Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“Captain Burton!” he exclaimed. “You're alive and young again! By heavens! How have you done it? I demand to know the secret! To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable!”

Burton gave a bark of laughter. “Still the rapier-sharp wit! The war hasn't blunted that, I see, and praise be to Allah for it! It's good to see you, lad! It's bloody good to see you!”

“Sure and begorra, he's calling me lad now! And here's me a quarter of a century his senior by the looks of it!” Wilde caught Burton as the explorer suddenly sagged. “Hey now, you're trembling all over! Come and sit down. Bertie, in the drinks cabinet-there's a decanter of brandy. Fetch it over, would you? Sit, Captain. Sit here. Are you feeling faint?”

“I'm all right,” Burton croaked, but, to his horror, he suddenly found himself weeping.

“It's the shock, so it is,” Wilde said. “A dash of brandy will put you right. Pour generously, Bertie, the captain probably hasn't tasted the good stuff for a long while.”

“I haven't-I haven't tasted it at all since-since Dut'humi,” Burton said, his voice weak and quavering.

Wells passed him a glass but Burton's hand was shaking so violently that Wilde had to put his own around it and guide the drink to the explorer's mouth. Burton gulped, coughed, took a deep shuddering breath, and sat back.

“Quips,” he said. “It's really you.”

“It is, too, Captain. Are you feeling a little more steady now?”

“Yes. My apologies. I think-I never-I never expected to find a little piece of home in this hellish world.”

Wilde chuckled and looked down at himself. “Not so little any more, I fear.” He addressed Herbert Wells: “Bertie, you'd best be getting off-we don't have much time. The devil himself will be snapping at our heels soon enough, so he will.”

Wells nodded. “Richard,” he said, “I'm going to prepare our escape. All being well, I'll see you within a couple of hours.”

“Escape?”

Wilde said, “Are you fit to take a walk? I'll explain as we go.”

“Yes.” Burton drained his glass and stood up. “By ‘the devil himself,’ I assume you mean Crowley.”

The three men moved to the door and started down the stairs.

“That I do, Captain.”

They reached the lower hallway. Wells opened the street door and peered out. The three Tommies were waiting by the car. The little war correspondent nodded to Burton and Wilde and slipped out into the mist, closing the portal behind him.

Wilde gestured to the opening in the side wall. “Into the basement, if you please, Captain.”

Burton stepped through and started down the wooden stairs he found beyond. “I don't understand Crowley and all this mediumistic business, Quips. The only evidence I've seen of it is the Germans occasionally manipulating the weather.”

“When the Hun destroyed London, they killed most of our best mediums, which is horribly ironic, do you not think? Here we are. Wait a moment.”

The stairs had ended in a large basement, which was filled with old furniture and tea chests. Wilde crossed to a heavy armoire standing against the far wall.

“Ironic?” Burton asked.

“Yes, because our clairvoyants didn't predict it! As a matter of fact, we now think their opposite numbers, on the German side, may have perfected some sort of mediumistic blanket that can render things undetectable.”

“Such as the approaching A-Bomb, for instance?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Ah-ha! That's got it!”

Wilde had been fiddling with something behind the big wooden unit. Now the whole thing slid smoothly aside, revealing the entrance to a passage. He turned and grinned at Burton. “Do y'know, I became the captain of a rotorship thanks to you? Do you remember old Nathaniel Lawless? A fine gentleman!”

“I remember him very clearly, and I agree.”

“After you wangled me the job on the poor old Orpheus , Lawless would never settle for another cabin boy. He sponsored my training, helped me rise through the ranks, and, before you know it, I was given captaincy of HMA Audacious. A lovely vessel, so she was, but the war had broken out by then and she was put to fiendish use. I soon found that I was losing myself in the mesmeric brutality of battle. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it's looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. It took me a few years, I must confess, to realise that vulgarity.”

He indicated that Burton should follow and disappeared into the secret passage.

“So I had myself drummed out of the Air Force.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Through what they call ‘conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.’ I inspired the wrath of a certain Colonel Queensberry, and he rather gleefully put his proverbial boot to my backside. It caused a bit of a stir at the time, I can tell you.”

“And afterward you became a newspaper man?”

“Aye, I did that-going back to my roots, as you might say-and I wound up in Tabora.”

The passage made a sharp turn to the right. As they continued on, Burton looked at the small lights that, strung along a long wire, gave illumination. “How do these work?” he asked, pointing at one.

“Electricity.”

“Ah! Like I saw on the Britannia! Was it Isambard who mastered the technique?”

“Good Lord!” Wilde cried out. “Brunel! I haven't thought of him in years! What a genius he was!”

“And for all his faults, loved by the public,” Burton noted.

“To be sure! To be sure! Ah, what a delight it must be to be a Technologist! So much more romantic than being the editor of a newspaper! I can assure you that popularity is the one insult I have never suffered. But to answer your question: yes, he mastered electricity-in 1863, as it happens.”

They hurried on, with Wilde panting and puffing as he propelled his bulk forward.

“Where are we going, Quips?”

“All in good time, Captain.”

Burton began to wonder if the tunnel spanned the entire city.

“So the mediums,” he said. “They were killed when London fell?”

“So they were. And we had no more of them until 1907, when Crowley came to the fore. In recent years he's focused his talents on defending this city, which is why the Germans have never managed to conquer it.”

“Surely, then, he should be regarded as a hero? Why is it that no one seems to have a good word to say of him?”

Wilde shrugged. “That's a difficult one. There's just something about him. He's sinister. People suspect that he has some sort of hidden agenda. Here we are.”

They'd reached a door. Wilde knocked on it, the same arrhythmic sequence Wells had used earlier. It was opened by a seven-foot-tall Askari-obviously of the Masai race-who whispered, “You'll have to be quick. There's some sort of flap on. They're going to move the prisoner.”

Wilde muttered an acknowledgement. He and Burton stepped into what appeared to be a records room, followed the soldier out of it into a brightly lit corridor, and ran a short distance along it until they came to a cell door. However, when it was unlocked and opened, the room behind it proved to be not a cell at all but a very large and luxurious chamber, decorated in the English style, with Jacobean furniture and paintings on its papered walls.

In its middle, there was a metal frame with a wizened little man-naked but for a cloth wrapped around his loins-suspended upright inside it. He was held in place by thin metal cables that appeared to have been bolted straight through his parchment-like skin into the bones beneath. His flesh was a network of long surgical scars and he was horribly contorted, his arms and legs twisted out of shape, their joints swollen and gnarled, and his spine curved unnaturally to one side. His finger-and toenails were more than two feet long and had grown into irregular spirals. Bizarrely, they were varnished black.