side was piled with boxes and what appeared to be shipping crates for instruments and glassware. Benches took up two other sides, and in the middle were two more benches, each with an elaborate set-up of pipes and boilers. Each was, as far as I could see, a small distillery. Pipes led up through the ceiling. “This is the result of all my work and all your money, gentlemen,” he said.

“Is that it?” said Moran.

“See one moonshine joint, you’ve seen ’em all,” said Ricca.

“Appearances are deceptive—and I must please ask you to refrain from smoking,” he said as Cristillo made to light up. “The alcohol vapour is flammable. A fire here would be regrettable, as we do not have the fire escapes which are so popular in your city.”

Dr. K. then drew our attention to the workbenches and started on a lecture about the science of distillation and purification.

It took me right back to chemistry lessons all those years ago in England, with Mr. Fotherington-Jones boring on about reduction and oxidation. But everything I knew about this business, I picked up in Chicago. Anyone with an interest in drinking knows about how you brew up a ‘beer’ by fermentation, then filter it and then distill it into whisky. The beer—vile stuff, though some folks claim to like it—is about ten proof, so you distill it to get the healthy eighty proof that the city has such a thirst for.

“We distill, but we must filter first to remove the less desirable compounds, such the precursors of methanol. You know methanol?”

“Wood alcohol; it makes you blind,” said Wilson. “The lousy hooch these jokers sell is full of it.”

“Indeed,” said Dr. K. “With this new filtration technique I guarantee removal of the substances that cause it, with no methanol in the finished product. I cannot save you from your sins, but I can at least offer you some purification!” He gave his ho-ho-ho laugh again.

The details of his filter were way beyond me or anyone else in the room. I got as far as understanding that there was a stack of ceramic discs, but that was about it. The doctor enjoyed having an audience. He seemed like a man who had spent too much time alone, but the scale of the place puzzled me. I had expected a log cabin in the woods, but a place this size suggested a whole organisation. So were his invisible associates here?

“Anyway,” Dr. K. finished, “enough of the technical details. What you gentlemen want to know is, does it work? Here we have the perfect demonstration. Two sets of apparatus which are identical except for this additional filter here.” He tapped a brass cylinder the size of a coffee cup. “Both will distill for the same length of time and you will taste the results for yourselves. You will see how the filter will make a big improvement to the end result.”

Dr. K. duly emptied buckets of fresh-brewed beer into each of the two boilers. The test would take twenty-four hours, and he wanted us to come back the next day. He then showed us how the apparatus was sealed and taped it to show it would not be tampered with. Each of us signed over the seal. It was pretty elementary magic-show stuff, and I could think of half a dozen ways that it could be beaten without leaving any sign.

Wilson was frowning. I knew what he was thinking: surely this guy doesn’t think we’re that stupid? Or is he really a straight-up guy who hasn’t even thought about cheating?

“I trust you, Doc,” I said. “Problem is, I don’t get paid to trust. So I guess you won’t mind me staying here and seeing the test through.”

“If you like,” Dr. K. said. “It’s not so congenial here, but a stay can be arranged. I will have to ask my associates.”

“What’s it to them?” asked Moran.

“They too have kindly provided me with this working space and some technical assistance,” said Dr. K. “They are the landlords of this establishment.”

“You working with hillbilly moonshiners out here?” asked Wilson.

“Call them that if you like.”

“I ain’t staying here overnight,” said Ricca. “But if Jones keeps an eye and says it ain’t rigged, that’s good enough for me.”

“Me too,” said Moran.

“Looks like you volunteered to keep watch for all of us,” said Wilson. “Do we get to meet these associates of yours, Dr. K.?”

“Well now…” He scratched his chin. “I suppose that’s up to them.” He gave a meaningful look down to the end of the room where the doorway opened on to darkness and more tunnels.

A hooded figure stepped forward noiselessly out of the shadows. I heard sharp intakes of breath. Moran drew his .45, Ricca pulled out a revolver, and Cristillo raised the Tommy gun. What I thought were lab coats hanging up were really Ku Klux Klan robes, topped off-by that tall, pointed hood with slits for eyes. That sort of fancy dress should have been comical, but coming out of the blackness the effect was pretty spooky.

“What is this?” demanded Moran. “Klan in Vermont? That’s crazy.”

“My associates do not wish to be identified,” said Dr. K. “The outfit is convenient for concealment.”

“It’s for Halloween,” said Ricca. “Hey, pal, what’s with the ghost suit?”

“He can stay,” said the robed figure, ignoring the others and pointing at me with a white gloved hand. His voice was blurred, as though he had something in his mouth. Now I could see there were several others behind him.

“Thank you,” said Dr. K.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Wilson, stepping forward and holding out a hand. The figure shrank back from him.

“You have to go now,” he said, and it took me a minute to make out the words. He backed away from us on silent feet until he faded away into the dark as though he was on rails.

“Local outfit?” asked Wilson.

“They won’t give you any competition in Chicago,” said Dr. K. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think our hosts would like you to leave, except you of course, Mr. Jones.”

He showed me a camp stool, and a locker with bottles of water. I could keep the lantern, but the electric light had to go off to save the batteries. Dr. K. instructed me that I must not leave the chamber on any account.

“There’s a bucket under a cloth over there for your natural functions,” he said before I could ask. “I will escort the others and rejoin you in just a few hours. And please, I advise you not to talk to them. Especially do not agree to anything.”

The others trooped out and, with a cheerful wave, the doctor cut the light, leaving me alone in the dark with just a lantern.

If you’ve ever faced the prospect of a night inside a giant anthill crawling with strange bugs, not knowing how to find your way out, you’ll have some idea how I felt. Otherwise you have no idea. I listened to the muffled sound recede and fade entirely, then I shoved my worries firmly to one side and set to work checking out Dr. K.’s laboratory. Some of it was easy to make out, like the boxes of canned food and salami, and a box crammed with bars of real Swiss chocolate. There was clothing, all of it the doctor’s, a camp bed, and other basic necessities.

I found a wooden box containing a Luger, well cleaned and oiled, at the bottom of a cardboard suitcase full of clothes. The ammo was peculiar: the lead bullets had been carefully replaced with a white, chalky material with a chemical smell.

There was a portable office. It was locked, and it took me all of five minutes with a piece of wire to get in. There were letters in German and a handful of family photographs, showing a smiling Dr. K. with a sturdy woman and a couple of blond children, ‘Lübeck 1925’ written on the back.

A folder held letters from Chicago from his business partners: a scrawled note from Spencer Wade telling him to go to Newfane where he would be met by Walter Brown, and another one saying he’d be sending Edward Jones to bring back the filter. Then there were letters of varying degrees of literacy from the North Side and the others.

Three boxes acted as a bookcase, with rows of books in English and German. They were mainly chemical textbooks, but there were a few surprises, like the stack of pulp fiction, from Black Mask (“Dead Men’s Letters”) to Amazing Stories (“The Man from the Atom”). The high end was represented by Goethe’s Faust.

The laboratory section gave up a set of bound notebooks, all in the same neat handwriting, and all in German. Most of them had copious amounts of scientific notation. One was a homemade dictionary, translating from something like Arab script—words made all of Ms and Ws and Vs crammed together—into German: Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff. It was all unintelligible, until I found that he had put chemical formulae in as well. Even I recognised H2o.

Another notebook seemed to be nature sketches. There were some toadstools and fungi on stumps, but mainly it seemed to be crayfish. I guess everyone has his own interests. Dr. K. was a competent draughtsman, but the crayfish in particular looked as though he were drawing from memory and had to make up the details.

The benches and tools were not old, but showed signs of wear. A barrel was full of waste: broken glass, metal shavings, sawn-off lengths of tubing. One shelf held literally hundreds of ceramic discs, wrapped in paper and carefully numbered and labelled. They were all circular and the size of your palm, but on close inspection they had different thicknesses, different colours and textures. I gathered that getting them exactly right was the whole secret, and most of the money had gone into getting different types of disk made.

If he was a fake, he had put in plenty of homework. Or maybe he was just crazy.

IV

I heard Dr. K. coming down the tunnel in enough time to get back to the camp stool. He bustled in and started unpacking a shoulder bag.

“I have a Thermos of coffee for you from Pretski, and also—this!” He waved the chessboard in the air. “I think we should have time for a game or two tonight. You have inspected my laboratory thoroughly, I hope?”

“Nice place you got here,” I said. “For a mole. Why don’t you stay at Pretski’s at night—it’s not that far?”

“My associates prefer me to be here.” He retrieved a small box for a table and started setting up the chessboard.

“What do you need them for anyway? Any shack in the woods would do.”

“Ah, Mr. Jones, it’s not the premises, but the expertise, which is important. I have learned so much from them.”

“From a bunch of backwoods hillbilly moonshiners?”

Dr. K. shook his head. “You don’t really believe they are just hillbillies, do you?”

“What then?” I asked, watching him set up the board.

“You are a detective.” He held out two fists and I nodded at the left: he opened it and showed me a white pawn. “So use the evidence of your eyes.”

I used the same opening as before, and the game followed a similar course to our first one as I thought out loud.

“Who would have a place like this, underground, in the middle of a forest?” I thought I’d toss out a few facetious ideas at Dr. K. to see how he reacted, and maybe put him off his game.

“Those guys looked short to me—maybe they’re the Seven Dwarfs, and this is their gold mine? Or they’re a nest of German spies left over from the war? Some sort of crazy religious cult? A secret society? Some East-Coast Triad gang? They’ve got strange taste in décor and they don’t have much to do with the neighbours. No vehicle tracks, no footpaths around here even. Very primitive set-up, no windows, no plumbing…like cavemen. They don’t like showing their faces.” I snapped my fingers. “Got it: they’re an ancient tribe of troglodyte Indians, the remnant of an ancient civilisation. Better than that, they’re the survivors of ancient Atlantis. The locals are terrified of them; that’s why they don’t talk about them.”

“You are quite right,” he said, and continued the development with a knight. “Except for one detail. They are extra-terrestrials.”

“Spacemen? Yeah, I forgot to mention that.”

“Indeed. They have been here for many centuries, and, as you say, their neighbours have a superstitious dread of them. They are not like any terrestrial life; I believe they are actually a species of highly developed fungus.”

“Of course, I shoulda known,” I said, thinking of Amazing Stories. “It’s the Mushroom Men from Mars. Like walking slime mould.”

“Slime mould—yes, yes, exactly so.” He nodded vigorously. “But with a hard exoskeleton, like a lobster, to give it structure. Parallel evolution with our crustacea…they are not individuals, merely the mobile fruiting bodies of a larger underground organism. One that feeds, I think, on geothermal energy. They have advanced technology, but the ones here do not understand it,” he went on. “Perhaps they have great universities and scientists somewhere in the galaxy. But this is a remote, isolated outpost—as remote from civilisation as Newfane. They are just as ignorant and superstitious as the people in the village.” He raised his voice as though for the benefit of eavesdroppers. “They boast more than Americans about their science, but they are the worst laboratory assistants I ever had. Not one of them would be admitted into a German university, not even to sweep the floors.”

He was losing track of the game in his excitement, and I took an exposed rook with my queen.

“They are good with valves and pipes, but electricity…they don’t understand it. I have to get my own generator. They believe in the ether! Like peasants, they just keep doing the same things without understanding why. They do not understand experiment, theory, scientific method…their science has not advanced in one hundred years…not in one thousand years.”

“And these mushroom men wanted you to make moonshine?”

“After a fashion,” he said. “Alcohol is a primary fuel for their machinery. Fossil fuels are peculiar to our planet; the process of fermenting carbohydrate to alcohol is universal. The apparatus they had is very old, and when it broke they had no idea how to fix it. Amusingly enough, methanol is the biggest problem: it poisons the organic catalysts they use.”

He actually stopped and chuckled at that.

“So they had to ask me to build a new component from scratch, with what I could learn about the structure and function of the old one. It was too good an offer for me to refuse.”

“So you knew you were looking for some kind of ceramic but not exactly what,” I said. “And the mushroom men couldn’t stake you with the money, so you brought in the Chicago boys.”

“Partly…but also because my hosts lack the means to test the filter properly. So you are all here to give it the seal of approval.”

“They can’t be that dumb.” It was a crazy story, and full of holes at that.

He did not reply; he was studying the board. Eventually he moved a pawn, blocking my attack and threatening a counter-attack with his bishop.

“So now you know everything,” he said. “Those others, they’re not interested, only in the money. They are just hoodlums. You know, in German, a hoodlum is just a ragamuffin, a street boy. Here they are dangerous. Mr. Moran makes me uncomfortable. But you are not a hoodlum, you are an investigator. You would find out everything yourself, but I make it a little easier.”

I moved my queen back. “Thanks,” I said.

“It’s all supposed to be secret, but I don’t like secrets. Tomorrow we have the demonstration. Afterwards they would like me to stay here, keep my knowledge and expertise forever. I would be a part of, as you say, their brain trust. They do like brains.”

“I heard something like that.”

“Pickled brains,” he said. “You know why? Because a brain is like a wax cylinder or a phonograph record. With the right machine you can extract information from it. But I might, on the other hand …”

Dr. K. was looking down at one hand which was making a walking gesture with two fingers beside the chessboard. “‘Twenty-three Skidoo,’ yes? I do not want to be here forever.”

The bishop struck out across the board, scything down a pawn. I nodded to show I understood.

“My job is looking after Mr. Spencer Wade’s money.”

“Don’t worry, he will get a good return on his investment. The ceramic filter is worth several million dollars to whoever can exploit it first.”

We played on in silence for a while. I steadily lost ground and pieces and ended up fighting a messy rearguard action that was only going to end one way.

“Excellent,” Dr. K. declared when it ended. “Shall we play another?”

We played chess for some hours. We ate crackers with cheese and pâté, and the apples Dr. K. brought from Pretski’s. We finished three games and he won two; the third was a long drawn-out stalemate. We talked about science and philosophy and life in the universe—or at least Dr. K. did, and I listened. He was what you might call a monomaniac. Dr. K. was perfectly normal when he was talking about politics, or French wine, or how Chicago had changed since the World’s Fair. But get him on the topic of mushroom men and he was off into outer space faster than a rocket ship. I wondered if it had started out as a joke or a fantasy of his, and it just grew and grew down here in the darkness—like a mushroom. Until he couldn’t see the joke anymore and it all made perfect sense to him. It happens. Crazy people aren’t crazy all the time—you just have to know how to handle them. I’ve spent worse evenings. I don’t think I’ve spent weirder ones.

Afterwards the doctor took the camp bed. I had said I would stay up, keeping one eye on the stills. I was used to long surveillance jobs, and even sitting on the dirt floor was more comfortable than most. At least it was indoors.

You could hear the low flame burning in the lantern, the bubbling of the two boilers. The air was dead, stale, witness to the fact that whoever made these tunnels didn’t know much about air circulation. Sometimes you could hear distant scrapings. It sounded like machinery or something further down in the tunnels.

Then there was a distant chanting somewhere below. I could not make out words however hard I tried; perhaps there weren’t any. I thought again about secret religious cults. Those robes with the pointy hoods were the same ones they wore in Spain. It still didn’t make any sense.

“Superstitious peasants,” muttered Dr. K., rolling over. “Always praying instead of thinking.”

The chanting continued in bursts for an hour or more: hymn followed by psalm and then maybe some preaching. It was the craziest thing I ever heard. I drowsed and drifted without ever quite falling asleep. Then I heard a noise nearby and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Someone was creeping up on me. I moved fast, turning up the lantern just in time to catch a flash of white ducking back into the tunnel entrance.

“What is it?” asked Dr. K.

“One of your friends,” I said.

“That is unusual.” He looked troubled. “Perhaps they are keeping an eye on you? I will talk to them tomorrow.”

The rest of that long night passed uneventfully. The stills bubbled. Dr. K. snored like a hog. The blackness pressed in on me.

In the morning he yawned, and chuckled to see me blinking back at him.

“Still awake, Mr. Jones? I do admire your determination. You would make an excellent assistant. I could have you watching chemical reactions all night.”

He left to collect the others. I stretched, then did some exercises to get the kinks out of my arms and legs, back and neck. I washed my face in a bucket of water and regretted not bringing a razor. The doctor did not seem to have one, and I felt like I’d grown two days of stubble overnight.

I breakfasted on crackers and cheese and was feeling a little fresher by the time Dr. K. led the others into the lab. Cristillo had his Tommy gun with him again. It seemed like an unnecessary amount of hardware. Unless they had something in mind which involved the rest of us not getting back to Newfane.

I took the chance to go outside for a smoke. The light hurt my eyes, and it was cold and fresh after the closed-off dirt walls and stale air inside. The birds sounded good. Yesterday it seemed as if the forest had none, but this morning there appeared to be dozens of them singing their hearts out. Out here in the clear daylight it all seemed so simple. Why had I been so worried about being down there all night, when there was nothing to it?

Wilson stood with me, pumping me for information about what I had learned from Dr. K.

“He’s a loon,” I finished. “But he might still be a good scientist.”

“How’s that?”

“I once had a case from a guy who swore he was the true king of France. He thought Napoleon’s secret agents were trying to murder him,” I said. “No kidding. He’s an insurance executive, and he’s one of the smartest cookies I ever met. Never missed a trick, or made a bad deal. Back in the war, his platoon was hit by some French ’75s, and that’s the only way he could make sense of it. He still checks under the bed for French spies every night. One part of his brain is on the fritz, but the rest is all OK.”

“Dr. K. is smart all right. We traced him back to New York. He was doing pretty well until his partner burned the factory down for the insurance and pulled a disappearing act.” Wilson snorted a laugh. “Seems you can’t trust anybody these days.”

“And how about those guys in hoods?”

“I was shooting the breeze with Hooker, the fellow that runs the store in Newfane. He wouldn’t tell me a thing about this gang. He calls them ‘those ones’ and makes ’em sound like leprechauns. He says they don’t trouble the village, and the village doesn’t trouble them. Hooker warned me to stay away, whatever they offer. Folks who do business with them disappear after a while—says he lost an uncle that way.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” I said.

“Keep an eye on Moran,” said Wilson. “He’s up to something.”

After a cigarette I felt up to the big revelation: the proof of Dr. K.’s work. We gathered in front of the laboratory set-up under the electric lights.

“This is the complete technical description of the filter,” said Dr. K., holding up four manila envelopes. “One for each of my investors. But of course, first you must confirm that it is a success for yourselves.”

He placed the envelopes on the bench behind two rows of shot glasses. Ricca, Cristillo, Moran, Wilson, and I stood around as he ceremonially broke the seals and removed the flasks of refined liquor from the end of each of the stills and poured out the golden liquid. I heard a rustle from the other end of the room; there were white figures watching us from the shadows.

“This is the basic version,” said Dr. K., handing around glasses and raising his own. “Forty per cent alcohol—eighty degrees proof in your peculiar American measurement. But is has various contaminants which do not make for a satisfactory drink.”

We all rolled the moonshine around and sniffed and sipped. In fact, it was not bad at all. It was rough, but I’ve had plenty worse. We agreed among ourselves that it was good enough.

“Nonsense,” said Dr. K., “it is a horrible drink.” He held up a glass from the second still to admire its colour. “This is something different. ‘Theory is grey, but the green tree of life grows gold.’” He handed out glasses with shots of the liquor from the still with his special, patent-pending ceramic filter.

He was right. It was in a different class. It reminded me of drinking a good twelve-year-old Scotch after trying the younger version. You could recognise the same flavour, but the imperfections had been smoothed out into something that warmed instead of burning, something which had taste to it instead of just stabbing your taste buds as it passed.

“Now that’s more like it,” said Moran.

“Sure is—set ’em up again,” ordered Ricca, sliding his empty glass over.

Everything went dark. I sensed the others moving about and some kind of struggle nearby. I was about to make some lame gag about wood alcohol making you blind when there was a prolonged clattering noise, punctuated with higher notes of breaking glass.

“Please be calm,” instructed Dr. K. “It is a simple failure. I will get a light.”

Seconds later the room was lit by a lantern held up by the doctor.

Moran and Ricca had both drawn guns, and Wilson was backing away. One of the stills was overturned and the floor was littered with the smashed apparatus, with sections of piping and broken glass in a wide pool of liquid. Then I saw Cristillo, on the ground, stone dead, with his Tommy gun lying next to him. His eyes were still open and bulging. One hand was holding the wire garrotte looped firmly around his neck, cutting half an inch into the flesh. Blood was mingling with the other liquids around him, adding a darker stain.

“Too slow,” said Moran, and shot Ricca once in the chest from three feet away. As the Southsider went down, Moran stepped over and shot him once more in the head. It was a professional job all the way. Each shot was a sharp crack in the closed space.

“What are you doing?” demanded Dr. K.

I already had my hands up as Moran turned around. Wilson had his up too, and had put Dr. K. and me between him and Moran.

“Keep ’em where I can see ’em,” ordered Moran. “You too, Wilson.”

“Everybody keep calm,” I said. “Moran, what’s between you and the South Side mob is your business.”

Moran grabbed a manila envelope and stuffed it into a pocket without taking his eyes off us. “Now, let’s get outta here,” he said. “Dr. K., you lead the way.”

“You may not go.” It was that buzzing voice, coming out of the dark. “None of you may leave.”

A wall of white robes appeared, eight or ten of them stepping noiselessly into the circle of lantern light with more behind. The pointed hoods and black eye slits made them look inhuman. The effect was menacing, but they did not seem to be armed.

“This ain’t your business,” said Moran, nodding at the two bodies on the ground. No reply. Moran weighed up the situation, then casually took a step back and holstered his automatic. “See, I don’t have a beef with you fellows. Sorry about the mess.”

“It’s all over,” Wilson told the hoods. “We’ll take what we paid for and go. We don’t want no trouble.”

“The demonstration was successful,” said Dr. K. “Surely you are satisfied the filter works?”

“The filter works.” I could not tell which of the hoods was speaking. “You have completed the work. You may not leave. None of you.”

“I don’t think you understand who you’re talking to,” said Wilson. “We ain’t staying.”

“You may not leave,” came the reply.

“Let’s talk about this,” said Wilson.

“You may not leave.” There was no feeling there, no change of tone. It was like listening to a stuck record or a station announcer.

“To hell with this,” said Moran. He had edged back to where Cristillo was lying and abruptly dropped down to grab the Tommy gun. As he lifted it, he aimed and squeezed the trigger, filling the chamber with thunderous staccato gunfire and muzzle flashes.

Moran handled the machine gun the Army way, sweeping the stream of bullets from left to right and then back at waist level, just the way they teach you. The robed figures surged forward but went down like bowling pins. The whole thing took all of three seconds, but it seemed like much longer.

I hit the floor, covering my head with my hands, thinking irrationally that if I had survived the fields of France I could survive this.

Moran inspected the damage through the clearing smoke. It was quite a mess.

“Moran!” I called out.

He looked up, drew his automatic, and fired once before they were on him: a wave of seven or eight of them, bringing him down and tearing the gun away. Still more appeared from the darkness from every direction. They were all around us. When I looked back Moran had stopped struggling.

“This is very unfortunate,” said Dr. K. sadly, looking at the wrecked apparatus. The bodies did not seem to bother him.

“Come this way,” one of the figures ordered, and the doctor gestured for me to comply, as if I needed telling. But he made me wait until he had found me an extra lantern.

I was led into a bare room with nothing in it but a dozen empty crates.

There was no door, and one of the figures stayed with me.

“You were sent by Spencer Wade?” asked the hood. “Are you from his family?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “More of a family friend.”

Up close, the robed figures were even stranger. Their arms were too short, and their hands were not right. This guy had to be deformed. Unless they really were from Mars.

I didn’t like the way this one was looking at me.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“We will wait.” His voice was even harder to make out than the other one.

“Where are you guys from anyhow?” I asked. “Dr. K. says you’re extra-terrestrials. Is that right?”

He seemed to sway slightly.

“Do you want to travel to other planets?” he asked at last. “Do you want to see the glories of the vast cosmos?”

“Why, are you selling tickets?”

“It can be arranged,” he said in that blurred, buzzing voice. After another long pause he added: “It is a rare opportunity. Only a few are taken.”

“You have a rocket ship hidden down here?” I said.

“We have our method of travel.”

Close up I could make out a face through the eye slits. It was a pale, blank face, almost as white as the robes. “It would be your…reward.”

In that dark, close place the crazy talk was getting to me. My guard was far too enthusiastic about sending me into the cosmos. I only know of one way of getting to another world, and it’s not pleasant. On the other hand, there are plenty of types who think that opium takes them far away. Maybe the anthill crowd was a colony of dope fiends. I was running out of theories and it made as much sense as anything.

“I think I’ll go back to Chicago first,” I said.

“We will talk later,” he said. “But think. Think about what we are offering.”

Then he stood back in the doorway and played statue.

I sat on a crate and lit a cigarette. There were a lot of bodies to clear up, but that wasn’t my problem. I wondered what they would do with Moran. I wondered what they would do with me. It sounded as though someone wanted me to take the cosmic tour rather than leave.

There were sounds of disturbance further down the tunnels. My guard disappeared, and a few seconds later Dr. K. was in the doorway, holding up a lantern which caught the smoke billowing around him like stage fog. Wilson was right behind him.

“There is a small fire,” said Dr. K. “We must go now. Otherwise we will not leave.”

He led me down unfamiliar tunnels. He had his knapsack but no hat or walking stick, and was lighting the way with a flashlight. He was evidently taking a circuitous route to avoid notice but took a wrong turn, and it seemed as if we were walking for miles. This part of the complex was constructed better; it seemed more modern, though perhaps it was actually much older. There were smooth floors and walls. The rooms were more like bank vaults and less like caves.

As we passed the opening into one room I heard a confused voice: “Who’s there? What’s happening?”

“Was that Moran?” I asked.

Reluctantly, Dr. K. came back and shone his flashlight into the vault where the voice had come from. The circle of light played over metal shelves, something like an operating table, racks of equipment. Cylinders like big saucepans lined most of the shelves. And, in the corner, Moran. What was left of him.

“You see, Mr. Jones, there is nothing we can do for Mr. Moran now,” Dr. K. said, pulling me away.

We came out of a different cave mouth from the one we had entered by. “Take this, Mr. Jones,” he said, passing me the Luger. “I believe you are a much better marksman than I. They should not trouble us much in daytime, but unfortunately it is overcast today. Watch out for anything in deep shadow. Or…in the air.”

I tucked the gun into my waistband and set off after him. We splashed through brooks and down muddy paths. We were going much faster now, and Wilson and I had trouble keeping up with Dr. K., ducking under tree branches and skidding on the mossy rocks. He ploughed through stands of big yellow toadstools on the path, scattering them.

Wilson slipped on a patch of mud and went down cursing. I stopped long enough to see him get up and come after me. My ankles were painful from the awkward footing of tree roots, my chest was hurting, and I was getting tired. Wilson kept going; he was a few years younger than I first thought, and in much better shape than any librarian. Dr. K. bounced along ahead of us like a rubber ball, blasting through the ferns, following a path only he could see.

Something stabbed me in the face, and the next thing I knew I was falling backwards into something soft. I thrashed around, fighting to get to my feet. Footsteps ran past me; I looked up and saw the dead tree branch I had run into. I had a fresh cut on my forehead, but the branch missed spiking my eye by an inch.

I checked I still had the Luger, clambered up, and kept on running after the other two. I wiped away blood oozing into my eye, looking around and no seeing any landmarks I could recognise. That long run had a nightmare feel to it, and I’ve run it a lot more times in my nightmares. Usually I get away.

V

We arrived in Newfane before I expected. Pretski was surprised to see us when we knocked on the door. Our clothing was stained, I had blood down my face, and Wilson was holding his arm; he had hurt his shoulder on a tree stump when he fell. We must have looked like the survivors of a massacre. Only Dr. K. seemed undamaged.

“We must pick up a few things before leaving,” said Dr. K. “Please excuse us. What time is the bus?”

“The bus won’t be comin’ today,” Pretski blurted out. “Not if they want to keep you here.”

“How far is it to the highway?” I asked. “Ten miles?”

“Too far, I think,” said Dr. K. “They can move quickly.”

“You can’t stay here,” said Pretski, getting more worried by the second. “I’m sorry, doctor, but I have my wife, and …”

“I’ll see if I can make a phone call,” I said.

I headed briskly over to the store, extracting the number for Transnational Development Services from my mental filing system. The woman said they might be able to help me out of a jam, and they were no friends of that ghoulish crowd in the woods. Maybe if they were on the ball they’d be able to send in the cavalry to give us a ride out of here.

Hooker was behind the counter, reading a mail-order catalogue. He gestured for me to use the pay phone, but when I picked up the earpiece there was only silence. Hooker said the line must be down again.

“Does that happen often?” I asked.

Hooker looked away. “Sometimes. I warned you about goin’ with them in the woods,” he mumbled. “No one can say I din’t.”

Outside, the woods pressed in on the village from all sides, dark and lowering. I thought getting back above ground would be the difficult part. Dr. K. had the door open on the new Ford that Ricca and Cristillo arrived in and he was tinkering.

“I believe I can get it to start in a few minutes,” he said. “Can either of you drive?”

I shook my head, but Wilson nodded. “If the alternative is sticking here.”

Dr. K. set to work while Wilson retrieved his valise from his room, and I did likewise. Pretski stood there wringing his hands. By the time we walked out to the car again it was sputtering and coughing before subsiding into a steady rhythm.

The man in overalls whom I had seen hanging around was hastening toward us from down the street. He looked angry.

“Hello, Mr. Brown,” said Dr. K. “Gentlemen, this is Walter Brown, my associates’ associate.”

“You can’t go, Dr. K.,” Brown snapped. “You know it ain’t allowed.”

“But I’m afraid we are going,” said Dr. K. “Please thank your associates for their hospitality.”

Brown sized the three of us up.

“You’ll never make it out alive,” he announced at last. “Stop this foolishness.”

“Good day, Mr. Brown,” said Dr. K.

Brown turned and stamped off.

“Excellent,” said Dr. K. “I did not think he would oppose the three of us openly.”

He glanced around the town before getting into the back and hunkering down low so as not to be seen. I took the passenger seat, holding the Luger under my coat.

“The march of the pawn to the eighth square,” said Dr. K. behind me. “It is always the most anxious journey, is it not? We must be resolute, gentlemen!”

Wilson experimented with the gears and soon we were driving out at a respectable speed. As I looked back I could see Pretski watching us anxiously. A minute later, we rounded the bend and left Newfane behind.

Then there was a zip in the air and the windshield was starred around a hole big enough to put your finger through.

“Drive faster,” said Dr. K. Wilson did not need any encouragement.

A second shot pinged off the bodywork, and this time I could tell it was fired from behind us. We rounded another bend and there was no third round.

“Walter Brown, making his Parthian shot,” said Dr. K. “If he was truly determined, he would have placed himself in front of us, not behind. He is an employee who wants to tell his masters that he has done something so he does not get punished.”

“Close enough for me,” said Wilson.

Dr. K. was especially worried about the two small bridges we had to cross, but they were still intact. Then we came to a place where the road was partially blocked by an enormous rock fall, boulders scattered about like a handful of pebbles.

The situation was not as bad as it first looked, as the larger rocks were well off the road and it would be possible to clear a way. I found a shovel in the back of the car and moved the small stuff while Dr. K. handled the bigger ones and Wilson kept watch, scanning the trees around us.

“I think an explosive charge was placed here in advance to block the road,” Dr. K. said, heaving a two-hundred-pound boulder along like a snowball. “But the position, or the charge, was not well calculated. They are bad with calculations.”

“Something over there,” called Wilson from the car.

I squinted over to where he was pointing, but it just looked like a big crow perched in the lower boughs of a pine tree. All I could really see were the branches moving.

“Keep watching, Mr. Wilson,” said Dr. K., and redoubled his efforts.

In fifteen minutes we had cleared enough rocks out of the way to get the car through, bumping, over the uneven surface. As we started moving again I saw shadows flitting under the trees over to one side. They might have been children wearing dark ragged clothes that trailed around them. But I didn’t get a good look.

“Keep the gun ready,” Dr. K. said. “Aim low in the body and do not hesitate.”

After that I scanned the road ahead with more concentration than a bum looking for pennies in the gutter. I saw things in the shadows a few times, but they were all in my imagination and I did not have to use the Luger. It was the longest drive of my life, but we finally rounded a bend to see the traffic on the main road ahead.

When I turned around to tell Dr. K. we had made it, he was gone. His knapsack was gone too. I hadn’t heard a thing.

“He must have jumped out when we stopped at the last intersection,” said Wilson, looking back.

“Didn’t you see him in the mirror?”

“I didn’t see a damn thing,” he said. “I was looking ahead.”

He sounded as if he didn’t believe it himself. I’m sure he was wondering the same thing as I was: was it humanly possible, or even inhumanly possible, to snatch a man out of a car without anyone seeing?

Wilson drove more carefully on the main road so that he wouldn’t attract attention. Even so, something alerted the motorcycle cop who tore up the road behind us and signalled Wilson to pull over. I wondered if it was the shiny new automobile, or the Illinois plates, or maybe it was something else.

We came to a stop and the cop brought his bike alongside. He stood there, straddling his machine impassively.

Thoughts started racing through my mind. The car was stolen; it would not have been reported yet—unless someone had fixed that phone line to Newfane and called ahead specially. I was carrying a gun I did not have a license for, and I was in the company of a man who was a known criminal. On top of that, this was Vermont, and if they wanted to get technical about it, I was not licensed to work anywhere in this state. If the cop felt like dragging us in for questioning, I did not have to tell them anything, but I’d get thirty days and my Chicago license would be shot.

Then there would be Wilson in the next room, spinning his version of events. He was a sharp operator and a quick thinker. He could call on some big hitters from back home. I knew who the fall guy would be.

We had to persuade the cop to let us go.

Wilson and I exchanged looks and got out. Wilson extracted a five from his pocket and palmed it. Small-town traffic cops don’t like motorists from the big city, but a fin is a good soother.

The cop was perfectly still. He was wearing a helmet and goggles, and one of those leather masks they wear when it drops below freezing. His goggles were dark tinted, with no sign of eyes behind them.

“Good day, officer,” said Wilson.

“Stay there,” growled the cop, his gloved hand on his holster, and we both froze two paces away.

Seconds passed and a truck went past. The cop did not move a muscle. It was as though he was welded to his bike.

“We’re not moving,” said Wilson. “Do you want to see a driver’s license now?”

The cop did not reply. The truck dwindled into the distance and disappeared over the curve of the hill. The Luger was tucked into my waistband under my jacket.

“Stay there,” said the cop, and this time I could hear the buzz in his voice.

The hairs at the back of my neck prickled.

“Nice motorbike you have there,” said Wilson after a pause. He scratched his nose with too-elaborate casualness. “Sorry, I’m not supposed to move, am I?”

A farm truck was approaching from behind us now, struggling on the slight gradient.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. I was no longer worried about having my license revoked. I was worried about going back to that anthill and facing what was there. I wondered how much time we had before Walter Brown or someone else turned up to take us back.

“Don’t move,” said the cop. “We have to wait here.” It was as though he were listening to a faint voice shouting orders from a long distance away.

“Nice uniform,” said Wilson, leaning closer. “Except the badge, that’s a cheap imitation. Want I should get you a real one?”

“Wait here,” repeated the cop.

So long as we did not move, he didn’t seem to care what we said. Another farm truck ground past and carried on, shedding wisps of hay in its wake. I tensed, wondering if the cop was waiting for the way to be clear before making his move. But he stayed there like a statue.

The Luger is an automatic pistol. I had a round in the chamber, but the safety catch was on. Only morons carry a cocked gun at their waist without the safety. That meant I would have to draw it with my right and release the safety with my left before I could shoot. I had checked where the catch was, but had no chance to practice. There would likely be some fumbling, and with a strange gun I wouldn’t be sure of hitting with the first shot even at close range.

Cops all carry double-action revolvers like the Smith & Wesson .38. With those you can leave the hammer down on an empty chamber, and when you pull the trigger it brings the next chamber around and fires. So no fumbling with a safety. The cop would have to be asleep not to get the first shot.

Moran could probably have drawn and hit the cop from twenty paces faster than you could blink, and done it with any handgun around. Not me; I’ve always ducked out of situations where gunplay was likely to be involved. Nor had I spent much time at a shooting range; if you prepare for a situation it’s more likely to happen. Too many guys convinced themselves that being a crack shot meant they would win every time. Which I guess included Moran.

Wilson scratched his nose again with the same exaggerated action, careful not to make anything that looked like a threatening move. He turned his head to look around, checked out the road, glanced at me.

“Nice day,” Wilson said. There was no sound now but the wind, no cars coming. “How ’bout a cigarette?”

There was no response, and Wilson reached slowly into his pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes, and extracted one with an easy flick. Then he replaced the pack, took out a Ronson, and fired it up. Our eyes met; he glanced a question at me, I nodded.

“Can my friend have one?” he asked. Then, with a smile, “Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude, I should offer you one first.”

Wilson stepped forward, proffering the pack with a flick of the wrist which sent a shower of cigarettes cascading around the cop’s knees. When it came to distraction, Wilson was a pro: the eye automatically follows movement whether you want it to or not. I had the Luger out, safety catch off, and stepped forward.

“Don’t move,” said the cop, as I held the gun against his thigh and pulled the trigger.

The gun jumped in my hand—it had more of a kick than I expected—but the shot went right where I meant it to. I felt as if I had just laid down four of a kind to scoop the pot.

“Uh,” said the cop. It was not a cry of pain, or even surprise. It sounded more like a belch, or the sound when a movie skips a few frames by mistake.

For a stupid second Wilson and the cop and I all looked down at the small, scorched hole in the black leather encasing his leg.

Maybe I should have shot him through the chest, but cold-blooded murder takes some practice. A slug through his thigh wouldn’t kill him, but it would take his mind off stopping us.

“Plug him again,” said Wilson. His hand was in his jacket pocket, and for the first time I wondered if Wilson was armed too.

“Don’t move,” said the cop.

The way he said it really spooked me. There was no change in his expression, no indication he even realised I’d just shot him through the thigh and he should be screaming in pain. I fired again without thinking, and again, and again, and the cop just stood there on his bike. He jumped a little with each impact as though I’d poked him, but that was about all.

After the fourth bullet he seemed to sigh and exhaled a cloud of thick white steam or smoke. It poured out of him, mainly from his mouth, but also out of the bullet holes. He was enveloped in a sort of mist of it all over. Then he toppled over, the motorcycle coming down on his injured leg.

Wilson had started moving as soon as I fired. He was in the driver’s seat, had the engine started, and was already pulling out when I jumped in the car.

“Should have put one in his head to finish him off,” said Wilson. He was looking hard in the rearview mirror, his foot down.

“I did,” I said.

The cop was still moving. He gave no sign of pain, but wriggled out on his elbows and knees with disturbing, animal-like agility. Wisps of smoke surrounded him as though he was burning inside. It didn’t bother him much, but he was slowing down.

“He’s not getting up,” I said, looking backwards. The fake cop was scuttling around his bike like an enormous bug, or a turtle that can’t get up when you put it on its back.

What the hell was in those bullets? For that matter, what the hell was in that cop outfit?

“Jesus Christ,” said Wilson as the cop disappeared behind us. “What a freak show this is. Let’s get back to Chi’.”

We drove all the way to Burlington without talking.

VI

Wilson parked the car down a side street well away from the station in case anyone was looking out for it. The two of us shared a compartment for the journey to Chicago’s Union Station. Wilson insisted in putting his valise on the rack by himself, in spite of his shoulder. As the train gained speed we both began to relax. Perhaps we had both been expecting something at the station. The sense of pursuit was wearing off.

“What a caper,” he said at last, offering me a cigarette. “Too bad we didn’t get Dr. K.’s filter. That was some smooth bourbon he made back there. It breaks me up.”

“Too bad,” I agreed.

“I knew that idiot Moran would spoil it for us all,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you he would?”

I nodded, watching the scenery go by. I unfolded the newspaper from the vendor at the station. The world was pretty much the same as we left it. No mushroom men, no nocturnal buzzing horrors, just the usual murders and accidents.

“You ever hear of an outfit called Transnational Development?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Who are they?”

“Who can tell? They paid top dollar to have some parties rubbed out a year or two back. Where do they come in?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What are you gonna tell Wade?” asked Wilson. “He’ll want to know what happened to his money.”

The fields and forests went by the window. It was all green and charming, and there were few dark shadows under the trees.

“Did you ever work the Spanish Prisoner?” I asked.

“I worked every game you ever heard of, and then some,” he said.

“Care to explain it to me?”

“It’s easy as pie,” said Wilson. “You make up something the mark wants— like an inheritance, or a cargo of silver, or buried treasure if it’s not too corny. And you make out that he can get it if he spends just a bit of money, paying for papers or bribing an official or something. But you have to make it exclusive; only he can get it. And you keep stringing him on, keeping the something just out of reach, asking for more money each time. Until he runs out of money or gets wise.”

“Pretty close to what we just saw, don’t you think?” I said. “The special filter is the ‘something.’ Kept just out of reach, with a phony story about a crazy German scientist who wanted it to be a secret. And at the end the scientist and the filter disappear, along with the money.”

Wilson’s hand was in his jacket pocket. It looked as if he had something in there, maybe about the right size to be a little Browning .25 automatic. It’s the sort of gun that wins you second prize in a shootout, but it’s just dandy for shooting a man in the back of the head at point-blank range. Or in the front of the head if he happens to be unarmed.

“Nice try,” said Wilson, “but no cigar. You saw what happened to Cristillo and Ricca and the others.”

“Guns with blanks and stage blood,” I said. “It was kinda dim lighting. People make up a lot of what they think they see. There’s a shot and a guy falls down, you assume he’s been hit. But it ain’t necessarily so.”

“Wait a minute,” said Wilson. “Are you saying I was mixed up in a scam?”

“Put it like this: I know your line of work.”

“You’re a hard case, Jones,” he said. “If I was running a game it’d be a lot slicker than that. Hell, maybe I’ll use the idea someday. I’d have a shack in the woods instead of that underground place, and end it with a raid by phony G-men. Hustle the mark away so he’s glad to get out alive, and have the whole show burning down for a grand finale. But Jones—you could have killed the bogus cop. And even I wouldn’t have a guy put a bullet through a car windshield I was driving.”

“It’s a smart piece of trick shooting,” I said. “And I’ve got Dr. K.’s gun: maybe it’s loaded with blanks.”

“Horse feathers,” said Wilson. “Ricca’s brains were blown out ten feet away. You saw the same as I did what Moran did to those guys with the Tommy gun. And what happened to Moran after. You saw what you saw, and you can’t talk a way out of that.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’ll be sending some boys with a trunkful of dynamite to blow up that hole and any others like it. Nobody messes with us.”

“I’ll figure out a story for Wade,” I said at last. “About how dealing with the gangs isn’t a smart idea when they turn on each other like dogs.”

“You tell him,” said Wilson.

“And it’s too bad about his investment. But my fee is the same either way.”

“Attaboy,” said Wilson.

