Sobbing openly and making no attempt to hide it, Henry replied: “Janet was taken two months ago. They took her in broad daylight, or what we used to call daylight, on her way back home from an SSR meeting. She’d been a member since not long after her mother was taken. A boyfriend of hers from the old days saw it happen. It was those freakish flapping-rag things, those so-called Hounds. I was always telling her to stick to the shadows whenever she ventured out, but on this occasion I’d forgotten to warn her against angles. They took her on a street corner; just ninety degrees of curb that cost Janet her freedom and, as I believed at the time, her life too. But no, Janet’s captors were working for that thing in the Twisted Tower, something I hadn’t known until she escaped and got home just a month ago.
“That was when I found out about what goes on in that hellish place. Since when I’ve risked my own life five times making this trip in and out, always hoping I might see Janet’s mother, or her younger sister Dawn, and that I might be able to rescue them somehow… but at the same time making certain deliveries and planning for the future… in fact planning for right now, if you really want to know. But my wife… and Dawn… that poor kid, just seventeen years old: they’re somewhere in that nightmarish tower, I feel certain. But alive and suffering still, or dead and… and eaten! Who knows?” There he paused and made an attempt to bring himself back under control.
Feeling the need to have the old man continue, however—no matter how painful that had to be for him—I said, “Henry, before Janet escaped… did she ever see her mother, or her younger sister Dawn, there in the Twisted Tower?”
He shook his head. “Not once. Other girls, plenty of them, but never her Ma. And where Dawn is concerned, that’s completely understandable. She was taken just three days after Janet found her way home in time to… in time to die! In other words she was out of that place before Dawn was taken in.” He paused for a moment or two before continuing.
“Now, I know it must sound like I’ve been pretty careless of my girls, but that’s not so. And maybe it’s best if Dawn really is dead, because of what Janet… because of what she told me was happening to those… those other female captives.”
And as he broke down more yet, as gently as I could I asked him, “Well then, Henry, what did Janet tell you? What was happening in there, to the other female captives?”
Sobbing and stumbling along through the water—sobbing so loudly I thought he might sob his heart out—still he managed to reply: “Oh, that’s something I see in my blackest nightmares, Julian, and I see it every night! But first let me tell you how Dawn was taken…
“I had left her at home while I went looking for a place to bury Janet. No big problem there… a hole in the ground, with plenty of bricks and rubble to fill it in. Necessary, yes, because there are packs of real hounds running wild through all the destruction. But then I’d gone rummaging for food in the ruins of a corner store I’d found: canned fruit and meats and such. But when I got back home with my haul—‘home’, hah!—a concrete cellar in a one-time museum, a wing of the old Victoria & Albert, I think it was… hard to tell in all that devastation. But anyway, when I got back Dawn was gone and the place had been completely wrecked. What few goods we’d had—sticks of furniture and such—were broken up, strewn everywhere, and the place was damp and stank of… oh, I don’t know, rotting fish, weeds, and stagnant water. The evil stench of the Deep Ones, yes; and they, too, are the servants of Bgg’ha, as I believe they are of all the octopus-heads…”
And there Henry fell silent again, leaving only the echoes of his tortured voice, and the sloshing of our legs through the water. But I still couldn’t let it rest; there were things he had hinted at that I would like explanations for; I wondered just how much he’d learned, how much he knew. And so:
“You said your wife was taken that first night,” I reminded him, as if he needed it. “She was taken as all hell stampeded through the city and there was no defence against the turmoil, the horror. But that was a long time ago, Henry. And weren’t these monsters slaughtering everyone and destroying everything in their path at that time? How could you possibly think your wife might still be alive in Bgg’ha’s Twisted Tower? Especially after what Janet told you about it?”
At which the old man seemed to freeze in his tracks, jerked to a standstill, and in the next moment turned on me, snarling: “How do you know what Janet did or didn’t tell me, eh? And how much do you know about that damned Twisted Tower? Tell me that, Julian Chalmers!”
Oh, I was glad in that moment that I had returned his suitcase to Henry, and that he was carrying it with both hands. He still had that gun on his hip, and if he could have reached for it without jeopardising the safety of the case and its contents I felt sure he would have done so. And who knows what he might have done then? But he couldn’t and didn’t, and I said:
“Henry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but those creatures in the Tower… they eat people, don’t they? Haven’t you already said as much? And it’s been a very long time for your wife. Now, don’t be offended, but in the light of your daughters’ ages, not to mention your own obvious years, it has to be my understanding that your wife isn’t a mere girl; so what good would she be, alive, to such as Bgg’ha and his minions? I mean, him and his monsters? Beasts in their stables? What use to them except as… well, except as—”
But that was as far as he would let me go, and I could tell by the look on his face that it wouldn’t in any case be necessary to finish my question.
“God damn you, Julian!” he said, turning away. “It was hope—desperate, impossible hope!—that’s all. And as for… as for poor Dawn…” But he couldn’t say on and so went staggering away through the sluggish, blackly glinting water, in the eerie light of the swirling Shoggoth tissue.
I gave him a few moments before catching up, then said: “I’m sorry, Henry, but you leave me confused. I know you’re planning some kind of revenge—in whatever form that may take—but if you were really hoping that Dawn and your wife are still alive, might not the violence of any such revenge hurt them too, not to mention you yourself?”
Yet again he came to a halt and turned to me. “Of course it would, and will!” he said. “But far better that—a quick, clean death to them, indeed to all of us—than what they could be suffering, to what Dawn if not her mother must be suffering, even as we speak!” And before I could say anything more: “Now listen…
“Did you know they take young boys, too? Young men, I mean, of your age or thereabouts? And since you appear to be good at figuring things out, can you guess what they are used for?”
“No, not really,” I replied, unwilling to disturb him further. “But in any case, maybe we should quieten it down now. I think I heard voices—some kind of sounds, anyway—from somewhere up ahead.”
The old man’s eyes focused as he looked all about, searching for recognisable signs on the old blackened walls. And: “Yes,” he whispered, as quietly as I had suggested. “Your ears are obviously better than mine. We’re only five minutes or so away from Green Park, which is one of the worst places for—”
“—Deep Ones?” I finished it for him, and he nodded. And from then on we stayed silent, creeping like mice, glad that the water level had fallen away to no more than an inch or two. And for the second time Henry entrusted his case to me…
Ahead of us, the Shoggoth light brightened up a little until it was about half as good as dim electric light used to be. Even so it suited us just fine, because Henry was right and four or five minutes later Green Park’s platform loomed up out of the shadows and gloomy distance. By then, however, those barking, gutturally grunting “voices” I had heard had faded into distant echoes before ceasing almost entirely; but still there were the sounds of some sort of laborious work going on in that subterranean burrow’s upper reaches. So we didn’t climb up onto the platform but stayed on the tracks in the shadow of the bull-nosed wall, where we crouched down and kept the lowest possible profile as we traversed the mercifully short length of the station. And halfway across that comparatively open space, suddenly Henry paused to tug nervously on the sleeve of my parka, indicating that I should look at the platform’s flagged floor.