mankind’s history has inevitably run. Tonight the ultimate mysteries will be known! Tonight the Portal will be opened!”
“Yes, yes,” said Omally, “we’ll wait here then.”
Soap’s eyes had glazed. It was clear that he no longer saw Pooley or Omally; he had become focused both mentally and physically upon some distant point. His voice boomed on, filling the caverns, washing over the black rocks like some evil sonic wave. “Blessed be the Gods of Ancient Earth. The dark ones and dwellers of the deep places. Great Rigdenjyepo, King of the World, Lord of the Nether Regions, Guardian of the Inner Secrets!”
Omally cupped his hands about his ears and muttered the rosary beneath his breath. Pooley, whose bladder was on the point of giving up the unequal struggle, rolled his eyes desperately.
Without warning Soap suddenly jerked forward. The two friends watched his glittering form flickering away into the darkness, his voice bouncing to and fro about the vaulted corridors, until finally the light died away and the ghastly echoing cries became only a memory.
Omally and Pooley stood a moment faintly outlined by the light above. Slowly they turned to face one another, came to a joint decision which argued strongly for the authenticity of mental telepathy, and with one movement made for the stairs.
Minutes later on the corner of Sprite Street Omally crouched, bent double, hands upon knees, gasping for breath. Pooley did little other than sigh deeply as he relieved himself through the railings into the Memorial Park. Between the gasps, gulps and Woodbine coughs, Omally uttered various curses, veiled blasphemies and vows of impending violence directed solely and unswervingly towards Soap Distant.
Pooley finished his ablutions to the accompaniment of one last all-embracing sigh. Having zipped himself into respectability he withdrew from his inner pocket a bottle of Soap’s fifty-year-old wine. “Shame to leave empty-handed,” he said. “One for the road John?”
“One indeed,” the Irishman replied. He took a great pull and swallowed deeply.
Pooley said “What should we do? Soap is clearly mad!”
Omally wiped his mouth and passed the bottle across. The full moon shone down upon them, in the distance cars rolled over the flyover and a late-night dog returning from some canine revelry loped across the road. All seemed so normal, so mundane, that their experience within the caverns was already taking on the nature of a bad dream. The clock on the Memorial Library struck two.
“If all that we saw was real and not some shared vision, I am truly at a loss to know what action we should take. Soap is not harming anybody, although I am certain that such an enormous maze of tunnels should be reported to the authorities, if only that they might be certified as safe. While I was down there I had the feeling that most of Brentford could have sunk easily into them, still leaving room for half of the Chiswick High Road.”
“But what about the doors?” said Jim. “Surely one man could not open them alone, they looked pretty hefty. You don’t really believe that they lead into the inner earth do you?”
Omally shook his head. “I haven’t a clue, although those crests, I’ve seen them before somewhere.”
All further conversation was however stifled by a low and ghastly rumble which came apparently from the lower end of Albany Road. Like a hideous subterranean clap of thunder it rolled forward. From far along the street, lights began to blink on in upstairs windows. Cats began to whine and dogs to bark.
Pooley said, “It’s an earthquake!”
Omally crossed himself.
Somewhere deep within the earth a monstrous force was stirring; great ripples ran up the paving stones of Sprite Street. A shock wave spread across the grass of the Memorial Park, stiffening the coarse blades into regimented rows. A great gasp which issued from no human throat shuddered up from the very bowels of the earth, building to an enormous crescendo.
Omally felt inclined to run but his knees had turned to jelly. Pooley had assumed the foetal position. By now Sprite Street was a blaze of light, windows had been thrown up, front doors flung open, people issued into the street clad in ludicrous pyjamas and absurd carpet slippers. Then as rapidly as it had begun, the ominous rumbling ceased, seemed to pass away beneath them and fade away. The denizens of Sprite Street suddenly found themselves standing foolishly about the road in the middle of the night. Shuffling their carpet slippers and feigning indifference to conceal their acute embarrassment they backed into their respective abodes and quietly closed their front doors.
The night was still again, the lights of Sprite Street dimmed away and Pooley rose to his feet patting dirt from his tweeds. “John,” said he, “if you will excuse me I am now going home to my bed where I intend to remain for an indefinite period. I fear that the doings of this evening have forever destroyed my vitality and that I am a broken man.”
“Certainly this has been an evening I should prefer to forget,” said Omally. With that he put his arm about his companion’s shoulder and the two friends wandered away into the night.
9
It was indeed a mystery. The pressmen thrust their way through the crowds of baffled onlookers and peered disbelievingly down from the bridge to the muddied track of twisted bicycle frames, old tin cans and discarded pram wheels which spread away into the distance. How an entire one-mile stretch of canal from the river lock to that of the windscreen-wiper factory could simply have vanished overnight seemed beyond anybody’s conjecture.
“It couldn’t have gone out through the river lock,” an old bargee explained, “it is high water on the Thames and the river is six foot up the lock gates on that side.”
“And at the other end?”
The bargee gave his inquisitor a look of contempt. “What, travel uphill into the next lock do you mean?” The interviewer coloured up and sought business elsewhere.
Archroy, who was a great follower of Charles Fort, explained what had happened. “Teleportation,” said the lad. “The water has been teleported away by those in sore need of it, possibly inhabitants of a nearby sphere, most likely the moon.”
The pressmen, although ever-anxious to accept any solution as long as it was logical, newsworthy or simply sensational, seemed strangely diffident towards his claims for the existence of telekinetic lunar beams.
It was certainly a most extraordinary event however, one which would no doubt catapult Brentford once more into the national headlines, and at least bring good trade to the Flying Swan. Neville was going great guns behind the bar. The cash register rang musically and the no-sale sign bobbed up and down like a demented jack-in-the-box.
“And don’t forget,” said the part-time barman above the din, “Thursday night is Cowboy Night.”
Jammed into an obscure corner and huddled over his pint, Jim Pooley watched with loathing the fat backside of an alien pressman which filled his favourite bar stool. Omally edged through the crush with two pints of Large. “It was only after I got home that I remembered where I’d seen those crests before,” he explained as he wedged himself in beside Pooley. “They were the coat of arms of the Grand Junction Water Works, those doors must have been part of the floodgate system from old Brentford dock.” Pooley sucked upon his pint, his face a sullen mask of displeasure. “Then what of old Soap?”
A devilish smile crossed Omally’s face. “Gone, washed away.” His fingers made the appropriate motions. “So much for old Rigdenjyepo and the burrowers beneath, eh?”
Pooley hunched closer to his pint. “A pox on it all,” said he. “The Swan packed full of these idiots, old Soap flushed away round the proverbial S-bend and Cowboy Night looming up before us with about as much promise as the coming of Ragnorok!”