After that the adrenaline wore off and I slept for most of the way, or at least dozed. I kept seeing bad things whenever I got to the edge of sleep, and the sound of the tracks turned into an insistent buzzing voice. But I was fully awake as we approached Union Station. Wilson showed his impatience, getting his valise down and looking at his wristwatch.

“You want help carrying that?” I asked. “It looks kinda heavy.”

He gave me a sharp look.

“When we went out with Dr. K., I couldn’t help wondering if maybe you were lagging behind deliberately so you could leave some markers so you could find the way,” I said. “Maybe you came back that night too and put on some white robes to see if you could sneak in and grab the filter.”

“Could’ve been anyone you saw.”

“You see,” I said, “it strikes me that maybe you never were just a cheap sharper—maybe that was all a blind. Maybe you’ve got another line. Maybe it wasn’t Moran that put a wire around Louie Cristillo’s neck. We were supposed to think it was because he’d talked about garrotting Germans in France. But the angle was wrong. Moran was a lot taller than Cristillo, but the angle of the garrotte around his neck, you could see it was done by a shorter guy, not a taller one.”

“Says you.”

The train had jerked to a stop, and I could hear people getting out of other carriages, but neither of us moved.

“And if I was to ask the storekeeper about who’d been in to buy some wire, what do you think he’d tell me? You said you were talking to him in the store this morning.”

“You’d better go back and ask him,” said Wilson. His hand was moving toward his jacket pocket.

“Also, when those pieces of the still were all over the floor, there was one piece that was missing—the filter. It would take someone pretty smart with their hands to get that out, wouldn’t you say, and stash it under his jacket? Someone who didn’t trust Dr. K. to give us the real formula, who wanted to be sure he had a working model. They say people who can’t be trusted don’t trust others.”

“There’s just one problem with your theory, Jones,” Wilson said with a slight smile. “You packed the Luger in your case before we got on the train.”

He was pointing the gun at me from inside his pocket. I gave him my best sneer.

“Try again, buddy, you don’t fool me with that one. Any kid can pretend their finger is a gun.”

He whipped the .25 out of his pocket and flicked the safety with his other hand, as easily as a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Wilson was fast, but I move fast too. As he raised the gun I blocked it with my left hand and hit him on the chin with a straight right.

It wasn’t my best, but it was a solid punch and Wilson went down like a sack of potatoes. I took his valise, leaving him mine in exchange. Carrying two would make me conspicuous. I hopped out of the carriage as quick as I could. Knocking a guy out cold isn’t like in the movies where they stay down long enough for the hero to untie the heroine and explain the plot to her.

I figured I had a slow count of ten before he came around.

Wilson was up again right on cue and heading down the platform fast. I watched him pushing through the crowd of grey suits, head scanning from left to right. There were too many suits to cover; rule one of being a private detective is knowing how to blend in. He started to run after a guy in one direction, then stopped when he saw it wasn’t me. He headed off fast the other way. He didn’t realise I had stepped out of the carriage and then into the carriage on the next platform and watched him go.

As an afterthought I went back and picked up my valise. There was a book of chess problems in there I didn’t want to lose. There were also some bullets left in the Luger I might be needing.

VII

The next morning, I presented myself at the residence of Mr. Spencer Wade. I was clean and sober, shaved and washed, brushed and scented. I was in a fresh suit. The smell of mildew never did leave the one I had worn in Newfane. It was a pity I had to get in by climbing over the garden wall, but I didn’t like the look of the two types sitting in a car opposite the entrance. I didn’t know their names, but I knew their business.

The flunky did not bat an eyelid when he opened the house door. He conducted me to the conservatory, and I found myself again in a bamboo armchair among the lush green foliage.

Spencer Wade joined me five minutes later. He seemed anxious until I pointed to the parcel wrapped in brown paper on the glass table in front of me. He was still wearing the signet ring with the wavy-W design.

“I brought you something,” I said. “Seems like your Dr. K. wasn’t a phony after all.”

“That’s excellent news,” he said, unwrapping it from the brown paper and weighing the small cylinder in his hands. “So this is the filter. How does it work?”

“Inside it are ceramic discs, that’s all I know,” I said. “There’s no instruction manual. I guess you can find some smart guys to take it apart and make you a million more just like it.”

“I’m not going to ask about what it’s been used for,” he said, sniffing it and smiling.

“Of course, you wouldn’t want to be linked to anything illegal,” I said.

“My dealings have all been legal and above-board,” he said. “And I’m awfully grateful to you for carrying out your assignment so thoroughly. This is exactly what I was hoping for.”

“Unfortunately there were a few hitches on the way,” I said, and gave him a brief version of events in Newfane and on the train. “I guess you expected some trouble.”

“I had no idea.”

“Your family ties to Newfane go way back,” I said.

Wade shook his head negligently, still looking at the filter.

“The way I doped it out,” I said, “your grandfather used to fetch and carry for that tribe in Newfane. But he was smart, smarter than the rest of them. He saw a way he could make some real money. So he and his partner Hooker got hold of some of their hardware—maybe because that needed fixing too. That was the famous Wade-Hooker valve gear that made locomotives just a bit more efficient and paid for your modest place here. You know Hooker’s nephew is still in Newfane, keeping a store?”

“Is that so? I never knew Hooker.”

“You wouldn’t. He disappeared after the valve gear was invented,” I said. “But your grandfather stayed in with the Newfane crowd—that signet ring was his, wasn’t it, with the wavy sign on it? I bet he still did a few odd jobs, fixed them up with help.”

Wade glanced involuntarily at the ring. The pattern was exactly the same as the strange alphabet in Dr. K.’s notebook. And Walter Brown, the hoods’ eyes and ears in Newfane, had been wearing one just like it.

“And your father was another helper in his time. He never tried anything too clever, just hung on to his money. But you’re not so smart, and when things started to get tough for you, you thought you’d stick your hand in the cookie jar.”

“Mr. Jones, I’ve already said you did a good job, and I’m not averse to giving you a bonus for your efficiency,” he said. “But this conversation is over.”

“I think you set it all up,” I said, and he did not try to interrupt. “I think your friends in the anthill in Newfane told you they needed a scientist, and you smelled a business opportunity. Mutual benefit: they got a brand new filter, and so did you. So you found a scientist who was down on his luck and desperate enough to help you, because he’s just had his factory burned down. And you told me to send the formula as soon as I got it, because you didn’t expect I’d be coming back.”

Spencer Wade looked at me. It was not a friendly look.

“Dr. K. was smarter than you,” I said. “He double-crossed you. He brought in some more backers, tough guys that you couldn’t just tell to scram. He was smart, he invited all three gangs. They all had to join up, or see the others get one over on them. He knew they’d give the Newfane boys a fight if they tried anything. Dr. K. always counted on slipping away when the time came—instead of just disappearing into the anthill forever. How am I doing?”

“Why did you give me the filter?” he asked.

“I was paid to do a job,” I said. “I did it. The filter is all yours. The boys from the North Side, the South Side, and the outfit will all be knocking on your door real soon, and you’ll be sharing it with them. You’ll have a lead on the industrial market, maybe enough to make a pile of money if you’re smart.”

“Well, I think I’ve taken up enough of your valuable time,” Wade said, oozing sarcasm. He was trying to be unpleasant. He was an amateur. “I’d better let you get back to running your big important detective agency.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, picking up my hat. “And you enjoy yourself. But you know and I know why your grandfather disappeared. Your father knows that even if he keeps cruising in the Caribbean and trying to stay ahead, one day they’ll find him. That’s what’s going to happen to you too. Those folks in Newfane always come to claim their own, don’t they?”

He shrugged as though I bored him, and pressed a button on the arm of his chair. The flunky appeared in two seconds.

“Send the invoice to my office,” he told me, and I already knew it would never be paid. The money was nothing, but men like him enjoy their petty victories. To the flunky he added, “Show Mr. Jones out.”

Wade did not offer to shake hands. I was happy to get out of there. I even waved at the two parties in the motor car waiting outside. So long as Wilson got his hands on a copy of the filter he’d get over it in the end, but I wasn’t going to be asking him for any favours soon.

Miss Transnational Development Services Inc. was waiting in my office, in my chair.

She was posed perfectly, smoking a cigarette. There were no butts in the ashtray, so she had not been waiting long.

“I’m pleased to see you back in one piece, Mr. Jones,” she said.

“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, hanging up my hat.

“Things turned out better than we expected,” she said. “We picked up Dr. K. Outside Newfane. It sounds as though you shook things up.”

“Just trying to do my job,” I said. “How is the good doctor?”

I would be sorry if anything had happened to him. He was a strange character, but I do believe he tried to do the right thing by his own standards.

“We lost him again,” she said, and I nearly laughed at her sour expression. Dr. K. was a slippery character all right. “But perhaps now you’ll think differently about working for us, now you know what we’re dealing with. Now you know about certain parties on the other side. We can put some very lucrative business your way.”

“Is that so?”

“I’m Estelle, by the way.”

I thought about what they were dealing with and how I felt about another case like Newfane. It did not take long.

“Not a chance, lady,” I said, and held the door open for her.

Estelle rose, mashing her cigarette out and picking up her bag.

“Au revoir, Mr. Jones,” she said with a half-smile as she passed. I shut the door behind her.

The whole thing was wrapped up and filed away, and I walked away from it. That was pretty much the end of the story. Pretty much, but not quite.

Two weeks later I had a cryptic postcard in neat handwriting:

“P –> K8.” It was chess notation: Pawn moves to the eighth square in the King’s row. Home and safe.

It was postmarked from Valparaiso. I had to look that one up in the gazetteer; it’s a port in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The driest place on earth. Too dry for mushrooms.

Dr. K. had made it to his eighth square. I guess he jumped from the car because he didn’t trust Wilson. Or he didn’t trust me. Or maybe he realised the hoods would follow the car and he didn’t want to be in it when they caught up. He was a smart guy.

I had other reminders too, like the claustrophobia nightmares, which stayed with me for quite a while, in fact never really left. They come back sometimes when I’m tired after a bad day. I’m paralysed, in the dark, crammed in a tiny box like a metal coffin and I can’t breathe. But it’s worse than that. Imagine waking up and finding your feet have been amputated, and your legs. And your arms. And the rest of your body. All gone. You can’t breathe because you don’t have lungs to breathe with. No mouth to scream.

I’d been at pains not to tell Spencer Wade just how much I knew about Newfane and its creepy inhabitants. So long as I just thought they were a bunch of crazy people I was safe.

But I’d seen too much. What Dr. K. told me about their being some kind of walking fungus was bats, but it all added up. They didn’t move like people. Their bodies did not bend like human bodies under those robes, the joints were all wrong.

When I shot that fake cop, he didn’t bleed. But he started to smoke. Weird, white smoke. I knew Dr. K. had special bullets, and maybe tracers do something like that, but I don’t think so.

When Moran had shot them up underground…the lighting was bad, but there is no way they were human. That was why he was still gawping when they jumped him. Those were not bullet-riddled human bodies leaking blood; the Tommy gun chopped them up like they were watermelons, leaving great chunks of greenish-black pulp all over. They were still flopping about on the ground, only half dead. No, they weren’t human at all.

The worst thing was at the end, though, after we heard Moran call out and I saw the thing in the vault.

I only looked in for an instant, but I saw one of them.

He had taken his hood off.

And he had taken his face off.

That white face was just a plaster mask lying on one of the metal shelves. Beneath it there was nothing, no face, just a mass of tendrils sprouting from a narrow, black head. Something like a crayfish. Like the thing I saw that night outside Pretski’s or moving in the shadows under the trees that left tracks which weren’t footprints.

But that wasn’t what gave me nightmares. Those ones where I wake up and I can’t move and I’m lying there trapped and all alone in the dark.

In that vault, I saw Moran, what was left of him, in the corner. Moran was no hero, but he had stood up to those things when the rest of us gave up. He fought like a man.

In my last image of him, Moran’s head looked as if it had been opened with a circular saw, the top taken right off and the insides emptied out. They had finished him all right.

Moran was still talking, though. He was still alive, sort of. But the voice was not coming from the pithed, brainless body. It was coming from one of those tin cans. They had put his brain in a can, and he was still alive, still feeling, still talking.

Trapped in a tin can. In the smallest metal coffin you can think of, alive.

And he’s still there.

THE MONSTERS IN THE PARK

Crystal Palace, South London, 1936

Nothing less than the great enterprise and resources of the Crystal Palace

Company could have attempted for the first time to illustrate and realise—
the revivifying of the ancient world—to call up from the abyss of time
and from the depths of the earth, those vast forms and gigantic beasts
which the Almighty Creator designed with fitness to inhabit and precede
us in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain.

—Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “The Geological

Restorations at the Crystal Palace”

Britons ought to know better than to serve alien interests.

—Oswald Mosely, “The British Union and The Jews”

I

There is no evidence of those terrible and fatal event sat the Crystal Palace. The fire destroyed everything. Webster, the only other witness, has his own reasons for keeping quiet. It is just as well. Knowledge of the threat literally hanging over humanity would cause needless panic. We have always known that men are mortal, that all empires pass away, that all species disappear and leave only fossils. But it is something else to see the form that our end will take. Everyone now fears another war in Europe; but there is an infinitely greater danger.

This is why, when the train takes me past Crystal Palace Park, I turn away to avoid seeing the monumental sculpted dinosaurs amid the ferns and palm fronds. They are too much a reminder of what occurred there.

I would not have called Webster a friend. He was no more than an acquaintance, and since our days at oxford I had only seen him at a handful of dinners and social gatherings. He was from a wealthy family, born to be a stockbroker, and not of our set at all. I knew him mainly through my late friend George, that genial soul who died so violently at the culmination of that horror in Dulwich nine years earlier. George made a habit of cultivating those who were attached to money or power, and Webster was always destined for a princedom in the financial kingdom. I could easily have put off Webster’s request, but his communication was so urgent and so desperate that it would have taken a harder man than I to turn him away.

Webster married soon after leaving university. He was now the father of an eight-year-old son who had a burning desire to come to see the Crystal Palace. This was not so extraordinary, but the circumstances around it were unusual. Webster poured out the story in a letter that ran to a dozen pages. It was a lengthy epistle for a man whose usual style of communication was a terse and imperious paragraph.

The boy was a perfectly normal healthy lad, explained Webster, quite the sportsman when it came to soccer and rugby, much as Webster himself had been. Paul was not apt to study, and drove his mother to distraction by arriving home with scuffed shoes or buttons missing from his shirt. He tormented his sister and stole sweets from the table. His manners were not so polished, and over-indulgence had fostered the habit of answering back to his mother, and even at times to his father. Webster was confident that a few years of public school would smooth down these rough edges to an acceptable finish. But at the age of eight, he accepted that boys would be boys.

Some weeks previously, a sudden change had come over Paul. He had fallen into a fever for two days, which the doctor was at a loss either to explain or to treat. Paul recovered as quickly as he had contracted the illness, but immediately afterwards Webster had found him reading a book.

“I dare say you would think this quite normal,” Webster wrote. “But to discover Paul reading of his own free will, and moreover reading a scientific textbook, astonished and worried me more than I can tell you. The boy NEVER reads.”

The fever had brought about other unaccountable changes. Paul lost all interest in kicking a ball about, or playing with the dog, or oppressing his little sister. He preferred to stay indoors all day, reading books. At school he was quiet and obedient, and had not been punished in weeks. The teachers were favourably impressed at his progress.

Paul was unable to give an account of the change. His mother was cautiously pleased at the transformation, but his father was horrified.

“You must meet him for yourself,” wrote Webster. “But I say at once that the Paul we have now is not the Paul who is my son. Perhaps you have some experience with these things as a teacher. The doctors I have consulted have all been worse than useless.”

I had seen rapid transformations of children in the past. It was certainly not unknown for a boy to be all boisterous energy one term and completely subdued the next. It was never a good sign, and one did not need to be a psycho-analyst to detect an ‘underlying trauma’ of one sort or another. As a rule it was best not to explore such matters too deeply. Outside interference is never welcome in family matters. But this seemed altogether different.

After the fever, Paul had a mania for hunting fossils. This had apparently passed, and now he had a passion to see Crystal Palace, and he had mounted a campaign to visit here as soon as possible. The boy had even consulted maps and railway timetables as though he meant to run away and come on his own. Webster had not felt equal to the challenge, and begged me—begged me—to provide my services as a knowledgeable guide.

“I don’t know where to begin,” said Webster. “The boy sometimes seems about to say something to me, then clams up. I’m sure you could do much better with him, and perhaps you will be able to get to the bottom of it all. What has happened to him? Will he ever return to normal? What is to be done?”

He wrote like a man at the end of his tether. I could hardly recognise the hearty fellow I had known, stalwart of the rugby team and the saloon bar. I might have laughed to see this titan of the world of finance brought low by a small boy, but Webster was troubled and thought I could help. I was, I admit, intrigued as well as flattered that he sought my assistance.

And so, having arranged a day’s leave, at ten o’clock on a cold Monday morning in November, I walked up from my digs in Dulwich to wait outside Crystal Palace rail station. It was not yet raining, but I had brought an umbrella. The umbrella functions as a walking stick; I walk more easily with one after my injury. The station disgorged its colourful cargo of sightseers and tourists, uniformed nannies with their little charges, Europeans clutching guidebooks, country gentlemen sporting outdated Edwardian plus-fours. At the weekend there would have been hundreds of people; today there was a fair scattering. And in their midst was Webster, a prosperous city gentleman clad in a fine camel-hair coat, holding the hand of a small boy.

If you saw a photograph of the lad you would not have detected anything unusual. From his sturdy shoes and skinned knees to his blond hair and battered cap, he was just like any other schoolboy. But he moved strangely: he did not run around like the others, but walked rather stiffly. He stared too long and too fixedly at things instead of looking about him. Even from fifty feet away the effect was slightly disconcerting.

The term autism was only just coming into use, but of course I knew the type. They develop quite normally for the first few years but then seem to slip back; they may cease speaking and become clumsy and fixated on things. They withdraw into their own world. But eight years seemed much too late for it to show.

“What ho!” I cried, raising the umbrella.

“William, old man,” said Webster, and seized my hand like the proverbial drowning man. He was a powerful individual, and he had the manner of easy authority about him. But his command was muted beneath layers of anxiety. “It’s good to see you again. Are you keeping well?”

After a few pleasantries he turned to the boy, who had been gazing steadily at me.

“Paul, this is Mr. Blake,” said Webster. “He’s a schoolteacher, and he also knows a great deal about Crystal Palace, and everything else too. I’m sure he’ll be able to answer your questions.”

“Pleased to meet you, Paul,” I said, extending a hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Blake,” Paul said gravely.

“Your father tells me you’re interested in the Crystal Palace,” I said. “I expect it’s the monsters you wanted to see—or is it the motor-racing? Or the aircraft?”

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing. His voice was clear and direct; it was a child’s voice and a child’s question, but there was something not at all childish about it.

“That,” I said, “is the South Tower. It was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It’s a water tower, storing water for the fountains.”

He inspected the tower, the Palace, and the gardens in turn as though surveying them.

“Yes,” he said.

The way Paul walked was not quite right. He was too careful, as though he were walking on a slippery surface. His head turned to take in the surroundings, but he did not stare at people, only at the buildings and decorations of the park. Webster bought our tickets and we went through the turnstile into the Park. ‘To The Monsters,’ a sign invited.

“Would you like to see the monsters first?” I asked Paul.

He frowned as though this were a conundrum. I have never met the boy who did not want to see the dinosaurs in the park at once. Paul was a strange boy, but any teacher learns to read the signs. I could tell from the way he looked around that he wanted something, but did not want to tell us.

“Yes,” Paul said at last, and the three of us made our way down past the flowerbeds, moving at the steady pace of the other groups of sightseers who surrounded us.

“Paul’s an expert,” said Webster. “He’s been reading all about geology and fossils and such, haven’t you, Paul? Even made us go and dig up a few fossils.”

“The books aren’t very good,” said Paul.

“I’m sure you’ll be more impressed when you see them in the flesh,” I said.

As we approached the lower park there was a sudden squall of wind from nowhere. A lady in front of me gave a small shriek as her hat blew off, and Webster caught it as easily as he would have taken a mis-hit ball off the leg stump. He passed it back to her with a bow, and I was amazed to see that in the meantime Paul had dropped down and was cowering behind a park bench on his hands and knees.

“The boy’s scared of wind,” explained Webster simply. He took Paul by the hand and helped him up. “Come on, old fellow, nothing to be afraid of here, just a bit of wind. It’s stopped now.”

Paul looked around warily, but allowed himself to be led down to the prehistoric section.

We stopped by the first diorama: a fine pair of Iguanadons. Like the other monsters, they were sculpted at life size and set in among vegetation intended to convey an impression of the Jurassic period. Paul gazed on them, hypnotised, and a faint smile covered his features.

“What do you think of the Iguanodons?” I asked to break the silence at last.

“Not very good,” said Paul. “He’s put the spike on its nose, when it should be on the thumb.”

“Quite right,” I said. “The Victorians were not very advanced when it came to understanding fossils.”

“The shape is wrong. The posture is wrong. They did not go on all fours to walk.”

“Your Paul is quite the expert,” I told Webster. “Most lads his age just gape at them.”

“It’s the wrong colour,” Paul went on. Evidently he thought I wanted a complete review of the model. “It should be light green on top and darker underneath. It should have a covering, like feather down, not bare scales.”

“Feathered dinosaurs!” I said. “Where did you hear that?”

The boy continued round the other exhibits, pointing out some of Hawkins’ more obvious errors. The Victorian sculptor had the Ichthyosaurus basking improbably, and the real Dicynodon was nothing like the giant turtle on display. But Paul also mentioned other extraordinary aspects in the same breath, things I had never heard before, criticising the Pteranodon perched on a rock because it could only fly from an elevated site such as a cliff. He talked as though dinosaurs were everyday things that he was familiar with. I wondered at the richness of this fantasy life.

Unusually, though, this fantasy had none of the usual elements—dinosaur hunts, fierce battles—but was more in the nature of wildlife observation. And it was remarkably accurate and consistent, scientifically speaking.

“You see now what I mean,” Webster said to me quietly while Paul was admiring the Teleosaurus. “He talks like a professor. He never said two words together in front of me before.”

“Perhaps you’d better let me talk to him alone,” I said. “He may be inhibited in your presence.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I do appreciate this, Blake. You’re a real friend in need.”

Webster went off to look at the rose garden while we went to the café. I pointed out Paul’s flapping shoelace and he stooped to do it up with a peculiar knot I had not seen before. He made a loop with each end, pulled them through each other and deftly tightened the knot.

“You’re very handy with your shoelaces,” I said, trying to work out how he did it. “Did you learn that at school?”

“No,” he said, and we walked on to the café.

I sat the boy down at a table and ordered a Knickerbocker Glory and a cup of tea.

There was a family of Cockneys in their Sunday best at the next table— mother, father, and three almost-grown children, two sturdy youths and a brash young woman. They were close, but making so much noise that they would not overhear us.

The waitress smiled as she placed the treat in front of Paul, a towering confection of raspberries, ice cream, and cream with raspberry syrup, topped with a glacé cherry. It was served in an exceedingly tall glass that might have been a vase. The size was deceptive; the glass was thick and the actual quantity of ice cream modest, but it made a great show. Paul looked at it as though inspecting a specimen.

“Now, suppose you tell me what this is all about,” I said to Paul. When he did not reply immediately, I went on. “Your father is worried about you. Perhaps you can tell me why he thinks you’ve changed?”

Paul was looking out the window towards one of the ponds. He seemed distracted. I shifted my approach slightly.

“This is between you and me,” I said. “I won’t tell him anything unless you agree.”

“Mr. Webster and the others live in a small world,” said Paul. “They can’t see beyond it. There’s no point trying to explain.”

“It can seem like that sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes grown-ups are very absorbed in their own worlds and find it difficult to imagine other worlds— like the world of dinosaurs. But I’m a teacher; I’m used to seeing all of history, the whole cosmos.”

I had his attention now.

“Do you believe in life on other worlds?” he asked. It was not the remark I was expecting.

“I suppose I do,” I said. “There are so many stars it’s inconceivable that none of them harbour life.”

“Do you believe in travel between the worlds?”

“Again, looking at the course of human development—from dugout canoes to steam engines to aeroplanes and rockets—it’s hard to believe that we shan’t travel in space.”

“Do you believe in the transference of thought energy?” Paul persisted.

“I’m afraid you’re getting beyond my level of science,” I said with a smile.

He looked away, his gaze directed off into a distant corner of the pond. I feared that I had lost him. I must try something bolder.

“Paul,” I said, in a low voice. “I once experienced something like what you call thought-transference…with a being that was not human. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. Nothing you can say will surprise me, or surpass what I could tell you.”

The memory of that encounter actually made me break out in a sudden sweat. I had not thought about it for months, but there was something otherworldly about Paul that recalled it to me.

He turned to look at me again with that singular, fixed gaze. He did not look at my face but examined the pattern on my tie, his little brow furrowing with concentration.

“I don’t know the right words,” he said. “But you know that a mind might travel across time and space?”

“Why not?” I said. “There are much stranger things known to modern physics.”

He thought for a minute, weighing something.

“Mr. Webster says you’re cracked,” he said carefully.

“Does he indeed?” I felt indignant, angry. I had thought that people no longer remembered the events of nine years ago, that all that had been left behind. But seemingly not. Perhaps someone overheard me talking in my room at night; that sort of thing gets around.

I wondered if my reputation for being ‘cracked’ was what Webster wanted me for: it was his desperate attempt to find someone who could communicate with the boy. Perhaps he was right; boys often feel more affinity for someone who has the status of an outsider than a conventional authority figure like a teacher. But it galled to be called ‘cracked’ to my face by a boy.

“Eat your Knickerbocker Glory before it melts,” I said. He picked up the long spoon, regarded it a moment, and proceeded to excavate the ice cream scoop by scoop. He spoke between spoonfuls.

“There is a race that lived here until fifty million years ago,” he said. “They came before the dinosaurs. They had cities and machines and vehicles.”

“A prehistoric race of men?” I said. “How extraordinary.”

I was flippant, still bitter about his gibe. But I was interested. Now we were getting somewhere. I was going to hear his story, and that would put Webster in my debt. Then I would tell him just what I thought about his tiny little world and whether I was ‘cracked.’

“This race weren’t men,” he said. “And they weren’t like any of the animals today, or like the dinosaurs. More like giant sea-urchins on land. Shaped sort of like cones. They had the power to send their minds through space and time. To swap bodies with other beings in other times and places.”

“Most impressive,” I said. “And how did you discover this remarkable race of pre-human beings? Did you read about them?”

“No,” he said. “I am one.”

It was frightening to hear this spoken with absolute conviction by a small boy.

“This body,” Paul went on, “is Paul Webster. His mind is in my body, seventy million years in the past. A city in what is now Australia, I think. And I am in his body here and now.”

Paul was quite convinced that he was possessed: of that I had no doubt. This was not just a prank. He was either quite mad or affected by something extraordinary.

“You have ice cream on your chin,” I said. He wiped it away with a napkin. When he started eating again, he held the spoon in his other hand.

The medical authorities discourage discussing a mental patient’s delusions with them, as this strengthens their grip. Instead, one should talk about other matters and bring them more back to everyday life. I’m no alienist or psychologist. My distrust of these authorities, after poor Sophie’s experience in so many asylums and institutions, was profound. Madness, or what appears to be madness, may be the result of forces outside the experience of the medical authorities. I decided to confront the delusion and work through to its conclusion.

“In that case,” I said, “can you tell me how we can reverse the process so you both return to your right bodies?”

“Yes,” he said. He seemed pleased. “It’s why I’m here. My journey here didn’t go right. This body is too young. Paul’s brain is small and I can’t think properly with it. I want to go home. I can’t do my job here.”

“Very good,” I said. “We’ll get you sent home and Paul back here. But how?”

“Do you know where the television studios are here?”

“Of course,” I said. Then I remembered his reaction on arriving. “It was the broadcast aerials you were looking at on the South Tower, wasn’t it? The Baird studios are in the Palace buildings. If you like we can see one of their demonstrations.”

“I need to use their…equipment. I can make a thing to send a signal and recall me home.”

“You can make a time machine?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “But I can send a signal. I can make the—the transmitter—from parts in a few hours. I have what is needed.”

“Perhaps your father could buy the apparatus for it?” I suggested. Money was not likely to be an object for Webster.

“No, only a television studio has all the equipment and enough power,” he said. “I studied this.”

“Very well then,” I said, “We will see if we can borrow or rent some apparatus from Baird Broadcasting. And in a few hours you’ll be on your way and we’ll have the old Paul back. Is that it?”

Paul looked at the empty glass with its thick etched pattern and put the spoon down carefully.

“Yes,” he said. “I will send a signal. I will go back there. Paul will come back here.”

“Very well,” I said, and extended my hand. “If I can help you, I will.”

We shook hands solemnly. His hand was small and soft, but his grip was powerful for a boy. He was undoubtedly the strangest boy I had ever met, and I had spent several years in teaching. I had no real idea of how we would proceed, but I trusted to my ability to improvise.

“It’s a pity,” he said, and there was regret in his voice. “The chances of returning here are so bad…but this body is too young to do anything with.”

“In a few years you’ll grow up and you can do anything you like,” I said.

“No,” he said, “there’s not enough time before the—”

He stopped suddenly.

“Before what?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Paul. “It’s difficult talking through Paul. His brain muddies my thoughts.”

“What were you going to say?” I asked in my crispest school teaching voice.

Paul did not reply for a minute.

“Mr. Webster says you’re cracked,” he said at last. “Nobody else will believe you.”

I was turning things over in my mind. Not enough time before the what? The papers were full of rumours of war and the bombing of cities. A child might well spin it into a fantasy about the end of the world.

“There’s quite a ruckus outside,” said Webster. “Some Blackshirts were handing out leaflets, and they got into a scrap with two constables trying to move them on.”

This was two weeks after the so-called Battle of Cable Street, where hundreds of fascists had tried to march through a Jewish neighbourhood in the East End. They had been decisively trounced by an alliance of local people. The event had done nothing to diminish the Blackshirts’ popularity; in fact, they were more active than ever.

The Cockney family, who had finished their ices, hurried out to see the fight.

“Sorry to break in,” Webster said, looking from me to Paul and back. There was shouting outside now, and the sounds of fighting. Evidently it had turned into a free-for-all with bystanders joining in on both sides.

Paul picked up the leaflet his father had put on the table and turned it over, reading the lurid headings picked out in bold type—’The Jewish Infiltration of Sport’, ‘Bolshevik Threat’, ‘What Britain Needs Now’.

“Paul and I have been talking,” I said. “And I have an idea that might help him, if you’re willing to go along.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “Good work, Blake.”

At that moment two Blackshirts hurried in and took the empty table next to us, crouching in their seats so as not to be seen from outside. From their uniforms, one appeared to be a foot soldier from the rank and file; the other had some sort of insignia and was clearly the ringleader. He was a rough character, with a broken nose and a deep scar that ran all the way across his cheek from his lip to his ear. He could have been the villain in a cheap melodrama, but he did have an air about him.

Paul put down the leaflet and stared at them. The Blackshirt officer tried to flag down the waitress, who busied herself at the counter.

There was a mutter from somewhere behind him. I made out ‘right pair of clowns’ and someone tittered. A piece of bread roll flew past. Both Black-shirts looked round, the sitting one balling his hands into fists.

“It involves the television studios,” I said. “Paul wants to visit them and use some of their equipment—I really think it will do him some good. But I suppose it’ll take some time to arrange a visit.”

“Time be damned,” said Webster. “We’ll go today.”

The Blackshirt officer noticed Paul staring at him with what might have been wonder and amazement.

“Don’t worry about the scar,” said the Blackshirt, with avuncular goodwill. I could tell he was good with children. He was probably good with everyone: he had that confidence about him which invites easy friendship. “I got it fighting for my country. What’s your name?” He spoke well, with the easy authority of an assumed man of the people. He looked like a thug, but he sounded like a politician.

Paul did not reply. He seemed hypnotised by the scarred man.

“I’ve a daughter just his age,” the Blackshirt said to Webster in the confiding tone of one proud father to another. He had the popular touch, no doubt about it, but there was something disquieting about him too. He turned back to Paul. “I expect you don’t think much of little girls, eh? You prefer football and fighting and running around.”

“I’m interested in human evolution,” said Paul. “The future.”

“So am I,” said the Blackshirt, not put off in the slightest, even pleased at this intelligent response. “We’re all interested in the future, aren’t we? The future of our race is what we’re fighting for. You’re a wise young man—an old soul in a young body. Professor Aveling would like you. Help me, will you?”

Then he raised his voice so the whole café could hear even though he was apparently still addressing Paul.

“You like this uniform, eh? This is the uniform of British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. We’re fighting for a better Britain. This badge here? It’s a swastika, a powerful symbol for the Aryan race.” He raised his arm to show Paul the emblem on his armband. “You know what this is? It’s a bolt of lightning, because like the lightning we fascists will never be contained. Want to try it on?”

Paul did not resist as the Blackshirt slipped off the armband with its red circle and white lightning bolt and slipped it over Paul’s shoulder.

“Bit big for you, eh?” said the Blackshirt. “Don’t worry, you’ll soon grow into it. We need brave boys like you in the Union. Now, I’ll show you how to do a proper fascist salute.”

The scarred man stood up and gave a proud, stiff-armed salute, barking “Heil Mosley!”

He looked round the café in challenge. Nobody spoke. He should have been ridiculous, but his energy and passion were magnetic. I began to see how the appeal of the movement worked: next to rows of smart uniforms, disciplined power, and virile strength, mere intellectual arguments seemed feeble and pointless. He was a dangerous man.

“Can you do that?” he asked Paul.

The whole room held its breath. Webster held up a hand, but Paul stood and threw up his arm in a childish imitation of the salute, piping his “Heil Mosley!”

“Very good, young man,” said the scarred Blackshirt. “When I’m Viceroy of India, you can be in my guard of honour.” He looked up to face the room, one hand placed protectively on Paul’s shoulder. “It’s in the blood. Even the youngest of this great race of ours instinctively recognises leadership and discipline—not spineless upper-class weaklings who are in hock to the Jew, but strong men who can lead us forward into the future. I’m not afraid to stand up and speak for what I believe in, and one day you will all join us, because you’re British.”

Not a single voice spoke up against him. He held the room in his hand; satisfied that nobody would challenge him, he sat down.

“I’m not having this,” Webster said quietly. “My son isn’t your—”

He was interrupted by the waitress, who had decided to act on her own account.

“You had better leave now, sir,” she said firmly to the Blackshirt. “This place isn’t a lecture hall, you know. There’re rules about that.”

The Blackshirt gave a condescending smile, nodded, and casually moved to take his armband back from Paul, but the boy clung on to it stubbornly.

“Here now, come on,” he said, looking from Paul to his father, “that’s mine.”

“You can whistle for it,” said Webster pleasantly, sensing that the moment of crisis was approaching. He was an athletic sort at oxford. He stood up and towered over the Blackshirt, casually taking hold of the heavy Knickerbocker Glory glass in one hand, ready to use it as a weapon.

The Blackshirt’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and I saw Webster had made an error. The smaller man had the look of a well-built and well-trained fighting machine. There were white scars on those knuckles. He would not back down, and if it came to trading punches, he would keep hitting. The two men glared at each other and the tension rose until Paul piped up.

“You’re William Joyce.”

The man with the scarred face looked round at the sound of his name. Vanity is the universal sin of politicians, and any recognition flatters them. His name was familiar even to me. Joyce was a big fish, Mosley’s right-hand man in the Fascist party. No wonder he didn’t want to get in trouble with the police here.

“Yes, I am,” he said warmly, changing his ground with a politician’s suppleness. “And as you’re an admirer, you can keep the armband as a gift from me. Be proud when you wear it, boy. Tell your friends William Joyce himself gave it you.”

Webster was about to object when a louder voice spoke up.

“Now clear orf aht before ’e takes your bleedin’ shirt too!” a man called from the back of the room, and the whole café laughed. It was short, nervous laughter, but the tension dissolved.

Joyce was satisfied with the outcome, and his young convert. The commotion had subsided outside; with a jerk of the head he ordered his colleague up. They strolled from the café together, almost swaggering. Even Joyce’s walk managed to suggest athletic power.

A buzz of conversation started up before the door closed behind them. Paul was watching the Blackshirts go, but Webster had dismissed them and he was focussing on the task ahead.

“What does Paul want to see the television studio for?” asked Webster.

“He says they have a piece of equipment there that he can use. It’s just a matter of sending a special radio signal and he’ll be back to normal,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Paul affirmed, before his father could even put in a question.

“I’ll be damned,” said Webster. “Just like that…all these weeks and you only wanted a radio set. It’s Logie Baird’s studio here is it, not the BBC? I’ll go and have a chat with Mr. Baird if he’s in.”

“You can’t just—”

“I know perfectly well what I can ‘just’, Blake,” said Webster. “You stay here with Paul.”

II

I ordered another tea, and lemonade for the boy.

“Better take the armband off,” I said. “People will think you’re strange. Now where were we—prehistoric races seventy million years ago? And that’s how you know so much about dinosaurs.”

“There is a sort of zoo in my city,” he said. “They don’t walk down the street, you know.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Must have been quite a city. What happened to it?”

“We all left it,” he said. “There was a war with another race—the others— so we went away through time. To an era far in the future from now.”

“By thought energy transference,” I said. “Of course. A mass migration through time. You didn’t fancy our era, however, even though it’s a bit closer.”

“The others,” he said with a shudder. “They are still here. When they swarm …”

This fantasy of Paul’s was getting more complicated. I could believe a single alien life form occupying a human mind; but fleets of them cruising up and down millions of years, swerving to dodge this other alien race who were apparently still here, was too much of a stretch. Still, delusions need not be plausible. I was still wondering what might have been behind his whole psychosis, what sort of event might have triggered it.

Perhaps he had heard talk of the possibility of another war. Baldwin’s chilling prediction that “the bomber will always get through” was a commonplace, and every pub know-all predicted the destruction of London. Perhaps a young boy might seek to escape from the fiery Armageddon with dreams of time-travel to the age of dinosaurs. And if the boy had fled, who was it in his place? He must be one of the dinosaurs’ intelligent neighbours, so he had to act accordingly.

His finger was tracing a swastika on the pamphlet Webster had picked up.

“The fascists have some interesting ideas,” I said as bait. “Very bold thinking.”

“They are very advanced,” said Paul. “They understand the need to exterminate other races, the need for control. At home our bodies are like beautiful pine cones ten feet tall. We are graceful and quiet. Our world is very simple, but grand. Our cities are like music made into stone. Everything is well ordered. All is all clean and hygienic. Everything is perfect. Not like here. But the others are resurging in that time, and we will have to leave.”

“Who are these others?” I asked.

Paul gave another shudder so violent it seemed to be the precursor to a fit, but it passed in a moment.

“They are horrible,” he said. “Dreadful…things. We do not talk about them.”

It was something like a phobic reaction, or like the deep taboo certain tribes have about mentioning certain subjects. Like a Victorian matron asked to talk about human reproduction, he could not face the subject.

“This is all very complicated,” I said, changing tack. “So you will migrate to the far future, to another different race?”

“Yes, the race that comes afterwards. After humans and others become extinct in a final war.” He said this with definite satisfaction. The end of the others was a real source of pleasure.

“They do say that cockroaches are the toughest creatures in the world,” I said jauntily, ignoring the matter of human extinction. “They outlived the dinosaurs and made it through the ice ages. Cockroaches can survive poison gas, germ warfare—even cosmic rays and radiological warfare. Will it be super-evolved cockroaches?”

His eyes widened. It seemed I had hit the mark. His fantasy did seem to follow along reasonably scientific lines, which was unusual. It reminded me of a piece of science fiction by Olaf Stapleton about highly evolved men from the future mentally projecting themselves back in time…but this was far more peculiar.

“What ho, Blake!” said Webster, putting his hat on the table and looking pleased with himself. Now that he had a way forward, he was a changed man. “I hope you still want to visit the television studio. It’s all organised for this afternoon when they shut up at five.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Lord no,” said Webster. “It’s a mere bagatelle, old man. I’ve opened bigger doors than that. ‘Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit,’ as they say.”

“‘Nothing is so well fortified that it can’t be stormed with money,’” I translated slowly. “Cicero?”

“William the Latin teacher! Old George gave me a silver watch with that engraved, that’s how I know it…” Webster trailed off, perhaps realising the faux pas of mentioning our mutual friend George and reminding me of his ghastly fate. “Anyway, since Mr. John Logie Baird’s company is in a fine state—didn’t you know?—he jumped at the chance to impress a new investor. A man will arrange everything when they shut up shop at five.” Webster beamed about him. “In the meantime I suggest we enjoy whatever the Palace has to offer, and then see about a spot of lunch. What d’you say, young Paul?”

We walked up to the terrace, and I smiled to see how Paul stood and surveyed the whole huge expanse of the great Crystal Palace. Many people say it’s just an overgrown greenhouse, but it has overgrown into a thing of such colossal majesty, all eighteen hundred glazed feet of it, that it impresses everyone. Paul might have seen some great architecture in his visions of the Cretaceous, but I daresay that the Crystal Palace could stand proud among them.

Of course the Palace had seen much better days. The maintenance costs were impossible, and it had barely made a profit since the War. The fountains and gardens were too run-down to awe the visitor, and the days of lavish spectacle were long gone. The only exceptions were Brock’s fireworks displays, which still pulled in the crowds, and you never saw a more fabulous show of pyrotechnics than the ones at the Palace. But by day it had a slightly grubby, dilapidated air about it. Close up you could see how filthy the panes were from the grime and smoke of London. Regular cleaning was out of the question.

We strolled down the arcades lined with palm trees and stopped to watch the roller-skaters.

I showed them the clock, and the crystal fountain, and the immense Handel organ with its ninety-two pipes, the largest of them stretching to the ceiling, with thousands of raised banks of seating around it, all empty. There were a few stalls selling snacks and handicrafts, various souvenirs of the palace, but as it was a weekday most of them were shut up.

We stopped for a while at the slot machines, and Webster gave his son a fistful of pennies to spend. He was surprisingly adept at rolling a coin at a target, or guiding it through an obstacle course with a steering wheel. Paul managed to win his coin back again and again.

“That is very unusual, isn’t it?” Webster asked in an undertone as we watched Paul playing Big Game Hunt. The tin elephants and lions flopped down one by one. A bell rang at the end, and his coin was returned. “He was normal before.”

Paul stopped at the Gipsy Fortune Teller, a plaster bust swathed in scarf and jewellery under a glass bell jar. Her smile was sinister rather than welcoming. At the front of the machine was a hand-shaped brass plate on which you were supposed to place your palm to be read. Paul stood in front of it, reading the sign but without comprehending.

“It tells your future,” said Webster. “Want a go?”

“No,” said Paul firmly.

“It’s just a chance thing, “ I said. “There’s no actual mechanism to it; it just chooses fortunes at random. Here.”

