was told, and then I heard it: those faintest of hollow echoes; a distant grunting, muttering, and slap-slapping of feet in the shallow pebbles back where we had come from. But the grunted—or gutturally spoken—sounds were hardly reassuring, and definitely not to my companion’s liking.
“Damn you! Damn you!” the old man whispered. “Didn’t I warn you to go back? You might even have made it in time before they came on the scene. But you can’t go back there now!”
Just the tone of his hoarse voice made my flesh creep. “So what is it?” I queried him again. “Who or what are ‘they’ this time?”
“We have to get on,” he replied ignoring my question. “Have to move faster—but as quietly as we can. Their hearing isn’t much to speak of, not when they’re up out of their element, the water—but if they were to hear us … ”
“They’re not men?”
“Call them what you will,” he told me, his voice all shuddery. “Men of a sort, I suppose—or frogs, or fish! Who can say what they are exactly? They came in from the sea, up the Thames and into the lakes and wherever there was deep water. It was as if they had been called … I’m sure they were called! By those crazies of the Esoteric Order. But true men? Not at all, not in the least! Their fathers must have mated with women, definitely—or vice versa, maybe?—but no, they’re not men … ”
Which prompted me to ask: “How can you know that for sure?”
“Because I’ve seen some of them. Just the once, but it was enough. And you hear that slap-slapping? Can’t you just picture the feet that slap down on the water like that? Good for swimming, but of small use for walking.”
“So why are we in such a hurry?”
And once more impatiently, or yet more impatiently, he said, “Because they can call out others of their kind. A sort of telepathy, maybe? Hell, I don’t know!”
We moved faster, and I could hear him wincing each time our feet kicked up water that splashed a little too loudly. Then in a while we came across a narrow platform to one wide, where the wall had been cut back some two feet to make a maintenance walkway four feet higher than the bed of the tracks.
“Get up there,” the old man told me. “It’s dry and we’ll be able to go faster without all the noise.”
I did as he advised and reached down to help him up. He was little more than a bundle of bones and couldn’t be very strong, but he didn’t for a second offer that case to me or release his grip on it. And so we moved ahead, him front, me behind; and eventually—this time without my urging—he continued telling me his story from where he’d left off; his story, plus that of the alien invasion or takeover; or walkover, which seemed to come much easier to him now. So maybe he’d needed to get it off his chest.
“It was those Esoteric Order freaks. At least, that was how everyone thought of them: as folk with too few screws, and what few they had with crossed threads! But no, they weren’t crazy except maybe in what they were trying to do. And actually, that even got into the newspapers: how the Esoteric Order was trying to call up powerful creatures—god-things, they called them—from parallel dimensions and the beginning of time; beings that had come here once before, even before the evolution of true or modern Man, only to be trapped and poisoned by yet more mysterious beings and banished back to their original universes, or to forgotten, forbidden places here on Earth …
“Well, it was a laugh, wasn’t it?” As daft as all those UFO stories from more than a century ago, and tales of prehistoric monsters that lived in a Scottish loch and on Himalayan mountains; oh, and lots of other myths and legends of that sort. Oh really? And if the oh-so-bloody-clever newspaper reporters who infiltrated the church and saw them at their worship and listened to their ‘idiotic beliefs’—if they had been right, then all well and good … but they weren’t!
“And when should it happen—when did it happen—but at Hallowmas? The feast of All Hallows, All Saints!
“And oh, what an awful feast that was, them feasting on us, I mean, when those monstrous beings answered the call and came forth from strange dimensions, bringing their thralls, servitors and adherents with them. Up from the oceans, down from the weird skies of parallel universes, erupting from the earth and bringing all of the planet’s supposedly dead volcanoes back to life, these minions of madness came; and what of humanity then, eh? What but fodder for their tables, fodder for their stables.”
That last wasn’t a question but a simple fact, and the old man was sobbing again—openly now—as he turned and grasped my arm. “My wife … ” he almost choked on the word. “That poor, poor woman … she was taken at first pass! Taken, as the city reeled and the buildings crumbled, as the earth broke open and darkness ruled … !
“Ah, but according to rumor, the very first to go was that blasphemous, evil old church; for the so-called priests of the Esoteric Order had been fatally mistaken in calling up that which they couldn’t put down again: a mighty octopus god-thing who rose in his house somewhere in the Pacific, while others of his spawn surfaced in their manses from various deeps. Not the least of them emerged somewhere in the Arctic Circle along with an entire plateau; that was a massive upheaval, causing earthquakes and tsunamis around the world! Another rose up from the Mariana Trench, and one far closer to home from a lesser known abyss somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He was the one—damn him to hell!—who built his twisted tower house here in the zone.
In fact the Bgg’ha Zone is named after him, for he is Bgg’ha!
“And there’s a chant, a song, a liturgy of sorts that human worshippers—oh yes, there are such people!—sing of a night as they wander aimlessly through the rubble streets. And having heard it so often, far too often, dinning repeatedly in my ears while I lay as if in a coma, hardly daring to breathe until they had moved on, I learned those alien words and could even repeat them. What’s more, when the SSR trapped and caught one of these madmen, these sycophants, to learn whatever they could from him, he offered them a translation. And those chanted words which I had learned, they were these:
“Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh i’ihu’nagl fhtagn.” A single-made sentence that translates into this:
“From his house at Im’ykh, Bgg’ha at last is risen!”
“And do you know, those words still ring in my ears, blocking almost everything else out? If I don’t concentrate on what I’m doing, on what I’m saying, it all slips away and all I can hear is that damned chanting: Bgg’ha at last is risen! And perhaps I even have … I even have the means with which to do it … ”
But there the old man fell silent once more, possibly wondering if he’d said too much …
Then, as we rested for a few minutes, and as I looked down from the maintenance ledge, I saw how the dirty water glinting between the rusted rails was much deeper here, perhaps as much as ten or twelve inches. Seeing where I was looking, my companion told me:
“Yes, there’s very deep water up ahead, and likewise on the surface.”
Ahead of us?” I repeated him for want of something to say. “But … on the surface?”
“Mainly on the surface,” he nodded. “That’s where it’s leaking from. We’re heading for Knightsbridge, as was—which isn’t far from the Serpentine—also as was but much enlarged and far deeper now. That, too, was the work of Bgg’ha; he did it for some of his servitors, the kind we heard wading through
