Vampires Overhead (5 page)

Taking Bingen’s reluctant arm, I led him forward while Dad pushed the gate softly to behind us and padlocked it. We turned to see him dimly in the dark, indicating that we were to go further along out of sight, and then he went off across the yard to the main entrance, his figure casting long dancing shadows from the lantern bobbing by his side. We stared, rather apprehensively, down the tunnel.

‘Nobody’ll be able to see us here by the gate,’ Bingen muttered angrily. ‘We’ll be all right here. S’no use going down into that black hole.’

‘We’d better go down a bit farther, like the old boy said,’ I whispered into the darkness. I could not see Bingen, even though he stood within reaching distance. ‘I shouldn’t like him to get discharged through us being here. If anyone came close to the gate with a light we’d be seen. Let’s go down a bit. There’s a corner, isn’t there? We’ll go round it like he wanted us to.’

The tunnel descended sharply; there were steps, down which we fell, and then a steep descent, into a gloom that could almost be felt, and I stumbled after Bingen, dragging the rifle and sword he had leant against the wall outside. From side to side of the tunnel I staggered, then wavered round a corner unexpectedly to bump into him.

‘Ouch! What the devil you doing with that sword?’ he grunted. ‘Put the blamed thing down where it’ll be safe. Got a match? We’ll have a drink and a smoke until that blasted manager’s gone.’

Furtively, between cupped hands, I struck a match, and, after we had lit cigarettes, glanced about the tunnel in which we stood. Some seven feet high by six broad, the arched roof and walls of brick were damp and green with fungus. Farther down out of sight I could hear the soft lapping of water.

‘Queer place this. Does it just run down into the river?’

‘Used to run down to the old loading hard until the hard got silted over with mud,’ answered Bingen sourly. ‘Years ago you could walk out on the mud to the lighters, and then the river rose to cover the tunnel. It was originally used for loading, but they had to build a loading platform. There used to be a gate at the river end, been underwater for years, but I suppose now, with this weather and the river nearly dry, it’ll be above-water at low tide. The water used to come way beyond here.’

He stooped to feel the ground.

‘It feels dry enough, but there was a box up at the top. I fell over it. I’ll get it for a seat. I don’t want to stand about here all night.’

Feeling before him in the dark, Bingen stumbled up the tunnel. I watched the pin-point of his cigarette, glowing redly, disappear, and then in a few moments he was back.

‘There’s a light moving about up there,’ he whispered after he had felt for and clasped my arm. ‘Didn’t like to go up for the box. Anyway, the ground seems dry enough. Let’s squat until Dad gives us the tip all’s clear.’

‘I feel just about tight, Bingen,’ I said, softly lowering myself to the ground. ‘Had more than I usually do these days, but even then, there must have been something extra in those bottles. For the love of Mike, what was it?’

‘Drop of the real stuff. Old Scotch ale. Don’t very often get a chance at any. Glad I was sensible enough to fetch a bottle down here with me. Gawd knows how long that blasted manager’ll be. Here, have a sup.’

The bottle was pushed against me, but I’d had more than enough. I declined, and we sat there silently. Bingen drank again and again, for I heard, above the softly lapping river, the gurgling liquid as the bottle titled. Once water smacked violently in and out of the tunnel from the wash of some boat passing out there in the night.

A tame ending, I thought, yawning, to what was to have been a hectic night yarning about old times. Bingen was furious at being chased from the light and the bottles of the watchman’s hut, and he smoked surlily, ignoring my attempts at conversation, until I, too, lapsed into silence. I leant with my back against the wall and felt gradually sleepy.

Curiously, no thought how strange it was the watchman did not come in a few moments to call us back to the light occurred to me. The strong old beer had made me dozily content, and somehow, after yarning about the war, it was quite natural for me to be there in the darkness of a tunnel with a rifle, sword, and Bingen, now snoring loudly, lying by my side. I slid farther down from the wall until I too lay full length upon the floor. The world heaved, whirled for a few seconds dizzily, and then I was asleep.

Vaguely, I remember hearing footsteps clumping over the cobbled yard above before I dozed. It must have been that manager or whoever it was had stayed, and I can imagine Old Dad chuckling delightedly to himself that the two of us, down there in the tunnel, kept so quiet. But no one wakened us, and beneath the river we slept drunkenly, while the country burned and died in scenes of indescribable horror. Queer jest of fate that, armed with weapons which were to save our lives, Bingen and I slept unsuspectingly below that inferno.

Dare I try to imagine what happened in the City above?

Now that it is over, so far as we know, I have tried to visualize, but the very magnitude of it overwhelms me. London in flames! The population of the country wiped out in a few hours!

Theatre crowds must have emerged to swarm into tube and train; the brilliance of the City’s lights dimmed, the black intersecting spaces increased in area; unfortunates upon the Embankment twisting, turning wearily on the light-bathed seats, seeking sleep; taxis grown scarce around Piccadilly, and lorries numerous about Covent Garden. And then, the startling silence preceding the dawn! Empty skies enclosing the huddled, brooding houses . . . and then the Vampires!

I can see them!

An illimitable cloud of dull-grey cotton-wool, intensifying blackly as it drops silently out of a starry sky . . . nearing earth. At first, as a cloud no larger than a man’s hand, they might have appeared to one who glanced skywards that night . . . and then a filthy fungus enveloping the countryside to obliterate man and his works. From the skies they came. The globe we know could not have bred them . . . from some far planet nearing earth at the outermost curve of its orbit they must have come . . . seeking food . . . bringing fire. Lost souls driven from some Hades in the vast Unknown they might have been . . . who knows . . . who will ever know?

