The Feaster From The Stars (Blackwood and Harrington) (2 page)

From his vantage point above the valley, he can see the house and its annex. The house seems as ancient as the livid sky beneath which it broods, its stone mottled and crumbling with the weight of centuries and the frequent onslaughts of wind and rain. The storm clouds rush overhead with unnatural speed, blasting across the firmament like breath expelled from the mouth of a consumptive god. In the distance, beyond the western end of the valley, the grey North Sea groans and thrashes itself furiously, its writhing surface bruised by thick white foam.

The annex is as new as the house is ancient. Built less than six months ago, it is composed of nine large, corrugated-steel huts. Each hut is semicircular in cross-section, like a miniature zeppelin hangar, and even from this distance, he can glimpse activity inside through the glowing windows. According to the mission briefing he received in London, whatever is happening at the research laboratory has brought insanity and probably death to the scientists at work out here on the windswept west coast of Scotland. Her Majesty’s Bureau of Clandestine Affairs believes that the tragedy must be linked to the research being conducted into the mysterious Vril energy that powers the interplanetary cylinders of the newly discovered civilisation on Mars.

Her Majesty’s Government wants the secret of Vril; the British Empire requires it, for the ultimate consolidation of its military and economic power.

The last communication from the research facility – the last communication that made any sense, that is – claimed that the team were on the verge of a momentous breakthrough. A means had been discovered, through the combined application of occult and electromagnetic principles, to open a fissure between the physical world and the ætherial realm containing the Vril energy.

The last sane telegraph message had stated that the team were about to activate their equipment and open the portal between worlds, between universes. The machines were fully charged, the containment receptacle primed and ready to receive the first transmission of Vril energy. In London, the Government waited, with orders to inform the Queen the moment further news came through from Scotland...

But when it did come through, it was not what they were expecting. The next telegraph message was horrible to read, so obviously the product of a mind that had been completely undone. Clearly, some appalling event had occurred in the laboratory, something frightful and incomprehensible. So concerned was the Government that the Prime Minister had contacted Her Majesty’s Bureau of Clandestine Affairs and ordered them to send an agent to assess the situation.

And so here he is, Thomas Blackwood, Special Investigator, descending quickly and stealthily into the valley, towards the ancient house and the brand new research annex. Later, he will appreciate the irony of his stealth, for the people inside the laboratory care little for what is occurring outside or who is approaching.

With the wind screaming around him and the icy rain stinging his face, Blackwood creeps towards one of the windows in the nearest hut and looks through. What he sees makes him want to cry out. His stomach churns, threatening to void itself of his last meal, and he averts his gaze quickly.

The memory of the scene burns in his mind like a white-hot brand. Blood… dismemberment… the scattered fragments of what had once been men, cleaved and divided in strange ways… and there, amongst the human wreckage… there…

In the darkness of his bedroom, Thomas Blackwood’s eyes flashed open. He gasped and sat up suddenly, as if to do so might banish the memory of the nightmare, but the horrible images drifting through his newly-wakened mind would not be denied so easily. He gasped again, and a low moan escaped his grimacing mouth.

Alone in the darkness, amid the rumpled chaos of his bed sheets, he buried his head in his hands. ‘Oh God,’ he whispered. ‘Oh good God!’

Slowly, he got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, where he looked at his face in the mirror, at features which were normally finely chiselled and pleasing to the eye, but which were now twisted by anguish and stark with the memory of what he had seen in that remote Scottish research facility five years ago.

What the scientists had done to each other in their violent insanity was bad enough, but what had
caused
that insanity had still been there, glowing and pulsating in the laboratory. There had been more than a dozen of them, placed at various points throughout the room… no, not placed, laid, by the thing that had seeped through the fissure in time and space connecting the sane universe with the realm containing the Vril energy: the extradimensional abnormality known as a Sha’halloth.

The thing had sensed the fissure at the very instant it opened, had deposited its eggs and then withdrawn back to its own realm. The eggs were shapeless globs of glistening jelly, glowing with colours never seen in this or any other world of the ordered cosmos. They were covered with writhing tendrils which seemed to fade in and out of visibility, and as Blackwood had entered the laboratory and stood gazing at them in horror and revulsion, he had felt something probing his mind: a mental molestation more devastating than anything that could have befallen his physical body.

Before the glowing tendrils had a chance to take root fully in his mind and drive away his sanity, Blackwood had unslung the carbine from his shoulder and sprayed them with bullets. So revolting was the way in which they burst, and so awful were their contents, that Blackwood collapsed to the floor and vomited before turning the gun on the three remaining scientists who had entered the laboratory and thrown themselves at him, screaming, their minds no longer remotely human.

Five years is a long time, but Thomas Blackwood remembered the events of that day as if they had happened only five minutes prior.

When the Prime Minister read his report, he had ordered an immediate and indefinite moratorium on Vril energy research. The secret of the Martian cylinders’ propulsion would have to remain with them for the foreseeable future, and Blackwood was far from sorry.

He regarded himself in the bathroom mirror, then undid the buttons of his pyjamas and sighed as he looked at his chest and the large silver circle which was embedded in the skin. Its irregular pentacle with the wide, staring eye at the centre had originally been carved into an amulet given to him by the Comte de Saint Germain, who headed Station X, the Bureau’s occult research and development branch at Bletchley Park. The amulet had been a detector and a ward against various forms of Magick, but thanks to Blackwood’s recent entry into the Realm of Faerie during the affair of the Martian Ambassador, the amulet had become fused with his skin, and he no longer had the option of taking it off: it was now a part of him, and would remain so for the rest of his life, like a tattoo etched in silver upon his chest.

