Home From the Sea Page 9

  I am afraid none of us sat in the parlor were quite able to follow his thinking.

  Carnacki sighed and sat back in his chair.

  "Maybe the means I reached a conclusion will make things clearer."

  *

  "The next morning I started by inscribing the protective circles on the chamber floor. I began with the basic protections from the Sigsand MS.

  "I began by drawing a circle of chalk, using a piece of string anchored to a center point and taking care never to smudge the line as I navigated my way around the chamber. Beyond this I rubbed a broken garlic clove in a second circle around the first.

  "When this was done, I took a small jar of purified water and went round the circle again just inside the line of chalk, leaving a wet trail that dried quickly behind me. Within this inner circle I made my pentacle using the signs of the Saaamaaa Ritual, and joined each Sign most carefully to the edges of the lines I had already made.

  "In the points of the pentacle I placed five dry biscuits wrapped in linen, and in the valleys five phials of the purified water. Now I had my first protective barrier and with this first stage complete the center of the chamber, now protected as it was by the most basic of spells, already felt more secure.

  "I have told you enough tales by now for you not to need a description of my electric pentacle, for you know that it has saved me many times already, and proves most efficacious against many emanations and disturbances.

  "I have made several improvements in recent months, and when I set the mechanism to overlay the drawn pentagram upon the floor and connected up the battery, the glare shone from the intertwining vacuum tubes. You may expect me to tell of the azure glow, but my improvements, coming as they have from long study on the ways of the Outer Circle, have led me to include other colors. The Sigsand manuscript puts it thus:-

  Nor can he abide in the Deep if ye adventure against him armed with red purple. So be warned. Neither forget that in blue, which is God's color in the Heavens, ye have safety.

  "My interpretation of this, I must tell you, consists of seven glass vacuum circles -- the red on the outside of the pentacle, and the remainder lying inside it, in the order of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

  "Once I was sure that the vacuum valves were all operating correctly, I stood in the center of the circles and readied the phonographs.

  "Just before I started young Carruthers called from the entrance. He, stout lad, had offered to stand beside me once more, but I could not in all conscience expose him to such danger. I had him stand in the upper chamber. The Colonel, as a precaution, had already filled the side chambers with black powder. Carruthers was in charge of the detonator, to be used in the event of my abject failure.

  "I called back to the lad, indicating that all was ready, then started up the recording of the gunfire. The effect was immediate. I felt it first through the soles of my feet, but soon my whole frame shook, vibrating in time with the rhythm. My head swam, and it seemed as if the very walls of the chamber melted and ran. The pentacle receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint of light in a blanket of darkness, and I was alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding beat.

  Shapes moved in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that capered and whirled as the drum grew ever more frenetic. I gave myself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.

  I know not how long I wandered, there in the space between. I forgot myself, forgot my duty, in blackness where only rhythm mattered. I believed I had been there for an age, but I was brought back directly to the pentacle when the cylinder on the phonograph played itself out. Only two minutes had passed.

  "Thankfully I still stood in the centre of the pentacle. A giant drum beat around me, but now that the key, the gunfire, had been stopped, I felt no call to join in the blackness.

  "Beyond the pentacle, despite the fact that the valves glowed brightly, the chamber was filled with darkness, shadows so deep that I could not see the carved walls. For the first time I could sense my adversary directly, probing at my defences, looking for a passage through. It was time to begin the expulsion.

  "I replaced the cylinder in the phonograph with one that Brown and I had worked up. Our markings on the wax matched a passage of rhythm mentioned in the Sigsand MS as being used by certain tribesmen in removing malevolent spirits. I did not yet know whether it would work, but I had no option but to give it a try.

  "I also attached my electric pentacle to the phonograph, such that the spectrum of would glow in time with any sound. I started the cylinder spinning more in hope than in expectation of success.

  "The phonograph sounded thin and tinny in comparison to the deep drumming that echoed in the chamber, but when the valves started to flash in time the drums seemed to falter and the darkness thinned enough that I could momentarily see the walls of the chamber. I almost let out a cry of victory, but I was premature.

  "The blackness surged. Sparks flew from all the valves, the sudden light so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, and even then the after image stayed there for long seconds. The defences held, for a while. But I knew I only had mere minutes before the phonograph cylinder would play itself out, leaving me only with the electric pentacle between the entity and myself. From what I had seen, I knew that if I were to wait that long I would be a goner.

  "I started to chant in time with the recordings, meaningless sounds in a voice made throaty with fear. But the new sound found some sympathy in the walls of the chamber itself, as if they had been hewn for this very purpose.

  "A new beat grew, a bass drum in perfect time with my chanting.

  "Once more the darkness threw itself forward against my defences.

  "Several of the valves started to dim, and my voice faltered. . . just for a fraction of a second. The blackness swelled and pressed an attack stronger than any previously made. The valves flickered and dimmed. I raised my voice, putting more depth into the chant, aware that there were mere seconds left to me.

