Click Clack

“What is it?” Andrew asked. He had noticed me stopping by a small pipe. I reached out and plucked a small piece of red and silver metal that had been perched on a steaming pipe, close to chest height. It was folded into the shape of a deer.

“My father makes these out of coke cans,” I said, holding it in front of my torch. “He gives them to us at Christmas and on birthdays. They’re little things but… they build up over time. I have dozens all lined up. He must have left this for us.”

“So we’re on the right track,” Caz said. “His directions are actually right?”

It had been six days since my father had gone into hiding in the London underground but this was the first time I thought I might actually find him. Quietly, I pocketed the little figurine and tried to kindle the feeling of hope it gave me.

“He must mean a lot to you,” Caz whispered.

“He’s kind,” I replied. “Everyone hears ‘schizophrenia’ and they think ‘psychopath’ but that’s not true at all. He lives in a scary world filled with voices and strange patterns. He’s vulnerable, not dangerous. He must be having a bad episode to come down here.”

“You said he’s done this before though,” Andrew said. “At least that means he knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s just he was 43 when he last spent some time down here. He’s 65 now and struggles with stairs.” I held up the bizarre list of directions he’d left me, some of which included ten foot drops onto hard concrete. “How’s he going to manage this?”

“I’ve never heard of a telecoms bunker anywhere in this part of the underground,” William said.

“If he’s where his letter says he is,” Andrew interrupted, flashing his brother a dirty look. “We’ll find him. We know everything down here.”

“Yeah,” William stammered, quickly adapting. “No one knows this city like we do.”

“How deep are we now?” Caz asked after a few minutes of silence had passed.

“Honestly I don’t know but I’m gonna guess about 60m,” William answered.

“There’s a kind of quality to the air past a certain depth,” Andrew added. “You learn to recognise it.”

“I never even knew this was all down here,” she replied.

“My dad was obsessed,” I said. “He used to research all the stuff hidden down here, but this bunker was his favourite of them all. When I found his directions I knew what it was going to say before I even opened it. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met, funny, passionate, and he’s… he’s just got this spark you know? But he overestimates himself. He thinks he’s invulnerable and I know he’s going to get himself hurt down here.”

“You’re a good son,” Caz said.

“You came to the right guys,” William added, turning over his shoulder to smile at me.

Silence returned and I kept my eyes down, trying to ignore the harsh monochrome concrete tunnel and the way it made me feel. Eventually, the two brothers led us to a creaking bulkhead that hung open on rusted hinges. Carefully William squeezed past the stiff door before crying out for us to follow. I soon found myself standing in an enormous reservoir, easily the size of ten football pitches. One of the nearby walls was inscribed with the letters: ACWW Ansley Wells Reservoir 1867-1869 and I excitedly told the others:

“This must be the reservoir he mentions in the letter.”

All around us dozens of red-brick pillars reached out of the water and into the vaulted roof, all perfectly aligned in diminishing rows. Andrew pushed ahead with a map held open in his arms, muttering quietly to himself.

“It shouldn’t be here,” William said after glancing at his brother. “I thought it would be a small side-tunnel, something unmarked, but there’s nothing, nothing in any documents about this. I figured he was just a craz—”

“Ahem!” Andrew coughed loudly, and William immediately shut up.

“Could you have just not heard about it?” Caz asked.

“No,” Andrew answered. “We’d know about something like this. If there was even a whisper about this the urban exploring community would be all over it. This is… it’s incredible. If we knew about this section of tunnels we’d be running tours down here every other day of the week. So would everyone else.”

“But is there a route through?” I asked. “I mean if the instructions he left me are accurate then… I mean doesn’t that mean we have a good chance of finding him?”

“Yes,” he replied. “So long as we find the manhole and ladder your father described.”

“Come on,” William said, and one by one we all began to march through the ankle deep water. Only we didn’t get very far before something caught my eye.

“There’s something under the water,” I said.

“What?” Andrew asked.

I walked over knowing it’d be quicker to show them than explain. The water wasn’t very deep, and I gingerly reached out to pick the object up.

