We passed under another dusty archway, and were suddenly on the level: a railway platform, of course. The light was neither daylight or electric; dim and unstable it came and went, fluctuating.
“This filth isn’t light as you know it,” the old man said. “It’s shoggoth tissue, bioluminescence, probably waste elements, or shit to you! It leaks down like liquid from the wet places. Unlike the hideous things that produce it, however, those god-awful shoggoths, it’s harmless. Just look at it up there on the ceiling.”
I looked, if only to satisfy his urging, at a sort of glowing mist that swirled and pulsed as it spilled along the tiled, vaulted ceiling. Gathering and dispersing, it seemed tenuous as breath on a freezing cold day. And:
“Shoggoth tissue?” I repeated the old fellow. “Alien stuff, right? But how is it you know all this? And I still don’t even know why you’re here. One thing I do know—I think—is that you’re going the wrong way.”
For he had got down from the platform and was striking out along the old rusted tracks that my sense of direction told me were heading –
“Northeast!” he said, as if reading my mind. “And I warned you that you wouldn’t be safe coming with me. In fact, if I were you I’d follow the rails going the other way, south; and sooner or later, somewhere or other, I’m sure you’ll find a way out.”
“But I’m not at all sure!” I replied, jumping down from the platform and hurrying to catch up. “Also, it’s like I said: you seem to understand just about everything that goes on here, and you’re obviously a survivor. As for myself, I’d like to survive, too!”
That stopped him dead in his tracks. “A survivor, you say? I was, yes—but no more. My entire family is no more! So what the hell am I doing trying to stay alive, eh? I’m sick to death of trying, and there’s only one reason I haven’t done away with myself!” And that catch was back in his voice, that almost sob.
But he controlled it, then swung his small, heavy, battered old suitcase from left to right and changed hands—groaning as he stretched and flexed the strained muscles in his left arm—before swinging the suitcase back again and visibly tightening his grip on its leather handle.
“You should let me carry it,” I told him, as we began walking again. “At least let me spell you. What’s in it, anyway? All your worldly possessions? It looks heavy enough.”
“Don’t you worry about this suitcase!” he at once snapped, turning his narrow-eyed look on me as his right hand fell once again to the butt of the weapon on his hip. “And I still think you should turn around and head south while you still can—if only … if only for my stupid peace of mind!— ” (As quickly as that he softened up) “—because I can’t help feeling guilty that it’s my fault you’re here! And the deeper we get into the Bgg’ha Zone, the more likely it is you won’t get out again!”
“Don’t you go feeling guilty about me,” I told him evenly. “I’ll take my chances, like I always have. But you? What about you?”
He didn’t answer, just turned away and carried on walking.
“Or maybe you’re a volunteer—” I hazarded a guess, though by now it was becoming more than a guess “—like that first one who went in and came out screaming? Is that it, Henry? Are you some kind of volunteer, too?” He made no answer, remained silent as I followed on close behind him.
And feeling frustrated in my own right, I goaded him more yet: “I mean, do you even know what you’re doing, Henry, going headlong into the Bgg’ha Zone like this?”
Once again he stopped and turned to me … almost turned on me! “Yes,” he half-growled, half-sobbed, as he pushed his wrinkled old face close to mine. “I do know what I’m doing. And no, I’m not some kind of volunteer. What I’m doing—anything I do—is for myself. You want to know how come I know so much about what happened around here, and to the planet in general? That’s because I was here, pretty much in the middle of it; the middle of one of the centres, anyway. And you’ve probably never heard of them, but there was this crazy bunch … the Esoteric Order, or some such … they had their own religion, if you could call it that, their own church where they gathered; and their bibles were these cursed, moldy old volumes of black magic and weird alien spells and formulas that should have been destroyed back in the dark ages. Why, I even heard it said that. … ” But there he paused, cocking his head on one side and listening for something.
“What is it?” I asked him. Because all I could hear was the slow but regular drip, drip, drip of seeping water.
Then, with a start, a sudden jerk of his head, the old man looked down at the rusting rails, where three or four inches of smelly, stagnant water glinted blackly as it slopped between the tube’s walls. And: “Shh!” he whispered. “Listen, damn you!”
I did as I was told, and then I heard it: those faintest of hollow echoes; a distant grunting, muttering, and slap-slapping of feet in the shallow pebbles back where we had come from. But the grunted—or gutturally spoken—sounds were hardly reassuring, and definitely not to my companion’s liking.
“Damn you! Damn you!” the old man whispered. “Didn’t I warn you to go back? You might even have made it in time before they came on the scene. But you can’t go back there now!”
Just the tone of his hoarse voice made my flesh creep. “So what is it?” I queried him again. “Who or what are ‘they’ this time?”
“We have to get on,” he replied ignoring my question. “Have to move faster—but as quietly as we can. Their hearing isn’t much to speak of, not when they’re up out of their element, the water—but if they were to hear us … ”
“They’re not men?”
“Call them what you will,” he told me, his voice all shuddery. “Men of a sort, I suppose—or frogs, or fish! Who can say what they are exactly? They came in from the sea, up the Thames and into the lakes and wherever there was deep water. It was as if they had been called … I’m sure they were called! By those crazies of the Esoteric Order. But true men? Not at all, not in the least! Their fathers must have mated with women, definitely—or vice versa, maybe?—but no, they’re not men … ”
Which prompted me to ask: “How can you know that for sure?”
“Because I’ve seen some of them. Just the once, but it was enough. And you hear that slap-slapping? Can’t you just picture the feet that slap down on the water like that? Good for swimming, but of small use for walking.”
“So why are we in such a hurry?”
And once more impatiently, or yet more impatiently, he said, “Because they can call out others of their kind. A sort of telepathy, maybe? Hell, I don’t know!”
We moved faster, and I could hear him wincing each time our feet kicked up water that splashed a little too loudly. Then in a while we came across a narrow platform to one wide, where the wall had been cut back some two feet to make a maintenance walkway four feet higher than the bed of the tracks.
“Get up there,” the old man told me. “It’s dry and we’ll be able to go faster without all the noise.”
I did as he advised and reached down to help him up. He was little more than a bundle of bones and couldn’t be very strong, but he didn’t for a second offer that case to me or release his grip on it. And so we moved ahead, him front, me behind; and eventually—this time without my urging—he continued telling me his story from where he’d left off; his story, plus that of the alien invasion or takeover; or walkover, which seemed to come much easier to him now. So maybe he’d needed to get it off his chest.
“It was those Esoteric Order freaks. At least, that was how everyone thought of them: as folk with too few screws, and what few they had with crossed threads! But no, they weren’t crazy except maybe in what they were trying to do. And actually, that even got into the newspapers: how the Esoteric Order