Abaddon - Chapter 7

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 17, 2005

We all woke up in the morning. It is raining, and it seems we’ve made our base camp (summit camp?) at precisely the wrong part of the face. For most of its length, the Devil’s Escalator is shielded from above by a more or less continuous overhang. In the dark, we chose the only part of it that wasn’t covered. When we woke up, nesting birds were looking back at us on either side, perfectly dry, with puzzled expressions on their beaks.

The overhang is evidently the reason why the Escalator is invisible from ground level - why Lake Avernus isn’t is more of a question. The canyon walls around it might conceivably hide it from view. In daylight - or what passes for daylight here, a sort of porridge-grey gloom which nevertheless seems brilliant after the oily blackness of last night - there is indeed a waterfall draining out of it, as well as into. Well, mostly water. It plops rather than plunges over the edge, sending a brown torrent of water, not-quite-water, used nappies and tampons (which, tut tut, should never be flushed) and a whole raft of other unlikely flotsam down unthinkable distances into the depths.

I walk up to the lake, and am impressed, though unamazed, at the extent to which it steams. Maybe that also masks it from overhead view.

The sides of the lake are very slippery, and I can only marvel at the lucky escape we had last night in not ending up in it. In consistency, it is like brown Ready-Brek, or the sort of sucking quicksand I’ve seen in far too many bad 50’s movies. Anyone falling in would certainly not come out again, I tell myself.

And then, a peculiar thing happens. I see a particularly big piece of garbage drop into the soup from above, an entire electric oven, a thing that would not normally float. I’ve heard bored kids sometimes sneak over the Beglerbeg’s Wall and chunk things down into the dark - fluorescent tubes and gas cannisters, mainly - just to watch them explode. It doesn’t explode - it’s an oven - but it does burst apart like an egg hit by a jackhammer, and sinks beneath the surface.

Then, incredibly, it comes back up again - even the big metal parts that shouldn’t float. It bobs, mostly, back up to the surface and drifts serenely back towards the shore, in bits.

Then I notice the bubbles rising and popping in the centre of the lake, unleashing great choking sulphurous farty clouds when they burst and shower poo around themselves like some sort of purulent hand grenade. This is not a lake of water, but a lake of poo, and decomposition is taking place down there underneath the surface, and decomposition means heat. The temperature down there in the centre might be that of bathwater, maybe even hotter. Maybe boiling hot. Perhaps the old bathhouse far above is not so weirdly situated. Maybe the bathhouse owners somehow managed to pump hot water up from here into its boilers. And sure enough, in one corner of the lake, I find a set of muck-encrusted pipes. Municipal sewage outflow, or private Victorian hot water inlet? No way to know.

So whatever solid objects fall into the lake, the lake gives up. Good news for scavengers hunting the shore for useful discarded items. Maybe even for human beings falling into the pool from far above, if they don’t get smashed by the impact or boiled alive by the lake waters...

The boy could have fallen down this far and survived. And been nudged gently ashore, even unconscious, by the current.

So, following that undeniable logic, if we carry on following the Devil’s Escalator down, we are about to run into the people he next ran into.

The Escalator, though cut directly from the stone of the cliff, has steps of rock of a completely different colour. Possibly, suggests Pete, this is because it was the Devil’s own job to shape the native stuff. The path is also shored up with this material where it needs to be. And whilst I’m taking the steps two at a time, I suddenly realize where I’ve seen it.

“This was mined outside town”, I say. “There’s an old set of quarries. Turned into a country park now. It’s the same stone, I’d swear it.”

“Must have been cut a long time ago, then”, says Vern, drawing my attention to a graffito on one of the squat rock pillars that support the overhang at points where the road has had to be physically battered through the abyssite. On top of the marks of a thousand chisels, there is something scratched into the stone in the Roman alphabet. I write down the lettering exactly.

HIC IACET M AEMILIVS GAIVS XXII LEGIONIS CENTVRIO PROPTER IMPIETATEM SVVM LAPIDIBVS LAPSIS INTERFECTVS DITIS IRAM CAVE

“It says ‘Cave’”, says Vern.

“Maybe it’s the same word in English and Vaemna”, shrugs Pete.