“It’s an axe,” William said, not very far behind me. “Weird.”

He left and I could hear him telling Caz not to worry. Andrew however, who had also spotted the unusual mark along the handle, stayed right next to me. He gave me a knowing look and I nodded before dropping the axe back in the water.

It was blood, soaked into the very grain of the wood.

-

Click clack
He’ll break your back
Follow his laws and stay on track

The words were spray painted in stark white lettering across the pitted interior of a drainage pipe.

“Creepy,” Caz whispered before nervously chuckling. We all tried to laugh it off as well, as if we could somehow send the fear packing by bad acting.

It broke the spell enough or us to carry on. The pipe was wide enough for all four of us to walk abreast and so far my father’s instructions had not failed us. As we expected, we soon came across a rickety ladder rising up from the centre of the pipe to an already opened hatch. It was a about a thirty-foot climb to the top and the two brothers wasted no time in setting out the order of ascent. It was to be one at a time, just in case the ladder could not hold much weight.

I was to be last as I weighed the most, and I patiently waited as one by one the others climbed the ladder and disappeared. Just before Andrew left he stopped and saw me flick the torch nervously towards the darkness. He and I both knew there’d be a few nervous moments where I would be all alone.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah sure,” I answered. “Let’s just be quick about it.”

He nodded and began to climb, his footfalls appallingly loud. I waited patiently for him to climb, only when he was about half-way up we both heard a distinct sound from up ahead.

Click clack.

It was a single short exclamation amidst the silence.

Click clack.

There it was again, louder this time. I couldn’t see further than a few metres in any direction and my chest was tight with panic.

Click clack.

The water at my feet surged. I watched, confused, as it started rising above my ankles. I couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to be running uphill, although I hoped I’d just gotten turned around and couldn’t tell up from down. That made sense, I figured. More sense than the idea that the water was somehow fleeing something in the dark, something out there that had a presence I could feel crackle with an invisible charge. A presence that lingered directly on the mind as if it bypassed the senses and spoke to some primeval need to hide…

As soon as Andrew gave the all-clear, I grabbed the first rung and started climbing.

Click clack

I stopped without meaning to. I was half-way up but the sound was so close I had to look down and check. I could see nothing except churning water.

Click clack

It was so loud this time it didn’t even echo, like something spoken just over my shoulder. I decided not to wait and see and scrambled up the last few rungs, my grip shaky and clumsy. I kept worrying I was going to fall, but some primal need to flee had seized me and was urging me on.

Click clack

Thump

Click clack

Thump

Something was climbing up behind me. I felt my whole body tense up with terror and I practically leapt clear of the last few rungs. As soon as I was clear of the hatch I grabbed the cover and slammed it shut as hard as I could.

“Who was down there?” Andrew asked.

“Nothing,” I said, not sure I wanted to even trust what my eyes had glimpsed as I’d panicked in the dark.

-

My torch filled the room with a chalky light. Behind me a pipe dripped while Andrew swung the door shut with a keening rusted howl. We had finally found the bunker, or at least the door my father described, and found ourselves in a small room. Moving our lights, we saw three cots, the mattresses half-covered with bunched up khaki sleeping bags that cast lumpen drifting shadows. In the centre of the room was a table with a frayed pack of cards and a 10,000 piece jigsaw placed face down.

“I thought it was a world war 2 bunker?” Caz asked as she lifted an old Walkman CD player from beneath a pillow. “Unless someone has been here since?”

“The last time my father would have come down here was around 1996,” I said. “The letter makes no mention of seeing anyone living here. He said it was filled with gas masks and uniforms and paperwork from the 50s.”

We carried on into the next room where we found a small canteen. From there the bunker opened up into a labyrinth of industrial tunnels, their walls covered with lifeless dials and steel lockers. Choosing at random, we followed one of the tunnels to a small dormitory with just four bunk beds, all unmade and empty. At the foot of one of the beds was an unlatched and open trunk filled with women’s clothes. Buried beneath the underwear and overalls was a small book titled Millennial Apocalypse: The Y2k Bug and The Modern Mayan Prophecy.

