Pax Britannia: Human Nature (28 page)

"You followed me?"

"You and your master."

"How long had you been trailing us?"

"Since... since you left the town. Since the circus."

"Why?"

"You... intrigued me. And I thought you might be heading into danger."

"Danger?"

"On the moors, what with the Barghest killings and all. You were obviously strangers to these parts. I was concerned that you might fall foul of the beast yourselves."

"Well we did, didn't we? But you already know that. So why didn't you step in to help us then? Why didn't you intervene when Miss Haniver's life was in danger then?"

"I... was scared. It is to my great shame. It is why I have come here now, to make amends. Miss Jennifer is still in danger."

"She's not the only one."

The second revelation, as far as Nimrod was concerned, had been how gentle and well-spoken the creature was. But good manners and a pleasant speaking manner did not an innocent man make. So Nimrod kept his gun on the young man, just in case. He had no reason to believe that this Jacob was truly on his side at all. He had not had the chance to back up his bold words with actions yet, and until that time came, Nimrod judged that it was better to keep him at arm's length, and right where he could see him, with a gun trained on his back at all times.

And, in this manner, they had proceeded together further into the abandoned mine, following the snaking network of tunnels that led them ever onwards under the Umbridge estate.

"Look. Up there," the creature - this Jacob - said, suddenly stopping as he emerged from another low-roofed section of tunnel.

Nimrod quickly followed, and looked. There was a light ahead of them, an electric light.

Jacob turned his misshapen face towards Nimrod. "We're almost there."

There was a skittering of legs upon the uneven rocky floor at his feet and Nimrod nearly jumped as he felt something squeeze past him, its pliable body rubbing against his legs.

He lowered the lantern and looked at the floor. Beetles scuttled away from the light, long-bodied centipedes snapping at one another with nutcracker mandibles, fighting to claim a fissure in the rock for protection. Only they weren't beetles, Nimrod realised, or centipedes, they were both and yet neither, at the same time grotesque man-made creations that were all legs, chitin and mandibles.

He swept his lantern over the undulating mass at his feet. He saw things with the bodies of crabs, propelled across the floor with writhing starfish limbs. He saw something with the body of a snake scuttle past on half a dozen lobster legs. There were many-legged things, things with the bristling limbs of spiders, with the amorphous, oozing bodies of slugs, while something scampered across the wall, nearly brushing Nimrod's ear, before disappearing into the shadows again, that left him with the enduring, unpleasant image of a rat engulfed by an octopus.

"Abominations," the creature that called itself Jacob declared. "Blasphemies against both God and Nature!"

"Vivisects," Nimrod muttered.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"I rather feel that these are the work of another Creator entirely."

Placing his feet carefully, so as not to tread on any of the creatures if he could at all help it - not because he cared about the fate of the vivisects but simply because he found the idea of squashed slug-bodies beneath his feet abhorrent - Nimrod took the lead now, the light from his lamp helping to clear a path through the seething mass of bodies in front of them.

And then they were on the other side of the glistening black cavern, Nimrod and his unexpected companion. Ahead, the mined out cave gradually gave way to an obviously man-made tunnel, this one faced with stone. Its damp, moss-covered walls suggested great age to Nimrod. He wondered how long ago the passageway had been created, how old the foundations of the Umbridge House really were.

Had this tunnel been in regular use during the smugglers' heyday of the eighteenth century? He thought it likely. Who knew what had been brought into the country without the revenue men being party to it. Whiskey, tobacco, slaves? Or perhaps this tunnel had been used for more altruistic purposes, as an escape route, to get persecuted men to safety, following the network of caves beyond perhaps as far as the sea.

"We are beneath the house, I think," Jacob said, studying the tunnel with his head still on one side.

"I think you're right," Nimrod agreed. "Keep your wits about you. We don't want to be discovered now."

The way ahead was lit by dully pulsing caged bulbs, positioned at regular intervals as far as the eye could see. Nimrod placed the hurricane lantern on the floor, at the mouth of the cave, causing a momentary commotion among the encroaching abominations, which slithered back across the rocky floor behind them into the oily darkness. He then set off again with renewed vigour, quickening his pace, now that the surface on which he ran was packed earth rather than moisture-slick, uneven stone. Jacob loped after him.

The passageway gave way to more stone steps, which this time took Nimrod and his companion back up into the bedrock, on which the Umbridge estate stood, he assumed towards the cellars of the house. The further they climbed, the more recent the building work appeared to be.

Reaching the top of the flight Nimrod came to a halt. Jacob stopped below him and looked up quizzically, his head tipped to the right. "What is it?" he asked.

Nimrod silenced the freak with a "Shhh!", a finger on his lips and a wave of his hand. Ahead of him was a network of rooms and corridors, vaulted cellars and storerooms that led off from one central sanded passageway. He could see the brickwork of other walls and further doorways through the archways opening off both sides of this passageway. He did not need Jacob's heightened sense of hearing now to make out the pitiful moaning voices, the dragging of feet - or other body parts - on the sandy floor. And the smell - the smell was indescribable.

Nimrod's grip on the gun in his hand tightened, one gloved finger tensed against the trigger. With his free hand he signalled for Jacob to follow him.

Placing his feet carefully again - this time to avoid grinding the grains of sand beneath his heels as much as he was able - Nimrod led the way through the cellar-dungeon.

He had only gone five yards when he came upon the first of the dungeon's prisoners. He surprised the thing, lying there in the near darkness, and cursed inwardly as it let out a yelp of surprise. Nimrod pointed his gun at the thing's face, his finger tightening on the trigger.