“It’s Latin”, I say. “There’s a man buried under this pillar. Quite an important man, a Centurion, I think. And ‘Cave’, I add, means ‘Beware’.”

Pete refuses to believe this. “You aren’t telling me Romans built this thing.”

“No”, says I, “I’m telling you Romans repaired it.”

“But it’s still in use.”

“So is the A2. Romans built that too.”

“What’s the rest of it mean?”

“No idea.”

We also, it has to be said, pass parts of the path which have been repaired with more modern materials - poured concrete, iron girders, metal brackets - although the Romans had concrete, they seldom put steel reinforcement in it. “This stuff looks more recent”, says Vern. Duh.

And then, directly underneath us in the dark, Pete catches sight of more of the same.

“Uh - what the hell is that?”

It’s only because he’s enough of an idiot to stroll along unconcernedly right next to the edge that he sees it first. When we do look down - I have to crouch down to get that close to the drop - it’s absolutely impossible to miss. After all, it spans the Abyss from side to side.

It’s a mass of rust, obviously, after so many years. But its original night-black paintjob is still obstinately refusing to reflect light - presumably the original builders painted it that colour to blend it in with the black hole of the abyss beneath it, probably to fend off air attacks. At its centre, I can still see the attachment points for the cable windings. Lord alone knows how they got it into place. It resembles a single span of the Forth Bridge, both in size and appearance. Every single one of the metal triangles that honeycomb its surface must be large enough for a man to fall through them. There are control cabins, inspection walkways, ladders, housings for giant motors. It must weigh as much as an ocean liner, contain enough steel to make a hundred Maus tanks.

So why, in a time of severe tank shortage, did they build it?

“I know what it is”, I say, not without a touch of smugness.

“A Greco-Roman centrifuge”, says Vern.

“An ancient Mongol planetarium”, counters Pete.

“A big old Nazi gantry crane”, I say. “Built to explore the Abyss. It must be capable of hauling a hundred tonnes or more.”

“What”, says Pete, “like the one the Americans have got in the square upstairs?”

“And like the model of the one the Soviets built in the Museum.” This, of course, explains where the Soviets got the idea, and the motivation - if superior German researchers wanted to build a thing so badly, the Russians would have to build one of their own just to see what the Nazis had been up to. “They copied what the Krauts had done before them. Probably even used German scientists to build it.”

“German crane scientists”, smans Pete.

“A crane to dangle stuff down a mile or more”, I say, “is a difficult thing to build. I don’t even know that anyone ever has built one. Not as difficult to build as an atom bomb or rocket, maybe, but hardly easy. And they just left it down here to rust.”

Pete shrugs. “If you believe the Museum dioramas, they left in a bit of a rush.”

“But why didn’t they blow it up? If Hitler and Goebbels and so on were crazy enough to think this was so all-fired important, why did they leave it for the Russians to find?”

“Maybe they got to the inner world”, grins Vern. “Maybe they found out there’s nothing there.”

“Or maybe”, says Pete, “they found something down there so bad, they wanted the Russians to find it after them.”

This is most unlike him. I tell him so.

“Just a thought”, he says.

“Er”, says Vern. “There’s something moving down there.”

I squint. There is indeed movement, down there in the thicket of metal triangles. Whether it’s human, I can’t tell. But something was moving, and has now hastily withdrawn into the scaffolding, which means only one thing: We’ve been seen.

Pete nods. “Well, we always suspected that, didn’t we?” He points across the gulf at the opposite cliff. I squint to follow his finger.

“Looks like someone else saw the thing before we did, too.”

It’s a rope, attached to the cliff by bolts and pitons, bright red nylon against the grey rock.

“Sean's rope”, he says. “Worked his way right down that face to put it there.”

I ask why we didn’t see any ropes on the way down to the Escalator.

“Probably climbed that bit freestyle”, says Pete. “Nutter.” But when he says ‘Nutter’, he says it in the same way as anyone normal might say, ‘What a guy!’

So it’s settled, then. We’re going down to take a look at the Nazi gantry crane, no matter how many drug-addled lunatics might be hiding in it.

