The Tunnel at the End of the Light Read online

  Title Page

  TIME HUNTER

  THE TUNNEL

  AT THE END OF THE LIGHT

  by

  Stefan Petrucha

  Publisher Information

  First published in England in 2004 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]

  The Tunnel at the End of the Light © 2004 Stefan Petrucha

  Cover artwork by Matthew Laznika

  Time Hunter format © 2003 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish created by Daniel O’Mahony

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Prologue

  Sometimes, huddled against the scratchiness of a rocky corner, my swollen belly hurting with emptiness, my hairy skin cold save for the fast, hot breath and body warmth of the others, I calm myself enough to dwell on myself. And my mind, sensing my mind, can reflect on certain truths, such as:

  These are not words. I have no words.

  I have aches and pains, longings and absences. I have hungers, lusts, limbs and teeth – but no abstract symbols to codify and echo these things. I have sound. I can howl to the others about food, or danger, or the need for sex, but that’s all.

  Or: There is no light. I have no light.

  To call it dark is meaningless. There never was any light. I don’t even know how I can guess at the idea. Maybe my dreams extrapolate it from the three shades of grey I sometimes see, or maybe I imagine that the twin orbs in my head were not always so useless as they are now. Why have them, then, to begin with? Why place them so prominently? They barely tell me anything, but they’re always swollen with tears, stinging, and I feel, or know, or guess, that directly behind these large, obsolete orbs lies the most crucial part of my being.

  I wonder many things. I don’t know about the others, but I am aware that I’m aware, and I wonder why that is. I wonder why they don’t seem to think or see, and why it hurts to think that, why my heart wants so badly that the wetness comes again and again to my useless orbs, even when my belly is full and I am warm.

  Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s me.

  The others seem satisfied. Things sting, tickle, bite, scratch. Rough or soft or in between. They hit the ears, drip and echo, screech and whisper. Tongue tastes grit, bitter roots, squishy fish in oily water. There is little else to speak of, except perhaps for the feel of us. Of each other. Pointy, bony frame to pointy, bony frame, skin flapping over bone like a half-sheared pelt. Yet there is the strength of granite in our limbs.

  But that’s all. All the category. All the sense. All the shade. All the distinctions to be made in the world. Except, oh yes. The sweetness.

  Sometimes, oh sometimes, such a rare, rare sometimes, it is like birth or death; I find among the things I feel a heavenly sweetness, and pull it to my tongue. And then all is tickled and alive, and the darkness dances with laughter.

  Heaven lasts a moment. The others always smell it. They read me the way they do the heat or the coolness of the rocks or the odours that the air drafts carry. They know when I have sweetness. They even know when I’m about to find it, sometimes before I know myself.

  And so, after a moment’s joy, there is the scratching, the pulling, the tearing, to get it away from me. It is torn and shredded, passed from hand to hand as far as it will go. It never goes very far without vanishing, for we are many and we all have teeth.

  Some are killed for holding on too long. If the sweetness does not move fast enough, a head crushed by stone, or body scratched too deeply to recover. Then they are eaten the way a rat is, or one of the Meaty Ones that sometimes wander down here with the strange pelts that cover their skin.

  I learned quickly not to hold on too long. They thought enough not to kill me, because I am best at finding such things, but they hurt me, hurt me badly, and unlike them, I learned.

  That was the first time I realised I was different; when I knew I had learned not to hold on too long. It was also when I first felt free to hate them all, myself with them, to hate them for their nearness, for the yowls, for their sharp fingers, for their teeth, for their smells, for the way they dumbly follow me, because I am better at finding the sweetness. And to hate myself for being in the world with them – and wonder where it is that the Meaty Ones come to us from, and if it is any different.

  So, before I sleep, I let my mind sense my mind. But when I wake, I am looking. The others think I search for sweetness, but my thought is on the Meaty Ones, and where they come to us from. If they can wander here, perhaps I can wander there. So instead of searching for sweetness, I scour the cracks and crevices to find a way away. To the others, it looks just the same.

  But if ever I should find such a way, I must not let them know. We are as much in each other’s minds as we are in each other’s way, and, by and by, they would find me. They would be terrified to lose me. They would kill and eat me rather than lose me. So, instead, if I find such a way, I must hide it, even from myself, and wait until I find some sweetness. Then I can give it to them, and while they are in heaven, I will go away.

  Where is there to go? My mind thinks a place different than this, where I am not surrounded and used, where my eyes are not useless. But I have no idea what it would look like or how to get there, or even if the journey would take more than I have life to give.

  But that matters little.

  I have no sense of time.

  Chapter One

  These scenes are always wet, Lt Clive Gidley mused, spitting a bit of mud away from his upper lip. Muck-brown water, with the occasional chunk of mud, continually splashed into his face, its source an unseen leaking pipe that someone had forgotten to seal. Despite the discomfort, he didn’t blame the work crew for clearing out as soon as they could.

