Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (33 page)

Barnsby’s confusion let silence fill the room. The ticking of the huge clock rang against the dusty bookshelves and empty fireplace.

“What do you mean?”

Cornwall gave Alan Barnsby a small, deprecating smile.

“In 1940, I was still rebuilding my stable of talents from the disaster...but then you wouldn’t know about it. It was before your time, even before PISCES itself was formed—but the outlines of the division had already been established, and things were going well, until the disaster of 1925.” With a sweeping gesture Cornwall flattened his thin, blond, oil-slicked hair. Sweat stood on his brow in tiny beads.

“Disaster, sir?” Something dark moved in Barnsby’s gut, like the shadow of a memory.

“Let me ask you, Alan. In the spring of 1925, when you were fourteen years of age, do you recall any odd occurrences in your life?” Cornwall gathered the photographs on his table together, pushing them roughly into a accordion folder.

“It’s in my file, sir. You know all about the nightmares...” Even fifteen years later they leapt back without hesitation. The black dreams which had swept over his life. Like a tidal wave of sewage they had spilled into his adolescent nights, corroding and rotting everything good in his mind. During those dark days young Barnsby had stumbled about his life, drawn and ill, while at night a voice so deep and resonant Barnsby could feel it in his bones called to him from a place so terrible its burial at the bottom of an ocean was not enough to stop its power. A dead city in the absolute black of the sea, the shuffling of drowned monstrous forms stirring from the miles of filth on the bottom. Creatures, heralds of the end of man, swimming up towards the sun, and what was worse—in the dreams he was there too, straining for the upper air, lungs bursting with effort. Barnsby had kept what he could to himself in those days, his sanity draining away as the voice grew more insistent and the city crept closer in his mind. Finally he had gone into fits on the last night of the dreams and was taken to a doctor. He drifted in and out of consciousness for eight hours. When he woke, the veil which had fallen over his life was gone. It was that plain. An invisible but very real weight was lifted from his mind.

Beyond that night the dreams had never recurred.

“Barnsby?” Major Cornwall was saying.

“Yes. Sorry.”

“I see you remember the dreams. Those same dreams struck my pool of talents in 1925. Two died. Five went irretrievably mad, eleven others left the service for good. You suffered the same dreams as a young man. It is now how we test for the ‘real McCoy,’ as the Americans might put it. Nightmares in the spring of 1925 equals psychic talent. The dreams seem to be indicative of genuine psychic ability.”

“But what did the dreams mean, sir?”

“I don’t believe that is germane at the moment. In any case, I’m not sure you will want to know. I was speaking of our search for talents in the 1940s...”

“Well...I’m...go on, sir, I’m sorry.” Barnsby’s anger had somehow drifted away. He was now held rapt by the narrative. He leaned forward.

“Where was I? Yes. The recovery of our resources in the 1930s. We searched the globe for ‘talents’ to replace those we had lost in the debacle of 1925. In the crown colonies and abroad. One of particular interest was discovered in Darwin, Australia, in 1940. Lawrence Hutchins was his name. He made a living by predicting world events for second-rate spiritualist magazines, and he was strikingly accurate, at least for a time. We became interested in Hutchins—”

“So he was a precognitive, like Mr. Briggs or Miss Chalmers?”

“No.” Cornwall leaned down and removed a file from his front desk drawer. It was sitting at the front of the drawer as if Cornwall had perused it recently, or perhaps he knew this confrontation with Barnsby was coming. Barnsby did not need to use his talent to guess which circumstance it was. Cornwall was one of the brightest men he had ever known. Next to the workings of Cornwall’s mind, Barnsby felt like a child playing chess with a master.

“I don’t think I understand, sir.”

“Hutchins, it was discovered, had somehow come upon a cache of...books. Odd books. Old...books.” Cornwall removed an aged, coffee-stained photograph from the file and placed it on the table in front of Barnsby.

Barnbsy’s memories of the library at the dawn of time rose unchecked in his mind, a flood of images linked to the one Cornwall had placed on the table. The photo showed a hinged grey box, with a looping hieroglyphic-like scrawl in an unknown language embedded in its silver-grey metallic cover. But Barnsby knew what it meant. He knew the alien sigil represented humankind. Barnsby could still recall opening such a box in the vast silences of the library at Pnakotus to read the handwritten text within, one hundred and fifty million years before. He stood suddenly and stepped back from the table and the photograph, as if something had just startled him. His thin, glove-covered hand trembled in the air. As he noticed the tremor, Barnsby ran his hand up his face and through his hair, as if to calm his trembling fingers. He stared with wide-eyed amazement at the photo, as if it would disappear if he blinked, like he was looking at something unreal which had somehow materialized simply because of him.

“Now you see why I did not wish to involve you?”

“It’s all real, isn’t it?” Barnsby breathed, but Cornwall continued, unmindful of the interruption.

“Our investigation, it was...convoluted, but needless to say, our tests revealed Hutchins as a fake. He was involved in some type of cult and when we searched his home we discovered his—” Cornwall cleared his throat “—library.” Another photo fell to the table: a cluttered, filthy apartment strewn with dirty cups and beer bottles, stacks of cheap magazines and stained clothing. In one corner, carefully set apart from the mundanites, a three-tiered stack of the alien volumes shoved against a peeling plaster wall. Barnsby’s initial thought chilled him to the bone: They are supposed to be stacked side by side. He shook it off, silencing the voice of the dead Professor Peaslee in his mind.

“What—um. Sir. What did you find?” Barnsby felt his voice tremble as he spoke.