“Y2K preppers,” I said.

“Clearly it wasn’t just your father who knew about this place,” Andrew replied. “Someone else must have thought it was a great place to hide out.”

“The Y2K bug was the only apocalypse he didn’t believe in,” I chuckled.

“How long do you think they were down here?” Caz asked.

I walked up to a nearby corkboard where a calendar was pinned and fanned through the pages. The last date marked was October 24th, 2001; the small square crossed off with a purple felt tip pen. All the dates before that were marked off, going all the way back to January with mentions of birthdays, anniversaries, and even Easter.

“Did they seriously spend all that time down here?” Caz asled.

“At least one of them was,” I replied, gesturing to the calendar.

“Let’s keep going,” William said. “I want to get a sense of how big this place is.”

We carried on exploring for at least another two hours. We found another dozen beds although not all looked used. One of the larger rooms had been turned into a kind of communal living space complete with tables and benches, and another was a small gym filled with fold-up exercise equipment. Surprisingly, very little of the bunker was dedicated to living space. The vast majority of the rooms were used for storage and we found whole walk-in freezers filled with desiccated and rancid meat that swung gently in the dark. Beneath them, people-sized sacks of grain and oats were stacked like firewood, their contents mushy and rotten.

There were generators, water filters, distillation units, lathes, presses, six kinds of fuel, books, and enough medical supplies to shame a hospital – there was even a room with half-a-dozen UV lights wired up over some long-dead plants. This wasn’t a half-arsed effort at surviving the end of the world. They’d been tremendously well-prepared.

But now they were gone.

Despite searching for hours, we kept finding new doors, new rooms, even whole new floors. The bunker seemed endless. Eventually William and Andrew decided we needed a break. I was standing at the threshold of the fourth sub-level, desperate to continue looking for my father, when they convinced me to step away and return to the entrance so we could regroup and discuss what we’d found. Begrudgingly I agreed and we began to retrace our steps only for something strange to catch our attention from up ahead. It was a sound coming from the entrance up ahead. I turned the corner with my breath held, waiting to hear that dreadful sound I’d heard in the tunnel.

Only what I found was somehow even more surprising.

“Dad!” I cried out, rushing ahead to greet my father. He looked startled for just a moment, but he didn’t turn to greet me. He never took his attention from the door that he was so desperately trying to pull shut. His face looked stretched out of shape, and it took me a few seconds to realise it was because he was scared in a way I’d never seen before.

“Dad it’s okay, it’s me,” I said taking a step forward. “These are my friends. We’ve come to get you out.”

“No!” he cried. “We have to close it! We have to stay!”

I was about to ask why, but then I heard it.

Click clack.

Without realising I became a man possessed and rushed forward to help my father, spurred on by the memory of that presence in the tunnel. From where I stood on the other side of the door, I could see nothing, but I knew everyone was confused and crying out their questions. I ignored them, pushing as hard as I could on that rusted bulkhead.

Click clack.

I heard Caz scream, and I was suddenly thankful I was behind the door. Suddenly William and Andrew were beside me, white with terror and pushing with all their might. Caz joined in too, and with all of us at it, the door finally swung shit and my father twisted the lock, sliding thick metal bars into place.

“I thought you said there was nothing down here!” Caz cried, turning to face our guides. “What the fuck was on the other side of that door?”

I decided to let William answer that and instead turned my attention to my father who was on his knees, gasping for breath.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, tears in his eyes.

And with that he shoved me aside and ran sobbing back into the shadows.

-

“Is it… is it a person?” she asked, staring through the tiny portcullis embedded in the door.

“Does it look like a person?” William said, his tone close to exasperation.

“Well it has two arms and two legs,” she answered. “There’s a head... I think. It’s just waiting.”

“Well it must be a person then,” he said with a facetious shrug. “Why don’t you go out and ask them about the weather?”

“We don’t have the answers,” Andrew said, stopping the argument before it began. “We don’t know anything, but I think if we all took a vote no one here would want to try and get past it.”