I put a coin in the slot. Four bulbs flashed feebly for a minute while the Gipsy head turned and nodded, and a slip of printed paper was ejected.

“‘I Tell Your Fortune: If you play with fire you may get your fingers burned!’” I read. On the other side there was a Bible quiz question—a sop, perhaps, to those who thought fortune-telling was unchristian. “Do you know who was cast into a fiery furnace?”

Paul looked at me uncomprehending.

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, of course,” I said. “Book of Daniel.”

I was reminded for some reason of my friend Daniel. Daniel who had died in a fire nine years ago. Daniel who had not survived the fiery furnace. Daniel who had his fingers burned in an inexplicable fire.

“It’s just random,” I repeated.

Paul stopped for a minute longer, scrutinising the machine minutely as though there might be some secret hidden in the folds of the plaster gipsy.

“Random events are not always random,” Paul muttered, turning away to a sort of mechanical shove ha’penny with spring-loaded flippers.

Afterwards we ate lunch at the Crystal Palace Grill Room, an outlandish piece of Victorian extravagance. It was all deep carpets, red plush, and tables festooned with silver cutlery and white linen. It was expensive for my tastes, but to Webster it was clearly nothing special. They served a very decent roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes, with a gravy boat generous enough to smother the lot.

“Those Blackshirts are fools,” said Webster. “They think this country is besieged by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers in league with the Bolsheviks. Hah! Half the men I do business with are Jewish, and they don’t care for Bolshevism any more than any other millionaires. Ridiculous.”

“I tend to agree.”

“They have a lot of superstitious tommy-rot instead of political theory,” said Webster. “Ancestral Aryan race gibberish about runes and old gods and sacred caves. It might wash in Germany, but it won’t wash here.”

“They’re quite popular right now,” I said.

“Yes—for all their stupidity, they’re more dangerous than you might suspect,” Webster said, suddenly serious. “I don’t expect you’re following this business about the king? No, they’ve kept it out of the newspapers here, but the American magazines are full of it. Our monarch has taken a shine to an American divorcée called Wallis, would you believe. And that means we are about to have a constitutional crisis.”

“Does it really matter whom he marries?” This was the first I had heard of the affair, and I did not appreciate its significance.

“Of course it does,” said Webster. “One of two things will happen. Either Baldwin will force the king to abdicate, or the king will dissolve Parliament and ask someone else to form his government. And our fascist friend Mosely is tipped to be his man; the king is very taken with fascism.”

“A coup, in Britain? Surely not,” I objected. “And that bully-boy as Viceroy of India?”

“The king is popular, Mosely is popular,” said Webster. “If they can take the people along with them—you know, put on a lot of jolly Royalist flag-waving and patriotism—it’ll be a fait accompli. The Army won’t stop them. Look at Italy and Germany.”

“William Joyce could be leader,” said Paul slowly. “He has the right brain. He can sense things other people can’t. He will be a great war leader.” Paul’s voice dropped to a murmur and he seemed to be looking at something far away, listening to chanting crowds. “Strike first. Strike hard. None must survive.”

“Those fascist pamphlets talk a lot about an ‘inevitable’ war with Russia,” Webster told him. “But it’s all bosh, Paul.”

“Were you talking about a war against Russia?” I asked, and Paul shook his head.

“Not a war against Germany,” said Webster dismissively. “And especially not if Mosely and his crew get in charge—they’d side with Hitler. Anyway, we’re watching things very closely. It’ll all break in the next few months, Blake, mark my words. And Paul, don’t let me see you wearing that armband or mentioning anything about fascism, especially in front of your mother. We have Jewish relatives, you know.”

“Only the fascists are strong enough,” said Paul stubbornly.

“Sometimes you have to lie politely,” I told him. “Have you ever thought, wouldn’t it be ghastly if you asked someone how they were, and they actually told you?”

Webster laughed, but Paul gave me a queer look. In his world, his world of well-regulated cities, people did not lie. Deception, social or otherwise, was not part of their society. That would make it difficult for someone coming to our world, where we are all such practised liars, especially if they had to practice a deception while they were here.

Social customs will always be the hardest part of trying to pass as a native. We scarcely notice them ourselves, like fish in water, but if you tried to live with Kalahari bushmen, or Borneo head-hunters, or Chinese rice farmers, you would be permanently wrong-footed. You encounter your brother-in-law: should you greet him with a bawdy joke, because not doing so would make you seem unmanly? Or must you avert your eyes until he recognises you, on pain of a grave breach of etiquette? Or must you offer some ritual blessing? Quick, quick, a second’s delay and your strangeness will be remarked on at once.

Webster consulted his old-fashioned pocket watch.

“We should make our way to Mr. Logie Baird’s studios shortly,” he announced, and waved to a waiter for the bill.

The studios were in the Crystal Palace itself, opening on to the South Transept. We passed a trickle of engineers leaving, and it looked as if the place was being shut up, but a young man in a smart suit stepped out to greet us.

“Mr. Webster, sir,” he said brightly, “I’m Roberts. Very pleased to meet you, sir. Mr. Logie Baird sends his very best compliments.”

Roberts was a polished businessman of the American type, the sort that likes to think of themselves as ‘go-getting’. He was dressed smartly, and the parting in his hair could have been drawn with a ruler. He was extravagantly polite to Webster, but having established that I was merely Paul’s tutor, he ignored me. He gave Paul just enough attention to show Webster that he was interested in the boy.

“You’ll be wanting to see our colour studio, of course,” he said.

“Of course,” said Webster.

Roberts took us round the empty studio, apologising for how little there was to see when the place was deserted. Really it was not much more than an empty stage set, with stacked furniture and empty desks. He did a good job of expressing how innovative Logie Baird’s work was, how much better this high-resolution image was and how far it had come on with colour transmission.

Webster asked penetrating questions about cost and the size of the audience, and the competition from electronic technology. He seemed well-informed. At a suitable pause he seemed to notice Paul again.

“My son wishes to carry out an electrical experiment with some of your equipment,” he said, “Don’t you, Paul?”

Paul nodded seriously.

Roberts smiled, not sure if this was a joke. As soon as he realised it was not, he slipped easily into asking exactly what was needed, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a small boy to play with broadcasting equipment like a Hornby train set. Logie Baird had chosen his man well. The influential would-be investor would be humoured to the utmost.

“Everything is in here,” said Roberts, unlocking another door and throwing it open. “I think we might need an engineer to help. I’ll see if I can rustle one up.”

Paul took two steps forward, eyeing the metal racks of machinery, scanning up and down. Some of it was labelled, most of it was incomprehensible.

“I don’t need any help. I can find what I need,” he said shortly.

“Keep an eye on him, will you, Blake,” Webster instructed. “Roberts and I will finish the tour.”

Roberts gave a backward glance, but I assured him I would not let the lad break anything.

The workbench was too high and Paul chose to work on the floor. On several occasions he directed me to fetch down items from high shelves. Other than that I played no part in his work. He was quick and methodical, constructing assemblies one after the other with the skill of a watchmaker. When complete, he placed each unit to the side and started on the next. He might have been any boy playing with his Meccano set, until you saw the precision of each movement he made—and the disconcerting way that he used both of his hands independently at once, as though each possessed a will of its own.

I began to feel lightheaded. I had been keeping my mind open. I accepted that there was more to it than a schoolboy behaving eccentrically. I even accepted that there might be forces at work which were beyond the ordinary. God knows I had enough reason to believe in that possibility. But I had never really grasped the implications.

He did not seem to mind my watching, but worked with a single-minded concentration.

“Is the light good enough?” I asked as he bent over a tiny part. He paid no attention.

My knowledge of electronics is rudimentary, but it seemed to me—perhaps it was no more than suggestion—that he was indeed making some kind of transmitter.

“Can you really send a signal through time?” I wondered. I remembered my friend Daniel, who would have been able to give me an erudite summary of Einsteinian space-time in the time it took to polish his glasses.

“And if you do…why, you could send it back to before you began your journey and save yourself the effort of coming in the first place. Wouldn’t that be a paradox? And what if, when you go back fifty million years, you put down mousetraps and exterminate the forebears of the human race? You would kill your own many-greats-grandfather! Or what if you change the course of history here—”

He stopped and looked up at me.

“Don’t put me off,” he said.

I wondered then if I might have made a terrible mistake.

What if I was not helping a stranded traveller to return home? The signal he was sending might really be the beacon for an invasion force. If one alien mind could come through time and take over a human being, why not a million, or ten million? My scalp prickled as Paul continued his careful, patient, remorseless assembling.

I knew he was poor at lying. At least, he was when he had to make something up on the spot. When he wanted to deceive, he left the truth unspoken rather than lying directly. No, I had to believe his story about going back.

Paul took something from his pocket and wired it into the apparatus. Something small that glinted in the light. I moved around to get a better look.

“What is that, some sort of crystal?” I asked.

In forty-five minutes the workings of it were complete, and Webster and the dapper Roberts were standing behind me, chatting away like old friends or new conspirators. I had found the empty carcass of a television set, which Paul was using as a framework to arrange the components into their correct configuration and wiring them together.

Roberts cast a critical eye over it. Electrical engineering must have formed some part of his background. He was the sort who spent his leisure time tinkering with the latest electrical machinery. His expression went from one of ironical amusement to astonishment.

“The boy made this himself, did he?” He looked from Paul to Webster and me, as though he suspected a practical joke. He looked at the device again.

“It sends a special type of radio wave, “ said Paul. “The waves are all lined up together, here.”

“What’s that then?” asked Roberts, squinting at the crystal, a clear sliver about the size of a cigarette.

“Something Paul dug up,” said Webster. “At a place in Dorset. Paul demanded we go there to look for fossils. We were there for hours. I was shovelling away like a Trojan. We found some fossils in the end—what did you call them, Paul?—but this was the only thing he was interested in. There was this granite cube: I had to split it open with a chisel, and this was inside.”

A granite cube might have been there for millions of years. But how difficult would it be to find something after that length of time? Perhaps not quite impossible if you chose your landmarks well.

Paul made some final adjustments, and I carried the device to the workbench and placed it carefully, following his directions on its alignment. He stood on one side, opposite the rest of us, the inventor displaying his creation.

“The electricity is fifty Hertz, one-twenty volts from the wall,” said Roberts. “Is that all right?”

“It will draw five kilowatts,” said Paul.

Roberts whistled.

“Blimey! No wonder you’re using all those high-cap units…Still, the fuses here should be good for it. If the lights go out we’ll know who to blame.”

“Plug it in,” said Paul.

Roberts connected it and threw a switch. Nothing happened that I could tell.

“It is working,” said Paul. He sounded pleased with himself.

“I can hear a high-pitched sound,” said Webster.

Roberts was still looking at the device. He was thinking in terms of sending a signal through space, but I was wondering about a signal through time. Was this exact same crystal in a strange laboratory, seventy million years ago, resonating with the pulses that Paul had just transmitted? Einstein implied that such a thing was possible, but it seemed too incredible.

“Now what?” asked Roberts, but Webster shook his head.

“The signal has been sent. Turn it off now,” said Paul. “And put it on the floor.”

Paul started to dismantle the apparatus with quick, efficient movements.

“You can leave that,” said Roberts hastily. “I wouldn’t mind having a bit of a look at it. I’ll put everything back for you.”

“No,” said Paul, continuing his demolition, pulling each of the pieces into its component parts before Roberts’ frustrated gaze.

“Roberts, old man,” said Webster. “You’ve been enormously helpful to me. I’m thoroughly impressed with the job you’re doing here. Here’s my card—get in touch with me when you like and we can discuss prospects over lunch one day. I’ll invite a few people you’ll want to meet.”

Roberts tore his eyes off the destruction of the radio and took the proffered business card. He was bursting with questions, but too clever to allow his surface to be ruffled.

“Thank you very much,” he said weakly.

Paul left the components neatly arranged on the floor. I did not see the crystal, which he must have slipped into a pocket.

There was a dull percussion somewhere over our heads, followed by a tinkling which sounded like the fall of a thousand tiny pieces of glass. Roberts and Webster looked mildly puzzled. Paul let out a shriek of sheer terror and shrunk down on to the floor, just as he ran away when the wind blew.

III

“Steady on old man,” said Webster, taking the boy’s hand. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”

Paul was in a state of semi-paralysis, whimpering and clinging on to Webster as he was led out.

Roberts took us to the door of the Baird studios and stepped outside with us into the South Transept. It was dark by now, and there were few people about. There were a few lights on inside the Crystal Palace, however, and a trickle of people crossing the transept in the distance. They were carrying musical instrument cases, identifying them as the members of some orchestra rehearsing that evening.

“That was close,” said Roberts. He pointed to a spot on the floor a few feet away which glittered with tiny glass fragments, as though crusted with a hard frost. I looked up from the floor to where a perfectly circular section of the glazing had been knocked out a hundred feet overhead.

High above, blue light flickered, and I thought it must have been lightning. But although it was overcast there was no rain and no storm.

Paul cried out and pulled away. Webster and I both dashed after him, and that was what saved us.

A curious sound which I can only describe as a loud popping exploded high above us; I looked up by reflex and saw a sort of white cloud shoot down at tremendous speed and engulf Roberts. The cloud was perhaps ten feet across but dense and compact. It was, in fact, just like a shimmering smoke ring.

After the cloud struck the ground, it bounced like a rubber ball and disintegrated into a fountain of glass fragments. I instinctively covered my face, but there was little need: after rebounding from the paved floor, the glass was in tiny pieces which showered off me harmlessly.

Roberts had not fared so well. The glass that had struck him had been composed of larger pieces of glazing from the roof, spinning at fantastic speed. They cut him open as though he had been thrown into a threshing machine. He was lying flat, face-down, fifteen feet away. I saw the glass blades projecting from his body; some had been driven into his skull, so great was their force. Blood welled up from every square inch, so much that it looked like a bucket of red paint had been emptied over him.

I approached, but stopped helplessly when I saw the state of the body. The volume of blood was appalling; I could not bring myself to turn Roberts over and check for a pulse.

Webster was still running after Paul, who had fled down the transept leading to the main hall.

I looked up to the source of the attack, but I saw nothing except dark sky—and another electric flicker. As my eyes adjusted I made out an ellipse of blue light directly overhead which waxed and then faded to nothing. I had a peculiar feeling of being stared at, as though the beam of an immense searchlight shone down on me, and then, after a second, moved on.

My mind struggled, trying to grasp what was happening and slipping each time. An accident? No, it was not an accident; it was connected with the signal Paul had transmitted, and he knew it. His peculiar fear of winds…I knew at once that this must be that other race he had spoken of, who were such deadly enemies of his own people, and who had waged war on them millions of years ago. And who were, somehow and unknown to mankind, still on this earth. They had intercepted the signal and traced its source.

I stood rooted to the spot staring upwards. What should I do? What could I do? There was an odd modulated whistling and, although I could see nothing, a few more pieces of glass were dislodged from high above me. Something I could not see was descending through one of the holes blasted through the roof of the Crystal Palace. However I strained I could not see any more than a vague descending blur. It was slow but deliberate, a small airship rather than a bird or aeroplane. The warbling whistle rose to a peak, and I even felt a faint rush of cool air; then the sound subsided as it glided slowly after Webster—after Paul.

My hair was standing on end, not just figuratively but literally. I had been charged up with static electricity. It covered my face and hands with a sensation like soft fuzz. The spell was broken and I came back to myself, brushing glass off my jacket and out of my hair. There was not another soul about. My heart pounded wildly and my ears were ringing.

My feet started moving of their own accord. I was not walking to the nearest exit, but after the other. I turned the corner and looked down the nave. Paul and Webster were perhaps two hundred feet away. Webster had hold of the boy by both arms and was shouting at him.

The whistling changed tone abruptly, and the other changed from a blur into a solid form for a moment.

My first impression of an airship had not been so wide of the mark. An airship, or a jellyfish underwater. Its surface had a hard metallic sheen, like graphite, but it rippled like seaweed, with hundreds of small protuberances opening and closing like obscene mouths. It was surrounded by a crackling blue aura. The thing was not lighter than air, but floated on the jets of electrified air ejected downwards from those whistling mouths. It seemed to be a composite entity, made of dozens of smaller things bunched together, like a sea anemone.

I had the conviction that it was at the same time a living thing and an intricate piece of machinery: the exact intersection between living and non-living. When mechanisms evolve and fuse with our natural bodies, when our machinery is so advanced that biology supersedes flesh, perhaps we humans will become as the other.

The aura was part of it. The solid being was merely the core, the skeleton of something much larger that extended for tens of yards. The complex, swirling arrangement of plasma was a kind of external nervous system, like delicate limbs and antennae feeling all around.

Stated like this it merely sounds like a strange animal, but the other filled me with a revulsion I cannot describe. There was something terribly wrong about its very existence. Any natural creature, even something as far from humanity as a butterfly or a worm, can trigger some sort of human sympathy. We are all children of the earth, after all. But this was not part of our creation. If I was religious I might have called it unclean, blasphemous, a thing of the devil. Instead I can only repeat that it was it unutterably alien and unnatural, and the sight of it shook me to the depths of my being.

A minute earlier I had seen a man slashed to ribbons by flying glass. But I would rather witness that a dozen times than see the other again.

It pulsed with the motion of a squid or cuttlefish shooting out water, and a moment later Paul and Webster were hit by a silent, invisible explosion which threw them skidding down the nave. The other faded out again at the same instant, but I could still hear the shrill whistle of a thousand tiny flutes.

They were bowled over, but Paul regained his feet almost at once. Without the lethal knives of broken glass to give it teeth, the air-pulse simply knocked its target down or blew them away according to size. But the hurricane which uproots and throws down oak trees has little effect on a sapling, and although Paul was thrown some distance he was uninjured as he dashed away. Webster, who had been thrown heavily against a shuttered tea-stall, moved feebly.

Another change of modulation in the whistling, and the other was gone. I hurried to where Webster was rising painfully.

“Are you all right?” I asked, holding out a hand. It was a fatuous question.

“Where’s Paul?” he demanded, supporting himself on the shelf of the stall. He winced when he tried to raise his left arm.

“Still running,” I said. “Is your arm…?”

“Ribs broken,” he said, raising a hand to them and wincing again. “For God’s sake, go after him.”

He only seemed to have a vague idea of what was happening, what Paul was running away from, what had knocked him off his feet. He had not seen Roberts’ body yet. Perhaps the part of his mind which maintained a cordon sanitaire protecting him from the horrors that lie outside of sanity prevented him from realising what we were facing.

“Please, Blake,” he said. “He’s just a boy.”

I wanted to tell him that Paul might be a boy, but he was inhabited by the mind of an alien parasite, and a fascist one at that, a being whose intentions towards mankind were at best indifferent and at worst malignant. And that the thing pursuing him was a horror beyond imagining.

I tried to help him, but Webster waved me away angrily, shouting “Go!”

I gave a wild laugh and went. Please don’t think it was courage or any sort of heroic impulse that drove me. It was more like a sort of fear. So long as I could hear the other, I would know where it was and I could keep my distance. And so long as I did not see it again I would be able to maintain my self-control.

Few of the interior lights were on, but the interior of the Palace was illuminated by the outside lights. I passed through an empty hall decorated in Spanish style, the shops and counters all shut up. I could hear a faint shrill sound—or was it just the ringing in my ears?

A figure was walking down the centre of the nave. It was a night-watchman making his rounds.

“Did you see a boy go past?” I asked.

“Running like the wind,” he said, and pointed to the next hall. “Are you his father?”

“No, his father is back there, hurt,” I said. “An accident. Please get some help for him, I’ll get the boy.”

It sounded so normal when I said it. The watchman went in the direction I had indicated.

I continued at a steady pace, not wanting to run into the other by surprise. I found myself in the main hall, passing the glass fountain and the enormous clock. I was back among the slot machines, and I saw something move. It was Paul.

The boy was crouched on all fours behind the gipsy fortune-telling machine, peeking out at a spot in the distance.

“Paul!” I hissed. I felt I had to whisper. “Where is it?”

He was startled and looked around suddenly. He was scared, but had recovered most of his wits and the cunning of the hunted animal. He was holding something tightly in one small fist. I guessed it was the crystal.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s confused. It sees by radio waves, and the metal confuses it.”

I realised he was talking about the metal of the Palace itself, the enormous iron framework supporting the glass around us.

“Can we outrun it?”

“Not if it sees us,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded gravely.

Fifty feet away was a glass wall and beyond it the Park. Surely there was some way of breaking it and escaping. But that would be a noisy process, and even when we escaped we would be horribly exposed in the open park outside. Concealment seemed the safer option.

We could go back to the studio, or find shelter behind one of the many other doors that opened on to the halls. There was one marked Crystal Palace Staff only behind me. I put my shoulder to it, and on the second try the lock gave. I pulled Paul through after me and closed it.

An electric light revealed a corridor with offices on both sides, each with neat lettering above the door. The administration occupied a small army of clerks and secretaries, and this was one of their more extensive outposts. We could easily lose ourselves in here, and there would be other exits, so we could stay ahead if the other should happen to come closer. I relaxed fractionally; just having a closed, opaque door between me and that intruder made me feel better.

“Where are we going?” Paul asked.

“We are lying low,” I said quietly. I took the third door at random, flicked the light switch, and closed the door behind Paul. “It can’t search through the whole Palace.”

We were in a small office with four desks, each with a typewriter, an in-tray, and an out-tray piled with papers. I pulled up a chair for myself and another for Paul.

“You said it was blind but saw with radio waves,” I said in a whisper. “What other senses does it have? Can it hear, or smell?”

He did not take the chair.

“We can’t stay,” he said. “I didn’t explain properly. It sees through walls, with radio waves.”

He looked involuntarily at his clenched fist. It was not us it was following, but the crystal.

I opened my mouth to speak, but my ears popped with pressure change and there was a crash as the outer door to the offices was wrenched off its hinges. A moment later the door into our room blew open, and air rushed past me. A shrill whistle rang in my ears. The contents of the desk trays flew into the air in a blizzard of paper; something like a dust devil, but made of paper, almost filled the room and ricocheted from wall to wall. It buffeted me almost off my feet.

I took Paul’s hand and led him rapidly through the connecting door into a dark room, then a corridor and up a flight of steps. The whistling was still audible, but well behind us. I stumbled on the stairs in the darkness and lost my grip on Paul, then found him again. We raced up another flight of steps.

I was wondering whether there was another staircase or if we would have to jump out a window when a blast of air struck. Even though it came from behind, it had the effect of sucking us backwards, like grasping tentacles made of air. I had a firm hold of the handrail on one side and Paul’s hand on the other. He wailed as the hurricane struck, and he was yanked off his feet.

There was a great wrench, but my grip held; it seemed that I was holding Paul horizontally, and below us I could see glimmers of blue light in the darkness.

The blast of air stopped; I slumped forward and Paul fell on to the stairs. I quickly hauled the boy around the corner and down the corridor. Something big was blundering about below us.

The windows here admitted more light from outside. I was looking around for a weapon. I had the idea that the other looked fragile, that if I hurled one of the heavy typewriters down from above, it might injure the thing. There was a fire extinguisher by the door. Would that have any effect? Unlikely—but it gave me another idea.

Flames are a form of plasma, electrically charged gas. I had demonstrated this in the classroom to the sixth-formers a few times. There’s a fine experiment showing how a candle flame conducts electricity, which always impresses them. Well then, a room full of flames should be enough to baffle the thing, confuse its radio-wave vision for long enough for us to get further away. And perhaps it would not like fire either.

I took out my lighter and ignited stacks of paper here, there, and everywhere, as we went through the office. Before we left I smashed bottles of correcting fluid on the floor, one after another, and pushed Paul ahead of me.

The far doorway filled with blue light. Then a tornado struck. Paul was well ahead of me and clear of it, but I caught more of the force. I was thrown head over heels like a rag doll and lay stunned. The room was filled with light as half a dozen fires flared up among the drifts of paper where the flammable correcting fluid had caught sparks. The blue glow was eclipsed by the glory of flame, though I could hear a whistle like a locomotive.

I crawled after Paul and started down the next staircase, my shadow jumping crazily in front of me from the firelight behind. For a minute my heart soared with the thought that the fire might really have hurt it, or that it had the same innate aversion to fire as animals.

There were crashing sounds as though elephants were loose in the offices— or a cannon firing blindly in all directions.

After that point my memories are disjointed. We seemed to be running through a nightmare of offices, going through door after door and room after room. The whistling was all around us and I remember turning around dazedly, not knowing which way to go. Paul seemed to have an idea, though, and I was always chasing his receding figure.

Then we were fleeing down a lighted corridor and we were out into the main hall of the Palace once more. There was a pall of smoke above us, and in my confusion I could not think where it had come from. The whistling was drowned out by the roaring of fire.

Webster was there, with the night watchman. They were looking up at the fire above when we came out, as if hypnotised by the billowing smoke. They did not seem to see Paul racing past.

“Come on!” I shouted. They looked around vaguely as though dazed. I guessed then that they had caught a sight of the other and were struggling to grasp it.

As we were standing together, there was a powerful whooshing sound which spread from behind and beneath, and which overtook us. The thick floorboards of the Palace had been deliberately set with a quarter-inch gap between them, so any dust and litter could be easily swept away at the end of each day. I read later that this formed a highly combustible mixture, and that a mass of flammable debris had accumulated under the floorboards. The fire raced through it. Seconds later, smoke started up through the gaps in the boards all around us and ahead of us.

That galvanised Webster and the night watchman into life.

We hurried on after Paul through the thickening mass of smoke. As we neared the centre of the Palace we passed a group of men carrying violin cases.

“Is there a fire?” one of them asked.

“Yes!” I shouted, and they turned as one and rushed along with us to the main doors.

Outside the wind was cool and sharp. It was a frosty night. We stopped, coughing, feeling that we had arrived at safety.

“There’s a fire,” said the night watchman in a dazed voice. “I’ll get some water.”

“Call the fire brigade,” I told him.

There was a small crowd of musicians and others. Some of them were leaning over something on the stones just outside the front door. It was Paul, lying insensible.

“He just fell over,” said a man to his neighbours, as though we might blame him. “He didn’t even trip up. He just…fell over. Fainted like.”

Webster and I examined Paul. Inert, he was a pathetically small figure. I looked for a head injury, but there was nothing. The boy was in a dead faint, and we could not bring him round, even with the smelling salts one of the female musicians produced. One hand was still holding on to the crystal in something like a death grip.

“It’s breathing the fumes that causes that,” said someone. “He just needs some air.” The Palace itself was full of smoke by now, almost down to ground level, but lit up with a fierce flickering orange light.

“Move back now,” said a police constable. Inside the transept, sheets of glass loosened by the heat crashed down one after the other. There was an almost continuous barrage of sound.

When I turned again the whole of the transept was lit up by flame leaping up from the floor, consuming everything inside, crawling up the sides of the Palace. Down the hill there were the bells of approaching fire engines, but already the flames were beyond their power to control. Clouds of brilliant sparks billowed up into the sky like mad shooting stars. Even the sky reflected the glow of the fire, bathing the whole scene in orange moonlight, and the wind whipped the flames.

My heart lurched when I saw something fly up from the Palace and arc toward Sydenham. Then it happened again, and I recognised flying sheets of glass: the heat was so intense that the updraught was enough to lift them. Luckily the strong winds blew them away from the crowd.

“There’s an ambulance on its way, sir,” the constable assured Webster, who was still vainly trying to rouse Paul. “Let’s get him moved back.”

Another sound emerged from beneath the roaring of the flame. It was a whistle which descended in pitch like a gramophone winding down, and becoming a long drawn-out groan. It sounded like the bellow of a wounded and floundering giant.

“That must be the great organ,” said one of the musicians. “Sounds like it’s in pain.”

“It’s the Palace dying,” said another, and there was a murmur of agreement. It certainly sounded like something dying.

The constable had pushed us well back from the Palace by now, and we could see glass cascading down inside, when I noticed the shadows at the base of the building shifting and moving. A dozen voices cried out as they saw it too. A rippling carpet seethed out from underneath the building and swept through the crowd.

It was an army of rats, brown rats, thousands and thousands of them, fleeing the fire. They had no fear of us. I felt them running over my feet and saw Webster brushing them away from Paul’s form. In a minute they were gone, disappearing like dark liquid.

A minute later and the crowd parted as the police led the ambulance men through. They carried Paul off in a stretcher, with Webster in their wake. I tried to follow, but was told that there was only room for one in the ambulance. I would have to make my own way to St. George’s.

I was shellshocked. The threat had gone and I was alone among the crowd, which was swelling rapidly. There was nothing I could do at the hospital, and anything I told them might make matters worse—or get me into trouble. I stayed with the mob for two hours and watched the show. I had seen fireworks at the Palace many times, but for grandeur and tragedy this beat them all.

The fire engines only started to arrive after the ambulance had gone. It seems the night watchman had spent twenty minutes trying to fight the fire on his own before he called them. First a few engines arrived and then dozens, summoned from every borough of London, and Surrey as well. But by then there was a crowd of thousands and the engines had to force their way through the mass of people.

The firemen, hundreds of them, bustled around with little effect. They ran their hoses from the pools and fountains, but the different brigades all had different connectors and it was an age before they could bring their hoses into play. They raised ladders to shower water from above, but it was a trickle into an inferno.

Aeroplanes circled overhead like vultures: some intrepid press men had decided to get the best possible view. There were detonations, one after another, from within the Palace. Someone said they were dynamiting to save part of it, but that could not be true. Nobody knew what caused the explosions, but I half wondered if one of the planes had not been a bomber. When messages can be sent across time anything is possible.

I saw liquid glass run like water, hissing as it crossed the wet ground. The metal frame glowed red like hot coals. The flames ran up ever higher, and at last the central nave crashed down with a noise like the end of the world. And in a sense it was the end of a world.

The two water towers remained afterwards, but the rest of it was a broken shell, the iron ribcage of a colossal dinosaur. The crowd began to disperse after ten o’clock, but I stayed on after midnight and walked home in the small hours, my brain full of fire and lightning and smoke and destruction.

Back at my digs, I had no hope of sleeping. Instead I stayed up and wrote notes on all that had happened, notes festooned with question marks and sudden breaks. I realised that I was in effect writing a confession of having started the fire. If the police read it, I would be doomed. I knew now that eyebrows were still raised over my state of mind after the events in Dulwich nine years earlier. He’s cracked, you know, that Blake fellow. Always was a bit strange. My notes would have me condemned as a mad arsonist in no time. I wrote on.

Eventually I fell into a kind of fever-sleep. I dreamed of an enormous chamber made of dark granite with round windows and arched doors. It was monumental architecture, the sort intended to dwarf the individual with a sense of insignificance. The decoration was stark and severe. It was foreign, more foreign than a Chinese palace or an Inca temple, but there was something in it that spoke clearly of its makers’ intentions. Here was a chamber that worshipped power. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

In this chamber I was standing or sitting before a pedestal which held an odd apparatus of mirrors, silvery metal, and slivers of crystal. Rows and rows of crystal rods, each the size of a finger, just like the one Paul had carried; but somehow they looked different, as though I were seeing them through quite different eyes. Some part of me realised that I was seeing the nightmare world which Paul had described, and that if I looked up I would see the beings which inhabited it on banks of stone benches, gathered in conclave.

I chose not to look up.

I could hear them speaking—they were talking about me! I had the impression of an official gathering; not a court of law, but a government committee. I tried to speak, but the words would not come out. They were civil servants making a tricky but vital decision, and wanted to gain credit without risk. Their predecessors had failed and been punished; they could not afford to fail again. The debate was full of ringing phrases and slogans as they jousted against each other with rhetoric. The debate rolled around while I looked at the ornate patterns etched into the granite floor, patterns composed of many interlocking swastikas. It was an impressive level of detail for a dream.

And then the silver apparatus clicked and everything faded like a radio programme when the dial is moved and static overwhelms the signal.

IV

The next day I taught my classes as usual. They were all on familiar topics; the lessons were on a set schedule, and I opened my mouth and the words tumbled out in the right order as though I were an automaton. I sent a note to Webster, but had no reply.

Two days later I had a polite note from Mrs Webster. She said that Paul was quite back to his old self, thanked me for my kind assistance, and hoped that I was well. In a P.S. she noted that Webster would be indisposed for a few days. He had broken three ribs while escaping from the fire, but “no worse than he suffered on the rugby pitch,” she said. Mrs Webster was not as hearty as her husband, but she tried to follow his lead. She assured me that he would be in touch soon.

I did not hear from him in the weeks that followed. I first assumed that this was simply high-handedness. I had served my purpose in helping to restore Paul, and he had no further use for me. Then I wondered whether it was because of the fire, and that he feared I would be involved in a criminal prosecution. Any association with me could be fatal to his career. But as the weeks fell away I began to suspect something else—that the nervous shock of that encounter had had a bad effect on him.

I made some tentative enquiries, and my fears were realised. His secretary informed me that Webster was on an indefinite leave of absence and that all his business was being handled by a colleague. A mutual acquaintance revealed that he was now living apart from his family in a pied-à-terre in Chelsea and was ‘acting rather queerly.’

I should have known better, but rather than forgetting about the events, I tried to make sense of them. I returned to my notes and made what study I could of the others. It was an absurd and hopeless task; picking at scabs is not the way to heal a wound.

I read about magneto-hydrodynamics and T. T. Brown’s experiments with ion winds to propel a craft through the air with electricity. I read about electric eels and other creatures. I found out about vortex rings, air ejected like smoke rings of great power and range. I even made some enquiries about seeing with radio waves, addressing them to a couple of university departments. A polite man from the Air Ministry paid me a visit shortly afterwards. He came to ask questions about radio waves rather than answer them, but I gathered that it’s a topic of some interest to them. They wanted to know what I knew, and whether I had any discoveries to share.

The others, I believe, mainly inhabit the upper atmosphere, that zone called the ionosphere, where they constantly charge and recharge themselves from the electrical forces there. It is hard to imagine us having many dealings with something as alien as the others. We will never even see them, unless our scientists find a way to penetrate the plasmonic screen which bends light around them. I believe it evolved to protect them from the harsh radiation at those altitudes, though it functions as well as a cloak of invisibility.

Biology tells that that unless some extraordinary constraint is applied, a species always expands to fill its habitat. I suspect there must be as many others in the skies fifty miles above us as there are fish in the sea.

They descend only seldom to the surface; certain reports of blue lights and strange winds in mines make me believe they may sometimes go underground to great depths. I believe they have their own network of shafts and tunnels which sometimes intersect with our own. It is possible they have their own catacombed cities or hives, somewhere deep in the earth.

My concern—and here I speculate—is that, as ‘Paul’ suggested, they swarm periodically, like so many other creatures which breed en masse. Their bodies may be largely made of carbon extracted from the atmosphere, but they must require other elements and they must breed. When the time is right, they will descend like locusts in a great devouring swarm. They will bring down destruction far greater than any aerial bombardment we can presently imagine. The sky truly will fall.

Knowledge of the others would cause great distress and mass panic, but it would be needless. The others will be doom for humanity, but it is a remote doom. Their breeding cycle must be a matter of thousands of years, perhaps linked to solar cycles. There is no historical record of such an event happening, except perhaps in some of the fragments of myth in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and similar writings. I also puzzle at a certain passage in the Book of Revelation which is too similar for coincidence. They are terrible, and the mere sight of one is deeply disturbing, but mankind should have some centuries at least before they trouble us.

I ran into Webster on the street two weeks later. It could hardly have been a chance encounter, but he feigned surprise at seeing me. This was an entirely different Webster from the one I knew before. His easy hail-fellow-well-met manner had melted away, his attitude had stiffened. Before he acted like the lord of all he surveyed; now he seemed as awkward as a schoolboy in the teachers’ common-room.

“Blake,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “I never thanked you for helping me with Paul. I’ve no idea what was wrong with him, but you certainly helped cure it.”

But his eyes were cold above a fixed smile.

“I’m glad I could be of help,” I said. “Is he well?”

“He’s just the same little scamp as before,” said Webster, in the same tone of stage jollity. “Though he can’t remember anything that happened while he was acting strangely.”

“I suppose we’ll never know what happened,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve recovered yourself. I never had a chance to talk to you about—about what we saw.”

“I didn’t see anything,” he said. “What did you see?”

“I don’t know,” I said, put on my guard by his question. “But there was a dreadful whistling, and these blasts, and I—I thought I saw a thing in the air—”

“I didn’t see anything,” he repeated, and I saw the spasm that took hold of Webster’s face even though he looked down at his feet. I looked down also. His shoelaces had been tied oddly.

“I didn’t see anything,” he said a third time in a thick voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring it back to you—”

“Nothing to bring back,” he said, looking up again, his expression under control. “I think you must have been confused by the flames and the smoke, like those night watchmen.”

“I suppose you’ve been busy broking stocks,” I said to change the subject.

“No, I’ve been…” he stopped dead before continuing awkwardly. “I’ve been indulging in a hobby of mine for the last few weeks. Research, going round a few libraries here and there. Talking to some people.”

“Good Lord, Webster,” I said. “Time was, you wouldn’t be seen dead in a library. You always said books were for chaps who were no good at sports. I thought you had people who did that sort of thing for you.”

“No,” said Webster flatly.

“So what have you been researching?” I asked.

“This and that,” he said.

This was even odder. Men with obsessive interests, whether it’s family genealogy or the development of steam locomotives, are always keen to share them with others. Usually you can’t get them to shut up. I saw then that there was a tiny swastika badge in his lapel.

The silence grew and I was about to end this peculiar encounter when he unexpectedly took me by the arm and spoke rapidly.

“By the way, Blake, as I’ve run into you, I remember now there was just one thing I wanted to ask about, just a little thing. You know Paul had a little piece of crystal, about this big?” He held thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Do you know what happened to it?”

“Paul had it in his hand,” I said. “Why do you ask? Are you going to re-assemble the apparatus?”

Webster tried to laugh, but the effect was more like a cough.

“Oh, I don’t set any store by that nonsense Paul made up. I just want it as a keepsake,” Webster said.

“But wasn’t it all nonsense?” I asked.

“Of course it was,” he said, gripping my arm tighter. “It was all nonsense.”

“Did he tell you his story about ancient civilisations then?” I asked.

“Do you know where the crystal is? Do you have any idea?”

“If he doesn’t have it, perhaps it fell out of his pocket when he was lying on the ground,” I said. “Or in the ambulance.”

“I’ve searched,” said Webster. “The ambulance, the hospital, every scrap of clothing. I’ve put out advertisements with a reward of fifty pounds.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “Maybe it would be easier to find another crystal. Dig one up as you did with the first one?”

The grip on my arm became painful as the anger flashed through him.

“They’ve all gone!” he snapped. “Taken. That was the last one.”

“Calm down, old man,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I think of anything. I’m sure it’ll turn up.”

He released my arm, aware at last that he was making a scene, and forced a genial expression.

“Good man, Blake.” He extracted a business card and wrote a telephone number on the back before passing it to me. “Scour your memory. Think back to everything you saw. Fifty pounds—a hundred pounds. Name your price! I’m relying on you, Blake.”

He shook my hand mechanically for much too long. We parted on amicable terms, and Webster continued on his enigmatic mission. I followed him at a distance and saw him enter the Horniman Museum.

As I sit at my desk I have Webster’s card in front of me. The handwriting is a good simulacrum, but not convincing when I compare it to his letter. And certainly Webster never used to write with his left hand.

I have no moral doubt that the thing which was in Paul now inhabits Webster’s body.

Was I cheated when I agreed to help ‘Paul’? He had not quite lied: the swap had been made and Paul had been returned to his body. But that did not prevent the being from launching itself again and taking over another human body, this time selected from the three present when the apparatus had been activated.

Roberts had been killed before they could take his body. I had been tried and found wanting. Webster was their chosen vessel. But what is his mission?

Perhaps, as ‘Paul’ said, he is simply gathering information, preparatory to a migration which will leapfrog humanity altogether, going from millions of years in our past to millions in our future. But I mistrust their interest in our world.

The first word of a constitutional crisis appeared in the papers three weeks after the Crystal Palace fire, and I remembered Webster’s prediction that the fascists might get into power. The King was indeed embroiled with an American divorcée, and Baldwin wanted him to abdicate. The fascists prepared for their moment.

There were too many echoes of that ancient race in the fascist movement. If they had tools in our world, then they would like the fascists: a heavily armed society, one that tramples individuals to build its strength, one whose science is all directed towards military, one which has a fanatical belief in race. This would be their version of humanity—and a suitable weapon to wage war against the others. And ‘Paul’ had been fascinated with William Joyce.

They wanted to hasten that final war, bring it forward by hundreds or thousands of years. Strike first and strike hard, as ‘Paul’ had said, before the others could swarm. A liberal, democratic state might view the others tolerantly, might devise on a programme of mass shelter-building as had been proposed for the coming conflict. They would certainly not do anything to provoke the others and would be best advised to let well enough alone, however much this might look like appeasement. We might live in peace for millennia.

A fascist state, on the other hand, would declare a war of extermination as soon as they discovered those disturbing aliens. They could never tolerate anything which threatened their title to sole ownership of the earth.

If our science could furnish us with weapons, humanity might win a pyrrhic victory over the others, one that would leave our cities shattered and our nations ruined. The wandering bands of survivors would be easy prey for the next dominant species to rise from the ruins, the cockroach-things which will succeed us and which will act as unwilling hosts for those alien minds from the distant past.

I still hope ‘Webster’ may be thwarted in his aims. I have written a letter to William Joyce with information about Webster, couched in the language of the most vicious anti-Semitism, denouncing Webster as a spy for a cabal of Jewish bankers. Joyce might not believe all of it, but I’m sure enquiries will be made—enquiries that will set him on the trail of Webster’s Jewish business connections, his Jewish relations, and his suspiciously sudden conversion to the right-wing cause. He looks like a spy, and that will put an end to his chances of influence with the fascists, whatever he offers them.

My main hope lies elsewhere. ‘Webster’ was in a mortal hurry to retrieve the crystal and send another signal. The limitations imposed by his form of time travel must be severe. He seemed frantic, and well aware of the risk of giving himself away when he talked to me. I don’t know if he wants to transfer himself to another body, or to summon reinforcements from his era, or just to send back some vital dispatch. Whatever the reason, it is important enough for him to risk his entire mission by tipping his hand to me.

But he will not send any signals without that crystal.

Like me, he knows well enough where to find it. After the great fire that destroyed the Palace, thousands of tons of debris were cleared up with bulldozers and dumped into a landfill site in Kent. He might well find the spot and start sifting through it. A rich man like Webster would have the resources to do that. But it is not as easy as finding a needle in a haystack: that piece of crystal is mixed in among a billion shards of broken glass from the Crystal Palace. I hope and believe that it is lost forever, leaving ‘Webster’ stranded in our time and helpless to alter our history.

Editor’s Note: Edward VIII accepted abdication without a fight in December 1936, and the British Union of Fascists faded rapidly. Oswald Mosley sacked William Joyce in 1937; Mosley was opposed to Joyce’s strongly pro-German stance. Joyce fled to Berlin at the outbreak of war and joined Hitler’s propaganda ministry, making radio broadcasts to Britain under the name ‘Lord Haw-Haw.’ He was hanged for treason in 1946.