It had been human once - at least part of it had - that much he could tell from its face. But it could hardly be described as human now. It looked more like a human face had somehow become attached to a seal's body. The thing still had one arm - although the elbow seemed to bend the wrong way - but on the other side of its body it had a flipper. Its hide glistened wetly.

On seeing Nimrod the inhuman thing tried to pull itself out of the way, dragging its great body along by its one crooked arm.

Hearing a hiss of aggression from his right, Nimrod spun round, gun raised.

The seal-thing's cry of alarm had attracted more inhuman things. A figure emerged from the shadows contained within an archway. A head shorter than Nimrod, it walked on two legs, like a man, but its features were something wholly other. The roughness of the skin and the jaundiced yellow of its eyes reminded Nimrod of the lizard-creature he and Master Ulysses had run into in the sewers beneath Southwark, while the thin red sliver of a forked tongue darted in and out of its toothless mouth.

Where the seal-thing was naked, this creature wore a basic sackcloth shirt and trews, like someone incarcerated in the poorhouse.

And there were still more abominations crowding in on them; things that were half-men and half sea-creature, the head of one - entirely hairless, its porcelain pale skin shot through with blue veins - swelled and then deflated again with its own pulsating rhythm, where there should have been a mouth nothing but the fronds of a sea anemone.

One squatted like a toad, its mouth forced open by a set of anglerfish jaws that were far too big for it. Another was only human from the trunk down; its arms were writhing octopoidal tentacles while the beaked head of some large fish sat directly on top of its shoulders. They were like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting he had once lifted from an art gallery, the denizens of some macabre garden of unearthly delights.

Nimrod tried to count how many of them there were, moving towards he and Jacob from out of the dank shadows. He reached twenty before another movement to his left distracted him from the task. Certainly there were more than he had bullets for. Perhaps he would only need to kill a few of them before the others gave up the fight.

Another peered around the corner of an archway, and for a moment Nimrod felt relief that there was another normal human being down there with them. The young woman looked at him with puppyish curiosity and then moved into the light cast by the flickering fizzing bulbs. Nimrod took an involuntary step backwards as he realised that the entire left-hand side of her body - the side that had been hidden behind the arch - was in no way human at all.

Half of her head was that of some overgrown insect, a lone mandible clacking uselessly from within the woman's distended mouth. Her torso writhed with unidentifiable pseudopods and she supported the weight of her albino body on a pair of crustacean limbs, as long as a man's arm and with one too many joints.

He bumped into something soft and pliable and spun on his heel again. The slug-like body, the size of a child with the face to match shifting and sliding across the inconstant, rippling flesh of the gastropod mollusc flinched, recoiling into its own mucusy mass.

Nimrod gagged. He was not one to have his stomach turned so easily, but what he and the freak had found down here, dwelling in near darkness under the Umbridge estate was something of another magnitude of appalling horror altogether.

Who would do such a thing? And how, against all the odds, had it been achieved?

As he was so ready to decry, Nimrod was not a medical man, but he knew enough about physiology to understand that any attempt to marry human flesh with that of another species should have resulted in failure and, like as not, death, as a result of tissue rejection.

In his moment of shocked hesitation, the things moved in closer again. He swallowed hard. It was time to take decisive action.

"Take care, Jacob," Nimrod said clearly, so that the other things present might hear him just as well. "They may be hostile."

Nimrod swept his pistol round in an arc in front of him. Instinctively, it seemed, the creatures moved back, as if they were fully aware of the danger the weapon presented. They must have seen such a thing before.

Nimrod set his eyes on the door he could see now at the end of the passageway; solid steel, with a small barred grille at face height.

He took a confident step forward and the gathered pack backed away before him. He poked his gun at a slavering, dog-faced creature and the horde moved away further still. Nimrod took another step forward into the space left by the retreating abominations. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Jacob still close behind him, the pack moving in to block the way back behind them.

Apart from the occasional discomforting mewling whimper, snake-like hiss or epileptic tapping of chitinous claws, none of the cellar's inhabitants moved to attack them, or to halt their progress. It seemed as though the half-human things were letting Nimrod and his companion pass, almost as if they were keen for them to make it to the door and leave. It was almost as if the creatures were showing them the way out.

As he passed the abominations he looked at them more closely. The things looked back at him with pleading watery eyes. And there was fear there too. He became aware of inflamed knots of scar tissue, where one unnatural body part was joined to another.

There were other marks too, that were not the result of some abominable surgery; burns, grazes, contusions. And there was something about the condition of their skin, the way it clung so closely to whatever passed for a skeleton in each individual case - if they even had such a thing - sunken eyes and bony joints that suggested malnutrition in many cases.

The longer he observed them the more certain he became. These were wretched specimens indeed, but what made their already abominable condition even worse was that they were scared and abused, both mentally and physically. They had been half-starved and beaten into submission. Nimrod was almost amazed that hunger hadn't driven them to fall upon each other. Perhaps they were more human than he had at first realised.

But who could do such a thing to creatures that must once have been human, no matter how unlikely that seemed now.

The rough, broken-nosed face of one individual came to mind immediately: Rudge, the gamekeeper.

The last of the surgical subjects hauled its massive bulk out of the way - a creature with the pallid, hairless physique of a great ape topped off with the head of a child, a languid expression in its eyes, and strings of saliva dangling from its stroke-twisted mouth - and then there was the door in front of them.

Nimrod tried the handle.

"I might have known it," he said gravely, finding himself talking in a whisper, feeling suddenly self-conscious in the expectant stillness that hung over the pack. "It's locked."