  "In answer the whole chamber seemed to swell in song, my own voice echoed and amplified, as if recorded and re-recorded on a thousand phonographs simultaneously. Even as the valves failed completely the blackness shrunk and diminished. A valve popped and I was forced to blink. When I looked again it was just in time to see the blackness hover over the phonograph, like a black cape falling over the contraption.

  "The cylinder played out with a last dying whirr. The blackness fell into the drum then was gone. The echoes faded and died and my chant died with them. I stood in a sudden silence."

  *

  "I may have been standing there yet if the tremulous voice of young Carruthers had not inquired after my health in a loud voice that had more than a hint of fear in it. When I emerged from the lower chamber he almost set off the detonator in his fright, and I had to prise his hand gently from the handle lest he send us both to the place the Colonel intended for the barrow.

  "The Colonel himself was disinclined to believe that the situation was controlled with no evidence to prove it, but that night the whole camp slept peacefully.

  "The man from the Ministry arrived the next day and demanded from me that I show him how to use and control the blackness. I told him the truth. I did not know how.

  "I did not however tell him of that last second in the chamber, and how the darkness had been absorbed into the cylinder.

  "And no one but me has seen hide nor hair of that piece of wax.

  "Until now."

  *

  Carnacki reached down to the side of his chair and brought up a phonograph cylinder. He traced the grooves and scratches in the wax with his finger.

  "What a marvellous thing modern technology is. This single cylinder has done the same job as a rock chamber that must have taken many years to hew from the ground.

  He showed the cylinder to Jessop and smiled.

  "I believe it to be safe, as long as I keep it far from the sound of th
e Hotchkiss Mark I. What say you Jessop? Would you like to hear what happens when you play this back on your equipment?"

  Jessop went white and shook his head.

  Later, after Carnacki had shown us out with his usual jaunty out you go, Jessop and I walked together along the embankment. He was quiet for a long time, but when he spoke, I knew exactly what he had been thinking.

  "You know, I think they are right. I think the Gramophone is the way of the future."

  The Invisible Menace

  I didn't know why I was called to attend a meeting in Whitehall, but I certainly didn't expect to be hauled up in front to the Minister of Defense or to be read the riot act; but that's exactly what happened. The six of us stood in front of the Minister's desk like a group of naughty schoolboys while he laid into us for everything he perceived was wrong with our running of the operation. It seemed our research group had been remiss in our duties, or at least, that was going to be the official line if we didn't, in the Minister's own words, get our heads out of our arses.

  "We can't survive another Blitz, and these new Russian rockets are ten times more lethal than the V2s ever were. We brought you in to do something about it. It's high time we saw some results, so I'm sending you all on a forced holiday until we get somewhere."

  Quite what the 'something' was that we should be doing, the Minister never made clear, but we members of the Rocket Research Group who were present were left in little doubt that our careers were on the line unless we came up with a plan, and fast. We were moved out of Lincoln the very next day and sequestered in South London for the duration, or until the Minister decided he needed us for something else, or didn't need us at all.

  At first we were at a complete loss as to how to proceed. We already knew that long-range radar wouldn't cut it, it was all well and good to see something coming from far away when you had anti-aircraft gun positions all along the coast, but none of our guns were going to stop a Soviet ICBM. All that long hot summer of '55 we sat in the overheated, too-cramped Nissen huts that were our temporary accommodation in Greenwich barracks, scratching our heads and throwing out ever increasingly dumb ideas for consideration. In the evenings we went down to the local bars, smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much ale, neither of which helped us come up with any worthwhile, but it was more fun than sitting in the huts.

  Young George Thornton, our most junior engineer, was the unwitting catalyst that finally broke the run of duff ideas and started us on the right path. He turned up one Monday morning full of cheer and tales of meeting a new girl. Over the course of the day we all learned much more than we needed to about a weekend that had revolved round a trip to the West End to see the latest big Yank movie to come over the pond.

  "It was smashing, Professor," he said to me. I wasn't really listening, I had spent most of a frustrating morning fiddling with an electromagnet, trying to get the blasted thing to work, and I wasn't in the best of moods. "They have these alien spaceships, see, right graceful they are too, like swans, with long sweeping necks, although their heads shoot death rays with this huge noise you have to go hear in a big picture house, PweepWeepWeep , like that, trucks and tanks and people all vaporized. Then, when the Yanks try to stop them with planes and bombs, they've got this magnetic force field around them that stops everything, of course I could see it was just a glass dome trick like, but Bettie, that's her name, Bettie loved it. And then there's this bit in a farmhouse and. . . "

  As I say, I had tuned him out, but two words had got through at the same time as I was looking at the big magnet.

  Force field.

  I didn't even know if it was possible, but maybe it didn't have to be, I wasn't just thinking about an invisible shield, I was wondering whether just the idea of an invisible defense, whispered to the right, or wrong, people, might be enough to deter an attack. But I worked on it anyway, if we were going to sell it to the Russians as a reality, we'd need to make it sound plausible, and fill the story with all the heft and weight of something that actually existed.