The cause of the fire which destroyed the Crystal Palace has never been established.

THE DEVILS IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Being an account of events on the voyage of the SS

Amaryllis from Melbourne to Fiji in the Tasman Sea, 1886

“I don’t want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no
other job we ever turned our minds to.”

“Let us think of the way to go to work,” Ricardo retorted a
little impatiently. “He’s a deep one.”

—Joseph Conrad, Victory

What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish:

he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind
of not of the newest Poor-John. A strange fish!…Legged like
a man and his fins like arms!

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I

When Mr. Butcher, chief mate of the steamer Amaryllis , stepped into the forecastle, the lively chatter among the men faded. The shadow of death could not have silenced them more quickly; and Butcher was in the place of that grim messenger.

We were standing or sitting in our berths, some in their black jackets, others bare-chested, barefoot, in coloured shirts or vests and singlets. The place was fogged with tobacco smoke. Some men had darning in their hands, while Podmore had a book open and the apprentice Hall was trying to work out knots with pieces of cord. But all had abandoned their work or reading as the conversation had sucked them as a maelstrom takes a boat. We had all been speaking at once, offering an opinion, attacking someone else’s or just yelling agreement. The ship’s cat sat sphinx-fashion on a bunk, watching through slitted eyes.

“Ly-ee-Moon’s sunk all right,” said Butcher. He spoke slowly, as though words cost him money. It was hard news for us, like landsmen hearing about the death of a neighbour. Butcher cleared his throat and went on. “The survivor’s Polynesian and don’t speak English. You there, Dublin! You was ashore in Papeete, wasn’t you?”

The man who answered to Dublin, and whose family name was O’Neill, gave a shrug. It was not a proper question, and the chief did not expect a reply.

“Come after,” ordered Butcher.

O’Neill shrugged again, for the benefit of his audience, and followed the chief back down the companionway.

They had been arguing about whether the battered lifeboat picked up from the Ly-ee-Moon meant that ship was lost. There were a dozen reasons a man might be found adrift on a ship’s boat—accidents, desertion, drunkenness, or simple stupidity—and every hand had his own stories and instances to share. The sailors had feared the worst. Now the chief had settled the matter.

“That’s the Ly-ee-Moon gone down then,” said Podmore, the sailmaker, gravely closing his volume of Bulwer-Lytton and placing it on his lap. Podmore was the patriarch of the crew, the oldest man aboard, with a long beard and grey hair tied back. His word counted for something. Even a statement of the obvious was wisdom when he spoke it. Some of the others crossed themselves or spat.

They had docked alongside Ly-ee-Moon, named for a seaway in Hong Kong, on more than one occasion, and the crews affirmed their brotherhood by getting drunk ashore. Ly-ee-Moon had sailed these seas for thirty years. The ship rolled gently and the lamps turned in their gimbals. The thump-thump-thump of the engines was barely audible in the forecastle. The black cat stretched and settled again.

“The Ly-ee-Moon was a sound enough vessel, though she was old,” said Singleton at last. “She was the fastest schooner afloat when they launched her, and still sailed well.”

“Plenty of sound ones go under,” said Podmore. “And opium ships never come to any good in the end.”

“They should never have renamed her,” said Singleton. He was a seasoned hand, tanned and worn by the weather to a finish like mahogany. “Might as well put a curse on a ship as rename it: everyone knows that’s bad luck.”

“It’s not luck when a ship’s sunk,” said Bell, one of the firemen. “Let’s not have your old superstition again. Besides, she stopped being an opium ship years ago, and isn’t Ly-ee-Moon her original name?”

“Aye, but she was SS Taihei Maru for years,” said Singleton. “And the curse stays with an old opium ship.”

“Superstition,” said Nilsen, first engineer and therefore chief of the firemen, quick to back up his man. “The fault was not in her stars, it was in her engines.”

The firemen, tenders of the ships’ burning heart, were of the mechanical persuasion. The sailors were bearded, sun-browned, and tattooed, a different tribe from the paler, clean-shaven, muscular brotherhood from the fiery caverns. It was the firemen’s creed that when everything was made properly and done properly, everything worked properly. Wind and weather, which every sailor watched with an anxious eye, were old history to them. The Amaryllis still had sails to supplement her engines and save the coal, but to the firemen they were mere vestigial organs, embarrassing remnants like the useless wings of an ostrich. In their religion man did not progress at the whim of the elements but by his own two hands.

“The survivor’s alive and talking, so maybe we’ll know tonight,” said Singleton. He turned to Nilsen. “And you said he was dead when he was hoisted up.”

“I didn’t say he was dead; what I said was he was more dead than alive, and not likely to live,” corrected Nilsen. He was a Scandinavian and used the English language with care. “And maybe he’ll die yet.”

“Sure, he’ll die to just prove you right!” said Charley, the West Indian cook, and the others laughed. There was a deal of rivalry between the sailors who worked on deck and the firemen and engineers who worked below on the boilers. No chance was lost to needle the other. The ship’s cook was by tradition an honorary sailor. “You’ve always got to be right, if it kills the poor man.”

“He looked near enough to death when we hoisted him on board,” Nilsen insisted.

“He’s well enough to talk now,” said Singleton. “That reminds me.” He pulled an object from his pocket and turned it over in the lamplight.

“What’s that?” asked Podmore.

In reply, Singleton tossed the object, a lead sinker in the form of an irregular pyramid, and Podmore caught it one-handed.

“Found it on the foredeck the watch after he was picked up,” said Singleton. “There’s marks on it like writing.”

“There’s all kind of odd fishing weights,” said Podmore, tossing it back. “It ain’t gold, that’s for sure.”

One of the men said the shipwrecked man had been clutching a piece of gold treasure, but had gripped it so tight nobody could get a proper look. Discussion of that would come after the wreck.

“MacWhirr was captain of Ly-ee-Moon,” said Bell thoughtfully. “He’s been ploughing these seas twenty years, but he’s not one to go around a typhoon when he can go through and that’s a risk.”

“Ly-ee-Moon was an A.S.N.C. ship,” said Podmore. “They don’t take fools for skippers.”

“MacWhirr’s got Nan-Shan now,” said Singleton. “That new ship from Dunbarton. I don’t know who had Ly-ee-Moon after MacWhirr.”

“Wasn’t it Webber?”

“He was cashiered after he took to drink in Hong Kong.”

“The other Webber, the Scot who was first mate on Princess Marie.”

“No, he went to Canada.”

“Not that Webber …”

They argued like children, stubbornly, loudly, and with frequent repetitions. The conversation bounced around with everyone offering an opinion, as it will with men who have a time on their hands and nothing at stake, chewing at it like a dog with an old bone. Such arguments could last half a day before smouldering out, only to break back into flame a week later. They went through rosters of names and debated who was master of which vessel now, and whether the Australian Steamship Navigation Company had ever had an unsuitable captain, and how well Ly-ee-Moon would weather a typhoon if she sailed through one.

The debate had subsided to a wrangle between Podmore and Nilsen over how many Webbers there were at the A.S.N.C., when O’Neill came back. The forecastle fell quiet.

O’Neill shook his head without speaking, sat on his bunk, and relit his pipe. He took a long pull and looked round to see if his audience was listening.

“Sure, and it’s a queer business,” he said, exhaling smoke.

“What happened?” demanded Podmore.

“I don’t know if I’ve the right to tell ye,” said O’Neill.

“Blast the man,” said Podmore. “Why not?”

“He’ll tell,” said Charley, sitting down on a sea chest by O’Neill’s berth. “He’s just wafting the savour from the pot so we get an appetite for it before he serves. Isn’t that so, Dublin?”

“Well now…” O’Neill began, gesturing for the others to come closer. They gathered obediently round his berth. Only the cat flicked its tail and stayed where it was.

“There was just Butcher and the old Man, and my own self there,” he began. “And Yang, going back and forth and dawdling and listening when he could. And this castaway, a strange fellow with tattoos down his arms. He was no more Polynesian than Charley or I. And I would know, seeing as how I was ashore in Papeete a spell myself.”

Papeete was notorious for its colony of European beachcombers. Some of them were travellers or artists, but most were sailors who’d jumped ship in the hope of living in paradise. They said you could live for free there on fruit and fish, they said the women were beautiful and friendly, they said that a man had nothing to but decide whether to lie in the sun or the shade all day as the fancy took him. O’Neill had told them all many tales about his time there. He said he had eventually given in to the call of the sea and the lure of the open ocean and joined a ship again. Others suggested that lack of coin played a part. Life in Polynesia might have been cheap, but not quite as free as the stories said, and with no money at all it was as hard as anywhere else.

“And where was he from?” asked Podmore.

“Ah well, that’s the thing,” said O’Neill. “I could see he was no Polynesian, but we tried out one language after another, me and Butcher and the old Man, all to no use. In the end my ear caught something familiar, and do you know what it was?”

“Just tell us, man,” said Podmore.

“Nothing more, and nothing less, than simple pidgin,” said O’Neill. “But with such an unholy bad accent that of the three of us it was only myself could make out what he was saying. And of all places, the fellow is from the island of Ambrym.”

“That’s in the New Hebrides,” said Singleton.

“It is that,” said O’Neill. “He’s light-skinned for a New Hebridean, as pale as Nilsen there, and that’s what fooled the old Man. Now, this fellow is very excited when he sees me, because of this.” He held up the silver crucifix which hung around his neck. “He thinks I’m a priest, and he’s after falling all over himself trying to tell me the whole story.”

“He thinks you’re a priest!” said Charley. “That’s a good one.”

“And the nut of it is this,” O’Neill went on. “He’s called Matthew—or Mattoo or Matu, but it’s all the same. He’s living in a little village somewhere on the coast of Ambrym. A fisherman with a canoe, like most of the islanders there. It’s all fish, and cocoanuts, and bananas and taro and kava to drink…it’s an easy life, I’m telling you, the land of milk of honey. But the only thing is, you see, the religion. Every village in Ambrym has its own ways: most of them are Protestant, some Catholic, and a few other odd ones about the place. But there’s a few where the church has been abandoned, and the old ways get their hold back, and his village is one.

“They’ve a sort of a fish-god there, and a whole nation of fish-men under him who live in the sea, so they say. And every seven generations this village has to give the most beautiful young woman to be the bride of the fish-king to replenish the blood of the fish-kingdom.”

“And he told you all this, in pidgin?” asked Podmore. “How did he tell it?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaimed O’Neill. “Will you not just let me tell the tale in my own words? You can pick over the bones afterwards as you like. Now, where was I?”

“Giving a bride to the fish-king,” prompted Singleton.

“Exactly so,” said O’Neill. “Now Matthew has a sister, with hair as black as the raven’s wing, and eyes that sparkle like the sun on the sea, and the rest of her as young and wholesome and ripe as a papaya ready to fall off the tree. Those native girls! Boys, if you’ve not been to the islands, you don’t know paradise.…Anyway, he might be a good churchgoing pagan, as you might say, but our fellow loves his sister and doesn’t want fish for his in-laws.”

“Blasted heathens!” said Podmore. “What did they do with her?”

“According to their tradition,” said O’Neill, “the high priest, in all his vestments and regalia, takes her out to a reef a mile out from the shore. All the village come out in their canoes to see. And the priest says his blessings and Ave Marias and calls the fish-king and declares them married. And the attendants of the fish-king come and takes her away.”

“Gah,” said Podmore, “I know this old story. It’s George and the Dragon, ain’t it?”

“That’s what the old Man himself said to it,” said O’Neill. “Maybe they’ve been offering up virgins for thousands of years.”

“Hold up there a spell, mate,” said Nilsen. “Dragons in fairy stories I understand. But this fish-king—he’s a man dressed up, is it?”

“Matthew swears the fish-men are real,” said O’Neill. “He’s seen them, though never their king. They live under the water like fish and they come up on dry land and walk like men. And they hunger after land-women something terrible.”

“This is nonsense,” said Nilsen. “It’s a man dressed up. Like when someone makes up as King Neptune and his retinue when we cross the line.”

“Plenty of good men used to swear they’d seen mermaids in the old days,” said Podmore. “In the clear light of day, sunning themselves on the rocks. I’ve met old hands who would swear to that.”

“Mermaids!” said Nilsen. “You can pull the other one too, and listen to the bells ringing. Educated men should have nothing to do with these superstitions.”

“I’m only telling you what I heard,” said Podmore.

“There are peasant stories in my country too,” said Nilsen. “Count Magnus summoning his strange companion from the sea, and other weird stuff. But scientists have never found evidence that mermaids exist.”

“I’ve seen waves taller than the mainmast of this ship,” said Podmore hotly. “With my own eyes. And your scientists say they don’t exist. I believe my eyes, not your scientists!”

“They talk about Sea-Morgans in Somerset,” said Singleton. “They say those breed with men, and the children …”

“But scientists—” started Nilsen.

“Whatever you say,” interrupted O’Neill loudly before the conversation could fragment, “Matthew who lives on Ambrym swears to fish-men, and that’s at the heart of this story. So the wedding is all arranged and the preparations made and all. Our man wants to send to Port Resolution for the law—”

“It’s only a naval commission,” said Podmore, “New Hebrides is neutral territory, there’s no governor.”

“—but his father, who is a very pillar of the community and friends with the priest, approves of the match, and his wife is of the same mind. The girl, dutiful daughter that she is, wouldn’t dream of opposing her father’s wishes. So there’s nothing for the authorities to do anyway. And Matthew can’t get her to run away. So he has to find another way.”

“Kill the fish-king,” said Singleton.

“No, he takes the cunning way. The high priest’s regalia, his golden headpiece, is draped out on the village altar in full view. They’ve no chests or safes on this island, and even the walls are made of leaves. Nobody would ever dare touch sacred things, so they should be safe. But the night before the wedding, Matthew creeps up to the altar and steals the priest’s regalia, and gets in his canoe and paddles like the blazes. The priest can’t hold the wedding, you see, without his sacred jewellery. That’s the way it is with these pagans.”

“Should have buried it instead,” said Podmore.

“Thrown it into the sea,” said Singleton, “nobody would ever know.”

“No, no, no,” said O’Neill warmly. “He says the fish-men would sniff it out in no time. They can find it from miles away, like a shark following blood in the water.”

The crew digested this intelligence, each thinking about how he would attack the problem.

“Break it to pieces and bury them separate,” said Podmore.

“The volcano…” started another.

“Give me a twelve-pound sledge and an anvil,” said Nilsen.

“Matey,” said O’Neill, “they’ve no hammers in these villages except stones. Let’s suppose Matthew knows his business. So he sails and paddles like fury all night and all day until he’s on the open sea—and this is a fellow who’s never been more than a league offshore in his life. And that’s when the Ly-ee-Moon comes across them—”

“Making the Fiji-to-Sydney run, like a blasted cattle ferry,” said Podmore.

“—and he’s shouting and hallooing, and they pick him up. Our fellow throws himself at the captain’s feet and begs and sobs and pleads with him. He wants to take the gold to the Christian god, because the Lord Almighty is the only one more powerful than their fish-idol.”

“And the captain didn’t throw him straight back,” said Podmore.

“He did not,” said O’Neill. “He said he could stay on till Sydney if he worked their passage. Seems the ship was a couple of hands short and this sturdy fellow was manna from heaven to Captain Webber.”

“I said it was Webber,” said Nilsen. “The drunkard.”

“You’ve finally got us on board the Ly-ee-Moon with this tale,” said Podmore, “and it’s took you long enough the course you took. What we want to know is what happened to her.”

“To be sure,” said O’Neill; “that’s where I was bound next. Our fellow is signed on to Ly-ee-Moon for his passage, shovelling down with the firemen like a Trojan for his passage. The sea is fair and all well with the world. But on the third night there’s a terrific crash. Ly-ee-Moon is grounded bad on rocks, listing terrible, and there’s hands running around all over. Our man Matthew is in a boat with two other men, and they’ve barely cleared the davits before the Ly-ee-Moon breaks in two. The aft section slides under with a terrible roar and belching smoke and steam—just like the volcano back on Ambrym.”

“What about the other boats?”

“None of them made it away. It was dark and the sea was high. There were men on the aft section who might have made it to shore, but the waves were too much and they rowed the boat further out to get off the reef,” said O’Neill.

“But what happened to the Ly-ee-Moon?” demanded Podmore.

“Fish-men,” said O’Neill. “Our man swears he saw them leaping off the Ly-ee-Moon as she was going went down, like seals into the water. He says they must have clambered over her, done mischief with the rudder or the screw or some other piece, steered her into the rock.”

“Fish-men,” said Nilsen. “I don’t believe it.”

“Men used to go overboard after mermaids,” said Podmore. “And the sirens lured ships on to rocks in olden days. They’re more dangerous than you know.”

“So what about these other two men that was in the lifeboat?” asked Singleton.

“So they’re rowing away,” O’Neill continued, “looking for the other boats or survivors in the flotsam. Then something breaks the water alongside, and a fish-man grabs one of them by the arm and pulls him into the water. Then there’s more fish-men swarming all over and grappling with the other sailor. Our fellow Matthew lays about him with an oar like Samson fighting the Philistines, battering them about the head and knocking them back into the water.”

O’Neill mimed the actions as he spoke, flailing about as though he were fighting off the fish-men left and right.

“He drives them off over the side, and he breaks their hands when they try to come over the side again and again. And after a terrific battle it’s finally calm again, and it’s just him on his own in the boat. He starts rowing as fast as he can, because he knows they’ll regroup themselves and come after him. And after a couple of hours it starts to get light, and what does he see but the good old Amaryllis steaming towards him.”

“And that’s when we picked him up,” said Podmore, as O’Neill paused to take breath.

“That’s the whole story,” O’Neill concluded.

“What did the old man say?” asked Singleton.

“He didn’t say anything,” said O’Neill.

If the old Man had not given his verdict, then the story, and even the sinking of the Ly-ee-Moon, were in doubt. It could all be a tall story.

“Likely Ly-ee-Moon lost the boat in a storm, and this Matthew found it,” said Nilsen. “They may believe all that stuff about fish-men on Ambrym, but I’m not having it. Fish-men!”

“I suppose you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit neither,” shot back Podmore. “Not until your scientists find him with a telescope.”

“Or—he stole the boat: that’s more likely,” said Nilsen.

There was a chorus of agreement about the thieving and lying tendencies of natives from the circle of listeners. Podmore shook his head, and O’Neill looked doubtful.

“Maybe that’s the story he told you,” said Charley slowly, in his deep West Indian voice, “but the whole thing sounds fishy to me!”

This was met by general laughter.

“That’s quite likely,” said O’Neill. “But then…he had a powerful way of telling it, no stopping to make it up. The old Man kept asking him to say again how the ship went down, and niggling him about the angle of list and where the boats were, and the noise the boilers made when they went under. And he couldn’t trip the fellow up once. And the other thing,” O’Neill added. “That jewellery from the priest.”

“What about it?” asked Podmore.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” said O’Neill. “It is wondrous stuff to be sure. It’s golden, a rare lustrous gold—like gold mixed with something even more precious. It’s made of little plates as big as your thumbnail, joined up with the finest gold links. And these plates are all etched with the tiniest, most delicate little pictures, every one of them different. The old Man was looking at it through a glass, and he said it was all scenes of fish-men and monsters and fish-gods.”

“It’s old King Neptune,” said Podmore. “He’s the god of the fishes. Poseidon of the Greeks, Dagon of the Philistines. Chalchulu to the old Aztecs. Davy Jones himself.”

“That’s not South Seas jewellery,” said Nilsen. “I’ve seen trinkets from those islands. They make them from coral and pearls and shells. Never gold.”

“This is gold for sure,” said O’Neill. “Solid gold, and quarter pound or more. It would grace the High Priest of Atlantis, it’s a mystery how these savages came into it.”

“I’ve seen pieces like that,” came a voice from the back. It was Miller, a Yankee. “A skipper in New England used to bring ’em back regular. It was scrap gold mostly, but a few of them was big, fancy items with pictures of frogs and fishes etched on them that he kept for his own.”

“Where did he get them?” asked Nilsen.

“He never said. But there wasn’t a Christian in his crew,” said Miller darkly. “Folks said he had a pact with the devil. Sent messages on a sinker down below. We didn’t care to deal with him or his.” Miller took a long draw on his pipe, choosing his next words carefully. “Some say his men kidnapped women, and he traded them for the gold in the South Seas. I cain’t say nothin’ about that.”

“Traded where, with who?” asked Singleton, but Miller just shook his head.

“Stories of mermaids among the spray on the rocks in the distance is one thing,” said Nilsen. “But mermen that climb on board?”

“I never saw the sense of mermaids,” said Singleton, to change the topic. “I mean, lower parts of a fish? What does a man want with that?”

“The fellow said they can walk like men,” said O’Neill. “And if their menfolk lust after our womenfolk, there must be a compatibility of the organs of generation, if you take my meaning.”

“But what does a fish-man want with a land woman?” Singleton persisted. “It’s unnatural.”

“Unnatural? Oh man!” said Charley, rolling his eyes. “When you’ve been on ship long enough, any kind of woman starts to looks good—black, white, red, yellow—and if those mermaids looks like Dublin’s tattoo they aren’t so bad …”

This started a new round of discussion about the effects of a prolonged lack of female companionship and the merits of women of different nations, a conversation spiced by personal observations that ran on into the night. The sinking of the Ly-ee-Moon had been put behind them, and was not referred to again.

II

The next morning, the watch reported flotsam ahead. There was planking, a hatch cover, then some mattresses and a sea chest. It was all clustered together, carried out to sea on the same powerful current that dragged debris away from the coast like a river in the sea. Shortly afterwards the lookout called that a boat was sighted, and the captain grimly ordered a quarter-boat to be lowered.

The lifeboat proved to be empty, but there were dark stains here and there that might have been blood. Among the litter in the scuppers was a boathook, the metal smeared with black to suggest it had been used as a weapon. The boat, as well as a lifebelt recovered later, carried the name of the Ly-ee-Moon.

The Amaryllis sailed through more drifts of flotsam, and an hour later a second boat was sighted. There was no sign of life aboard, and the boat crew set out again with little energy. But when they reached the lifeboat, the boatswain waved back and shouted. There was a man huddled under a sheet of canvas, and he was weak but alive.

When we glimpsed him coming aboard, the second survivor of the Ly-ee-Moon looked drunk or drugged. He was a European, a long lean man and dressed as a sailor. The old Man directed Podmore and Singleton to carry the wretch to his stateroom, where Yang, the ship’s steward, pressed a tin mug of coffee laced with rum on him.

Podmore helped the sailor to a seat, gave him a fresh jacket, and offered to stay and help, but Butcher turned him out. Yang was on hand, though, and the steward was an incorrigible gossip who had shipped with Podmore for many years. Yang was the main conduit of information from the old Man: if he was looking at charts for a new course one night, or preparing a report, Yang would tell all about it. Podmore relayed the tale as faithfully as a semaphore.

“Yang says he righted himself quick when he sat down with his coffee,” said Podmore. “He was admiring the books on the bookcase and the furnishings as though he’d never seen anything so fine. So straight up the old Man asks him who he was and what happened to the Ly-ee-Moon.”

“‘My name is Thomas Crocker, your honour,’ he says, ‘and I’m at Long Acres farm hard by Marnhull, in Somerset,’” said Podmore. “I heard before from his voice he was West Country. So the old man asks him what he means about farms when he’s a sailor.”

“‘I can do any work you name about the farm, your honour,’ says this Crocker. ‘But I never durst go to sea and leave my home. Not with my mother worrying so.’ That’s what he said!”

“And he’s got an anchor on his arm. Did you ever see a landsman with one of those?” asked O’Neill.

“Never go to sea?” asked Singleton. “How did he get here then?”

“Yang says the old Man asks him the same thing, and he looks back stupid and says he’s never left his village. And when he asks Crocker where he thinks he is now, the man says, ‘In your honour’s manor-house, of course.’ And the old Man asks him what’s that out the port-hole, he looks out and says it’s fields and meadows. But he can’t quite make out which direction it is to his farm and can his honour direct him before his mother worries about him.”

“Which direction to his farm?” said Charley. “Man, he’s got a long, long walk to Dorset from this place.”

“He’s simpleton,” said Singleton. “Or he’s gone stark mad.”

“The old Man keeps asking more questions and Crocker gives all the same replies,” said Podmore. “Finally, Yang says, the captain asks him how old he is, and Crocker says ‘Fifteen year this Easter, your honour.’ From a man who’s thirty if he’s a day!”

“Stark mad,” repeated Singleton.

“You know when a vessel’s in trouble with high seas?” said Charley. “You jettison the cargo overboard so she rides higher. I think it’s like that in a man’s head. Sometimes he throws things out and lightens the load because he’ll sink otherwise.”

“It’s called amnesia,” said Nilsen. “I saw a man get a blow from a swinging bag of rice who didn’t know what day it was afterwards. It knocked the memories out of him and he couldn’t remember a thing from the past week.”

“There was that Foster who forgot everything he was told.”

“He was just an idler.”

“No, it was his memory…” The conversation broke up into several different dialogues.

“And that was all they got from Crocker,” said Podmore. “He was right there on the Ly-ee-Moon when it happened, no doubt of it, but he don’t remember a blessed thing. The old Man had one last idea and he ordered Yang to bring in the native Matthew and asked if Crocker knew him. The poor fellow broke down and sobbed and begged the old Man to have mercy on him. So now he’s got a cabin midships too. Like that Matthew, they’re both shut away for their own good.”

“Two madmen,” said Singleton. “This ship’s a reg’lar floating Bedlam.”

“I’ve said that before,” said Charley.

“Nearer the point,” said Podmore, “is the matter of what sank Ly-ee-Moon. We’ve no more idea now than we did yesterday. Ships don’t just run on to marked rocks on a coast full of lighthouses.”

That started of another free-for-all, with theories spun and assertions made with only the slenderest basis in fact. Unless the captain plotted a risky course, or if the crew were unskilled or careless or drunk, a ship like Ly-ee-Moon should be perfectly safe in home waters. Sudden squalls, crew mutinies, or cargo fires were all chewed over, old histories brought to light and old stories turned over. The subject of bad luck and curses came up more than once. They were still talking when the order came for lights down. During the whole time not one of them had mentioned the fish-men that Matthew had seen, or claimed he saw, after the Ly-ee-Moon went down.

Hall took his turn on watch at midnight. He was an apprentice, and the youngest of the crew. He had been pulled out of uneasy sea-dreams and looked across the water with a new sense of anxiety. The moon was up, and the Amaryllis was ploughing a solitary furrow upon a sea that appeared perfectly circular and featureless. The surface shimmered like grey silk, undulating gently and hypnotically. Steam trailed behind her in an endless pennant running up into the sky.

Something had sunk the Ly-ee-Moon. And if the New Hebridean’s account could be relied on at all—and Hall did not know that it could—the sinking happened sometime in the depths of night. The men had not tried to scare him with stories, as they so often did. That was a sign they were worried too.

Far ahead of the ship was endless dark, and she steamed straight for it. In the forecastle Hall had felt safe enough. On deck his nerves thrummed like cables in the wind. Out here he felt the isolation, with no speck of human life from horizon to horizon, and the fathomless depths beneath them. Sometimes the ship felt big, but now she was just a tiny little boat in all this titanic darkness. The deeps below them were boundless, deeps filled with who knew what. They might be lurking below, crowds of them, watching the ship pass over them like men watching a balloon pass by. Except that unlike men on the ground, they could swim up from the deep …

Hall looked away from the sea to take in the familiar silhouette of the Amaryllis, and counted the riding lights. He paced up and down a few times. On another night he might have been fighting sleep. Butcher was no disciplinarian, but his standards were high, and Hall would feel the end of a rope if he was caught asleep, as well as suffering some more humiliating official punishment. Tonight, though, Hall was wide awake, his senses tingling in the fine salt air.

They had left the wreck far behind them now, and the drift of flotsam and the two lifeboats, the empty one and the one with that man Crocker. The empty one was an oddity. It happened sometimes that a boat was launched empty, or came loose when a ship was going down. But there were those marks, and the signs that there had been some skirmish there. Just like Matthew’s night-long battle with the fish-men.

Hall stood at the rail, leaning on a stanchion, thinking of the impossibility of getting on to a moving ship from below. Flying fish could do it, but not a fish-man or a man-fish. The hull was sheer and did not afford a hold. Even the chains at the prow were too high, except maybe when she plunged through a high wave.

Hall was turning over this latest discovery when the gale blew up out of the dark. The wind strengthened, and the rigging began to moan. The storm appeared in the distance, white below and dark above, rushing towards them.

“Fasten yourself!” Butcher ordered, and Hall quickly roped himself to the rail, knotting and double knotting.

It seemed like just seconds later that Amaryllis sailed right into a big foaming sea, the ship rising up, seeming to launch herself into the air before plunging down with a lurch that made Hall seize hold of the stanchion. She continued with a gait like a galloping horse, throwing herself up and down with every wave.

The water was close beside the ship now, towering walls of green glass topped with snow. Then Amaryllis topped a wave and gave a sudden lurch to leeward, and a roller came sweeping over the deck. Hall hung on with his arms and legs as the torrent of icy water rushed over him; the ship rolled again and the wave was gone, but the deck was awash with white foam, streaming back over the side.

One of the boats had come loose and been carried across the foredeck; it now rested against the rail. The steam windlass was not secure and swung round with every roll, swinging its chains until it fouled in the rigging. There was no canvas up, but the masts tipped and bent with every roll.

The water had burst the door of the forecastle, and through the roaring he could hear the shouts and cries of alarm from below.

The men came up, hurrying to secure hatches and doors and portholes, clambering over the deck from handhold to handhold like a pack of apes, gripping hold of rails and ropes and ringbolts as they went. Three of them started to secure the loose boat, pausing at the upswing of every roll when they had to take hold, while others saw to the windlass and set lifelines.

“Heavy wind,” Podmore shouted to Hall as he passed.

The others did not stay on deck long completing their tasks, and in a few minutes Hall was alone.

The wind howled overhead, drawing strange moans from the rigging as it veered. Cold rain fell in short, intense showers that blanked out all visibility, as though immense bucketloads were being hurled down from an infinite height. Hall found himself shivering from the cold.

Hall had never seen a storm like it, had never imagined that the stories the others told were actually true. The ship boomed, and a vast sheet of white spray shot upwards and towered over him before collapsing again and soaking him afresh in salt water, stinging his eyes. The strength of the wind was enough to loosen his grip, and he struggled as though he were being wrestled. The deck slanted crazily beneath him, rolling to ridiculous, unheard-of angles, then suddenly dropping away, and it seemed that his feet were not on the ground but he was in mid-air, falling. She lurched upwards again, almost pulling the stanchion out of his grip, and the wind howled and plucked at him.

The starboard light shone feebly ahead of him in the dancing rain, and as he watched a moving mountain of water overtook it. He saw the head of the wave toppling over as it fell toward him.

A single thought raced through his mind: “My God—My God—My God—”

The stanchion was torn out of this hands, something struck him a blow on the chest, and Hall was suddenly afloat and borne whirling upwards. He expected to see the ship fall away as he was swept overboard, but the water rushed away and he thumped back on the deck, catching his chin a blow on the rail. The rope securing him had held.

Choking and coughing, half-drowned, Hall wrapped his arms and legs around the stanchion. He did not know if he was dead or alive. He just wanted it to be over.

The rolling continued for an hour, first from one direction and then from another, and sheets of spray spattered over him. But the worst of it was over. Butcher came, swinging arm over arm, and put another lamp on the starboard, shouting a greeting as he passed. The other men were back in the forecastle, except those on duty in the wheelhouse.

Hall became aware of the sounds of the ship. Sometimes the sound of heavy objects shifting and bouncing below could be heard as a new angle forced something loose. The gale had taken them all by surprise, and there had not been any preparations made. There would be breakages to pay for, and the owners would be putting hard questions to the captain.

The sea was still high, but the rolling was steady now, without the wild swings that threw you off-balance, and the waves boomed in steady cadence against the hull. The wind blew strong but steady.

The rail ahead dipped into the dark of the sea, then rose into the faint light of the sky, dipped and rose. And when it rose again it was changed, as though it was fouled with something, but the light was not good enough.

The light of the lantern caught movement midships. Hall could not be sure until he saw the glint of light off a hatch opening and a man dripping through the hatchway.

“Hi there!” called Hall, but his voice was lost in the wind.

The hatch swung and banged, swung and banged. That meant something was wrong, because what sailor would not fasten a hatch? Unable to think what it was but knowing his duty as the man on watch, Hall hesitated, then untied himself and, moving with the rolling of the ship, made his way across the deck, unhooking the lamp as he went.

Hall clambered through the hatch and down the ladder, holding the storm lamp up before him. Here were the cabins for supercargoes and passengers. They were all empty on this voyage, except for the two now occupied by the madman Crocker and the native Matthew. The decking was awash with four inches of water, sloshing around his feet the ship rolled.

The smell hit him as soon as he came in: a thick, fishy smell, the smell from a barrel of dried herring just open. Worse than that, a barrel that had gone off and mingled fish with decay.

As he turned the corner Hall saw moving shadows ahead. He held up the lamp in the dark and saw that there was not one man, but half a dozen of them, crowding the corridor by one of the doors. They did not have a lamp, and all he could see was the shape of their bodies, compressed by the shadows into ape-like form. They were all wearing the same greyish-green oilskins, foreign ones not like the brown-black oilskins on the Amaryllis.

As the light caught them from behind the six men all stopped dead and slowly turned around.

In a moment of nightmare, Hall’s lamp caught six pairs of enormous fish-eyes, six blunt animal snouts, and six open mouths filled with shark teeth. They were not wearing oilskins: that was their skin. They were all different shapes, but with the same finish, like vessels turned out by the same shipyard to different plans: a hulking brute, a squat midget, one stooped with long arms, another that seemed to go on all fours. One raised a hand, and the fingers were webbed and clawed. They gaped and started to shuffle towards him.

There was an open doorway beside him, and as the ship rolled Hall half jumped, half fell into the cabin and slammed the door, feeling for the bolt and pushing it shut. He had dropped the lamp in the corridor, and the cabin was as black as the pit. The only thing to be seen was the faint lighter circle of the porthole.

The door handle turned. There was a burst of shouting outside, not in any language that Hall could understand. They hammered on the door. Then something heavier thudded against the door—a man using his shoulder. But the door held solid.

Hall felt his way, pushing off the walls and bunk as he crossed it. He was halfway to opening the porthole when the cold spray slashed through. He thought madly about whether he might be able to clamber out the porthole and climb up the side of the ship. That was sheer insanity. Going out was certain death; staying in was certain death.

Could there be any furniture he might wedge the door with? Hall, a plain seaman, had never been in these cabins. He felt around like a blind man, but his hands found another door handle: it was a connecting door into the next cabin. The ship rolled again, and with it there was a louder thud from the main door and a crunch of wood beginning to give way.

The connecting door was locked, but from this side: when Hall unbolted it the door opened easily and Hall fled through it, feeling his way into the next cabin.

Outside there was a commotion, shouting and croaking and battering, as though some heavy piece of lumber had bowled down the corridor. Hall hesitated a moment, then took his chance; as the ship rolled he opened the door into the corridor. His lamp was still alight, floating on the ankle-deep water in the corridor, but the scene illuminated by the feeble, rolling light made no sense. There was nothing but rolling shadows and thrashing limbs in the churning water. Hall caught a single glance before he dashed back to the square of faint light from the hatch above, jumping on to the ladder, leaving screeching and growling like fighting tigers behind him.

He scrambled back on to deck, barking his shins. He raced to the wheelhouse and tripped over a rope. He recovered his feet, skidded on the deck, and made the wheelhouse, where he seized the rope of the bell and rang a general alarm, deafening himself with the clangour, then raced to the forecastle as Butcher looked out angrily from the wheelhouse.

The forecastle door burst open before he got there, Singleton at the lead.

“Boarders!” Hall shouted. “We are attacked! Boarders!”

Men spilled out from the door like a new wave breaking over the foredeck. Some had snatched lamps from their holders, and all of them were armed: with belaying pins, handspikes, a boat-axe, or just their own knives. They roared out like a horde of barbarian Vikings intent on slaughter, whooping like a pack of savages.

“Midships!” shouted Hall, joining the rush back to the cabins.

Hall half saw movement ahead of the mob as he came down the ladder again and glimpsed a retreating form. But with the swinging lamps behind him it was hard to tell what was movement and what was just shadow, and by the time the crew had stormed through there was nothing to see. A couple of doors swung loose as the ship rolled, but there was no sign of intrusion as the crowd of armed sailors milled about, searching for an outlet for their sudden violence.

Butcher, pushing through the crowd, gripped Hall by his shoulder.

“What are you doing, Hall? Answer me!” he demanded.

“There were some men,” Hall stammered out. “Men, down here.” He retrieved the lamp from where it had fallen.

“What men—who was it?”

“Strangers,” said Hall weakly. “A pack of them—hideous—did you see them?” he asked O’Neill, who had led the charge behind him.

“I didn’t see anything,” said O’Neill slowly.

The others looked away or shook their heads as Hall went from one to the other. None of them had seen anything, or would admit to it; nor would they meet Hall’s eye. Those with knives had sheathed them; the others held on to their makeshift weapons awkwardly.

“Hideous strangers,” said Butcher. “Men like fish, eh?”

Hall started to say yes, but stopped when he saw the look on Butcher’s face.

“All hands—back to your quarters!” Butcher shouted. “Boy’s made a mistake.”

“Chief,” said Podmore, sticking his head through a cabin doorway. “The savage is in his cabin, but Crocker has gone.”

“Form search parties,” said Butcher, His voice was steady, but his face was like thunder. “Podmore, take two men and go aft. Singleton, two men for’ard. Nilsen, take two men and search these cabins proper.”

Hall was sent back to his watch while the rest of the crew combed the vessel from end to end, to look from the deepest hold to the deckhouse for any place where a madman might be hiding himself. Both had been locked in their cabins, and Yang swore that he had turned the key after delivering the evening meal. But the key was in the door, and anyone might have unlocked it; some even claimed that a skilled man could have turned the key from inside if he had a few tools. As usual, more or less wild speculations and theories were batted around as the men went about their task.

Hall, still on watch, saw the little groups moving about their assigned missions. Crocker had gone missing on his watch, or at least the escape had been discovered then. So it was his fault.

The search parties combed the ship for Crocker, stem to stern, and found no sign of him. They could not see how his door had been opened, but a piece had been torn away from the door to Matthew’s cabin that you could put a hand through. They could see Matthew inside, curled up beneath the porthole in an attitude of extreme terror, but he would not respond to their shouts.

When they broke in they found why: he was stone dead.

After a while the search parties all returned to the forecastle, and Hall had the deck to himself again.

“Hall!” Butcher loomed beside him. “Now you tell me straight out exactly what you saw.”

Swallowing, Hall went through the events again: his sensing someone moving nearby, the glimpse of a back disappearing down the hatchway, and those six upturned faces looking at him with their round eyes and open mouths. He tried to make them sound more like ordinary men seen in bad light than monstrosities, but Butcher pressed him for the details. Swallowing again, he described their wet grey-green skins and the faces that were more frog than human.

He half expected a slap across the face for lying, but Butcher was thoughtful rather than angry.

“Whatever you saw, it’s gone now,” said Butcher. “And you’re a plucky one for raising the alarm. Take this.”

He passed Hall a flask, and Hall sipped the raw rum cautiously.

“Drink like a man,” Butcher snapped, and Hall duly swigged and broke into a fit of coughing. Butcher took a pull from the flask himself. “If you talk about this in the forecastle, you’ll make a fool of yourself. If you stay silent, you can be as wise as Solomon. You understand me, Hall?”

Hall nodded, his eyes streaming as the rough spirit lit up his whole throat and chest.

“And look forward, not back,” said Butcher. “Men go mad thinking about what they might or might not have seen.” He paused a second to see that his words had sunk in, then turned on his heel to return to his post in the wheelhouse.

It was a confusing exchange, and Hall chewed it over. He had expected punishment for the false alarm and the tale about the fish-men, which was now beginning to seem foolish even to him. At the time they had seemed so real, but now they were more like a dream than a memory. He had not dreamed it, he was sure: he had gone through the hatch and dropped the lamp there. But those creatures did not belong in the ordinary, waking world. What had Podmore said about mermaids being things which could be glimpsed in the distance but never met close-up?

Most troubling was that final jumbled glimpse of the ruck of bodies.

An hour later the sky lightened again and the sea fell, as though Amaryllis had sailed into harbour and left the gale behind. Singleton arrived to relieve him of his watch, but when Hall went back to the forecastle he found it in disarray. The straw mattresses and blankets on the lower bunks were soaked with seawater. Hall had an upper bunk, but tonight it was occupied by a snoring O’Neill with the cat curled up asleep on his chest, high and dry. Hall knew better than to disturb the Irishman. He lay in his clothes on the wet bed, and presently he slept.

“Stone dead, but still warm,” were the first words he heard the next morning. Podmore was recounting his discovery. The smell of seawater had been pushed aside by tobacco as the men warmed themselves with a morning pipe. “No blood or nothing.”

“What did he die of?” asked O’Neill.

“God knows,” said Podmore.

The day was a hard one. Butcher pushed the men to make good all the storm damage on top of their usual work. All were short of sleep and bad-tempered, and the false alarm had jangled them. They were restive and complained to one another in their working groups. Learning of the loss of the Ly-ee-Moon had unsettled them to start with. The sudden storm had rattled them more, throwing them about and damaging the ship. The death of the native Matthew was another blow, and the loss of Crocker. The predominant view was that he had broken out in the storm and killed Matthew in his madness, taking the gold jewellery—which had not been found—and leaping overboard to go back to Dorset.

More than one suggested that Hall had been infected with the same madness as the other two and that he ought to be watched.

They had been through the ordeal and it was over, but as a crew they were not proud. A good crew would not have let a little storm harm the ship, or allowed madmen to run loose. But there was plenty of the course still to run, and they could make the Amaryllis shipshape again and redeem themselves.

The mood took a darker turn when Singleton brought something out on deck, keeping it at arm’s length as though he were holding a poisonous snake. The metallic plates flashed like golden fire in the sun.

“It was hidden under Matthew’s bunk,” he said.

Golden extensions trailed from the headpiece like the arms of a jellyfish, hundreds of tiny scales held together by the finest of gold chains. It was as big and heavy as O’Neill said, a king’s ransom in gold.

“Throw the damned things overboard,” said O’Neill, backing away. “That’s what brought the curse on the Ly-ee-Moon, and on us.”

But Nilsen and two of his firemen were on deck, getting some air between stints at the boilers, and they would have raised an outcry. Sailors are subject to a harsh rule of law, and Singleton handed the linked gold pieces to Butcher, who scowled at them and took them off to the old Man. The sailors muttered among themselves that the bad luck was still on board.

