“The old grocery stores? The shattered shops?”
“Yes, of course.” My turn to nod. “Where else? The supermarkets that were. Those that aren’t already completely looted out. In the lighter hours—the few short hours of partial daylight, when those things sleep, if they sleep—I dig among the ruins; but stuff is getting very hard to find. Day by day, week by week, it’s harder all the time. Landed here just a couple of days ago. Least I think it was days; you never can tell in this perpetual dusk. I haven’t seen the sun for quite some time now, and even then it was very low down on the horizon, right at the beginning of this … this—”
“—This long last night?” he helped me out. “The long last night of the human race, and certainly of Henry Chattaway.”
Then he sobbed, and only just managed to catch it before it leaked out of him, but I heard it, anyway. And: “My God, how and why did this bloody mess happen to us?” And craning his neck he looked up to where black wisps of cloud scudded across the sky, as if searching for an answer there … from God, perhaps.
“So—er, Henry?—in fact you are a believer,” I said, standing up from the broken wall and dropping my smoke before it could burn my fingers. “So, are we sinners, do you reckon?” And I stepped on the glowing tobacco embers, crushing them out in the powdered, brick-red dust.
Controlling his breathing, his sobbing, the old man said, “Do you mean are we being punished? I don’t know—probably. Come with me and I’ll show you something.” And getting creakingly to his feet, he went hobbling to a more open area close by, once the corner of a street—more properly a function of twisted blackened ruins and rubble now—where the scattered, shattered debris lay more thinly on the river ground, and only the vaguest outlines of any actual street remained. Of course, this was hardly unusual; for all I knew the entire city—and probably every city in the world—would look pretty much the same right now.
The old man tugged on the sleeve of my parka where I stood glancing here and there, aware that at this once-crossroads we would be plainly visible from all four directions. But my companion was pointing toward the northeast; so that even before my eyes followed the bearing indicated by his scrawny arm, his trembling finger, I knew what I would see. And:
“Look at that!” He uttered a husky whisper, almost a whimper. And once again, “Look!” as he tugged more insistently on my arm. “Now tell me: isn’t it obvious where at least one of those names comes from?”
He was talking about the twisted tower—a “mile-high monstrosity,” he’d called it –where it stood, leaned or seemed to stagger, perhaps a mile away, or a mile and a half at most. But matching it in ugliness was its almost obscene height … not a mile high, no, but not far short; with its teetering spire stabbing up through the disc of cloud that had been drawn there and now circled it like a whirlpool of the debris of doomed plants round the sucking well of a vast black hole. It was built of the wreckage, the ravaged soul of the crushed city; of gutted high-rises; of several miles of railway carriages twined around its fat base and rising in a spiral, like the thread of a gigantic screw, to a fifth of the tower’s height; of bridges and wharves torn from their anchorages; of a great round clock face, recognizable even at this distance as that of Big Ben; of a jutting tube concrete and glass that had once stood in the heart of the city where it had been called Centrepoint … all of these things and many more, all parts now of this twisted tower. But it wasn’t really twisted; it was just that its design and composition were so utterly alien that they didn’t conform to the mundane Euclidean geometry that a human eye or brain would automatically accept as the shapes of a genuine structure, observing them as authentic, without feeling sick and dizzy.
And though I had seen it often enough before, still I took a stumbling step backwards before tearing my eyes away from it. Those crazy angles, which at first seemed convex before concertinaing down to concavities … only to bulge forth again like gigantic boils on the trunk of a monster. “That mile-high monstrosity,” yes; but I had seen it before, if not from this angle, and I’d known what effect it would have on me; so I’d been far more interested in what stood—seeming almost to teeter—in front of it, as if in some kind of obeisance:
It leaned there close to that colossal, warped dunce’s cap, out of true at an angle of maybe twenty degrees, only a hundred yards of so in the tower’s foreground; and instead of the proud dome that it had been, it now looked like half of a blackened, broken egg, or the shattered skull of some unimaginable giant, lying there in the uneven dirt of a vast, desecrated graveyard: the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral.
“Horrible, horrible,” the old man said and shuddered uncontrollably—then gave a start when, from somewhere not very far behind us, came a dismal baying or hooting call; forlorn-sounding, true, but in the otherwise silence of the ruins terrifying to any vulnerable man or beast. And starting again—violently this time as more hooting sounded, but closer and from a different direction—the old man said, “The hounds! That howling is how they’ve learned to triangulate. We’ve got to get away from here!”
“But how?” I said. “The howling’s from the south, while to the northeast … we’re on the verge of the Bgg’ha Zone!”
“Come with me—and hurry!” he replied. “If some of these wrecked buildings were still standing we’d already be dead—or worse! The hounds know all the angles and move through them, so we can think ourselves lucky.”
“The angles!”
“Alien geometry,” he answered, limping as fast as he could back down the rubble canyon where we’d met, then turning into a lesser side-street canyon. And panting, he explained: “They say that where the hounds come from—Tindalos or somewhere—something?—there are only angles. Their universe is made of angles that let them slip through space and they can do the same here. But London has lost most of its angles now; and with the buildings reduced or rounded and jumbled heaps of debris, the hounds have trouble finding their way around. And whether you believe in Him or not, you may thank God for that!”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, certain that he told the truth. “But where are we going?”
“Where I intended to be going anyway,” he replied. “But you most probably won’t want to—for which I don’t blame you—and anyway we’re already there.”
“Where?” I said, looking left, right, everywhere and seeing nothing but heaped bricks and shadowy darkness.
“Here,” he answered, and ducked into the gloom of a partly caved-in iron and brick archway. And assisted by a rusted metal handrail, we made our way down tiled steps littered with rubble fallen from the ceiling, lying there under a layer of dust that thinned out a little the deeper we went.
Where are we?” I asked him after a while. “I mean, what is this place?” My questions echoed while the gloom deepened until I could barely see.
“Used to be an old entrance of the tube system,” he told me. “This one didn’t have elevators, just steps, and they must have closed it down a hundred years ago. But when these alien things were rioting through the city, causing earthquakes and wrecking everything, all of the destruction must have cracked it open.”
“You seen to know all about it,” I said, as I became aware that the light was improving; either that or my eyes were growing accustomed to the dark.
The old man nodded. “I saw a dusty old plaque down here one time, not long after I found this place. A sort of memorial, it said that the last time this part of the underground system was used was during the Second World War—as a shelter. It was too deep down here for the bombs to do any damage. As for now, it’s still safer than most other places, at least where those hounds are concerned, because it’s too round.”
“Too round?”
“It’s a hole in the earth deep underground,”