K Jeter: Morlock Night

"Are you all right?" I asked.

She nodded as she slowly regained her breath. By the scrap of light from the hole in the sewer's arching roof, I watched as she stood and unfastened a short tubular object from her belt. A click, and a flaring beam of light shot from one end of it. A peculiar sort of lamp I thought it, but undeniably useful.

I stepped close behind her as she went up to the corpse of her assailant and played the beam of light over it. The skin of my arms and neck contracted in horror as the body's details were revealed by the bright circle travelling over it. My mind raced back to the memory of a fantastic story of a Time Machine and the adventures it produced, told in a warm, well-lit parlour only a few hours – it seemed ages! – ago. My eccentric host's very words leapt into my thoughts… this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing… it was a dull white, and had strange, large grey ish-red eyes… flaxen hair on its head and down its back… I shivered involuntarily when I realised that the corpse on the sewer floor before me was the very image of my story-telling host's imaginary Morlocks! Indeed, as I stared at the dead thing, its large eyes still glaring at us, the word imaginary shrank from my thoughts. I stood aghast, bereft of sense as would be an Alpine traveller, who, upon the lifting of a snowstorm, finds himself poised on the very brink of a bottomless precipice.

As we examined the creature's vile carcass, I noted a few significant differences from those details that the Time Machine's inventor had described to his dinner party. Our host had given his audience the impression of a much smaller creature with a thin-shanked, spidery appearance. The one before us now was of the stature of a short man built wide across the shoulders, with corded muscles filling out its sinewy arms. The flaxen hair was clipped short, and the creature was garbed in a one-piece, utilitarian garment, crossed with leather straps like my companion's, but stained with blood from the fatal wound my shot had given him. A rifle similar to the woman's lay under the corpse, while the bayonet was only a few inches from the creature's outflung hand.

My study of this apparition was ended when the woman doused the light. The beam disappeared with only a slight click from the tube she held. "A scout," she said. "We'd better move on before the rest of his squad comes after."

I helped her drag the pallid corpse away from where it would have been visible from above. Then, into the complete darkness and stale must of the sewer tunnel, I followed after her. As I slogged through the shallow water, my mind flicked from thought to thought like the beam of light my companion produced to light our way.

The remembered words of the mysterious Dr. Ambrose taunted me. Clearly he had not been the babbling lunatic I had surmised him to be. A figure of knowledge and power I saw him now; but what knowledge? What power? By his agency, I was certain, I had been translated from my quiet London haunts into this dark vista of struggle and death. A fragment from Matthew Arnold… as on a darkling plain! Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night – crossed my thoughts. But what did it signify? Was all this some covert invasion that had erupted in the midst of England of which Ambrose had some advance knowledge? Was there a connection between his pallor and the much ghastlier whiteness of the Morlock I had slain? Could this Ambrose perhaps be an agent of the Morlocks disguised as a man of this time, and drawing me into some devious plot? For what purpose?

Such was the anxious tenor of the musings that absorbed me as I tramped through the damp sewer tunnel. I longed to ply the woman ahead of me with questions – she certainly didn't seem to wonder at these proceedings – but refrained. Simple survival dictated my silence for the moment. Dreadful conjectures of war and disaster sweeping over English soil filled my breast.

I felt one of the woman's hands reach back and push against my chest. "Hold up a second," she whispered, then stepped away from me. The stream of sewage water splashed against my boots as I waited. "All right," she said after a few seconds. "Climb up here."

The beam of her odd lamp illuminated the mouth of another tunnel a few feet above the floor of the one in which I stood. She reached a hand down from her perch and helped me clamber up beside her. "I think this will take us somewhere along the Thames," she said. "We'd better rest for a few minutes before we go up there."

I sat down and leaned my back against the tunnel's curved wall. The long march through the sewer's heavy, oxygen-depleted air had in fact nearly exhausted me. A cool draft of fresh air came from somewhere beyond, though, and we sat in our clammy niche, refreshing our lungs.

"Whose squad you with?" asked my companion at last. I couldn't place the accent in which she formed her terse words.

"Ah… no squad," I said. "Don't have one, you see." I had resolved to conceal my ignorance from her concerning the circumstances into which I had been thrust. To ask point-blank the questions pressing in my brain would most likely convince the woman that I was insane. But if I hid my lack of knowledge about the war raging over our heads, I could perhaps add to my store of facts without exposing myself.

"Freebooting it, huh?" she said. "That's a hard way to go. Though I suppose that's what I've got coming now. Those damned lockers came down on my squad like a ton of bricks. I doubt anyone besides myself got away with his skin on." She lapsed into silence, staring into the lightless depths of the sewer.

"Where are you headed now?" I asked.

"Squeezer's company was pretty well dug into the East End. If we can get past the locker lines and link up with them we'll be doing all right. We can probably get what we need – some food, water and ammo – from Squeezer and his bunch. He owes me a favour."

I mulled over these scraps of information, trying to glean as many inferences as possible from them. Was the word lockers somehow derived from Morlocks? I decided to fish for more information. "Ahh… where will this Squeezer and his men pull back to if the, uh, lockers take the East End?" I assumed the person in question to be some sort of military leader.

"Pull back?" Her face turned toward me. "There isn't any place to pull back to. The East End is it. When that goes, it's all, over."

"Surely," I protested, "there must be somewhere else-"

"There was a radio transmission from Birmingham yesterday. But none today. And the locker bombers were spotted flying that way this morning. The whole city's probably smoking rubble by now." Her voice droned out the chilling statements, the rage and horror suppressed by the need to keep control of one's self.

I didn't ask her what radio transmissions or locker-bombers were.

"But Europe," I said. "Or America. Surely there must be some place that can, help us-"

"What help could a bunch of corpses give us? They were all wiped out months ago." She leaped closer to me. "Are you all right? You didn't get hit in the head or anything, did you?"

"No… no, I'm all right. I just… got confused. That's all. Fatigue, you know." My mind raced giddily at these revelations. This is the end of it all? I wondered sickly. Surely the force that had overwhelmed all the rest of the world would have little trouble snuffing out a last ragged band of holdouts in London's East End. And after that?

The dead Morlock's pallid visage and staring red eyes swam before my mind's eye. So inheriting the Earth millions of years hence wasn't enough for the filthy breed! They must swarm all over Time itself until every second of Creation was under their brute heel! And what of Man – the progenitor of these obscene parodies of himself? Subjugated, perhaps, if any survived. Kept as cattle like the far future's Eloi to feed the Morlocks' hideous appetites.