The Creeping Kelp (14 page)

 “No man is to touch any part of it, under pain of himself being subjected to ordeal by fire.”

 She’d been right about the fire. On screen, he saw that teams of people dressed in full HAZMAT suits were at the far end of the street, all armed with flame-throwers, all burning what looked like piles of bodies that had been hastily tossed on pyres. Smoke and small pieces of ash rose in the air and were dispersed by the wind.

Suzie whispered again.

“They’re just making it worse.”

The Colonel echoed her words.

“We discovered, too late, that these tactics were only making matters worse. It seems the best defence against this thing is concentrated Hydrochloric Acid. All stocks from all over the country are being shipped to the coast and a call has gone out world-wide for aid, but it will be some time in coming. In the meantime, we are at the whim of fate, with no way of telling where or when the next strike may come, nor indeed where it came from in the first place.”

Suzie chose that moment to speak up.

“I may be able to help with that.”

The Colonel saw her and gave her a thin smile.

“Our expert, Ms Jukes, is just lately returned from London where she was briefing the Minister. Maybe she can give us a report on her meeting.”

And maybe she can’t.
Noble thought, but kept his mouth shut as Suzie moved to the front beside the Colonel.

What followed was as clever a piece of misdirection as Noble had ever seen. She didn’t lie to them. Not quite. Neither did she quite tell the truth. But by the end of half an hour she had them convinced that she had a
possible
answer at hand, and that, if she could be given a chopper and a backup team of marines, she
might
be able to find and halt the source of the menace. When she finished, the room was quiet, but Noble felt like giving her a round of applause.

The Colonel looked like a man with a renewed mission.

“It’ll take a couple of hours to get a crew prepped and supplied,” he said. “Will you be in the lab?”

She nodded.

“I have one last experiment I want to perform on the sample, then we’ll be ready to go.”

One last experiment?

Noble’s heart sank.

That can’t be good news.

When they returned to the lab and she told him what she intended to do, he was even more concerned.

“But I have to,” she said. “I believe there’s some kind of psychic link between this sample and the main—
brain
, if that’s what we call it. If I can put it under enough stress, I may be able to piggyback on that link, to dream its dreams and trace the source back. Don’t you see? We can find out
exactly
where to hit it.”

Noble nodded.

“Yes. I see. What’s that?” he asked and pointed into the corner of the room.  As she moved to look, he turned and focussed on the sample jar.

“You idiot,” Suzie shouted, but her voice was pulled away, as if by a strong wind. The grip in his mind took hold again
.
A tide took him, a swell that lifted and transported him, faster than thought.

Massive towers and turrets rose high above the sea and gargantuan black shapes rolled through cavernous streets.

The grip on his mind tightened.

He pushed back, hard, and strained to see inside the buildings. His gaze seemed to be drawn to a spot where the dark Shoggoths were at their most numerous, slithering and rolling over sheets of plastic, melting and forming it into new strange and wondrous shapes that towered high above the ocean. And there was something else, just visible beneath many layers of material, something long and red... the rusted keel of an old cargo ship.

He
probed,
seeking to look deeper.

Deep in the rusted keep, something stirred and Noble suddenly felt fear, a loosening of the bowels and weakening of the knees.

He pushed one last time and thought of the warmth of the lab, of Suzie’s smile.

When he opened his eyes he was looking into her concerned face. The sample in the jar smoked and bubbled and Suzie had a jug in her hand, emptying acid over the material.

“I had to destroy it,” she said softly. “It was taking you.”

At first, her voice sounded soft, as if coming from a great distance. Someone started pounding a hammer inside his skull. But slowly, the lab started to fill in around him. There was an acrid tickling at his nostrils caused by the acid eating away at the sample in the jar.

“Was it worth it?” Suzie asked.

He nodded.

“I know what we’re looking for.”

July 24th - In the Air Again

The Colonel arrived soon after.

“Your ride is waiting, folks. I hope you’re ready.”

He led them back up through the fort to the esplanade. The chopper was there already. When they got in, they were given lifejackets and headsets, the wearing of which made Noble feel like an extra from a war movie.