III

Hall was last in line at the midday meal. As the others filed out of the galley he tarried over breaking his biscuit into small pieces over the thick stew Charley had ladled into his tin dish. The black cat rubbed round his calves.

“Eat it hot—it’s no better when it’s cold,” said Charley.

“I’m not hungry,” said Hall.

“Everyone is worried,” Charley said unexpectedly. “They don’t show it, but they are.”

Hall looked up at him.

“Of course they are,” Charley went on. “They ain’t stupid and they ain’t blind. But they don’t say anything. Not out loud. It’s just hard for you because you don’t know the rules yet, what you say and what you don’t say.”

“Do you think…?” Hall started, but could not finish the question. Charley tossed some utensils into a bowl, stacked bowls, waited for him to go on.

“Some things are bad luck, everyone knows that,” said Charley. “Ly-ee-Moon was an opium ship once, and Yang can tell you how those are cursed. Having a dead man on board is bad luck too, and that piece of gold—well, nobody is going to sleep in the forecastle until it’s gone. The old Man can’t do something just because sailors say it’s bad luck. He can’t go throwing valuable private property overboard for no reason, no, the company rules would not allow. But he can take measures, you savvy?”

Hall did not savvy.

“Do you think they’ll come again?” Hall asked. He regretted the question as soon as it was out, but it could not be helped.

“You sit down there now,” said Charley, indicating a water butt. “Eat your food. And I’ll tell you about it.”

Hall sat down obediently, the cat attentive at his feet.

“What you mean to ask is, ‘What are we going to do?’” said Charley.

Hall nodded, chewing the stringy meat.

“The old Man now, he’s a very practical man,” said Charley, “And Butcher, you may think he just cares about rules and suchlike. But he’s been at sea a long time and he’s a very practical man. And your shipmates, well, they’re very practical men too. Even the firemen.

“When there’s a risk to the ship—a storm that blows up from nowhere, or a reef that’s not on any charts, or maybe, maybe ‘slimy things that crawl with legs upon the slimy sea’—practical men don’t wave their hands about and say ‘What is this thing? I don’t believe it!’ Practical men find a practical answer to the problem. When you raised the alarm, you saw we were ready with our practical tools.

“I’m just the cook, and the old Man only asks me about the provisioning and suchlike matters. But he’s got all sorts of practical knowledge. If you ever see inside his stateroom he has a whole wall of books, books this big”— Charley sketched a thick volume in the air—“all bound in leather, like a whole library. All practical books. And in his head there is more than all those books. Not just winds and tides and steam pressure, other things, deeper things beyond you and me.”

Hall nodded again, still chewing and swallowing, the cat looking up at him.

“The old man has all this practical knowledge,” Charley concluded. “He has to be the ruler in this kingdom, captain of this ship, he has to know everything. You can always trust him to know better than you or me.”

“But are those fish-men real?”

Charley laughed at Hall’s earnestness.

“I tell you, I’m just the cook! I’ve caught and scaled and gutted and cooked every type of fish that swims the seas. Ask me about baked fish, fried fish, boiled fish, steamed fish, grilled fish—but not fish-men.”

Seeing Hall’s disappointment, he went on.

“All right, all right. I’ll tell you this one time, and after that—” Charley mimed sealing his lips. He leaned closer confidentially and lowered his voice as though not wanting to be overheard. “Mermen, fish-men, sirens, sea-devils, deep ones, water-apes—they call them all different names. All the same ugly thing. Sailors know this.

“You know Noah’s Flood? They say fish-men are sinful men who did not go on the Ark. They made a deal with the Devil who gave them gills like fish, but they want to come back to the land.

“Another man says they’re drowned men who Davy Jones lets live, if they worship him. They start like men but they slowly come like fish.

“And another—a man of science, a German supercargo—said all things on land come from the sea. And he says whatever breeds with human is human. They want our women—and our seed—to keep their blood fresh so they don’t turn back into fish. He says one day when their god says the time is right, they will come back on to the land again and fight us for it. That’s what he said.” Charley spread his fingers out in front of him. “I don’t know. I set these things out for you like a bouffay, so you can pick and choose what you like. I don’t say it makes too much sense.”

“So the fish-men are, sort of, degenerated human beings?” said Hall.

“I just tell you what I’ve heard,” said Charley. “You saw what you saw. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I wonder—” Hall started, but Charley cut him off.

“Don’t wonder,” said Charley. “It’ll make you crazy.”

“How’s that?”

“If a man thinks about falling off the rigging all the time, one day he falls. If he thinks, ‘I’m thousands of miles from home, how will I ever go back?’ he goes crazy. If he thinks about millions of fish-men down there, he goes crazy. Bad meat rots in your stomach and makes you sick. Bad thoughts rot in your head, and you get sick in the head. That’s why I said I’d only tell you once. Now forget it.”

“How can I not think about something?” asked Hall. “If you try to not think about something, you think about it.”

“You should think about practical things instead,” said Charley, taking the empty dish from him and putting it down for the cat to lick clean. “For example, there is a locker in Butcher’s cabin with six rifles and two revolvers, with ten wooden cases of bullets packed sea-tight. Very practical for a certain situation, I’m sure. For me, a cleaver is a practical thing to have. You think about your own practical way to deal with things.”

“Another thing,” said Hall, rubbing the cat’s head as it butted his ankles. “Why is a black cat called Snowball?”

Charley laughed out loud. “You don’t know? It’s ’cause it makes Nilsen wild!” He imitated the Scandinavian’s accent. “‘Vy is a black cat called Snowball? Ziss is not the logical name for a black cat…’”

Hall laughed too, and the cat purred.

An hour later Podmore was cutting away the last of the seaweed fouling the rails. Great thick braids of it, tangled as though woven together, trailed from the railings like ropes. Singleton was cleaning the deck beside him with a holystone in desultory fashion, scrubbing patiently but without energy. He was tired and distracted.

“We should fling the blamed gold overboard and be done,” said Singleton, looking out over the rail where mattresses hung out to dry.

“That’s the old Man’s decision to make,” said Podmore. “He knows the regulations better nor us, he knows the way.”

“It’s King Neptune’s necklace you said,” said Singleton. “Let King Neptune have it, I say, and leave us alone. Render unto Caesar.”

Podmore thought about this for a long minute.

“I’m a Christian,” the old sail maker said at last. “I don’t hold with pagan gods, or making sacrifices to ’em. ‘In thee do I put my trust, o Lord,’ that’s what it says in the Bible.”

As he said it he tested the blade of his knife with his thumb. Podmore was a steadfast man, but he was doubting now. Between his faith in God and the old Man, and his sure knowledge of things that lurked beneath the water.

“You believe the same as the rest of us,” said Singleton at last. “I don’t want that thing on board another night longer, not after what happened to the Ly-ee-Moon. No more do you.”

“What are you dawdling here for?” demanded Butcher, who had approached silently. “What a crew of old women I have, talking fast and working slow.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Podmore briskly. “Is Dublin hurt badly?”

“That fool of an Irishman should be in music-hall with his acrobatics,” said Butcher. “He’s just sprained an ankle, that’s all. The idiot says he saw a face at the porthole while he was fastening it. Frightened of his own ugly reflection! I hope a shellback like you knows not to join in with rumours, Podmore. They’re silly with them already.”

“No, sir,” said Podmore.

There was a bump and rattle at his feet. It was a lead weight, shaped like a rough pyramid. Perhaps it had been caught up in the weed Podmore had just cut free, and moved with the roll of the deck. But to all three men it looked exactly as though it had just been thrown on board from the sea.

Podmore looked away and said nothing. Butcher picked the weight up, scrutinising it sourly.

“Reckon it’s a message,” said Singleton. “Miller said that New Englander captain used to drop messages down below with a sinker. We’re being hailed: it’s clear as day.”

Butcher slipped the lead weight into his pocket without a word and went below to see the old Man.

Podmore and Singleton watched him go.

“There’s going to be another blow tonight,” said Podmore slowly. “A strong one. There will be more weed to clear tomorrow.”

They looked at the rail, and an unspoken thought hung in the air. If half a dozen fish-men might climb aboard by stealth on ropes of weed, how many hundreds might come if they were determined to board in force? The kingdoms of the sea are vast, and no man can number the legions of the deep. Every sailor has seen shoals of fish vaster than herds of reindeer on the tundra or buffaloes on the prairie. Every sailor knows there are more things down there than fish, even if he has never seen them.

Butcher was on his way to another duty: helping the old Man with the autopsy of the dead man. They followed the instructions laid down step-by-step in the Ship-Captain’s Medical Guide. Butcher read out the instructions and the captain reported his findings for Butcher to take down in his big, square handwriting. Word was passed down from Yang, who had read Butcher’s notebook, that Matthew was not strangled, and had no external injuries at all. It seemed that he had been weakened by the exertions of the previous few days, and his heart had given out in an extremity of fear and panic.

Word went round that Matthew’s remains would be buried at sea at sunset. All hands would attend, but as they smartened themselves up in the forecastle the mood was still hostile. Gathering them all together in front of the captain would precipitate the crisis. They knew it, and they looked forward to it.

“You tell him,” said Singleton to Podmore. “Tell him that blasted jewellery has to go overboard, whatever the rules, or it’ll be the end of all of us.”

“I ain’t saying anything to the old Man,” said Podmore.

“We’ve all got to go to him in a body and tell him,” said Charley. “Or this whole ship is finished.”

“And I say the old Man knows his business,” said Podmore.

Nilsen, the engineer and senior in the fire room, would have been the next ranking man, but he was away dealing with some matter on the engines. But the firemen were not likely to side with the sailors.

“It’d be better coming from you,” said O’Neill, appealing to Podmore. “You lead us, he can’t ignore all the hands together.”

“If he doesn’t listen, we can seize the thing by force,” said Singleton. “Fling it over the side. It’s not theft, because it’s not his, or any living man’s. We can get the key to his stateroom from Yang.”

“We’ll have no mutinous conduct on this ship,” said Podmore quietly. “Nor on any while I’m aboard.”

Singleton squinted at him. The old sail maker was calm and determined.

He knew something right enough, but he wouldn’t say what.

“What strange days these are,” remarked Nilsen, coming into the forecastle. He seemed cheerful, smug even.

“And what’s making you so chipper now?” demanded O’Neill.

“Our old Man, he has tricks up his sleeve,” said the engineer. He paused by O’Neill and tapped his temple. “He thinks of things.”

“Like what?” asked O’Neill.

“You’d never guess it,” said Nilsen, pulling off his soot-stained shirt as he reached his bunk. “He found a way between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

The others waited, patient and silent, as he put on a clean shirt and buttoned it up.

“Butcher called me to the captain’s stateroom,” said Nilsen. “It was quite strange. The old Man had that golden jewellery, and he was making pictures of it. He had the chart lenses, and he was looking at each of the scales in turn and making a picture with a pencil in a logbook. Butcher and I come in and we stand there, and we keep standing there as the old Man finishes one picture and starts another, a thing like a big twisting snake. And we wait while he draws it on the paper, and turns the page and starts looking at next little scale. So Butcher coughs and says ‘I have Nilsen, sir.’”

“What was he drawing it for?” asked Podmore.

“He did it like he was mesmerised,” said Nilsen. “‘It’s time,’ says Butcher. The old Man was like a little boy when the nurse wants to take his toy away. ‘I keep thinking I’ve got all the faces taken down, but then I find another one.’ And Butcher says nothing, and the old Man he sighs, and he looks up and he sees me. ‘The Royal Society would like a sight of this, Nilsen,’ he says. ‘Did you ever see workmanship like this?’ and he holds it up to me with the glass. ‘I believe if I had a microscope I’d still not see everything in it.’”

I tell him I have seen Swiss watches which have this detail.

“‘Can you hear it?’ he asks me. ‘Butcher says he can’t hear it, but I can.’ And I can hear it too, just a faint sound, a sound like a gnat whining. I almost can’t hear it.”

“Singing gold?” said Podmore.

“Just very faint,” Nilsen said. “Some vibration of the particular metal alloy, I suppose. I am not a specialist in this. The old Man shuts his book and stands up, and Butcher nods, and the three of us go down to the engine room together. They tell me what to do, and I put the golden jewellery on a shovel. And I open the boiler door, and very carefully I hold the shovel over the fire. This is tricky work, let me tell you.”

“So you destroyed that damned thing?” asked Singleton hopefully.

“Let me finish telling you! After a minute the shovel is glowing red hot, and I’m starting to burn myself because you shouldn’t stand there with the boiler door open, and the gold is glowing a little but it hasn’t changed. And this is very strange, because, you know, the melting point of gold is low, about one thousand degrees centigrade, it should melt before this.

“So I stoke up the fire a bit and open the vent, and put a cloth over my head, and I keep trying. I’m watching the necklace very carefully because I don’t want to drop it, and the old Man and Butcher are watching me. I keep thinking gold should melt sooner, but it just stays there.

“‘Can’t you make it any hotter, Nilsen?’ asks the old Man. Well! I take a hammer and I smash a bucket of fresh coal into powder, and I toss that in. Fresh-powdered coal gives a good heat. And I tell Bell to open the vents full and work the bellows by hand.

“I have wet towels round my face and my shoulders, and I’m burning when the necklace starts making sounds. It’s pinging and popping and tinkling like hundreds and hundreds of little bells. And it just melts all together, all the little scales at the same time, and it’s a puddle of liquid on the end of the shovel. And I tell you, the shovel itself is ruined from the heat.

“In fact, we ran hotter than it’s supposed to go. It just took me an hour to put the furnace back to right, bend a plate or two and correct the seals to the boiler….” Nilsen would have gone on about his precious engines, but nobody was interested.

“What about the melted gold?” demanded Podmore.

“I take it out of the boiler and Butcher had put this holystone on the deck.”

“A holystone?” asked Podmore.

“It was hollowed out,” said Nilsen. “He put it down for me to pour the gold into. He had been working it with a chisel and he had cut into the surface like a mould. So I poured the gold, very, very carefully so every drop went in. The stone cracked a little bit but it stayed together. I splashed some water over myself—I thought I’d be blistered all over, but it wasn’t so bad—and when I turned around they were taking it out of the mould. They’d turned it into the shape of a cross.”

There was a murmur around the forecastle as the sailors began to see what their old Man had been thinking.

“And the captain has his Bible and he reads out the blessing over it,” said Nilsen.

“The captain’s good as a priest on board,” said Singleton, nodding. “He takes the Sunday service and everything. He’s got the Church’s authority at sea, just the same as he’s got the Queen’s.”

O’Neill, a good Catholic, murmured dissent. A Protestant captain had no rank in his church that he had ever heard of. But the others were all approval.

“And when he’s finished,” says Nilsen, “he turns to me and holds it up in the light, and he says. ‘Fine work, Mr. Nilsen, very fine work. This is a proper Christian cross, wouldn’t you say?’ And I say ‘Yes, sir, it is. Even though the ends were not right, they were long, and all bent around, almost like a wheel. Not like a normal cross. But he said to leave it like that.”

“He’s a practical man,” said Charley. “He knows how to take the curse off.”

“So that’s what he’s about,” said Podmore. “I stitched Matthew into canvas today, saw there was something round his neck.” The task of sewing bodies into sailcloth fell to the sail maker; tradition said that the last stitch went through the corpse’s nose to confirm he was dead. “Butcher put a gold cross round his neck before I put the last stitch in. I wondered where it come from.”

“What does the bent cross mean?” asked Hall. Nobody answered him, but later he remembered seeing Miller cross his arms over his chest. It was an old, ritual gesture of warding, a gesture more ancient than the Pharaohs or the Patriarchs. The gesture echoed the shape of the bent cross.

Ten minutes later, all hands were mustered on deck. The sky was empty but for distant wisps of clouds, and the sun was just clear of the horizon. The steam made a fine, clean trail behind the ship. A trestle had been placed by the rail, and two planks laid together, one end on the rail and the other on the trestle. On top of the planks was a bundle wrapped in sailcloth. It contained the mortal remains of Matthew, lately of the island of Ambrym in the New Hebrides. It also contained some old anchor shackle and pieces of broken yard pin to weigh him down. In among this scrap were two pyramid-shaped lead weights.

A Union Jack with a white border was placed over the parcel. There had been some argument in the forecastle, but, as Podmore doggedly insisted, Matthew served as a sailor on Ly-ee-Moon and the old Man did right to give him a sailor’s burial. Even if a man drowned on the first day of his first voyage, he was a sailor for that.

Charley tolled the bell with a steady, slow rhythm. At every swing to starboard the semicircle of steely water seemed to come up with a rush, as if impatient to take the body. Shadows came and went just below the surface, floating like logs just below the surface but somehow keeping pace with the ship.

At a word from Butcher the tolling ceased, and all caps came off.

The captain of the SS Amaryllis stood by the trestle, his peaked cap in his hand, looking on the parcel as though in judgement. He was tall, smart as a guardsman with his double row of brass buttons, his gold braid and polished boots, his beard neatly trimmed. He waited a few moments, perhaps for the wind to be just so before he began.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” the captain proclaimed in a powerful foredeck voice. The old Man could make himself heard in a storm, he could out-shout the thunder. “Therefore can I lack nothing, He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth besides the waters of comfort.”

The men listened attentively, heads lowered in a seemly show of reverence. The captain read through to the end of the psalm. He continued in a more commanding tone.

“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep, in sure and certain hopes of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Butcher gave the signal, and as Podmore and Nilsen raised the ends of the planks Butcher snatched up the Union Jack. The planks were well greased, and the parcel slid easily, disappearing over the side in an instant, taking with it the savage and his new-fashioned gold cross—which might be a Christian cross, or something subtly different. No personal property but religious symbols were deemed appropriate to be interred with their remains, according to the captain’s handbook and company rules.

Every man on the deck exhaled. The ship seemed to lift in the water, as though a heavy freight had been transferred ashore, or ballast dropped.

Hall was standing closest to the rail. He leaned forward and caught the faint circle of vanishing ripples as the waters closed over the parcel. The forms that swarmed around the point of impact might have been sharks, or something else. They dispersed again swiftly as though fleeing danger.

The captain ordered a hymn, even though it was not part of the regular burial service. We sang “Dark was the Deep, the waters lay” like a crew of ragged angels, raising our voices lustily to the heavens, sure at last of our salvation, praising the Lord as one.

The sun sank quickly below the horizon as the hymn ended, and a peace descended. The sky above and the sea below were empty of menace. The crew turned in, and if their mattresses were not quite dry it did not stop one of them from having a deep and untroubled sleep.

The story of the two strange shipwreck survivors, who had escaped the Ly-ee-moon only to be claimed by death days later, was duly worked up and embellished and circulated round the ports where the Amaryllis stopped on her journey back to Bristol. By then it was not a story of fish-men at all, but a tale of the workings of fate and unlucky gold.

Hall never told anyone what he had seen that night in the corridor, the shadows thrashing in the water as he fled for his life. It did not come back to him all at once, but in fragments, as though the pieces were held in separate compartments. He knew finally that he had only escaped because the maniac Crocker had attacked those fish-things, assaulted them with all the strength of a lunatic, pounding them with fists like hammers—and they had turned on him and devoured him like a shoal of hungry barracuda. Jaws and teeth that fastened on to him, the ankle-deep water sluicing away the fast-flowing streams of blood and shredded flesh. Hall knew also that Matthew must have been watching too, through the hole in his door. They had not just killed Crocker, they had torn him apart and devoured every bit. Matthew could not get away from the sound of that frenzy, and the terror of it had stopped his heart.

THE NORWOOD BUILDER

Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and
melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my
own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned
him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of
what he felt himself about to discover.

—H. P Lovecraft, “From Beyond”

A lath-and-plaster partition had been run across the passage six feet from the end, with a door cunningly concealed in it. It was lit within by slits under the eaves. A few articles of furniture and a supply of food and water were within, together with a number of books and papers.

“There’s the advantage of being a builder,” said Holmes, as we came out. “He was able to fix up his own little hiding-place.”

—Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”

I

The last thing Lottie remembered was trying to tear her hand free from the handcuffs. They were too tight; each jerk bruised and lacerated her wrist, but it was the only way she could get free. At the same time, another part of her was thinking it was all her own fault, that she should never have come, that she should have realised how dangerous Jack was.

It had all started so well. It was a day out in the country for her, far from South London. The Peugeot lurched and splashed its way along the puddled track, and the Satnav pinged as the little cottage came into sight. She pulled off the track which led to the farm proper, parking up in the broad gravel parking bay. There was a barbed-wire fence, with sheep cropping the grass on the other side.

A pale full moon stood over the hill in the morning sky. It was a picturesque addition; you never see a moon like that in the city.

The converted farm building was clean and spare, stripped down to its original stone, with a new tile roof and clean PVC window units. It was a holiday let, an old barn or cattle shed renovated and put to profitable use.

“Call Grant,” Lottie told her phone, and he picked up on the first ring. “Are you there?” Grant asked. “How strong is the phone signal? How does the place look?”

“It looks normal,” she said. “Signal`s fine. Stop worrying, hon.”

“I’ll call you in twenty minutes,” said Grant. “Take care.”

She put the phone away as Jack came out of the house. He must have heard the car. He had not changed much: skinny jeans, faded Echaskech T-shirt, unruly hair, a cluster of silver earrings through one ear. He ambled over with his familiar cheeky grin, looking her up and down.

“You came!” he said. “Great, really great. You look fantastic. Short hair really suits you.”

Lottie hesitated a moment as he leaned in and kissed her, but it seemed perfectly natural. They were exes, after all, and for all Grant’s worrying she did not mistrust Jack. And from this close she could see he was glowing. If he was female, Lottie would have diagnosed pregnancy or a new lover. Or just perhaps he had livened himself up with some chemicals before she arrived.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“Ah, a few months.” He looked around the sweep of farmland, the hedgerows, the grazing sheep, the black plastic sheeting held taut over a silage heap with car tyres, as though he had not seen them before. “It’s okay. I wanted somewhere quiet.”

The front door opened directly into a main room that took up most of the ground floor: one end was a living room, the other one was a dining room with a galley kitchen. Wooden stairs spiralled up to a mezzanine bedroom above. The high ceiling and windows on three sides gave it a bright, open look, and the décor was untouched show house. A set of prints of heaped apples and rustic vegetables was distributed over the walls, along with an imitation copper warming pan and sprays of dried flowers.

There were piles of papers and books and magazines on every surface, as though someone had just unpacked boxes of them while moving in. They were Jack’s, and Lottie knew they would never get tidied away any further. They occupied every flat surface, like drifting snow. He was still just as untidy as ever. In the living room area there was a desk with a laptop, and the papers seemed to cluster more thickly around it.

“Your girlfriend isn’t a tidiness freak then,” she said. He had mentioned he was with an Australian girl called Lisa. She had not made much impact on the place, but there was a pink anorak hanging by the door with some flowered Wellingtons.

“No,” he said. “She’s working today. In the pub.”

“Is that where you met her?”

Jack laughed at that and scratched his chin. He was still as predictable and easy to read as ever.

“Take a seat and I’ll fire up the kettle.”

The solid dining table, bare wood like the rest of the furniture, had been swept clear of clutter. There was just a teapot, some mugs, and a Murakami novel which Jack must have been reading while he waited for her. Lottie took the sole empty chair.

He turned and leaned back on the kitchen counter. Posing, she thought. He still looked tanned and healthy, heroin-thin with no trace of a beer belly. His face was more deeply etched than before. He had been working hard, or partying hard, or both. He was looking at her and grinning. His pupils were normal-sized, he blinked normally: no clinical signs of drug use.

“I suppose you’re wondering,” he said archly, “just why I invited you to my secret lair.”

“‘Epigenetics’ was what you said.”

His phone call had come right out of the blue. She hadn’t even thought about him for years, since their parting after that afternoon watching the last Concordes land. They had been postgraduates then, studying for their Ph.D.s, starting out as flatmates and, with a lazy inevitability, becoming lovers.

After the briefest exchange of personal histories on the phone he had asked her for a big, big favour, as she was the only person in the world he could possibly ask. She was a respected scientist, inside what he called ‘the establishment’. He had Googled her recent work on the genetic basis of leukaemia and was knocked out by it. He needed her to come and take a look at his work and tell him how it could be commercialised, written up, taken forward.

“I stayed outside the establishment,” he said. “You know how it was always my mission to pick up on the bits that mainstream science missed? It’s paid off, big time, but I don’t know what to do with it next.”

“Is this really science, or fairy stories?” she asked. She knew about Jack’s enthusiasms from the old days.

“Science. Unbelievable, but science.”

He had stubbornly refused to tell her any more than that.

“If I told you, you would not believe me,” he said. “And you wouldn’t come. Which would be tragic! If I don’t tell you, you’ll have to come to see it for yourself—and then, you will believe. You will believe!”

It was typical Jack. Eventually she agreed, not because she was interested in his work in the slightest, but because he wanted her. She had warned him about going outside the pale of real science, and seven years later there he was. Needing to be rescued, again.

Grant was set against her going.

“He’s a complete shit,” said Grant. “He’s a liar and a thief. And just incidentally a drug dealer. He obviously wants something from you. Probably money, from the sound of it…but who knows what? You’re not going out to some remote place in the middle of nowhere with him on your own.”

“He’s harmless. And there is no way I’m going to have the two of you in the same room. It wouldn’t be constructive.”

She was not scared of Jack. His cowardice, his avoidance of conflict, had been one of the recurrent themes in their relationship. The only violence had been directed towards him, on those occasions when Lottie had found about some underhand act and had completely flipped.

In the worst of these he had casually mentioned at the end of an evening that her mother had phoned that afternoon: Lottie’s brother had been injured in a car accident. Not badly injured, Jack said, and he had not wanted to spoil their evening. Lottie totally lost it and started flinging china mugs at him which exploded against the wall or bounced off his arms.

He became the pathetic victim and she was instantly overcome by remorse. She never dreamed he would be capable of actual cruelty or physical violence. He was amoral enough, she had no illusions about that, but he lacked the necessary guts.

Jack was always looking for short cuts. He thought only idiots made life difficult for themselves and rules were for losers. As a student, he always copied lecture notes rather than going to lectures himself. As a postgraduate he borrowed other people’s work where he could get away with it, or fudged results so he did not need to go through the laborious process of repeating experiments. He called it a flexible attitude.

Jack’s popularity nosedived after he interfered with a fellow student’s project, changing the doses of drugs being used on a set of lab rabbits. The result had been twenty dead rabbits and six months’ work wasted. Jack felt it was worth it because he might just have been on to something big.

“Win some, lose some,” said Jack. He never admitted responsibility, but everyone knew.

His flexibility extended to his personal life too. He took money from her purse because it was the easiest way of getting cash. He did a bit of small-scale drug dealing because he used the stuff himself, and it was the easiest way of getting money. He borrowed Lottie’s car without asking because, hey, what was he supposed to do and why was she making such a thing out of it? Why did the insurance matter when nothing had happened? He broke her laptop, but that wasn’t really his fault, was it?

She learned soon enough not to trust him. Then everything was fine.

He had been predictably useless, and entertaining, as a flatmate. He was always there to crack open a bottle of wine, light a joint, and bitch about mutual enemies. But she knew not to expect him to say when they ran out of coffee, or printer ink, or toilet paper, let alone buy any of these things himself. Sending him for groceries was a recipe for disaster; she found him an hour later, browsing the science fiction section of the Crow bookshop next to the supermarket.

As a boyfriend he often surprised her with romantic gestures—a CD she had mentioned, unexpected romantic evenings out—but failed on basics like letting her know when he was going to be away for the evening, the night, or the weekend. He played in a band sometimes. He enjoyed performing but rarely showed up for rehearsals. He liked the idea of being a rock star, but not the craft and the graft of a working musician.

Jack hungered for big results. He did have a knack for finding potentially significant research in the literature that others had missed and making something of it. When he was fired up, he worked hard for short periods, but the long slog of laboratory work was beyond him. He favoured what he called the penicillin style of discovery: one chance finding of a mould in a Petri dish, and you’ve discovered antibiotics and revolutionised medicine. You just had to look in enough Petri dishes rather than getting hung up with doing tiny variations on the same experiment all the time.

“Penicillin wasn’t the work of one man,” Lottie told him.

“Yes it was,” said Jack. “Everyone knows about Alexander Fleming.”

“The first patient treated with penicillin got better for two days, then died when they ran out,” said Lottie. “It took hundreds of people working on different strains of mould, finding new ones and growing them before they found one which could produce enough penicillin for it to be useful.”

“Yeah, the backroom people,” said Jack, shrugging them away. “If that’s all you ever want to be, go and be one. A miracle that cures someone for two days is a miracle—the rest is details. It’s Flemings that change the world, not drones.”

Jack’s Ph.D. thesis looked promising, but his progress was uneven and Lottie wondered how much of it would fade away under close scrutiny. Most people wait until after they complete a doctorate before they change the world, but Jack was in a hurry.

There had been no particular triggering factor for their breakup. But one summer afternoon they had been sitting together in Norwood Park, watching the last three Concordes make their final approaches over London, and it had seemed like a time for endings.

“I think I’ll move out,” she said when the last plane had disappeared behind the buildings, gliding down to Heathrow. “It’s just not working for us, is it?”

“If that’s how you feel,” he said. He managed to sound faintly injured but without any interest in winning her back. As always, he wanted to put the responsibility on her. He did not seem especially upset by the idea and made no attempt to talk her out of it.

She realised afterwards that going with Jack had been the lazy option for her. He was undemanding, but when she was with him her work had also trailed off. She had spent too many afternoons anaesthetised by cheerfully mindless television when she should have been working, too many mornings agreeing that they didn’t really need to get up yet.

It was something of a surprise that he had carried on in science. Her Internet searches showed that he had not published anything since his incomplete and contested Ph.D. The only things with his name on were a slew of articles in alternative health magazines and web sites. There did not seem to be any particular pattern to them. Jack had been trying out one field after another—looking, no doubt, for that elusive Petri dish.

Meanwhile Lottie had been doing it the hard way. She had worked on the genetics of leukaemia, in protein changes associated with Alzheimer’s, and the basis of some inherited bone diseases. It was not earth-shattering stuff, but she had been diligent and thorough. Now she had her own laboratory and her own little team with two anxious Ph.D. students of her own.

She also had Grant, her husband, who gave her the same unwavering devotion he gave his beloved Crystal Palace F.C. Grant cooked exquisite but insanely hot curries, worked off his hangover digging in the allotment on Sunday mornings, and brought back flowers or vegetables. He worked as hard as a hospital administrator as she did as a biochemist; he had some bad days at the office but cheered up as soon as he saw her in the evening. Jack had been a good talker, but Grant was a good listener.

The chances against Jack’s biochemical researchers having actually found something were astronomical. But something in her wanted to see him again. Did she want to gloat?

Perhaps there was some of that; he at least would appreciate how much hard work she had put in and would be able to see how it had paid off at last. It would be good to meet up and talk about the old days living in that grotty flat. Long Saturday evenings at the Hollybush and long Sunday mornings sharing a Full English at Domali. But mainly she had gone simply because he asked.

Jack poured boiling water into the kettle, and the aroma of green tea slowly suffused the room. He really did look happy, deep-down happy, in a way she had never seen.

“It’s a good variety,” he promised, pouring the tea into two conical cups stamped with Japanese ideograms. “You’ll like this.”

He brought the laptop over, placed it on the table, and cleared a stack of books off a kitchen chair to sit down beside her. He started up a PowerPoint presentation.

“This is just a rough version,” he said. “But it’s got all the main ideas.”

“I thought this was about results you want to share? Not a sales pitch.”

“Oh yes. Yes yes yes yes,” he said. “Big results. Big time. Bigger than big. You won’t believe. But it needs context.”

He was getting excited. He spilled the tea as he poured, and pushed a cup over to her. He clicked the mouse pad, then stood up, adopting a stance copied from a TV presenter.

A title came up: Human Epigenetics and the Norwood Builder.

“I’ll explain the Norwood Builder part at the end,” he said. “It’s from Conan Doyle. People laughed at him when he got into spiritualism and weird science, but he knew something. I think it came to him through theosophy and Blavatsky…anyway, my little journey started with the mighty Paracelsus.”

A woodcut image appeared on the screen, of a balding man in what might have been a mediaeval monk’s habit. His hands were resting on the guard of a sword with the word AZOTH visible on the pommel.

“Oh God,” said Lottie. “Not him again.”

“Him again,” affirmed Jack, grinning. “The greatest alchemist of the sixteenth century, possibly the greatest scientist that ever lived. Paracelsus, despised in his own time and proven to be right about everything centuries later.”

“Inventor of homeopathy,” she mocked.

“Inventor of the first painkiller, and chemotherapy, first man to realise that diseases are caused by germs, that mental illness isn’t evil spirits. The original Faust, the original Frankenstein—possibly the first person to clone a human—”

“Yeah, right.” She blew on her tea and sipped it. “The fat German bloke who boasted a lot. I remember you going on about him. A lot.”

“He disagreed with the medical-scientific establishment of the time about everything.” Jack picked up his cup of tea, put it to his lips, and put it down without drinking as the words kept coming. “He disagreed with the surgeons, with the pharmacists, with the learned doctors. He believed that the people who really knew were the herbalists, the midwives. The ones who had actually been treating patients successfully for hundreds of years!”

“We’ve had this conversation,” said Lottie. “And herbal medicine is still crap. Okay, mainly crap.”

“Anyway, he spent his time going out and talking to village wise women, and hedge-wizards, and all sorts of disreputable characters. He travelled the entire known world—Europe, Asia, Africa, everywhere. And he left behind lots of books, but they’re all written in cryptic alchemists’ language that nobody can really decipher.”

“What’s a hedge-wizard?” Lottie asked.

“Whatever. Is that tea okay for you?”

“It’s fine.”

“Unlike the medical establishment, he didn’t reject anything that contradicted Aristotle. And that’s how he figured things out, like realising that miners’ diseases were caused by their working conditions—first documented occupational disease. But if someone told him about a werewolf, he didn’t laugh at them. He made notes.”

“Were-fucking-wolves?” Lottie exploded. “What are you on?”

“You see?” said Jack excitedly. He was practically hopping up and down. “You’re laughing, because you don’t understand. I will show you werewolves, and much more, much, much more….”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “But you’ve got to cut the weird stuff out if you want people to take it seriously. Paracelsus, medieval chemotherapist, fine. Roll the next slide.”

“That’s strange,” he said, looking under her chair. “Is that a mouse? Don’t move.”

He leaned over and she felt his hand lightly on her arm. Before she realised what was happening he jumped backwards, and she saw that she was hand-cuffed to the chair. Her hand went to the phone in her pocket.

“Please!” he said. “Lottie, please! Don’t be angry, I had to stop you going away. You’ve got to listen to all this.”

She tugged at the handcuffs. “Get these off,” said Lottie.

“I promise I’ll take them off afterwards.”

“Get. These. Fucking. Off. Now!”

Jack took another step back, waving his hands. “Calm down please, Lottie. This is really, really important. Literally life or death.”

The phone was still in her pocket. She could call the police, or get Grant to call them. Even if Jack wrestled the phone out of her hands Grant would know she was in trouble, and he had the address. Out here it might take the police fifteen minutes, but just knowing they were coming would stop Jack in his tracks.

Then what? He would probably release her at once, apologising and begging her not to press charges. She would have to stay until the police arrived, and then go through a whole embarrassing process of making a statement. The police would probably put it down as some sort of domestic incident. Would they be grinning and smirking behind her back, assuming it was a sex game gone wrong? Or would they take it seriously and want to charge Jack with kidnapping, arresting him and starting a long process through the courts? Did he already have a criminal record?

Her whole visit would be a humiliating failure. Grant would have been proved right. However much he downplayed it, he would never quite be able to trust her out of his sight again. Jack would be in trouble, which was his own fault, but she would be at the centre of it. How long would she have to spend in court? What would get dragged up in court? Would that sort of thing make the local newspapers at least?

On the other hand, if she just sat through his stupid presentation, then he could let her go and she never needed to mention it to Grant, admit he was right all along.

“Please,” whined Jack. “I’m begging you. I need you to see this so badly. It’s so, so important.”

She hesitated. If Jack did anything threatening, made any kind of move towards her, she would use the phone. But for now she would stay chilled, listen to what he had to say if it was so important to him.

“This had better be good,” she said. “Fucking good.”

“Paracelsus noted how monsters could be born of normal parents, and realised that it was not what we would call genetic,” Jack said, speaking quickly. “They were not inherited from the parents. He said deformities could be caused simply by the imagination of the mother—”

“Ah yes, enlightened Renaissance misogyny,” snapped Lottie. “Let’s blame the woman.”

“Not blame,” said Jack. “The placebo effect works because when you believe that a sugar pill will make you better, it can have a physical effect. The nocebo effect is the same in reverse: if you believe something is harmful it can kill you. People can die simply because they think a witch doctor has cursed them.”

“Documented cases?”

He waved the objection away. “Nobody knows how the placebo effect works. I have an idea. And it could affect an unborn child.”

“Spit it out then,” said Lottie.

“Paracelsus described human-animal hybrids, and how they could be formed by imagination alone,” said Jack. “Which is where we get to—big drum roll here!—epigenetics. Cells are building blocks. Just like Lego: you could make a duck out of pig cells, or a fish out of human cells.”

A tractor passed close by the cottage, its big wheels throwing gobbets of mud up behind it. Even out here in the country you were never really that far away from other people.

“The DNA is the same in all your cells, but eye cells are different from tooth cells,” Jack was saying. “Epigenetics controls which genes are turned on and off, keeps all the functional cells in the right place. It also shapes the whole organism.”

A second slide appeared: a slender, glamorous actress in black with a diamond necklace and tiara, holding a long cigarette holder to her lips.

“Audrey Hepburn, epigenetics’ poster girl,” said Jack. “She was Dutch, and she lived through the Hunger Winter of 1942 in Holland when she was a teenager. However, it left her permanently changed: thanks to epigenetics she would always have her slim, willowy figure. And that’s the point about epigenetics: you don’t just inherit it. Unlike DNA, you can actually change the epigenetic make-up of a human, even an adult one. It’s like there are several different versions: a skinny you, a normal you, an obese you—it just depends on the epigenetic switches.”

“Ye-es,” said Lottie. She wondered if his big discovery was going to be a dieting aid.

The next picture was a man in uniform sitting slumped over, his head in his hands.

“And we know that all sorts of things can make epigenetic changes—exposure to chemicals, viruses, even psychological experiences. Post-traumatic stress disorder produces epigenetic changes to the nervous system. You end up permanently adrenalised and ready for action, jumping at loud sounds. It’s a good adaptation when you’re in a constant life-or-death situation, but it’s a problem when you go back home after the war.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Lottie, “There are real researchers out there working on therapeutic applications of epigenetics.”

“Too slowly. They need a penicillin moment,” said Jack. “And I’ve done it, through Paracelsus’ method of looking at folk medicine. Just as aspirin was derived from willow bark and quinine—”

“What have you found?”

The next picture was a grainy black-and-white photo of Hitler talking earnestly to two men in white coats, in what might have been a laboratory. On a table on front of them were ranged glass jars containing pale, half-formed things in liquid. Swastika flags hung behind them for a gala occasion.

“The Nazis should have cracked it,” he said. “They had open minds on science and traditional folklore. Plus they didn’t have any scruples about human experiments—and you can’t test this with animals.”

Lottie did not like his tone. She wondered just what Jack had been up to, what he was planning to do. Human experimentation took a huge raft of bureaucratic paperwork before you could get permission. Jack was known to cut corners. It occurred to her that Jack’s girlfriend worked in a bar and was well-placed to spike people’s drinks.

“Human beings have a unique epigenetic flexibility,” Jack was saying. “Which the mainstream hasn’t really realised. Anyway, the Nazis’ stupid racial theories got in the way. They thought in terms of pure blood, which is rubbish—if you tinker with the epigenetic switches, you can turn a white Aryan giant into a dark-skinned pygmy. Even inherited mental illness doesn’t actually kick in until the genes are switched on.…Anyway, Hitler’s pet scientists almost got there with embryos, but not quite. They should have looked more at ritual cannibalism and its effects.”

Lottie sipped her tea. At least he hadn’t turned into a Nazi, but he was at the level of a tabloid paper rather than a scientific paper.

Another black-and-white photo, a man in a dark suit and white shirt contemplating a stem of wheat with lunatic intensity.

“The Soviets got close too. Maybe they got further than we know, but it’s all secret. Lysenko showed that wheat could be ‘vernalised’—made to sprout in spring rather than autumn—by exposure to cold, and the effect was inherited by later generations of the same grain. It meant they could grow wheat in Siberia. They tried the same thing with humans.”

“They transplanted dogs’ heads in the laboratory too. Lysenko wasn’t what you’d call a scientist.”

“That’s the typical mainstream reaction: anything that doesn’t fit with your worldview you just dismiss. What the Russians showed was that human beings could be altered; they just didn’t find a very good way if doing it. They got side-tracked into stupid human-ape hybrids.”

Her phone played the opening bars of Dusty Springfield’s I Only Wanna Be with You, and Lottie answered it awkwardly with her free hand, watching Jack’s reaction. He did not try to stop her, but fidgeted anxiously as she talked.

“Hi, Grant, how’s things? Well, I’m getting Jack’s alternative version of biochemistry. Pretty flaky as you’d expect. Yes, he is. No, it’s fine. No, I’m still waiting for him to get to the point. Fine. Okay. I’ll call you when I’m leaving—shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes tops.”

Jack was visibly relieved when she ended the call. Lottie kept the phone in her hand, ready to call back in a second.

“Right,” said Lottie. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get to the point and wrap this up and then I’m out of here. Even if I have to take the fucking chair with me.”

“Look at this.” The slides came one after the other: a cave painting of a figure with the head of a dog, a hairy ape-man in a jungle, an Egyptian jackal-headed god, Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, a cartoon of an odd humanoid thing with spines along its back, a Gothic black-winged vampire, an amphibious toad-human thing. Too many of them, a parade of monsters. “Do you see it? Do you see it?”

“See what?”

“They’re all the same thing—all modified human forms. There’s a word for it: abhuman. All of them descended from, or interbreeding with, humans. And look at this, look at this.”

The next slide took her back to A-level biology: a line drawing of rows of embryos at different stages.

“Recapitulation,” Lottie said automatically. “As it develops the human embryo goes through all the stages of evolution—it starts as a blob of cells, then it goes through a fish-like stage with pseudo-gills, and an amphibian stage, a lizard stage with a tail, et cetera.”

“Ex-actly!” he said triumphantly. “Now you’ve got it. ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’”

“It’s a shit theory and it was disproved about a hundred years ago,” she said.

“What if I told you that it’s true—all the embryonic forms represent viable alternate adult forms? A fish version of you, an amphibian version of you. You know aquatic ape theory—that humans passed through an amphibious stage quite recently? Epigenetics. Also the source of legends like the Russian Vodyanoy, a frog-human hybrid, and probably mermaid traditions. No other species has this. This is absolute, definitive evidence for some interference in human evolution a few hundred thousand years back. The aliens were here and they’ve left their mark right under our noses.”

