Small galleries and chambers led off the curved passage at regular intervals. They searched each set. Atkins barely noticed. None of it mattered. It was all dry as dust, and dead, just as they would be. All he could think about was Flora, how he would never see her again. Never smell her perfume again, or see their child growing up. His child. He imagined the life he had lost, married, with the child, little William. He could feel his weight in his arms and smell its hair. See his smile as he recognised him. Gone, all gone.
Atkins became aware that someone was talking to him.
“Only,” Gazette was saying. “Chalky’s found something. I think you ought to see it.”
Atkins looked at Chalky. “Show me.”
Emboldened, Chalky took the lead and showed him a tunnel running off the main passage. Chandar accompanied him. Chalky pointed to the far wall of the chamber. “It were down here. I was just checking and saw it glinting in the torch light. There.”
Atkins saw the glint on the floor by the wall. He walked over, sank down on his haunches, and picked it up.
“What is it?” asked Chandar.
Attached to a small scrap of bloodstained khaki cloth was a brass button. Atkins examined it, rubbing it clean with the pad of his thumb. There upon the button, in relief, was a bomb, fuse aflame, with crossed rifles and a crown, all cradled in a wreath. It was the crest of the Pennine Fusiliers.
He blinked and looked up at Gazette. “Check your uniform buttons,” he said, his voice imbued with a sense of urgency.
After a little fumbling, it became clear that they all had the requisite number.
“It’s not from any of us,” reported Gutsy.
Atkins hardly dared think it. There was only one man who might have made it this far. One man.
Gutsy stared at him. “Christ, you don’t think—”
Atkins nodded. “Jeffries. Who the hell else could it be?”
SKARRA CONTINUED TO mutter in Mathers’ head. In the confines of the edifice, his heightened awareness was flooded with new sensory details. The information was pressing in on him and he was powerless to stop it.
“I can see him,” said Mathers, taking the bloodstained scrap and staring fixedly at it.
“Who?” asked Atkins.
Mathers waved the button at him. “Jeffries.”
The corporal stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I can see him, his scent on it. I should be able to track his scent trail if there is any left to follow.”
“You can do that?”
Mathers looked at the chatt. “Skarra tells me I can.”
He was aware of the chatt watching him intently as he concentrated on the scrap of cloth. Using the shapes, sounds and textures that danced around it, Mathers was able, with some effort, to draw Jeffries’ scent out of the surrounding kaleidoscopic mists. He watched as vaporous tones of purples and reds coalesced and evaporated rapidly around each other, trying to confuse and deceive. They shifted and changed, into blues and yellows, like a snake shedding skin after skin, as it sought to slip beyond even his heightened perception, but he held it fast in his attention. Under the haze of stale, sour human aromas, he had his base note now; that part of a man that was immutable, unchangeable, distinctive. It resolved itself into a thin green thread of scent that he could follow.
He had no doubt that others in his crew, Clegg or Perkins even, who had received such a concentrated dose of petrol fruit juice recently, might see something of what he saw, but they lacked the education, the intuition, to make the connections he was now experiencing.
Fascinated, he began to walk haltingly, following the fragile drifting airborne trail, constantly checking it with the control scent of the khaki scrap. The others followed at a distance. Slowly, he became attuned to it, to the dancing particles of scent, sweat and blood. At first, it was nothing more than a scent echo, a faint trail hanging in the air, then it began to take on a phantasmagorical shape. Indistinct at first, it coalesced into the faint, ethereal figure of an infantry officer. Hardly daring to breathe, he followed the redolent wraith as it continued its journey. It entered a series of chambers. He watched as it crossed to a wall and crouched down, inspecting something there.
Mathers stepped closer to see.
As if sensing him, the wraith turned. Mathers recognised it as Jeffries. It looked directly at him. A disdainful smile spread across its face as it stepped towards him. With the guilty start of an eavesdropper caught red-handed, Mathers cried out and lurched back, out of reach of the apparition as it advanced on him, and lost his concentration.
In that moment, it seemed to him that Jeffries gesticulated and, upon that gesticulation, proceeded to evaporate until there was nothing left of his incorporeal form but a faint drifting trail suspended in the air.
Mathers reeled from the chamber. “He was here. He was reading… something on the wall.”
A wave of pain rippled out from his abdomen, through his torso, up his spine and down through his limbs, causing him to double over. He’d been away from the tank for too long. He fumbled for his hip flask. He’d forgotten it was empty. He grunted with frustration and pain, pulling his splash mask and helmet from his head, and sucking in great lungfuls of air. The plaques on his face were now red and livid and his eyes, iridescent swirls on black, seemed unfocused and inhuman.
“Easy sir, I’ve got you,” said Jack Tanner.
Following her instincts, the FANY approached the group, her eyes catching Alfie’s as she passed. “Let me help,” she said.
Cecil stood up, held out his arm, and refused to let her pass. “It’s all right, miss,” he said belligerently. “We’ve got him. He don’t need nobody else.”
“She can help, sir,” Alfie insisted.
Mathers turned his head and looked at him through the slits of his splash mask.
“No, Perkins, you know she can’t.”
LEAVING MATHERS TO the care of his crew, Atkins took a torch and pushed past them with impatience into the chamber. Holding it high, he could see the markings on the wall. They were not like the chatt glyphs. With a swell of frustration, he realised they weren’t in a language he could read either. He couldn’t make any sense of it. But it was familiar. He brushed his hand briefly over the scratched graffiti with curiosity. It looked like the coded script he had seen in Jeffries’ journal, the one Lieutenant Everson pored over obsessively. Then he saw something he did recognise. His brow furrowed. He fished in his top pocket and pulled out a folded piece of tattered paper. The leader of every patrol had one, Everson insisted upon it. He unfolded it to reveal a carefully copied symbol. He compared the two now. There was no doubt.
It was the Sigil of Croatoan from Jeffries’ journal.
Atkins’ mind was a flurry of thoughts, like a shaken snow globe. He found an ember of hope in the ashes of his world.
Jeffries had been here. It couldn’t have been by chance. He had a map. Had he expected to find this place? What was its significance? What information did the coded writing contain? What did it all mean?
He had no answers. One thing he did know was that Jeffries was his only lifeline, and his mind seized on it and wouldn’t let go. If Jeffries wanted the information, so did he. Somehow, Jeffries was the key. Maybe his boast back in Khungarr, that he was their only way back, wasn’t just a desperate tactic to buy himself time to escape. One way or another, Atkins wanted to know the truth. Taking a pencil stub from his pocket, he laboriously copied the symbols on the back of the piece of paper.
With his mind consumed with thoughts of Jeffries, he exited the chamber. He turned to the tank commander, who had recovered his composure and replaced his mask and helmet, once again hiding the ravaged face and the unnerving eyes that, Atkins now knew, saw things beyond the reach of normal human senses.