The Wolf of Whindale, page 11
Holding the Knack felt like being bled: all the precious vitality seemed to be draining out of me, and in its absence a horrible sort of clarity seemed to be unravelling in my brain. I tried to work my pick between the Knack and the flesh of my hand, but I couldn’t get any purchase on the damned thing, and any pressure I applied sent the pick stabbing directly into my fingers. It was as though the Knack was glued to me, tightly and absolutely, and had been so for some time.
Panic was rising in me, but Aneurin was pestering me about the automata, and saying that a change had come over them. Really, I was too concerned with the change that had come over my hand to attend to owt else, but I gledged up, and saw one or two of the creatures stepping back from their work, as though suddenly puzzled to find themselves here, underground, staring so intently at a wall. There was a slight sense of relaxation about them, a loosening of tension about their shoulders. I saw one of them touch his chin as though for the first time, and then I noticed that their interminable murmuring, which had accompanied our labour all this long while, had fallen into unison. Their words were no more intelligible for that, but it was unsettling to be down there with an army of waking sleepwalkers all murmuring the same thing of a sudden. It stopped me from thinking about my poor hand for a moment, in any case. It was as though the thunder that had seemed to be threatening all the time we were down there had just started to break, with at first the most distant rolling, far over the horizon, but headed our way all the same.
‘Fy duw … I think they are waking!’ cried Aneurin.
I said aye, whatever was left of them was waking.
Next, they became cognisant of me and the Iron Devil – maybes they sensed that we were not as they were – and they began to shuffle towards us. At first it seemed they moved without volition, or according to a mysterious group logic, as a school of fish might zig and zag in unison. But it was towards us that they tended, which was a sight to quicken the liver.
I cried out ‘Put nowt down! Put nowt down!’ at the top of my lungs, for these were the magic words of old that would bring all work and movement to a sudden stop, anywhere within earshot. But alas, such sorcery did not obtain down in the Sill, and the creatures kept stumbling towards us, jostling against one another now, with no more regard than the leaves blown on a breeze – at most, maybes one or two of them shook their heads, as if momentarily distracted by some ancient association still attached to the sound of the phrase, but that was all. In my despair, I repeated the cry a number of times – ‘Put nowt down! Put nowt down!’ – until my voice cracked and I thought I’d start bawling and bubbling on like a bairn.
Awake they might have been, but the automata were yet beyond language and reason, and still they closed in on us. But presently Aneurin had a better thought, and taking up a jumper-rod he began to whack it against the nearest supporting post. This is what you did when you needed to send the signal of ‘Put nowt down’ a greater distance than your voice alone could cover: you would beat on the rails or on a post five times, the first two slow and the next three quick. This would bring work to a cessation. Slow … slow … quick-quick-quick. We called this jowling.
This is what the Iron Devil now tried – slow … slow … quick-quick-quick – and I cannot tell you the relief it was to see this tattoo give pause to the creatures’ motion. They stood afore us, the nearest but a few yards away, frozen utterly, even as though God had poked out one of His long and holy fingers and stopped the pendulum on the great clock of the world. Were they so much as breathing? I knew not. Aneurin looked at me and I looked at him. All’s still at the Sill, I thought, and the silly phrase immediately lodged in my thoughts and there began to beat and repeat its own mad tattoo throughout much of what I’m about to tell you.
We both understood that we needed to make use of this strange lull and try to find our way out of the Sill altogether, though we had nowt but a hunch as to which was the proper direction. Nor did we know how long the automatas’ bewilderment might last. And yet neither of us had made a move. So I said, ‘Look sharp!’ and started forward.
‘What if they wake up once more?’ the Iron Devil murmured from close beside me.
‘If they do, you make sure and jowl the signal again, quick smart!’ said I, though I think, in fact, I might have used some coarser turns of phrase.
And so we began to weave our way among the stilled creatures. They were statues, very like those of saints in a cathedral, for they had a queer, beatific blankness of expression, and some of them had hands raised as though in almsgiving – and they were all, as it were, arranged for our perusal: they faced us, even those who had initially been beyond our sight. It was an eerie thing, to walk among a herd of statues all turned in our direction. It meant that they had all, every man Jack of them, been making their way towards us at the moment when the Iron Devil stilled them.
We moved as nimbly and speedily as we could. Presently, a hissing sound arose, like a long-drawn wave breaking on a shaley beach, and suddenly they recommenced their awful, eager-sounding whispering. It was our time to freeze now, and we stood still and watched them, saucer-eyed, to see what would happen next. The creatures made it through one round of their whispered incantation (for that is what it was like, after all: an incantation) and then suddenly, as at a signal we had not perceived, all of them turned to face us again – just spun on their heels, pivoting in regimental unison as though the pair of us were magnets and they were nowt but iron filings. At that, my companion and I nearly leapt into one another’s arms in fright.
‘Jowl!’ I cried, and the Iron Devil came to, as it were, and lurched for the nearest post, and even as he was beating out the signal – slow … slow … quick-quick-quick – the automata were shuffling forward, and reaching out their arms to apprehend us. But thanks be to fortune (I say fortune, for I cannot be persuaded that God was watching the events down at the Sill) the old trick worked again, and the creatures were spellbound and fixed in place once more. All’s still at the Sill.
