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9781416503446

Subterranean

by
  • ISBN13:

    9781416503446

  • ISBN10:

    1416503447

  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 2006-11-28
  • Publisher: Pocket Star
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List Price: $7.99

Summary

Tonsell-by-the-Stream, a sleepy little village outside of London, is suddenly swallowed down into the earth through the hellish machinations of an ancient, ominous force. At the behest of an extraordinary supernatural agent -- and in exchange for the life of his best friend -- down-and-out and amoral occultist John Constantine must venture deep into underground shadows to investigate this cataclysmic occurrence. But unbeknownst to Constantine, something beyond his worst nightmares awaits below -- the deadly and phantasmagorical realm of the Sunless . . . a terrifying world where the Gloomlord rules over all with a sadistic and merciless hand, and Tonsell-by-the-Stream was only his first target on the surface world. . . .

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Excerpts

1

SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHAMBHALA -- AND SOME MIGHT CALL IT SHEOL

Setting out on his mission, eager to follow the stranger, Duff Duffel heard the soft-headed boys sniggering at him as he left the only surviving village pub in Tonsell-by-the-Stream, Cornwall. "Dee old Dee!" called the boy Bosky, as Duff clutched his old Navy coat about himself in the late afternoon May drizzle and shuffled past the alley where the young wastrels clacked their dice and their skateboards. The boy Bosky wasn't such a bad sort; he had to give the old man a jeer or two, but he was never one to call him a stinking old drunk, like that Upson fellow. Duff gave the jeering no more thought than he gave the chattering of squirrels in Smithson Wood. He knew the locals thought him daft, called him Daft Old Duff, wrote him off as a senile guzzle-guts, and he cared not a speck, because in his time he'd seen marvels and dreams come to life, indeed he had. His soul had left his body and flown to the Palace of Phosphor; he had bestrode the rings of Saturn and he had seen dryads dancing in the circles of stone.

He belched a memory of the three ales he'd drunk -- drunk them watching the stranger in the pub -- and he picked up his pace, beginning to wheeze in keeping up with the interloper, who was now fifty yards up the lane, heading for the edge of the village. Mr. MacCrawley was this burly, sharply dressed toff's name -- so the pub keeper had called him, when he'd settled his bill for the drinks and two days renting the little flat out back of the pub.

Now this MacCrawley was striding away down the lane, but Duff had seen him in the smoky pub clear enough: a stocky man, wide-shouldered, with iron gray hair cut short, almost bald; black tufted eyebrows, pale gray eyes, and a jutting block of chin. He wore a fine Savoy Row greatcoat, the color of fog, and shiny new black shoes. On an index finger was a ring with a great red cabochon, on which was carved a symbol few would know: a dragon with its body curved into the shape of anS, twining the letterT. Duff knew that crest, for he had been the apprentice of a true magician in his time. Duff's drinking and whoring had caused Master Scofield to turn him out, but it was Scofield who came a cropper -- for he vanished into the Deep Barrow, and never did return. The magician was dead, surely, while Duff still tottered about, drawing the dole and getting by on odd jobs, doing his little castings now and then, just to keep his hand in, but afraid to go far with it. If a spirit did answer his conjuring, it was only to laugh at him.

Duff passed the flower and gift shop -- it would scarcely survive, were it not for the American tourists, buying supposed "Celtic pendants" and the like -- in the window of which was a placard advertising the "Flower Show and Jumble Sale in Aid of Preservation." Up ahead, MacCrawley had turned the corner. "He's off to that barrow in the wood, he is," Duff muttered. "I knew it, too, did I not? I did!"

Duff hesitated about following MacCrawley into Smithson Wood. He had only a half pint of whiskey on him in his old Navy coat, and he was not sure so little drink would see him through a visit to the barrow, a place he had not visited these twelve years and more.

Still, it was Duff's mission to protect this village from the likes of MacCrawley -- from those who bore that sigil on their rings, and the dire disembodied who served them. Old Duff was not appreciated for his efforts, no not by half. More than once he'd driven away those harridan mists who fed on the bone marrow of old men and women, so that elders could not fight the sicknesses that came and died of pneumonia. The villagers laughed at him, as he ran through the village waving switches of ash wood at what they supposed were scraps of fog, but Duff forgave them, they didn't know better, and more than one of them had given him the price of a bowl of soup and a drink on a cold night.

So Duff made himself plod onward, after MacCrawley; made himself continue on into the lengthening shadows of the wood.