“In Hutchins’ collection of books? Books exactly like the alien books you described in your brief? Nothing of direct use, really. Most were written in human languages using oversized characters. Some in languages we could not identify. Others were empty.” Cornwall lit a cigarette and flipped through the file on the table.

“What...was in them, sir?” Barnsby sputtered, as the broken filaments of a dead man’s memories played across his mind. 1945, atomic weapons, the final war. The whispers faded into the darkness of his mind as he clutched at them, leaving him with only a dim feeling of predestination, a feeling of huge creatures shaping his destiny with alien, antiseptic thoughts that he could never understand, only blindly serve.

Cornwall let out a laugh which contained no humor: “What was in them? Nothing...everything. What was there was so convoluted and strange that it made little sense. What we could understand was vague. Most of the text dealt with the past, some with the future. It seems Hutchins discerned his precognitive secrets from a volume we never found, a volume about the 1940s. At least, that is what he claimed once we had him in custody, although he would not reveal where he got the books. He claimed he was in league with what he referred to as ‘those who will come after.’ He said that many people were similarly in league, but little else was discovered about his claims. And then he was gone.”

“What happened to Hutchins, sir?”

“Suicide. Under...unusual circumstances. Details are unimportant. What is important is that his death ended our investigation until your brief. We could not uncover where Hutchins had come across the books. Those books we recovered were copied, cataloged, and stored. We’ve had occasional insights into world events through some oddly worded sentences in them, but mostly they are too vague to be of any use. But if we were to find the source of the books...” Cornwall’s eyes were alight with fervor now, his fist clenched. He looked over at Barnsby and then composed himself, turning around, standing, placing his hat squarely back on his head.

“If you could find the source, no more Dunkirks, then, sir?” Barnsby’s voice rose as he finished the sentence and tears stood in his eyes. Cornwall, the man he had trusted, the man responsible for the secrets of the world, had secrets of his own. Americans were dying to protect those secrets.

“Something like that, lieutenant.” Cornwall’s voice was far away.

“Sir, what have you done in Australia?” An incredulous whisper.

“I...we have done everything we had to do, Barnsby. For King and for country.” Cornwall sniffed once and pushed his window wide. A staff car outside slipped past, its engine frantic and overwhelming in the water-heavy air. A cold wind blew in as the sun began to emerge from the low, grey clouds.

When Cornwall shut the window, an answering silence filled the room, destroying all questions before they could be asked.

Flame-colored pinpoints of light danced in the limitless dark. The moon had long since gone down. Now, in between, was the time of absolute night. The starlight offered little clarification except to denote the division between the horizon and the ground. Everything beneath the lip of the world was perfect black.

Everything, that is, except for the swaying, tiny lights floating out in the night, which moved slowly away from Joe Camp. Camp was crouched on a stony outcropping of rock which Mal had told him, when they set camp there that dawn, had no name. They had come more than seventy miles in two days from Lake Woolomber, across the flatlands of the Gibson Desert, traveling mostly at night to avoid the summer’s heat. Joe felt good for no reason he could discern, laden with what he was sure was pilfered equipment and clutching a Sten submachine gun in the comfortable fold of his left arm.
I am in western Australia chasing OSS agents into a desert with an aborigine,
he thought to himself, hoping it would sound insane. Instead, it felt reassuring; it felt right. Mal leaned in close, his voice rich with the stench of tobacco, and said:

“That’s them there.”

The tiny lights were lanterns of people moving on the five-mile-distant Tobin Ranges. It was hard to tell how many there were; the lights would bleed into one another and sometimes suddenly spilt into half a dozen individual sources. Their movement away from Joe’s position was also hard to discern in the dark, and they seemed to sway and slip over the black surface of the Earth in an almost static line. Soon enough however, one by one they disappeared into the black.

Somewhere within the mountain, Mal assured him, Peaslee and Steuben were held captive. Joe had no reason to believe the aborigine’s story except for its sheer unbelievability. Who would conceive such a bizarre story to cover up some other plan? Nothing made sense. But Joe’s mind kept coming back to the dead man in the hallway they had left behind—along with his sanity—at Port Hedland, an image which never failed to sober his thinking.

No matter how strange they seemed, these events were real.

Maljarna had chosen Joe two days before, from a group of more than forty of the Ngaanyatjarra’s most able warriors, during some sort of ritual. Joe Camp had only the vaguest idea of what they had set out to accomplish. He knew it involved the missing OSS men, which was as much as Mal would say. Old Muluwari seemed pleased that Maljarna had chosen only a single companion for the task set before him, although the rest of the warriors seemed incredulous at the young aborigine’s selection.

After a huge meal where all his questions were deflected cleverly by Muluwari, Camp was given access to the tribe’s impressive cache of weaponry, still freshly packaged in wooden crates marked with British registry stamps. The stamps were recent and the weapons were cutting edge. Submachine guns, mines, mortars, grenades, desert survival gear, all of British design. Mal refused to reveal where the weapons had come from, and old Muluwari had only said:

“The souls of those these weapons were made for are there within them still, to serve those that’ll avenge them, Joe Camp.”

Joe didn’t quite understand why that statement made him so uncomfortable. They left the Ngaanyatjarra camp after loading up with gear that night, while the remaining warriors held heated arguments in their strange language with the old man around the fire. Women and children formed a ring around Mal and Joe Camp as they walked out of Lake Woolomber to the north. Each tribesmember reached out to touch them, fingers barely brushing them, as if the men themselves had become holy items. These events of two days previous still played in Joe Camp’s mind like a surreal film, repeating over and over again in his head. It was hard to imagine something like that could really occur.