“—This long last night?” he helped me out. “The long last night of the human race, and certainly of Henry Chattaway!”
Then he sobbed, and only just managed to catch it before it leaked out of him, but I heard it anyway. And: “My God, how and why did this bloody mess happen to us?” Craning his neck he looked up to where black wisps of cloud scudded across the sky, as if searching for an answer up there—from God, perhaps?
“So—er, Henry?—in fact you are a believer,” I said, standing up from the broken wall and dropping my smoke before it could burn my fingers. “What do you reckon, then—that we’re all career sinners and paying for it?” I stepped on the glowing cigarette end, crushing it out in the red dust of powdered bricks.
Controlling his breathing, his sobbing, the old man said, “Do you mean are we being punished? I don’t know—probably. Come with me and I’ll show you something.” And getting creakingly to his feet, he went hobbling to a more open area close by, once the corner of a street—more properly a junction of twisted blackened ruins and rubble now—where the scattered, shattered debris lay more thinly on the riven ground, and only the vaguest outlines of any actual street remained. Of course, this was hardly unusual; for all I knew the entire city, and probably every city in the world, would look pretty much the same right now.
And after tugging on the sleeve of my parka while I stood glancing here and there, only too well aware that out in the open at this once-crossroads we would be plainly visible from all points of the compass, my companion finally let go of me to point toward the north-east. So that even before my eyes followed the bearing indicated by his trembling hand and finger, I knew what I would see. And:
“Look at that!” The words were no more than a husky whisper, almost a whimper. And more urgently this time: “Look! Just look at it, will you! Now tell me, isn’t it obvious where at least one of those names comes from?”
He was talking about the Twisted Tower—a “mile-high monstrosity” he’d called it—where it stood, leaned or seemed to stagger, perhaps a mile and a half away, or two miles at most. But matching it in ugliness was its almost obscene height… a mile high? No, but not far short; with its teetering spire stabbing up through the disc of cloud that had been lured into circling it like an aerial whirlpool or the debris of doomed planets round the sucking well of a vast black hole. It was built of the wreckage, the ravaged soul of the crushed city; of gutted high-rises; of many miles of railway carriages twined around its fat base and rising in a spiral, like the thread of a gigantic screw, to a fifth of the tower’s height; of bridges and wharves torn from their anchorages; of a great round clock face recognisable even at this distance and in this gloom as that of Big Ben; of a jutting tube of concrete and glass that had once stood in the heart of the city where it had been called Centrepoint… all of these things and many more, all parts now of this Twisted Tower. But it wasn’t really twisted; it was just that its design and composition were so utterly alien that they didn’t conform to the mundane Euclidean geometry that a human eye or brain would automatically accept as the shapes of a genuine structure, observing them as authentic without making the viewer feel sick and dizzy.
And though I had seen it often enough before, still I took a stumbling step backwards before tearing my eyes away from it. Those crazy angles which at first seemed convex before concertinaing down to concavities… only to bulge forth again like gigantic boils on the trunk of a monster. “That mile-high monstrosity”, yes—but having seen it before, if not from this angle, I had known what effect it would have on me. Which was why I concentrated my gaze on what stood in front of it, seeming to teeter or waver there as in some kind of inanimate obeisance:
It leaned there close to that colossal, warped dunce’s cap, out of true at an angle of maybe twenty degrees, only a few hundred yards or so as I reckoned it in the tower’s foreground; and instead of the proud dome that it had been, it now looked like half of a blackened, broken egg, or the shattered skull of some unimaginable giant, lying there in the uneven dirt of that vast, desecrated graveyard: the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“Horrible, horrible!” the old man said and shuddered uncontrolla-bly—then gave a start when, from somewhere not very far behind us, there came a dismal baying or hooting call; forlorn sounding, true, but in the otherwise silence of the ruins terrifying to any vulnerable man or beast. And starting again—violently this time as more hooting sounded, but closer and from a different direction—the old man said, “The Hounds! That howling is how they’ve learned to triangulate. We’ve got to get away from here!”
“But how?” I said. “The howling is from the south, while to the north-east… we’re on the verge of the Bgg’ha Zone!”
“Come with me—and hurry!” he replied. “If some of these wrecked buildings were still standing we’d already be dead—or worse! The Hounds know all the angles and move through them, so we must consider ourselves lucky.”
“The angles?”
“Alien geometry,” he answered, limping as fast as he could back down the rubble canyon where we had met, then turning into a lesser side-street canyon. And panting, he explained: “They say that where the Hounds come from—Tindalos or somewhere—something?—there are only angles. Their universe is made of angles that let them slip through space, and they can do the same here. But London has lost most of its angles now, and with the buildings reduced to rounded and jumbled heaps of debris, the Hounds have trouble finding their way around. And whether you believe in Him or not, still you may thank God for that!”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him, sure that he told the truth. “But where are we going?”
“Where I intended to be going anyway,” he replied. “But you most probably won’t want to—for which I don’t blame you—and anyway we’re already there.”
“Where?” I said, looking left, right, everywhere and seeing nothing but heaped bricks and shadowy darkness.
“Here,” he answered, and ducked into the gloom of a partly caved-in iron and brick archway. And assisted by a rusted metal handrail, we made our way down tiled steps littered with rubble fallen from the ceiling, now lying under a layer of dust that thinned out a little the deeper we went.
“Where are we?” I asked after a while. “I mean, what is this place?” My questions echoed in a gloom that deepened until I could barely see.
“Used to be an old entrance to the Tube system,” he told me. “This one didn’t have elevators, just steps, and they must have closed it down many decades ago. But when these alien things went rioting through the city, causing earthquakes and wrecking everything, all that destruction must have cracked it open.”
“You seem to know all about it,” I said, as I became aware that the light was improving; either that or my eyes were growing accustomed to the dark.
The old man nodded. “I saw a dusty old plaque down here one time, not long after I found this place. A sort of memorial, it said that the last time this part of the Underground system was used was during World War II—as a shelter. It was too deep down here for the bombs to do any damage. As for now: it’s still safer than most other places, at least where the Hounds are concerned, because it’s too round.”
“Too round?”
“It’s a hole in the earth deep underground,” he replied impatiently. “It’s a tunnel—a tube—as round as a wormhole!”
“Ah!” I said. “I see. It doesn’t have any angles!”
“Not too many, no.”
“But it does have light, and it’s getting brighter.”
We passed under another dusty archway and were suddenly on the leveclass="underline" a railway platform, of course. The light was neither daylight nor electric; dim and unstable, it came and went, fluctuating.