At first I thought it was because I was so drowsy. Yet all of a sudden images flashed through my head. They seemed like fragments of a dream. At the time, I couldn’t say for sure if they were dream or not. Or whether the monster fired these pictures into my head.
The weariness grew worse. I could hardly focus my eyes the headache was so painful. But creeping through my skull like cold, menacing phantoms came images - these images were of my friends. Jenny, Pitt, Adam. Wide-eyed. Anxious faces beneath harsh lights. I grew tense. Maybe it would be like when I imagined the police in those white forensic suits? Only there was something different about this. Although I sat behind the steering wheel in that truck I seemed to be able to see my friends in another part of the tunnel. However, I didn’t see all three at once. This wasn’t like watching CCTV. This was seeing through their eyes. One moment, I looked through Adam’s eyes, then Jenny’s, then Pitt’s. When my vision was channelled through them I caught snatches of their thoughts. Adam’s, especially, resonated with fear. Cold, cold terror crept into his heart. It’s not good down here... bad things happen in these tunnels... danger... horror... people have cried down here... with loneliness... fright... despair... they were chased... caught... hurt... badly hurt... I want to go home...
Jenny and Pitt were entering a warehouse. Even though they were deep underground the roof must have been nearly twenty feet above them. Lining this cavern of a place were huge steel shelves that filled one wall.
I tried to stop the stream of pictures gushing through my head. Yet this didn’t seem like a dream, or imagination. By some telepathic power I knew I was seeing what they were really doing... and through their eyes. But what if it turned bad? Really, really bad? My heart lurched as I imagined their fate.
With all my will power I tried to snap out of this trance, but I couldn’t. What’s more, I couldn’t move a muscle. All I could do was sit there, frozen. Using all my strength, I managed to turn my eyes to where the creature stood. At that moment it moved away. The plastic blurred everything. Far too blurred to make out any detail. Yet I saw squirming objects appear to ride on its back. Call it intuition, but I sensed the creature had noticed something that needed a closer look. Then I slipped into that trance again. With an uncanny clarity my friends’ actions were recorded by my mind’s eye. Their thoughts pierced my nerves. Deep down I knew exactly where the monster was headed. Worse, I couldn’t do a thing to warn the three. This is what I saw inside my head - and through their eyes:
‘How do they reach the ones higher up?’ Adam asked. He was staring at the shelves. But his thoughts clamoured: Want to go home... Not good here. Something might hurt us...
‘See those ladders set on runners?’ Jenny pointed. ‘They can be rolled to wherever they’re needed.’
Pitt said, ‘I’m not bothered about shelves full of boxes. Where’s Naz?’
Adam shivered. ‘First, where’s the exit? Remember that thing we saw?’
‘Did anyone see what it looked like?’ Jenny asked.
Pitt shrugged. ‘Too far away. Just a speck in the distance.’
Adam said. ‘But you could tell it was huge. It nearly filled the tunnel.’
‘And it was fast,’ Jenny added.
Pitt looked back. Tunnel lights gleamed on vehicle shrouds.
Jenny’s eyes widened. ‘What’s wrong. Pitt? What have you seen?’
‘Naz?’ asked Adam, hopefully.
‘It’s not a person. Too big.’ He suddenly hissed. ‘It’s coming this way.’
Jenny whirled round. ‘Hide on the shelves. Get right behind the boxes.’
Adam groaned. ‘It’s bound to find us.’
‘Once you’ve found somewhere keep absolutely still. Don’t make a noise.’
The lights flickered. A breeze blew along the tunnel. Discarded pieces of paper and old gum wrappers slithered along the floor. They knew it raced toward them.
Quickly, the three found their hiding places. Jenny climbed the ladder up fifteen feet to a shelf full of packed rice. There, she hunkered down behind dozens of boxes. Pitt hauled himself up to a shelf as high as his head. Engine parts, dozens of them, all wrapped in polythene. For some reason they made him think of human skulls in polythene bags. Adam went low. He wriggled under the bottom shelf then lay with his back on the concrete floor. Its coldness seeped through his clothes to touch his skin. The steel panel of the shelf was just two inches above him. He remembered how crabs lodged themselves into gaps between boulders on the seashore. For him this seemed the safest place.