  The mad thing to do was remain, with a doodlebug between one’s legs.

  He wiped his face and shifted, hoping to better secure his precarious balance. His manicured hand sunk into mud, making him nearly slip before he could yank it free. At that, his strong, steady heart skipped a beat.

  Best not try that again, he thought. Think about the girl.

  A pretty thing. He’d almost met her at the pub the other night. Ever since, his thoughts wandered back to the wistful moment she had risen from, then vanished back into the crowd. She’d had the kind of red hair that glowed blonde at the highlights. When she’d seen him looking, just before she’d disappeared, she’d smiled in a way that made him smile back. Just thinking about her made him smile again.

  There, that calmed him enough to continue. With the right attitude, he might even parlay his fear into indignation. Indignation always made him more competent. So he began thinking how unfair it was for him to be here stuck in the muck of a deep tunnel just adjacent to an unused, ghost, station on the Piccadilly Line.

  Bad enough this silly buzz bomb had somehow lodged itself way down he
re. Worse still was the fact that once a routine tube inspection brought it to light, it was quickly deemed too close to the old station simply to blow it up with a half pound block of TNT, as they usually did in such cases. Apparently, old Constitution Hill station, somewhere between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner, closed since 1934, was more valuable than the life of one lieutenant.

  Oh, he’d guessed the reason, even though they wouldn’t tell him. He knew, from the bricked up walls he’d passed on his way in, that the station must have had a military use during the War. They’d always picked the ‘deep level’ lines – dug in at around 220 feet – and this was one. There were probably classified files stored in classified file cabinets in the classified station. And that was why he was at risk.

  There were scratches in the coloured paint along the body, revealing the metal shell, indicating perhaps it had slipped from its original point of impact. That was a good sign. The igniters could be so damaged, or faulty, that the thing would never go off. That was typical of the FZG-76, or V1. V for vergeltung, retribution, supposed payback for the bombing of German urban areas. Unfortunately, also typical of the V1s were an electrical impact igniter and two mechanical ones, which made defusing the thing terribly difficult.

  What colour had her dress been?

  Light, not white, but close to it, crumpled at the neck and sleeves. It had hung loosely on her slight frame, popping out here and there when it encountered some rounder flesh. Local girl, likely. She’d been there before and would be there again.

  And she’d smiled at him.

  And why not? He deserved a smile. He’d been chosen for this little task because he was the best. In fact, he’d been part of the team that had defused a V2 on 22 March 1945. One of three failed V2 impacts that had occurred during the course of the War. In that case, the warhead had been on the ground. Defusing it, despite the lack of practical experience, had been relatively easy. V2s were not expected to fail, and seldom did. V1s were not so easy.

  Stethoscope firmly in his ears, its business end stuck tightly to the bomb, he twisted the screwdriver just a bit, trying for steady, even, pressure.

  Make it as natural as gravity, his instructor had told him, six years earlier.

  Easy enough to say. One ton of explosives could flatten a city block.

  Think about the girl.

  She was slight, pretty, but in a very shy kind of way – and he knew she had really smiled at him. She probably wouldn’t even mind the shake in his right hand. It would probably make her love him even more. Sacrificed his health for England, and all. And it wasn’t really all that much of a shake. Acted up mostly when it was damp. Like now.

  He applied a touch more pressure. The metal creaked, just a bit, and he caught a flash, in his mind’s eye, of swirling debris hurtling up into the sky.

  Think about the girl.

  Sweet eyes. Thin lips.

  The plate came loose in his hands. He was more than halfway home now, more than halfway back to the girl. More than halfway...

  Out of time.

  Things had been lonely after the war. He’d never been very good at meeting people. Wasn’t gregarious, a quality he envied. But being in a pit below the earth with a bomb, if nothing else, set your priorities straight, so he vowed there’d be no more lonely drinking. He’d finish this job, then head back to the tavern and go on up to her. He’d even have a grand story to tell.

  He could even tell her about the V2. He’d received a medal for that! He could explain, he was sure, in an engaging tone, how the fall of a V2 rocket was a series of events that took place in a kind of jangled time. Unlike the V1, the V2 travelled faster than the sounds it made – three times the speed of sound, to be precise. As it was about to hit, if you were unlucky enough to be standing nearby, you’d hear a whip-cracking sound. This was the blast wave created by the explosion. That wave would hit the ground first, before the rocket, a split second before the bright flash of impact. This would be followed by the sort of chaos you’d expect from a huge explosion. But then, oddly, ironically, like a ghost of the moment gone, you’d also hear a whine and a rush of whistling air, as the sound of the rocket’s coming caught up with the rocket itself. The only warning you got, Gidley could tell her as her eyes went wide, was after the fact.