“I certainly don’t,” I said, aiming my response at Andrew. “ Maybe we’ll just get to laugh about this when we’re back up on the surface but for now I can’t think of anything worse than going back the way we came. At the very least I’d like to try and exhaust all other options because whatever is out there, it’s scaring the ever-loving shit out of me.”

“Do you think there could be another way out?” Caz asked.

“It’s worth checking,” I replied. “And I still need to find my dad.”

“This place is one of the largest underground facilities I’ve ever seen,” Andrew said. “It makes sense it’d have more than just the one entrance.”

--

“Is this what I think it is?” Andrew asked.

We huddled around him and stared at the haphazard sketch on one of the walls. At a glance it looked like a squarish mushroom or a top heavy wine cork but the more I stared the more details resolved themselves.

“Dorms, cooking, food, grain…” Caz muttered as she squinted to read the faded writing beside it. “First level.”

“It’s a map,” I muttered. “The preppers must have been exploring this place just like us.”

“That’s what I thought,” Andrew replied. “But… look, floor two they’ve got storage, fuel, cleaning supplies, electronics. On floor three they have filtration, water, distillery, UV lamps. On floor four there’s just sewage.”

“But it keeps going,” William said. He pointed towards the lower levels on the map. The lines were rough and covered with question marks. The map was clearly unfinished.

“There’s more here,” I said, showing everyone a notepad I’d been flicking through.

Floor 5: Some metal caskets, vases, nice paintings. Duplicates of ones I’ve seen in the London Museum. Museum ones fake, these ones real? Vault to protect valuable culture perhaps?

Floor 6: Funny looking computers. Don’t need to worry about 2k bug at least. They run on vacuum tubes. All busted up.

Floor 7: Loud machines down here make my teeth itch. Purpose ???

Floor 8: Filing cabinets everywhere, mostly empty. Some government documents remain, all redacted, logo and department thoroughly scrubbed. British and American flag on wall, both look weird. Wrong colours, wrong number of stars, wrong stripes. Illuminati?

Floor 9: Too dark to see, torch low on battery. Will return later. Could at least see stairs to another floor. How deep is this place?

“They don’t make a single mention of a way out,” Caz said.

“But they didn’t explore it all,” I replied.

“Is that even possible?” she asked. “How could they live here all this time and not explore it all? How big is this fucking place? If I didn’t know any better I’d say it was built from the bottom-up”

“We’ll just have to go see for ourselves,” I said.

-

During our descent we each made our own worrying observations. Caz, for example, observed that many of the paintings on floor 5 were not duplicates but rather slight variations of famous paintings. When asked if they were fakes, her response was a little strange.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “This, this is a near perfect carbon copy of one of the early sketches of a Monet, except it’s a full canvas painting instead of just a preliminary outline.”

“Well maybe the fraud used the wrong version?” William asked.

“I doubt it,” she replied. “The sketch was unearthed just a year or two ago.”

We carried on, stepping over obsidian caskets, redwood trunks, human-sized urns, and mouldy sagging cavasses until we reached floor 6 where we found ourselves surrounded by an unusual army of upright machines with glass faces. They looked faintly like computers but lacked any kind of interface that I could recognise. As described in the journal, a few of them had dusty and cracked vacuum tubes but others lacked them. I might have thought them little more than novel antiques were it not for one of the machines that bore a tiny inscription reading Magnetic Resonance Safe Display.

I didn’t tell the others; the anachronism confused me but I didn’t know what it meant. As it was we were forced to hurry through floor 7 to avoid the wretched smell of o-zone emanating from an army of humming machines, their glass portcullises glowing a peculiar blue that pricked the skin if you strayed too close. William even burned himself wiping some dust from one of them, and in doing so revealed that a strange four-fingered streak along the glass had somehow been made on the inside.

It was almost a relief when we found floor 8 filled with nothing but endless filing cabinets. Unlike the journal description, we found them to be empty and were left to silently make our way through their disorderly arrangement, zigzagging through them until, finally, William cried out,

“Where’s this stairway the journal mentioned?”

