Operation Antarctica

- 5 -

Banks stopped reading and shut the journal with a snap that caused Hynd to look up from his cards and raise an eyebrow.

“More fucking demonology bollocks and shite,” Banks said with a grim smile. The sarge went back to the card game, but Banks sat by the stove, staring into space. He didn’t believe his own oaths. It hadn’t read like bollocks and shite. And that was the problem. It had read like cold, hard fact, and he believed every word of it to be true. He still didn’t see how it applied to their situation here. But he was afraid he was getting closer to an answer, one that he wasn’t going to like.

The card game was still going strong, but Banks wasn’t in the mood to join in— besides, he usually lost to the men, either through bad play on his part, or by design to help morale. What he really needed was a stiff drink to settle his gut down, but the nearest scotch was back on the boat, and well out of reach. Instead, he made for the kit bags and began rummaging through the heap of books, notebooks, and papers that had been collected in the hangar room.

It looked like everything was in German apart from the journal he’d lifted from the oberst’s desk. He ploughed through a thick log book of the base operations, looking for clues as to their fate, reading list after list of supply deliveries, personnel coming and going. The fuel consumption figure in particular caught his eye — it was remarkably low, consider the German’s had been on site for many months. He was looking for clues as to what had befallen the base, but there was nothing in the logbook to suggest an oncoming calamity.

He moved on to what appeared to be the oberst’s personal journal, and an ongoing record of the saucer’s construction. The name Carnacki was obvious in places among the German, but Banks’ grasp of the language wasn’t sufficient to the task of deciphering it enough to get any kind of understanding.

He moved on to the diagrams and charts. The blueprints looked remarkably simple, far too simple for something that purported to be a space-going vehicle, and Banks started to wonder if the black-ops propaganda theory might not be the closest to reality. Then he came upon a package wrapped in thick waxed paper. Inside was a series of several dozen black and white photographs.

The first showed two airmen in heated flight suits. They looked alike enough to be twins, young and sturdy, clean-cut blond men with fresh-faced smiles, standing in the hangar with the shining silver shell of the saucer behind them. The second showed the saucer itself, sitting in the center of the hangar, and although there was no color, the lines and circles on the floor beneath it were definitely glowing, looking brilliant white in the photograph. The third photograph showed the two men inside the saucer, which appeared to be almost an empty shell. Banks got a shiver to see that the men appeared to be standing inside individual pentagrams, reminding him all too clearly of what he’d been reading in the Carnacki journal.

But it was the fourth photograph that caught his breath in his throat and demolished the black ops theory once and for all. Although it was black and white, and very grainy compared to modern photographic methods, the image was clear enough. It was a coastline Banks couldn’t identify, but taken from such a height that there could be no doubt, especially after a quick glance through the rest of the photographs in his hands that showed more pictures taken from a great height. The saucer had made a flight. More than that, it had made it into orbit.

He turned the last photograph over. There was a black swastika stamped in ink on it, and a date. It matched the date he’d seen circled in red on the oberst’s wall calendar — the 4th of January, 1942.

Now that he’d seen the pilots standing in the pentagrams, Banks knew he needed to finish the Carnacki journal. It was too important to be ignored, indeed might be the pivotal key required for understanding the whole matter. He went back to the stove, and back to the journal, trying to quell the growing dissatisfaction in his gut.

He took up again exactly where he’d left off.

Now that the darkness had washed away, and I could no longer feel any presence, every part of me wanted to step out of the circles and head up and out into warmer air, and a place where there was a large glass of good scotch waiting for me. But I knew Churchill’s mind. He would want to know more of the nature of this new thing I had found, and how it could be pressed to become an advantage in his favor. And to do that, I would have to face the thing again.

I stood still and lit a fresh pipe. The taste of tobacco did much to remind me that I wasn’t lost down here in the dark, that I was here of my own free will. I was here to learn.

