“You’ve never seen a girl so lovely, Julian. Only thirteen, or was it fourteen years old?—I don’t any longer remember—when the world went to hell—growing up almost entirely underground, in that dark, damp basement we called home. What chance for poor Dawn, eh? Never had a boyfriend, never knew a man; her dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty wasted in the gloom of a cellar. And all she ever saw of the outside world on those occasions, those very rare occasions when, at her pleading, I would take her into the light of day, was the sullen sky and the shattered city… but we could never stay for long… not even crouching in the rubble … there were terrible things in the poisoned sky—Shantaks, I’ve heard them called, and the faceless Gaunts—and it was never very long before they would glide or slide into view, scouring the land as they searched… searched for… for what else but us! For mankind’s devastated remnants! For the scattered handful of human beings who remained!
“But my Dawn… she was everything to me… as her mother before her, and her poor sister. But they were taken, all three, and what have I now—what’s left for me?—except the hope of a measure… however small a measure… of revenge!”
It seemed to me the old man was waiting for an answer, and so I shrugged and obliged him, saying, “Well since you ask, it seems there’s nothing left for you Henry, except that small measure of revenge. So you’ll do what you have to, and for that matter, so will I.”
“So will you?”
I nodded and said, “There’s nothing much left for me either, Henry. So just like you I’ll do what I have to—” And I had to bite my tongue as I almost added, ‘—to survive’.
The Shoggoth light ahead of us was very much brighter now, and in order to change the subject I pointed it out to my companion. “Look there, it’s almost daylight up front! Or as daylight used to be, I mean.”
“I see it,” he answered, as his sobbing gradually subsided. “Another fifteen to twenty minutes and we’ll be there. Piccadilly Circus… or ground zero, if you prefer.”
“Hmm!” I said. “But I always thought that term described a point on the ground directly beneath the explosion—not above it.”
He was obviously surprised. “Quite right, yes! But since we both know what I meant, why nit-pick?” Then, looking at me sideways and slyly: “By the way, you really have got it all figured out, haven’t you?”
“Most of it.” I nodded. “But I still don’t know, can’t see, how you’ve been able in the circumstances to build any kind of device powerful enough to make all of this worthwhile. I mean, you’d need a laboratory, and the know-how, and the materials.”
Henry returned my nod. “Very good,” he said, “very clever. But don’t I remember saying that you had no idea who or what I am or was? I’m sure I do.”
“Ah!” I said. “So this is what you were getting at. Except you never did get around to telling me. So then, Henry—who and what were you?”
“I am, as you know, Henry Chattaway,” he replied. “But what you don’t know is that I have an almost entire alphabet of letters after my name, that I was twice put forward as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in physics, and that…”
He paused, and I prompted him: “Yes? And that…?” For this was the one thing I had most wanted to know but hadn’t dared ask him outright in case it gave me away. And:
“Well, why shouldn’t I tell you?” he said, as the first signs of the man-made cavern or excavation that was the main Piccadilly Circus Underground station gradually came into view up front. “For it’s too late now to do anything else but see it through: the last of my dreams come true on this long last night.”
And as we climbed up from the tracks onto the platform and I returned his small heavy suitcase to him, he continued: “Julian, I was the top man—or rather, not to make too much of it, one of them—on PFDP, the Plasma Fusion Drive Project. Similar in its way to the Manhattan Project, it was very hush-hush even though no one in the scientific community gave it a snowflake’s chance in hell, even as a theory. What? Abundant energy from next to nothing? You may recall that seventy years ago the same dream had given birth to the bombs that put an abrupt end to World War II. Not so much a dream as a nightmare, as it happened—at least until someone began speculating about the possible benefits: that maybe nuclear power could provide cheap energy for the entire world; which of course never really worked out. The fuel was dirty, dangerous, and had too many safety problems; the mutations and fatal diseases that followed on inevitably from the accidents and errors were hideous, while some of the infected radioactive regions remain hot even to this day.
“Well, history repeats, Julian. Plasma fusion was the next best hope for cheap energy, far better and cheaper and so much easier to produce… why, men might even go to the stars with it—if it worked! But it didn’t, or rather it did, except even the smallest, most cautious of tests warned of a Pandora’s Box effect. Only let it loose and it could initiate a chain reaction with anything it might touch and fuse with. That’s the only and best explanation I can give to a layman, especially in what little time we have left. But enough: we stopped working on it, and the world’s authorities—every single one of them, recognising the awesome power of this thing—signed up to a strictly monitored ban on any further experimentation… simply because they couldn’t afford not to!”
While Henry talked, his voice gradually falling to a whisper, we had proceeded from the tunnel to the platform, then to the relatively pristine stairs and elevators. The latter, of course, had not worked since the night of the invasion; but the stairs, completely free of rubble, had taken us to the surface, which upon a time had been a landmark, a renowned open-air concourse where many streets joined in that great circus it was named for. A far different sort of circus now.
“This place,” I said, letting my voice echo, “is looking rather empty. Not what one would expect, eh?”
“I know,” Henry agreed in a whisper, probably wondering why I wasn’t whispering too. “It’s been like this each time. You would think it should be crawling, right? Which in a way it is, if not as you might expect. Not crawling with alien life, no, but with the very meaning of the word ‘alien’ itself!”
Crawling, yes. And making one’s skin crawl, too. Even mine. It was the way it looked, its shapes and angles; its architectural features, if you could call them that; its non-Euclidean geometry.
It had four legs—or was it three? Maybe five?—all leaning inward, or was it outward? Something like the once dizzy and dizzying Eiffel Tower, but a twisted version, and what we had surfaced into was the base of one such leg that used to be Piccadilly Circus. The rest of the legs were green-misted and vague, half-obscured by distance, submarine-tinged Shoggoth light, and the intervening shapes of anomalous buttresses, columns and spiralling staircases. And adding to the confusion nothing stood still but appeared literally to crawl, each surface flowing and changing shape of its own accord.
As for the staircases: some had steps as broad as landings, others with steps like frozen ripples on a pond, but rising, of course, and a third type with no steps at all but smooth, corkscrew surfaces of some glassy substance, sometimes turning on clockwise threads and other times winding in reverse. And all of them stationary, at least until one looked at them.
We were dwarfed, Henry and I, made minuscule by the gigantic scale of everything; and screwing up his face, shielding his eyes as he peered up into reaches that receded sickeningly into skyscraper heights and vast balconied levels, Henry said, “That must be where the life is: Bgg’ha’s throne room, cages to house his prisoners, dwelling areas for them that serve him. The monster himself will sit high above all that, dreaming his dreams, doing what he does, probably unaware that he’s any sort of monster at all! To him it’s how things are, that’s all.