“The team’s carrying enough ordnance to blow away a town,” the Colonel shouted from the doorway, “And we’ve retrofitted some weed-killer backpacks with acid.” His face contorted with something that looked like rage. “Kill this bastard. Wipe it out, before it does the same to us.”

He closed the door on them and they felt the chopper buck and sway as it lifted away from the fort. Suzie wasted no time in unpacking a laptop and firing it up, searching for streaming video news. She was able to use a small set of headphones, but Noble had to rely on the pictures. No sound was needed. The pictures told the story all too well.

Carnage and panic.

Noble looked away, his attention caught by a movement across the chopper. The far side from where he and Suzie sat was occupied by a row of marines, all now engaged in checking equipment and weaponry. They looked calm, deadly, and efficient and gave Noble a feeling of reassurance that they weren’t on a wild goose chase.

The C.O. looked to be a Lieutenant he’d seen around, Mitchell, a Welshman, a man of no more than thirty, who looked too young to be commanding a dozen hardened soldiers. But it looked like the men all knew their officer and respected him, for when it was obvious he was speaking to them in their headsets, they all paid attention and there was no talking back, no shows of bravado.

Suzie nudged him in the ribs, bringing his attention back to the screen. The Minister hadn’t been able to keep a lid on the story about the kelp’s origin. Noble knew that neither he nor Suzie had spoken of it, so either it was the Minister himself or someone in his office. Either way, he’d fallen on his sword and news pictures showed him outside a huge house, looking stern and grim over the headlines that spoke of his dismissal. What Suzie wanted him to see came next. It was grainy, in black and white, but it was obvious what he was looking at.

A tall, studious looking man who could only be Professor Rankin, stood, centre-stage, and waited for the Brass to move into their place along a harbour wall before speaking. Although Noble couldn’t hear what was being said, he could see the defiance and pride in every move Rankin made.

Rankin dragged on a chain. The lid of a box that sat in the harbour started to open, slowly at first. Tentacles found the edges and tore. A chunk of metal flew like a discus, passing less than three feet over the head of the assembled dignitaries. The kelp came out of the box like a greyhound from a trap, expanding as it came into a roiling mass eight feet wide and near again as thick.

It completely ignored a net full of fish. Instead, it threw out a writhing forest of tentacles… straight towards Rankin.

The screen froze, showing a mass of tentacles seemingly suspended in the air, small moist eyes wide open along their length.

“Well, the secret’s out,” Noble said.

Suzie smiled thinly.

“A wee bit too late. Anyway, it makes no difference to our mission. All it means is they’ll have someone apart from us to blame when this is all over.”

If it’s ever going to be over
.

Noble was thinking about the presence he’d felt in his mind, the thing that seemed to be inside the rotting keel of the cargo ship. It hadn’t felt like something from the Second World War. It had felt older—far older, a presence that had always been there, dreaming, waiting for the stars to turn in their course for the right time for it to rise and lay claim to its domain.

He laughed at his own bombast, then got embarrassed when he noticed several of the marines were looking at him as if he were mad.

Maybe I am.

He was remembering the Spanish Captain’s words, over four hundred years old, but more pertinent than ever.

There is no pain in the dream, no fear, no hunger, just the sweet forever of the dead god beneath. There is a spot where a dead god lies dreaming. We will find him and join him there.

July 24th - The City on the Sea

Sometime later, Lieutenant Mitchell’s voice came over the intercom.

“We’re approaching the co-ordinates we were given. We need the experts up front here.”

Noble got up gingerly. He was used to walking around on boats tossing on strong seas, but just the knowledge that there were hundreds of feet of air beneath him made him more circumspect. Suzie had no such qualms and was already ahead of him and into the cramped cockpit, so he heard her reaction before he saw the sight for himself.

Bloody hell.

He heard Mitchell’s laugh.

“My thoughts, exactly.”