"Who is that MacCrawley bloke then, Skupper?" asked Butterworth -- a middle-aged, moonfaced man with a thick crop of long, dyed-blond, permed hair, looking up from snooker as the landlord of the Sleeping Plowman returned from the bog -- the landlord sniffing his fingers, as he always did. "I've seen him coming out of His Nibs' -- twice he was there not twenty-four hours past. What's he up to?"

The landlord, "Skupper," a gloomy man of no certain age, greased-back hair, pitted skin, and a red nose -- for he tippled right along with his customers -- only growled in response, running his beefy hands down his stained apron, slipping his substantial girth behind the bar like an eel fitting into a hole too small for it.

"Come on then, Skupper! I've got a right to know! I'm on the committee to save this here pub -- "

"Don't want to save it," Skupper growled, pulling a lever to gush draft into a glass. "Want to sell the buggerin' bog-hole."

" -- and if he's buying up property round here from Lord Smithson, why, we have a right to see to preservation -- there's preservation laws! It's hard enough keeping some semblance of tradition, with the foot-and-mouth driving the piggeries and sheepmen out of business. How many farms selling off to developers, and the like! The only other pub already turned into flats! And fox hunting banned, so Lord Smithson can't go out anymore with his hounds!"

"Here, you're one to talk of tradition, Butterworth," said Harry Garth, a cadaverous man with white hair and a deeply lined face, and a cap he'd had so long it was scarcely more than a rag, though he had money enough from selling his dairy to buy any number of new caps. "Wasn't so long ago you were trying to get us to host a bloody rock festival!"

"Wasn't long ago, he says!" Butterworth retorted, chalking his cue furiously. "Why, that was twenty-five bloody years ago! I was scarcely more than a boy!"

"Was I you, Butterworth," said Skupper, scowlingly wiping out a glass with a rag that might be making it dirtier than it had been before, "I would not ask overmuch about MacCrawley and Lord Smithson. If they is doing deals, Smithson won't take to anyone poking their great beezers into 'is business. They're in some kind of lodge together too, like the Masons or the Oddfellers, for they both got the ring -- and them as in lodges is tight."

"He's right," said Garth. "You run your tourist shop at the sufferance of 'is Lordship. Turn you out whenever he pleases!"

Butterworth scoffed -- then pointed his cue at the back door, where Garth's teenage grandson, Bosky, was furtively reaching through to a forgotten glass of whiskey on a table, trying to snake it out without being seen. "Here, Garth, your grandson's at the whiskey again!"

"Bosky!" Garth roared, coming out of his booth, waving his cane. "Cease and desist, boy, or I'll tell your mother, you -- "

Bosky snagged the whiskey glass and ducked out with it, tittering, followed by an ashtray thrown by Skupper. "Garth, you'd better keep your grandson out of here or I'll have the rozzers on him!"

Outside, Bosky knocked back the whiskey, shuddered, tossed the shot glass into a pile of crates and led the way out of the alley as Finn and Geoff came complaining after him, asking why he hadn't shared the drink. "Because it wasn't enough to share, you pillocks! Come on, let's go to the wood and smoke up what I got in my pocket!"

"You what?" Geoff chided him. "You said you had nothing!"

"Almost nothing. It's not much more than a crumble . . . Let's cut through Mrs. Bushel's yard . . ."

They were running much of the time, vaulting fences, dodging bulldogs -- two bulldogs, one old and fat and one young and sleek, in two yards -- and pounding up the lane, skylarking, trying to trip one another up. Then they veered off the road onto the familiar path into the Smithson Wood, his Lordship's land, as so much was hereabouts, Geoff tapping at his iPod to try to get it going, stumbling over the mossy stones as he frowned down at the device. "Forgot to charge the bloody thing . . ."

Bosky led them through the intermittent shafts of sunlight slanting through the branches of the alders, the ash trees, the English oaks. The thin cloud cover, sometimes drooling rain, only reluctantly let the sun through . . .

Not a quarter mile more and they'd reached the place some called "the barrow," an old pile of stony hummocks taking up most of a clearing. They liked to smoke the green that Bosky got from his cousin in London here, and many of the stones were marked with their graffiti.

"You reckon any of those mushrooms could be magic, like?" Finn asked, kicking at the circle of toadstools around the great tumble of gray stones. "I mean -- ya know -- psychedelic shrooms."

"Oh you'd hallucinate a treat, right before you died!" Bosky hooted. "Those aren't shrooms, you git, they're toadstools. Here . . ." He passed the little brass pipe to Finn, a pale, athletic boy -- or he had been, once -- with white-blond hair, nicknamed for his Finnish ancestry.

"Shite you've crammed a lot of old joint-ends in there -- we're smoking paper. Too harsh -- "

"Oh stop your whining, Finn," Bosky said, climbing up on the rocks. "Hey -- there's someone's coat laid over one of these rocks! Crikey that's a fine coat too!"

