The Dark Descent, page 110
(SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR)
echoed back to them. The business at the hedge played on her mind more and more, and finally she had to ask again.
“Lonnie, what was it?”
He answered simply: “I don’t remember, Doris. And I don’t want to.”
They passed a market that was closed—a pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to were piled in the window. They passed a laundromat where white machines had been pulled from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls like square teeth from dying gums—the image made her feel queasy. They passed a soap-streaked show window with an old shop to lease sign in the front. Something moved behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face of the cat.
She consulted the workings and tickings of her body and discovered that she was in a state of slowly building terror. It felt as if her intestines had begun to crawl slightly inside her. Her mouth had a sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.
They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can’t, her mind informed her in a matter-of-fact sort of way. I can’t go under there, anything might be under there. Don’t ask me because I just can’t.
Another part of her mind asked if she could bear to retrace their steps . . . past the empty shop with the cat in it (how had he gotten there from the restaurant by the call box? best not to think about that), the somehow oral shambles of the laundromat, the market of severed shrunken heads. She didn’t think she could.
They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A six-car train lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy bride rushing to meet her groom with unseemly rapaciousness, trailing a train of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out aloud. She looked at him and saw that he had aged and turned into someone she didn’t think she knew in the last hour . . . had it been an hour? She didn’t know. But she did know that his hair looked somehow greyer, and while she told herself firmly—as firmly as she could—that it was just a trick of the light, it decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.
“Doris—” he said, pulling back a little.
“Come on,” she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel it trembling. She walked forward and he followed docilely.
They were almost out—it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief—when the hand grasped her upper arm.
She didn’t scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her mind wanted to leave her body behind and just . . . just fly. Lonnie’s hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side—she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone. She had not seen him again since.
The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape’s hand. It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It leaned there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was all she could make out . . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes.
“Got a cigarette, love?” a husky cockney voice asked her, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something sweet and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.
Those green eyes were cat’s eyes. And suddenly she became sure, horribly sure, that if the big slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges of scar tissue, the tufts of ginger hair.
She tore free, backed up, and felt something part the air near her . . . a hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound—
Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brainrattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where . . . or for how long.
What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Norris Road (at least she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center of the road), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. DAWGLISH & SONS read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name ALHAZRED emblazoned across ancient and peeling green paint. Below the name was a series of Arabian pothooks and dashes.
“Lonnie!” she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer . . . but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her mouth and fall dead at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool grey ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End—if she was still indeed in Crouch End—and that thought brought fresh terror.
She told Vetter and Farnham that there had been absolutely no reflection on her part during that unknowable length of time between being dropped off at the call box and the final horror. She had reacted like a frightened animal. Stimulus was applied; they fled. And now she was alone. She wanted Lonnie, her husband. She was aware of that. But it did not occur to her to wonder much—if at all—about why this area, which must surely lie within five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly deserted. It did not occur to her to wonder how the disfigured cat could have gotten from the restaurant to the shop-to-let. She did not even wonder much about the inexplicable pit in the lawn of that house, except as it bore on Lonnie. Those questions came later, when it was too late, and they would (she said) haunt her for the rest of her life.
Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for Lonnie. Her voice did not echo, but her footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple. It might have been some distorting effect of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the warehouses seemed to lean over the road now. The windows, caked with the dirt of decades—of centuries, perhaps—seemed to be staring at her. And the names on the signboards (she said) became progressively stranger, lunatic, and certainly unpronounceable. The vowels were in the wrong places, and consonants had been strung together in a way that would make it impossible for any human tongue to get around them. CTHULU KRYON read one, with more of those Arabian pothooks beneath it. YOGSOGGOTH read another. R’YELEH said yet another. There was one that she remembered particularly: NRTESN NYARLA-HOTEP.
(“How could you remember such gibberish?” Farnham asked her.)
(And Doris Freeman had shook her head, slowly and tiredly. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”)
Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk—she wouldn’t have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did—she no longer called for Lonnie. She was now in the grip of the greatest fear she had ever known, a fear she would not have believed a human being could endure without going mad or dropping stone dead. Yet it was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, although concrete, was not satisfactory.
She said it was as if she was no longer on earth. As if she was on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The . . . but it was hopeless.
She could only walk under a sky that seemed twisted and strange between the dark bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.
And it did.
She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewalk ahead of her. It was the two children—the boy with the deformed claw hand and the little girl. Her hair was in braids.
“It’s the American woman,” the boy said.
“She’s lost,” said the girl.
“Lost her husband.”
“Lost her way.”
“Found the darker way.”
“Found the way into the funnel.”
“Lost her hope.”
“Found the Whistler from the Stars—”
“—Eater of Dimensions—”
“—the Blind Piper who is not named for a thousand years—”
Faster and faster their words came, a breathless liturgy, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:
“Where’s my husband? Where’s Lonnie? What have you done to him?”
There was silence. And then the girl said: “He’s gone beneath.”
The boy: “Gone to Him Who Waits.”
