Free Catacombs of Terror! by Stanley Donwood

What is ‘it’?”
    The man sighed. Nice. His turn. I felt better all of a sudden.
    “It has had many names. None of them do it justice. I guess you’ve heard of alchemy, of the Philosopher’s Stone, through your avid TV watching? The Philosopher’s Stone is an agent of transmutation. To turn lead into gold—that was the stated goal of the alchemists. But physical transmutation is a metaphor. Alchemy—the use of the Philosopher’s Stone—is actually about controlling
everything
. It’s about controlling the
world.
”
    What a fucking joker. He sounded like some kind of zealot. Or something. I didn’t trust him to the end of my pint.
    “You said that your name isn’t important. Maybe it isn’t. So don’t tell me. But tell me why I should even waste my time shooting the breeze with you. Because you’re sure as hell not whoever you’re pretending to be.”
    He glared at me for a little while before he answered.
    “I will,” he said in a low voice, “after you tell me what you know so far. Tell me your thoughts. Tell me what you’ve found out.”
    “Why the hell should I tell you? I’ve done the hard work so far, in my opinion. Finding stuff out, climbing down holes. I got abducted. I got a kicking. By fucking Tweedledum and fucking Tweedledee. Not you, mister whoever you are. It hurt a lot. Why should I tell you anything at all?”
    He grinned. It wasn’t a smile. I got to see a lot of his teeth.
    “What else are you going to do with what you know? With what you have? What else can you do but tell someone who might believe you? Who else can you tell?”
    He had something there. What was I going to do next? I was sunk badly into a situation that I seemed to have less control over with every hour that passed. He was right, really. Who else could I tell? Here was mister Stonehenge T-shirt, right in front of me. He was part of this, whatever it was. Not for the first time, I took a look at my options and felt the usual growing dismay. All of this buzzed around my brain for, well, about three seconds. I put on a pensive, intelligent expression for another minute or so, just to save face.
    “You’re right, I guess,” I said. It wasn’t a thing I said often, and my voice caught a little as the words came out. Lack of practice.
    “So?” he asked. I took a deep breath or two and told him. About what had happened so far. About my suspicions about KHS and ScryTech. About the deep hole at Charlcombe. About the slight strangeness of my ‘interview’ with the CCTV operatives and Murnau. About being followed, and gave a vehemently described account of my time both in and outside of the shiny, expensive car. Then I asked him, also pretty vehemently, who the fuck he was. I think I asked him to tell me without delay. Something like that.
    “I’m an academic. I was asked by a close friend to speak to you. I must apologise for the subterfuge. We needed to know if you were as reliable as we’d hoped you’d be. You should also know, by the way, that the woman you met last night in the Star was an actor, a former student of mine . . . . Now then, we are very concerned about what is happening. Very concerned. And I’m sorry about the violence you suffered today. Their security is even tighter than we imagined.”
    “We? They? I guess ‘they’ are ‘them.’ AFFA. Who are you calling ‘
we
’?”
    “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk here. Perhaps your office might be less . . . public?”
    “Okay,” I said, “but one thing before we go. I came in here last night and made some enquiries about you. I spoke to a barman. He’s not here tonight. But he didn’t seem to like you too well. Any ideas why that should be?”
    “Tall fellow? Dark hair? Eyebrow piercing?”
    I nodded. The guy grinned again. Teeth again. “Monty Cantsin. One of my students last year. He was hoping for a First. He got a Third, and he wasn’t very happy about it.”
    I nodded, slowly. It sounded just about believable. Not much else did. I