Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

Yet Hal was too preoccupied to get excited about the General’s decision to ramp up his responsibilities. The call had come fifteen minutes earlier in the thin dawn light at the end of a long day and sleepless night of tearing himself apart over his confrontation with the Caretaker. At first he had considered reporting the manifestation — what the Caretaker had told him was surely of importance — but the more he vacillated, the more he pulled away from that route. Hal comforted himself with the thought that once he had decided what it all meant he would make a full disclosure at the Cabinet office. Yet he knew, quite powerfully, that the Caretaker’s message was meant for him alone, if he could ever decipher its meaning. And so he had sat quietly in his room, turning it over and over in his head. For a loyal public servant like Hal, his inaction felt like a grand betrayal and the guilt ate away at him constantly.

The guard at the main door checked Hal’s pass and directed him along a maze of corridors to a section sealed off with a steel gate. The guards here were hard-faced, clearly capable of shooting him in the blink of an eye and losing no sleep over it.

In the high-security section, the doors were thicker and lacked the small shuttered window usually provided for the warders to check on the inmates. Disturbing sounds emanated from the unseen inhabitants. From one cell came a howling like a wild animal’s cry, accompanied by frenzied clawing at the walls. And in another, something wet and sticky lashed back and forth.

Hal found Reid and Manning deep in conversation. Manning had a touch of glamour that belied her Home Office position, but Reid was always the perfect spy, ready to fade into the background at any moment. Beyond them, workmen were adding even greater electronic security to one of the cells. Manning and Reid stopped talking when they saw Hal.

‘The General sent this urgently.’ Hal handed over a sealed envelope to Reid. ‘Your eyes only.’

Reid opened it and gave a brief, triumphant smile. ‘We’re on our way.’

Manning was distracted by the work taking place in and around the nearby cell. Hal thought he sensed a touch of uneasiness about her.

‘Who’s in there?’ The words came out before Hal could stop them and he waited to be reprimanded for breaking the department’s rule of no questions, any time.

But Manning was oblivious to protocol. She continued to stare at the cell as she gave her distracted answer: ‘Prisoner Zero.’ Hal was not enough of a neophyte to probe further.

‘Tell the General we’ll both be around for the interrogation,’ Reid said to Hal. ‘We’ll do it in four-one-four — there’s a two-way mirror.’

‘Got it.’

As Hal turned to retrace his steps, a disturbance broke out just ahead. A guard staggered backwards out of an open cell door, his SA80 spraying bullets all around. He was wearing an ABC isolation suit, a red arterial spray gushing from a ragged tear down the front of it.

Suddenly the corridor was filled with the most terrible sounds: jungle shrieks, haunted moans, insectile chittering and a low, chilling susurration. The prisoners had smelled the blood.

Hal was rooted by the sight for a second too long. Just as he was about to run back up the corridor, a small black shape bounded from the cell on to the chest of the still-twitching guard. At first, Hal thought it was a spider the size of a small dog, then some kind of lizard. Finally, he realised he was looking at an imp that would not have been out of place in a medieval wood-carving. It was the glossy black of crude oil and covered in gleaming scales. Its body had human proportions, but its head was oversized, like a baby’s. A pointed tail lashed back and forth.

‘Take that,’ the devil said with a swipe of razor-sharp talons, ‘for presumption. And that for stupidity. And this simply because it is my nature.’ The talons became a blur of rending and tearing.

And then the imp stopped, sniffed the air and turned its head in an oddly mechanical way towards Hal. Hal’s blood ran cold as the devil’s red eyes fell on him.

‘Aha!’ the imp said with jubilation. It sounded like a throaty old man. ‘Fresh meat.’

It leaped from the seeping corpse so fast that Hal couldn’t keep it in his vision. Bouncing off the walls and ceiling, it hit Hal full force in the stomach. He fell to the floor, winded, as the imp did a little mocking dance around him. Before Hal could lever himself up, the devil jumped to squat on his chest with surprising weight.

‘Now, now,’ it said, with a malicious grin, ‘no running before we exchange pleasantries.’ It hooked one talon in the corner of Hal’s mouth and pulled his lips into a grimace. The finger tasted gritty and vinegary. ‘A thin covering on fragile bone,’ the imp continued. ‘What a strange and ineffective design.’ But then it paused, puzzled, and sniffed the air over Hal’s face. ‘What is this?’ The imp grew oddly uneasy. ‘The stink of righteousness? The rank odour of life?’ It pressed its face close to Hal’s so that its burning red eyes filled Hal’s entire vision, its spoiled-meat breath nearly making him retch. ‘The Pendragon Spirit?’

Hal was too terrified to read anything in the imp’s manner at that moment, but later, on reflection, he would believe that he had seen a hint of fear.

A second later, the creature was wrenched off his chest. Four guards in ABC suits lifted the imp into the air before clamping around its neck a metal collar with an attached chain. The imp let out a high-pitched, agonised scream, thrashing wildly as if the very touch of the collar burned it.

As the guards dragged the imp back to its cell, the cacophony from the other cells grew even louder, the cumulative noise now tinged with fury and hatred. Hal pressed his hands over his ears and staggered to his feet to catch his breath. The imp’s cell door clanged shut, followed by several resounding thuds as the creature threw itself at the door.

The other occupants continued to rage until a strange sound reverberated from the far end of the corridor where Manning and Reid were being protected by other guards. It had the organic tone of a voice, but sounded to Hal something like a tolling bell. Immediately, whatever creatures lay behind the closed doors fell silent, and the quiet that followed was infinitely more disturbing.

Breathless and frightened, Hal stumbled out of Brasenose and into the High Street where two men were grunting and sweating as they attempted to fix the wheel of a cart. He was instantly hit by a wind sharp with the bite of winter. A flurry of snow stung his face. Puzzled, he looked up to see grey clouds now obscuring a sky that had been blue when he had entered the building. Snow in June? Even the final few things they had been counting on were fading away. Fastening his jacket, he turned into the icy gale and hurried towards Queen’s College.

Just after 6 a.m., he found Samantha buried behind a mound of paperwork in her tiny office in the Ministry of Intelligence. No one kept regular hours any more. Her repeated complaints about deadlines and a possible sacking fell on deaf ears and eventually Hal convinced her to take an early breakfast.

Shivering, they made their way to one of the pubs that opened before dawn for the market workers. At that time they’d be able to find a quiet corner away from the usual gossiping cliques from the Government offices.

‘I can’t believe this weather.’ Samantha sipped a herbal infusion, which everyone now drank instead of tea. ‘Everything’s gone mad.’

‘Everything went mad a long time ago,’ Hal replied.

Samantha caught his flat delivery and asked him what was wrong. Hal enjoyed the concern in her eyes. Cautiously, he related his meeting with the Caretaker and the mysterious transformation of Oxford.