JAMES HERBERT
Domain
Also by James Herbert
The Rats
The Fog
The Survivor
Fluke
The Spear
The Dark
Lair
The Jonah
Shrine
Moon
The Magic Cottage
Haunted
Sepulchre
Creed
Portent
The Ghosts of Sleath
‘48
Others
Graphic Novels
The City
(Illustrated by Ian Miller)
Non-fiction
By Horror Haunted
(Edited by Stephen Jones)
James Herbert's Dark Places
(Photographs by Paul Barkshire)
TIME: 12: 37
DAY: Tuesday
MONTH: June
YEAR: The not too distant future…
PLACE: LONDON
ONE: ADVENT
They scurried through the darkness, shadowy creatures living in permanent night.
They had learned to become still, to be the darkness, when the huge monsters roared above and filled the tunnels with thunder, assaulting the black refuge - their cold, damp sanctuary - with rushing lights and deadly crushing weight. They would cower as the ground beneath them shook, the walls around them trembled; and they would wait until the rushing thing had passed, not afraid but necessarily wary, for it was an inveterate invader but one which killed the careless.
They had learned to keep within the confines of their underworld, to venture out only when their own comforting darkness was sistered with the darkness above. For they had a distant race-memory of an enemy, a being whose purpose was to destroy them. A being who existed in the upper regions where there was vast dazzling light, a place that could be explored safely only when the brilliance diminished and succumbed to concealing and pleasurable blackness. But even then the darkness was not absolute; different kinds of individual lights pierced the night. Yet these were feeble, and created shadows that were veiling allies.
They had learned to be timid in exploration, never moving far from their sanctum. They fed on night creatures like themselves, and often came upon food that was not warm, that did not struggle against the stinging caress of the creatures jaws. The taste was not as exciting as the moist and tepid moving flesh, but it filled their stomachs. It sustained them.
Yet in this, too, they were cautious, never taking too much, never returning to the same source, for they possessed an innate cunning, born of something more than fear of their natural enemy; it was an evolution accelerated by something that had happened to their species many years before. An event that had changed their pattern of progression. And made them alien even to those of their own nature.
They had learned to keep to the depths. To keep themselves from the eyes of their enemy. To take food, but never enough to arouse unwelcome attention. To kill other creatures, but never to leave remains. And when there was not enough food, they ate each other. For they were many.
They moved in the darkness; black, bristling beasts, with huge, humped hindquarters and long, jagged incisors, their eyes pointed and yellow. They sniffed at the dank air and a deep instinct within craved for a different scent, a scent which they did not yet know was the sweet odour of running blood. Human blood. They would know it soon.
They tensed as one when their keen, long ears picked up a distant wailing, a haunting whining they had never heard before. They were still, many risen on haunches, snouts twitching, fur stiffened. They listened and were afraid, and their fear lasted for as long as the sound lasted.
Silence came and it was more frightening than the sound.
Still they waited, not daring to move, barely breathing.
A time passed before the thunder came, and it was a million times louder than the giant rushing things they shared the tunnels with.
It started as a low rumbling, quickly becoming a great roar, shaking their underworld, rending the darkness with its violence, tearing at the walls, the roof, causing the ground to rise up and throw the creatures into scrambling heaps. They lashed out at each other, clawing, gouging, snapping frenziedly with razor teeth.
More thunder from another source.
Dust, fumes, sound, filled the air.
Rumbling, building, becoming a shrieking.
More. More thunder.
The world and its underworld shivering.
Screaming.
The creatures ran through the turbulence, black-furred bodies striving to reach their inner sanctum within the tunnel network. Fighting to exist, deafened by the noise, squealing their panic, desperate to return to the Mother Creature and her strange cohorts.
The man-made caverns shuddered but resisted the unleashed pressure from the world above. Sections collapsed, others were flooded, but the main body of tunnels withstood the impacts that pounded the city.
And after a while, the silence returned.
Save for the scurrying of many, many clawed feet.
The first bomb exploded just a few thousand feet above Hyde Park, its energy release, in the forms of radiation, light, heat, sound and blast, the equivalent of one million tons of tnt. The sirens that had warned of the missile and its companions' approach were but a thin squeal to the giant roar of its arrival.
Within two thousandths of a second after the initial blinding flash of light, the explosion had become a small searing ball of vapour with a temperature of eighteen million degrees Fahrenheit, a newborn mini-sun of no material substance.
The luminous fireball immediately began to expand, the air around it heated by compression and quickly losing its power as a shield against the ultraviolet radiation. The rapidly growing fiery nucleus pushed at the torrid air, producing a spherical acoustic shock-front which began to travel faster than its creator, masking the fireball's full fury.
As the shock-front spread, its progenitor followed, quickly dispersing a third of its total energy. The fireball grew larger, almost half a mile in diameter, leaving behind a vacuum and beginning to lose its luminosity. It started to spin inwards, rising at an incredible speed, forming a ring of smoke which carried debris and fission-produced radioactive isotopes.
Dust was sucked from the earth as the swirling vortex reached upwards, dust that became contaminated by the deadly,
man-activated rays, rising high into the skies, later to settle on the destroyed city as lethal fallout.
The angry cloud with its stem of white heat was more than six miles high and still rising, banishing the noonday sun, when the next missile detonated its warhead.
Three more megaton bombs were soon to follow...
Miriam stood transfixed.
What was happening? Why the panic? And that dreadful wailing noise of just a few minutes before.
The sirens of World War Two. Oh no, it couldn't be happening again!
She was too stunned, too frightened, to move. All around people were pushing, shoving, running in fear. Of what? Aeroplanes with bombs? Surely that didn't happen any more. She should have paid more attention to the news. Should have listened more closely to her neighbours. Miriam recalled hearing something on the radio about tension in the Middle East; but she'd been hearing that for years and years.