  But even before I made a start, I ran the idea past the team, then the brass at Whitehall. To my surprise the Minister thought it to be a dashed fine idea, I found out later that he'd seen the same movie as young George, but at the time all it meant was that I suddenly had more funding and assistants than I knew what to do with.

  Now that we had a goal in mind our ideas for putting it into operation were still outlandish, and some were definitely still dumb, but at least they were now dumb with a purpose. I couldn't get the idea of the electromagnet out of my head. So we built a bigger one, then a bigger one still. We began experiments using pulsed EM to charge the atmosphere and disrupt anything coming at us from above. Initially all we succeeded in doing was blacking out radio and television transmission all across the Home Counties, the PM took a lot of flak for that one, but we were definitely getting somewhere. After a couple of months we had built a test system that successfully kept pigeons away from Trafalgar Square, that got the PM a lot of his Brownie Points back with the public, but little praise from the laundry and cleaning firms in the city.

  Finally, one day in early November, we thought we had a working model that would function for at least long enough for a full strength demonstration. I won't bore you here with the technical details, the math is labyrinthine, but more that that, it is deadly dull. Suffice to say, we had a model that looked feasible, math that worked, so we built it; it wasn't anything that was going to be portable, not anything that could be wheeled out on a battlefield. It was the size of a small house, an ugly mess of coils, copper, brass, magnets, wiring and enough generators to keep most of the city going for days. It had been cobbled together fast, too fast in my opinion, but the team said it was going to work, buoyed as they were with the success of the unit that was still buzzing away next to Nelson's Column in the city center. We were ready to show off.

  The MOD made a big deal of it, the Minister and the PM were present in the square in the center of the old Barracks, along with much of the country's top military brass. I realized that if the Russians were intent on an attack, we might well have just provided them with a perfect opportunity.

  The Minister made a fine speech about the security of our great nation and the ingenuity of the best scientific minds in the world. I pushed the switch, just praying that the bally thing would work.

  A loud, not unpleasant hum filled the air, and the sky above us shimmered, now slightly green where it should have been blue, if my calculations were right it would now have taken on that tint over the whole city. Everybody waited silently for several minutes. Nothing much of any import happened. The sky shimmered and danced like oil rising from a hot skillet, and everyone's faces had taken on a greenish reflective hue, but apart from that, there was nothing to show for all our efforts. Nothing visible anyway.

  "Is that it?" the PM asked.

  The Minister smiled.

  "That's it, sir. London is now the only city in the world to get a protective shield at the flick of a switch."

  "And how do we know that it works?"

  "I think the appropriate question is, how do the Russians know that it doesn't?"

  The top brass all drifted away, but many of them shared the PM's wry smile. The Minister gave us a pat on the back and the rest of the day off, so I took my team down into Greenwich in search of a bar in which we could celebrate.

  *

  The first sign that things were not as they seemed came that very afternoon. The early evening news was on the television in the pub, they were still talking about Princess Margaret's failed engagement, and what with that, and the locals complaining about the poor reception on the box, I wasn't paying it too much attention. But then they broke into the scheduled broadcast with a news flash, the main stand at Upton Park had collapsed, luckily after the afternoon match was done and the crowd had dispersed. The BBC dispatched a film crew, but all they got was scenes of rubble and ruin, the old stadium looked like a bomb had hit it. Of course the ne
ws was in black and white, but the reporter's talk of a 'persistent green glow, and smell of vinegar' had me thinking.

  "Did we do that, do you think?" young George said beside me, he was rather the worse for wear, having taken to the ale with some gusto.

  I shook my head.

  "I can't see how. It's a coincidence. That's all it is, an accident."

  There was another 'accident' in Lewisham that evening when a tower block collapsed, then another in Putney on Sunday morning when the old bridge went down into the river 'as if some giant foot had stood on it' according to bystanders. After witnesses to both events independently mentioned a strange green glow and smell of vinegar I was not in the slightest bit surprised to be called in to an emergency meeting in the Minister's rooms in Whitehall that same Sunday afternoon.

  *

  Many of the military men that I'd seen at the Barracks the previous day were seated around the long table. They weren't smiling now, and the fact that I wasn't given the option of sitting with them told me just about all I needed to know about my place in the pecking order.

  The table was strewn with photographs of destruction, Upton Park, the Lewisham tower block, and a stretch of rubble-filled river that I took to be the remains of Putney Bridge. Right in the center of the table was a large map of the city, with three red flags denoting where the damage had been done.

  "Did you do this?" the Minister said, almost shouting. I refrained from reminding him that only twenty four hours before he had been telling me what a great thing I had done. I merely nodded.

  "I think we did." I emphasized the 'we', possibly a bit too strongly for he bristled visibly.

  "Then I suggest 'we' switch the bloody thing off, right now," he said.