“Prove it. Let’s see the evidence for these other forms,” she said.

“Here,” he said, and the next slide was a cartoon with two panels. In one a cackling witch, leaning over a cauldron, held up a scoop of bubbling green brew to a prince in a coronet. In the next the prince had been turned into a small green frog, still wearing a coronet.

“The classic, the original ur-story,” he said, “a potion that turns a human into a frog. Of course the frog would still be human-sized, but what’s interesting is that the stories all agree on practically every point.” Jack held his hands up, as though delivering a final argument. “Now if that’s not epigenetics, I don’t know what is.”

“Evidence?”

“In Europe it was called Vinum Sabbati,” he said. “Sabbath Wine, consumed by witches at their Sabbaths to transform themselves. The secret was only known to a few scattered individuals in pre-Christian cults. What’s intriguing is that it crops up everywhere in prehistory—Siberia, Africa, Central America—”

“And like Paracelsus, you’ve been ignoring science and tracking down wise women who make this stuff in a village in Guatemala. Carlos sodding Castañeda rides again.”

“Except I made contact on the Internet,” he said, nodding. “It’s difficult. They won’t talk to just anyone. You have to go through a load of tests and trials and initiations to get to the good stuff. But I did it, I bloody did it!”

“There’s no science then,” she said, obscurely disappointed. Why had she ever expected him to take the difficult route and do actual research, collect evidence? Had she been expecting a proper laboratory with labelled samples, or rows of seedlings with different epigenetically determined characteristics?

“I’ve got an actual sample of Vinum Sabbati.” His eyes were shining. It was not love, unless it was self-love. Jack had excelled himself, Jack was on top of the world, as high as a kite. “I can transform a human into any abhuman form. How’s that for science?”

She laughed nervously. “Have you actually tried this stuff?”

He smiled, and for the first time he looked dangerous. “I needed someone who would understand, who has the right mind. You’re the only person I know. It has to be you. This stuff is way beyond Lisa.”

A cold shaft of panic shot through Lottie. Her stomach lurched. The witch’s green potion. The green tea in front of her. Jack’s anxiety that she had to stay. The handcuffs. Why had he handcuffed her to the chair?

“Jack,” she said, “what was in that tea?”

Now he was setting up a compact video camera on a tripod on the other side of the dining table. The red light winked on as he pointed it at her. She swallowed and tugged at the handcuff.

“Vinum Sabbati,” he said. “Lottie, it had to be you. You’re the only one who would understand, and the psychological aspect is key. Paracelsus was bang on about mental imprinting.”

He sighted her through the viewfinder. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said, “the effects wear off in an hour or two. I promise. This is gonna be the biggest breakthrough ever.”

By then she was frantic, pulling and wrenching at the handcuffs, not even noticing the pain, furious, desperate just to get away, the phone dropped, lost, forgotten in her haste. After that, nothing, just a timeless blank.

II

Grant was helping her into her clothes. Lottie was confused. He was putting her shoes on and he kept asking her something over and over.

“Can you drive?” he said. “Do you think you can drive now?”

“Of course I can drive,” she said without thinking, wanting to be helpful, and he helped her into the car. There was another car too, a blue Volvo which seemed vaguely familiar.

“Just go to the A-road,” he said. “Wait there for me. Can you do that?”

He had to repeat it three times. She was fine, she was really fine, nothing was wrong, but she felt fuzzy and confused as though the parts of her brain were not connecting up properly.

Lottie drove slowly down the unpaved road, the car lurching and diving over the ruts and potholes. After two miles, where the road joined with the carriageway, she pulled over on to the verge.

She got out of the car and leaned over a grassy ditch and was thoroughly sick. She vomited again and again. It was not as painful as such bouts could be; her body was simply ejecting foreign material, naturally and thoroughly. When she was finished she heaved once more and it was over.

After that she felt much better. It was getting on to evening—Lottie’s watch had gone—and the contrails and the clouds in the distance were stained pink with the setting sun. Cars and lorries whizzed past; she watched them for a while and then sat down in the car again and turned on the radio, her mind drifting. The nearest experience was jetlag, that odd mental dislocation you had after a long journey across many time zones, to find it was dawn when you were expecting dusk. The songs on the radio were pleasant; they came and went, as soon as they finished she forgot what they were. After a while she realised that she kept feeling her wrist; it was not even bruised. It was not as bad as she thought.

After a while the blue Volvo came down the track. Grant and Lottie embraced for a long time.

“Are you all right?” he asked at last.

“I think so.”

Grant kissed her, then looked up and down the road.

“There’s a lot of traffic—do you think you can drive home if you follow me?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Lottie—you do still sound a bit spaced out.”

She shook her head. “No, really. I’m much better now.”

They drove back, slowly, and as they got closer to home Lottie’s mind started to clear as though they were driving back to reality. She recognised the Volvo, which belonged to a friend of Grant’s. The familiar sight of the Crystal Palace aerial, a landmark showing they were nearly home, further revived her. At home, everything was exactly as she had left it. She had come back to perfect, untouched normality.

That evening they cooked chili con carne together, drank wine, and watched some old movie on DVD, holding hands but talking little. It was only afterwards, when the end credits had rolled, that she asked him.

“Grant—what happened at that house today?”

Grant shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me about it.”

It was unlike Grant to avoid a direct answer. But it was not unfair; he had been dragged in, after warning her not to go, and he had the moral high ground. So she told him as much as she remembered, which was not much: Jack’s shining-eyed enthusiasm, the green tea, the handcuffs, the garbled mixture of epigenetics, history, and folklore, the point when she realised it was all horribly wrong.

“I called your mobile,” said Grant, “and he—Jack—answered. I knew something had happened. I warned him what would happen if he harmed you, and I came over as fast as I could. I borrowed Steve’s car. I found you passed out, and your clothes around the kitchen table.”

“What about Jack? Did you see him?”

“I saw him,” said Grant. Then, finally, “He’s dead, Lottie. He was in the bathroom. Can you remember anything?”

“What happened? Did he overdose, or…?”

“Think, Lottie. Can you remember anything at all?”

She tried, but there was nothing there, just an empty space like the gap between sleeping and waking.

“Blank,” she said.

“There was a lot of blood,” Grant said, even more quietly. “It didn’t look like an accident. It wasn’t suicide.”

Lottie digested the information gradually.

“I wiped everything that might have had your fingerprints on it,” Grant went on. “Got all your clothes, your bag, your phone. I washed up the teapot and put away one cup so it wouldn’t have looked as if he’d just had a visitor. I wracked my brains, but I think I got everything. There’s car tracks in the mud…but no CCTV around there.”

“Do you think I killed Jack?” Lottie asked. A pause, and she swallowed. “Did I kill Jack?”

“If you don’t remember, then there’s no way of telling,” said Grant.

“There was a video camera,” she remembered suddenly. “What—”

“I deleted it,” he said. “Put the camera away. The police could undelete the file maybe, if they think to look for something, but there’s no reason they should.”

“You saw the video,” she said. “You saw what happened after he drugged me.”

“It didn’t get much,” he said. “After the first couple of minutes it’s all off-camera.”

“And what happened?”

“You lost your rag,” said Grant. “Went completely berserk, and you attacked him.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” she said. She recalled the knife block in the kitchen. “Was there a knife?”

“I cleaned up everything I could,” he said. “I made sure there were no forensic traces. I had to break a window to get in, but…that can only help the scene from our point of view. Make it look like a break-in.”

“What happened to my clothes?” Lottie asked.

“I don’t know. All I saw was on that bit of video…you were very angry. Screaming mad. That drug had a bad effect on you.”

“Oh my God,” said Lottie. They sat holding hands on the sofa until the minutes became hours, and Grant suggested they go to bed at last.

She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth, thinking, Today I killed a man. I don’t remember it, but I did. But it did not feel real.

The next day it seemed even more unreal. Whatever the drug was, it had not had any longer-term effects. She looked up some material on substances used by witches and in pagan ceremonies—mushrooms, hemlock, bella-donna. They were used to make something called flying ointment, which gave the illusion of flight. That was why witches believed they could fly on broomsticks. She could not find any drugs associated with transformation spells, but was side-tracked into lycanthropy. In the eighteenth century, lycanthropy was defined as a condition where the sufferer turned into an animal; by the nineteenth century it was the delusion of turning into an animal. Transformation was unlikely. But a drug that made you think you were a wild animal was more plausible.

The next day Grant warned her not to look at the news. Jack was in it, initially as the fourth or fifth item. By the next day he had moved up to second place; this was not the routine burglary-gone-wrong they initially reported, but something more brutal and deliberate. There were pictures of Jack and a girl on a beach. Police were questioning Lisa, Jack’s Australian girlfriend.

Lottie started to worry about the car. Her bright yellow Peugeot had been parked outside the cottage for a couple of hours at least. Someone might have seen it. She remembered hearing a tractor go by. The driver must have noticed her car there. How many of Jack’s acquaintances had a yellow car like that?

Grant told her not to worry.

On the third evening two police officers showed up, one in plainclothes and one in uniform. They sat round the dining table, with Grant hovering in the background, and quizzed Lottie about her relationship with Jack. How long she had known him, when she last saw him, what she knew about his recent activities. They knew from phone records about the call the previous week, and she gave an accurate account of the conversation up to the point he asked her to visit.

“He said it was something huge, but he couldn’t tell me about it.”

“Strange to call just to say he couldn’t tell you anything,” said the plain-clothes man reasonably. It was not quite a question, but it demanded an answer.

“He was very excited,” she said. “He wanted to tell someone about his work.”

“But he wouldn’t say what it was?” The question was calm but insistent, almost incredulous.

“No,” said Lottie, and felt herself reddening. “He just said I wouldn’t believe it.”

There were more questions, and Lottie kept finding herself repeating “I don’t know” to all of them. The police did not seem to mind. At the end they took it down in longhand and gave her the statement to sign. Then went away, politely repeating how sorry they were about the situation.

The story faded out in the media over the next week, until one of the tabloids had an exclusive. Under the headline Satanic Cult Murder, a story gave details leaked from the police investigation, including the autopsy. Jack had not just been killed, but ‘brutally dismembered’. The killing was a warning; police had received emails from a group calling itself Children of Pan claiming responsibility for the killing. The journalists had verified that Jack had been a member of various Internet forums connected with witchcraft, Satanism, and the occult, many of them overlapping with drug use. The Children of Pan hinted that Jack had betrayed some secret, or was about to, and had been punished for it.

The newspaper called him Jack the Ripped. The killing had been violent, brutal, and thorough. Some body organs had been removed and not accounted for.

“Don’t read any of it,” Grant advised her.

“You’ve read about it, though.”

“It’s pretty unpleasant. It’s not going to make you any happier.”

“Is there anything about a yellow car at all?”

“Nothing. They’re more interested in finding the people he was talking to on the Internet.”

For days Lottie was waiting for the police to call again, was looking over her shoulder. Could the police track her by details in her mobile phone? Grant said that the police would only be able to tell the general area it was in at the time, and then only if they did some correlation with mobile numbers, which they would only do for a suspect. She did not seem to be one.

Their alibi was that the two of them had been at home together that Saturday, doing nothing much. But what if they asked Steve about Grant borrowing his car? The police had not even asked what they had been doing that day, but now Lottie did not know if she could lie. She wished she had made an exact note of what Jack was supposed to have said on the phone when she gave the police a new version of the story. But making notes would leave damning evidence on her hard disk that might be found if they searched the place.

Sometimes Lottie wondered about what had really happened. Grant was quite jealous, quite protective. He was much bigger and more powerful than Jack. Had Jack really been dead when Grant arrived, or had he found her unconscious, assumed she had been assaulted, and there had been a fight? Was Grant capable of killing and then lying about it? It was hardly stranger than the idea that she could have killed Jack and remembered nothing about it.

The fear faded gradually, but it did fade. Jack’s girlfriend, Lisa, was released; she refused to talk to the media and flew back to Australia with her parents the same day. The police questioned a man whom Jack had contacted on the Internet, a dealer in herbal remedies and legal highs. They also impounded his laptop, looking for a connection to the Children of Pan emails, but the man was released without charge the next day.

The police issued appeals for witnesses, but there was no new evidence. The story dropped out of the papers. Lottie received a form letter telling her that her statement was being retained as part of an ongoing investigation. And that was it.

One evening Lottie drew the bedroom curtains and noticed how the street was silvered by moonlight. It was almost a full moon, a lopsided seven-eighths moon. That meant it must be a whole month now. The moon would always remind her of that day at the cottage.

Lottie woke with a burning pain in her ankle. It felt as if a rusty manacle were squeezing and biting into her, but the sensation faded as soon as she was fully awake. The alarm clock showed 2:30 a.m. Lottie lay awake, listening in the dark. Grant’s breathing was heavy and regular.

Pain seized her left ankle again.

Was something biting her?

Lottie brought her knee up and touched where it hurt, feeling around her ankle. There were no fleas or ticks or bedbugs, but a sort of hot glow of pain ringing her ankle. Lottie found her whole foot was oddly numb. She could not feel her foot. She explored with her fingers and discovered that her foot was not her foot.

It was scaly, and the shape was exactly like a chicken’s foot. The toes were long and thick and ended in curved talons.

This really is Kafkaesque, she thought.

Shock took over. Lottie felt over the chicken-foot again and again, and explored where it joined on to her ankle. Some impulse made her try to flex the toes on her numb foot—and the huge talons flexed horribly in response. She lay back again, trying to breathe, trying to think calmly. Grant was a shadow next to her, sleeping placidly through it all.

I’ve got to think about this rationally, she thought. Why chicken feet? Why not webbed feet like a frog? Wasn’t she supposed to turn into a frog? Why did it stop at her ankle? Lottie’s thoughts raced, piling up on each other, and then she was racing along some underground tunnel into a maze of dreams.

On Sunday morning Lottie was brushing her teeth before she remembered her experience of the night before. She looked down at the same two ordinary feet that she had always had. She flexed her perfectly normal toes. That was quite some nightmare. Probably it had been triggered by the reminder of the full moon.

Later that morning she saw the moon from the kitchen window. It had filled out and rounded into a complete shining circle. On an impulse she went into the bedroom, threw back the duvet, and saw the long parallel cuts as though the cover had been sliced with open razors.

Lottie heard the pulse thumping in her ears. She examined the cuts clinically. Yes, there were four of them, in the right configuration. There were matching cuts in the duvet itself where stuffing showed through. She tutted involuntarily: that was a nuisance, they’d have to get a new one.

Lottie waited until Grant went out of the house to put in a few hours’ healthy toil on the allotment. Then she went on the computer and Googled the details of the Dorset Ripper killing. According to the known evidence, the house had been broken into, apparently in the middle of the day while Jack was there. He had shut himself in the bathroom, but the intruder or intruders had broken down the door.

The exact cause of death was unknown because of the extensive mutilation. Jack’s abdomen had been sliced open and the chest cavity had been excavated. Most of the organs were still present, but the heart and liver had been removed. Terms like ‘frenzied attack’ and ‘bestial violence’ were used. But the killer had some knowledge of anatomy and surgery, and the killing bore the signs of ritual murder.

Feeling ice-cold, Lottie started an image search on birds’ feet, looking for a match. She started with raptors, eagles, and vultures that tore their prey.

Birds’ feet were the wrong shape. They were all evolved for perching and gripping. The feet she was looking for were more like lizards’. The nearest match was a Komodo dragon. She thought about Siegfried and other myths where people metamorphosed into dragons. Of course, you’d start human-sized, but, like other reptiles, you’d grow and grow over the years and centuries.

Lottie remembered what had happened after Grant had found her and put her in the car. How she had leaned over a grassy ditch and thrown up repeatedly. She had not thought at the time about the sheer volume of what she had thrown up, or the odd taste it left in her mouth. A bit like liver pâté.

Lottie sat very still, listening to her own breathing. She was still there when Grant got back. She heard the door, heard him scraping his shoes and taking them off on the mat, the sound of the coat cupboard being opened and closed. He stopped halfway into the living room.

“Lottie—what’s wrong?”

“When you talked to Jack on my mobile,” she said, “what did he say to you? What exact words did he use?”

Grant shook his head. “I don’t remember the exact conversation. It was so confused…but he kept saying it worked and you were going to kill him.”

“It worked. Meaning his Vinum Sabbati worked.”

“I suppose so.” He stood uncertainly in the doorway.

“Was there a lot of blood?”

“You know there was,” said Grant.

“I mean, a lot of blood on me?”

He nodded slowly.

“On my face and mouth?”

“I had to clean you up,” he said. “I used paper towels from the kitchen, took them with me in a plastic bag, and binned it at a service station.”

“Shit,” said Lottie. Two tears overflowed and rolled down her cheeks.

A second later she was sobbing, and Grant was holding her in his arms. He smelled of earth and vegetation.

“It’s all right, Lottie,” he told her. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” she said, choking on the words. The sobbing subsided by degrees and she was able to talk normally, still holding tight to him, her cheek against his. “That stuff changed me. Flipped all the epigenetic switches and left them there. It’s probably linked to some monthly hormonal cycle; that’s when it takes effect. Every fucking full moon I’ll turn into god-knows-what. The Norwood Builder. The monster inside comes out.”

“The what?”

“It’s what Jack said. I looked it up. It’s a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of The Norwood Builder.’ This builder disappears and it looks like a murder. But it turns out the builder is trying to frame his neighbour. All along he’s hiding in a secret room in his house.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Jack’s theory was that aliens interfered with human epigenetics, then they disappeared. But he’s found where the aliens are. They’re hiding inside us. Just waiting for when the stars are right and they can come out again. But Jack opened the door in me and it can …”

She was sobbing again.

“That bastard’s not going to beat us,” said Grant. “I won’t let him.”

“It’s a full moon tonight,” she said. “You’ll have to tie me up. Lock me in the shed. Restrain me.”

“That didn’t work last time.”

“I’ll go away,” she said. “Grab the tent, take the car and camp in the New Forest or somewhere.”

“Every full moon?” he said. “That’s not going to work.”

Lottie pulled herself away from him. “I know you want to protect me, but I want to protect you too. I read what happened to Jack—”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“What I did to Jack. It’s a carnivorous reptile, like a velociraptor or some shitty thing like that,” she said. “One with long claws for tearing things open. You’re not going to survive that, even if you sleep in chain mail. I am the original proof of epigenetic metamorphosis in Homo sapiens. My beast within. Have you seen how fast lizards move? And it’s probably warm-blooded. My God, I’ve just thought, what if I get pregnant? Oh God, Grant, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?” Lottie realised she was babbling.

Grant waited until he was sure she had finished. He had been crying too, but his brown eyes were steady and he spoke quietly.

“I have an idea what it is,” he said. “There was something on that video I deleted. Just blurred moving shots.…Jack got his fairy tale ending, but the wrong fairy tale. Maybe if he could have made you more scared he would have turned you into a frog. He said the psychological part was the key, didn’t he? But you were angry, not scared. That’s why you turned into that human-dragon-alien thing. Jack got what he deserved. It wasn’t your fault, Lottie, none of it was your fault. You have to believe that.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she repeated. “But it’s going to happen again.”

“It isn’t going to happen again,” Grant insisted. “I’m telling you, Lottie, it’s all over now, it really is.”

She looked at his calm face.

“But I’m going to metamorphose again tonight,” she whispered. “Those claws, they’re like knives …”

Grant held her cheeks in his hands.

“No, no, no,” he said gently. “I know about fairy tales too. And I know how to break the spell. You’re not going to change again. Like Jack said, there’s a psychological part to this. What you believe matters. And we know how to solve this.”

“But how can you stop—”

“I told you, I know about fairy tales. I’m breaking the spell. You’re not a frog. I’m turning you back into a princess forever,” he said, and he leaned forward and kissed her.

SHADOWS OF THE WITCH HOUSE

Canterbury House Sanatorium, Upper Norwood, South London, 1927–37

Unhappy those!—Who darkling sail,

When stars, and ports, and pilots fail.

—Miguel de Cervantes, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings,

And crawled head downwards down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I

Dearest William,

I must confess at once that I am a murderess and a madwoman.

The madness can hardly be a surprise. As you will know, I have spent the last ten years in various institutions, bedlams, clinics, and asylums—or asyla, as George would have insisted.

These have been difficult times, and I have only gradually groped my way back to the light. Before he died, Daniel claimed that the world is made of words. Now I am the one wielding the pen. Perhaps I can write my way out of here, thread the maze by spinning a yarn and finding the exit. Your final struggle with the Whatleys’ Cthulhu-spawn in the church proved that words are our only real weapons against our demons. With my education I should be a mistress of words—Miss Sophie Alexandra Victoria Hetherington, M.A. (Hons) (oxon), no less—but I still can’t get them to obey. They hop and scamper around me like poorly trained animals.

Weia-lala! Think of me as a dotty, doting Ophelia to your Hamlet, both of us hemmed in by supernatural forces, sudden death, and bouts of insanity. Though surely I’m not as wet as Ophelia?

A smaller confession: I have read your account of the events at Dulwich that frightful summer when George and the others died, or at any rate your first draft. I discovered from a mutual acquaintance that you were writing a memoir, and it was not so very much trouble to get into your rooms one afternoon. I was not even lying when I told the porter I was an old friend. You have always been so organised that it was the work of a minute to find where the manuscript was filed in your desk.

One should never read private diaries or other people’s letters, but one always does, doesn’t one? You, I know, are too perfect for such snooping, but forgive me, for I am mad. I hasten to add that I did not attempt to look at the papers in the locked tin box under your bed. I left that particular beast undisturbed for now.

You do make it into a marvellous story. Of course, I remember things differently, and I saw more behind the scenes than you did. I much prefer your version of us—brave, selfless, strong—but I might have to disillusion you a tiny bit. It’s wonderful to be so blind to the faults of others, but does distort one’s view so. Your discretion is admirable, but failing even to hint at Tom’s activities, or George’s appetite for shopgirls and waitresses, makes your narration incomplete if not decidedly unreliable. Tom’s ambition to photograph every one of the perversions in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was surely one of his more interesting foibles, and you missed it entirely. I raided his room and spirited away the worst of his photographs, by the way.

Equally unforgivable is your absolute blindness to clothing. You do not describe a single one of my outfits; even worse, you ignored Jessica’s, and that after all the trouble she went to trying to catch your eye. You never even mention George’s outré waistcoats, which were universally recognised, even by people who didn’t know his name. George’s waistcoats were known far and wide. And Daisy, beautiful Daisy, who was flypaper for every man’s eyes, is quite ignored when most people would have spent pages describing her.

But perhaps I should focus on more important things. When I saw your poor, battered body after they pulled you from the ruins of that church I felt guilty. Guilty that I had not dissuaded you from going, guilty I had not been more help, guilty I had not been there with you.

My small penance was to throw myself into rescuing your reputations and looking after poor Daniel. I explained your marsh gas theory to the police, the newspapers, and everyone else. It caught on very well. It was not a cover-up; it’s just that people like nice, simple explanations that make sense. They insist on them, whereas the mind revolts at stories of ancient beings and other dimensions which make no sense and raise more questions than they answer. I can be very plausible when I put my mind to it—remember all those faux-highbrow parodies I used to submit anonymously to sabotage your magazine at oxford!—and journalists are a lazy bunch, they’re happy to have you do their work for them. I used up the last dying glimmers of my brilliance in making George the hero trying to close down a dangerous church before the congregation were all gassed. The vicar had been sending some quite barking letters to his bishop, and the Church also preferred to believe methane intoxication was the cause rather than anything more theologically embarrassing.

I should have written to you before. Tragically, we may still end up murdering each other. Though I hasten to add that there is simply nobody by whose manly hand I would rather perish. Perhaps I can play Desdemona to your Othello. Be gentle with me.

George had little real understanding of what we faced, but he bulldozed on regardless of the dangers. It was the first challenge he had met that he could not overcome by persuasion or pulling strings, or getting the rest of us to solve it for him. We were George’s cabal, his circle of advisors and fixers, and for the first and last time we disappointed him.

George was a remarkable man, suffused with a perfectly flammable mixture of ambition and talent. He was not an intellectual, with his Fourth Class Gentleman’s Degree gained after too many years at oxford, but he was a superb manipulator, and he knew how to claw to the top in politics. He never wasted a minute. Everything was grist to his mill, whether he was practising his common touch with porters or interrogating Lord Westbrook’s nephew about scandal over cocktails. I was his Lady Macbeth, his indispensable confidante. Of course George always planned to marry some silly mare from the right political dynasty when the opportunity arose. But I would always have been the mistress he plotted with while she was stuck with the kiddies. The two of us, contra mundum—against the world—as he always said.

Yes, I was as easily fooled as anyone by him.

You always saw George as a jolly buffoon, not a megalomaniac little boy who thought the world was his playroom. He always saw himself as the coming man, and he moved the rest of you around like his toys as it suited him. And I was delighted to be by his side, helping set things up, setting you challenges and getting you to compete with one another. He loved thinking up those peculiar forfeits for the losers.

George might have been less entertaining if he ever gained real power. He had an unhealthy fascination with death warrants. George was very much of the Young Turk tendency and thought that progress meant clearing out the dead wood—or killing it yourself. That was his idea of strong, decisive action.

Then George was directed into this Cthulhu business. Oh, he knew about Whatley before you did, but as ever he did not want to be seen as the prime mover. I found an unsigned letter in his desk suggesting to him that here was a business that he might make his name with, that it would be noted by people who matter. But he was not equal to the challenge of things from outside his little world, and the result was the catastrophe you were caught up in.

George’s funeral was a very grand affair in his people’s village. As fiancée presumptive, and hence the next best thing to a respectable widow, I was given a place of honour. I only survived by inhaling half a decanter of sherry carelessly left unguarded in the drawing room.

At least the funeral wasn’t ruined by some silly girl turning up and claiming she was carrying George’s child. It was far from impossible; politicians and philanderers just want to be adored, and it’s no wonder the two are often the same person. George did have his appetites.

I don’t remember much about the other funerals.

Afterwards I was cut adrift, lost at sea. George had been my career-plan, my future. Without him I was lost, a woman on her own.

You were still in hospital. I wanted to see you, but they stopped me. I think they were worried about your mental state, which was precarious for some time. All my attempts to visit or get in touch were gently but firmly blocked. I did, however, manage to send you Tom’s last photographs, his final proof of the reality of that creature. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, but I wanted you to know for sure, just as I know.

After I sent it I understood why we could not see each other again. We would inevitably remind each other of those events, and we would talk about things we should not talk about and open those wounds which we were both still recovering from, tear each other apart. Like reactive chemicals, we needed to be kept apart or destroy each other.

Poor Tom, he gave his life for those pictures. He was the doubting Thomas whose doubts were finally dispelled. Peeping Tom who was finally destroyed by what he saw.

Of course Daisy’s body was never found; nor was Jessica’s. Daniel told the police, rather disjointedly, that she had disappeared into the ground, and they naturally enough thought this must be connected with the collapse of the church. No underground holes were ever found. She was officially declared missing.

It was all over; I dressed entirely in black. I lay in bed all morning and drank my breakfast. Curious, isn’t it, that even the nastiest champagne is perfectly acceptable for breakfast, but decent Chablis is frowned upon? I read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy for days, and listened to gloomy marches on the gramophone. I took comfort from the endless succession of pages, and things settled into a stable equilibrium. I learned to soldier on through my empty life, melancholy crystallising into a shell around me.

“Now I am strong and lapped in sorrow / As in a coat of magic mail,” as that miserable Stevie Smith woman has it.

An existence took shape around me. I still had Daniel, whom I visited every day and went some way to looking after. For that period he was my raison d’être. And poor Daniel’s raison d’être was to get Daisy back from that other world which had taken her.

A small inheritance meant that I was living in my own house. My house-keeper was a taciturn white-haired Irishwoman who came in every morning and tidied up with grim determination. She was often gone by the time I got up. I did not bother to hide the empty bottles, and she must have thought I was the very embodiment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Being wealthy meant that I was merely an eccentric; if I was poor I would have been mad and would have been punished for my moral failings.

I had been diagnosed as having a nervous condition; I was briefly incarcerated but talked my way out of it. After that, at my family’s insistence I dutifully visited a psychiatrist twice a week. If I hadn’t agreed I would have had to go back to some institution where Mummy could see I was Properly Looked After and wring her hands when she visited on Sundays. The prospect of Mummy’s middle-aged friends clucking over me and what a bad end my intellectual ways had brought was too much to bear.

So I endured Dr Hamilton’s twice-weekly inquisitions. I did not like Dr Hamilton, and as he was being paid a guinea a session, I was not too diplomatic in giving my opinions. Like all classicists, I resent how psychiatrists have commandeered Oedipus, Electra, and the others from our field. He in his turn was professional but faintly sinister, like a prosecuting barrister whose questions seem quite harmless until he suddenly turns on you. Like a barrister, I suspected he was preparing his case, a case against my sanity.

Dr Hamilton was bearded and wore a burgundy-coloured velvet jacket and a range of bowties. He was a quiet-spoken sort and maddeningly persistent in his questions. I lay on the couch while he sat out of my line of sight behind me. There was an expansive bay window on one side, but the couch was positioned so my view was filled with a blank wall decorated with African masks. The doctor quizzed me gently about my family, my upbringing, my feelings for my father, my dreams. I’m sure he sent my family back regular reports on my progress; and I’m sure they kept asking if I should be safely in an institution. For my part I was content to play Scheherazade, telling a new story every time, keeping myself out of the asylum for another day each time.

Dr Hamilton believed I had experienced something like shellshock, but as with all his type he thought the roots of the problem lay much deeper. That was why he wanted to excavate the depths of my unconscious and lay bare whatever noxious creatures lurked therein.

I dreamed of Daisy. I know Daniel did, and I expect you did too. They were not fully formed cinematic dreams with a proper narrative, but those long, slow timeless impression-dreams you get while falling asleep. There was water and a smell of sea things, damp stone, Daisy’s voice mumbling drowsily, and a very faint caress of tentacles on naked skin. They were disturbing dreams that took me down a ramp into the darker places of my unconscious. There I slid into my own particular nightmares which scared me awake. But there was something peculiarly horrible about knowing that Daisy was in there, or out there, or in any case somewhere.

Daisy always said she was psychically sensitive. Poor thing, prey as she was to any passing superstition, but in this case she must have been right. I wondered if the dreams were a form of psychic contact. I tried again and again to write down the words she was saying in my dreams, but they were more of the same formless non-language like bad Modernist poetry. Dr Hamilton was not impressed by those dreams. He preferred ones which were more theatrical and gave him greater scope to impose his interpretations. I managed not to shout at him, but I don’t think the encounters moved me an inch closer to sanity.

I had broken with our set since what you aptly call The Horror. The deaths were simply too much: everyone simply froze when I was around, as though I were Banquo’s ghost, or else they tried to pretend nothing was wrong, which was worse. I do not mind being despised, but I will not be pitied. I felt like shouting and screaming and crying the entire time. I soon gave up seeing any of them. I gather you did too. It was at this point that I stole in and gained my illicit preview of your version of events. I wanted also to check on your mental state; it did not seem favourable for a reunion, for reasons which will become apparent.

The only thing that kept me going was looking after Daniel. I have never had much in common with him, and you have to admit he was a peculiar little chap, even for a mathematician. George and I relied on you as a translator because you were always able to follow his ideas, which are quite opaque to those of us to whom mathematics is slightly less transparent than Sanskrit.

Daniel was in an even worse state than I. Rather being in limbo, he was ferreting away at his mathematical explorations day and night. I don’t think he ever left his rooms. I brought round food parcels and made sure he ate. I ordered him to take a bath every week and threatened to bathe him myself if he didn’t. I brought a purse of pennies and sixpences to feed the gas meter and the electricity meter. I even—forgive me, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst!— did some light cleaning.

These visits gave me a purpose in life. Daniel already had a purpose in life: Daisy. She had become an even more ideal object of unrequited love, being a beautiful woman who was not now present to shatter his illusions. Even better, there were no longer other suitors to contend with. She was the princess trapped in a tower, and he alone might be able to rescue her. He had no doubt that he would achieve it sooner or later. Her knight in shining glasses, with a pen for a lance and a steed made of mathematical equations. Daniel recounted over and over what he had seen on the night of Daisy’s disappearance. George had stationed them outside the church, ostensibly to prevent anyone else from entering and to keep an eye out, but mainly to keep Daniel out of the way. George was showing signs of racial paranoia—a polite way of describing it—and was convinced that Daniel was a Semitic spy among us in league with the enemy. Fortunately he never suspected just what ran in my blood.

Daniel was happy just to be alone on a summer evening with Daisy. You must have known how much he adored her, even though they barely talked. He was her ardent, tongue-tied admirer, oppressed by how many other admirers she had. Daisy was pure and innocent, but never chaste. Tom would ask Daisy quite casually to come to his studio and pose naked—and she would oblige without batting a beautiful eyelid—but Daniel would no more think of asking her to walk out with him than he would tear off her clothes and ravish her there among the gravestones.

Daniel says they were standing quite close together, by which he means just out of arms’ reach, when there was a terrible rending, thundering noise from inside the church. He and Daisy looked at each other, and he felt the ground shiver under his feet. And instead of being on the grass, they were on that peculiar stonework—crazy paving is just the right term for it—and sinking into a sort of bowl.

Daniel scrambled on to the grass, but when he turned to give Daisy a hand she was just standing there. Daisy never was quick on the uptake. He said the stonework around her was unfolding, and even though she was in the same place Daisy seemed to be getting further and further away, and walls and buildings were growing up around her. Daniel said it was like looking through a kaleidoscope that changed as you watched. The buildings did not seem to have proper shapes—they were like trick pictures which first seem convex and then concave depending on how you look at them. Daniel called to Daisy but she was already beyond reach.

Behind her was a trap-door set at an angle to the ground, an Alice in Wonderland door that was at once tiny and immense. It opened into darkness, and as the angle changed the last Daniel saw was something, or some things, squeezing its way out, and the sight of it blanked out everything else until he found himself alone in the churchyard with the church collapsing into ruin a hundred feet away.

At the time Daniel could make no sense of what he saw through the trap-door, but he later concluded that the long feelers, the rubbery limbs with their prodigious claws, the scaly, gelatinous mass must all have been part of a single entity. It was that thing which is called Cthulhu. And Daisy was looking up and up at the being which loomed over her, a mountain of primordial slime congealed into pulsating, animated life.

It sounded truly vile, but perhaps Daniel’s insensitivity and cool objectivity shielded him when others would have collapsed into hysterics. I could not be quite so insouciant if I literally saw the bottom fall out of my world, fall into a pit filled with squirming monsters.

“And that’s exactly where she is now. You understand, there is no time in R’lyeh,” said Daniel. “It has many spatial dimensions—too many for us to perceive—but no time dimension. Everything there is frozen; there is only the impression of movement. Cthulhu exists permanently, in our past and our future.”

“A sort of tableau,” I said. I thought of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with its eternally youthful lovers always just on the point of kissing but never quite touching, its frozen, silent music. “Or perhaps it might be like a play. The play itself is eternal, but we experience it in our own time. What time is it now in Elsinore—is Hamlet alive or dead?”

“Daisy can’t be there for any length of time, strictly speaking,” said Daniel. “When she reappears no physical time will have passed. Nothing happens in R’lyeh. That thing can’t touch her. Cthulhu can’t ever leave R’lyeh.” He did not sound quite so sure of himself. Maybe even Daniel was guilty of wishful thinking. “I suppose a three-dimensional projection into time might be possible …”

“Just as Hamlet comes alive every time someone plays him?” I asked.

He gave me the look that mathematicians sometimes give non-mathematicians, which is more pity than scorn. Like Pauli’s reaction to a particularly sloppy theory: “It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.”

“But those dreams…” I said.

“Mental images of the last moment before worlds separated,” he said. “Sense impressions. Just dreams.”

Although it made no sense to me—like you, I have trouble telling advanced mathematics from raving madness—he appeared to have some grasp of how her imprisonment worked and thought she might be released. I too was aware of the risk. The way that led to Daisy led also to Cthulhu. If Daniel opened the gates for her to step back through, what rough beast might come with her, its hour come round at last?

Daniel was in thrall to Daisy’s beauty and tormented by dreams. He worked on and on, ignoring day and night. He kept going until he collapsed from exhaustion, then dreamed of Daisy until he woke and took up where he had left off. My visits were perhaps his only distraction from this cycle. I had nothing else to do, and I managed to visit at least once a day.

If he got close to a breakthrough, I wondered whether I would have to lace his meat pies with cyanide. Where does one get cyanide from now? It has become so much more difficult since those poisoning cases; even the man in Boots the Chemist knows to ask questions. As it happens foresight failed me, and there was no need for cyanide.

Sometime around then I paid a visit to you when I knew you were out, and read your account of the Dulwich Horror. I worried that you too might have Plans; it was reassuring that you were not planning anything regrettable, but I was half-sorry not to have an excuse to see you again. Even if it would be for a duel.

I let myself into Daniel’s rooms as usual that evening. He lived in a furnished top-floor flat in a converted Victorian house on Knight’s Hill. The place was run by a sort of Jewish benevolent association. His neighbours were shabbily respectable, retired professional men whose savings had run low and who hid themselves from the world. They were a queer, reclusive lot; I heard them moving around sometimes. Daniel had a bathroom, bedroom, and a room with a gas fire and a table that served as kitchen, dining room, living room, and parlour. For Daniel it was simply the space where he worked. I referred to it as the domdaniel, but the joke fell flat when I had to explain that a domdaniel is an old word for a wizard’s cave.

Daniel was more responsive than usual, and even greeted me when I came in. He was at the table, with his notes and books spread out in front of him. Nothing else in the room had moved since the previous day. I started unpacking groceries from my basket.

“Tell me the story about the sea-shell again,” he said, putting down his pen and rubbing his eyes. He really was reacting to me.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “a man set an impossible challenge to find the cleverest inventor in the world: threading a cord through a winding sea-shell. The shell was so convoluted that nobody ever succeeded in doing it. The man took the shell, went from country to country, and eventually the puzzle fell to a man called Daedalus.”

I filled the kettle from the single tap and put it on the gas burner. I lit the gas and extinguished the match with a balletic flourish. Old habits die hard.

“Daedalus found an ant and attached a strand of spider’s web to its leg, and lured it into going through the shell by putting a drop of honey at the other end. The ant took the line of spider’s web with it. Then Daedalus attached a very fine silk thread to the web and pulled that through, and then did the same with a thicker silk thread, and he finally tied the thread to the cord and pulled it through.”

I took plates from the wooden rack and laid out bread and cold meats and butter.

“Clever man,” said Daniel. “He realised that to get through to the other side, you just have to find something small enough to go first, and then everything else can follow afterwards.”

“Too clever for his own good,” I said. “The man with the shell was King Minos in disguise, who wanted to kill Daedalus for betraying him. He knew that the only one who could solve the puzzle was Daedalus, who was hiding in exile. But Daedalus gave himself away because he could not resist the challenge.”

“Daedalus was clever,” said Daniel. “And we need to do the same. We need to find the ant, something that can get through that opening into the other world—then we can put through a thread and a string and a rope, and pull Daisy back. I’m not speaking literally, of course.”

Daniel seemed pleased that he was now able to put things so easily into terms I could understand. Heaven knows it took enough rounds of question-and-answer for him to understand the problem.

I passed him the corkscrew and a bottle of wine to tackle.

The kettle boiled, and I did my best to turn a block of instant soup into something resembling actual potage du jour. Cookery is not my métier.

Daniel was still gazing fixedly at the spiral corkscrew when he noticed me holding out the wineglasses expectantly.

“It goes down to a point,” he said. “A spiral ends in a mathematical point—”

“Just open the Chablis, Daniel darling,” I said.

We poured two glasses and toasted Daisy, as always. The princess in the tower, waiting to be rescued by her gawky prince.

As I cleared away the things on the table to make space for supper, I noticed a small brown volume, definitely antique, in a peculiar alphabet. I had never seen it before.

“Is that a new book?”

“A very old one,” said Daniel, literal-minded as ever. “It’s about the Qabala. Jewish number mysticism.”

“You read Hebrew?”

“I had to in my family,” he said, making a face. Daniel had never mentioned his family before. I don’t think I realised he had one. I think someone said he was an orphan.

“As a matter of fact, this book got me into mathematics. When I was ten, I found it in my grandfather’s library, and he let me have it. The idea is that God made the world out of words. If you turn the letters of those words into numbers you can transform them with mathematical operations, ‘turn them back into the words that are the world.”

“The magic of words,” I said. “Like the old Greek logos.”

“Sort of,” he said. “But these words don’t mean, they are. There’s no understanding them, any more than you understand rocks or trees. It doesn’t matter if it’s said by a human, or a parrot, or just carved on a stone. The words are reality.”

There was a prickling at the back of my neck. Daniel was getting into dangerous territory.

“I tried some of the formulae, and of course they didn’t work. I didn’t become invisible or fly. My grandfather was impressed by how hard I worked at it, though; he started to show me some real mathematics—making magic squares—and I was hooked.”

“Why are you reading it now?”

“Something I remembered…Yosher-Sephiroth, a gateway between universes.”

“Yother-soff-what?”

“Numbers and consciousness meeting in eternal light, everywhere at once,” he said. “It’s a sign of madness, isn’t it, when nonsense starts to make sense? Madness or genius. The Qabala is supposed to be a short-cut to cosmic illumination—”

“Pour another glass, will you, O Illuminated one? And do have some soup.”

He poured, but he was nettled by being brought back to the everyday. “I don’t like it that you come here out of pity,” he said.

“I come here because I like you,” I said, leaning over to plant a kiss on his cheek. He coloured instantly, as I knew he would.

“I’m a freak,” he said. “All I know is maths. I can’t make witty conversation like George and Will and Tom. I’m not handsome or athletic or rich. I can’t even dress smartly.”

“Oh, Daniel,” I said, dismayed. He had never said anything like this before. “What you’re suffering from is a lack of perspective. You’re comparing your weaknesses to their strengths. You’re cleverer than George and as athletic as Tom. Everybody feels insecure about themselves, Daniel, but what they don’t realise is that everyone else is too busy with their own insecurities to notice yours.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said. “You’re beautiful, and clever, and—”

“—and overweight. And as for freakishness—Daniel dear, you’re a perfectly normal mathematician. You look just like one. But me, I’m a woman with a first-class degree. I know nothing about dress-making or flower arranging or babies or any of the other things other ladies talk about. I might as well have two heads. Which of us is the freak?”

Daniel smiled ruefully.

“To Daisy,” I said, raising my glass again, and we clinked. We ate a little and then he went on, as I knew he would.

“We know too much, you and me,” said Daniel. “Either we try to forget it, or use it for our own ends.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you could—wouldn’t you try to bring Daisy back?”

“Of course,” I said. I hoped he did not notice the hesitation. I had my doubts, even then.

“I’ll take you up on that,” he added cryptically, patting the book. “I want to try you out with a bit of cabbalism later.”

After we had eaten I did the washing up and cleared things away. Daniel started tossing a coin, then several coins together, which tinkled and clattered on the table top and threatened to roll off.