A moment later the light died away until it was so dim Jenny could only make out indistinct box-shapes on the shelf. She winced. A pain flared up over her eye. Like when you drink ice-cold milk too fast.
On the shelf just at head height Pitt lay still. Then he realised that it wasn’t will-power keeping him immobile. He found it hard to move. A strange paralysis gripped him. When he heard the pad of feet in the tunnel he tried to shuffle even closer to the wall for protection. But he couldn’t lift his arm never mind move his body.
On the floor under the bottom shelf Adam found even moaning beyond him when the pain started in his forehead. His strength vanished. It was all he could do to turn his head to one side. When he did a dizzy, woozy sensation made him feel as if he was falling over the edge of the cliff. The moment he closed his eyes the vertigo grew even worse. I hope it doesn’t see us... if it does it will hurt us... blood will be shed...
All Adam could do was lie there as some enormous form entered the tunnel.
Thirteen
Peeping through gaps on the shelves, Pitt and Jenny tried to see what had arrived in this gloomy cavern. There was no doubting the beast’s size. Even from his hiding place on the floor, Adam looked, too. But all three felt strangely dizzy. Their limbs didn’t work properly. They felt sleepy. And all three had the same sharp pain boring through their skulls. This is how they stayed for the next thirty seconds. Then, as if the beast, had satisfied itself that there was nothing of interest in this area, it padded away.
When they felt that it was safe to emerge they crept from their hiding places. All three agreed amongst themselves how ill they’d felt. All of them noticed how the light had dimmed when the creature had entered this section of tunnel. But when they all tried to describe what they had seen of the beast no single one could agree on a description.
Adam declared, ‘I could see paws. Four of them. Like a lion’s.’
Jenny disagreed. ‘A lion? It was nothing like a lion. When I looked down at it from above I could see tentacles. Masses of tentacles. They were bright green.’
Pitt shook his head. ‘From where I was I could see bare skin, maybe its belly... there’s no fur, and certainly no tentacles. There were mottled patches on its body. I saw that kind of pattern once on something in a reptile house at the zoo.’
‘I had the best view,’ Jenny declared. ‘From right up there. It’s like a giant octopus.’
‘No way an octopus,’ Pitt insisted. ‘It’s a gargantuan lizard.’
‘You’re both wrong,’ Adam told them. ‘It’s a mammal. I saw furry paws. Probably a specially bred attack lion.’
‘Attack lion,’ Pitt snorted. ‘You’ll have had your eyes shut anyway.’
‘Are you calling me a coward?’
It was a dangerous thing to do. But for the moment they forgot about the real possibility the creature might come back. Instead, they bickered over what they did or didn’t see.
Fourteen
At the same time as the trio argued I was still in the truck. Five minutes ago, the monster had left my section of tunnel. Immediately the pain in my head went, too. But for those five minutes I was held in that trance. By some telepathic force I’d seen what was happening to Jenny, Pitt and Adam. What’s more, I knew what they had felt and thought. Somehow the creature had been responsible for that effe
ct. Fortunately, as the minutes passed, and that thing moved further from me, I felt better. The light grew brighter. The dizziness vanished. I could move my arms normally again. The moment my legs worked as they should I climbed out of the cab, ready to search for my three friends.
When I turned a corner I started to find some answers. The next tunnel was different. Instead of bare concrete walls they were covered with white tiles. Kind of clinical. Here there weren’t any trucks under plastic sheets. Instead, four red cylinders in a row. Each as big as a car. They lay on their sides on V shaped racks. Odd... very odd.
These were troubling to look at. They resembled the thing you might see towed behind a farm tractor, but they were covered in warnings. CAUTION: LIQUID NITROGEN INLET. BEWARE: SUB-ZERO TEMPERATURE. Worst of all: DO NOT TOUCH: DANGEROUS CONTENT. I shuddered. Were these nuclear weapons? I walked along the line of cylinders. Stencilled on each one, in fierce, spiky letters was: VOGGRON. And after that mystifying word, either an A or B or C or a D. So the first cylinder was labelled VOGGRON A.
