They were left to their own devices. At first, Noble tried to make conversation with Suzie, but the noise inside the chopper was deafening, like being inside a tumble-dryer full of ball bearings. After five minutes of shouting at each other, yet still failing to understand more than half of what was said, they gave up. Suzie started reading more of the papers from her briefcase, while Noble closed his eyes and tried to rest.
His mind raced. It felt like he’d taken a lurch into the Twilight Zone, ever since his first encounter with the black tar on the blades of the Zodiac propeller. Now he was at the centre of an emergency that had something to do with an Antarctic Expedition long before he was born. And how that was connected to a polluted stretch of ocean was still a mystery to him. But Suzie was on the case. He know from long experience that once she got her teeth into something she would never let go until she was good and ready.
He tried to trick his mind, thinking about beer, and the latest Test match cricket. But sleep wasn’t going to come. He kept seeing the same image in his mind, of the thing swallowing the Skipper, and the old man’s meat being stripped from the bone. He was almost grateful when Suzie nudged him hard in the ribs.
“You need to read this,” she shouted.
She still had more of the papers in her hand. She handed him a sheaf of maybe ten sheets. As he read, he was once more dragged back to wartime Scotland.
Over the next few weeks I came to understand the detail and scope of what Rankin hoped to achieve… and my part in it. The tarry material did indeed prove adept at recombining existing biological materials into things rich and strange. And it did so at a prodigious rate. Rankin had me trying to force it into combination with various forms of plant-life. We had a spectacular disaster when we introduced the tarry material to pond algae, which left a thick green scum covering the whole interior of the lab that had to be removed with bleach and blowtorches. Still, Rankin refused to be depressed.
“We are getting there,” he said, even though I had no real idea of the required destination—not yet.
I began to get an idea what he was looking for when we set the substance to work on some seaweed. It took a particular liking to Ascophylum Nodosum, one of the bladderworts common along this coastline. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Although contained in a tall sealed jar, the weed-tar combination filled all the available space within minutes and was soon a seething mass of crawling vegetation, frantically trying to escape. Rankin clapped me heartily on the back, phoned the MOD and returned to break open the whisky. We sat on the harbour wall smoking and drinking and after a few drams, his tongue finally loosened.
“They approached me last year,” he said. “They are frightened of the power of the German fleet and wanted some way of locking them in port and making them vulnerable to attack.” He took a long drag of smoke before continuing. “By coincidence, I had been talking that very day about the Shoggoth material. I put two and two together, the Brass came up with the cash, and here we are. We have done it, Ballantine. All we have to do is introduce a scrap of the new stuff to the waters around the Hun’s anchorages and they will be clogged up in no time. The perfect defensive weapon.”
I could see several flaws in this plan, but kept my mouth shut… I did not want to cut off the only supply of whisky I’d had in weeks. So far, he had not noticed that I was managing to get twice as much of it inside me as he was… I wanted to keep it that way.
I regretted it the next morning, of course… I always do. And, I regretted it twice as much when I walked into the lab to be confronted by two Admirals of the Fleet and a Secretary of State. Luckily, Rankin wanted to showboat, so I hung at the back and let him get on with it.
He gave them the spiel about the Antarctic Expedition and the Shoggoth material, but even in my hung-over state I could see that they were seriously under-whelmed. They perked up slightly when he started the experiment proper. He used an even larger jar this time, one near six feet tall. The tar combined with the weed and surged, filling the space in seconds, fronds flapping and slapping against the glass in frenzy.
The Brass sat in stony silence.
“That’s it?” the Secretary finally said. “All this time and effort and you give us some bloody, energetic seaweed?”
Rankin gave them the same line he’d given me the night before, about clogging up harbours and stifling the Jerry fleet. The Secretary sighed theatrically.
“Look Rankin, the reason we got you for this job was because we expected something flamboyant, something that would show our people that we are ahead of the game compared to Hitler’s scientists. But this just won’t do. They throw the Doodlebug at us and what do we do in reply? Send them some fucking, lively seaweed? No. This just won’t do at all.”
Rankin was a driven man after that. He would be found in the lab, alternately shouting at the Shoggoth material, and muttering under his breath.
“Flamboyant? I’ll show them flamboyant.”
I first guessed his intent when he had me procure some material from the Botanical Gardens in Glasgow. Venus fly trap, mostly, but also three different types of pitcher plant and a particularly sticky sundew that was both rare and expensive. I also heard from a colleague that he had requested several jellyfish be tracked down… the more poisonous the better. I tried to get a look at what he was working on, but by that time he had locked the lab down to all but himself. The rest of us were reduced to bit-players and spent most of our time in the mess hall drinking beer and playing cribbage… although in my case, I did not join in the card games.
It was nearly two weeks before we were summonsed for a demonstration. There were no Brass present this time… Rankin wanted to be sure of his flamboyance first.
He had made some drastic changes in the lab. A large glass tank took up full fifty per cent of the area. In the centre of the tank sat a metal box. A chain was attached to its lid and led, via a winch, to a pulley next to Rankin. On the far side of the glass tank, a small pony munched contentedly on a pile of hay. Suddenly, I wanted to be back in the mess, cradling a pint of lukewarm beer, or back in the postgraduate club at the university getting beat at chess.
Anywhere but here.
Several others shuffled nervously. Indeed, there might even have been a revolt… if Rankin had given us time to think about it. But before we could stop him, he yanked on his end of the chain.
The metal box opened.
The pony pricked its ears. That was all it had time for. Thrashing tentacles came out of the box. They waved in the air, as if tasting it, and sought out the pony, like snakes zeroing in on prey. They struck as one, wrapping themselves in long strands around the pony’s flanks. The beast started to whinny and tried to pull away. One of the tentacles tore off from the animal, taking a long strip of flesh with it. The other tentacles merely tightened and pulled harder.
Something climbed out of the metal box; an amorphous mass of thrashing fronds that might once have been seaweed. It opened in two halves, spreading wide like bat-wings. The tentacles pulled the pony across the tank. Foam bubbled at the pony’s mouth, its tongue lolling, red and steaming. But it was still alive as the thing took it into its folds, still alive as the carpet of vegetation wrapped itself around the body and squeezed. We all heard the bones crack. As if from a far distance, there was a piteous whinny.
Someone behind me threw up and I smelled beer and cigarettes.
“For pity’s sake, Rankin. Do something,” I shouted.
He turned and smiled.
He yanked on another chain and a rain of what looked like water came from a series of pipes above the tank. The vegetation started to smoke and curl and once more I smelled the tang of vinegar as the hydrochloric acid turned everything to oily sludge.