It doesn’t take long to make our way down to the crane, though at one point we have to detour round a rusting Nazi half-track abandoned on the path, its machine gun still pointed up towards the pit head at maximum elevation. There is no ammunition left in the machine gun. Possibly this is the reason why it’s still attached to the vehicle. But what was it doing down here in the first place? What can have been down here that required the use of armoured vehicles for protection?

I sit down on a rock a long way away to get a stone out of my boot while Pete and Vern walk down to one of the concrete piers that support the gantry. I warn Vern and Pete that the hopheaded nutjobs, whoever they are, might have guns or knives or pit bull terriers and such. Pete nods, but states confidently that the accurate range of a pistol is only about forty or fifty yards. He reckons we’ll know a junkie is about to shoot at us before we get that close to him.

Pete, it transpires, hasn’t met that many junkies.

He walks out onto the broad flat walkway where the crane joins the cliff. His boots crunch on the muck. The structure is deserted. At one end, a rusted iron manhole lies on the concrete like a bad penny. The hole it covers lies open, and the wind is making a noise on it like the blowing of a flute.

He edges closer to the gantry. Nothing moves.

“Whoever was here”, he says, “I think they’ve gone now.”

The note blown by the wind on the manhole changes, drops suddenly.

“PETE!” I yell.

They’re in the manhole.

A single smacked-up opium fiend pops out, and, with a “THIS DAY SHALL YOU BE WITH ME IN PARADISE!”, hits Pete with an accurate burst from what looks remarkably like a submachinegun. All three slugs hit him dead in the chest. He topples back, off the edge to which he was walking so close like a twat, and falls on the back of his head onto the rusted iron crap of the gantry. There is a sound like a heavyweight boxer punching a melon.

Then he slides off the gantry and down, leaving a red trail like a slug, and is gone. So easy. Live human, dead human.

Vern is suddenly nowhere to be seen.

Having looked for Vern in vain, the controlled substance user in the manhole turns around, preparing to do me too. “I am not going to hurt you”, he says unconvincingly, whilst continuing to point the gun right at the middle of my head. However, when he pulls the trigger, there’s only an unimpressive CHING sound. He appears to have some difficulty figuring out how to clear the jam from the breech, and while he’s holding the gun upside down and squinting up its barrel I hit him square in the eye with the only weapon I have, a nasty sharp shard of abyssite I’ve just prised out of my boot heel. It hits so hard that I see blood. He should scream like a baby. Instead, he shuts one eye, works the jam loose, waves the gun in my general direction, and fires (inaccurately, as he’s firing with only one eye). Rock chips spray me from all sides as his near misses carve up the cliff.

And then, he’s stopped firing, and is rolling on the ground struggling with something much bigger and heftier than he is. Vern, who had dropped down behind the concrete pier out of sight, suspended over the abyss by his fingertips, has squirmed back up over the edge and taken him from behind. The junkie fights like an anaemic demon, but is so pale and wasted that Vern can simply lift him up, turn him round till he’s hanging over the edge, and drop him. He doesn’t even scream or paw the walls as he falls, but instead makes a “WOOOO!” noise, like a kid on a roller coaster.

Vern stares down into the abyss for a long, long time.

“He’s still going down”, he says.

I rush over suddenly to the manhole cover and kick it back over the hole, several times before it settles. Then I sit on it. Hoping it’s bulletproof.

“What do we now?” I say.

Vern has no answer. He seems as stunned as I am. To cap it all, the Oracle Smoker - I presume he was an Oracle Smoker - meanly kept hold of the submachinegun when he fell over the cliff.

“There may be more of them about”, I say; and as if on cue, the cliff to my right suddenly stars as something zings into it at high speed.

“How did they get up there?” says Vern.

They are shooting at us with a pistol - about three or four people and one pistol, from much higher up the Abyss. Direly aimed bullets PING and PAZANG off the rock and concrete all around us. Occasionally they miss the gantry structure altogether. But they’re coming down the Escalator, and if their one peashooter doesn’t explode in the face of the man who’s firing it by the time they get to point blank range, we’re goulash.

“Must be an easier way down the cliff”, I say. “We must have missed it in the dark.”

“Yes”, says Vern. “We must have.”

“We can’t go up any more”, I say, frighteningly rational.