“God knows,” I replied. “This place is a maze.”

“I’m not sure I even want to find it,” Caz said, her voice carrying strangely in the dark.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“If there’s another way out, there’s another way in.”

I can’t say why it hadn’t occurred to me before but the thought hit me like a breeze block. I stopped dead in my tracks, as did William and Andrew, and only Caz was left pottering around, oblivious to the effect her sentence had had on us.

“You don’t think…?” Andrew muttered.

“Guys,” Caz said. “I think I found something.”

She was stood by a wall of lockers that had been pushed over and dragged to fill a small stairwell. It had all the makings of a hasty and desperate barricade.

“Should we…?” I asked.

Click

What immediately followed that sound couldn’t have taken longer than a few seconds, but there were a million thoughts running through my head and the events played out like in some kind of slow mo.

In the harsh silvery light of my torch—the air thick with raining motes of dust—one of the cabinets was thrown and sent tumbling down the pile. I became paralysed by an electric terror that seized me, my eyes wide and my mouth open in a silent cry.

Clack.

Another locker was lifted up and thrown aside, falling end over end like a domino.

Click clack.

A hand emerged from beneath the pile of twisted metal, its palm pale and strangely large. It pushed more and more of the lockers away until, at last, a head appeared. It was dangling lopsidedly from a broken neck with a slack pair of milky eyes and a drooling mouth. That sagging wretched head was adorned with a policeman’s helmet, and from the neck down he wore a buttoned down constable’s uniform like something straight of the Victorian era. Bound to his hip was a strange looking baton connected to a rusted power-pack by dozens of coiled copper wires,.

He was huge, not muscular just… large, like he came straight out of a different world. His enormous groping hands looked big enough to crush my skull and, as if ready to signal his intent, the monster’s head snapped from right to left—*CLICK CLACK—*and he took a step forward.

William acted first, leaping forward into a running jump to kick the strange figure back into the stairwell, but it was like moving a tree. He struck the giant with a quiet thump and fell backwards onto the floor. He was scrambling to get up when the constable’s giant hand wrapped around his head and lifted him from the floor. Wasting no time Andrew ran forward, pulled free a knife, and began trying to frantically free his brother. But the blade did nothing - no blood, no pain, no change in grip. It was like he stabbing at straw.

I felt a gentle tug on my sleeve and nearly screamed, but the hand that reached up and gripped my own felt warm and somehow familiar. A glance down showed my father staring up at me, finger pressed to his mouth. He was crouched in darkness. He pulled me away just as Caz started screaming and a loud crack reverberated through the dark. My father grabbed me and stared into my eyes. Silently he mouthed for me to follow. Hesitating, I turned back but all I saw was a confused display of criss-crossing lights, and the desperate sounds of a struggle.

“It’s the only way,” my father whispered and, much to my shame, I followed. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was my deepest hope he’d take me somewhere safe. In reality, he dragged me into a small nook made by the endless rows of cabinets and he made us both crouch down in the darkness. There wasn’t really anywhere to hide properly, and all we could do was hide and wait and hope that whatever was looking for us wouldn’t look very hard.

It felt like a long time, waiting there. There was a terrible tearing sound, like paper being ripped from end-to-end. Screaming turned to painful wails, then grief-wracked sobs, and at last a quiet, despondent, silence. Whether the others had hidden, ran, or died one-by-one, I couldn’t say. A broken headlight lay somewhere on the floor where it cast dismal shadows, and I nearly gasped when I saw the wretched silhouette of the helmeted-giant taking another step.

Click Clack

Each footfall was punctuated by the stomach-churning sight of the monster’s snapping from side to side.. I swear I could feel that thing looking for us in the darkness, the same way you can feel someone looming over your shoulder. It was like a person magnified, not just in size but in spirit and intent.

With each step it took, my father tightened his grip around my wrist until, at last, the terrifying crescendo came and passed, and I watched the faint blue shadowy outline of the ghostly constable pass by our hiding spot without turning to look our way.

