Omally turned towards Holmes, who now crouched facing the door, Magnum forty-four poised once more between his outstretched hands. ‘What in the name of the Holies is it?’ he shouted above the growing din.
‘It came at me from a basement opening. I have only seen its like before amongst the work of Hieronymous Bosch.’
This remark meant little to Omally who had always thought a Bosch to be an expensive sports car. But that the something which was approaching was very very nasty and somewhat overlarge seemed on the cards.
As the first concussion shook the front wall, Holmes fired point-blank into the door. A gale-force icy wind swept through the bullet-hole, like a blast from a ruptured gas-pipe. A fetid odour filled the room; the stench of the very pit itself, of all the world’s carrion congealed into a single rotting mass. Holmes staggered back into Omally, coughing and gagging. The Irishman fell to his knees, covering his nose, and retching violently. Outside, the thing lashed at the door with redoubled fury. The iron hinges screamed in anguish, echoing those of the satanic emissary of death. Beneath the throbbing door, slim, barbed hooks worked and tore. A yellow haze of brimstone coloured the unbreathable air and the room shook and shivered beneath the hellish assault.
Omally crawled over to Soap Distant, who had wisely assumed the foetal position beneath the table. ‘You’ve got to get us out,’ he shouted, tearing away the hands clamped about the albino head.
‘There has to be a way.’
‘No way.’ Soap tore himself from Omally’s hold. ‘No way.’
Shivers of woodwork flew from the bottom of the door as the evil barbs, now showing porcupine quills and scorpion tails thrashing about them, stripped the Ronseal finish clear down to the filled knot-holes. Omally stumbled to his feet. Sherlock Holmes was standing alone in the whirlwind, a speckled band tied bandana-fashion across his face. A finger in the air. The doyen of dicks was definitely off his trolley, thought John. As if reading his thoughts, Holmes suddenly struck him a weltering blow to the skull. Caught in surprise John hit the deck. Holmes leapt down upon him and pointed frantically through the swirling, cascading stench. ‘Fireplace,’ he shouted, his voice all but lost amidst the screaming, the hurricane, and the splintering woodwork. ‘Up the chimney, get going, quick.’
It took very little time for Omally to cop on. Grabbing the huddled Pooley firmly by the collar, he dragged him towards what was surely the only hope of escape. Holmes stepped over to Soap and booted him in the ribcage. Soap peered up bitterly towards his tormentor, a dizzy blur, lost for the most part in the maelstrom of tearing elements. Holmes stretched deftly forward and hooked a pair of fingers into the sub-Earther’s nostrils. ‘Lead us out!’ he cried, bearing him aloft. Whimpering and howling, but somehow happy for the nose-plugs, Soap staggered forward. Holmes thrust his head first into the fireplace and then, suddenly enlightened, Soap turned towards his persecutor with a nodding, smiling head and gestured upwards. Within a moment he was scrabbling into the darkness above. Omally pressed Jim onwards and followed hard upon his heels. Holmes spun about, revolver in hand, as the door burst from its hinges to spin a million whirling fragments about him. The icy gale tore his tweedy jacket from his shoulders as the thing rolled into the room, a tangle of barbs, quills and spikes, whipping and lashing and screaming, screaming. The great detective held his ground and fired off his revolver again and again into the spinning ball of death as it charged towards him.
The wind and the terror coming from below spurred on the three-man escape committee as it crept higher and higher up the narrow black chimney. Soap’s voice called down from above, ‘Come on, lads, shouldn’t be more than a mile at most.’ Pooley mumbled and complained, but Omally, who was tail-end Charlie and in the most vulnerable position, bit him in the ankle. A howl of pain and a sudden acceleration from Jim assured the struggling Irishman that the message was well-received.
The going was far from certain and made ever more perilous by the cramped space and the complete and utter darkness. Stones and grit tumbled down into the climbers’ faces. Soap trod upon Jim’s hands and Jim out of fairness trod upon John’s. Higher and higher up the slim shaft of hope they clambered until at last they could no longer feel the icy wind rushing from below or the awful stench souring their nostrils. They paused a moment, clinging to what they could for dear life, to catch their breath, and cough up what was left of their lungs.