The gray fug of smoke wafted away through the corridors of the vessel. My valves lit up enough of the corridors in front and behind of me to show that there was no sign of the wall of darkness. I knew, of course, that the thing had not simply departed, for it is my experience that once an entity of the Outer Darkness arrives on this plane, they settle, and they are slow to leave.

I was proved right minutes later when the darkness gathered again in the forward corridor. As if it was aware of my presence now, it crept much more slowly than before. And as it was aware of me, so too, I was aware of it. It was less menacing this time, now that I knew it was there.

As before, the blackness gathered around the edges of my defensive circles, testing the boundaries of the valves; first the yellow one then the green flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed. Once again, cold seeped into my lower limbs and damp air washed against me.

I knew what was coming next. This time, when the darkness sent out its dark probe to my mind, I grabbed hold of it and followed it back to the source, a mental projection trick that let me glimpse, however briefly, some of the thing’s innate nature and intent. Fragments of what passed for its thoughts came to me, like images in my mind.

It was old, old and cold, and lost. It had slept for aeons in a deep place in the sea, undisturbed by storm or ice, lying, slumbering in the weed and stone, having been imprisoned even before the sea washed over it for the first time. Men had caught it, men wearing animal furs and wielding stone axes, wooden shields, and long-forgotten ways of dealing with visitors from the Outer Darkness.

And so, it had slept, and dreamed for the longest time. And then, after an age of cold, dank, dark, an iron thing came swimming in the waters above, breaking ancient bonds that the German submariners never even knew existed, allowing the darkness to surge and flow and fill them up.

I felt those poor German lads die, as if I had been the dark thing in the dark, and sudden, unbidden tears filled my eyes, and guilt hit me, hard. That broke my concentration, and alerted the dark to my presence.

It pushed against me hard, the shock almost sending me reeling outside the circles. The green valve flared and I thought I saw, for an instant, an even darker mass of blackness in the shadows, an amorphous, shifting, thing that spoke a word in a language that I did not know but guessed the intent. There was only one thing this darkness wanted.

Home.

I spoke the Gaelic words again, and as before the blackness faded away, retreating down the corridors to wherever it was hiding itself in the bowels. This time, I did not delay. I stepped out of the circles, left the pentacle on the deck, and made my way quickly up the turret ladder, out to the boat shed above, then, almost running, down the gangway and into the foreman’s office, where I headed straight for the scotch.

Churchill was sipping at a glass of his own and puffing on another cigar. He raised an eyebrow and smiled thinly.

“I gather from your rather startled demeanor that you have had some success?”

I downed a couple of fingers and waited until it hit my stomach and spread its heat before answering.

“I had some failure, and some of what you might regard as success. Although I am not convinced that success is the proper word for what I have experienced.”

He sat me down and joined me in another drink. He tried to ply me with another of his, frankly, enormous cigars, but I preferred the pipe. I puffed hard at it as I spoke, and he listened to my tale, without even the slightest hint of incredulity. He went quiet and thought for a few seconds before he spoke softly.

“So this thing in the dark that you saw? You believe it is what killed the Hun crew?”

“I believe so,” I replied. “In fact, I am sure of it.”

“I would like to see it for myself,” he said.

I protested long and hard at that, but his final answer was what persuaded me.

“I will not ask my men to do something I would not do myself,” he said, and by Jove, I think he meant it.

I went back with him as far as the deck of the submarine, but he bade me stand outside.

“As you did yourself, I will face this thing alone, in the same way as the men will have to face it to perform the task I must set for them.”

I warned him to step over the circles into the inside of the pentacle, and not to break the protection once he was inside, no matter what might happen. I also gave him the last two words of the Gaelic chant, as a last resort should they be needed.

“Wish me luck, old chap,” he said as he turned away. “I have faced many battles, but I do believe this short walk might be among the hardest things I shall be called to do for my country.”

I agreed with him on that, but he went anyway. He was still chewing down hard on that infernal cigar as he climbed up and over, into the turret and down into the bowels of the sub.