“It’s not stupid,” my father whispered, so quiet there was barely any breath to his hushed plea, only the wet sounds of him mouthing the words. “It knows we’re still here. Be quiet.”

He moved ahead of me on all fours and I followed. He turned left at the end of the lockers, towards the stairwell, and I nearly panicked at the thought of turning my back on the monster that still click-clacked somewhere in that very room. I couldn’t say if I was particularly stealthy; my breath was held most of the time and my heart felt like it was battering against my ribcage. But we reached the stairwell in safety, and I blanched at the feeling of something wet and warm along my hands and knees.

But my father didn’t stop, and in fact he made sure to turn and beckon for me to follow even as we passed the pulped remains of one of my former party members. The tussled blond hair made me think of William, but the bubbling mess of broken bones and pulped flesh meant it could easily have been Andrew, or even both of them crunched together like two corpses fed through a trash compactor.

Feet first, and on our stomachs, we backed down through the hole in the barricaded stairwell. The last thing I saw before my head ducked beneath the portal was a light glowing in the distance. With horror I realised that the monster had lifted up some kind of lantern to bathe us in light.

Click clack

“Please do not be alarmed!” it cried. Its voice a robotic transmission that sounded deeply warped. Even from afar I was certain it came from no human mouth, certainly not the slack drooling orifice I had glimpsed on its face. It was the kind of voice you’d use to force civilians into a bomb shelter, or even out onto a firing line. I inherently distrusted the speaker and whoever had authored it into this world. “Travellers! Do not panic! Risk of contamination is minimal. Entropic parasites are not present in this location. Goosehead infestation is under control. Please present yourself for examination by an officer.

“Vigilance is the price of safety.

“This is our last resort.

“There is no other refuge.”

-

“Does he eat them?” I asked, staring at the rows and rows of cages filled with desiccated remains. Some had been split open at the legs like wishbones, one had been forced through the unyielding metal bars and gored brutally in the process, but most looked like they’d starved to death. Approaching one, my father bent over and picked up a piece of paper and held it up to me. It was an unremarkable form with dozens of boxes only they’d been filled in with a desperate scrawl and the fingers that gripped it had clearly been wet and greasy.

Arrest report 203887

Infraction: failure to present Prosiah ID to arresting officer. Non-compliance with police is grievous offence.

Initial scans show lack of vaccination nanites. Translocation without prior vaccination is grievous offence.

Personal possessions suggest culprit has stolen from locals. Breaching integration protocols is grievous offence.

Suspect details are transcribed below.

Name: FUCK YOU!

Citizen ID No.: What the fuck are you on about!?

Initial statement: What the fuck is wrong with you? Let me go!

Notes from arresting officer: I’m very cold.

In the corner of the room there was a bizarre copper coffin that stank of decay and mould, wired up to a strange machine that hummed like those we’d found in the glowing blue-room. From the size of it I guessed it belonged to the policeman chasing us, although I could scarcely imagine why the floor was riddled with rusted and bent nails that would pierce the flesh of anyone who lay within. Then again, I remembered Andrew stabbing at the forearm and producing only a vague cloud of dust, and I realised that whatever was hunting us clearly had a high pain threshold.

We carried on downwards, passing through what I considered to be the policeman’s “workshop” and into a larger laboratory like structure and a meeting hall plastered with faded propaganda posters. One showed a smiling policeman much like the one who chased us, looming over a menacing figure who was too faded to see. Behind the policeman was a red-headed cartoon of a woman, clutching his coat tails for safety.

“Seen a goosehead? Find your nearest ReConned Officer!”

And in smaller print beneath:

“Reconstituted officers are immune to the entropic blight! Seek one immediately if you believe a goosehead is in the vicinity. DO NOT TOUCH THE INFECTED.”

The policeman in the poster was enormous, and clearly alike to the one who haunted us, but his head was set normally, and he looked quite cheery. His face was alert, intelligent even. Close by, another poster showed a similar looking policeman looming over a London skyline, a stern paternal expression worn on his face. The poster read:

“Even the meekest man may have the heart of a lion! Stand up against the plague. Resist the entropic parasites. Science can elevate the flesh, but this nation needs YOUR spirit! Something worse than death stalks London, do YOU have what it takes to stem the tide of parasitic assault?