The girl smiled—a malicious smile full of evil innocence. “He couldn’t well not go, could he? The mark was on him. And you’ll go. You’ll go now.”
“Lonnie! What have you done with—”
The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand—but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.
“The street began to move then,” she told Vetter and Farnham. “The cobbles began to . . . to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air—I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them—and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the way an earthquake must sound. And—something started to come through—”
“What?” Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into Doris Freeman. “What did you see? What was it?”
“Tentacles,” she said, slowly and haltingly. “I think . . . I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand squirming smaller tentacles . . . and there were pink things like suckers . . . but sometimes they looked like faces . . . like Lonnie’s face, some of them, some like other faces, all of them in agony . . . screaming in agony . . . but below them, in the darkness under the street . . . in the darkness beneath . . . there was something else. Something like great . . . great eyes . . .”
At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time.
And as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. She had no coherent memory of what had happened after that. The next thing she remembered was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent’s shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Francis Coppola film.
She had come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole the newsagent’s doorway made—but there was no need. Fifty yards up on her left was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler’s shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across the window, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.
She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. Somehow she had kept her purse. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs—her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it.
At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. A woman of about sixty with her greying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age under a streetlamp. They both looked at Doris as she approached them as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.
“Police,” Doris Freeman had croaked. “Where’s the police station? I . . . I’m an American citizen and . . . I’ve lost my husband . . . and I need the police.”
“What’s happened, then, love?” the woman asked, not unkindly. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer, you do.”
“Car accident?” her companion asked.
“No,” she managed. “Please . . . is there a police station somewhere near?”
“Right up Tottenham Road,” the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. “Like a cigarette? You look like you could use one, mum.”
“Thank you,” she said, and took the cigarette although she had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her.
He glanced at the woman with her hair bound up in the rag. “I’ll just take a little stroll up with her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right.”
“I’ll come along as well, then, won’t I?” Evvie said, and put an arm around Doris’s shoulders. “Now what is it, love? Did someone try to mug you?”
“No,” Doris said. “It . . . I . . . I . . . the street . . . there was a cat with only one eye . . . the street . . . the street opened up . . . I saw it . . . He Who Waits, they called it . . . Lonnie . . . I’ve got to find Lonnie . . .”
She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer. And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn’t been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.
The man said something then, and Doris thought it was: “Happened again.”
The woman pointed. “Station house is right up there. Globes hanging in front. You’ll see it.” And very quickly the two of them began to walk away . . . but now they were the ones glancing back over their shoulders.
Doris took two steps toward them. “Don’t you come near!” Evvie called shrilly . . . and forked the sign of the evil eye at Doris, simultaneously cringing against the man, who put an arm about her. “Don’t you come near, if you’ve been to Crouch End Towen!”
And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night.
Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the doorway between the common room and the main filing room—the back files Vetter had spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had made himself a fresh cup of tea and was smoking the last cigarette in his pack—the woman had also bummed several—smoking op’s, he believed they called it in the States.
The woman had gone back to her hotel, in the company of the nurse Vetter had called—the nurse would be staying with her tonight, and would make a judgment in the morning as to whether the woman would need to go in hospital. The children made that difficult, Farnham supposed, and where the woman was an American national (as she kept proclaiming), it became that much more complicated. And what was she going to tell the kiddies when they woke up? That the big bad monster of Crouch End Town
(Towen)
had eaten up daddy?
Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup. It wasn’t his problem, none of it. For good or for ill, Mrs. Doris Freeman had become sandwiched between the National State and the American Embassy in the great waltz of governments. It was none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to forget the whole thing. And he intended to let Vetter write the report. It was Vetter’s baby. Vetter could afford to put his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the night shift when he got his gold watch, his pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other hand, had ambitions of making sergeant soon, and that meant he had to watch every little thing.
And speaking of Vetter, where was he? He’d been taking the night air for quite a while now.
Farnham crossed the common room and went out. He stood between the two lighted globes and stared across Tottenham Road. Vetter was nowhere in sight. It was past three A.M., and silence lay thick and even, like a shroud. What was that line from Wordsworth? “All that great heart lying still,” something like that.
He went down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. He felt a trickle of unease now. It was silly, of course it was. He was angry with himself, angry that the woman’s mad story should have had even this slight effect on him. Perhaps he deserved to be afraid of a hard copper like Sid Raymond.
Farrnham walked slowly up to the corner, thinking he would meet Vetter coming back from his night stroll. But he would go no farther than the corner; if the station was left empty even for a few moments, there would be hell to pay—if it was discovered.
He went up to the corner and looked around. It was funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to have gone out up here. The entire street looked different without them. Would it have to be reported, he wondered? And where was Vetter?
He would take a little walk up, he decided, and see just what was what. But not far. It wouldn’t do to leave the station unattended, that would be a sure and simple way of assuring an end like Vetter’s, an old man on the night shift in a quiet part of town, mostly concerned with kids congregating on the corners after midnight . . . and crazy American women.
He would walk up just a little way.
Not far.
Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable stand at the corner for a moment and then disappear from sight.