I stood there for long minutes, straining to hear, waiting for a cry for help and ready to go to his aid if needed. For the longest time, there was no sound save my own breathing and the slight hiss of burning tobacco in my pipe. Then, as if from a great distance, I heard it, a voice raised in a shout, the old Gaelic phrase repeated twice. It sounded as if the second time contained more than a trace of fear.

Dhumna Ort! Dhumna Ort!

I had started climbing up the turret when I heard scrambling sounds above me, and had to retreat as Churchill descended out of the sub with some haste. He did not stop to acknowledge me, but marched, almost running, away along the deck and down the gangway. By the time I reached the foreman’s office, he was already making impressive headway down the scotch, gulping it down unceremoniously straight from the neck of the decanter.

He only spoke when he came up for air. His cheeks were now ruddy, but he was pale around the lips, with dark shadows under his eyes, and his hands shook badly as he lit a fresh cigar.

“That dashed thing killed the Huns,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a question.

But if I thought his experience might mean a change in course for his plan of action and a softening of his resolve, I was to be proved wrong with his next sentence.

“Can you show someone how to make that pentacle of yours? We will need one for each of the men. I shudder to think what might have happened had I not been inside it.”

I spent the night sitting in that cramped little room, drinking and smoking with Churchill. Every so often, he would call for one or another of his men and bark an order at them. But mostly we talked, of inconsequential matters; he spoke with some elegance, and not a little sense of regret, of his time as a journalist, and I regaled him with some of the tales that my friend Dodgson has already detailed in his journals. At some point I slept, and when I woke, Churchill was gone and about his business for King and Country.

As for myself, I never set foot inside the sub again after I retrieved my box of defenses the next morning. I spent two more days at the boat shed instructing Churchill’s men in the art of pentacle defense, and showed some Naval engineers the trick of the valves and wires needed for their construction.

I heard no more for a week, then out of the blue, I received another summons to the dockyard late of a Sunday evening.

The river was as quiet as it gets, and there was no ceremony. Firstly, they loaded the dead Germans. I did not watch that part, for I was reminded all too vividly of the impressions I had received of their passing from the thing in the cold wet dark. I stood in the shed doorway, smoking a pipe until that part of the job was done.

Then fifteen of Churchill’s men went on board, each carrying a small bag of luggage and a box that closely resembled my own box of defenses. Churchill had a word and a handshake for every one of them, but if he had any qualms about what he was doing, they did not show.

Churchill and I retired to the hut at the rear again, where we shared more of his fine scotch until, almost an hour later, the big shed doors were opened, the timber wedges were knocked away and the sub slid, almost silently into the river.

We went out onto the dock to watch it head off out toward the Estuary, a great dark shark cruising on the still waters.

“I don’t know about the Germans,” I said, “but it certainly scares me.”

“They will take her out into the North Sea and leave her floating as near to where we found her as they can manage,” Churchill said. “Hopefully, the Huns will find her before the sea claims her again.”

“And your men? How will they return?”

Churchill looked at me, and now, for the first time, I saw how deeply he had been affected. He had fresh tears in his eyes.

“They have their orders,” he said, turned his back on me, and walked away.

I never heard of the fate of the submarine, or Churchill’s men, and although I have met Churchill twice since, he has never spoken of it.

But some nights, when the fog rolls in from the river and I smell salt in the air, I dream of them cruising along in the deep dark, all dead at their posts while the cold blackness swirls around them.

I hope it was worth it.

Banks closed the journal softly this time, lost in thought, feeling the pieces of the jigsaw click together as he processed the information he’d just read.

The Germans had indeed found the sub after Churchill had it returned. But far from it scaring them, or perhaps despite it scaring them, they had turned it back to their advantage, somehow taming the thing Carnacki had found in the sub, and molding it to their own devices. It was no great surprise, given their corruption of everything they ever touched, and it seemed impossibly outlandish, but Banks had seen all the evidence now, and could come to no other conclusion.

They got the idea from Winston bloody Churchill.

They used a fucking demon to power a UFO.