Silently, hardly disturbing the air, they must have come upon the land.

Falling on London; falling in layers like snowflakes, huge, obscene, black, twisting, writhing, growing motionless as more layers press them to earth swelling the drifts. Unaccountable millions there must have been of those blood-chilling muzzles, working vainly at the barren ground, satisfyingly at . . .  Lying unstirring under piled layers of their kind, as though devoid of life, but for a shaking ribbon of pulse beating jerkily in their black foreheads, waiting for food. And for the millions which sated upon warm red blood there must have been millions which could have clamped working muzzles to nothing but the hardness of bricks and mortar, moisture of green herbage, dry brown of bare earth. Were
they
gratified with the results their ether-crossing flight had achieved? But this story, trying to tell the events of the world above the tunnel, would stop suddenly short. And yet I am fascinated weirdly by what must have happened. Isolated houses would have opened doors and windows in vain efforts to obtain air, when the suffocating layers dropped to smother, and warm into glowing embers with chill, phosphorescent bodies, wooden joists and rafters. And glowing embers would burst into flame when the massed bodies moved to let air drift among them. In the towns, I fancy, fire must have driven people from shelter to frightful deaths beneath the Vampires. Countryside and City, flaming and dying beneath those ghastly, black-winged, suctorial bodies. Until some weeks ago I though the things perished in the flames they so magically spread, but they did not. They are impervious to fire. What mysterious chemical reaction breathed from their cold bodies to cause warmth and smouldering embers? Some unearthly form of phosphorous, for in the dark they have shone faintly. But who can explain . . . who will ever explain . . .? Somewhere in the world, perhaps, high-browed professors are delving excitedly into this visitation from another specie of life. But of the tunnel, Bingen, myself, and later, the girl . . . that is all
I
can tell you.

III

The First of the Vampires

STRANGE THE WORKING
of destiny! Neither Bingen nor I had any special merits deserving an isolated preservation from the holocaust, and yet, there we were, down in that rat-hole, sleeping off what many people would call a drunken orgy, and others, more charitable, merely a hectic meeting between old friends. And the rat-hole was the saving of us both!

Perhaps once or twice, when the cold hardness of the stone floor turned me a trifle achingly, I wondered drowsily why the watchman did not come to let us out, but I must have slept heavily, with the unaccustomed liquor doping my senses, for Bingen was the first to awake. How long he sat, crouched in the dark, staring terror-stricken at the thing humped by the gate, I do not know, but for some four hours we were asleep in the tunnel, and during that time London burst into flame above, and its crowded tenements died lingeringly beneath the Vampires.

Half asleep, I pushed myself to sit erect, work and stretch my shoulders to ease the stiffness, before yawning and leaning back against the wall. I speculated idly on my whereabouts for some time, until my aching head remembered the night’s events of Bingen, the brewery, the manager’s unexpected visit, and even as I remembered I felt Bingen’s hand tight gripped on my thigh. He must have been sitting silently, holding on to my leg, for some time, and I think that actually wakened me. I tried to push his hand away, but could not, and angrily I rubbed my eyes, and then it was I felt, rather than saw, the red half-light filling the tunnel. Momentarily I thought it due to knuckles pressing on aching eyes, but when I opened them properly I realized that a dull, fiery glow reflected down from the entrance.

Bingen sat oblivious to my awakening, and his unmoving tenseness caused me to follow the direction of his fixed gaze up the tunnel.

From where we sat, the bend hid almost the whole of the entrance, but one portion of the gate was visible. I saw the deeper black of the corner, my eyes focusing to the dark, the bars of the gate itself, and, beyond the bars, a hardly discernible smudge. Although the diffused glare was uncanny, weirdly prepotential of peril, there was nothing actually, so far as I could see, to bulge Bingen’s eyes from his white face, but he stared as though unbelievingly up the slope.

‘What’s the matter, Bingen? Bingen! Been struck dumb? What’s the matter?’ Leaning forward I shook him, staring into his face. He ignored me, sat motionless, watching, with fixed wide eyes, did not answer, but I felt his grip on my leg tighten convulsively. I shook him again. ‘Is there something you can see? What’s this light? Bingen, pull yourself together, man.’

Glancing about in the eerie red half-light I understood. The brewery was afire! But surely that was insufficient to strike dumb terror into Bingen, and then, even as I perceived the significance of the light and was pondering on Bingen’s stupefying terror, the blood in my veins chilled slowly, icily, unbelievingly, for startlingly a shaft of red light stabbed down to illuminate the portion of gate in my vision. Behind the bars, the grey smudge grew to blackness. Details came into view, lit prominently by the shaft of flame as I scrutinized it.

Bingen whispered huskily, shakingly:

‘It was there when I woke up. It was there, like it is now, watching us. It’s watching us. It’s watching us, I tell you!’

His voice rose shrilly.

‘For God’s sake don’t be a fool, Bingen. It’s some silly joke that damned old fool of a watchman’s playing.’

‘It was there, watching us, when I woke up.’ Bingen’s voice was low and thick; he whispered emphatically trying to reassure himself. ‘Yes! Yes! It’s a joke. A joke. That’s what it is.’

Yet both of us knew it was no joke.

Down my spine trickled a thin stream of icy sweat. Even though the watchman had conceived of the red glow backing it, he could not have produced the thing humped on the ground by the gate. We sat watching in rigid terror. As we saw the thing then, the spotlight of flame had detailed it from a dull-grey mass silhouetted against a shimmering glow, into a fantastic horror, etched acidly on the retina of my disbelieving eyes. But I have seen so many since I saw the first of them down in the tunnel.