Free Catacombs of Terror! by Stanley Donwood Page B

to. I drained my whiskey. I looked around, a little wildly I think. Stonehenge leant over and handed me his still untouched whiskey. I drank that, too.
    “Karen Eliot is one of this elite? One of these—AFFA fuckers? Who are about to have this ultimate power, whatever the fuck that is? Okay. If I’m going to believe this—any of it—you’re going to need to tell me more. A lot more.” I lit a cigarette and got another whiskey, in what order I don’t remember. I don’t expect you’d remember either, at a time like that.
    “Yes. Karen Eliot isn’t who you may have thought she was. She is one of a central core, or cabal, of twenty-three individuals concerned with—er, conducting business—under the city. What else would you like to know?”
    “Okay. Okay.” I thought for a minute. “
Under
the city? You said something about that before, in the pub. What is it? What is under the city?”
    “Tunnels. Caverns. Labyrinths. They’re very, very old. Some of them predate the Romans. A lot are medieval. Some are more modern. They are not widely known of, for the good reason that They keep it that way. Every drainage system, every pipeline laid, every new building . . . everything, anything, that disturbs the surface, is vetted exhaustively to ensure that there is no chance it will impinge on the tunnel system. The tunnels themselves are extensive. We don’t know how far they extend, but the excavations being carried out by KHS at Charlcombe suggest that the network may run even as far as that.”
    “They do. At the bottom of that hole there were maybe three tunnels radiating off in different directions. It was all paved with flagstones or something. I couldn’t easily tell. I didn’t have my flashlight.”
    “Three tunnels? Interesting. There are probably the same number radiating from a cavern underneath the Circus.”
    “What the hell is it about the Circus? My contact tried to find out about the 1993 KHS dig there. He came up with zilch. ‘No significant finds’ or some such crap. And who the hell are KHS anyway?”
    “All right. How can I explain this? The Circus is, well, is basically
Stonehenge
,
rebuilt,
recreated
, in its perfect form.” His eyes were gleaming.
    I pointed to his T-shirt. “Hence the threads, eh?”
    “Yes, hence the T-shirt. One of my particular specialities. Stonehenge itself is obviously badly dilapidated. The Circus is a much more modern temple, and it remains undamaged. Even after it was damaged in the Second World War it was perfectly repaired. Perfectly. Nowhere else in the entire country, in the whole of the UK, was repaired with such precision. The original architect himself was one of Them. He understood the power of the Neolithic temple at Stonehenge. He calculated the dimensions and placing of the stones as they were in the eighteenth century, and with the help of . . . certain . . . others extrapolated their data back through time. He finally came up with the right sums. He and his son designed both the Circus and the Royal Crescent, two of the more admired architectural creations in the entire country. Those two structures, combined with the streets between them, form a massive symbol on the face of the earth. It’s generally given out that this represents the sun and the moon. It doesn’t. It’s AFFA’s symbol. And it’s as old as Stonehenge. Older. They had uncovered the matrix of Stonehenge as it was—how it was intended. Then they rebuilt it. They rebuilt it in here, in this city.”
    “All right. Okay. Just about. But why here?”
    “Because here was—and is—their centre, their laboratory, or headquarters, or whatever. Their temple. The temple of AFFA. They have always been here. We don’t know why. But this was the birthplace of alchemy. It may be that the hot water from the springs here was used in earlier experiments. Or in processes of some kind, or, well . . . I don’t know. But the tunnels are the reason for it all. They’re the key. They