  Out of time.

  But it wasn’t like that now. This was a V1, and it wasn’t going anywhere at any speed. So here, snug in his dripping pit, when his hand moved to the far left, perhaps in a subconscious effort to wipe some of the collected sweat from his brow, Gidley could hear a little crackling spark as the electrical igniter went off.

  Not before, or after, just as.

  As the payload exploded, just before it made Lt Gidley a very small part of a two hundred foot hole in the ground, it occurred to him that perhaps he shouldn’t have been thinking about the girl at all.

  ***

  In the same spot the next day, paunchy, thick-haired and generally jolly Chief Engineer Whit closed his eyes a moment to savour without distraction the taste of chocolate in his mouth. Someone had once told him that chocolate made the human brain react the same way as being in love. A confirmed bachelor for many years, much as he delighted in the company of the ladies, Whit had long ago decided he preferred chocolate.

  But, there was a time for pleasure and a time for business, and the sooner he got his business done here, the sooner he’d be back to his pleasure. So, swallowing and stuffing the bar back in his shirt pocket, he opened his eyes, held up his electric torch and took a good, long look at the hole the previous day’s blast had left.

  ‘Look at that, would you?’ he said, to no-one in particular.

  Within minutes of the explosion, the standby emergency crews had swarmed into the area, buttressing this and propping up that, and though they’d done a fine job of it, it still looked like a lot of sad, fragile latticework pressed against a very big hole in the ground – a much bigger hole than even a ton of explosives should have made. It seemed to go on forever, like a cavern.

  Whit reasoned that the blast had opened up some sort of neighbouring air pocket, and that at least half of what he was looking at had been there, concealed by a relatively thin wall of rock, long before the V1 had ever made it down to these depths.

  From what he could make out of the blast radius itself, most of it had extended down along a path of least resistance, through softer rubble, leaving the concrete supports of the underground train tunnel relatively intact. In fact, it looked like even if any sort of cave-in were to occur, the folks living above had little to worry about.

  Sticking his torch in his mouth, he unrolled some blueprints in the dim yellow light, to confirm what he recalled. He was right: the survey maps showed no additional construction beneath the ghost station. So whatever had been opened up was natural in origin, or at least more than a few hundred years old. He stepped forward towards the large opening, the pale yellow light of his electric torch a sad candle against the darkness within. It was his duty to enter – he had to make sure there were no structures there, or at least try to judge if the opening extended under the tube. That might cause some additional trouble.

  Slowly, half sitting on broken rock, half walking, he made his way a few feet down and in. Leaning low, he saw that the hole seemed to veer off further down and toward the east, like a tunnel. This was good news, since that direction was away from the track. Better news, there wasn’t a man-made object in sight.

  He was just about satisfied that his inspection was complete, when he heard something shift. Whit was well aware that human hearing wasn’t quite so good at placing the location of sounds in the lower registers, but he guessed the noise had come from further down. Probably some rock settling, but it might be dripping water, which could ultimately cause a collapse. Better make sure.

  Eyes closed, he took another bite of chocolate, then slipped further in and down. The sound came again. Roc
k against rock? Certainly something against rock.

  He swung his torch around in time to catch something moving. A shadow flitting just out of his vision. Now, that wasn’t a rock. One of the men having some fun with him? Whoever it was would have to be barmy to risk the climb down here for the sake of a joke. That meant it could be only one person.

  ‘Chester?’ he called out into the dark.

  Then, all at once, it wasn’t just one sound anymore, or one shadow. It was a dozen. The sounds built into a cacophony of scraping, and below that a strange hiss that bore a vague resemblance to human breath. The shadows were moving so quickly, falling into one another, it was impossible to tell what they were.

  He turned to run, but bony hands, strong, quick and eager, pulled him down on his back. The torch slipped from his grasp, its beam revealing patches of filthy, hairy skin as it rolled, and occasionally the most horrid eyes and teeth. His chocolate bar was wrested from his hand by forces unseen, and seemed to float away in the darkness, carried aloft invisibly with shrill whines of delight.

  A thought struck him, that maybe the confectionary was all these things wanted, and that now they’d let him go. It was a childish thought, though. Pain tore through his right leg. His arms flailed about helplessly.

  The last thing he saw was the torch, having rolled against a rocky wall, illuminating an oblong circle of yellow and grey.

  The last thing he heard was the sound of something chewing on his leg.

  Chapter Two

  Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future is contained in time past.

  Honoré Lechasseur had read that somewhere, recently. On the street, he’d picked up a yellowing, coverless volume from a cardboard bin full of old books, only to read that first line and toss it back with a smile. He had nothing against poetry, but he’d been looking for something to help take his mind off things. While it may have been a lovely metaphor for the human condition, for him it was quite literal.