Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Then, as we rested for a few minutes, and as I looked down from the maintenance ledge, I saw how the dirty water glinting over the 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 over-head.”

“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 that shallow water back along the tracks. There’s plenty more of them in the Serpentine, which is part of a great lake now that has drowned St. James’s Park and everything in between all the way to the burst banks of the Thames. We can stay down here for another mile or thereabouts, but then we may have to surface… either that or swim, and I really don’t fancy that!”

“You’ve done this before,” I said as we set off again, because it was obvious that he had, and fairly often and recently. That explained how he knew these routes so well.

He nodded and replied, “Five times, yes. But this will be the last time. For you too, your first and last.”

“Or maybe not,” I answered. “I mean, you never can tell how things will work out.”

“You young fool!” he said, but not unkindly, even somewhat sadly. “You’ll be right there in the heart of the Bgg’ha Zone, in the roots of the Twisted Tower, that loathsome creature’s so-called ‘house!’ And I can tell you exactly how things are going to work out for you: you won’t be coming out again!”

“But you did it,” I answered him. “And all of five times—if you’re not lying or simply crazy!”

He shook his head. “I’m not lying, and I’m not simply crazy. You’re the one who’s crazy! Listen, do you have any idea who I am or why I’m really here?”

I shrugged. “You’re just an old man on a mad mission. That much is obvious. I may even know what your mission is, and why. It’s revenge, because they took your wife, your family. But one small suitcase—even one that’s full of high explosives—just isn’t going to do it. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon is ever going to do it.”

The look he turned on me then was sour, downcast, disappointed. And: “Have I been that obvious?” he said, pausing where the ledge stepped up onto an actual platform. “I suppose I must have been. But even so you’re only half-right, and that makes you half-wrong.”

The Shoggoth light was suddenly poorer, where the mist writhing on the tiled, vaulted expanse of the ceiling was that much thinner. Our eyes, however, had grown accustomed to the eerie gloom and the fluctuating quality of the bioluminescence, and we were easily able to read the legend on the tunnel’s opposite wall:

KNIGHTSBRIDGE

“My God!” my guide muttered then. “But I remember how this place looked in its heyday: so clean and bright with its shining tiles, its endless stairs and great elevators, its theatre and lingerie posters. But look at it now, with its evidence of earth tremors and fires; its blackened, greasy walls; its collapsed or caved-in archways and all the other damage that it’s suffered. And… and… Lord, what a mess!”

A mess? Something of an understatement, that. The ceiling was scarred by a series of broad jagged cracks where dozens of tiles had come loose and fallen; some of the access/exit openings in the wall on our side of the tracks had buckled inwards, causing the ceiling to sag ominously where mortared debris and large blocks of concrete had crashed down; and from a source somewhere high above, a considerable waterfall was surging out of an arched exit and spilling into the central channel, drowning the tracks under a foaming torrent.

As we clambered over the rubble the old man said, “I think that I—or rather that we—are probably in trouble.” And I asked myself: another understatement? How phlegmatic! And meanwhile he had continued: “Like everywhere else, this place is coming apart. It’s got so much… so much worse, since the last time I passed through.”

Which was when he began to ramble and sob again, only just managing to make sense:

“There’s been so many earthquakes recently… if the rest of the Underground system is in the same terrible condition as this place… but then again, maybe it’s not that bad… and Hyde Park Corner isn’t so far away… not very far at all… and anyway, it was never my intention to surface here… there’s water up there… too much water… but there’s still a half-decent chance that we’ll make it to Piccadilly Circus down here in the Underground… I’ve just got to make it to Piccadilly Circus… right there, under the Twisted Tower!”