Blackwood washed and dressed, went through to his study, filled his favourite Peterson pipe with cherry tobacco, struck a match and watched in contentment as the bowl began to glow a luxuriant shade of orange. Drawing in the fragrant smoke, he went to the mantelpiece and leafed through the morning’s mail which his housekeeper, Mrs Butters, had placed there for him.

Only one item sparked his interest: an envelope which bore a Masonic seal. He tore it open and took out a card embossed with the same design and bearing the following message:

The Society of Spiritualistic Freemasons is delighted to offer an invitation to

MR THOMAS BLACKWOOD,

to attend a lecture to be given at half-past eight on the

Seventeenth of November, 1899 by

DR SIMON CASTAIGNE

at the Society’s Hall in Mayfair.

The subject of the lecture is

‘The Plurality of Life on Other Worlds’.

RSVP

‘Hmm,’ Blackwood murmured, puffing on his pipe. The Society of Spiritualistic Freemasons was an offshoot of his own Lodge, and he was a little surprised to receive such an invitation. He guessed that it was because of his work with the Bureau, which was known to a select few high-ranking members. He briefly considered accepting the invitation, but then reflected that in recent weeks he had had his fill of ‘the plurality of life on other worlds’.

Dropping the invitation onto his desk, he sauntered over to one of the tall bookcases lining his study and selected one of his favourite volumes, a treatise on the mythology of the Dogon Tribe of West Africa. He then sat himself down in the large, comfortable armchair that stood in one corner of the room, and poured a brimming, steaming cup from the pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee which Mrs Butters had prepared for him. The rich aroma of the coffee filled the room and, combined with the scent of the tobacco, produced an atmosphere which seemed to Blackwood, who was still out of sorts from the nightmare, to be eminently conducive to the passing of a pleasant morning of intellectual recreation.

Outside, the streets of Chelsea thronged with people going about their business in the cold dampness of the morning air, and Blackwood, for his part, was quite happy to let them get on with it. He had earned a rest, had paid for the last week of relaxation with a shattered left forearm, several broken ribs and a concussion. The recently-concluded affair of the Martian Ambassador had left him in a rum state, and it was only thanks to the administration of Martian medicine that he was not still confined to a hospital bed.

The Martians had taken charge of his medical treatment as an expression of thanks for his work in averting war between the Red Planet and Earth – not that he had acted alone, of course: he had been ably assisted by Lady Sophia Harrington, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, whose own research into the mystery of Spring-Heeled Jack had first brought them together.

The doctors who had been overseeing his convalescence were astonished at the rapidity of his recovery following the application of the Martian medical treatments, as was Blackwood himself. Within a matter of days, his broken bones had almost completely healed, and he was well on the way to feeling his old self once again.

He knew that very soon he would be required to return to work and recalled with a smile the look on Grandfather’s face when he had paid Blackwood a visit just prior to the latter’s departure from hospital. He suspected that the Bureau’s Director was more satisfied at the thought that he would soon have one of his best agents back in the field than at any emotion which might have been inspired by altruism or fellow-feeling. Grandfather, after all, had lost both his legs during the Second Afghan War, and now had to make do with a pair of steam-powered artificial ones; a few broken bones and a bang on the head were of little consequence to him.

Sophia was another matter: she had hardly left his bedside, once he had returned to consciousness following his final battle with Spring-Heeled Jack, who had been revealed to be a Venusian
agent provocateur
named Indrid Cold, and more than once she had succumbed to tears as she surveyed his injuries. She really was a most remarkable young woman – brave, resourceful and decent – and Blackwood, who normally preferred to work alone and to pursue a solitary life in his infrequent leisure time, found himself missing her company.

No matter, for he was quite certain that they would be seeing each other again soon, and as he heard a faint knock on the apartment building’s front door below, he placed a little wager with himself that the reason for their imminent reunion had just arrived.

A few moments later, there came another knock, this time on his study door.

‘Enter,’ he said, having resigned himself to the likelihood that a pleasant day’s reading was about to be curtailed.

Mrs Butters opened the door a little way and poked her matronly head into the room. ‘Mr Blackwood, sir, you have a visitor.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Blackwood in a loud theatrical voice as he stood and placed the unopened book on his desk. ‘My visitor is none other than Detective Gerhard de Chardin of New Scotland Temple.’

A loud, throaty chuckle from the corridor outside told him he was correct. Mrs Butters showed the detective in and nodded at Blackwood’s request that she bring another coffee cup, before bustling away towards the kitchen.

‘Sounds like you’ve been reading too much Conan Doyle,’ said de Chardin as he stepped into the room and offered his hand, which the Special Investigator shook warmly. ‘How are you, old chap?’

The detective was an inch or so taller than Blackwood’s six feet, although both men were equally trim and well-proportioned. While Blackwood was clean-shaven, de Chardin sported a neatly trimmed goatee, which he was in the habit of stroking contemplatively.

‘Never better, thank you.’ Blackwood indicated the armchair which he had just vacated. ‘Have a seat, sir.’

De Chardin nodded his thanks, while Blackwood pulled out his desk chair and sat down opposite his guest.

‘How did you know it was me?’ asked the detective. ‘I doubt it was anything as simple as looking out of the window.’