‘How much farther, Soap?’ Omally wiped at his streaming eyes and strained to support himself whilst delving in his pockets for a fag.
‘A goodly way and all of it straight up.’
‘There is actually an opening at the top?’ Jim ventured. ‘I mean I’d just hate to climb all this way and find myself peering out of a ventilation duct in Lateinos and Romiith’s basement.’
‘Hm. To be quite candid, this digging is one of the great grandaddy’s. We shall have to trust to the luck of the Distants.’
‘Oh, very comforting. Ooh, ow, ouch!’
‘Sorry, Jim. Did I singe your bum?’
‘Pass me up that fag, you clumsy oaf.’
‘Smoking cigarettes can harm your health,’ said Soap. ‘Ooh, ow, ouch!’
‘Onward, Christian Soldier,’ said Jim, withdrawing the lighted fag from Soap’s trouser seat.
The three continued their bleak and harrowing journey, now illuminated by the firefly-glow of three burning cigarettes. The first hour was really quite uneventful, other than for the occasional minor avalanche which threatened to plunge them to a most uninviting oblivion. It was several minutes into the second that things took a most depressing turn for the worst.
‘I hate to tell you this,’ said Soap Distant, ‘but I’ve run out of passage.’
‘You’ve bloody what? Careful there, that’s my damn hand you’re treading on.’
‘Get a move on, Pooley.’
‘Shut up, John.’
‘Stop the two of you, for God’s sake. I can’t climb any higher.’
‘Then get to one side and let us pass.’
‘He means the passage has come to an end, John.’
‘Then stand aside and let me kill him.’
‘Shut up, I can see daylight.’
‘What?’
The three men strained their eyes into the darkness above. In the far distance a dim light showed. A mere pinprick, yet it was some kind of hope, although not a lot.
‘Get a move on,’ yelled Omally.
‘I’ve told you, something’s blocking my way.’
‘I just knew it,’ said Jim, with the voice of one who just knew it. ‘No way up, no way down. Doomed to starve here until we drop away one by one like little shrivelled up . . .’
‘Give it a rest, Jim. What’s in the way, Soap?’
Soap prodded above. ‘Some old grill or grating, rusty as hell.’
‘Easy on the descriptions.’
‘Solid as a rock also.’
‘Doom and desolation oh misery, misery.’
‘I have plenty of fuel in my lighter, Jim.’
‘Sorry, John. Can’t you wiggle it loose, Soap?’
‘It’s rusted in. Can’t you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Let me get up there then.’
‘There’s no room, John.’
‘Then we’ll all just have to push, that’s all. Brace yourself, lads, after three. Three!’
Soap wedged his shoulders beneath the obstruction, Jim got a purchase under his bum, with Omally straining from below.
‘Heave.’
‘AAAGH!’
‘Oooow.’
‘Get off there.’
‘My God.’
‘Again, it’s giving.’
‘It’s not giving, I am.’
‘I felt it give.’
‘That was my shoulder.’
‘Put your back into it.’
‘Mind where you’re holding.’
‘We’re there, we’re there.’
‘Who said that?’
‘One more time . . .??
?
‘It’s giving . . . It’s giving . . . It’s gone.’
Soap’s head and shoulders battered up through the obstruction, a thin and crumbling iron grid cemented solidly into place through the application of fifty-years pigeon guano. ‘You rotters!’
Soap’s arms were pinned at his sides, his feet lashed out furiously. ‘You rotten rotters!’
‘Watch where you’re kicking,’ Pooley complained.
Soap’s muffled voice screamed down at them from above. ‘You ruddy lunatics, I’m stuck in here.’
Now, as one might reasonably expect, a heated debate occurred beneath the struggling Soap, as to what might be the best means of adding the necessary irresistible force to the currently immovable object.
‘We must pull him down and give him another charge,’ Jim declared.
‘Down on top of us so we all fall down the hole?’
‘Grease him with goose fat.’
