Simon Clark - Humpty's bones

Adam shivered. ‘First, where’s the exit? Remember that thing we saw?’

‘Did anyone see what it looked like?’ Jenny asked.

Pitt shrugged. ‘Too far away. Just a speck in the distance.’

Adam said. ‘But you could tell it was huge. It nearly filled the tunnel.’

‘And it was fast,’ Jenny added.

Pitt looked back. Tunnel lights gleamed on vehicle shrouds.

Jenny’s eyes widened. ‘What’s wrong. Pitt? What have you seen?’

‘Naz?’ asked Adam, hopefully.

‘It’s not a person. Too big.’ He suddenly hissed. ‘It’s coming this way.’

Jenny whirled round. ‘Hide on the shelves. Get right behind the boxes.’

Adam groaned. ‘It’s bound to find us.’

‘Once you’ve found somewhere keep absolutely still. Don’t make a noise.’

The lights flickered. A breeze blew along the tunnel. Discarded pieces of paper and old gum wrappers slithered along the floor. They knew it raced toward them.

Quickly, the three found their hiding places. Jenny climbed the ladder up fifteen feet to a shelf full of packed rice. There, she hunkered down behind dozens of boxes. Pitt hauled himself up to a shelf as high as his head. Engine parts, dozens of them, all wrapped in polythene. For some reason they made him think of human skulls in polythene bags. Adam went low. He wriggled under the bottom shelf then lay with his back on the concrete floor. Its coldness seeped through his clothes to touch his skin. The steel panel of the shelf was just two inches above him. He remembered how crabs lodged themselves into gaps between boulders on the seashore. For him this seemed the safest place.

A moment later the light died away until it was so dim Jenny could only make out indistinct box-shapes on the shelf. She winced. A pain flared up over her eye. Like when you drink ice-cold milk too fast.

On the shelf just at head height Pitt lay still. Then he realised that it wasn’t will-power keeping him immobile. He found it hard to move. A strange paralysis gripped him. When he heard the pad of feet in the tunnel he tried to shuffle even closer to the wall for protection. But he couldn’t lift his arm never mind move his body.

On the floor under the bottom shelf Adam found even moaning beyond him when the pain started in his forehead. His strength vanished. It was all he could do to turn his head to one side. When he did a dizzy, woozy sensation made him feel as if he was falling over the edge of the cliff. The moment he closed his eyes the vertigo grew even worse . I hope it doesn’t see us… if it does it will hurt us… blood will be shed…

All Adam could do was lie there as some enormous form entered the tunnel.

Peeping through gaps on the shelves, Pitt and Jenny tried to see what had arrived in this gloomy cavern. There was no doubting the beast’s size. Even from his hiding place on the floor, Adam looked, too. But all three felt strangely dizzy. Their limbs didn’t work properly. They felt sleepy. And all three had the same sharp pain boring through their skulls. This is how they stayed for the next thirty seconds. Then, as if the beast, had satisfied itself that there was nothing of interest in this area, it padded away.

When they felt that it was safe to emerge they crept from their hiding places. All three agreed amongst themselves how ill they’d felt. All of them noticed how the light had dimmed when the creature had entered this section of tunnel. But when they all tried to describe what they had seen of the beast no single one could agree on a description.

Adam declared, ‘I could see paws. Four of them. Like a lion’s.’

Jenny disagreed. ‘A lion? It was nothing like a lion. When I looked down at it from above I could see tentacles. Masses of tentacles. They were bright green.’

Pitt shook his head. ‘From where I was I could see bare skin, maybe its belly… there’s no fur, and certainly no tentacles. There were mottled patches on its body. I saw that kind of pattern once on something in a reptile house at the zoo.’

‘I had the best view,’ Jenny declared. ‘From right up there. It’s like a giant octopus.’

‘No way an octopus,’ Pitt insisted. ‘It’s a gargantuan lizard.’

‘You’re both wrong,’ Adam told them. ‘It’s a mammal. I saw furry paws. Probably a specially bred attack lion.’

‘Attack lion,’ Pitt snorted. ‘You’ll have had your eyes shut anyway.’

‘Are you calling me a coward?’

It was a dangerous thing to do. But for the moment they forgot about the real possibility the creature might come back. Instead, they bickered over what they did or didn’t see.

At the same time as the trio argued I was still in the truck. Five minutes ago, the monster had left my section of tunnel. Immediately the pain in my head went, too. But for those five minutes I was held in that trance. By some telepathic force I’d seen what was happening to Jenny, Pitt and Adam. What’s more, I knew what they had felt and thought. Somehow the creature had been responsible for that effect. Fortunately, as the minutes passed, and that thing moved further from me, I felt better. The light grew brighter. The dizziness vanished. I could move my arms normally again. The moment my legs worked as they should I climbed out of the cab, ready to search for my three friends.

When I turned a corner I started to find some answers. The next tunnel was different. Instead of bare concrete walls they were covered with white tiles. Kind of clinical. Here there weren’t any trucks under plastic sheets. Instead, four red cylinders in a row. Each as big as a car. They lay on their sides on V shaped racks. Odd… very odd.

These were troubling to look at. They resembled the thing you might see towed behind a farm tractor, but they were covered in warnings. CAUTION: LIQUID NITROGEN INLET. BEWARE: SUB-ZERO TEMPERATURE. Worst of all: DO NOT TOUCH: DANGEROUS CONTENT . I shuddered. Were these nuclear weapons? I walked along the line of cylinders. Stencilled on each one, in fierce, spiky letters was: VOGGRON. And after that mystifying word, either an A or B or C or a D. So the first cylinder was labelled VOGGRON A.

When I reached VOGGRON C I groaned, ‘Oh, no.’

The third cylinder had been bashed hard. Dents covered it. Only the dents bulged outward not inward. One end of the cylinder had been torn away. The metal cap, which was six feet in diameter, lay on the tiled floor. The cylinder itself was clean inside. Completely empty.

VOGGRON. Now I knew what had smashed open the bunker door. What’s more, I knew EXACTLY what had chased us. As I stood there, a darkness fell over me. It spilled across the floor, growing bigger as some shape — one that cast a long, dark shadow — crept up behind me.

Even though I wanted to move I couldn’t. Like one of those dreams when you need to run but can’t move so much as a finger. Then came its touch on my shoulder.

‘Hey, Naz, what you found here?’

‘Jenny?’ I spun round. ‘Adam? Pitt? I thought it had got you.’

‘We thought it was you who’d been nabbed.’

Grimly, I said, ‘If we don’t get out of here fast we’re all done for.’ I nodded at the cylinder. ‘By what was in there. The Voggron.’

Adam saw the wrecked cylinder. ‘It broke out of that tank, didn’t it? It escaped from the bunker, now it’s back.’

I frowned. ‘But why would it come back?’

Pitt rubbed his jaw. ‘Maybe the Voggron doesn’t like being outdoors. Or it needs to return to its lair.’

‘But what is it?’ Jenny examined the cylinders.

I shrugged. ‘Earlier, I hid in a truck when it came along the tunnel. I didn’t see it exactly… ’