“Keep your country safe. Keep your family safe. Inquire about reconstitution at your local constabulary.”

I turned my light to the final poster. It depicted a rowdy looking soldier winking at a woman who walked past with a smile. Just below was another panel showing him at a clinic, the doctor vomiting while the soldier’s skin slowly started to drip from his bones.

“The locals may look like us! They may talk like us! But they are NOT from our world.

“FOLLOW TRANSLOCATION PROTOCOLS! Keep your family safe. Keep your country safe. Do NOT fraternise with the natives!”

I jumped when a few seconds later my dad spoke aloud. I turned to see him holding a piece of paper in his hands. He read from it aloud.

“Word came down from HQ on what to do with Officer 217. Support told me that ReConned officers without executive function are a nightmare to contain so I guess we’re not the first to deal with this. They say if we ship him back they’ll be able to kill him. It may seem small with everything going on, but with the future so uncertain we can’t have a ReCon walking around in eternal pain. It’s dangerous to everyone and, not to mention, very cruel.

“As soon as the next safe opening comes along we’ll send him back. If there’s still a HQ, they can sort it out. If not then at least we don’t have to worry about him giving us away. By the way, I saw you practicing in the mirror. Your accent is getting better. Any day now and I’ll arrange a visit to the surface.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“God knows,” he answered, before taking my arm and leading me to a stairwell in the corner of the lab. When we descended we found at ourselves at another floor that strongly resembled a metro station. It bore the sign:

“Outpost 18997.” But graffitied underneath were the words: “The Last Stop! Nowhere else to go!”

Gas masks littered the floor, and the railway was clogged with a thousand bleached bones whose screaming skulls looked out from behind cracked and broken visors. They were all reaching for the platform. Turning my light on I could just about glimpse a broken down carriage some distance away. Like the other machines in this place it bore strange tesla coils and copper orbs that I imagine once crackled with electricity and power, but which were now either thick with rust or covered in sickly Verdigris.

I nearly gasped when a breeze flowed through the tunnel and tousled my hair. For a fleeting moment I thought about abandoning all sense and running into it with open arms and joyful cries, but we were nowhere near the surface. And why were all the skeletons fleeing towards us?

“Dad,” I asked, finding myself able to give voice to the thought for the first time since we’d been reunited. “What the fuck is this place?”

“Just a bunker,” he sighed. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. Just about anything except this. I’m starting to think,” he gestured towards the tunnel, “that that tunnel doesn’t lead home at all.”

“At least not our home?”

“Right.”

Click.

“Fuck,” I hissed.

Clack.

“I thought there’d be a way out,” my dad said, his face bunching up, close to tears. “Oh God I’m such an idiot I thought I’d be safe. I thought…”

“Come on,” I said. “We simply have no other choice.”

-

The tunnel ended in a wall, only the breeze kept on coming. It smelled odd, a little like the dust filled air of a construction site. Dad reached out and touched it and we saw the whole wall ripple like water. If we hadn’t been running for our lives, we might have even felt awe and wonder.

Click clack

“Here we go,” I said, taking a deep breath. Dad turned to look over his shoulder at the source of the noise, only to pull his pull his hand back from the illusory wall.

It didn’t come back alone.

Something was on the end of his finger. Something that looked a little like the spots you see in your eye on a sunny day, or like the little worms that haunt the corner of your vision. Only it wasn’t flat like those visual flare ups. It was thick, three dimensional, and about the size of a leech. It looked a little like something alive and made out of a mixture of KY Jelly and the rainbows you see on oil. Before either of us had a chance to ask about it, it began to engulf his hand.

“Shit shit shit,” he hissed. “Get it off! Get it off!”

Dad tried to flick the thing off like a bit of snot but it didn’t react to inertia or even gravity. The way it bubbled and moved around his skin, it didn’t even look like it could interact with his hand, like it wasn’t made out of the same matter as the rest of us. It got about half-way up his arm before he started screaming.