At about this time, I became aware of my right hand again, or, rather, I became aware that I was not aware of it, as it was now completely numb all the way up to my elbow. I found myself looking at it to make sure it hadn’t dropped off altogether; but it was still there, and still grasping the Knack. Before me on the ground, I noticed a discarded pick, which I took up with gratitude. I only had the use of my left hand now, and in order to control the pick I had to grasp it half way up the shank – in consequence, it would only be of use at close range, but I was glad to have it all the same.
‘How long was that? How long does the spell last?’
The Iron Devil said he wasn’t sure; he thought it had been a minute or maybes a bit longer, but he wasn’t sure.
‘I think it was two minutes,’ I declared. ‘Not long. Not long at all. Well, we must make the most of it!’ And so we pressed on, dodging atween the creatures, moving more nimbly now that we had a sense of how little time a jowling would buy us.
Thus we made our progress, stop-start, through the army of stultified ex-men, the automata. Sometimes they were grouped close together like skittles, and we had to shunt and shoulder them out of our way. They would put up no more resistance than their bodyweight, but that slowed us all the same, and a feeling of panic would quickly arise if we found ourselves surrounded too thickly by the herd and with no post in sight.
When we started to suspect our time was running low, we’d linger by the nearest post and wait for the tide of whispering to rise once more about us. That was the worst time of all, I think, when we were standing and waiting, on the twitch for the least bit flicker of motion in the gloom. As soon as it began, the Iron Devil would rap out the signal – slow … slow … quick-quick-quick – and that would silence and still the creatures for another minute or two. All’s still at the Sill. If he left it too long, they would complete a line of their evil whispering, and then all suddenly spin on their heels to face us: it was too disquieting; neither of us wished to ever see it again.
I cannot say how often we repeated this procedure. Time, as was indicated to me later, and as I suspected even then, behaved very differently at the Sill. But it seemed to me that we were making good progress, and, certainly, we had a system that worked well enough, and was allowing us to pass through the herd of creatures unmolested. All was going about as well as we might reasonably have hoped, given the straits we had been in when we first found the Knack in the deepest level of the Sill. Yes, all was going well, until it all went so very wrong.
Suddenly, the creatures were whispering again, and this time it seemed only a moment had passed since our last jowling. We stared madly at each other, the Iron Devil and I, and fairly charged ahead, clambering past the swaying bodies of the creatures in order to reach the next post on our way. But, as rotten luck would have it, there was not a post to be seen for the longest stretch, and the creatures were grouped afore us in an especially tight herd. With horrible clarity, we saw that we would not make it to safety, and bellowed questions at each other, such as whether we should turn back and head for the last post we rapped; but I think we both knew instinctually that heading back into the depths would have been the worse folly.
By now the automata had completed their catechism, and, as we had come to expect, all of those not already facing us executed their pivot – every one at the same instant, every one obedient to the same will – and now they resumed their shambling gait towards us, with wasted arms lifted to embrace us, blackened lips blowing kisses as they whispered horrors.
In desperation, the Iron Devil rapped the jumper-rod against the wall of the corridor – slow … slow … quick-quick-quick – but it hardly made a sound, and so made no odds to the automata who crept ever closer. We had both known that this wouldn’t do; the noise must carry for it to have any effect. Why hadn’t we found some object we might have used as a sounding block, something we could have brought with us to avoid just this eventuality? I don’t know, but we hadn’t thought of it, and now it was too late.
The foremost of the creatures had reached us now. Unthinkingly, I let the Iron Devil stand in front of me: he had the jumper-rod to fend it off, and all I had was an uncertain grip on the pick that wobbled unpromisingly in my left hand. My right arm was now a ghost to me – I could but slowly lift it; it would avail me nothing in combat. With the automaton in range, and clutching at us with its blackened fingers, the Iron Devil took a great swing at it, and whacked it across the head with the jumper-rod. It made a sound that put me in mind of windfall apples in September, when Mop and me, back when we were bairns like, would have at them with sticks and watch the rotten ones fly apart. Well, the creature’s head made much the same sickening sound. It stopped dead in its tracks for a moment, and its head fell forward bonelessly, but its body stayed upright, whereas a man so stricken would surely have fallen down dead or unconscious anyway. And then it raised its head once more and grabbed the Iron Devil by the throat.
My companion gave a squawk, for the creature had moved with unexpected speed, and – it being too close now to allow him another swing at it – he raised up the jumper-rod and drove the pointy end directly into the creature’s left eye. Nor did he stop at that, but pushed on bodily until the rod was sunk very deep in its skull and might even have pierced it through. And then, without a sound, the creature collapsed at last, sinking to its knees before the Iron Devil as if in supplication, with the jumper-rod still sunk into its face. My saviour planted a foot on its chest, and pulled and twisted and tugged the rod free. It was dripping with gore that looked, by the dim light we had, like blackcurrant jam.