‘You wally.’
‘Tickle his feet then.’
‘And you a millionaire, Jim. I thought you blokes had it all sussed.’
‘A hoist, a hoist, my kingdom for a hoist.’
‘I’m starting to suffocate, lads,’ called Soap distantly.
Pooley weighed up the situation. ‘Doom and desperation,’ he concluded.
‘Stop everything,’ Omally demanded. ‘Enough is enough. It is a well-attested fact that the man who can get his head and shoulders through a gap can get the rest of him through also.’
Soap wriggled like a maggot on a number nine hook.
‘Stick your head down here, Jim. I want to whisper.’
Soap thrashed and struggled, but his movements were becoming weaker by the moment.
‘I can’t do that to Soap!’
‘It only takes a second. Take my word for it, it will do the trick.’
‘But it’s not decent.’
‘Do it to Soap or I’ll do it to you.’
Pooley closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. Reaching up he performed a quick vicious action.
‘EEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! ‘
A few moments later three men lay puffing and panting in the entrance to the loading bay at Meeks Boatyard on the bank of the Grand Union Canal. A few feet away a wall of impenetrable turquoise light rose from the water and spread away to either side and ever above.
‘Too much to hope that we’d come up on the other side,’ sighed Pooley.
Soap Distant, red-faced and clutching at himself, looked daggers at him. ‘I’ll have you for that,’ he said painfully.
Jim smiled sickly. ‘What could we do? Look on the bright side, at least we all got out alive.’
‘Not all,’ said John Omally.
‘Eh?’
Omally gestured towards the open manhole through which they had just emerged. ‘And then there were three,’ he said in a leaden tone.
‘Holmes,’ cried Pooley. ‘In all the excitement . . .’ he scrabbled over to the manhole and shouted the detective’s name into the void. His voice came back to him again and again, mocking his cries.
‘Leave it, Jim.’ Omally put his hand to his best friend’s shoulder. ‘He never had a chance.’
‘I didn’t think.’ Pooley looked up fearfully. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘None of us did. We only thought of ourselves and our own.’
‘We left him to . . .’
‘Yes. He saved our lives at the expense of his own. A noble man.’
Pooley climbed slowly to his feet and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. He looked up to where the Lateinos and Romiith building rose, filling the skyline. ‘Oh damn!’ he said, kicking at the toppled manhole cover. ‘Oh, damn damn damn. Those swine are going to pay for this.’
‘Oh yes,’ said John Omally. ‘They are definitely going to do all of that.’
30
Professor Slocombe withdrew a goose feather quill from the inkwell, and scratched out the fifth day from the June calendar. From beyond the shuttered French windows sounds as of merriment reached him. The Brentford Festival had begun. Throughout the night, the floats had been assembling upon the Butts Estate; lumbering through the darkness, heavy and ponderous. Through a crack in the shutters he had watched their slow progress and viewed their silhouettes, stark against an almost white sky. He had presided over many Festivals past and judged many a float competition, but he had never seen anything such as this. The shapes which rolled onward through the night upon their many wheels were totally alien, even to he who had seen so much. They were the stuff of nightmare, the dreams of the delirious and dying sick. If human hand had wrought these monstrosities, then it was a hand far better stricken from the arm.
A shiver ran up the long spine of the ancient scholar and his mottled hand closed about a crystal tumbler, half-filled upon his desk. Sleep had not touched him in more than a week and could offer nothing to soothe the ache which filled his heart and the very marrow of his bones. The great clock upon the mantelshelf was even now ticking away mankind’s final hours. The prophecies were being fulfilled and the helplessness, to one who knew, but was yet unable to act, was beyond human endurance.