Click clack

The constable was visible now, working hard to keep its feet steady on the mountain of bones. It was taking its time. But then again, we didn’t have anywhere to go, so what was the rush?

“Get it off!” Dad screamed, collapsing to his knees. He held his arm up and I saw that there were holes punched clean through his flesh like he was a piece of swiss cheese. By now the worm-thing had swallowed his whole arm up to the shoulder, its quivering translucent flesh expanding by the second. Every second or two it would seize up and appear to strain with effort, and another geometrically perfect hole would be punched into my father’s flesh, bisecting bone and muscle like it was nothing more than paper.

“Infestation detected!” the constable cried, and I turned to see him closer than ever before. “Biological vessel has breached translocation. Containment protocols have failed.”

He reached down and grabbed my father’s skull like it was an orange, and he lifted him off the ground effortlessly.

“ReConn Officer 217 preparing for unscheduled emergency translocation.”

Click!

The monster’s head lurched towards me on its broken neck.

“Do not attempt to flee before the arrival of further police presence. Doing so will only increase the severity of your sentencing. Remain where you are.”

Clack!

The neck snapped back, and without further delay the monster stepped forward into the rippling wall, taking my screaming father with it.

-

It is not, it turns out, all that uncommon for people to go missing in the underground. Andrew, William, and Caz were not asked after, at least not by the government. Their families have tried to hire private investigators, I understand, but for the most part nothing looks odd from the outside. They held tours underground in dangerous places. They’d had one or two close-calls before (which I’d never heard of when first hiring them), and the police weren’t at all surprised it had ended badly for them. I never even had to come up with much of an excuse. I told them about the drain pipe, the one with the ladder, and said it had flooded while we were part-way through it.

After that nobody asked any questions. Well… except for one. He was a policeman, a normal looking one. And he turned up at my door three weeks after it had all died down while wearing a smile that made my stomach churn. He looked decent enough, I guess. I hadn’t wanted to think too much about anything down there and after telling so many lies a part of me started to believe them. Maybe we had nearly drowned? Maybe I had spent two delirious days stumbling around while half-dying of pneumonia? It made a lot more sense.

But this guy, he didn’t look right. Not so much in the face, but in the way he looked at me, the way he smiled. He said he had a few more check ups to do and entered my home with a polite manner, but one which didn’t really let me protest. He just entered, nodding and speaking the whole time about the weather and the upcoming easing of lockdown and the smell of good food cooking in my neighbour’s kitchen.

Nothing about it was right. Nothing at all. Least of all the suitcase in his right hand that looked nothing like the kind of thing a cop should carry. It was old battered leather with a funny little lock made of oily brass. When it clicked open he kept its inside facing away from me, but I caught a glimpse of some wires, maybe even a glass tube.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just a test,” he said with a smile and an hard-to-place accent. “All sorts of things down there, I reckon. All sorts of funny bugs… parasites. Just want to make sure you didn’t bring any of them back with you. One day, I hope, someone will go down and block all that nonsense off. That way we never have to worry about people getting hurt again. But uh… well some people can be sentimental about history.”

His eyes, turned down towards the mysterious case, were filled with tension. At one point I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and he flinched. He tried to hide it, but I got the sense if I reached out and touched him he would’ve screamed the house down. Only all of that changed when a little ding rang out from the whirring machine that he wouldn’t let me see. Suddenly the case snapped shut and he was reaching out to shake my hand.

“Oh so good!” he cried, and I could see the relief in his face was coming from somewhere deep inside his soul. “No infection,” he said. “Clean bill of health!”

“No parasites,” I replied “entropic or otherwise.” And he stopped dead like I’d slapped him hard. That creepy forced cheeriness disappeared, and he looked at me with so much sadness in his eyes.

“Was anybody down there?” he asked.

“Nobody alive,” I answered.

“We thought as much,” he replied. “Nothing down there worth saving, I suppose?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, trying but failing to look unphased, “I suppose we’re here for good.”

And with that he left, his strange little suitcase tucked under one arm.