We stepped back. We – but I should say ‘he’, for I had contributed nowt – had felled one of the automata, but there were maybes scores more to get through afore we got on bank. I said as much, and said that we could not hope to succeed by felling every one of our adversaries in like manner.
Three more creatures were nearly upon us.
‘We cannot make our last stand here,’ I yelled.
‘Then let us try a little further on down the road!’ our hero replied, and, plucking up heart at that, he charged forward, breaking through the creatures and jabbing either end of the rod at them as he did so. Most of them overbalanced and fell, but it seemed they took no hurt at this and at once resumed the chase, though they moved much more slowly than we. I fairly scurried after my protector, and thus we made it along a good stretch of tunnel, with the Iron Devil stotting the creatures aside like skittles or walloping them with the rod – I saw one creature take such a crashing swipe to the temple, the eyeball popped from its socket – and always with me at his heels, swiping at the herd with my pick, about as effectual as a little dog yapping at the heels of a marching band.
We were making some progress, but expending a deal of energy. When next we found a likely post, we jowled it, and since we could see no creatures near to us, we had to hope that it had taken effect. We leant upon the walls and gulped in breaths, our lungs churning and our skinny legs trembling. I felt sick at heart, and I think the Iron Devil was the same. We could scarce afford to breathe for long, however, as the automata behind us, back the way we had come, would be in pursuit of us, and, though they moved but slowly, they did not cease to move unless we had them spellbound. It was impossible to avoid imagining them, deep in the darkness, out of earshot of our jowling, crawling and staggering towards us, even now.
Soon after we had started to make our way once more, having rapped out the signal again for good measure, we happened upon a thing that seemed to us a great gift, and we thought for a moment that all our luck had turned: here was some charge. How it came to be there, and how we had missed it during our prior excavations, I know not; for whenever we’d found some charge, we’d made use of it at once, and certainly the creatures hadn’t the know-how to so much as recognise the stuff. But here it was. I don’t suppose many heavenly intercessions have been so wholeheartedly welcomed as were these packets of black powder.
Well, our joy was like so much kindling: it went up in a great blaze, but it couldn’t last. I saw the gloomy thoughts resettle on the Iron Devil’s brow, and he asked how should we make use of this, for it wouldn’t be safe to carry it any distance, when we had to fight our way through the creatures; it was too unstable a compound to be jiggled so.
‘We cannot leave it here, though but. It is a boon. I say we use it, here and now, and try to bring down the roof. That way, as we press on, we will at least know that there can be no more creatures approaching us from behind.’ I was talking myself into the idea as I went along. It sounded like quite a good idea, really, to my ears.
So that’s what we set about doing. We laid the charge all around the post, and in the vicinity of what seemed to us to be the supporting rocks. We worked breathlessly. Setting charge was a fearful business at the best of times, but doing so in such a hurry, and with little light, and surrounded by enemies as we were, it’s a wonder we managed to avoid blowing ourselves to kingdom come.
We cut the wire into lengths, making a fuse for each packet of powder that we’d jammed into the rock and the post. The lengths looked right to us, though you never knew for sure how much clearance you’d have, because there was no telling how fast the fuse was going to burn: three seconds or fifteen — you never knew until you found out. At last, we touched the ends of each one with the flame of a candle, starting with the longest and working our way down to the shortest, and once they had all commenced to sparkle we made a run for it. We had but cautious hope that our plans would carry. And if they did not, we could not return and try again; it would be too dangerous altogether.
It was time to be gone from that place, and to cover the most distance, but my joints and my legs were stiff from having been crouched over, laying the charge for so long, and I was alarmed at how sluggish I seemed to be moving. The Iron Devil seemed to be faring little better, but we ran as fast as we were able, in any case. Perhaps, had we not been so stiff and sore and weary by that time, things would have ended differently.
We were scurrying along, squatting under a low roof, when we saw a group of them coming at us, flat-footed, unbalanced, but en masse. We stole a look at each other, me and the Iron Devil, and I think for a brief moment he smiled. And then, at our backs, as though the gates of Hell had been thrown open, the blast came.
The hurricane picked us up lightly as though we were may blossom, and flung us forwards. The creatures in front of us were likewise thrown back the way they had come – I saw them, for a second, mid-flight, like stick-figures in a bairn’s drawing – and then all light was extinguished. A fraction of a second later, it seemed, the noise reached us, as though the earth were tearing itself asunder for Judgement Day, and then I passed from darkness into darkness.
The last thing I had felt was a sensation of flight; now I was waking, in patches and flashes of time, and all I knew was aches and sharp pains that thrilled into my mind from every direction. I was being ground in the teeth of a monster, or so it felt. All was bleakest darkness, and I was buried alive.
How much time passed, I know not. My thoughts were apt to race and churn, and then fly away like startled birds. At length, however, I found myself digging my way out of the shale in which I lay buried. My right hand – which felt numb, and yet also bigger than its natural size, and which still seemed to be holding on to the Knack – my right hand was digging and scooping and delving, as though it were now merely a shovel, and it seemed to be doing so without conscious motivation from me. Very strange to awaken thus, and to find oneself in the throes of exhuming a corpse, when the corpse is none other than yourself.