“You’ll lose money that way,” I warned. “What are you doing that for?”

“Generating random numbers,” he said.

“I thought you told George that there was no such thing as random,” I said. “Everything is caused by something else, like clockwork or billiard balls.”

“To all intents and purposes, tossing coins does generate random patterns. The question is whether it’s possible to influence the pattern.”

I filled the percolator for coffee. I can’t cook, but I can brew wonderfully.

“Have you ever heard of Maxwell’s demon?” I shook my head. “The ant in the shell, the smallest possible effect. The water in the percolator is a mixture of hot and cold molecules mixed up together. Suppose you had a tiny being—Maxwell’s demon—working a tiny gate between the two halves of the percolator. He would open it only for hot molecules going one way and cold ones going the other. Eventually you’d get one half of boiling and one half of freezing water.”

“That sounds like magic,” I said.

“People have been arguing whether it’s real for a long time. It’s all about entropy. The Demon seems to defy physics because it doesn’t expend energy, it’s just pure information, do you see?”

“Of course not. In the meantime,” I said, lighting the gas burner again with a match, “I’ll do it this way.”

“If you control information, energy is your slave. You could make nebulae collapse into a point, or explode stars into supernovas …”

He tossed the coins again and made a note.

“Coin tosses are random,” said Daniel. “Like the movement of water molecules. Unless something—Maxwell’s demon, call it—influences them.”

“You think your demon can give the coins a nudge—”

“No!” he said. “No nudging! No physical force, just the transfer of information.”

“You’ve lost me,” I said. “As usual.”

Daniel tossed coins and made notes. After the percolator bubbled without demonic assistance, I brought the cups over.

“Now,” he said, “look at this: it’s the number of heads I get out of tossing six coins. Random, no?”

He showed me a row of numbers: a string of fives and threes and fours and twos and the occasional one and one six.

“If you say so,” I said. I fitted a cigarette into a holder and lit it, and wondered about a glass of brandy. Being with Daniel was so wearying sometimes.

“I’ve been trying a charm for the last couple of days,” he said. “I’ve not had much luck—so to speak. I want you to try it.”

My scalp prickled. I had a sense of déjà vu, of something terrible about to happen. The two of us had been here before, talking like this, and then something ghastly—

“It’s all about the transfer of information,” Daniel said. “From a pattern in your head to a pattern in random coin tosses. If you can do that you can do anything. You only get those dreams when you’re just dropping off to sleep, when your brain is in that neutral phase, like radio static. That’s when the pattern comes across from R’lyeh.”

He tossed the coins and made another note. Three heads.

“Or with Ouija boards. You could transfer thoughts from anywhere to anywhere else, send an encyclopaedia across the solar system, across dimensions. Transmit your mind through space—through time, if Einstein is right. ‘Spukhafte fernwirkung,’ he called it, ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

He tossed again. Four heads.

“Modern science is full of funny ideas,” I said.

“Mutation—that’s a random process. What if you could influence it, produce specific mutations or changes …”

“You mean like Flora Whatley’s child,” I said.

“That thing in the church, it probably needed Maxwell’s demon to keep it stable.”

I laughed and was about to say something about the biology of dragons and angels dancing on pinheads when Daniel abruptly took my hand, pressed the sixpences into my palm, and closed my fingers around them.

“You try. Just shake them and drop them on the table,” he said. Light gleamed from his glasses. He read out some strange words from a slip of paper and looked expectantly at me.

I felt the weight of the coins in my hand. If I refused, I would lose Daniel. He was making such a small request. If I turned him down he would know I did not wish him to succeed, and that would tear open a rift between us. I would lose a precious friend. And, if I stopped seeing him, I would not be able to keep an eye on his progress.

I wanted to stall, but the insistence in that gaze was powerful. I was thinking of how to forestall him next time as I shook up the coins like dice and slapped them down on the table.

The six coins all showed heads.

“I’ll be damned,” said Daniel. “It works. Ha! You do have the power.”

“You always tell me not to read anything into isolated statistical thingummies,” I protested, even as he scooped up the coins and pressed them into my hand again.

Slowly I shook and tossed again.

Six heads.

Daniel beamed as though he had discovered a new planet. I held up my hands so he could not make me toss a third time.

“Daniel, that’s enough. Stop this now.”

“Just one more,” he pleaded. “One more thing. Then I’ll never ask you to do anything again.”

He was going through his notes and found a slip of paper with some words written out in big block capitals.

“I don’t think it’s wise to be doing this,” I said. “I don’t understand this, and I’m not sure if you do.”

“Sophie,” he said, holding up the paper, “all I’m asking you to do is to read out a few words. For Daisy. For me. Just this one time. You can do it.”

I hesitated.

“If you don’t help me,” Daniel said suddenly, “I swear I’ll never see you again. I swear it.”

That was a low blow. I would not have expected it from Daniel. I had never thought of him as ruthless, but he meant what he said. I took the proffered slip and looked at the string of meaningless syllables. They might have been transcribed from Hebrew for my benefit, but I think perhaps it was some other language.

“What are these words?”

“It took me an age to calculate it,” said Daniel, not without pride. “The shortest path to cosmic illumination. To open the way to understanding.”

He sat facing me, arranged six coins in front of him, and placed his hands palm-upwards on the table.

I could have deliberately mispronounced the incantation or left out one syllable. But that would be dangerous. And perhaps Daniel did know what he was doing; I had never known him to be wrong. Perhaps this was the only way I could help him.

I read out the words slowly and carefully. It was a tongue-twister, but I managed it without any mistakes.

I once saw a newsreel of a novelty act, a sword swallower who swallowed a lit neon tube. The effect was most peculiar: you could see the glow from inside him outline his whole ribcage. That was what I was reminded of when I saw the light coming from Daniel, spilling from his eyes, his open mouth, as though a ball of light had exploded inside his head. His lips moved again, but there was a tremendous flash and I felt the heat. I must have stepped back then, dazzled and blinded.

My vision was full of a dark after-image, a human-shaped form suddenly transmuted into light. Daniel was burning like a hundred torches, a human bonfire, still sitting there. His clothes were blazing, and I could not see him for flame and smoke. It never occurred to me for an instant that I might have saved him then.

I screamed and backed away, half feeling my way out of his room and into the corridor. I was out of the building before I looked up and saw, through the dark blobs of after-image, his window lit up with writhing flames.

There were shouts of “Fire!” from somewhere in the building. Cold night air brushed my ankles, my face. I leaned against a wall, breathing in gasps. People were coming out of the building and the adjacent houses. Everybody was looking up to the burning house.

Daniel had his illumination all right, but it was too much, far, far too much for him. I did not know whether it was a miscalculation or whether it had succeeded and the light was too great for the unprepared human brain to tolerate. Perhaps he over-estimated his own ability to withstand what he invoked. Perhaps he was not ready for it. After all, it was a work that others had spent lifetimes preparing themselves for, and he had made the entire journey in a few weeks.

Of course I had heard of spontaneous human combustion—who can forget Krook’s fiery end in Bleak House? But these days science has dismissed it as something of a myth. They say it’s caused by drunks dropping cigarettes on themselves, or falling on to gas fires. They say that the laws of thermodynamics mean a person cannot just burst into flames. And in a sane world, perhaps it could not happen.

Perhaps Daniel had achieved the understanding he sought; but I was reminded again of how Daedalus had been tricked into revealing himself by the puzzle of the shell. A being who could makes stars explode could probably do the same with people.

I was dazed, looking up at the smoke and the flames, but that did not matter because everybody else was as well. Nobody was looking at me. Nobody would connect me with Daniel’s death. I had never met his neighbours and did not think they even knew me by sight.

“Miss Hetherington! Excuse me, may I have a minute of your time?”

A taxi glided to the kerb a few feet away, and an unfamiliar voice was calling me, a woman with an American accent.

The taxi door was opened. I was confused and any exit would do; I sat down in the jump seat. Opposite me was a vision straight out of the movies: a blonde bob that shone like burnished gold, and the sort of dress you don’t see in this country. Make-up by Coco Chanel, handbag from New York. Seeing her, I understood what was meant by the phrase ‘looking like a million a dollars.’ She was all that and more. She could have been the moll of a successful Chicago gangster or a Hollywood starlet—or a Hollywood starlet playing a gangster’s moll.

“I’m Estelle,” she said. Offering a silver case, “Cigarette?”

Estelle instructed the driver to take us back to my house. His crewcut told me he was not a real taxi driver at all, but another American. Estelle lit my cigarette with a lighter which flashed with jewels in the half-darkness.

“Did you see what happened?” I asked. I was still in shock, running on instinct.

“The fire? We saw a bright light, and then you came out. That’s all. Do you want to tell me about it?”

As she put her lighter away, I had a glimpse into her handbag and saw an ivory handle nestling among comb, lipsticks, and perfume bottle. That handle was not a hairbrush; it was a double-barrelled pistol. I had been meant to see it. Next to the gun was a big silver pendant in the shape of a swastika on a chain.

“About that fire,” she said.

“Daniel,” I said. “He was trying to do something, I don’t know what happened …”

I choked. The only reason I did not crack up entirely was that Daniel’s death was still so unreal. The uncontrollable weeping would come later. I could not believe I would not find Daniel still in his flat tomorrow, transcribing pages of numbers and symbols. Estelle nodded as though it were the most natural thing in the world that Daniel should have gone up in flames.

“It figures,” she said. “It’s the right night for it. We were wondering if we’d see something tonight.”

“See something?” I repeated dully.

“I work for a certain organisation,” she said. “I’m sorry if that sounds mysterious. We work against certain outside interests, if you know what I mean.”

“Not exactly,” I parried.

“I think you do,” she said. “You’ve had experiences. What happened in that church in Dulwich was not—it wasn’t an accident, was it? It was outside interests.” She looked to see if I understood.

“You mean outside interests like—” I started boldly, but I choked on the next word. “Like—Cthulhu?” I croaked.

“Sister,” she said with the ghost of a smile, “Cthulhu is the bellhop. He runs errands for the big boys.”

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“There’s a war on,” she said. “There has been for a long, long time. Between people like us and people like the Whatleys. It’s bigger than you think. Sometimes it’s just individuals, sometimes it’s whole secret societies, cults, front organisations. Sometimes they infiltrate governments.”

“And what about you—are you a secret society too?” I asked.

“We fight fire with fire,” she said.

George was a connoisseur of secret societies. He joined absolutely everything at university from the Bullingdon to the Yellow Room, worming and burrowing his way towards the beating heart of power, quickly dropping out of those which gave no benefits. His view was that there were really two sorts. One type were dining clubs for like-minded chaps which gave them a chance to make connections and talk shop without being overheard by anyone who wasn’t the right sort. The other type were genuinely clandestine, with layers and layers of hidden hierarchy above the rank and file. Those were the interesting ones, the dangerous ones.

“A secret society mainly keeps secrets from its members,” George told me. “Especially about what its real purpose is and who’s really running the show.”

I wondered just who had directed George to take an interest in that church, and whether he had been expendable to them.

“Do you actually know who you’re working for?”

I asked. “I know who I’m working against,” Estelle fired back.

We travelled on in silence for a minute while I digested this.

“Are you taking me for a ride?” I asked flippantly, in a mock American accent.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. She was only half-joking. Estelle was used to being in control. She was pleasant and radiated a little human warmth, but she had a burnished hardness about her.

I scanned her face, looking for lines around her eyes and mouth. How old was she exactly? A perfectly frozen twenty-five, I decided. A wizened heart under an enamelled, scratchproof surface of youth.

Estelle seemed like the sort of person who appreciated the direct approach.

“What is this about—what is Cthulhu?” I asked.

“Nobody knows anything about Cthulhu,” she said. “And anybody who tells you otherwise is talking bull. Pinning Cthulhu down is like trying to shine a spotlight on a shadow. All you get are contradictions. I guess you’ve seen enough of him to know which side you’re on.”

She gave me a meaningful look.

“So which side are you on?” she asked at last.

“I’m a deserter,” I said. “You say there’s a war on; well, I’ve deserted. I’m not fighting on anybody’s side. I’ve seen too much—I’ve seen—Daniel—”

And then I started crying. I could not stop, could not form a sentence. Estelle patted my knee and handed me paper tissues from a small packet. I kept wiping my eyes and blowing my nose and breaking out in sobs again. I had never seen paper tissues before.

They took me home and helped me into the house, Estelle and her driver. They sat me down in an armchair and gave me a glass of brandy. The driver stood over me while Estelle prowled the house, looking for something. The driver was not a big man. His suit was cut well enough to disguise most of his bulk, but he was muscle-bound, one of those American football player types. When I tried to get up he pushed me back down again, harder than he needed to. His eyes were dark and unfriendly.

I could hear Estelle murmuring, and she passed by the doorway with one hand outstretched as though dowsing for water. After a while she found what she was looking for. She appeared in the doorway with a parcel under her arm.

“Let’s go,” she said. The driver shot a questioning look towards me. “Leave her be.”

“You’re kidding me,” said the driver. “Her?”

Estelle’s mouth set in a hard line. “Let’s go.”

The driver drew a knife—the biggest knife I have ever seen, with saw teeth down one side, one of those trench knives—and turned on me. He held the point under my chin so I was forced to look up into his cold eyes.

“We know what you are,” he said. “We’re watching you. Any monkey business and you’ll see what happens.” I felt the cold metal of the knife blade against my chin, forcing me to raise my head until I was looking at the ceiling. “You got that?”

His tone suggested he did not see me as a person but as something else, something that could be exterminated without conscience. Those who fight monsters may become monsters themselves…Nietzsche is dreadfully overrated, but he was right about some things.

“She’s got it,” said Estelle.

The driver stepped back and sheathed his knife with great deliberation. The blade had an engraved pattern of four runes etched into it. I thought of Daniel’s magic words carved into rocks.

The driver gave me a final look of contempt and stalked out.

Estelle patted my arm sympathetically.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “We’re no angels…but I guess you know how it is in wars. Don’t worry about him; I can take care of him if he tries to bother you.”

I said nothing.

“Deserting’s a smart choice. You’re best off out of this whole business,” said Estelle. “Get yourself a nice husband, have babies, have a regular life.” She looked around the place one last time. I don’t know if she was envious of my settled existence or appalled by the ramshackle condition of my living room. “Look after yourself, sweetie.”

They were gone and I was all alone.

I could not imagine ever having a normal life. Daniel was dead and I could not care about anything anymore. All gone. The worst had happened and it was over. I might see mirages from time to time, but I would not dream again of Daisy. The connection, whatever it was, had been cut.

The oddest thing was the expression on Daniel’s face as the illumination burst out from him. He looked quite serene, happy even, for the first and last time, even as his flesh melted and dissolved into the roaring flames, haloed with smoke like a mediaeval martyr.

It felt like the end of everything.

It was not the end.

II

“My new collection is a radical exploration—the first true exploration!—of the most important of all human emotions,” announced Herbert, as soon as I signalled that all the visitors had their drinks.

There were twenty-three of them—I know, I counted the glasses—a mixed flock of possible buyers, small-time critics and some friends Herbert had slipped in as plants to make admiring sounds. The tradition of the professional claque in the audience extends across all the performing arts, and presenting sculpture is one.

Herbert’s studio was a sort of abandoned factory or workshop for assembling bicycles. It smelled faintly of gear-oil and leather. It was spacious but unheated, and the temperature was arctic; the guests kept their coats on. The space was artfully lit with just a few spotlights. This created dramatic shadows, a few bright pools to focus the concentration on the works beneath their dustsheets. It also hid all the clutter and decay in the corners.

Herbert was not an imposing figure, but like other artists he made the most of what he had. With his shaved head, neat beard, and workman’s jacket he looked unusual enough and evoked shades of Lenin. He had a riding crop which he used as a pointer or slapped his leg with to emphasise a point. He spoke loudly and his sentences got slower and slower as he went on.

“The most primal, the most neglected of human emotions. My sculptures are the concrete expression of that intangible sense which runs deep across every culture, every civilisation, and every race in human history. What is that emotion?”

He had slowed almost to a stop, and the audience was rapt now. It was so cold I could see their breath in the air.

“What is that emotion?” Herbert repeated, speeding up again and waving the riding crop. “What is deeper than hate, deeper than love, deeper than fear—deeper even than lust?”

The shrouded forms gave no hint. Whatever was under those white sheets was impossible to guess. Even I had not seen them; Herbert had covered everything up before we started making preparations for the show.

“What is that feeling, which is so essential to our survival?”

“Boredom,” suggested the man from the Norwood News. He was a middle-aged hack who had downed his Sekt in one gulp and tried to pick up another before I whisked the tray away from him.

“No!” said Herbert, pointing at him with the crop. “Boredom is the affliction of the over-civilised, the idle middle classes—the diseased brains of those who have not discovered what it is to work, to create! Pah, boredom, I spit on it! No, what I bring you comes from mankind’s furthest history, it is the key to our survival and the greatness of our aesthetic power as human beings.”

Even I was beginning to get interested now, but I did wonder if Herbert’s creation could be equal to the build-up he was giving it.

“What I bring you, ladies and gentlemen, is the pure essence of disgust!” And with that he whipped the dust sheet off the nearest sculpture. It was painted plaster over cloth and wooden battens—Herbert was not the sort who could afford stone—but competently executed. It was not completely human, but approached humanity in some degree. The body was roughly bipedal with a forward-slumping aspect, and an unpleasant rubberiness about it. Black wings rose over it like broken umbrellas. It was in the act of feeding, and its face was buried in a mass of entrails—real entrails, I realised, remembering the butcher’s boy who had visited while I was helping with the glasses. I had assumed he was bringing cold meat or something, but of course it was the finishing touch.

The audience gasped in unison. Some sounded more staged than others. “The monstrous, the hideously deformed, dripping necrotic ichor, squamous forms pulsating and plashing—”

Ah, Bohemia!

Where talent is less important than aspiration. Where to flout convention is the mark of genius. Where skill is redundant if not actually passé, and complete ignorance of artistic convention (except to mock it) is very heaven.

We all sneer—or at least I do—at that American who sells painting courses by post with the slogan “Every Man a Rembrandt.” In Bohemia, every man is a Picasso, every woman an Isadora Duncan, a Zelda Fitzgerald or a Virginia Woolf, heaven help us.

I met the Bohemians through a young man called Carl whom I found at the greengrocer’s sorting through the cabbages. He wanted one for a still life, and was looking for exactly the right vegetable. The greengrocer was completely baffled by this performance.

“Too Impressionist, do you think?” he said, holding one up to the greengrocer. “What do you think, what is this cabbage trying to say to us?”

“I don’t talk to ’em myself,” said the greengrocer, suspecting he was being made fun of.

“Ask for a Cubist one,” I suggested.

“What about this?” Carl said, holding up a Brussels sprout. “A miniature, perhaps?”

I picked up a cauliflower. “Perhaps a Surrealist approach?”

“Excuse me,” said the greengrocer. “I got customers to serve. You two can carry on outside if you want.”

We giggled like schoolchildren and ran out together. It was the first time I had laughed since…well, for quite some time. Half an hour later we were holding hands in a tea room and still laughing. Carl had a boyish enthusiasm for life and an infectious good humour. He also mixed splendid cocktails and had divinely thick eyelashes. No, I never was the sort who would get myself to a nunnery. The dead heart comes back to life, beating painfully, dull roots stirred by spring rain.

When Carl left school his parents offered him a choice between the law, the army, or banking. Carl chose art. Paris was daunting, but he found his niche in South London and had been devoting himself to painting with like-minded friends for more than a year. Carl needed a patron. I needed a lover. It was a perfect arrangement. I was a vamp, a vampire, feeding off Carl’s energy and joie de vivre. The transfusion gradually revived me.

Carl belonged to an artistic set inhabiting the corners and crevices of Norwood. These soi-disant Bohemians were less talented, less ambitious, and less wealthy than their fellows in Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Lacking salons, they met in dingy apartments and cafés and jazz clubs.

The Bohemians have a hard life; they have to listen to bad music and worse poetry, and admire one another’s excruciating artworks. There was Carl’s older friend Herbert, who sported a goatee beard and disguised his Northern accent, except when he was drunk, and another sculptor called Richard and a playwright called Gregory. There was an earnest bespectacled American called—of all things!—Chuck, who was researching an academic treatise, and a cynic called Julian alleged to be a writer. Carl said that Julian wrote lucrative filth under a pen-name. I doubted whether Julian had ever published anything, but he was a remittance man whose family paid him to keep his flamboyance away from their county.

The women, sadly, were mainly uneducated camp followers and hangers-on, chorus girls who aspired to be dancers and the occasional slumming deb like me. My special friend was Claudia, who also wore black. She was tall and slender with long dark hair, and clung to me like an elongated shadow. She was a neurotic thing, but easy company, so long as one didn’t mind hearing about her heartless lovers and how beastly they were, in great detail. Claudia was an accomplished shoplifter and could drink any amount of wine at any hour without visible effects—both talents which impressed me greatly. When she could be bothered, Claudia was literary. She had written a series of lengthy suicide notes which she was in the process of turning into an epic poem, or a play, or perhaps an opera, depending on the day of the week.

It all felt awfully déclassé, a step down into an inferior society. All of us in George’s coterie we were the crème de la crème; we were the finest of our kind; we were Olympian. George was a kind of miniature Zeus, a powerful ruler complete with his weakness for mortal women. Tom was a clear-sighted Apollo, master of light and arts with a Leica instead of a lyre; Jessica was virginal Athena, invincible on the tennis court, builder of cities; Daisy was Aphrodite, goddess of love unmatched in beauty. But perhaps that immortal aura which surrounds them is nothing but the glow of nostalgia.

The Bohemians were a properly motley crew, leftovers and remnants without a first-class degree or a first-class mind among them. One needed a strong nerve to listen to some of their inane conversation, but alcohol does soothe the mind wonderfully. As do other substances; we even visited opium dens in the East End.

They were eclectic. They lived precariously without real jobs or family money. They could not afford to dress well, so they shunned fine clothes; the boys dressed like Continental labourers, the girls like gypsies. My colourful cast-offs were soon redistributed in unlikely fashion combinations. Something always turned up to keep them in cheap wine for another week. They were truly bohemian in that they moved around at need, staying in one another’s rented rooms or houses or lofts or garrets. If anyone’s uncle or cousin had an empty property they would ‘look after’ it and it would become a kind of commune for a few months.

I found myself hostess to a constantly changing cast of houseguests acting out their dramas around me. Carl officially occupied the guest bedroom, and the others took what rooms they could or camped out on sofas or chaises longues or floors. The housekeeper muttered darkly in her Irish brogue and cleaned around them.

One of the boys fixed the old grandfather clock. For some reason it only chimed at midnight. Conversation stopped, the fire crackled, and the shadows seemed to quiver as though the house hesitated slightly before entering the new day, as though it might be going somewhere else. I invented a ritual which said that when the clock chimed everyone had to empty their glass and refill from the nearest bottle, and that cheered things up.

I had, in effect, acquired an entire salon to lord it over. I was never tyrannical, but I like to feel I quashed a few of the more vividly atrocious oeuvres before they could be released on a helpless world, so I did some good.

An old black tomcat with a ragged ear took up residence, taking advantage of the supply of scraps to scavenge and dirty plates to lick, and making himself at home. This small feline bohemian was quickly christened Griddlebone. Like the others, he was a friendly creature who would happily share a bed with anyone and forget about it the next morning.

I did not permit Carl to use the house as a studio. That would have seemed too much like a permanent arrangement. We kept things très casual.

Bohemians came and went; many became disillusioned with the lifestyle after a few weeks. Free thinking and free love are wonderful things, but the lack of hot water and the irregular eating arrangements do grate after a while. The poor dears get discouraged when they haven’t discovered the meaning of life and realise that they don’t have the talent even to be a Surrealist painter. They drift back to proper jobs, marriage, and the inevitable small rented house in Penge with brown wallpaper and furniture on the instalment plan.

They say that Elizabeth and Leicester once rowed up the River Effra as far as Hermitage Road. Now the Effra is an underground sewer carrying away all our waste. From royalty to excrement: isn’t that a metaphor for the modern age?

I loved the Bohemians because they were harmless and determined in their resistance to the ordinary. Not one of them had a political bone in his body, and while they preached a lazy Bolshevism, none of them knew what it actually meant. Ideas were for display, not for discussion. Their only goal was épater le bourgeoisie—to shock the respectable middle classes with their unconventional ways. They dressed shockingly, they talked shockingly. They read shocking books, listened to shocking music and, when possible, saw shocking plays and films.

They shunned brown and decorated their rooms with exciting wallpaper.

This gave them the most tremendous airs of artistic self-righteousness and superiority. Picasso might have talent, but he had become rather— commercial, don’t you think?

Money was always short, and we all rallied round to help one another, which is why I was playing waitress at Herbert’s studio event. It was the first time I had seen his work. Aside from the shock value of the tripe, brains, and pig’s blood which were liberally splashed around the sculptures, there was not much to it. The sculptures did not have much variation. The one he displayed was by the best, the others having a crude, unfinished look to them. In all of them the faces were covered by a wing or buried in food. Faces are always the hardest to do.

“Are you properly disgusted, Sophie?” Carl asked, holding out an empty glass.

We were standing before a sculpture of a gargoyle entangled with a vaguely feminine figure with plaster-white limbs and a top dressing of fresh livers. It was not clear if the thing was devouring her or coupling with her, or both. Sheep’s eyeballs were positioned next to the scene, as though they had popped out of her head in horror. The splashes of blood would ruin the plaster: it was all intended to be ephemeral, fleeting stuff. I did not see how Herbert hoped to sell any of it.

I filled Carl’s glass and took a minute to assess the gory figure with its malformed limbs and hunched body. The collection was derivative, a patchwork of Gothic themes stitched together. Herbert’s attempt at artistic patter would not have passed muster with a second-rate Victorian showman luring crowds to his collection of freaks. There was something haunting about some of the tableaux, a slight frisson of real horror, but the effect was no more than the echo of a bad dream.

“I’m not familiar with modern art, but he has a notion of horror,” said Chuck, who seemed rather taken with it. He was tall, slim, and rather bookish. He had no eye, and like all Americans he was too easily impressed by grand, empty gestures.

“It has a certain crude éclat,” I said. “But…no. Ten years ago, before Dada, Herbert might have been on to something. Now the art schools turn out this sort of thing by the yard.”

“I know where he got those figures from,” said Julian, snapping his fingers suddenly. “I knew he’d stolen the idea from somewhere. And not very far away.”

“What do you mean, stolen?” asked Carl.

“The funny gargoyles on Virgo Fidelis convent,” said Julian. “Don’t you think it’s the spit and image of those? I was admiring them by moonlight the other evening.”

He said this with the air of one who often walks by moonlight to enjoy the ambience, rather than because he has drunkenly missed the last bus. He was disappointed when neither of us immediately agreed with him, and tossed his hair in theatrical irritation. Julian was not necessarily homosexual, I had learned, but the pose kept him at the centre of attention. It also allowed him to slip past women’s defences. Most of the girls of our set were wise to him now—but wise after the event.

“Well, I think it’s a blatant theft, and I’ll tell him so,” said Julian, stalking off.

“It’s very different from his previous stuff,” said Carl. “He has a new muse, a girl called Marguerite. I can’t think what she’s like to inspire this.”

“Disgusting, I suppose,” said Claudia. “Isn’t she here?”

“No,” said Carl. “He keeps her hidden away, his mysterious woman.”

“Married, probably,” I surmised. “Can’t be seen with him.”

As it turned out, I was almost right.

The evening was a short one. It was much too cold and there was not enough wine to keep the guests there for long. A few of us helped clear up—no more than rounding up the empty bottles and glasses—before fleeing in the direction of the welcome fire in the Conquering Hero. I recall looking round just as I was leaving and taking a last look at the sculptures as the lights were turned off one by one. They seemed infinitely more sinister in the dark.

A week later Carl invited everyone over to my house for a jazz party. The kitchen is the biggest room in the old house, and the boys moved the furniture so a trio could play in one corner while the rest of us slouched, sat, or sprawled around. Carl insisted on bringing Chuck, because he was American and had never heard jazz. Chuck was determinedly antiquarian and had come to Europe to escape the modern world. He spent a lot of time in the British Museum.

“Chuck is studying the Dark Arts,” said Julian. “He’s looking for Secret Things.”

I didn’t think anything of this remark, but Chuck shot Julian a look of pure hatred. A trust had been betrayed. For some reason, Chuck had not wanted me to know of his interest in the occult.

Ten miles away in the West End there were real jazz musicians from America, men who had lived in the bayous of Louisiana and learned their music in New Orleans bordellos. That was the jazz we used to go and see with George, touring Dixieland originals, and Daniel and I had our perpetual argument about whether the beauty of jazz lay in the form or lack of it. But real musicians cost real money; here we listened to pale imitations. Very pale ones, boys whose whole lives had been spent under the watery sun of England.

The music moaned and wailed in incessant, winding loops, never quite getting anywhere. The evening seemed to be going on forever, and perhaps it was boredom that caused me to succumb to the lure of hashish-laced cigarettes. I was soon in the land of the lotus-eaters, drifting on clouds of aromatic smoke. The world was a long way away and nothing very much seemed to matter. The jazz rhythms merged into the background, until it seemed to me that I was looking at a wall grown with ivy, each note a leaf and with a hundred different strands running up and down. Around me others were nodding appreciatively, and for once all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I wondered if this was that trance state that all the old religions aspired to, if this was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece.

A couple were swaying to the music, chiaroscuro figures in the smoke and dim light. I envied their free, natural, loose-limbed grace, but envy gave way to pure pleasure in watching them move. The musicians started to play faster, with more energy, feeding off the dancers. This was what Bohemia aspired to, this was why they looked down on stuffy balls with waltzes and foxtrots and musicians in starched shirts. This was the real thing, the ideal, life as it should be lived—or perhaps it was the effect of the hashish.

The couple turned, and as they stepped through a beam of light I saw them. The boy was a stranger, young and handsome, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, and the suggestion of a Rudolph Valentino moustache.

The girl was Daisy.

I gave a small cry but stifled it at once. If this was a dream, I did not want to break the spell and wake up. I wanted to see Daisy again, to feel she was free in the world again, radiating her beauty into it.

After a minute the dancers sat down and I lost sight of them. I breathed again and subsided into my drugged dreams. If my brain had not been so clouded I would have done something, but it was all just too beautiful to disturb. The jazz lapsed back into its endless not-quite-repetitions, and I was drifting softly on a sound that would always remind me of her.

Daisy was, simply, the nicest person you could ever hope to meet. And I don’t, for once, mean that in a sneering way. Her niceness dissolved one’s ability to think badly of her. You rather ignored her for her intellectual failings, but she was in many ways the best of us. She was uncomplicated. Daisy managed to be simple and direct where we were lost in our cerebral convolutions.

Daisy was the little sister I should have had, that everybody should have had. She may not have achieved much in your terms, but she never needed to. She had open-mouthed admiringness, as entirely real and genuine as the adoration of a spaniel that thinks you’re the best and cleverest.

We love people for what we are when we are with them. When I was with her I was brave, I was witty, I was full of worldly wisdom, and I wanted to share it as much as she wanted to lap it up. With Daisy I was my very best self.

Perhaps if Daisy had been plain her mind would have developed more. I don’t know if that would have been a good thing. Daisy was the Uncarved Block of eastern philosophers. She was so beautiful, the slings and arrows of life glanced off her beauty, and the way was smoothed for her. She could enliven any gathering just by being there, like some magic cookery ingredient.

I can only guess the effect she had on men, but for most of them there was an instant halving of I.Q. She was surrounded by a moving circle of men playing the fool, showing off, stumbling over their words, and dropping things. Daisy thought it was all charming and delightful. Poor Daniel: if he had only done something idiotic he might have won her.

George thought she wielded the greatest power in the world: if he could only harness it, then armies would crumble before him. He did his utmost to charm her with gallantry and flatter what little vanity she had. With her on his arm, doors opened before him. She thought that was wonderful.

“You dreamed she was in a jazz club,” said Dr Hamilton. Obviously I had to tell it as a dream. You do not want your psychiatrist to think you are any madder than you are. “But she was remote from you, and you say she did not see you.”

“I was a bit of a ways back, and she was right in front of the band,” I explained. “In the dark.”

“So you were in the dark, and she was in the light,” he said. “Interesting.”

“Those African masks are quite ugly,” I said to break the silence at last. There were half a dozen of them on the far wall, bizarre wooden things which hardly looked like human faces at all. Dr Hamilton had brought them back after a research trip to Dahomey, he said. He thought they represented archetypal figures from the collective unconscious; I thought they represented bad art.

Freud had classical statuary in his consulting room, which would have been more to my taste. That was a world away in North London.

Today the masks looked particularly threatening. “I wonder if they come from the same part of Africa as jazz music?”

“Did the jazz club suggest anything to you?” he asked. “We’ve talked about this sort of thing before.”

“The womb, obviously,” I said. “A warm, dark, enclosed space where I felt safe. Perhaps I’m identifying Daisy with my younger self.”

“And was the male dancer your father?” asked Dr Hamilton.

Instead of snorting at this ludicrous idea I had to pretend to think about it for a minute. It was always better to go along with his ideas rather than striking out on my own. Doctor knows best.

“More some archetypal male figure,” I suggested. Dr Hamilton did like an archetype. “They made a perfect couple.”

“First your recurrent dreams of Daisy underwater cease after several months,” he said. “And now you start dreaming of her in a new scene. I think we can say we’re making progress. I think we are ready for a new stage in your treatment.”

There was something sinister about the way he said this, a sort of smug, evil purr, that took me aback. And those masks definitely looked more unpleasant today.

“Not hypnosis,” I said. We had talked about hypnosis several times. Dr Hamilton was an enthusiast, but I prefer to keep the innermost recesses of my subconscious locked away, thank you. You never know what might come out. Like you, I keep some dark things in there, things that Dr Hamilton had better not disturb.

“We can talk about it next time,” he said.

Chuck was sitting on a wall outside reading the newspaper, ready to walk me back to my house. Chuck was a perfect lamb, always so polite and well-mannered. He dressed smartly, but his clothes were so determinedly old-fashioned that he looked like a character out of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This air of fancy dress was perfect camouflage among the Bohemians.

It was sweet of him to be waiting for me there. I scented an ulterior motive.

“Shall we walk back through the woods, Miss Sophie?” he suggested, folding the paper up and tucking it under his arm. “It’s the scenic route. Much better than all these suburban houses. Primeval forest will do you good after that head-shrinker.”

“It’s probably not too muddy,” I said. I’d have worn stouter shoes if I had known. “I didn’t know you read newspapers.”

“I don’t usually read anything so recent,” he said with an air of apology. “But I forgot to bring a book with me.”

From my handbag I fished out my copy of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems.

“This is light enough to take anywhere,” I said. “It’s a sort of guidebook to London by one of your fellow Americans, you know.” The joke fell flat. Chuck did not read modern poetry, or anything modern for that matter, as he had told me many times. “Like you, Eliot thinks the modern world is a disaster and we need to revive the—Wait!”

He froze as I grabbed the newspaper from him. A picture had caught my eye, halfway down a column on the front page which proclaimed:

A TRAGIC ACCIDENT.

Young Man Plunges To Death In Norwood Street.

Body Lay Undisturbed on Pavement For Several Hours.

December 5.—on the morning of Monday the 4th, Westow Street was awakened by a distressing event when John Grey, whose postal round includes the street, found the broken body of Mr. Rupert Copeworth on the pavement. Mr. Copeworth had fallen unheard from the window of his third-storey room at Number 50, some time in the small hours of the morning. His body lay unnoticed until the postman made his pre-dawn round. Exactly how Mr. Copeworth came to fall from the narrow window has not been ascertained, but close neighbours say his habits had become irregular in recent weeks …

The local newspaper devoted a column on the front page to this death, and there was a grainy photograph with it, a graduation picture of a youth with high cheekbones. I knew him at once, even without the moustache. It was the man I had seen dancing at the jazz party.

I read on. The article hinted that a dissolute lifestyle had brought about his death, that his lapse into loose living and dubious friendships was at the heart of it. Music was mentioned more than once in disparaging terms. Evidently he had played it at all hours on the gramophone.

They saved the best to last.

“There was a look of stark terror on his face that will be with me until my dying day,” the paper quoted the postman as saying. “They say a falling man is dead before he hits the ground, and I truly believe he was.”

“That’s the dancing man from the jazz party,” I said, showing it to Chuck. It was definitely him. Unless, of course, my memory was playing tricks, or some other part of my brain was misfiring. Up till now I never had any doubt in my own sanity beneath the layers of misery, alcohol, and deliberate bloody-minded misbehaviour. But now I doubted.

“Could be,” he said, but without any enthusiasm. “I noticed her, but not him.”

“What was she like?”

“Very pretty. Small and blonde, about twenty—one of your perfect English roses. She had on a blue dress, satin or something, and one of those feathery items in her hair—a fascinator, you call it. And she had a twinkle in her eye: you could see she really enjoyed dancing. I didn’t really pay much attention to the guy she was with.”

I didn’t think any other man had noticed her partner either. It did sound like Daisy, though, or her twin…Or a thousand other girls in London.

I tore out the story, folded it into a bookmark for The Waste Land, and handed the paper back to Chuck.

He took my arm like a gentleman, and we went up the long path that leads up through Sydenham Woods. The bare winter trees towered over the path. It was muddy and I trod with care, leaving deep imprints behind me. For some reason the trees made me uncomfortable, as though they were strangers eavesdropping on us.

“This is what I came here for,” he said. We stopped to look up into the high branches of a particularly splendid oak. “I love these big oak trees. When I came to London I thought Norwood must be all forest. Just as I thought London would be like a mediaeval city.”

“I hope you’re not too disappointed,” I said.

“In Providence, my hometown, there are entire streets of buildings three centuries old, but your Old London Town is all plate glass and streetcars and automobiles. Out here in Norwood, though—

“The mystic grove, by Druid wraiths possess’d,

The flow’ring fields, with fairy-castles blest:

And the old manor-house, sedate and dark,

Set in the shadows of the wooded park…”

“I’m afraid they cut down most of the trees for charcoal and built sweet little houses,” I said. “Not many Druid wraiths left.”

“The Druids abide,” he said. “They hanged their victims on these very trees.” He looked into the skeletal branches with approval. “Can you believe it?”

“That was Tacitus writing anti-British propaganda,” I said.

Chuck shook his head with the air of a man who knows better. “True religion always requires human lives. The Druids practised human sacrifice and communicated with the old Gods. And their practices lived on in the secret witch-cults after them, right up to today—right up to Madame Blavatsky, your local witch here. She’s got a few smart ideas.”

“Theosophy is so passé,” I said, walking on. It was an odd coincidence that he should mention Blavatsky, who appears as a character in The Waste Land. “England has embraced the modern world. Providence sounds rather Olde Worlde.”

“Carl said your grandmother was a witch.”

“Not at all,” I said. “My family said she was a witch, but only because she was a girl from a poor family who snared a rich young man. The only magic was the natural result of mixing a lusty young man with a fertile young woman.”

Chuck coughed with embarrassment at my earthiness. Men are such delicate things when it comes to reproduction.

“And luckily for her, he was not enough of a villain to deny everything, so he was forced to marry her. But the family badgered her about witchcraft for years until she gave up and died of scarlet fever.”

“My ancestors were wizards.” There was pride, defiance even, in his voice. “One of them only just escaped from Salem. That’s why I came here. There’s more in magick than your modern world wants to believe, and I mean to prove it. Paracelsus says you can burn up a chicken and then restore it to life from the ashes.”

“No doubt a marvellous party trick,” I said.

“But you see, it’s just chemistry, it’s nothing to do with superstition, and it’s not blasphemous.”

Leaves squished underfoot and we wended our way uphill.

“Still quite dangerous.”

“Power is only dangerous to the foolish,” he said. “Before you summon anything, you have to know how to dismiss it, the right words and gestures and symbols. That’s why I’ve been studying at the British Museum.”

“They have a section for this sort of thing?”

“They have such treasures there, and they don’t even know it,” Chuck snorted. He was in his element now. “Like those inscriptions on temple doorways. You know what a swastika is, right? Turning one way it raises things, turning the other way it dispels them. Keep things out, keep them in. It’s just a matter of the scientific application of the right symbols, no more spiritual than turning bath faucets on and off.”

He spoke with such fluency and conviction, so unlike the rambling Bohemian discourse I was getting used to, that it was rather charming. I wondered if Chuck would try to steal me away from Carl, and whether I would let him—for a while, anyway.

I also thought of turning on and off, of Daniel’s unstable creatures which could be destroyed by breaking the magic spell which sustained them. Chuck was indeed groping towards power.

There was an outburst of cawing above us. Dark birds were bickering noisily in the high, naked branches of an oak.

“I hear a murder,” I said.

“Wh-what?” Chuck said, then laughed. “Oh, I understand you. A murder of crows. They seem to be having a dispute.”

The crows rose up, black wings beating, before settling back down in a different configuration around a large nest-like object they were pecking at. At first I thought they must be devouring some fledglings—crows do that sort of thing, you know—but it was entirely the wrong season.

“I wonder if they’re eating mistletoe berries,” said Chuck. “It grows on the oak. The Druids used to harvest it for their ceremonies. Wouldn’t that be something powerful?”

“Is that why we kiss under the mistletoe?” I asked, leaning a fraction closer, but he moved away from me. I should have known. New Englanders were the Puritans who found England too impure for them. Chuck’s motive for walking with me was not romance.

I looked up again. It seemed to me that the crows were pecking something more substantial, but the thought that came into my mind was far too ghoulish to suggest. Chuck’s mention of the Druid sacrifices must have planted the idea.

“I like your friends,” said Chuck. “They’re unconventional, they talk of crazy things. I never met people like that before. You’re like a little secret cult.”

“What?”

“You’re all dedicated to art, which is just another form of human striving towards the ultimate, like religion. Take that jazz party. Jazz is traditional African voodoo music, to summon the gods. It like a religious ritual, isn’t it?”

I thought about The Waste Land, with its seemingly meaningless words, its cryptic passages, the deliberately misleading notes. Perhaps even that was a book of spells and prophecies, if you knew the secret.

“And that old house you live in,” he went on, getting warmer. “It has a history. That clock—and there were two witches here in the seventeenth century who were tried by fire—and I want to talk to you about the Whatleys—”

“How tedious,” I said. “Yes, another American tourist looking for quaint local colour, witches, and human sacrifices. I thought you were more original than that, Chuck.”

“Please don’t call me Chuck,” he said. “Call me Charles. Julian introduces me as Chuck because he knows I hate it.”

“My apologies, Charles.”

We walked on. I had an uncomfortable feeling. Could an unintentional ritual summon Daisy’s phantom to dance in my kitchen? What if somebody else thought we were dabbling in the dark arts? What if Estelle and her brutish driver decided I had overstepped the line? Would they kill somebody, throw a man out of a window if they thought he was involved?

