“I left her at home while I went looking for a place to bury Janet. No big problem there … a hole in the ground, with plenty of bricks and rubble to fill it in. Then I went rummaging for food in the ruins of a corner store I’d found; canned fruits and meat and such. But when I got back home with my haul—‘home,’ hah!—a concrete cellar in a one-time museum; a wing of the old Victoria and Albert, it might have been. But anyway, when I got back, Dawn was gone and the place had been completely wrecked; what few goods we’d had—sticks of furniture and such—were broken up, strewn everywhere, and the place was damp and stank of … oh I don’t know, rotting fish, weeds, and stagnant water. The evil stench of the Deep Ones, yes, and they, too, are the loyal servitors of Bgg’ha, as I believe they are of all the octopus-heads … ”
And there Henry fell silent again, leaving only the echoes of his tortured voice, and the sloshing of our legs through the water. But I couldn’t let it rest at that. There were things he had told me for which I would like explanations.
“You said your wife was taken that first night, as all hell stampeded through the city and there was no defense against the turmoil, the horror. But that was a long time ago, Henry—even years! Weren’t these monsters slaughtering everyone and destroying everything in their path at that time? How could you possibly imagine your wife could still be alive in Bgg’ha’s twisted tower? Especially after what Janet told you about it?”
At which the old man seemed to freeze in his tracks, jerked to a standstill, and in the next moment turned on me, snarling: “How do you know what Janet did or didn’t tell me, eh? And how much do you know about that damned twisted tower? Tell me that, Julian Chalmers!”
Oh, I was glad in that moment that I had returned his suitcase to Henry, and that he was carrying it with both hands. He still had that gun on him, and if he could have reached for it without jeopardizing the safety of the case and its contents, I felt sure he would have done so. And who knows what he might have done then? But he couldn’t and didn’t, and I said:
“Henry, I don’t mean to hurt you, but the creatures in the tower … they eat people, don’t they? Haven’t you already said so? And it’s been a very long time for your wife. Now, don’t be offended, but in the light of your daughters’s ages, not to mention your own obvious years, it’s my understanding that your wife isn’t a mere girl; so what good would she be, alive, to such as Bgg’ha and his minions? I mean, him and his monsters? Beasts in their stables? What use to them except as … well except as—”
But that was as far as he would let me go, and I could tell by the look on his face that it wouldn’t in any case be necessary to finish my question.
“God damn you, Julian!” he said, as he turned away. “It was hope—desperate, impossible hope!—that’s all. And as for … for poor Dawn … ” But he couldn’t say on and so went staggering away through the sluggish, blackly glinting water, in the eerie light of the swirling shoggoth tissue.
I gave him a few moments before catching up, and said. “I’m sorry, Henry, but you leave me confused. I know you’re planning some kind of revenge—in whatever form that will take—but if you were really hoping that Dawn and your wife are still alive, mightn’t the violence of any such revenge hurt them, too, not to mention you yourself?”
Yet again he came to a halt and turned to me. “Of course it would, and will!” He said, “But far better that, a quick, clean death to them—to all of us!—than what they could be suffering; to what Dawn, if not her mother, must be suffering even as we speak!” And before I could say anything more: “Now listen:
“Did you know that they take young boys, too? Young men, I mean, your age or thereabouts? And since you appear to be good at figuring things out, can you guess what they are used for?”
“No, not really,” I said, unwilling to disturb him further. “But in any case maybe we should quiet it down now. I think I heard voices—some kind of sounds, anyway—from somewhere up ahead.”
The old man came to a halt, his eyes focusing as he looked all about, searching for signs on the old blackened walls. And: “Yes,” he whispered, about as quietly as I had suggested. “Your ears are obviously better than mine. We’re only five minutes or so away from Green Park, and that’s one of the worst places for—”
“—Deep Ones?” I finished it for him, but he only nodded.
And from then on we stayed silent, creeping like mice, glad that the water level had fallen away to no more than an inch or two. And for the second time Henry entrusted his case to me …
Ahead of us, the shoggoth light brightened up a little until it was about half as good as dim electric light used to be. But if it had been only half as bright again, that would have suited us just fine and still we wouldn’t have complained—no, not for a moment! And Henry was right: four or five minutes later, Green Park’s platform came into view.
By then those barking, gutturally grunting “voices” I had heard had faded into distant echoes before ceasing almost entirely. But still there were the sounds of some sort of laborious work going on in that subterranean burrow’s upper reaches. So we didn’t climb up onto the platform but splayed down on the tracks in the shadow of the bull-nosed wall, where we crouched down and kept the lowest possible profile as we traversed the mercifully short length of the station. But halfway across the comparatively open space, suddenly Henry paused to tug nervously on the sleeve of my parka, indicating that I should look at the platform’s flagged floor.
Still keeping low, but raising my head just enough to scan the length of the platform end to end, I saw what he had seen: the large, damp imprints of webbed feet where the dusty paving flags had been criss-crossed. Then, too, I detected the frowsy smell of weedy deeps and the half-human creatures that dwelled in them.
Deep Ones! Henry formed the words with his mouth and lips, both silently and needlessly. And: Look! He pointed.
From the mouths of the entry/exit archways, rubble had been cleared away and heaped to the side. The stairs and one wrecked elevator, visible beyond the arches, were also clear of debris; but from one such entrance a thin stream of water flowed forth, snaking across the platform and over the lip of the bull-noses, before finding its way down into the well and from there, presumably, into unseen channels that were deeper yet. But even in the moments we spent watching it, so the flow quickly increased to a torrent, and at the same time a massed, triumphant shout—a hooting, snorting uproar, even at the distance—sounded from above. But of course we already knew that the engineering going on up there wasn’t the work of entirely human beings …
And now Henry whispered, “Come, let’s get out of here!”
Minutes later, and a hundred yards or more into the comparative darkness of the tunnel, finally the old man spoke up again. “We were lucky back there. We’ve been incredibly fortunate!”
“Oh?” I replied. “Lucky? How come?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Why, the fact that they had recently gone up out of the station! And that they hadn’t begun to flood the place earlier, like yesterday maybe. For if they’d done that we’d the swimming by now! Surely you know or can guess what they were doing, what they’re doing even now?”
Trudging along beside him, sloshing through inches of cold, black water, I shrugged. “Well, like you said: they’re flooding the place.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because … because they like the water?”
Henry offered up a derisive snort, and repeated me sarcastically: “‘Because they like the water’? Is that all? Man, can’t you see? Don’t you understand? They’re terraforming—no, aqua-forming—the Underground system, similar to what we were doing to Mars before those freaks in the Esoteric Order fucked everything up! They’re making the Underground