The Tunnel at the End of the Light Read online

  A sudden memory caught him off guard. He was in Dorset, 1943, on leave, sitting in a café with some of the soldiers from his company. They were talking about all the changes wrought to the world by one man: Adolph Hitler.

  As he recalled, Lechasseur had, without really intending to, turned the conversation by asking, out of nowhere: ‘What if they’d known what Hitler would do before he came to power, and they could have stopped it all with a single bullet to his head?’

  At the time, it was for Lechasseur a stray, aberrant notion. Only now did he realise that it may have been an early twinge of what he was eventually to become.

  Most of his friends were delighted at the wish-fulfilment fantasy, and went on to describe in some gruesome detail what exactly they would do to the proto-Fuhrer. Then their officer, Lt Jerome Friedman, an educated man, simply shrugged and said: ‘Would you really condone killing Hitler when he was a child? Would you put your gun to an innocent’s head?’

  The memory ended, but its taste lingered in Lechasseur’s mind. He looked back down at Crest, realising that he was about to condemn him to the darkness. But this was no thought experiment. The Subterraneans were approaching, and Lechasseur wasn’t killing anyone. In fact, he’d be saving quite a few people. And who knew how long a life, or of exactly what kind, Crest would have down here?

  A nagging feeling in Lechasseur’s belly suggested that, in spite of his inner denials, he knew the answer to that last question, but he forced it away.

  There was no real choice.. If Emily, always the more humanist of the two, had any objections, she wasn’t voicing them.

  Lechasseur felt along the heavier rocks that made up the entrance to the passage. A good shove would send them, and probably a great many more, down to seal the gap. He braced himself and grunted as he pushed, hoping to beat the arrival of the others.

  ‘Wait!’ Emily shouted, grabbing his shoulder again.

  ‘What?’ Lechasseur spat back, annoyed. ‘Forget about Crest! We don’t have a choice!’

  ‘No. I know we have to do it. But don’t you think we’d be better off on the other side of the tunnel? If this works, Crest will never reach the surface, and we’ll still be surrounded by Subterraneans. I suppose we might be able to use one to jump back to our own time, but that’s assuming they don’t catch us and use us to help with their protein deficiency.’

  ‘Right,’ Lechasseur answered.

  Together, they scrambled through the small opening, where the air was even cooler. Beyond the section of visible concrete, they could even see a far-off light.

  Again, Lechasseur braced himself, and this time, invigorated slightly by the fresher air, pushed for all he was worth. With a rumble, a large rock, and several of the smaller ones on which he and Emily were standing, slid free of whatever had been holding them back and tumbled forward. Lechasseur fell, dropping the torch. It clattered down into the lower tunnel, then vanished in a landslide of rock and dust. As Lechasseur rolled about, he had no idea what was happening to Emily, but hoped she’d found a better hand-hold than he.

  When the rumbling finally died away, and the dust settled, she appeared at once by his side, her breathing only slightly heavier than it had been. They felt about with their hands. The pile of rock now in front of them was really quite impressive.

  No-one’s digging through that with their bare hands, Lechasseur thought. No matter how much their heart desires.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The flat was strewn with the newspapers they’d collected from the last several weeks. Emily and Lechasseur, enjoying some hot tea, diligently scanned one after the other, trying to piece together the changes they’d wrought.

  It’d been easy enough to determine that although the bomb blast had occurred, and the life of Lt Clive Gidley had still been lost, there’d been no subsequent raids on the streets of London by creatures sub-human or otherwise. All the damage they’d witnessed in the streets was likewise gone, or rather, had never taken place. The major issues out of the way, they concentrated on the subtleties.

  Upon climbing up through the tunnel, they had reached the lively Constitution Hill tube station, and then the pre-war streets of London. From there, it had been a simple matter to find a young woman whose life extended to early 1950, and whom they could use to make the jump home. Lechasseur had picked her out fairly quickly from a crowd, and intuited the right time to jump to almost at once. He was pleased that his control over his abilities seemed to be growing. Even the subsequent dizziness had been less this time.

  ‘Here’s an advert for Bungard’s poetry readings,’ Emily said. ‘No mention of Randolph Crest attending.’ She had to squint to read the advert in the dim light of the flat. Though it was mid-morning, the curtains remained drawn. She was too exhausted to challenge Honoré today.

  Noticing, and feeling in an atypically gregarious mood, he rose and opened the curtains himself. The morning fog had yet to lift completely, but even the overcast sky alleviated the darkness in the room.

  ‘Sick of the dark?’ Emily asked.

  Lechasseur shook his head as he lifted his cup from the end table. ‘Not really.’ But then he added, looking outside: ‘Maybe just for today.’

  ‘Of course, you realise, Mestizer is still alive,’ Emily added. She briefly thought of sweetening her own tea, then decided to use lemon instead. Knowing Honoré had some perks.