"Here, this big rock's been moved -- " Geoff called. He was a bespectacled boy with pale skin, freckles, red-brown hair trailing over his collar -- the one who'd excelled in school before they'd given all that up. "Look -- a tunnel!"

"Stay away from that tunnel you little fools!" a voice croaked from the edge of the clearing.

Startled, they turned to see Old Duff swaying in the waist-high weeds just this side of the screen of ash trees. "Ha! Old Duff!" Bosky crowed. "Is this your coat, then?"

"Not a chance it's his!" Geoff snorted. "It doesn't smell like whiskey -- and it's too fine for him. Someone with money left that coat there!"

"Money? You reckon?" Bosky picked the coat up and immediately began poking through its pockets. But he found nothing much -- only a meerschaum pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco.

"I should put that coat down immediately, but gently, if I were you," said a rumblingly silky voice from the tunnel's mouth. Stooped over, MacCrawley emerged, dusting himself off. Cobwebs clung to his elbows. He stepped away from the tunnel and to one side -- rather hastily -- putting out his hand toward Bosky, who silently handed the coat over. And then the pipe and tobacco.

There was a raspy, breathy sound coming from the tunnel now. And an unpleasant smell. Like nothing Bosky'd ever smelled before. Something that smelled dead -- but not.

"Run boy, get away from there!" Old Duff shouted.

"What has he to fear, Old Duff?" MacCrawley asked, lofting his eyebrows theatrically. "That tunnel leads to a glorious sight -- some might call it Shambhala! 'Course some might call it Sheol too!" He chuckled creakily.

Never taking his eyes off Bosky, MacCrawley put the coat back on and then pointed -- while still staring at Bosky -- at the Finn. "You, boy! Come here!"

"Sod off, you old poof!" Finn said to MacCrawley. "I'm not going to -- "

"Oh but you will, my lad!" MacCrawley interrupted, turning toward Finn and making a curious hand motion, as if he were reeling something invisible toward him. Finn's eyes glazed, and he stumbled toward MacCrawley.

Bosky stared. "Finn?"

The raspy sound from the low tunnel entrance became a whipping noise, and Bosky turned to see a long, hairless, gray-black, rope-muscled arm stretching out. There were only four fingers on the hand, fingers shaped like those of a toad but longer than a man's, and they tapped at the ground as if tasting, sniffing it. On and on the arm stretched . . . impossibly far, two yards, and three. And still it stretched out, with a crackling sound, its elbow switching back and forth double-jointedly, the fingers trembling as it reached for Finn's ankle --

"Finn! Get back!" Geoff yelled, climbing up toward him. But Duff was there then, dragging both Geoff and Bosky back with surprising strength.

Finn came out of his trance as the long prehensile gray fingers closed around his ankle -- he screamed as it jerked him off his feet and dragged him as fast as a frog sucking in a fly, down into the tunnel. In a moment he was gone -- they heard only his echoing shriek.

"I disturbed the grippler," MacCrawley remarked, rolling the small boulder -- and showing no significant effort -- to cover the hole again. "It was coming for me -- had to give it someone. Would have been awkward, otherwise." He gave the boulder a final push and then turned to the boys, who were backing away, aghast.

MacCrawley grinned wolfishly, showing a mouthful of blocky yellow teeth. "Now off with you -- back to your little hovels -- you wouldn't want to miss the fun." He reached into his trouser pocket and Duff expected him to pull out a magic wand, but instead it was a large black metal revolver. MacCrawley pointed it at them. "You heard me -- and that means you too, old man! Get back to the village or I'll find you and your families and put bullets in the whole lot."

The boys needed no more urging; they fled, the old man puffing along behind them. They went by the shortest route, across the fields, following the cow paths.

The rain had started to fall with more decision before the two boys arrived at the outer reaches of Tonsell-by-the-Stream. They were still running, pounding across the old stone bridge arching over the Hillcrease River, which was in fact too small to be rightly called a river. Just on the other side, Bosky pulled up short, breathing hard, leaning forward, hands on his knees. "Oh Christ, I've got to stop smoking."

"Bosky . . . what're those?" Geoff asked, wiping rain from his eyes and pointing.

Bosky looked at what he supposed were ordinary surveyor's stakes, the sort one sees in fields marking a place for building, only what was hanging from the stakes wasn't the usual soft plastic streamer. He walked over to it to be sure -- the stake had been driven just atop the grassy bank of the river, on the village side -- and Bosky confirmed for himself that it wasn't a plastic flag; it was, yes, a streamer of skin and hair,humanskin and hair, because part of the face was there too, hanging from a knot of the brown hair still in the torn-away scalp. It was missing its eyeballs, but the sockets and nose and upper lip were there, a bit leathery but recognizable, like a mask made of human skin. Rainwater ran over it, made the skin look like it was sweating. There were curious little runes scrawled on the stake, running down its vertical length. Looking at the skin, Bosky's stomach contracted, and he backed away, gagging.