“Miss Sophie,” said Chuck, “my researches are not frivolous. These are matters of the utmost gravity. Your assistance in certain matters could advance the cause of human knowledge in ways that you can barely—”

“No,” I said flatly. “Much as I enjoy your company, I won’t have anything to do with your researches and I will not have you poking into odd corners of my house, or sacrificing so much as a fly.”

Chuck stopped, took a step back, and bowed low.

“My sincerest apologies, Miss Sophie. I won’t trouble you any further with my most impertinent requests,” he said coolly. He did not take my arm again.

Conversation became rather strained, and I was relieved when we finally reached my street. Chuck bowed again, turned, and walked out of my life forever. I later learned that he had left for Europe to pursue his researches, wherever they led. Probably into conflict with Estelle, or someone like her. I did not want any part of it.

The conversation with Chuck was a warning, and I was determined not to get involved in any such business ever again. I was a deserter and I would sit this one out whatever happened. No more jazz parties, nothing that might hint at rituals.

III

When I got home Claudia handed me a glass of white wine and an envelope. She knows my moods well. There was no stamp; it had been delivered in person, and my heart skipped a beat as I recognised Daisy’s elegantly looping calligraphy. Inside was the briefest of notes inviting me to tea at Lyons Corner House in West Norwood next day.

“How’s your ghastly old Freudian?” Claudia asked languidly, sinking into an armchair.

“Actually he’s a tolerably nice Jung man,” I said. “But so awfully wearisome with all his questions.” I held up the note. “Did you see her?”

“She was pretty enough,” said Claudia, wrinkling her nose. “If you like the bourgeois, goody-two-shoes type. Couldn’t melt butter with a blowtorch. Fearfully unfashionable—”

“Daisy’s a good sort,” I assured her. “I suppose she didn’t say anything?”

“She asked after you,” said Claudia. “I think she thought I was the maid.”

She looked down at her ankle-length black dress and sighed.

“Daisy is alive then?” I said without thinking. Claudia looked vaguely at me.

“Oh yes,” she said. “She was alive. Sometimes I wish I were dead.” She sighed again, overcome with emotional exhaustion. I could tell that another of her grand amours had failed, falling flat as predictably as a schoolgirl attempt at a cordon bleu soufflé. Griddlebone jumped into her lap, and she rubbed his head distractedly.

“Claudia,” I said, “whatever happened?”

“It’s all over between me and Gregory.”

Claudia was, in her own way, a witch: she had Circe’s power of turning men into swine. I had not paid much attention to Gregory. He was a dour playwright and director who mumbled when I talked to him. Claudia said I was too intimidating on the subject of literature. I had not been aware that ‘it’ had ever been going on between Claudia and Gregory, but evidently he had finished with her the previous day.

“It’s Another Woman,” said Claudia. “He’ll have seen some girl on the street and promised her she could be Cleopatra or Joan of Arc …”

I envied Claudia her ability to fall in and out of love, and how she preferred to place dynamite under her relationships rather than leave an unsatisfactory one standing. She retold the story of love and loss yet again, and my mind turned away from Daisy.

I was in Lyons Corner House half an hour early. I did not know what to expect; I was not expecting anything. I took a table and was nervously scanning the room for the millionth time when she appeared right next to me, so close I almost jumped. Daisy, large as life and pretty as ever. A yellow-and-white dress does not suit many complexions, but on her it looked completely natural, set off with a tiny hat and matching bangles. She trailed the faintest hint of sandalwood.

“Hello, Daisy,” I said.

“Hiya, Sofia,” she said cheerfully, dropping her handbag and pulling up a chair. Her smile was genuine. I have no idea how the churning of emotions was distorting my own face. “Where have you been? I looked everywhere, but nobody knew. And I found you in that house. What are you doing there?”

“There was an inheritance,” I said.

The waitress appeared and we ordered tea and, at Daisy’s insistence, a selection of fairy cakes.

“How are you? I’ve been so worried, you just disappeared.” She leaned forward, frowning. “People are saying awful things about you, but I think it’s only because you’re not there.”

“I thought you just disappeared,” I said. She laughed as though I had made a joke.

“No, I’m still here. But seriously, nobody has seen you for months. Your mother doesn’t answer my letters—I don’t suppose she forwarded anything to you?”

Mummy had never approved of any of our set. She would have liked Daisy if only she knew her.

“Daisy,” I said, “you did disappear, you vanished, Daniel said—” I stopped and Daisy waited patiently for me to go on. “He said you disappeared.”

Daisy shook her head slowly. “Poor Daniel, it was so tragic with that fire. I don’t think he was ever the same after that night at the church. They said you’d been looking after him, at the funeral…” She trailed off, seeing my expression.

I just stared at her. It was Daisy, it was definitely Daisy, and she looked exactly the same as before. In my widow’s black, with my widow’s face after months of crying and drinking, I must have looked completely different. I must have looked as mad as I was beginning to feel.

“I saw you at that jazz party the other week—” I started.

“Yes!” said Daisy. “And I saw you! But I couldn’t get to you because there was this boy, but someone told me you lived right there with all those arty people, and that’s how I found you!”

I opened The Waste Land and unfolded the newspaper story, showing her the picture. “Was he the one you were dancing with?”

She read slowly, moving her lips, and the tea and cakes arrived.

“Oh, that poor boy,” said Daisy. “I didn’t know his name …”

“Daisy,” I said, “it’s fantastic to see you again, but I’m really worried that something awful is going to happen. Is happening.”

Daisy put her hand on mine and squeezed. “It’s all right, Soph. I’m here and you’re here again. You don’t have to hide.”

It was all wrong, but there was nothing I could say. So we had our tea and cakes, which Daisy devoured with quick bites of her perfect little teeth, and she asked me about Carl and parties and what she called ‘the arty people’ I was with. We talked about the dreadful Dr Hamilton and everything I’d been doing. I learned that she had nobody special at the moment, but was obviously as popular as ever, mixing with what George had called the ‘Second Eleven’ of his social circle. They went on treasure hunts and sprees and weekends in the country, but the girls were very dull and she missed me terribly.

It all felt perfectly natural, and I realised how much I had missed her. At the end we kissed and agreed to meet again soon.

“Now I know where you are, you shan’t escape,” Daisy said. “I shall force you to come out and enjoy yourself.”

When she had gone I wondered if it was all a hallucination, if I had been sitting in the tea room talking to myself. But here was her empty tea-cup next to mine, and only one of them with lipstick-marks, and the scattering of cake crumbs by her place.

Events gathered speed over the next few days, so much so that when I tried to explain to Dr Hamilton, I had trouble assembling all the pieces into a coherent sequence. I pressed the latest strip of newspaper into his hand.

RAILWAY FATALITY.

Passenger Killed After Fall From Train.

Young Man Died Instantly After Carriage Door Swung open.

December 12.—A tragic accident occurred yesterday evening on the railway line between West Norwood Station and Sydenham Junction. The train was already well under way when a passenger, since identified as Julian Smith, is believed to have attempted to fasten a door which had been improperly closed …

Julian, our would-be writer and occasional homosexual, had made his last barbed comment, seduced his last unsuspecting victim. Dr Hamilton read on about how the door had flown open and Julian had been hurled out, how his appallingly mutilated remains had been found on the track a few minutes later. How a man sharing his compartment had been hysterical, raving about shadows, so much so that they had had to sedate him with chloroform. How the railway company had made a close inspection and declared that there was nothing wrong with the door latch. And how the other occupant of the compartment, a young lady, had been missed somewhere in the commotion and could not be traced.

“That’s her,” I said. “Daisy, she’s the mystery woman who was with him! And here, look at this.”

I produced another much-folded piece of newspaper, this one about how the aspiring theatre director and playwright Gregory Bathgate had hanged himself from a tree in Sydenham Wood. Nobody had explained why he had needed to climb to the top of an oak tree to do it.

“All dead!” I said. “People I knew! I even saw Gregory’s body hanging there and I didn’t recognise it at the time!”

There was another clipping and another, more Bohemian boys who had disappeared in recent weeks. They just dropped out and we never realised; one was found floating in South Norwood Lake in a state of decay, one was electrocuted by sticking a knife into a plug socket and burned all over.

The details were different, but certain elements kept recurring. Why had everybody else failed to see such an obvious pattern? How could the authorities have missed it when it was staring them in the face?

Dr Hamilton nodded, passing me back the fragments of newspaper. He had not given them as much attention as I expected. It was as though he had already seen them and knew all about it. Of course he knew about the Sorrows of Werther and the spate of suicides in Germany which it supposedly provoked among aesthetic young men. Perhaps he thought this sort of thing was to be expected among Bohemians. Or perhaps he thought I was making too much of it and imagining connections where they did not exist.

After all, Dr Hamilton could not be sure that I even knew any of these people, or if I was making it up. Even I was not so sure of my memory.

“I do understand how distressing this is to you,” he said. “I can tell how upset you are. I can only say again that I really do think that hypnosis would be of great use in your case.”

He had me in a corner and he knew it. You should trust your psychiatrist, but I had never entirely trusted Dr Hamilton. He would have said it was a sign of paranoia, but I always had the feeling that he was taking notes for a paper he was writing about me.

Perhaps I should have been a little less scathing about psychiatry in our early sessions. I should have been a little less forthright in my perfectly valid comparisons between his profession and that of witch-doctor. Of course in his profession he would record this type of hostility as mere transference. He would never take it personally.

But I was troubled by the type of questions he asked. He took too much interest in things which I did not wish to discuss, things which could be dangerous. I could not tell him why these things were dangerous, and that must have increased his impression that I was concealing some interesting neurosis. As our sessions went on I felt he was starting to see me as an interesting case, one that might be worthy of publication.

Well, I thought, if he wanted to hypnotise me so badly, as George would say, caveat emptor—let the buyer beware. I needed an ally, and Dr Hamilton was one of the few who might be able to understand.

Dr Hamilton did not swing a watch in front of my eyes on a long chain. Instead he just had me focus on a point on one of the ugly African masks while he droned on about my breathing slowing down, my eyelids getting heavy, and so on. My muscles relaxed one by one and it felt good. I let myself be covered by his words, as by a blanket of falling snow, deeper and deeper.

The masks on the wall receded to a great distance, and I could hear voices. One of them was mine.

“…like Persephone returning,” I was saying. “She was abducted by Hades, who appeared out of the ground and carried her off to the underworld, but Hermes rescued her and she was permitted to return to earth for a period each year.”

“And how do you feel about this?” Dr Hamilton prompted.

“I’m confused,” I said. “Human sacrifices don’t figure in classical mythology. Persephone’s cult was one of vegetation ceremonies…but there’s a rising and falling god, it says so in The Waste Land, who dies and returns …”

The masks on the wall had come closer again, as living faces. Their mouths were moving, but I could not hear what they were saying. It was chanting, like the sounds of the sea, but it was too far away.

“You feel that Julian Smith’s death was a kind of sacrifice,” he said. “In exchange for Daisy returning.”

“I had tea with her,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it, but it’s true. But I don’t understand, if Daniel brought her back when he died …”

“Was Daniel’s death also a sacrifice?” he asked.

“I—I don’t know. I don’t think he knew he was going to die, but he looked so happy, so peaceful, even when he was burning …”

“You actually saw Daniel burning?” Dr Hamilton asked. “You didn’t say before.”

“The flames blossomed, like orange flowers all coming out to bloom at the same time, and the light was dazzling, it was so bright. Illumination, he said.”

I could hear the chanting from the African faces more clearly now, and there were shadows moving all around them on the wall. And I could hear the scratching of Dr Hamilton’s pen as he took down notes.

“And were you there when Julian fell from the train also?” Dr Hamilton asked.

“No, no, the mystery woman wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Daisy; I told you that. As when that other man fell from his window in Westow Street, and the one hanging from the tree …”

More nib-scratchings from Dr Hamilton. The flitting shadows on the wall were annoying me; I couldn’t make out what they were, except that they looked like birds. Or bats; that was what they looked like. Big bat-wings, beating slowly not fluttering. Getting bigger.

“Who is the man hanging from the tree, do you think?”

I could hardly make out his words, because the chanting was so loud.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” they were saying, over and over. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

“‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’” I repeated.

I turned my head, feeling something close by. Dr Hamilton was standing right next to me, his face transfigured into a kind of furious joy as he transcribed what I was saying. This was something splendid for him; he had struck a vein of purest gold, and he was digging it out as fast as his pen could move.

Behind him was the window, and the daylight was blotted out.

The entire window was crowded with black gargoyle forms with dragon wings, pressing their faces, their bodies, their clawed hands against the glass.

I must have screamed and recoiled backwards, because the next thing I knew I was on the floor. I could hear the echo of shrieking in my ears. The door was open and Dr Hamilton’s receptionist was there.

“It’s quite all right,” Dr Hamilton was saying to her. “There’s no danger. Miss Hetherington is externalising some of her unconscious thought-forms, and the process was more successful than I expected. Remarkably so.”

He sounded nothing short of smug. The two of them helped me to my feet and someone passed me a glass. I took a sip and almost spat it out in disgust. They had given me a glass of water. Both beamed at me as though I had passed an exam.

The masks were still ugly, but they were just masks. There was no chanting, no shadows, nothing outside the window except a bare lawn with some wrought-iron furniture and a scattering of dead leaves. I was still reeling with the effects of the hypnosis. Those winged things were not real, not entirely real, but the menace was there.

“I really think we achieved something there,” Dr Hamilton was saying. Even then, that ‘we’ of his grated on me. “It was a breakthrough. Next time we must—”

“I have to go now,” I said.

I ran to the station, where I hailed a taxi. Out of breath, I gave the driver the address of Herbert’s studio and sat panting in the back of the cab.

I had not seen Herbert for weeks. People came and went, appeared and disappeared so often that one rarely noticed. The hypnosis had pulled loose those winged shapes from the depths of my memory. The door to the old bicycle factory was not locked. I opened it gingerly.

“Hullo—Herbert!” I called. “Is anybody home?”

I called again; only my echoes replied. Inside it was freezing, colder than outside. I pulled my coat about me and walked through.

The old factory still smelled of oil, and there were still cardboard boxes and odd litter in the corners. Something scuttled away as I approached, almost certainly a rat.

My breath made little clouds in the air. The sculptures were still there under their dustsheets. Herbert’s work benches were off on the other side of the room. The floor had a faint covering of plaster dust which showed tracks in it, little rat tracks going from sculpture to sculpture. The butcher’s brains and tripe had not gone to waste after all. The rodents had eaten every last scrap.

The thing about paranoia is that you see everything with a paranoid eye. As far as Dr Hamilton knew, I could be going through the newspapers looking for stories that fitted with my paranoid vision. He had only my word for it that I had known any of these people…and so did I. Since my encounter with Daisy I was beginning to mistrust my memory. I thought she had disappeared, been declared dead, but I was not quite positive that I had not seen her at George’s funeral. In fact, I had a very definite image in my mind of Daisy in a black dress with a veil, and where else could I have seen that?

The difference between a false interpretation of the world and a true one is, as I believe you always told George, that an accurate picture of the world can be tested. Anybody can explain away past events with a bit of twisting; the deciding factor is whether your theory makes predictions which can be verified.

I had made a prediction, and as I walked gingerly between the dust-covers, I was getting ready to test it. The statues were still here. I had not expected them to have flown away, not quite.

There was a breath of colder air, and I looked up to see an open skylight, in fact several open skylights. No wonder it was so cold in here.

I found Herbert draped across a chair behind one of the sculptures. He was, of course, quite dead. The more lurid newspapers said later he had been “very extensively” gnawed by rats, which had been attracted to the offal that had formed part of the exhibition. They also said the cause of death was impossible to determine because he was badly decomposed. Well, that’s a matter of opinion; I would say he was rather well decomposed.

Perhaps Herbert had just sunk into the chair one night after too many brandies and had frozen to death. Or perhaps the failure of his latest exhibition had been too much for him. Both of those theories would be put forward. But I did not think so, for three reasons.

Firstly, there was his face. The rats had taken his eyes, of course, and the flesh was dried out and the skin shrivelled. But even so, he was locked into a rictus scream of such intensity that I did not believe his last moments could have been peaceful.

Secondly, a bag of plaster near him had been ripped open, and that was the source of the fine coating everywhere. Close by there were more footprints; not just the rat tracks, but a woman’s shoes and other prints.

Thirdly, I had remembered that Carl had mentioned Herbert’s mysterious new muse was a girl he called Marguerite. A pretty enough name, which just happens to be French for daisy.

I swallowed several times and backed away slowly. I did not scream. I was past screaming now.

It was still light outside, though the sky had closed in and it was starting to spin. I walked towards Virgo Fidelis convent school nearby. It is a great Victorian Gothic edifice on the side of the hill. It has soaring windows set in pointed lancet arches, a transept spire, an inset statue of our Lady. But the rooflines are free from gargoyles. Whatever Julian had seen up there had not been architectural embellishment, but winged creatures waiting for their hour. My mind was in a whirl. I had suspected Herbert—but he was dead. I suspected Chuck, but he did not fit. For a moment I even suspected the cat, the witch’s black cat…but the real question was whether I could trust Dr Hamilton. Or whether Dr Hamilton was, in fact, the source of the whole problem. Could his prodding and poking in my brain be helping unleash those things? He knew about the background to my case, he knew about the Dulwich Horror, and perhaps he had his own ideas about that outbreak of madness. He was a Jungian, and he believed in the reality of the collective unconscious… Perhaps Daniel might have been able to help, but Daniel was gone. I would have to face the doctor on my own.

“You can’t see Dr Hamilton now,” said the receptionist, or nurse, or whatever she was. “He’s with another patient.”

“I have to,” I said firmly. “It’s about a murder.”

She looked at me steadily. Psychiatrists’ receptionists see a lot of melodramatic behaviour.

“It’s not possible at the moment,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to wait? Dr Hamilton will see you presently.”

I thought about rushing past her, but she would just have dragged me back and it could have turned into an ugly scene. She was probably better at wrestling than I am, and I suspected she had a chloroform pad ready under her desk for difficult patients.

I glared at the wall, thinking furiously about what I would say, what I would do. There were a string of deaths all around me. I did not know what was happening, but I had some idea. Daniel had brought Daisy back; I was convinced of that. It was the rest of it I was trying to understand: the bat-winged things that Herbert had tried to depict in his work and Julian had seen, the human sacrifices.

I looked at my watch again. It was well past the hour. The receptionist was intent on reading something and was determined not to look back at me.

Psychiatrists are the most punctual of professionals; you pay for an hour, and you get sixty minutes exactly before you are turfed off the couch for the next paying client. Their consulting rooms always have two doors, so you never see the person before you leaving. I assumed the next patient must be still there for some particular reason. Perhaps that hour might be extended for a patient going through a crisis, or one he was especially interested in, who was young and pretty or—

I sat bolt upright.

“The patient he’s seeing now,” I said. “It’s not Daisy, is it? Blonde girl, very pretty, petite, in her early twenties—”

“You know perfectly well I can’t possibly discuss Dr Hamilton’s other patients,” she said briskly. Perhaps she thought I was jealous, or was a paranoid accusing the doctor of having an affair with Daisy. But she looked down at her notes. It seemed the receptionist was not going to budge, but once I had settled down again she looked at the clock, then got up without a word and went down the hallway to Dr Hamilton’s office and knocked softly at the door.

I was already on my feet when she opened it. I might have been beyond screaming, but the receptionist was not, and her scream startled me.

I did not need to see the body to know that Dr Hamilton was dead. I heard later that he had hanged himself, but not before he did some peculiar injuries to himself with a pair of scissors. Perhaps both of those things were true.

I left the scene while the receptionist was calling for help. It was completely dark outside, and I was afraid. I found another taxi to take me home and had it wait outside the house while I threw things together. Claudia looked at me rushing around like a mad thing.

“Strugnell’s lot have a poetry reading in Tulse Hill later, if you can be bothered,” she suggested.

“Not tonight,” I said. “But you must. And—would you mind staying away for a few days?”

She watched me gathering together Carl’s things from his room and stuffing them back into the holdall he had brought with him.

“Oh dear,” she said.

I took notes from my purse and pressed them into her hand. “Take this. Stay in an hotel. Find an unsuitable man. Shock people.”

I kissed her. Claudia, for all her oft-stated death wished, deserved to live. Then I grabbed the holdall, seized Carl’s overcoat from the hall cupboard, and hurried out to the taxi. I directed the driver through the dark and what was now a steady rain to the studio Carl shared with half a dozen others.

The artists were slouching about drinking tea when I arrived. Barely greeting them, I dragged Carl away from the assembly and forced him into the taxi.

“Good news, you’re going to Paris,” I said.

“Why, Sophie, this is so sudden,” he said with a grin.

“I can’t go with you. Darling, it was simply wonderful but now it’s over. Please, please don’t say anything at all. Goodbye forever.” I kissed his confused young face and pressed an envelope into his hand. “You have to go, or your life is in danger. Here’s some money, get yourself to Paris and paint! If you ever loved me even a little bit, go, go now—and don’t look back.”

I gave the taxi driver far too much money and strict instructions to drive straight to Victoria Station and not under any circumstances whatsoever to stop and pick up a female passenger. He was to ignore Carl’s protests until they arrived. The driver gave me a knowing look, and they were gone into the rainy night.

It was the best thing I could think of; if I had gone with him the danger would have been greater.

Carl, that sweet boy, did not look back. I do not know what happened to him. I like to think he did go to Paris and had grandes affaires with voluptuous and petulant courtesans, that his paintings were cruelly rejected by all the salons, and he suffered properly for his art with some picturesque but not too serious illness. Then after a couple of years he would have given it up to live in Kent with an English girl, with a job in an office somewhere, and three children. He would wistfully paint watercolours on Sundays and think of his youth in Norwood, and me. I like to think that. I like to think that he got far enough away fast enough to escape.

I do not like to remember that last canvas he was working on at his studio.

I don’t like to think of a taxi passing a blonde woman, skidding in the wet and overturning on a corner, while winged shadows flitted around the wreck. Of Carl’s dead and oddly damaged body being discovered some time later.

The house was silent, dark, and empty when I got back. Claudia had gone. I never saw her again either. Surely she survived.

I sat in the kitchen for a while, massaging my temples. Everyone was gone. It was just me now, me and my madness. Rain slashed against the window, wind whistled around the eaves. It was indeed the dark and stormy night beloved of Bulwer-Lytton and every other third-rate novelist.

I brushed my hair and arrayed myself to meet what the night might bring. I put on my best dress, a black crepe silk affair, with some gold bracelets and gold drop earrings. I topped off the ensemble by unwrapping from its tissue paper an ancient gold tiara of oriental design, the only piece left me by my grandmother, with its eight long, dangly gold extensions. I slipped into shoes that added a good four inches to my hauteur. I applied make-up with particular care, adding the tiniest dab of scent behind my ears.

The woman in the mirror looked magnifique. To fight darkness, you must shine.

I prepared the house for what was to come, did a little tidying, and made some arrangements. Then I read through The Waste Land again, looking for clues, reading passages out loud to enjoy the sound of the words. It seemed as good a way of summoning as any.

At almost half past eleven there was a knock at the door. Daisy was there, arriving like a pale owl swooping out of the night.

“Hello,” she said. “I thought I’d find you in.”

“Hello, Daisy,” I said.

She hung up her slick coat and her umbrella. Daisy was fresh as her name-sake in a white floral print dress, the same motif repeated in her headband. It’s a look that works well for ten-year-olds. It worked for Daisy. Griddlebone rubbed round her calves, purring.

“Gosh, Soph, you look fabulous,” she said. “Like a pagan high priestess.” There was no trace of archness or hidden menace. This was going to be harder than I thought. I led her to the big wooden kitchen table where my newspaper cuttings were laid out like a Tarot reading. They were supplemented by some hastily handwritten notes about what had happened to Herbert and Dr Hamilton.

“Mind the markings on the floor,” I said.

Daisy stepped easily over the chalk patterns, careful not to tread on the lines, as she came over to look at my assemblage.

“You showed me this bit before,” she said.

“You must recognise some of these stories,” I said. “Names, faces, places, dates. I am passing mad, and I may be wrong, but I am not making all this up.”

Daisy looked up at me oddly. “Of course I recognise them. I’m not stupid, you know.”

We faced each other over the kitchen table, as though for a game. A game of chess? It was my move.

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman called Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world,” I started. Daisy listened patiently.

“She was so beautiful she started fights. Theseus abducted her and Helen went along, then her brothers brought her back. Her suitors decided that one of them would marry her and all the others would support him. Menelaus married her; Helen went along with it. Then Aphrodite, goddess of love, awarded Helen to Prince Paris of Troy, and Helen trotted off to Troy with him. Her husband came after her with his friends—and a wooden horse and everything—and they burned down Troy and killed Paris. Helen came back with her husband.”

“What does it mean?” Daisy asked.

“Helen kept changing sides depending on who she was with,” I said. “As though she had no will of her own.”

Even as I said it, I saw how empty the accusation was. Daisy was simply doing what she had always done. When George had sent her on errands or used her to open doors, she had always gladly acted as his tool without understanding his motives or his ends. And it was my fault. I had acted as procuress, won her over for George’s cause.

“You know I don’t have sides, Sophie,” said Daisy. “I’m just me. But I’ll always be your friend.”

It was an emotional jiu-jitsu move: by offering no resistance, Daisy left me completely off-balance. The tables were turned; if this was a game of chess, I would have to take the black pieces. Daisy was still my friend, and I loved her. That made it ten times more dreadful than if she had been a stranger.

Thunder boomed and rolled off in the distance.

“Those men see you, and they die,” I said. “Why is that?”

Daisy did not seem to understand the question, and she obviously thought I was being unfair, but she rallied and tried to meet me on my own ground.

“Do you remember, Sophie,” Daisy said, “I once asked you why kittens had to be drowned? And why all those boys had to die in the war? Do you remember what you told me?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. I could imagine all too easily what sort of flip, facile answer I must have given. About it being the way of the world, and the necessity of evil for the greater good, and that the innocent will always suffer. I may even have told her about theodicy, that entire branch of religious study which exists to twist logic until it explains how evil can exist in a world ruled by a loving God.

“I don’t remember,” I said again. “But whatever I told you was bad, and stupid, and wrong.”

I could not win this argument against myself. Could I tell her that human sacrifice was simply wrong? Daisy would not have an answer, but I did: Abraham agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar of Jehovah willingly enough. Is that not a clear enough example?

I could try telling her that Cthulhu was evil, but how hypocritical would that have been after my attempts to persuade you that a position of objective neutrality was needed? Jehovah smote a few cities when he felt like it, and the gods of Olympus regularly destroyed mortals on a whim.

“What’s the point of it?” I asked.

‘Why?’ is perhaps the most futile of questions when bad things happen. We always want the murderer to have a rational and sensible motive so we can make sense of things. But people are not always like that, so why should we expect to understand beings far stranger than ourselves?

George had his appetites, which ran to gullible young women of a certain class. There was no good reason for those repeated seductions. Perhaps there’s another reason for them, a practical reason. But it may be that Cthulhu’s appetites run to human sacrifice.

“It’s not me,” Daisy said. “What happens with those boys, I’m not the one that’s doing it, you know. Those things—things with wings—they come.”

I knew she was telling the truth. Of course it was not her. Daisy was just a beacon, a channel, bait that attracted Cthulhu’s sacrifices and guided his forces towards them.

“To lose one set of friends may be regarded as a misfortune,” I said, “To lose two looks like carelessness.”

“You always make jokes about serious things,” Daisy said unhappily. She sounded worried, as though she might have done something to upset me. She thought she had been doing the right thing. “You know much more than I do. The shadows with wings, they’re yours, aren’t they? The things that take the sacrifices for Him.”

“It’s nothing to do with me,” I lied. “Not directly. It has to stop.”

“I thought…” she said, and stopped. Her eyes narrowed. “I see. But you know, we have to prepare the way, to save the world. He must come, sooner or later, and He will call the old ones—what can we do?”

I had been prepared for evil, but not for good. Daisy was being helpful, as she always was. Daisy did not judge people. If someone asked her to walk a mile for them, Daisy would be glad to oblige. If they asked for a human sacrifice, she would give them two. For a good cause.

“This has to stop,” I said again, feeling I was repeating myself because I had lost an argument.

“What do you want me to do?”

What indeed? Death followed Daisy like another admirer, one who could not easily be put off. I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, gesturing for Daisy to follow. There was a claw-footed full tub of water in the bathroom, and we stood side by side looking into it.

“Daisy, what do you see?” I asked.

“Water,” she said. Then, “our reflections.”

“Look very closely,” I said.

Daisy bent lower.

“I can’t see anything else.”

“Closer.”

Daisy bent lower and I seized her by the throat, toppling her into the bathtub with me on top of her. There was a tremendous splash and half the tub of water splattered noisily all over the bathroom, a miniature tidal wave sweeping across the floor. But there was still enough water that her head was submerged, and my hands locked firmly around her neck.

I closed my eyes, so that I could not see her, and started chanting an incantation.

The words I spoke were exactly the same recipe that Jessica had chanted in the church at Dulwich. Perhaps her pronunciation was wrong or she lacked the skill in saying them, but perhaps Jessica was just unlucky.

Daisy struggled, but I have always weighed more than her and I bore down heavily. I was strong with a mad rage at my fate, and she was such a slight thing. Her thrashing about was not enough to move me from her. Daisy had not had a chance to take a breath, but her slow and ghastly drowning still seemed to take forever.

Something shifted under my hands. I opened my eyes involuntarily. The form beneath me was shifting, melting. A sea-change was coming over Daisy.

Then I was Odysseus, wrestling with Proteus, The old Man of the Sea, the firstborn of the waters, a spirit who can take any form. I was struggling with an ape-like thing, and then a leopard-woman, and then a dragon which slashed me with long claws, a slithering salamander with spurred feet. Shape followed shape, blurring and metamorphosing as rapidly as shadows passing over water.

I did not let go, and I bore down with all my weight, and I did not stop chanting that formula all the while.

It squirmed and flopped and there were fins and tentacles lashing out, wrapping around my arms and feeling for my face. You can’t drown a fish, I thought, but it was too late now and I clung on, strangling whatever I held with all my strength.

Then something burst like a bladder breaking. There was a vile stench, and my fingers closed on nothing but slime. I was kneeling in a bath full of a disgusting, slushy mess which bubbled like champagne. My vision was lost in a cloud of acrid green vapour that poured upwards like smoke from an inferno. I coughed and choked and shook my head and almost fainted.

Everything was seething around me. The primordial mess was starting to recombine, forming itself again. Forming into something else.

I pulled out the bath plug, and the big bubbles were going glub-glub-glub as the contents of the bath started to drain away. I turned on the tap as far as it would go, and then the other tap. The streaming water mingled with the mess, and it all turned into a whirlpool and kept on running down and down until nothing but clean water was left. Clean water, and my blood. I was bleeding from a dozen slashes on my wrists, my arms, my chest, and my face. Some of them were deep.

Of course, my poor crepe silk dress was utterly ruined.

I turned off the taps at last. Daisy was dead. Daisy was gone, sailing down the Effra with Elizabeth and Leicester, to the sea. Gone forever.

When Euripides wrote his play Helen, he had it that the Helen who went to Troy was an illusion made of a cloud by Hera. The real Helen, according to Euripides, stayed with her father Proteus. On some days I think that the Daisy I killed was just an illusion made of cloud, a mask fashioned by Cthulhu for his extension in our world. On other days I think that mask was made of Daisy’s flayed and cored body. On my bad days I think that I killed the real, pure Daisy, who had survived R’lyeh untouched, whose innocence transmuted the furnace-glare of Cthulhu’s presence into cool light. Daisy who was just being herself, and who should have lived instead of me. Would my death have served as well?

I was brought back to myself by the sound of the grandfather clock chiming midnight. It was a dark and stormy night and They were coming.

I struggled into the kitchen, dripping a trail of blood and water, and before the last chime faded I was standing at the centre of the elaborate petals of the pattern I had chalked on the floor. I did not understand the whys and the wherefores, I was working by intuition. Losing blood only sharpened my senses, helped tune me in to those vibrations that lie beneath the ordinary world.

The wind blew, and there was another sound beneath it.

The shadows all moved at once, blades of black grass growing, stretching up from the cracks in the floor, out of the corners of the room, from behind every piece of furniture. I thought there would only be a few but there were dozens, twisting and rising from the ground.

Daniel would have loved to see this. He would have applauded to see how they unfolded themselves from lines into shadows and then into three dimensions. The smallest were ugly little imps, the largest scraped the ceiling with their bat wings. Herbert’s sculptures had captured something of them, but not the worst. Herbert had seen them through more artistic eyes than mine; to me they suggested vivisection laboratories rather than Gothic paintings. They were more human than Herbert had portrayed them, and less: you could see their animal ancestry, the strains of monkey and rat and bat, and something else deeper and more chthonic, but the human strain was all too obvious. The room was thick with their odour.

To me they were all lopsided, deformed in different and horrible ways, but perhaps that is just the prism of my human eyes.

They were mine, my sins, the tenants of my house, my ancestral spirits. They had been around ever since mankind first had commerce with Cthulhu. They were hybrids, existing between worlds, and they thirsted to tear open a passage through human flesh with their claws.

The faces were worst. Herbert could never have sculpted those faces, nobody could, however insane. I could not look at them. Encountering them, simply becoming aware that they existed, was more than most people could stand. I could well understand how it would drive you to the merciful release of suicide—and what happened to those who were strong enough to stand their ground against that unholy horde.

They were ready to tear me to bloody rags. Only the chalk pattern protected me. I am the blasphemer, the apostate who killed Daisy, their guiding light and their lode star.

Never summon that which you cannot put down, Chuck told me. I did not summon these, and I knew they were beyond me.

I began a chant, an incantation made of words from before the beginning of time. Or, as Daniel would have it, words that existed outside time. I had no hope of finishing; even if I had been at my full strength I would not have prevailed against the mass of clotted darkness pressing in around me. It was like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon; century upon century of black vileness was piled up around me, and they were far too strong for my feeble efforts.

I was too angry just to give in. I kept chanting. What else could I do?

I cupped my hands to catch the blood running from my wounds. If it marred the chalk lines the shadows would break through in an instant.

Words began to fail me. I kept losing my place in the incantation. The bat-winged things remained in place, like the gargoyles they resembled, patiently biding their time. It had occurred to me that if I could hold out until dawn they would be forced to withdraw back to their hiding places before the light could burn them. These malformed things cannot exist in daylight: Daniel would be able to explain why being seen fully would destroy them in one of his collapsing waves.

But dawn was many, many hours away. I was weak and getting weaker with every drop and trickle of blood.

Hands reached for me, shadow hands, clawed and scaled or rubbery and glistening, reaching to me from the darkness.

I wished that the door would open and someone, anyone would come to save me. That you, or Estelle, or someone would burst in and rescue me, any sort of unlikely deus ex machina would do.

The rain pattered on the windows and the wind howled softly around the house and I could hear their voices in it.

Sophie, we want you…Sophie, we’re waiting…Sssssophie…

My mind drifted, my words drifted. My arms felt very cold. I lost feeling in my feet and I seemed to be surrounded with cotton wool. I felt as though I could not fall, that if I let go I would be caught in a feathery embrace.

And as that hazy, foggy nothingness began to engulf me I started to move through it like a swimmer. I had just enough strength to make my way towards the light. It was faint, and my progress was like one of those agonising dreams of walking through treacle, but I kept going. The veils slowly parted before me as the fog condensed into numbers which fell like snowflakes. As I reached to catch them the numbers became words.

The words forced themselves out of my mouth, the peculiar syllables shaping themselves, taking on clear and precise form, the original language of the creation. I heard a voice pronouncing the alien syllables; it was coming from my mouth but it was not my voice. I sensed the crowd of black-winged things drawing back.

There are many random processes in nature; the wind, the rain, and the clouds are all random, driven by the tiniest original causes. So are other natural phenomena. I did not know what was happening as my hair stood on end and blue sparkles danced between the floor and the ceiling, shedding an eerie glow on the dozens of dark, deformed figures filling the room.

The windows all lit up with the most brilliant light as lightning struck from every direction at once, zigzagging in from the four points of the compass. I had just enough time to guess what was happening before the brilliance was multiplied tenfold. The shadows dissolved instantly in that intolerable light, scattered pieces disintegrating into a shower of nothingness, no fragment escaping.

I did not hear what the thunder said: it was much too loud for human hearing. I was blasted far away, far into the light.

IV

My cleaner found me on the floor the next morning, comatose with lacerated arms. Of course I was committed to a mental asylum shortly afterwards. The damage to the house could only have been the act of a madwoman, and I certainly looked the part. Sophie’s mad againe…

Apparently there were outlines of a most disturbing variety burned into the walls around the kitchen, which were taken as further evidence of my mental disturbance.

It did not help that I was raving. It did not help that I was deaf for some weeks and could not communicate any of what had happened. Perhaps if Dr Hamilton had been alive I could have coerced him to stand up for me; but he was dead, and in any case I scarcely cared.

Besides, I really was mad for much of the time. Madness has a bad name, but in truth it is the only safe refuge at times. Hamlet played mad because it held reality at bay for him, and you of all people must know how true that is. Straitjackets and padded cells can be so soothing to the troubled mind, they give a reassurance that one is being looked after.

You probably imagine that I was treated badly—and some of the treatment is quite barbaric by any standards—but they did not damage my mind any more than it had already been damaged. They were kind to me, after a fashion. My family never visited, never sent a word, but the doctors and nurses were polite and friendly. They even took the trouble to tell me that the cleaner was looking after the house and my cat, and that he would be waiting for me ‘when I got better’. He’s probably still there ten years later.

Being strapped down in pitch darkness for days on end is not entirely pleasant. The various shock therapies I endured, as I had to. None of them came close to the shocks I had already endured, or could dislodge certain things from my mind.

I admit that being a mental patient is a dismal life and one that demands strength of spirit. They dehumanise you: you are no longer a person but a patient. You are an ugly creature, with a prison haircut, no make-up, drab clothes and a spotty, pasty skin from poor food and lack of sunlight. The important thing is to realise that the mirror lies. I know who I am and what I really look like.

Once I saw Estelle there, being shown some other patient. I heard somebody call her ‘doctor’. She glanced once in my direction.

I will not bore you with details of these last ten years of incarceration. I will only echo Wilfred Thesiger’s response when asked about life in the trenches during the Great War: “My dear—the noise! And the people!”

I learned early on to be a compliant, easy patient. There is no room for ego here. I was a good patient for the nurses and orderlies, who only want a quiet life and no trouble. If you are pleasant to them, they can easily be bribed into small favours. Cigarettes, sweets, and books can all be obtained at a low price. You can even get pens and writing paper.

After much thought, I sentenced myself to ten years for Daisy’s death, which for a variety of legal reasons I consider to be manslaughter. When that term elapses in one week’s time, I will take my leave of this place at last. I have planned it all.

I know that I will be pursued, and not just by the authorities. I will have to go a long, long way from here, and stay well hidden.

But there is one person I cannot hide from: you. We have some unfinished business between us.

You have been, I gather, a teacher, moving from school to school, leading a quiet and blameless life. A bachelor who avoids the company of others, perhaps because they can never understand him. I never thought that William Blake would lead such a humble existence.

You will have realised my secret by now. I am a Whatley, of the house of Whatley. My grandmother, the one they said was a witch, was old Whatley’s sister. He was my great-uncle; Flora Whatley was a first cousin once removed. The thing you battled in the church was my second cousin.

I inherited the house and Whatley’s gold. I inherited that filthy old book, which was duly passed on to me after the vicar died. That was the book which Estelle stole from me for her own purposes. I suppose I inherited the mantle of a priestess of Cthulhu.

The blood of the Whatleys runs in me. Naturally I was reluctant to help George in the first place; I knew that sooner or later he would find out the relationship and I would be on his list of those who needed to be liquidated for the greater good. I raised the issue of whether blood mattered more than moral choice, and thought it did. With an aristocrat’s belief in breeding, he thought only blood mattered. George would have made a good Nazi.

Blood does count for a little, though. I have inherited the skill, as Daniel realised, an ability at what once would have been called magic. Like any skill, like music or painting, it can be learned by those willing to put in the effort, but to me it comes easily and naturally. In any other century I could have been burned as a witch.

Perhaps I will still burn. I will leave the choice to you; I submit myself to your judgement. Have I suffered enough? I still have the power and all the potential for chaos that it brings. George would have said that I am too dangerous to be allowed to live. Perhaps he was right.

But consider this. You are also dangerous, you who also Know Too Much. You keep a manuscript in a tin box under your bed, one which is every bit as powerful and crazed as the book which I inherited from the Whatleys. You are also a danger to humanity. You must also judge yourself.

But that which summons the old ones can also be used to fight them. That power—their power—is our only hope.

When I have finished writing this I will wrap it up with a red ribbon. I shall bring it to you in person and make you read it while we drink a bottle of champagne. Both of us have earned that.

I am a murderess and a madwoman, but haven’t I served my time? You judge. The sacrifices stopped after that night. I have no doubt more shadows are slowly pooling and forming again in that cursed house, but lacking Daisy they have no direction, harmless as a forgotten box of knives in an attic. The young men of South London were saved, saved for the time being anyway, saved for another sort of sacrifice which they say is coming soon.

As for me: kill me or marry me. Perhaps we can run away together and dance the tango and be lovers at last. Or else we can die together and snuff out all our dangerous secrets forever. Either way we can finally escape those shadows which have blighted our lives and write ourselves into a different story.

Editor’s Note

Sophie Hetherington disappeared from Canterbury House mental institution in Norwood on 1 April 1938. Some clothes and a suicide note were found by South Norwood Lake, and it was believed she had drowned herself.

A day later, William Blake’s lodgings were destroyed in a fire. A single body was found in his burned-out room.

The accepted explanation of these events developed cracks some days later when dredging of the lake failed to produce a body. It was discovered that the suicide note appeared to have been plagiarised from My Little Deaths, a collection of blank verse by Claudia Witherspoon.

A forensic investigation revealed that the burned body was a larger and heavier-set individual than Blake, with two bullet wounds in the back. Dental records did not produce a match, and the body was never officially identified.

One other questionable piece of evidence remains, the record of a wedding on a Cunard liner from Southampton bound for Buenos Aires a week later. This was not discovered for some months and was assumed to be a prank, as there were no passengers of the name Blake or Hetherington listed in the passenger manifest.

THE DULWICH HORROR & OTHERS

Copyright © 2015 by David Hambling

The right of David Hambling to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in 2015. This electronic version published in September 2015 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION

ISBN 978-1-84863-343-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

THE DULWICH HORROR & OTHERS

Foreword

INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO SOUTH LONDON, MR. LOVECRAFT

THE DULWICH HORROR OF 1927

I

TWO FINGERS

I

THE THING IN THE VAULT

I

THE MONSTERS IN THE PARK

I

THE DEVILS IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA

I

THE NORWOOD BUILDER

I

SHADOWS OF THE WITCH HOUSE

I

THE DULWICH HORROR & OTHERS