  ‘At least she won’t remember you,’ Lechasseur offered.

  Emily turned to him. ‘Don’t be so certain. You and I have so far remembered the alternate time lines we’ve visited, haven’t we?’

  Lechasseur furrowed his brow. He made his hands flat, like a pair of scales, then moved them up and down as he spoke, weighing the choices. ‘Still... Mestizer. London. London. Mestizer.’

  It wasn’t the greatest joke in the world, but Emily didn’t even seem to be listening.

  ‘Something else on your mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s just that the V1 still exploded,’ she said. ‘So the path to their underworld, or whatever you want to call it, must still have opened. Why wouldn’t they want to come up from that dreadful place even with their rare-born king?’

  ‘Habit,’ Lechasseur theorised. ‘Or, stopping Crest somehow stopped them as well.’

  Thinking of Crest brought a twinge of remorse to Lechasseur. Now, in the fullness of time, just as Emily had second-guessed their ability to save Windleby, ways of saving the poet, ways of saving them all, had occurred to him. Maybe they could have brought Crest up with them, moved him to another continent? Or perhaps they could have somehow helped Gidley, stopped the bomb from exploding? There must be something they could go back and do or undo that might make things better. Maybe next time he would be better able to finesse things.

  He furrowed his brow, somewhat disturbed that he’d even acknowledged there would be a next time. But Emily was right. Remorse was a different creature when you could hop through time.

  Out of nowhere, Emily started humming the same catchy tune she’d hummed about a week ago, its source, like the lines of time they travelled, still utterly unknown. It lightened his heart a bit. He found himself wondering where she’d learned it, and if he might someday see Emily’s home for himself.

  Outside the window, Lechasseur saw a tall man being dragged along the streets by a small white poodle. A glimpse of the man’s future showed that the dog would soon be peeing on his new shoes. For some reason, this struck Lechasseur as funny, and he smiled for the first time in days.

  Even with the fog, or perhaps because of it, it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day.

  Epilogue

  I had light once, for a time.

  Upon waking from a dream, I found it, rushing out from the end of a stick. I grabbed the stick and I held it tightly, the way I once tried to hold my secret thoughts.

  The others were coming, fearing I had fled; wor
se, fearing that I had found some sweetness that they would be unable to share. I had found sweetness, but not the kind they lusted for. As they came, I showed it to them, shone it on them, and saw all their huddled faces for the first and last time. And I realised how much they looked like me.

  Exposed, stabbed by the light, they howled and screamed, louder even than the shouts they gave whenever the sweetness was passed around. Then they fled, the way the dark itself fled from my light.

  Then I was alone, as I had wanted, with the light I had dreamed of. I leapt with it, I howled with it. I shone it against the walls of the world. I chased the others with it, showing them power they never expected, even from their king.

  But when I tired, and curled up on the rough ground, clinging to the stick, they would no longer sleep with me. I missed the feel of their breath, the sound of hearts beating other than my own. I dreamt of their faces, all the same as each other, all the same as mine.

  When I woke, the stick was still in my hands, but the light had emptied from it.

  Still, in my mind, I could see the faces of the others. It was then I realised that I’d been wrong. The darkness comforts. The darkness suffices.

  Light may be only a relic from a time when there were things worth seeing.

  Words may be from a time when there were things worth saying.

  And my longing may have been from a time when there were things to want.

  By leaving, the light gave me something else. It gave me memory.

  And memory gave a new thing as well: a tasteless, textureless, odourless thing that passes constantly through us all, a thing that ages, decays and withers even the rocks that form the walls of the world. It is this thing, that by and by took the fires of my early days and brought all my yearnings to a comfortable sameness.

  There is food here. There is warmth. There has been much mating and I have sired many children, only some of which we have been forced to eat. Here all things are, and here all must remain.

  And until I fade into this thing that passes through all of us, until I can rise from my nest no more, and the others will perhaps take me into their bellies, I will want no other world.

  What for?

  I have no need of words.

  Once, for a time, I had light.

  And now I know I will always have time.

  About The Author

  Born in the Bronx, Stefan Petrucha spent his formative years moving between the big city and the suburbs, both of which made him prefer escapism.

  A fan of comic books, science fiction and horror since learning to read, in high school and college he added a love for all sorts of literary work, eventually learning that the very best fiction always brings you back to reality, so, really, there’s no way out.

  An obsessive compulsion to create his own stories began at age ten and has since taken many forms, including novels, comics and video productions. At times, the need to pay the bills made him a tech writer, an educational writer, a public relations writer and an editor for trade journals, but fiction, in all its forms, has always been his passion. Every year he’s made a living at that, he counts a lucky one. Fortunately, there’ve been many.

  The Time Hunter Series