"Fuck me! There's more of them, Bosky!"

Bosky looked up to see there was a line of the stakes, at the top of the grassy bank, each about seventy-five feet from the next, following the outer edge of the town, along the river.

"We're awake, aren't we, Bosky?" Geoff asked hoarsely as the rain began to slacken, the wind picking up to make the hanks of hair and skin snap and wriggle. "I mean -- with Finn being grabbed by that thing -- and then this . . . it don't seem . . . real."

"I don't know anymore, mate," Bosky said.

"You reckon Finn's dead?"

"I don't know that neither. But I'm going to go home, check on me mum."

"Yeah -- I'll check on me uncle . . . Then we got to call the coppers and tell them about these fucking stakes, man. Somebody's been up to no good -- "

"And what do we tell them about Finn, then? Eh? How do we explain that? They'll laugh us out of the fucking door, mate."

"I know but . . ." Geoff broke off, just shaking his head.

They started for the nearest lane -- it ended just before the riverbank, at a metal guardrail there with a dead-end sign on it -- and they had just climbed over the guardrail when they heard Old Duff shouting wheezingly at them. He was finally catching up.

"Boys! Don't go into the village!" he called from the other side of the bridge. "Stay outside the markers!" He pointed at the grisly stakes. "You mustn't -- "

But the sight of the old madman only set loose the terror that they'd just managed to keep under control till that moment, and they both turned and ran, wordlessly, toward home . . . into the village.

Old Duff stopped to catch his breath in the middle of the bridge. He leaned against the rail, wiping his forehead where sweat was replacing rain, and squinted at the stakes. When had MacCrawley put them up? He had accomplices, maybe Lord Smithson himself, or Smithson's man Pinch.

A cracking sound came then, and just beyond the stakes the ground was splitting open.

The earth shook, the bridge beginning to splinter and split under Duff; stones fell from its balustrades to crash into the river. He had to cling to the bridge to keep his footing as the sundering ground split in a lightning-shaped crack between the shallow river and the edge of the village, all the way around -- cutting the village out from the rest of the world the way a man cuts the core from an apple. The crack opened wider, becoming a crevice, then a ravine -- one that traveled all the way around Tonsell.

Screams and plaintive calls rose up from his hometown. Trees and houses swayed. Dust plumed -- an old yellow pickup truck, attempting to drive from the village, pitched into the widening abyss, blaring its horn, the sound diminishing pitifully as the truck vanished into the darkness. Old Duff could only watch helplessly as the ground supporting the village shuddered and slipped, down, down, not rapidly and not slowly, inexorably lowering the village into the earth, as if it was on a giant, unstable freight elevator of bedrock. Down went the rows of cottages and brick houses; down went the pub and the village hall; down went the gift shops and market; down went St. Leonard's church, its steeple the tallest structure in the village. Last to vanish was the cross atop the steeple -- shadow drew over it like a dark blanket drawn up over a dead man's face. Down the village went -- and out of sight.

Where the village had been was a great yawning pit, rimmed in dirt and rock, sending up dust and smoke. Birds, once part of the village life, now abandoned it, pigeons and sparrows and others, flapping up in their panic to escape, and they fled just in time, for in a moment even the pit was gone as sheets of bedrock shrugged and crept forward from both sides of the opening to close it up. The bedrock came together like clasping hands, but crunching into one another, closing the pit off from above, sealing the lost village away deep underground . . .

There was only a great roughly round patch of raw earth and gray stone then, where the village of Tonsell-by-the-Stream had been.

The ground ceased trembling; the bridge had cracked and crumbled at the edges but substantially held together. Old Duff still clung to its stone sides so hard his fingertips bled. He gazed at what was now a great stony scar in the ground where the village had been removed . . .

Smithson Manor still stood, on the far side of the scarred earth. It was a sprawling eighteenth-century structure of stone and timber, the double-peaked main hall three stories high. Its many windows seemed to gaze down in shocked silence at the convergence of roads once meeting at Tonsell-on-the-Stream, now ending abruptly in a raw field of stone and dirt.

All was silence, except for the unconcerned gurgling of the Hillcrease River, and the squawking of ravens wheeling overhead.

Copyright © 2006 DC Comics.



Excerpted from Subterranean by John Shirley
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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