Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

He looked around at the jungle-filled crater and idly fingered the scrap of khaki and the Pennine Fusilier button. If he had petrol fruit liquor, could he, too, see Jeffries’ trail as Mathers had done? He withdrew his hand quickly, overcome with an irrational fear that Jeffries might somehow sense him through it. If the chatts were insistent that nothing enters and nothing leaves this place, then returning might be problematic. Then again, so could leaving. They might as well try to find Jeffries’ trail while they were down here.

RILEY AND TONKINS wandered idly over the metal, newly exposed by the telluric blast. The storm, or whatever it was, seemed to have passed now, and although the blasts continued, they had rolled into the distance beyond the crater.

Thinking aloud, Riley held forth on various electrical theories, wondering whether he could stabilise such power, to charge not just an electric lance, but also perhaps an electric cannon. Tonkins’ only contribution to the discussion was, “I reckon you could have powered all the electric lights in London from that.”

Riley mulled that over for a moment, before going to check over the electric lance packs.

HEPTON SAT BY himself, ignored by the others, his hands shaking, two fingers extended by force of habit as if holding a cigarette he wished he had, but didn’t. He caught himself doing it and clenched his fist. It still trembled.

TURNING HIS MIND from Porgy, all Atkins could focus on now was Jeffries. Whatever Jeffries was after, whatever he wanted, he had come down here by himself to get it. By himself. Atkins held that thought for a moment and shook his head in disbelief as he recalled the men they’d lost getting this far. Jeffries had done it by himself. Whatever else he hated about Jeffries, the man possessed a self-belief and determination that he found hard not to envy. Whatever it was he was after, Jeffries was a driven man. But now, so was Atkins.

His mind turned to Flora. He would go to hell and back for her. Now it looked very much as if he would have to do just that.

Unfortunately, it meant taking his mates with him.

Talk to someone, Nellie had said. There was no one to whom he could talk. No one that would understand. His mates wouldn’t. They thought he was a decent, honest chap. He’d gone out of his way to show that he was, to himself if to no one else, to prove himself penitent.

Silently, he renewed his vow to return home, and thought of those who wouldn’t. Jessop, Lucky, Ginger, Nobby, Prof, Chalky, Jenkins, Porgy and, yes, even Ketch; he wanted their deaths to mean something.

He feared Everson might get cold feet. He hadn’t come this far to give up now.

He approached Lieutenant Everson. “Sir, we shouldn’t stay put too long,” he advised, glancing warily at the surrounding scrub. “We’re still going after Jeffries, aren’t we?”

Everson was leafing through the ironbound tome.

“This mission has been a complete shambles, Atkins,” he sighed quietly. “We’ve made peace with one colony only to start a war with another. Quite frankly, if I go back to the camp empty-handed, I think the men will lynch me.”

“It won’t come to that, sir. We have our second objective.”

“Are the rest of the men up to it?” he said, glancing over to the weary Tommies. It seemed that he had asked much of them, over the past few months. Dare he ask more?

“They will be, sir. The Black Hand Gang hasn’t let you down before. If that man knows the way home, I’d follow him into hell itself.”

“Well, it looks as if that’s were we’re going. But I don’t think we need worry. We’ve been there before. Remember Wipers?”

Atkins shuddered at the memory. “That I do, sir.”

THERE WERE ENTRIES in the book that, if they weren’t allegorical, very clearly pointed to a gateway, an entrance to the underworld and the Village of the Dead.

They moved off out along the Strip, that the Ruanach clan referred to as the Road of the Dead, heading towards the crater’s far wall, every so often marking their route with a chalked 13/PF on a rock or tree trunk, for the Ivanhoe to follow.

Wearing the Lightningwerfer, as Mercy had christened the electric lance pack, Atkins took the lead with Mercy as his winder; Everson followed, with Napoo occasionally scouting ahead. Pot Shot and Gazette eyed the jungle either side of the Strip, while Riley and Hepton struggled along like pack mules under knapsacks and kitbags of gear, but at least the going was firm, and Tonkins with the second Lightningwerfer brought up the rear with Gutsy.

Knowing now what was beneath his feet as they walked, Everson thought about the wider context of the mysterious lines on the landscape. He knew there were megalithic roads that scarred the landscape of Britain, but nothing there suggested any kind of giant structure beneath the surface like here. Who built it, and what was it for?

TREES TOWERED HIGH either side of the wide ribbon of scrub, spreading their thin spindly foliage out over the Strip and dappling the scrub beneath with dancing shadows. The tough shallow-rooted plants clung fiercely to the thin soil, reinforcing the image of an ancient, overgrown, long-disused road.

As the crater wall rose up before them, the vegetation became thicker. A grove of gnarled scab trees stood in their way, choked with the pallid creepers that infested the crater.

Mercy and Gutsy whirred away on the magneto handles, making sure that Tonkins’ and Atkins’ electric lances were fully charged. Atkins would rather have his Enfield in his hand – he trusted it more than this alien device – but knew as long as the magneto didn’t wear out and there were hands to wind, he didn’t have to worry about ammunition. Here, though, the electric lances came into their own: they spat and burned through the snarl of plants, sending small ugly creatures scurrying for new cover.

As Napoo slashed away at the last of the lianas and vines and they broke through the last of the undergrowth, they saw the far wall of the crater, towering six hundred feet above them. They clambered over moss-covered boulders down into an old stone-strewn dell, where huge buttressing tree-roots supported trees that must have been centuries old. At the base of the crater wall, a vast yawning crack split the rock, its mouth barred by a writhing mass of the pallid creepers that reached out to choke the surrounding vegetation. The size of the cavern mouth dwarfed the Tommies; it could have taken three or four battlepillars abreast.

A single valiant shaft of sunlight shone down through the scab trees behind them, attempting to penetrate the gloom beyond the entrance, but it fell on nothing within that it could illuminate. The light was swallowed whole and snuffed out, engulfed by the immensity of the black void beyond, a void that seemed to brook no examination from without, forcing those who gazed into it to take what lay beyond on faith.

Looking into that black gulf for too long gave Atkins an unsettling sense of unease and nausea. There was nothing within the obsidian darkness on which to focus, and strange unearthly shapes and colours swam in his vision, until he was no longer sure whether they were a trick of the mind or not. It was only when he looked away that reality reasserted itself.

Impressive though the entrance was, it was certainly more natural than their imaginations had led them to expect. Atkins had envisaged demons with flaming swords guarding it, perhaps, or giant lintels carved from the rock face and inscribed with unspeakable glyphs, standing on weathered, ruined Doric columns of great size. Or something darker, exuding great age and malevolence: vast forbidding blackened doors of charred bone, and niches of skulls.

“So that’s it?” said Mercy. “The gateway to the Underworld? Can’t say that I’m impressed. I was expecting something a little more–”