The Great White Space

Seventeen

My breath hissed and wheezed in my throat as we ran blindly down the tunnel. At one point Prescott stumbled and the trolley, freed from his grasp, veered into the side wall. There was a crash and it lurched, bumped again and then turned over with a clatter. I heard a cry but I merely leap-frogged over the belt of the machine-gun, which was stuck awry on its tripod, and pounded on. A few minutes later Scarsdale, Prescott and I, shame-faced and panting leaned against the wall of the tunnel in a spot where dusk began once again to take over and assessed the position.

There were no recriminations. This was not the time and the matter was too important for such trivia. Scarsdale first contacted Van Damm and warned him of what we had seen, in more restrained terms, of course. When he had finished I had my first chance to question him.

'What you are saying, Professor,' I said reluctantly, 'is that those creatures are from space? That despite the fact we know ourselves to be irrefutably miles beneath the surface of the earth, there is some sort of door which leads to the planets? Is such a thing mathematically possible?'

'This is so,' said Scarsdale sombrely. 'It would take too long to go into the theory now. But this is what I most emphatically believe and what I expected to find. These Great Old Ones pass and re-pass from their errands beyond the stars, for what purpose and by what means we know not. Man is just at the beginning of knowledge in these things. My task in coming here was twofold; firstly, to establish contact if that were possible and to forge links of friendship. Secondly, if that were not possible to warn the world of their presence here beneath the earth.'

'The Ethics of Ygor and your other documents presumably detailing these possibilities?' I said.

'Exactly,' said the Professor sombrely. His breathing was more shallow now and his eyes smouldered in the dim light of the tunnel.

'The lights I spoke of presaged a new invasion of the creatures. What we must do now, apart from extricating ourselves, is to record these beings as warning to the outside world. And that means photographs.'

'You surely do not intend to go back?' said Prescott in a strange voice, his jaw hanging slackly.

'We must, if we intend to survive,' said the Professor crisply. 'We must recover the trolley which contains all our heavy arms. If we have to fight our way out we shall never do so without their aid. You forget Zalor. They dealt with him and erased all traces of their presence to allow us to penetrate this far on our outward journey. Do not forget the side tunnels. The way back may be swarming with creatures. And I have not yet finished studying them!'

Prescott looked at Scarsdale with something resembling awe and admiration. Already the big man was on his feet, revolver in hand.

'Only two hundred yards, gentlemen,' he said encouragingly. 'Not far for the sake of humanity!'

We all ran blindly back down the tunnel into the strengthening light, hoping against hope that our echoing passage would not stir up more of those monstrous shadows. Vain hope. Scarsdale and I reached the trolley first, heaved it upright. Prescott righted the machine-gun tripod. There came an angry mewing from far off down the corridor, where dim shapes glowed in that subterranean light. Prescott screamed and then the stammer of the machine-gun sounded with heart-stopping suddenness. Bullets whined and ricochetted from the walls, striking sparks in the gloom and acrid smoke enveloped the group as the Professor and I tugged the trolley rearwards before running back to take up our stand either side of our companion. I had just time to take three pictures before they were on us.

The dim air was full of great lumbering shapes. Somehow I found the butt of a Very pistol and fired; the lurid glow of the flare illuminated a scene of Gothic horror. With mewing hisses great forms from the pit undulated and advanced towards us, their claw-like tentacles reaching languidly. The machine-gun fired again and I felt my pistol hot as I instinctively squeezed the trigger until the chamber was empty.

'No good,' Prescott was shouting in my ear. 'The bullets appear to make no impression.'

Indeed, I had myself noticed that the holes torn in the jelly- like substance of the things seemed to close up immediately, as water fills a footprint in a swamp.

Scarsdale, as always, had the better idea. He had seized the rack of grenades and lobbed them deliberately, one after the other, into the herd of lowing, milling beings. As we cowered on the ground the air vibrated to the explosions, the thumps followed by a rain of lethal fragments. Shrill mewing cries followed, cut by bright flame. We did not stop to see what damage had been done.

'Get the trolley!' Scarsdale shouted. 'We must not lose the equipment.'

His pistol flamed again as we fell back, the three of us blundering against one another in what amounted to near panic. I tripped and fell, felt Prescott's boots pass over my recumbent body. Somehow I slipped and slithered back along the corridor, filled now with acrid smoke and the stench of cordite fumes. Scarsdale and I heaved and pushed at the trolley, which seemed to be off balance. It came free then and we trundled it down the corridor into the rapidly dying light.