“We’ll have to go down”, deduces Vern (in whom the instinct to go down, after all, is strong).

I look at the rusty iron ladders disappearing into the gantry framework.

“We can go sideways”, I say.

“We’ll be trapped in there”, protests Vern. “Besides, we don’t know how many of them might be in there. That might be where they live.”

They’ve stopped shooting at us from above now, clear evidence that even a mind crazed by Oracle Smoke can still figure out how many bullets there are left in a magazine. But they’re still on their way down. And they don’t just have a gun with them. More ironmongery is flickering in the dim light. Knives. Bigger things than knives. Axes, maybe, or shovels, or meat cleavers.

“What are they shooting at us for?” says Vern, now they’ve stopped shooting. “We haven’t done anything to them.”

This, I have to admit, is a good point. Then I remember what the old policeman said about Oracle Smokers - that they don’t have any interest in anything but Oracle Smoke.

“Oh my god”, I say. “It’s down here, isn’t it. This is where it comes from.”

“We’d better get inside”, says Vern pragmatically, hurrying over to one of the rusted ladders. “Don’t hold on to it too hard, unless you want hepatitis. And only put your feet on the edges of the rungs.”

There’s nobody down inside the gantry, which is a big dark tunnel of rust dappled with triangular patches of light. Within it are walkways running the length of the structure, platforms, engine mountings, a telephone handset bolted to a girder. As I climb down, I can’t see a single junked-up cokehead down here.

What I can do, however, is smell them. The whole of the inside of the gantry stinks like an unwashed lavatory. In fact, when I take my hand off the wet sticky rung of the ladder and smell it, I realize that it is an unwashed lavatory. Not only has someone gone to the toilet down here, they’ve also gone to the trouble of smearing their shit around the walls, floors, rungs, everything.

My feet crunch on something as I step off the ladder. Vern switches on his head torch, shines it down. Glass glints back at us from the dark. Glass, and silver foil. “It was glass that was crunching underfoot up top”, I observe. “These are the remains of Smoke bottles.” I explain about Smoke bottles. Vern appears to be trying to get an international number on the bakelite telephone attached to one of the gantry supports.

“No electric”, he says.

“No kidding”, I say.

We move out of the gantry and into the concrete pier, where fingermarks are clearly visible by head-torch-light in the shitsmears on the wall. Smears of shit, and of blood. The entire floor, it seems, is just one big potty to these people. Stepping through the room is like stepping through a faecal minefield. Vaughan coughs hard on entering the room, what with the dust and all, then realizes he’s coughing and shuts up. Up above us, up a length of ladder, is the manhole cover to the top, with a sturdy (rusted) iron bar in its inner surface. Right behind us is the steel door to the gantry, which looks thick enough to give gunfire a serious run for its money. It’s the work of seconds to whip out a climbing rope and tie the handle of the one to the bar of the other, tighter than a drunk Scots virgin. Now no-one can open either. Whilst the dragon-chasing lotus-eaters outside learn this and start to hammer on the metal, we move on into the structure. We find us a dead Nazi.

Our dead Nazi is sitting in a little office inside the pier, where, from the position of his body, he appears to have blown the top of his own head off with a gun he is no longer holding (possibly the one the hopheads are now using on us?). We have to push and kick our way into the little side room he’s sitting in, as it seems to have been deliberately blocked off, the door nailed to the frame. A makeshift sign on the door says DANGER - HAZARD TO HEALTH in Russian, but we only notice this after we kick our way in. It has too much bum juice smeared all over it to be properly legible.

“He’s SS”, says Vern. “Important SS. A Captain. “See the pips on the left hand side of his collar? And on the right hand side of his collar - normally, there’d be some sort of unit designation here. SS runes, a death’s head, some other Nazi shit. But instead, there’s this.” He holds the disintegrating cloth up for inspection. The symbol on it looks like a swastika drawn with two sets of lines, as if drawn by a bad kid writing with two pens in the same hand to get his lines done quicker.

“That’s a way of disguising his unit”, says Vern. “Of confusing anyone looking for the officer who gave him his orders. It also means that he was a concentration camp attendant.”

“So they did use forced labour here.”

“Looks like it.”

