‘And the earlier deaths? The horse, and the maid?’
Thacker shrugged. ‘Experiments?’
‘You’re just guessing now, Thacker.’
‘All I’m trying to do is curb your enthusiasm for something that has no right to be here and is clearly dangerous. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.’
They walked the rest of the way in uneasy silence. At the main gate, they deposited the papers in big hazmat containers, then showered and scrubbed the outsides of their suits.
When the process had been completed, Dickson was the first to break the silence.
‘I know what you’re trying to do. I’m the one who’s supposed to turn everything around so that it looks evil. I’m the Cassandra, warning everyone of impending doom. But think of it. A shield against everything. I could retire, and sleep easy at night knowing that nothing could go wrong even though I wasn’t on watch.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ said Thacker, unstrapping his respirator, ‘and it’s never that easy. Let’s go and prod Henbury and Adams again. See what they have to say for themselves.’
Chapter Five
‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Dickson. ‘Gloves are off, and we want some straight talking from you two. I’ve a list of questions here, and you’ll damn well answer each and every one of them.’
Adams bristled. ‘Lord Henbury is a peer of the realm…’
‘Which amounts to bugger all here. If you want to complain to Her Majesty◦– yes, I said Her Majesty◦– you can do so when and if I let you go.’
‘Queen Elizabeth the Second,’ said Thacker helpfully. ‘George the Fifth’s granddaughter. Succession has been maintained while you were away.’
Henbury looked pale and tired. He shifted constantly in his seat, trying to get comfortable on a backside that was lacking both fat and flesh. ‘I’ll trade you. Answers for some narcotic. My stump’s giving me hell.’
‘I can arrange that,’ said Thacker. He stepped away to the tent flap and talked to the guard outside. ‘It’ll be here in a minute or two. In the meantime, where’s Jack?’
‘Jack is,’ Henbury hesitated, ‘probably dead. He was dying the last time we saw him.’
‘And when was that?’ asked Dickson.
‘Time has no meaning where we’ve been. Everything is different there.’
‘Before or after the house disappeared?’
‘After.’ He rubbed his too-large eyes. ‘We tried to save him, just as we tried to save ourselves.’
‘Robert, did you kill Jack?’ Dickson spoke very quietly.
‘No. I wish I had now. But it wasn’t us. We did nothing. Part of the problem. Doing nothing until it was too late to do anything.’
Dickson looked up at Thacker, who returned his questioning gaze with his own. The man wasn’t making any sense.
‘Where did the machine come from? The one on the first floor of the west wing, far end.’
‘Jack built it. He brought it from Egypt with him.’
‘Archaeologist?’
‘He thought so. Perhaps he was.’
‘Do you know what it does?’
‘It eats. That’s what it does. It eats.’
‘And what does it eat, Robert?’
‘Everything. It consumes the vital energy from anything and kills it dead.’
Dickson tapped his pen on his clipboard. ‘So why aren’t you dead? And Adams?’
‘How alive do we look?’ snorted Adams. ‘Do you think I was always like this skeleton I am now?’
‘Where’s Jack?’
‘He’s dead. He must be dead by now.’
‘Where did you last see him?’
‘He was…’
‘Every time you stop to think, I worry that you’re about to lie to me.’ Dickson leaned back. ‘This is not the time for lies.’
Henbury screwed his face up. ‘I’m in pain.’
‘I understand that. What was Jack doing when you saw him last? What makes you think he’s dead?’
‘He was being crucified, embedded in a metal wall. It was pulling him apart, a fraction of an inch at a time.’ Henbury took gulps of air to steady himself. ‘He didn’t want our help, even though he was in agony. He thought they would turn him into a god, when all they were doing was sucking the very last drops of life from him. We tried to get him out, but there was no way of freeing him. He was the only one who knew how to work the machine.’ And he collapsed sobbing on the tabletop, the effort of explaining too great for him.
Adams rested his hand on Henbury’s shoulder and looked mutinous.
‘Adams?’ asked Thacker. ‘Who are ‘they’?’
‘If we could swap places, you wouldn’t believe me. So why should I waste my breath?’
‘Try us. We’ve seen things you could only dream of.’
‘They’re called Ankhani. Least, that’s what Jack called them. They live on a dead world at the other side of the machine. He let some of them through… to feed. That wasn’t enough, so they took everything, including us.’
Dickson took out a fresh sheet of paper from his clipboard. ‘These Ankhani? Do they look like us? Do they look like you?’
‘No. Not like us.’ Adams shuddered. ‘Dull, cold things. They walk on tentacles. Big head like a half-inflated balloon. Eyes are black and hard. They die like us, mind.’
‘Oh. You’ve killed one.’ Dickson was sketching.
‘More than one. Aim for the head. They burst.’
‘How gratifying.’ He turned the clipboard around. ‘Anything like that?’
‘No.’ Adams snatched the board and Dickson’s pen. ‘Tall, upright. Two eyes on the side of the head. Ugly as sin itself. Walks on its tentacles, I said. Like legs, long like snakes. Here.’
Thacker looked over the table. If it was true, they were ghastly.
‘And what do they want with us?’ Dickson contemplated the monstrosity in front of him.
‘Nothing. We’re like cows. They use some of us for meat, and some of us for milk.’
‘They’re farming us?’
‘If we let them. The whole world could be like the Hall.’
Thacker rubbed his chin under the surgeon’s mask. ‘Why didn’t you tell us all this earlier? First opportunity you had?’
Adams raised himself on his hands. He leaned across the table. ‘We’re not bloody mad. You wouldn’t have believed us then, and you don’t believe us now. I can see it in his face.’ He jabbed a finger at Dickson. ‘He thinks we’re spinning some sort of yarn, either covering up what we really did, or that we’re mental with talk of monsters and doors to other worlds.’
‘And what about me?’ asked Thacker. ‘What sort of look do I have?’
‘You? You’re more ready to believe. You’ve seen what it was like, and you can imagine it worse, trapped in your own little bubble, having every last ounce of effort drained from you until even your blood starts to run slow.’
‘Sit yourself down, Mr. Adams,’ said Dickson. He looked at his list. ‘You were going to burn the Hall down.’
Henbury wearily raised his head. ‘We were going to try one last thing. Raise the energy levels back to what they were before we were cut off. We assumed we were going to die, but any chance of escaping that hell was worth it.’
‘But you never got the chance to set the fire.’
‘No.’
‘So how did you get back?’
‘We don’t know.’ Henbury ground out the words. ‘This is what is destroying us. We don’t know why, and we are afraid. We have made not one jot of difference to that machine. It does what it does and without Jack we can’t understand it.’
Thacker was distracted by the guard returning with the painkillers, a little brown bottle half-full with white pills. He heard Dickson ask: ‘You said something before about a door to other worlds?’
Henbury didn’t answer. He waited until Thacker had shaken out two of the pills into the palm of his hand and nudged them across the table.