On awakening, his companion shook his head a few times as if being buzzed by an angry wasp and then he cursed under his breath. Looking round sullenly, he spied Church, remembering him from before the blow. 'Who the hell are you?' he asked a little suspiciously, in the hard tones of working class south-east London.
'Jack Churchill. Who the hell are you?'
Silence. Then: 'Ryan Veitch.' He continued to look around furtively. 'They pick you up too?'
Church shrugged. 'Can't remember. I was riding across the moor on a bike and fell down some kind of hole. Where is this place?'
'Some abandoned mine. The place is swarming with them.' Veitch yanked at his chain angrily, but it held fast. 'Bastards.' He took a deep breath, then said, 'What are they?'
'Our worst nightmares.' Now it was Church's turn to be suspicious. 'You seem to be taking this pretty well, being confronted by something that shouldn't exist.'
'I've had plenty of time to get used to it, haven't I? About a bleedin' week since the bastards dragged me down here. I was hitchin' across the moor. The first time I saw them I threw up, then blacked out. I tell you, it was a stomachfull, projectile. The second time wasn't so bad. Half a stomach and three hours unconscious. Now I've just about got used to them, and that's a horrible bleedin' thought in itself.'
'Even so,' Church pressed, 'you're pretty much on top of it.'
Veitch hung his head so his hair obscured his face. Church thought he was being cold-shouldered, but his companion was obviously thinking, for a moment later he looked up and said bluntly, 'I've been dreaming about these sorts of things all my life. It's like I knew they were out there. The biggest sur prise was that I wasn't surprised when I saw them. It was almost like I expected to meet them.'
'Dreams?' Church felt a tingle of recognition.
'Yeah. You see these tattoos? They're my dreams. When I was a kid they used to make me miserable. I couldn't get them out of my head. I screwed up school, had trouble making friends, couldn't keep any bird on the go for too long-anti-social tendencies, they said. Attention deficit. Half a dozen other excuses. But it was the bastard dreams. I think I'd probably have topped myself by now if I hadn't found some way to get them out of my head.' He nodded to the tattoos. 'Every time one came into my head and wouldn't leave I went to this place in Greenwich and had a picture of it done somewhere or other. That night it'd be gone. I tell you, this body is a picture book of my screwed-up head.'
Church peered hard through the gloom and saw what seemed to be a tower floating in space. 'I had dreams too,' he began. 'Nothing like yours, but-'
Veitch flashed him a strange, intense look that stopped him dead. 'Dragons?' Veitch said, his eyes searching Church's face. 'Brother of Dragons?' Church nodded. 'Those words've been doin' my head in for weeks now. Just floating there. In fire, on a black background. What do they mean?'
Church shrugged.
Veitch looked truly disconcerted. 'I jacked in my job to come here. Didn't mind that too much. Renovating houses near the Dome for some tight landlord to make a mint on. I just thought I'd get some bleedin' answers-'
'But what made you come here?'
'A little bird told me.' His crooked grin was engimatic but disarming.
'What do you mean?'
'I thought it was a dream at first, but now I'm not so sure. Some Judy turned up in my room one night and told me to head out west if I wanted to find what I'd spent all my life looking for.' He laughed sourly.
A shiver ran through Church's body. Cautiously he described the woman he had met in the Watchtower. 'Yeah, that's the one,' Veitch said. 'So she is real. How'd she get in my gaff then?'
Before Church could answer there came a sound like a tolling bell, echoing dully through the walls from somewhere distant. The reverberations continued for a full minute and then slowly died away, leaving a strange, tense atmosphere.
'What's that about?' Church asked.
Veitch looked uncomfortable. 'Something's going on down here. I've seen things. There's a big cave full of oil drums. Some other place that looks like a church, only not one you've ever seen before. And those things … what do you call them?'
'The woman in the Watchtower called them Night Walkers. God knows what they really are.'
'Right. Well, I don't know what they're eating, but I've seen bones …' His voice trailed off, Church didn't press him further.
They fell silent for a while, then Church asked, 'So how did you see the place? They don't let you out for a walk, I presume.'
'Every now and then they take me out for a good kicking. My exercise, I suppose. Beats walking round in circles.' He winced, then masked it with a smile. 'It's like they expect me to tell them something. They keep grunting at me in those gorilla-voices, but I can't understand a bleedin' word they're saying. Not very bloody smart, are they?' A shadow passed across his face and he added, 'There's one of them who can speak English, though. He's scary. Doesn't look like the others. He's almost … beautiful.' The word seemed to catch in his teeth. 'Until you look in his eyes. The others make me feel like my head's bein' pulled inside out, but he's scary in a different way.' Veitch glanced at Church curiously. 'If he talks to you, just give him what he wants, all right?'
At that moment, the lantern flickered and died.
In the dark it seemed harder to talk. But the bond Church felt with Veitch was unmistakable, even though it was operating on some deeply subconscious level; they were both Brothers of Dragons, after all.
Their distracted, mumbled conversation turned to the past. Witch told of his childhood in south-east London, the youngest of six children struggling in a household where their mother had died when he was just a baby. His father had fallen to pieces in the aftermath and the boys had been left to keep the household running, cooking and cleaning, trying to scrape together a meagre living in any way possible. Now three of his brothers were in prison, one for drug dealing, the other two for a bungled armed raid on a building society in Kilburn. Veitch's life sounded harrowing, punctuated by brutal explosions of mindless violence, but he had a tremendous affection for his home and upbringing which Church found incongruous. The hardness of his environment had shaped his character into what seemed a mixture of knotted muscle and scar tissue, but beneath it Church sensed a basic decency with which he could connect. He could do worse than having someone like Veitch along for the rideif they ever got out of there.
For his part, he told Veitch very little about himself-even in those extreme circumstances he couldn't bypass his overwhelming need for privacy-but he did fill him in on everything that had happened to them since that night beneath Albert Bridge.
As they began to exchange theories about what was really going on, the sound of heavy footsteps echoed loudly once again and then the door was flung roughly open. Church snapped his eyelids shut as the silhouette appeared in the doorway, his gorge rising even at that brief glimpse. The beast's voice was guttural, vibrating on bass notes so low Church could sense them in the pit of his stomach rather than hear them; the tone was insistent and grew noticeably angrier as the cell was opened. Church felt the presence approach him like a cold shadow until he caught that deep, nauseating stench. Crushing, bony fingers snapped around his jaw, digging into the soft flesh of his cheeks until they burned like hot pokers and slowly Church's head was forced round. The pressure was so great he felt his face was on the verge of disintegrating; he had no choice but to open his eyes.
He looked into deep-set eyes with red slit pupils, something that could have been scales or a hideous skin deformity, monstrous bone formations, but the overwhelming terror he felt didn't come from the hellish appearance; in some uncanny way it was like he was looking deep within the creature, and what he saw there was too terrible to bear.
His mind screamed for an instant and then flickered out.
Church woke on the floor in the stinking straw, vomit splattered all around. His wrists ached as if they had been plugged with nails, but the sudden knowledge that he was no longer manacled came like a reviving draught. Although his head thundered, he sat bolt upright and glanced hastily around, ready to dart for any opening that presented itself.
'Save it.' Veitch sat in the corner, spooning something grey and watery from a rough wooden bowl. 'The cage is still locked-there's no way out.' He slurped the soup and grimaced. 'Now I know how those people in the plane crash in the Andes could eat their dead mates. You'll force down any old shit if you're hungry enough.'