There is not much meat on him by now; rats seem to have gnawed his clothes apart to get the meat off the skeleton. Thankfully, I can’t see any teethmarks in the bone that look human. The bullet has not only passed through his head, but zinged and ricocheted back and forth off the concrete all around the chamber, smashing a picture of the Führer on one wall, and putting a hole clean through Mein Kampf, Goethe’s Faust, and the Bible, all of which are sitting back to back on a bookshelf, flanked by a pair of rather natty Nazi bookends in the shape of Indomitable Eagles Of Destiny. A gas mask lies on the floor next to him. Why he’s committed suicide, I have no idea. Since he shot himself, the room also appears to have been vandalized by Soviets. A lurid red five-pointed star has been splashed across one wall, and RED ARMY TROOPS SHALL NEVER DIE over the opposite one.

In the next chamber on is a dead Red Army soldier. He’s also sitting at an escritoire, in uniform, a pile of papers neatly stacked in front of him. On his desktop he even has a steam-powered Soviet computer of some antiquity, with a screen the size of a postage stamp. He, too, has been shot in the head. There’s a little round hole in one side of his skull, and a big ugly hole in the other. He has actually been shot through one eye of his gasmask, which he is still wearing. There is glass inside his skull. It rattles when I touch it. His gun is also missing.

“Maybe someone else shot him”, hopes Vern.

“I get the feeling”, I say, “that he shot himself.”

The gasmask he is wearing is also useless. It seems to have been cut through at the front, where the rubber tube leaves the mask on its way to the filter cannister on his back. There is no sign of the knife that did this either.

Apart from him, the room is an ordinary, if very smelly, office, with a rank of filing cabinets lining one wall; I pull one out, and it’s still full of folders. Stars, hammers and sickles are stamped on every page, using even more unnecessary red ink than my old maths teacher.

“What does it say?” says Vern.

“Not sure...just tons of graphs...this block graph’s labelled ‘Potential Productive Output’...x/y plots of production versus time, production against workforce....uh, workforce goes down over time. Seems to peak in 1945, stays high through the early 1950’s, goes downhill sharply after 1953...which, er, will be about the time of the end of the gulag system.”

“They were making something down here”, says Vern. “Something that killed the people who made it. Something only prison labour was fit to make.”

Behind us, from close outside the metal door, a voice is saying, “In the year 2011 and seven months, from the sky shall come the Great King of Terror.”

“Before and afterwards, war reigns happily” echoes another voice from up above the manhole.

I rummage further through the drawers. “Some of these are in German. Look like production figures too, for the manufacture of something they just call Omega-Stoff.”

“You speak German as well as Russian?”

“I figured it’d be useful in business if I couldn’t get to be a spy.” He finds this funny, which is odd, because it’s true. Hey, we all have our dreams.

“What’s Omega-Stoff mean?”

“Erm. ‘Omega Stuff’.”

“Maybe it was some sort of fuel or explosive. All this was built by a Nazi army, after all.”

Behind us, voices outside the fragile-seeming metal doors are, and I am not kidding, informing us that the weather will be fine tomorrow until lunchtime, when a light drizzle will blow in from the direction of the Pripyet Marshes. It will, they say, be cold.

“I think we’d better go in further, Pen.” Vern is watching the violently vibrating doors with an expression of deep disquiet. “Maybe there’ll be something back there we can fight them with.”

I pull out a fistful of folders. “OK.”

We bar the next door on the inside. It disturbs me that, down here, someone felt the need to put a bar on it. The door is also huge, the size of a bank vault, inches thick. The other side of the wall it’s set in, in the light of my head torch, is plastered with signs in Russian which appear to make no sense. WARNING. AIRTIGHT SEAL. YOU ARE LEAVING THE SECURE AREA. RESPIRATORS MUST BE WORN. Beyond the Airtight Seal - which I assume is the door - the walls are still concrete, though we must be inside the cliff by now. But the chamber beyond is huge. The ceiling rests on steel pillars bolted together with pins a man’s wrist thick, and I-beams that reach from wall to wall. The air in here is like soup, full of airborne shit. I have to cough, but quietly, so hard that my brains nearly explode out of my ears.