We heard Prescott scream again then. It had a note of high, squealing urgency. I turned to see that he had attempted to manhandle the machine-gun away on his own. One of the great slopping things had its tentacle around his foot; some inky fluid like a squid's enveloped Prescott as I watched. His cry was abruptly cut and lost in the mewing hiss of the creature. Prescott was now high in the air as I lowered my pistol uselessly; I hesitate to use the word but it was my impression that our companion was ingested into the monadelphous shape of the viscous being which held him fast.

Both Scarsdale and I momentarily broke then and with the strength of men pushed beyond their limit hurled and shoved and wrenched the trolley down the slope and away from that hellish scene and into the welcoming blanket of the healthy and merciful semi-darkness.

We sat against the tunnel wall in the dim light and grimly pondered our situation; we were now over a mile from the scene of the confrontation and had somewhat recovered our senses. Following our headlong flight and when we found we were no longer pursued, Scarsdale and I had started to push the trolley like drunken men, always facing south towards the now desired darkness. The light had long ago faded to the lustreless dimness to which we had become accustomed and our eyes had now once more adjusted.

We were in a serious situation and if, as Scarsdale had already suggested, our opponents, enemies or whatever we cared to call them, had some means of cutting us off by using other tunnels we must be finished. Neither of us had any doubt that poor Prescott was dead and a like fate awaited the rest of us. Though these and other grim thoughts chased themselves through my whirling brain, strangely enough my nerves were now more under control than they had been when we knew nothing of the dangers we faced.

But it is often so and I had noted this on the expedition in the Arizona desert to which I have already referred. Over and again Scarsdale had reproached himself for being caught in such a manner. He held himself responsible for Prescott's death, and so he was of course; but no-one could have done anything else under the circumstances and had our late colleague not slipped there is no doubt that Scarsdale's decisive actions and heroic behaviour in the crisis would have enabled all three of us to get clear safely. I had told him as much but in the last hour he had retreated into himself and apart from occasional references to his inked notes, which he held on to through every crisis, both internal and external, he spoke but little.

This in itself worried me and I had kept the radio link with Van Damn open, more for something to do than with any real thought of maintaining our usual routine. I had, of course, given the doctor a somewhat more restrained picture of our situation; so far as Holden was concerned, he was about the same and Van Damm was, of course, keeping a very sharp look-out, after our warnings.

For some reason Scarsdale and I now found the trolley something of a burden; I myself think the axle must have become twisted when it fell against the tunnel wall or perhaps the defect had occurred during our flight. At any rate both of us now thought it a problem, even without the weight of the machine-gun, and we had considered, more than once, abandoning some of its contents.

Fortunate indeed, that we did not do so, as events were to prove. Scarsdale stirred at my side and something of the old energy now glowed from his eyes. He patted my knee clumsily as he got up.

'Sorry about my taciturnity back there, Plowright,' he said. 'I've a lot to think about.'

'It wasn't your fault,' I said for perhaps the tenth time. 'We have made stupefying discoveries and these, backed with my photographs, should be sufficient…'

I had got up by this time but he broke into my flow of speech, with a vehement shake of his head.

'No, no,' he said. 'You do not understand. This whole thing, I see now, is too fantastic for belief. What real proof could we show people? You do see now why I never went into details of what I really expected to find.'

We both put our shoulders to the trolley and heaved it along between us. Progress was slow, as we had also to watch our rear; my ears were now tuned to hypersensitive frequencies and I found the crackle from the radio linking us with Van Damm a definite intrusion.

I replied to Scarsdale with some commonplace. How could I really reply to him? He was right, of course; what could we say? How could we warn the outside world of our discoveries? And even so, half of Scarsdale's suppositions remained unproved. Mathematicians could no doubt find a method of equating the interior of the earth with the exterior vastnesses of space but I could imagine the response from the average scientific mind, deeply entrenched in library or laboratory in half a dozen European countries. Not that I blamed them. I myself would be in the van of the sceptics were I in their place.

