“Well, it was a laugh, wasn’t it?” As daft as all those UFO stories from more than a century ago, and tales of prehistoric monsters that lived in a Scottish loch and on Himalayan mountains; oh, and lots of other myths and legends of that sort. Oh really? And if the oh-so-bloody-clever newspaper reporters who infiltrated the church and saw them at their worship and listened to their ‘idiotic beliefs’—if they had been right, then all well and good … but they weren’t!
“And when should it happen—when did it happen—but at Hallowmas? The feast of All Hallows, All Saints!
“And oh, what an awful feast that was, them feasting on us, I mean, when those monstrous beings answered the call and came forth from strange dimensions, bringing their thralls, servitors and adherents with them. Up from the oceans, down from the weird skies of parallel universes, erupting from the earth and bringing all of the planet’s supposedly dead volcanoes back to life, these minions of madness came; and what of humanity then, eh? What but fodder for their tables, fodder for their stables.”
That last wasn’t a question but a simple fact, and the old man was sobbing again—openly now—as he turned and grasped my arm. “My wife … ” he almost choked on the word. “That poor, poor woman … she was taken at first pass! Taken, as the city reeled and the buildings crumbled, as the earth broke open and darkness ruled … !
“Ah, but according to rumor, the very first to go was that blasphemous, evil old church; for the so-called priests of the Esoteric Order had been fatally mistaken in calling up that which they couldn’t put down again: a mighty octopus god-thing who rose in his house somewhere in the Pacific, while others of his spawn surfaced in their manses from various deeps. Not the least of them emerged somewhere in the Arctic Circle along with an entire plateau; that was a massive upheaval, causing earthquakes and tsunamis around the world! Another rose up from the Mariana Trench, and one far closer to home from a lesser known abyss somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He was the one—damn him to hell!—who built his twisted tower house here in the zone.
In fact the Bgg’ha Zone is named after him, for he is Bgg’ha!
“And there’s a chant, a song, a liturgy of sorts that human worshippers—oh yes, there are such people!—sing of a night as they wander aimlessly through the rubble streets. And having heard it so often, far too often, dinning repeatedly in my ears while I lay as if in a coma, hardly daring to breathe until they had moved on, I learned those alien words and could even repeat them. What’s more, when the SSR trapped and caught one of these madmen, these sycophants, to learn whatever they could from him, he offered them a translation. And those chanted words which I had learned, they were these:
“Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh i’ihu’nagl fhtagn.” A single-made sentence that translates into this:
“From his house at Im’ykh, Bgg’ha at last is risen!”
“And do you know, those words still ring in my ears, blocking almost everything else out? If I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, on what I’m saying, it all slips away and all I can hear is that damned chanting: Bgg’ha at last is risen! And perhaps I even have … I even have the means with which to do it … ”
But there the old man fell silent once more, possibly wondering if he’d said too much …
Then, as we rested for a few minutes, and as I looked down from the maintenance ledge, I saw how the dirty water glinting between the rusted rails was much deeper here, perhaps as much as ten or twelve inches. Seeing where I was looking, my companion told me:
“Yes, there’s very deep water up ahead, and likewise on the surface.”
Ahead of us?” I repeated him for want of something to say. “But … on the surface?”
“Mainly on the surface,” he nodded. “That’s where it’s leaking from. We’re heading for Knightsbridge, as was—which isn’t far from the Serpentine—also as was but much enlarged and far deeper now. That, too, was the work of Bgg’ha; he did it for some of his servitors, the kind we heard wading through that shallow water back along the tracks. There’s plenty more of them in the Serpentine, which is part of a great lake now that’s drowned St. James’s Park and everything in between all the way to the burst banks of the Thames. We can stay down here for another mile or thereabouts, but then we’ll have to surface … either that or swim, and I really don’t fancy that!”
“You’ve done this before,” I said as we set off again, because it was obvious that he had, and fairly often or recently. That explained how he knew these routes so well.
He nodded and replied, “Five times, yes. But this is going to be the last. For you, too.”
“Or maybe not,” I replied. “I mean, you never can tell how things will work out.”
“You young fool!” he said, but not unkindly, even somewhat sadly. “You’ll be right in the heart of the Bgg’ha Zone. Right there, in the roots of the twisted tower, that loathsome creature’s so-called ‘house!’ And I can tell you exactly how things are going to work out for you: you won’t be coming out again!”
“But you did it,” I answered him. “And all of five times—if you’re not lying, or not simply crazy!”
He shook his head. “I’m not lying, and I’m not just crazy. You’re the one who’s crazy! Listen, do you have any idea who I am, or why I’m really here?”
I shrugged. “You’re just an old man on a mad mission. That much is obvious. I may even know what your mission is, and why. It’s revenge, because they took your wife, your family. But one small suitcase—even one that’s full of high explosives—just isn’t going to do it. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon is ever going to do it.”
The look he turned on me then was sour, downcast, and disappointed. And: “Have I been that obvious?” he asked me, as we came to a halt where the ledge widened out onto an actual platform. “I suppose I must have been. But even so, you’re only half right—and that makes you half wrong.”
The shoggoth light was poorer here, where the mist writhing on the tiled, vaulted expanse of the ceiling was that much thinner. Our eyes, however, had grown accustomed to the eerie gloom and the fluctuating quality of the bioluminescence, and we were easily able to read the legend on the tunnel’s opposite wall:
KNIGHTSBRIDGE
“My God!” my guide muttered then. “But I remember how this place looked in its heyday: so clean and bright with its shining tiles, its endless stairs and great elevators, its theatre and lingerie posters. But look at it now, with its evidence of earth tremors and fires: its blackened, greasy walls; its collapsed or caved-in archways; all the other damage it’s suffered. And … and … Lord, what a mess!”
A mess? Something of an understatement, that. The ceiling was scarred by a series of broad jagged cracks where dozens of tiles had come loose and fallen; some of the access/exit openings in the wall on our side of the tracks had buckled inwards, causing the ceiling to sag ominously where mortared debris and large blocks of concrete had crashed down; and from its source somewhere high above a considerable waterfall was surging out of an arched exit and spilling into the central channel, drowning the tracks under a foaming torrent.
As we clambered over the rubble, the old man said, “I think that I—or rather that we—are probably in trouble.” And I asked myself: another understatement? How phlegmatic! And meanwhile he had continued: “Like everywhere else, this place seems to be coming apart. It’s got so much … so much worse, since I was last here … ”
Which was when he began to ramble and sob again, only just managing to make sense:
“There’s been so many earthquakes recently … if the rest of the underground system is in the same terrible condition as this place … but then again, maybe it’s not that bad … and Hyde Park Corner isn’t so far away … not very far at all … and anyway it was never my intention