The room is also filled with machinery, arranged neatly in lines, still arranged neatly in lines despite the fact that it’s covered with muck and human excrement, probably because the machinery is too heavy to be disarranged. It’s quite obvious what sort of machinery it is. There are hoists for lifting heavy objects and lowering them onto the lines, bins for storing continuously consumed components, conveyor belts that span the length of the room.

“It’s a production line”, said Vern. “An underground factory. They were building them all over Germany towards the end of the War, to protect against Allied bombing. Germany and other places too, like Czechoslovakia. But what were they making?”

The factory lines seem to have been making more than one thing, in fact - huge, fluted metal tubes big enough around for a tall midget to stand up inside them, flat-riveted metal sheets that look like they belong on aircraft, man-high things like drainpipes with crosshairs and triggers, and a number of things whose purpose is totally unmistakable.

The hulls of these things alone are the height of a man, and the turret above adds almost that again. The turret runs almost the entire length of the hull. Their tracks are thick as building bricks. Their guns - those that have guns - seem big enough to fire truck axles out of. But despite all this sheer brutal size, they’re an inch wider than they really should be on all sides with a thick rind of rust. Down here, entombed in concrete, they have become useless. (They must be. Otherwise a junkie would be firing one of them at us).

“What the hell are those?” says Vern, hugely impressed.

“Mice”, I giggle. “The rest, I have no idea.”

Vern does. “Desperation weapons”, he says. “Those small tubes, they were called ‘Panzerfaust’” - he pronounces it ‘Pansyforced’, which has got to be Freudian in some way - “cheap anti-tank weapons. And those aviation parts over there look like bits of a Bochem Natter. Cheap piloted rocket so dangerous they really should have gone the whole hog and just called it a kamikaze. Weapons they produced towards the end of the war, when they were beginning to realize they were beaten. The big tanks, too.” He hangs his head guiltily. “My Dad had all nine million editions of The World At War, plus the handsome binders.”

“German weapons, then”, I say.

He discreetly points out the fact that I’m standing in front of a six foot Teutonic cross printed onto a rocket wing.

“Looks like the Russians left this part alone”, he says. “Almost as if they weren’t really interested.”

There are also offices, canteens, storage bays, and what look like air conditioning facilities. A red line wide enough for two men to walk it abreast has been painted on the floor, along with exhortatory expressions like STAY RIGHT!, STAY LEFT!, and OFF THE LINE MEANS DEATH!

We stay on the line.

There is also glass and silver foil everywhere, and a smell of burnt petrol.

“They’re in here”, I say. “With us.”

We pass a cabinet of gasmasks, staring eyelessly at us like racks of Killing Fields skulls.

“If there’s something so dangerous down here”, I say, “maybe we ought to take advantage of these.”

Vern looks at them distrustfully. “If they’re old fire respirators, they might have asbestos in the filters. Give yourself lung cancer, breathing through them.”

Despite this, I run my hand along the masks until I find one, at the very end of the bottom row, that I reckon might fit my face. The masks are helpfully sorted into sizes. They are of German manufacture, though someone has also stencilled instructions on each one in Russian, and the GRÖßE categories on the mask cabinet in German script are accompanied by equivalent ones in Cyrillic. They do not look quite like normal gas masks - the bit round the nose, and the filter cannister at the belt, both seem longer and more complicated.

My mask seems a fairly good fit, though I give myself a coughing fit from the dust (hopefully not the asbestos dust) when I put it on, and imagine all sorts of unseen terrors homing in on the ruckus I’m making as I do so. Some of the SS troopers must have had small heads, no doubt to house those tiny Nazi minds they were out of. I hang my mask around my neck, and buckle the filter round my waist. Immediately, I feel safer. Not.

The Soviets, it seems, planted a skeleton staff down here (literally in at least one case, haha). One of the canteens has a red border round it, and bunk beds at the far end. A Portakabin, which at a guess contained the office staff, sits next to the canteen. As usual, there are no guns.

But by far the most interesting thing we find is at the very end of the chamber, recessed into the wall and big enough to drive a tank into. We know this because someone already has done.

“It’s an elevator”, says Vern.