When I reached VOGGRON C I groaned, ‘Oh, no.’
The third cylinder had been bashed hard. Dents covered it. Only the dents bulged outward not inward. One end of the cylinder had been torn away. The metal cap, which was six feet in diameter, lay on the tiled floor. The cylinder itself was clean inside. Completely empty.
VOGGRON. Now I knew what had smashed open the bunker door. What’s more, I knew EXACTLY what had chased us. As I stood there, a darkness fell over me. It spilled across the floor, growing bigger as some shape - one that cast a long, dark shadow - crept up behind me.
Even though I wanted to move I couldn’t. Like one of those dreams when you need to run but can’t move so much as a finger. Then came its touch on my shoulder.
‘Hey, Naz, what you found here?’
‘Jenny?’ I spun round. ‘Adam? Pitt? I thought it had got you.’
‘We thought it was you who’d been nabbed.’
Grimly, I said, ‘If we don’t get out of here fast we’re all done for.’ I nodded at the cylinder. ‘By what was in there. The Voggron.’
Adam saw the wrecked cylinder. ‘It broke out of that tank, didn’t it? It escaped from the bunker, now it’s back.’
I frowned. ‘But why would it come back?’
Pitt rubbed his jaw. ‘Maybe the Voggron doesn’t like being outdoors. Or it needs to return to its lair.’
‘But what is it?’ Jenny examined the cylinders.
I shrugged. ‘Earlier, I hid in a truck when it came along the tunnel. I didn’t see it exactly... ’
‘I did,’ Jenny said. It’s got masses of tentacles. Like a giant octopus.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Pitt grunted. ‘I saw it. It’s a big lizard.’
‘You didn’t see all of it.’ Jenny got angry. ‘I was fifteen feet up on a shelf. I saw tentacles, round suckers, green skin, the works.’
‘No, no.’ Adam seemed to pity them. ‘I was closest. I saw paws. With fur. The Voggron’s more like a lion.’
Jenny turned to me. ‘Naz, tell them what you saw.’
‘It’s weird. I saw... ’ Yes! I had seen through their eyes. A kind of telepathy had been at work. I wanted to tell them all about it. How I’d known their thoughts. But what if they think I’m crazy? Suddenly, telling them everything didn’t seem a good idea. At least not at that moment. Instead, I gave a baffled shrug. ‘The truck was covered in plastic. All I did see was a figure... just blurred through the sheet.’ But I now knew what those squirming shapes were on its back. Tentacles. Just the thought of them made my own back itch.
‘So... ’ Jenny slapped her forehead in exasperation. ‘We all saw it, but we all saw something different.’
‘A lizard,’ Pitt insisted.
Adam shook his head. ‘Big cat. Lion, maybe.’
I held up one hand. ‘But we can all agree that it came out of there.’ I tapped the empty cylinder with my knuckles. It made a gong sound that echoed away into the distance. A ghostly shimmer on the cold air.
‘And there’s another thing.’ Jenny was deadly serious. ‘Although we can’t agree on what we saw, we can agree on how we felt.’
Adam pointed to his forehead. ‘A headache. The worst I’ve had.’
We all nodded.
‘Like an ice cream headache, only multiplied a hundred times.’ Jenny rubbed the back of her neck as if it still ached. ‘And all the strength went out of me.’
I shuddered. ‘I don’t know if it was my eyes, or the power supply, but it went dark.’
Pitt became uneasy, too. ‘And when it came close, and the headache started, and you felt like crud, wasn’t that the moment that you didn’t care whether it found you or not?’
I agreed. ‘The Voggron did that to us. It can mess with our minds.’ Again, I nearly told them that, just for a few moment, I’d been able to see through their eyes. But I decided to wait until one of them mentioned it. I didn’t want them to think I’d gone nuts. So, I just added vaguely, ‘Brain control. It’s a psychic transmitter.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Jenny said. But from her expression you could tell she knew it was the truth. The Voggron had telepathic powers. Even so, she didn’t know the half of its unnatural talents.