He saw why seconds later as he pushed past the Lieutenant and looked out the front windscreen. He
knew
they were out over the open ocean, a long way from the mainland, but below them was what looked, at first glance, to be a modern city of glass and plastic, tall skyscrapers rising in canyons along a grid of streets laid out in chequer board fashion. There were several
blank
areas, like municipal parks, dotted throughout, all a deep shade of green. as if planted with trees.

But those are no trees and that is no city I recognise.

The chopper descended slowly, the pilot taking no risks. Sleek black things shuttled to and from in the street, but this wasn’t traffic, not in any sense Noble knew it. Shoggoths, some grown to the size of trucks, went about some unknown business. The
city
stretched almost from horizon to horizon and must have been more than twenty miles on each side.

How in hell did they do this without anyone noticing?

He saw why when the helicopter turned and banked around one edge of a
street
that looked like it was under construction. The scene below was no less regimented than the marines’ preparations earlier. A line of Shoggoths carried plastic and Perspex materials across the kelp, while another group of the beasts seemed to
mould
and build, a small building going up even as they watched. They worked as one, as if with a single purpose.

Like an ant colony. I wonder what’ll happen if we kill the Queen?

Another thought struck him.

This is all new. It’s only taken them a matter of days, built during the growing panic on shore. What in God’s name will they be able to do if we don’t stop them?

“Over to you,” Suzie said in his ear. “Where’s this boat of yours?”

Noble looked down over the expanse of the city.

I was asking myself the same thing.

He could see no reference points he remembered from his vision and had no idea where to start. Then a thought struck him.

I’ve touched its mind once. Why not again?

He reached out with his mind and
pushed
.

Something below responded and once again, Noble went away, for a time.

He felt the grip in his mind, much stronger now, and was given a mental picture of the rusted keel, lying parallel to the edge of the largest of the
parkland
areas. At almost the same instant, the tide took him again, and he was floating, lost, in a luminescent sea, dancing to a rhythm he could feel pounding in his chest, lost with the Dreaming God.

This time he was brought out of it, not by a slap in the face, but by Lieutenant Mitchell shouting in his ear.

“For God’s sake, man, pull up!”

As Noble disengaged from the hold on his mind he felt a pang of disappointment, then a sudden burst of adrenaline and fear as he looked forward.

The chopper spun wildly. The pilot tried to right it, but he looked dazed, almost sleepy. Blood dripped from both his nostrils, but he did not have time to wipe it away, having to focus his whole attention on the bucking craft.

“Hold on to something,” the pilot said. “I’ll have to put her down and it’s not going to be pretty.”

Suzie grabbed Noble by the arm and dragged him back to his seat, where they tried frantically to buckle themselves in. The soldiers opposite didn’t look quite so sanguine about the situation now, but there was still no panic and one young marine even managed to give Noble a
thumbs-up
when he finally clicked the buckle in place.

And not a second too soon. The chopper bucked and spun and Noble felt like a sock in a tumble dryer.

But only for two seconds.

“We’re going in,” the pilot screamed in his ear.

There was a shattering crash and everything went away again. This time there were no dreams, no visions, just a deep, unending blackness.

He came back out of it into a chaotic world of screaming and gunfire.  Someone had him by the shoulders and he was being dragged bodily across cold metal. He tried to stand.

“Stay down,” somebody shouted at him, a tone that brooked no argument.

More shots were fired, almost deafening. His back hit what felt like a lip, then he fell into open air, arms flailing.

The fall was short and his landing, surprisingly soft. He found out why when he finally got his legs under him and stood. He was on a sheet of what felt like soft plastic. In some places it was clear, with dark water visible many feet below, and in other places the plastic was punctuated with pictures, or pieces of paper, labels from whatever piece of refuse had been used in the construction. The closest piece to his feet advertised a well-known brand of lemonade. But he had little time for study. The gunfire started up again and when he turned towards it, he saw what had happened. The chopper had crashed, embedding itself partially in the plastic material of the
ground
. It looked like the crew were all out safely, but even now, they were being forced to back away from the crashed craft as the black forms of the kelp-covered Shoggoths tried to crawl over it, intent on assimilating whatever pieces of it they could eat.