Perhaps the sceptics could be right and we ourselves the victims of some strange dimensional illusion? Self-hypnotism? God knows these dark caves were enough to make anyone's sanity totter. Or perhaps the Great White Space, as Scarsdale called it, was real enough but merely a three-dimensional cavity within the earth but possessed of such blinding luminosity that it seemed to us that it led beyond the stars. The things themselves would take some explaining but it was not beyond possibility that they were some subterranean form of terrestrial being, however loathsome and malignant to our eyes and senses.

My brain was occupied with these and other unproductive thoughts as we lurched and staggered along the endless corridor, back towards the comforting presence of our colleagues. We were not far from them when we heard the scream.

How can I describe it at this distance in time? I hesitate to use the term but it had such a horrific quality, as if whoever uttered it, had his soul torn from his body. The quavering echoes of this hideous intrusion had not yet died away along the corridors before scream after scream came to companion it. My legs buckled and I must assuredly have fallen had Scarsdale not got his strong hand under my elbow. I muttered some apology, trying to conceal the trembling in my limbs. I hoped Scarsdale was not disappointed in my qualities as a man of action; he had expected so much but the conditions we were meeting here were so bizarre and the occurrences so outside the range of normal experience that I feared I was making but a sorry showing. Yet he seemed to have noticed nothing, merely quickened his pace into a jog-trot and the pair of us continued to trundle the trolley along the endless tunnels.

The screams had died out now and were not repeated but there came only the low crackle of atmospherics as I jerkily called Van Damm on the radio over and over again. I heard the faint reports of a revolver then; Scarsdale heard them too. He grunted deep down in his throat.

'That sounded like Holden's voice,' he said grimly. 'The scream, I mean. The things have apparently got round by side I tunnels. I hope Van Damm has managed to hold his own. Holden was certainly in no fit state to help.'

'We shall be there in a few minutes,' I said. 'Do you think I we ought to leave the trolley and rejoin the others?'

'God, no,' said Scarsdale with an intensity I had never I heard in his voice before. 'That would be fatal. Remember, I whatever happens, to stay by the trolley. It holds the grenades and other heavy armaments. They are our only hope I if any more of these things appear.'

We had slackened our pace somewhat by now, as the weight of the trolley was beginning to tell at this speed. We shuffled together, neither speaking, my mind filled with unnameable dread as the light gradually began to lose its strength along the tunnel. We knew then that we must be nearing the spot where we had left our two companions. The radio was still emitting its sizzling static but there were no responses to the calls I continued to make every five minutes or so. Instinctively, Scarsdale and I switched on our helmet lights and with the yellow radiance burning comfortably ahead of us, completed the last stage of our journey.

I myself now had a deep loathing of the dark tunnels and I fought to keep control as I thought of the long miles of corridor along which we must pass over many days if we were to regain the sanity of the outer air. It seemed to have taken us months to penetrate this far and until we could rejoin the tractors we would stand little chance on foot against our lumbering opponents, I gave thanks for the fact that we had first encountered them in the brilliant light of space as my sanity must inevitably have tottered had they burst upon us in the inky-blackness of the outer mountains or in the twilight which now reigned about us.

Though they had apparently reached Van Damm and Holden by a circuitous route I was by no means certain in my own mind that this was so. The creatures were apparently emerging into the underground complex from the Great White Space and, unless they had incredible restraint, did not inhabit the city of Croth or the long labyrinth which separated us from the outer world, or we would surely have seen signs of them long ago.

It was true, as Scarsdale had suggested, that they might well have means of coming up behind us. But equally Holden, with his strained nerves and now the breakdown of his physical health, might have screamed during medical treatment. This did not explain Van Damm's continued silence but there was a slim chance that he might have noticed something unusual and gone off to investigate. These were the rationalisations I presented to myself as we panted down the last stretch of tunnel which separated us from our companions.

That they were not logical or sequential thoughts did not matter. I myself was partly unhinged with terror, even if only temporarily; Prescott's sudden and shocking death would have been enough for that — and my reaction to that was to feverishly assure my inner self that there could be a rational — even an ordinary explanation for anything which happened, however extraordinary it might appear to the outward eye. I had just reached this point in my rambling evaluation when Scarsdale gave a grunt and pulled at my arm. We both stopped the trolley as if at a given command and automatically stepped behind it. We had reached the point where we had left our companions. Apart from the crackle of the radio, now that the rumble of the trolley wheels had ceased, an unnatural silence pervaded the miles of tunnel that stretched about us.