‘Think about it,’ said Pitt. ‘Wouldn’t that be the perfect weapon? One that makes the enemy too sick and too weak to fight. Not only that, it can reach into your head and stop you even wanting to save your own life.’
And it can make you see through other people’s eyes. Why didn’t these three experience the same thing? I wondered. Why me... have I got something in common with the Voggron?
‘A secret weapon,’ Adam sounded panicky. ‘A Frankenstein soldier.’
‘But it didn’t know we were there,’ Jenny protested, ‘so how could it reprogram our brains?’
I stared at the cylinder. ‘It does it all the time, but only over a short range. And it’s only temporary. Otherwise it would affect those on its own side.’
Pitt whistled. ‘So the Voggron is a weapon. Just like the guns stored down here.’
‘Whatever it looks like,’ Jenny added, ‘it was kept frozen. When they needed it to fight the enemy it would be thawed out.’
‘Only it’s defrosted too soon. Maybe a circuit blew.’ Pitt whistled again. ‘That means there’s three more in these.’ He tapped an intact cylinder with his knuckles. Instantly a loud bang filled the vault. A sound like thunder. His eyes went wide. ‘Something just hit the cylinder wall from inside.’
Adam gulped. ‘It’s wanting to break out, too. Guys, we gotta find the exit.’
Pitt backed away from the cylinder as a rumbling came from it. ‘We could try going back to the lounge.’
In a very quiet voice, Jenny whispered, ‘Too late. It’s already here.’
Fifteen
There are times you think your eyes are cheating you. It must be imagination, you tell yourself. Or I’m not seeing properly, or it’s a dream. Only when I backed away I clunked into the wall. It hurt enough to prove this was no dream. Picture this: An animal that’s bigger than an adult lion. The creature prowls into the tunnel. It has a massive head with two fiery orange eyes, big jaws and a mane. Apart from the mane, and tufts of hair on its paws, it has no fur. The skin is yellow with blood-red patches. Pitt was right, it does resemble the skin of a lizard. It walks on all fours. From its back swarm green tentacles. At least fifty of them, like the tentacles of an octopus. These don’t sag but writhe in the air. They move with a quick, muscular strength. Each one is perhaps ten feet long. They reach out to touch objects: the light fittings, the cable ducts, the plumbing pipes. It must be using a refined sense of touch to map its environment. That and its eyes and other senses must create a perfect understanding of where it is. And it’s not just how monstrous the Voggron looks, it’s that nasty tri
ck it can do - to hurt you without even touching. The headache started in my head. My shoulders sagged as the strength seeped from my body. All of a sudden I found it hard to stand on my own two feet.
Despite his fear, Pitt was in awe. ‘Folks. Meet the Voggron.’
Adam gaped. ‘Earlier we all saw parts of it. Me, paws. Jenny, tentacles... ’
Jenny shouted, ‘RUN!’
The lion-like creature, with octopus tentacles writhing from its back, leapt forward. Its jaws opened wide to reveal huge teeth, sharp as steak knives. Slashing behind it, a long bullwhip of a tail. It lashed this flailing appendage in our direction. In absolute horror I saw that the tail ended in claws. Huge curving claws. The tail slammed into the wall above my head. Its wicked claws raked the tiles. As I ducked I saw the gouge marks. If that whip-tail had hit me in the face? Think of the savage cuts!
We all ran in different directions. It followed me at first. Its paws thumped the floor, then, when I ducked under a low doorway to a storeroom, it changed direction to race after Adam. At the same time one tentacle on its back snapped out to curl round Jenny’s waist. With an uncanny dexterity it gripped the back of her jacket. As it did that, it let fly with the whip-tail again. It struck a steel girder next to Pitt. Sparks flew.
Jenny was in deep trouble. It didn’t loosen its grip on her fabric. Quickly, it dragged the girl toward its huge mouth filled with champing teeth. Then it happened again. I found myself looking through Jenny’s eyes into the monster’s hate-filled face. The orange eyes blazed. Closer... and closer. The mouth opened. In total shock I yelled. A yell so loud that the Voggron glanced back for the source of the noise. Jenny took her chance; she slipped out of the jacket, leaving it swinging in the tentacle’s grasp, then she hid behind a row of water pipes.