Read The Feaster From The Stars (Blackwood and Harrington) for Free Online Page B

it?’
    ‘Can you hear her?’ Smallwood asked in a thin, strained voice.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The child.’
    ‘We heard her,’ said Brennan.
    ‘I thought I’d hit her. She was on the line, right in front of me. That’s why I stopped.’
    Smallwood gasped and put his hand to his mouth as the thin, tremulous little voice echoed again through the tunnel.
    ‘I don’t like the way that sounds,’ whispered Brennan.
    ‘Shut yer gob, Seamus!’ said Tench. ‘If there’s a child on the metals, we’ll have to tell Fraser and do a tunnel search – and I don’t like the way that sounds.’
    ‘It isn’t a child,’ said Smallwood.
    Brennan and Tench looked at him, and then at each other. ‘What are you talkin’ about, Bert?’ asked Tench.
    ‘It isn’t a child,’ Smallwood repeated. ‘Not anymore.’
    At that moment, the light from their Tilley lamps faded, as if they had suddenly run out of fuel, and then the train’s lights went out, plunging them into impenetrable darkness. Smallwood moaned in terror.
    ‘What the bleedin’ hell’s going on?’ whispered Tench.
    The darkness did not last, however, for presently the three men became aware of a faint blue glow which seeped into the driver’s cab, evidently from somewhere up ahead.
    ‘What’s that?’ said Tench. ‘Another train? Can’t be.’
    ‘It isn’t,’ said Brennan, pointing through the cab’s front windows.
    There was a shape on the railway tracks, made hazy and indistinct by distance and the glow which surrounded it… or which perhaps emanated from it, and as the shape drew nearer, the men saw that its outline was that of a human being, small and frail.
    It was a little girl.
    The silence in the cab was broken only by the ragged breathing of the three men, who watched in disbelief as the glowing figure drew up to the front of the train and looked up at them through the windows.
    ‘God,’ whispered Brennan. ‘Oh God…’
    The girl was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old and was terribly thin. The long gown that she wore trailed behind her, and Brennan quickly realised that it was a burial shroud. Her pale blue face was drawn in anguish, or perhaps fear, or perhaps a mixture of the two, and her eyes were wide and filled with the darkness of the grave as she looked up at them.
    The men were terrified, of course, but it was not fear which smote their rough hearts as much as sympathy, a searing compassion which flooded their entire beings at the sight of this poor, benighted, lonely little creature.
    ‘Who is she?’ whispered Tench.
    His companions did not answer.
    ‘Is she… alive?’
    The waif looked up at him, and then at Brennan, and then at Smallwood, her face bathed in the blue glow.
    And then she opened her mouth and let out such a piercing scream that the railway men clapped their hands to their ears and shut their eyes, thinking that their eardrums would burst. She screamed again and again, and such was the loudness and the anguish of it that they thought they would go mad. The screams echoed back and forth along the tunnel, filling the darkness…
    Across the city in Chelsea, Thomas Blackwood’s eyes flashed open, and he sat up in bed. His mind, drifting on the edge of sleep, had suddenly revealed the source of his vague memory of having read a strange word somewhere…
    ‘Carcosa,’ he said into the darkness of his bedroom. ‘Oh, good God!’

CHAPTER FIVE:
T he Fantasmata of Simon Castaigne
    When Sophia called at Blackwood’s rooms the following morning, she found Mrs Butters in a state of some agitation. ‘Oh, do come in, your Ladyship!’ exclaimed the housekeeper as she threw the door wide and beckoned Sophia inside.
    ‘Whatever is the matter, Mrs Butters?’ Sophia asked as she stepped into the hall and took off her hat and coat.
    ‘It’s Mr Blackwood, ma’am; I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He won’t come out of his study – didn’t even want his breakfast. And he hasn’t even got dressed yet, and here