Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Maude looked like she was about to cry. Beth knew that if Maude cried, she would.

She turned and left the lounge. In the bathroom, the sink looked like it belonged in a slaughterhouse. Beth cleaned the blood off her great-grandfather’s bayonet. She had a train to catch.

Du Bois parked the Range Rover outside Fort Widley on Portsdown Hill, another of the Victorian structures built to defend Portsmouth from a French invasion that had never come. A massive red-brick edifice built into the chalk of the hillside, the fort provided a commanding view of the suburbia and commercial estates below, then Portsmouth, the Solent, the Isle of Wight and beyond, though much was obscured in the murk of low cloud on the grey morning.

He checked the trace again. It was almost irrelevant now that they had an address. It was more a question of timing rather than anything else. He still had more than enough time to make the drive.

Du Bois climbed out of the four-by-four. It had been too late to make enquiries last night after he had let Beth go, but this morning he had rung around Mr Bryant’s friends and family, particularly other members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club based at Fort Widley. He had discovered some interesting things. Anna Bryant was scared of something, something that she was not prepared to go into over the phone. When he’d tried to speak to friends of Bryant from the diving club he discovered a lot of the numbers were disconnected. Entire families had disappeared with only a few missing-persons reports filed.

Du Bois finally got hold of a spouse. Through tears and anger he was told that all the members of the club had begun to act strangely. They were spending more and more time either diving or at the fort, though they had become very secretive about what they were doing. The woman’s husband had become less communicative. He had been nasty, even with his children. His diet had changed. He had started to ‘smell funny’. Eventually he had announced that he was leaving his job and his family. The estranged spouse hadn’t used the word cult, but it sounded a bit like that.

The club had a large lock-up at the fort behind a huge arched doorway with two iron-reinforced doors. The padlock proved no challenge for du Bois, and he pulled one of the doors open. Inside was a dark cavernous space and the stench was overwhelming. It was the reek of people living rough, using the place as a toilet, and the smell of the sea at low tide.

Du Bois moved cautiously. The place was a mess. Most of the equipment hadn’t been touched in months. His eyes cut through the darkness, amplifying the light from outside. The crates of diving equipment made it somewhat labyrinthine, but he could see no signs of life. There was a scattering of bedding and camping equipment, but something about their arrangement made them look more like nests than an area where people were sleeping rough.

Du Bois stopped and looked up. Dangling from one of the exposed roof beams, suspended on a chain with a meathook through its lower leg, was a body. It had clearly been there, rotting, for a while. Du Bois knew what a partially eaten corpse looked like.

Behind it was a large tank of murky green water containing a dark shape. Du Bois approached cautiously. He had the urge to draw the .45 but resisted. He still had the sense that there was nobody else in here, an intuition confirmed in part by his blood-screen. He magnified his vision and improved the resolution. It was an effigy made of scavenged bits of driftwood and marine detritus, and looked like a Sheela-na-gig, a fertility statue, an exaggerated and swollen pregnant female form. But there was something warped and wrong about the figure. All around the tank were the bodies of rats, birds, dogs, cats, various other small animals and even two sheep, a pig and a cow. None of them showed signs of having been eaten.

Du Bois had had enough. It was clear the place had been abandoned long ago. With a thought he linked to his phone and texted a request to Control for a clean-up crew. Normal people couldn’t be allowed to know how weird the world actually was. Then with another thought he started a search on material relating to Fort Widley, putting it through various filters to harvest the information he was looking for, though he wasn’t sure quite what that was.

Walking out into the murky morning light away from the stench was a blessed relief. The result of the search came back. Despite a mild feeling of being violated by information, du Bois sifted through the material in his mind rather than externally on the phone. The closest he came to what he was looking for were unsubstantiated urban myths about tunnels that led from the Palmerston forts on Portsdown Hill, down into the city and even as far as the sea defences on the front at Southsea.

Du Bois thought tunnels unlikely in engineering terms. He double-checked against online Ministry of Defence files. According to documents from the Victorian era, they had looked at tunnels but found them to be ‘unfeasible’. He didn’t have time to go searching for legendary tunnels. He added a search request to the clean-up crew request and then climbed into the Range Rover. He headed north.

The train pulled into the grey stone and concrete valley that was Bradford in the late afternoon. Never pretty, the murky weather had leached all the colour from the city. Beth had the money for a bus but felt better than she ever had before, her wounds all but healed during the journey. She almost ran up the Otley Road, past the cemetery where she’d spent many hours either with friends or alone, and turned into the familiar street of rain-slick-grey, stone terraced housing. It was only when she put the key in the lock that she knew this was for the last time.

After all the life and movement in Portsmouth, after feeling content, however briefly, for the first time, after the possibility of an actual life and then the screaming red violence, the dusty dirty house where cigarette smoke hung constantly in the atmosphere seemed so still and dead. The smell of a human being rotting away added to the feeling. The thing was, Beth couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case.

Her father was in the lounge, as ever, his oxygen mask hanging down as he sucked on a cigarette. The glow of the cigarette tip was the only point of light in the room.

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Did you find her?’ he asked, his voice little more than a rasp. Beth shook her head and watched disappointment spread across his face. She tried to muster sympathy for him, even pity. All she could do was try not to be any crueller than she had to. He had made his choices. He had to live with them.

‘Who is she?’ She watched her father swallow hard. Saw the fear replace disappointment.

‘I…’ he started. It would have been easier if he had been a better liar. Then he could have told her that he loved her as much as Talia, or even just loved her at all.

‘I’ll go back and look… I’ll find her, but you have to not lie to me. If you lie, I swear you’ll never see either of us again and I’ll go to the police.’ It was a gamble, a bluff, but prison had made her a better liar than her dad.

‘The police will be the least of our problems.’

‘You’re dying. It doesn’t matter now.’ It wasn’t said unkindly. The saddest thing, for Beth anyway, was that there was just no feeling there at all. ‘You stole her, didn’t you? You took her from some nice people, destroyed their lives and brought her to this dead place?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Beth was surprised by the anger in his voice, though it quickly subsided into a hacking cough.

She watched him for a while and then realised that this was the cruelty she was trying to avoid. She stood up, took the cigarette from his yellow-stained fingers and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. She was careful to make sure there were no sparks from the cigarette left before she put the mask over her father’s face and spun the wheel on the oxygen tank. She went and sat down, letting her father recover, until he took the mask off and spoke.