“An elevator that can lift two hundred tonnes?” I step, gingerly, onto the platform. It sways giddily under my weight, but not too much - after all, the pressure of my foot is not going to push a heavy tank sitting on a metal plate big enough to hold up a heavy tank very far. Far, far up above me, steel cables which must be strong enough to bind Satan himself sigh wistfully. If they snap....

“It’s not going to break”, says Vern. “It hasn’t broken under two hundred tonnes in sixty years, it’s not going to break under two hundred and one.”

Chagrined that he’s implying I weigh a tonne, I step out onto the platform.

“A lift shaft”, I confirm. “Going up.”

Vern, meanwhile, can’t resist poking his head torch over the edges of the platform and peering into the depths. “And down”, he says. He looks up again. “We could climb this.”

“Yes, and we could also find the bloody stairs.”

We find the bloody stairs, as I suspected, at the end of one of the ever-present red lines. But there’s an olfactory warning as to how safe they are - they stink of shit.

“They come this way too.”

Vern nods. “Maybe the lift shaft might be safer.”

These words are made even truer by a sudden clanging from the stairwell above.

“They’re up above us.” Vern dives out incautiously into the stairwell, squinting upward. “Two or three. At least.”

“Might have realized they can’t get in the front entrance”, I say. “Might be the same lot.” But at the same time, in my heart of hearts, I know this is all a lie, and that we are being outflanked, and are already outgunned and outnumbered. How many weed-loaded junkheads can one clandestine underground facility support?

But they don’t need to be supported. They don’t need to eat or sleep, and breathing and shitting are just things their body can’t kick the habit of doing. They don’t come down here to live. They come down here to die.

Just at that moment, we hear the sound of our carefully constructed blockade breaking far behind us.

“We could hide”, says Vern. “Somewhere off the red line, in the dormitories or in among the machinery.”

“These people know this place. We don’t. And I don’t think they care a great deal about sticking to the red lines.” I ponder this a minute. “I hate to say it, but there’s one direction they won’t be expecting us to go in.” I nod at the stairwell, going down.

Vern looks doubtful. I sweeten the deal. “We’d only need to go down a little, then wait until they come past. They’re bound to go into the factory room looking for us. Then we’d come back up and run up to the surface.”

He considers it, then nods. “Switch off your helmet light.”

I know it needs to be done - the head torches make us stand out like a priapism patient in a nudist colony - but it’s still scary. When the light dies, the dark is awful, all-enveloping.

“THEY’VE SWITCHED OFF THEIR TORCHES”, hisses a voice above us, much closer than I thought.

It’s only after a few seconds that I realize the enemy have their own lights as well, smaller, crapper torches, spiralling down the stairwell from above. Much, much more than two or three. But in the dim light, I tell myself, we will be able to see them coming and slink about invisible in the dark.

As soon as I move to go lower on the staircase, I bang my knee on the steel balustrade, and it hurts like hell, and I can’t yell out to relieve it. My feet crunch and squelch softly on the shitsmeared steps, and no matter how slowly and carefully I move, I can’t stop it sounding like I’ve got double-sided sellotape on my soles. But the enemy are even noisier, and we manage to move relatively silently against the relative cacophany they’re making. And when they come to the entrance to the machine hall, they move on into the room just like they were supposed to. But what they weren’t supposed to do was leave a man behind to guard the stairwell. A man with a gun.

The gun looks like a hunting rifle, a tiny little one, hardly designed to kill people. But I’m fairly sure it would smart some if it shot me. And therein lies the crux of the problem we non-junkies have in dealing with junkies - junkies may be being ridden by the heroin hag, but they’re not (necessarily) stupid. Instead, whatever intelligence they had prior to getting junked up is sharpened, bent solely to the purpose of getting hold of junk. Or, of course, of protecting what supply of junk they already possess.

“What the hell do we do now?” hisses Vern. He hisses too loudly. The hophead hears. He pricks up his ears. He takes a couple of steps further down the stairwell. We, on the other hand, can’t move. He’ll surely hear us if we do.

Then someone falls over a big clangorous pile of something in the big room upstairs, and we scuttle down a few steps, maybe just a little too loudly, as our junkie stiffens and listens again on the stairwell before taking another two steps closer. Someone else makes a racket in the big room, and we edge down a little further. Again, our junkie hears us and edges lower.

