“But as for his underlings—the flying creatures, and Deep Ones, and Shoggoths that build and fashion for him, varnishing their works with a slime that hardens to glass hard as steel—I have to believe that a majority of them… well, perhaps not the Shoggoths, who are more like machines, however nightmarishly organic—but by far the great majority of them, know full well what they are about.”
“I think you’re right,” I told him. “But you know, Henry, we’re not too small to be noticed. And I can’t imagine that we would be welcome here; certainly not you, suitcase and all! You need to be about your revenge, Henry, and should it work—to however small or enormous an effect—then, while you will have paid the ultimate price, at least your physicist friends may be aware of your success and will carry on your work, assuming they survive it. So why are we waiting here? And why is that awesome weapon you’re carrying also waiting, if only to be put to its intended use?”
It was as if he had been asleep, or hypnotised by his alien surroundings, or maybe fully aware for the first time that this was it—the end of the long last night. For him, anyway—or so he thought.
And he was right: it was the end of the road for him, but not as he thought. “Yes,” he finally answered, straightening up and no longer whispering. “The others who helped me put it all together, they will surely know. They’ll see the result from the skeletal roof of the museum. When the explosion takes this leg out, the entire tower may rock a little… why, it could even topple! Bgg’ha’s house, brought crashing down on the city that he has destroyed! And that, my friend, would be acceptable as a real and very genuine revenge! By no means an eye-for-an-eye—for who has lost more than me?—but as much as I could hope for, certainly.”
“The roof of the museum?” I repeated him as he headed for a recess (an outcrop, stanchion, corner or nook?) in the seemingly restless wall. “What, the Victoria & Albert’s roof, whose cellar was your home?”
“Eh?” He stared at me for long, hard moments… then shook his head. And: “No, no,” he said. “Not the Victoria & Albert, but the Science Museum next door, behind that great pile of rubble that used to be the Natural History Museum.”
“Ahh!” For at last I understood. “So that is where and how you and your team built it, eh? You used materials and apparatus rescued from the ruins of the Science Museum, and you put it all together… where?”
“In the museum’s basement,” he replied, as the wall seemed to enclose us in a leadenly glistening fold. “Those massive old buildings, and their cellars, were built to last. We had to work hard at it for a long time, but we turned the Science Museum’s basement into our workshop. And after tonight, when they’ve seen the result of my work, they’ll make the next bomb much bigger—big enough to melt the entire city, what’s left of it…”
And that was that. Now I had all that I needed from the old man, all that I’d been ordered to extract from him. Wherefore:
You can come for him now, I told the Tower’s creatures—or certain of them—fully aware that the nearest ones would hear me, because I knew they would have been listening out for me. But meanwhile:
We had entered or been enveloped in a fold in the irrationally angled wall, a sort of priest’s hole in the flowing, alien cinder-block construction. And there in a corner—I’ll call it a corner anyway, but in any case “a space”—was Henry Chattaway’s device, its components contained in four more small suitcases arranged in a sort of circle with a gap where a fifth (the one we had been keeping from damage during this entire subterranean journey) would neatly fit. The cases were connected up with electrical cables, left loosely dangling in the gap where the fifth would complete the circuit; while a sixth component stood central on four short legs, looking much like the casing of a domed, cylindrical fire extinguisher. In series, obviously the cases were a kind of trigger, while the cylinder—the bomb—would have contained anything but fire retardant! And affixed to the cylinder at its domed top, standing out vividly against the metal’s dull gleam, sat a bright red switch which, apart from the warning manifest in its colour, looked like nothing so much as an ordinary electrical light switch. The cylinder and its switch—a deadly however inarticulate combination, as the bomb had recently been—told a story all their own, but one which was now a lie!
Quickly kneeling, Henry opened his case, reached inside and carefully uncoiled a pair of cables which he connected up to the dangling cables on both sides. And now all was in order, or so he thought, and he was ready.
Screwing up his face and half-shuttering his eyes (I imagined in anticipation of a moment’s pain), he reached a trembling hand over the circle of wired-up suitcases, his index finger hovering over the red switch… until, remembering something, he paused and glanced at me. And then, to my dismay because I do have something of a conscience after all, he said:
“I’m so sorry, Julian, but I did give you every opportunity to leave.”
“Yes, you did,” I replied, kneeling beside him and, before he could stop me, flipping open the lid of one of the suitcases. “And I’m sorry, too,” I told him. “But as you can see, I knew I really didn’t have to leave.”
His jaw fell; his mouth opened wide; he gurgled for several long seconds, and finally said: “Empty!”
“All of them,” I nodded. “Especially the cylinder—the bomb.” But even then the truth hadn’t fully sunk in, and he said:
“I don’t understand. No one—nothing, not a single damned thing—ever saw me here. Not once. And this isn’t a spot where anyone or thing would think to look!”
“You weren’t seen here, no,” I replied with a shake of my head. “But you were seen leaving—just the once, by Deep Ones at Green Park—the last time you made a delivery. You were correct about their telepathy, Henry. Despite the confusion, the fear in your mind, or maybe because of it, they saw something of what you had been up to and a search was made. Otherwise no one or thing might ever have come in here. But once Bgg’ha had discovered your secret he wanted to know more about you and anything else you might be doing, and how and with whom you were doing it. So you see, they do care about us—or shall we say they’re at least interested in some of us—especially those of us who would try to kill them. And so I was sent out to look for you. Or to ‘hunt’ for you, if you prefer.”
Hearing that and finally, fully aware of the situation, the old man snapped upright. His eyes, however bloodshot, were narrowed now; the dazed expression was gone from his face; his gun was suddenly firm in his hand, its blued-steel muzzle rammed up hard under my chin. I thought he might shoot me there and then, and I wished that I’d called out to them sooner.
“God damn!” Henry said. “But I should pay more attention to my instincts… I knew there was something wrong about you! But I won’t kill you here; I’ll do it out there in the open—or what used to be the open—so that when you’re found with your face shot off they’ll know there are still men in the world who aren’t afraid to fight! Now get moving, you treacherous bastard! Let’s get out of here.”
But as we moved from the drift and slide of the continually mutating wall to the even greater visual nightmare of the Twisted Tower’s leg’s interior, and when I was beginning to believe I could actually feel the old fellow’s finger tightening on the trigger, then I cried out: