As Napoo slashed away at the last of the lianas and vines and they broke through the last of the undergrowth, they saw the far wall of the crater, towering six hundred feet above them. They clambered over moss-covered boulders down into an old stone-strewn dell, where huge buttressing tree-roots supported trees that must have been centuries old. At the base of the crater wall, a vast yawning crack split the rock, its mouth barred by a writhing mass of the pallid creepers that reached out to choke the surrounding vegetation. The size of the cavern mouth dwarfed the Tommies; it could have taken three or four battlepillars abreast.
A single valiant shaft of sunlight shone down through the scab trees behind them, attempting to penetrate the gloom beyond the entrance, but it fell on nothing within that it could illuminate. The light was swallowed whole and snuffed out, engulfed by the immensity of the black void beyond, a void that seemed to brook no examination from without, forcing those who gazed into it to take what lay beyond on faith.
Looking into that black gulf for too long gave Atkins an unsettling sense of unease and nausea. There was nothing within the obsidian darkness on which to focus, and strange unearthly shapes and colours swam in his vision, until he was no longer sure whether they were a trick of the mind or not. It was only when he looked away that reality reasserted itself.
Impressive though the entrance was, it was certainly more natural than their imaginations had led them to expect. Atkins had envisaged demons with flaming swords guarding it, perhaps, or giant lintels carved from the rock face and inscribed with unspeakable glyphs, standing on weathered, ruined Doric columns of great size. Or something darker, exuding great age and malevolence: vast forbidding blackened doors of charred bone, and niches of skulls.
“So that’s it?” said Mercy. “The gateway to the Underworld? Can’t say that I’m impressed. I was expecting something a little more–”
“Fire and brimstone?” suggested Gutsy.
Mercy shrugged. “Well, yes, I suppose. A little less woodland dell, more Welcome to Hell, as it were. Although I’m not complaining. To be quite honest, I’m a little glad it ain’t.”
“Evil has a banality all its own,” said Hepton, eyeing the entrance warily. “I wouldn’t let your guard down.” He made the sign of the cross and, a little self-consciously, Tonkins followed suit.
“Well, we’re not getting through that stuff without a little help,” said Gutsy, watching the slow-writhing creepers. He had a hand on Little Bertha, but knew it would be of little use against the mass of choking plant tendrils before them.
A bolt of blue-white energy blasted Pot Shot off his feet.
“Another telluric blast,” yelped Tonkins.
They dived for cover. Atkins grabbed the dazed Pot Shot by his webbing and hauled him behind a buttress root.
“What hit me?” he asked.
“Lightning,” said Atkins, his attention focused on the undergrowth around them. “Lucky for the rest of us you’re the tallest. Makes you a natural lightning rod.”
“Good job I wasn’t wearing me steel helmet then,” he said with a dazed smile.
Another blast followed, but it wasn’t the thunderous concussive heaven-bound telluric bolt, nor was it the half-expected blast of sulphurous hellfire.
“What the hell is it?” asked Everson, his back to a boulder for cover, as he checked the chambers of his Webley.
Mercy peered over the top of a fallen tree, behind which he’d taken cover.
Another bolt of energy arced out from the undergrowth. It was the writhing, spitting Tesla arc of an electric lance. Another licked out across the open space, scorching the undergrowth in which they’d taken cover.
“Chatts!”
“Blood and sand!” cursed Atkins. “How? I thought they were afraid of this place. What the hell are they doing here?”
“One of their balloons must have come down, like us,” said Gutsy.
“Nothing must enter. Nothing must leave,” Gazette quoted, laconically. “They’ve been abandoned. They know they’re not getting out of the crater, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Makes them dangerous.”
Another arc of energy spat across and hit a fallen log, vaporising sap and moisture in an instant and exploding the bole into a thousand fire-hardened shards of wooden shrapnel.
“Christ, you think?” yelped Gutsy, ducking as low as he could.
Gazette settled against a rock, nestled the stock of his Enfield into his shoulder and targeted the shadows in the grove of scab trees to the side of the cavern entrance. He squeezed the trigger.
Another bolt flashed from a different direction.
“How many of them are there?” bawled Pot Shot, pinned down behind a buttress root.
“I can’t tell, they’re leaping around, keeping us pinned down,” replied Gazette.
“Where’s Napoo?” asked Everson.
Atkins looked around. The urman had vanished. Gutsy jerked his head upwards; Napoo was edging round a scab tree, trying to get a better vantage point to spot the chatts.
Hepton flinched as the brief flash of another electric bolt threw his shaded funk hole into sharp relief.
There was a gunshot and a chatt fell from its perch, in a tree overlooking their position. Gazette cycled the Enfield’s bolt and looked for another target.
There was another gunshot. A chatt staggered through the undergrowth towards them, its electric battery backpack spitting and fizzing. It stumbled a few steps before the pack emitted a brief whine and exploded, engulfing it in a ball of white heat that left its carapace charred and smouldering as it collapsed.
“That wasn’t me,” said Gazette.
There was a snap of dry wood underfoot and the shade of a grey ashen-faced man stepped into the dappled shadow of Hell’s dell.
“It’s another fungus-man,” said Hepton, shrinking into the shadows as far as he could.
The figure stepped into the light.
“Fuck me,” said Mercy. “It’s the Alleyman.”
“Werner,” muttered Everson.
The German pilot looked the worse for wear. His smart uniform was scorched and his tunic unbuttoned, his face blacked with oil and soot; oil-filmed goggles sat atop his flying helmet and his smart polished boots were now scuffed and dulled by dust and mud.
“We meet again, gentlemen,” he called out jovially.
“If you think we’re surrendering to you and your chatts, you have another think coming,” called Everson.
“On the contrary,” Werner called back.
Another electric white-blue flash arced towards him out of the undergrowth, interrupting him. He flinched and ducked as it earthed yards away from him, blasting a chunk out of a young Japheth tree. The trunk gave way slowly with a creaking tear. Werner began running towards the Tommies. The tree crashed to the ground and Werner flung himself into the dirt. Using the fallen tree as cover, he scrambled over to them before peering back out at the undergrowth where the rest of the chatts were concealed. When he looked back, it was into the points of several rifles, fixed with bayonets.
Slowly Werner put his pistol down on the ground and raised his hands to shoulder height, not wanting to present more of a target to the remaining chatts.
“Tulliver said you crashed,” said Everson.
“My machine crashed. I survived, which is more than can be said for my uniform,” Werner said, indicating his torn and scorched tunic. “My tailor will be furious.”