Professor Slocombe raked his hand across the desk and tumbled a stack of magazines to the carpeted floor. Computer Weekly, Soft-wear Review, Micro Times, Popular Processor: the poison fruits from the new technology’s tree of life. Mankind had finally reached its own level of super incompetence, and made itself obsolete. It had promoted itself into extinction. Uncomprehending, it had made a science out of the thing; established a new order, laid the foundation for a new culture, and ultimately created a god. Or more accurately, aided the reinstatement of one previously superseded. Computer technology had given mankind the opportunity to regress, to cease thinking and in so doing cease to be. Why bother to add? The machine can do it for us. Mankind had been subtly tricked into believing that sophistication was progress. That godhead technology could cure man’s ills at the flick of a switch, or if not that, then after a few more years of further sophistication.
Man had lost sight of himself. Darkness was soon to triumph over the light, and the real means of confounding it were fading before the Professor’s eyes. It was progress. Mankind had made so much progress that it no longer had any hope of survival. The miracle of science had become a chamber of horrors.
Somewhere in the dark tower which pierced the Brentford sky, the bleak temple of technology, the dragon lay curled in its lair. Its moment of release drew nigh, and who was there to plunge the sword of truth into its black heart?
The old man drained his glass and refilled it. He watched the gilded pendulum endlessly carving its arc. Where was Holmes? He was to have returned at daybreak, having followed up certain of his own leads, but he was hours overdue. The Professor had put into his keeping certain documents which he felt might hold an ultimate solution; but where was he now? Crowds were gathering in the street and it was an invitation to disaster to venture out of doors.
The sound of rumbling wheels and wild applause drew his eyes once more towards the shuttered windows. Should they choose now to make an assault upon the house the Professor knew he would be powerless to stop them. If ever there was a time to rally the troops beneath the banner of truth, now was definitely it.
At the present time, the Legion of Light was holed up in an outside privy in Moby Dick Terrace. There was more than just a little of the Lost Patrol about these three particular stalwarts.
‘Can you see anything?’ asked Jim, as Omally put his eye once more to the door’s half-moon.
‘I can see a good deal,’ the brave Sir Knight replied, ‘and to be perfectly frank, I like not a bit of it.’
‘Let’s have a squint,’ said Soap Distant. ‘And you keep your hands to yourself, Pooley.’
‘They’re in my pockets. Have a care where you step, it’s crowded in here.’
Soap’s pink eye rose to the carved crescent. ‘My God,’ said he.
‘Not mine,’ said John Omally.
Beyon
d the broken trelliswork which topped the garden fence, the great Festival floats were moving in slow procession. The thin dawn light, now tinting their silhouettes, brought them form and solidity. They were vast, towering to fill the streets, extending outwards within inches of the house walls. But what were they? They had something of the look of great bloated sombre reptiles, with scaled flanks and rudimentary limbs. All gill slits and hulking slabby sides. But they were too large, too daunting, too top-heavy. They did not fit. How many of these monstrosities had already passed and how many more were yet to come? The three men skulking in the evil-smelling dunny chose not to make bets.
Soap tore his eye from the hole with difficulty. Already the terrible compulsion to watch each movement of the swaying behemoths had become all but overwhelming. ‘What are they?’ he gasped, pressing his hands across the hole that he might see no more.
‘The work of the Devil.’ Omally’s voice, coming from the darkness, put the wind up even himself. ‘We have to get out of here. At least to the Professor’s, then I don’t know what.’
‘A manhole, two gardens up, leads indirectly into a tunnel to his basement.’
‘Oh no.’ This voice belonged to Jim Pooley. ‘Down again we do not go. I will take my chances above ground.’
‘Well, please yourself. Whatever killed Holmes could not pursue us, it was pretty big. The tunnels hereabouts are small. I shall travel below; you do as you see fit.’
‘I think we should stick together,’ Omally advised.
‘Are you sure it’s safe, Soap?’
‘To tell the absolute truth, I’m not too sure of anything any more.’
‘Oh doom, oh desolation. Oooh, ooooow!’
‘Come on then.’ Omally eased open the door, and the three men, one now limping a little and clutching at himself, ducked across the garden and shinned up a dividing fence. Soap’s manhole was overgrown with weeds, which seemed promising. The hollow Earther took a slim crooked tool from his belt and, scraping away the undergrowth, flipped off the cover in a professional manner. ‘Follow me,’ he said, vanishing from sight.