“Wish me luck, old chap,” he said as he turned away. “I have faced many battles, but I do believe this short walk might be among the hardest things I shall be called to do for my country.”
I agreed with him on that, but he went anyway. He was still chewing down hard on that infernal cigar as he climbed up and over, into the turret and down into the bowels of the sub.
I stood there for long minutes, straining to hear, waiting for a cry for help and ready to go to his aid if needed. For the longest time, there was no sound save my own breathing and the slight hiss of burning tobacco in my pipe. Then, as if from a great distance, I heard it, a voice raised in a shout, the old Gaelic phrase repeated twice. It sounded as if the second time contained more than a trace of fear.
Dhumna Ort! Dhumna Ort!
I had started climbing up the turret when I heard scrambling sounds above me, and had to retreat as Churchill descended out of the sub with some haste. He did not stop to acknowledge me, but marched, almost running, away along the deck and down the gangway. By the time I reached the foreman’s office, he was already making impressive headway down the scotch, gulping it down unceremoniously straight from the neck of the decanter.
He only spoke when he came up for air. His cheeks were now ruddy, but he was pale around the lips, with dark shadows under his eyes, and his hands shook badly as he lit a fresh cigar.
“That dashed thing killed the Huns,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a question.
But if I thought his experience might mean a change in course for his plan of action and a softening of his resolve, I was to be proved wrong with his next sentence.
“Can you show someone how to make that pentacle of yours? We will need one for each of the men. I shudder to think what might have happened had I not been inside it.”
I spent the night sitting in that cramped little room, drinking and smoking with Churchill. Every so often, he would call for one or another of his men and bark an order at them. But mostly we talked, of inconsequential matters; he spoke with some elegance, and not a little sense of regret, of his time as a journalist, and I regaled him with some of the tales that my friend Dodgson has already detailed in his journals. At some point I slept, and when I woke, Churchill was gone and about his business for King and Country.
As for myself, I never set foot inside the sub again after I retrieved my box of defenses the next morning. I spent two more days at the boat shed instructing Churchill’s men in the art of pentacle defense, and showed some Naval engineers the trick of the valves and wires needed for their construction.
I heard no more for a week, then out of the blue, I received another summons to the dockyard late of a Sunday evening.
The river was as quiet as it gets, and there was no ceremony. Firstly, they loaded the dead Germans. I did not watch that part, for I was reminded all too vividly of the impressions I had received of their passing from the thing in the cold wet dark. I stood in the shed doorway, smoking a pipe until that part of the job was done.
Then fifteen of Churchill’s men went on board, each carrying a small bag of luggage and a box that closely resembled my own box of defenses. Churchill had a word and a handshake for every one of them, but if he had any qualms about what he was doing, they did not show.
Churchill and I retired to the hut at the rear again, where we shared more of his fine scotch until, almost an hour later, the big shed doors were opened, the timber wedges were knocked away and the sub slid, almost silently into the river.
We went out onto the dock to watch it head off out toward the Estuary, a great dark shark cruising on the still waters.
“I don’t know about the Germans,” I said, “but it certainly scares me.”
“They will take her out into the North Sea and leave her floating as near to where we found her as they can manage,” Churchill said. “Hopefully, the Huns will find her before the sea claims her again.”
“And your men? How will they return?”
Churchill looked at me, and now, for the first time, I saw how deeply he had been affected. He had fresh tears in his eyes.
“They have their orders,” he said, turned his back on me, and walked away.
I never heard of the fate of the submarine, or Churchill’s men, and although I have met Churchill twice since, he has never spoken of it.
But some nights, when the fog rolls in from the river and I smell salt in the air, I dream of them cruising along in the deep dark, all dead at their posts while the cold blackness swirls around them.
I hope it was worth it.
Banks closed the journal softly this time, lost in thought, feeling the pieces of the jigsaw click together as he processed the information he’d just read.
The Germans had indeed found the sub after Churchill had it returned. But far from it scaring them, or perhaps despite it scaring them, they had turned it back to their advantage, somehow taming the thing Carnacki had found in the sub, and molding it to their own devices. It was no great surprise, given their corruption of everything they ever touched, and it seemed impossibly outlandish, but Banks had seen all the evidence now, and could come to no other conclusion.
They got the idea from Winston bloody Churchill.
They used a fucking demon to power a UFO.
- 6 -
He thought it was a bombshell that would cause a ruction back in Whitehall and was prepared for a sense of urgency, or even official denial and an immediate cover-up. But when he went back to the dinghy for his checkpoint call after four hours, the voice at the other end listened to his report and answered only in the same calm, measured, voice.
“Secure and sanitize the base,” the man said after Banks had told him everything. “We’re sending a team down to relieve you, but it might be a day until we can round them all up and deliver them. In the meantime, find out everything you can that you think might be relevant. Hold out there and keep your heads down.”
Secure and sanitize. The squad’s not going to like that.
“What do you mean, they flew it?” Wiggins said. Banks had the team assembled, standing in a line in the hut, and had just brought them up to speed on his reading. “Surely somebody would have spotted a big shiny bugger of a thing like that in orbit?”
“It was 1942, lad,” Banks replied. “Everybody was a wee bit busy either shooting or getting shot at.”
“It’s not that big a stretch though,” Hynd added. “Von Braun was a fucking genius by all accounts. And there’s long been rumors about other stuff the Yanks have hidden away in their desert bunkers.”
“Aye,” McCally said. “But yon was wee green alien buddies from Roswell. Not fucking demons from the North Sea.”
Banks put a hand up to stop the conjecture.
“We’ve got our orders, and that’s all we need to know. Secure and sanitize.”