We are now coming close to the doorway on the next storey down. And through the doorway, we can see light.

The door is another of the massive steel ones, designed to be airtight, hanging open on a set of hinges big enough to be bridge supports. It is actually swinging open in the breeze - there is a breeze - though it must weigh at least a tonne. To leave such a massive object free to travel is surely to invite disaster. But to the people who live down here, the only conceivable disaster is a failure to get their next hit of Smoke. Having their arms, legs or head crunched off in a one-tonne door is, it seems, nothing by comparison.

There is the usual crop of warnings round the door - DO NOT GO FURTHER THAN THIS POINT, BREATHING EQUIPMENT IS MANDATORY, DANGER OF HELL AND DEATH, etc. Beyond the door, as I said earlier, we can see firelight.

It is surely beyond the end of foolhardy to light campfires underground. These people haven’t just lit one, but a hundred. The chamber on this level, I notice as we creep lower, is just as large, just as chock full of widgetry.

But the widgetry is different, somehow. Line upon line of cylindrical metal tanks, each the length of a petrol tanker. Each one bolted to the floor. Each fed by a complex mystery of pipes and valves, snaking out along the floor, rising to form metal arbours over the walkways between the tanks.

On the walkways, people are living. Not clustered around the campfires, huddled close to the heat, but laid out as good as dead on the cold metal, staring raptly at nothing, at things no-one without a head full of Smoke can see. The fires, I realize with a cold shudder, are not to warm people, but to warm Smoke bottles. Makeshift wire tripods are propped up over the flames with an ingenuity born of complete and utter devotion to purpose. Bottles of every size, colour and configuration are arranged neatly round the floor, even the empty ones positioned with the same reverence as religious icons.

Wait a minute.

Empty ones?

I shut my eyes, reopen them, and see the empty bottles still there, each one lovingly pre-wrapped in silver foil pressed around its outline like a tailormade dress around a bride. And the full bottles, too, though I’ve never technically seen either an empty bottle or a full before. But I can tell these are full, because they are as black as asps and gleam like venom.

There are so many full bottles that they stretch up the steps that lead up to our door out of the chamber. Some of them are close enough to touch. Between the empty bottles and the full on the floor downstairs, meanwhile, there is a tap, almost as if Oracle Smoke were a thing that came out of the walls like water or electricity. And that tap is coming right out of the end of the nearest and biggest of the tanks. The tanks that have skulls and crossbones on them. Skulls and crossbones, the Roman characters SAMAROBRIN, the Cyrillic characters Самаробрын, the Greek letter Omega.

“Oracle Smoke”, I realize, too late, out loud, “isn’t a drug. It’s a weapon.”

Vern nods. “Imagine what you could do to your enemies if you shelled one of their cities with the stuff.” He thinks a moment. “I’ll bet the shells those heavy tanks upstairs are built to fire are hollow.”

We’ve been sitting gawping into the sub-basement too long. The junkie at the top of the stairs has clumped down another couple of steps before we hear him coming.

“You are going to kill me”, he says, and shoots Vern. Vern crumples, but then, as the boy - he can only be around thirteen or fourteen - jerks the bolt back to load a new round from the magazine, shoots out a desperate hand and grabs the kid’s arm with a hand I know to be capable of hauling a fifteen stone man six feet up a rock face by its fingertips. I swear I hear bones crack. Then Vern sweeps the kid sideways over the balustrade as if he were a doll (which he virtually is; the Smoke has left him no musculature except what he needs to stand up straight and wander from bottle to bottle).

The kid falls. The gun clatters to the floor on our side of the bars. Ha! Luckily, though its barrel is pointing straight at me as it clangs down on its butt on the steps, it does not go off.

The single shot it did fire, however, has been heard. In the firelit blackness below us, bodies that looked dead are stirring. On the stairs above us, feet are clanging downwards. Vern, meanwhile, has collapsed against the balustrade, leaking red stuff. Decidedly useless and immobile.

“Samarobrin shall spread the breadth of the Northern Pole”, murmurs a voice from below.

“The well-dressed executive will be wearing tweed this winter”, assures another. I hear a knifeblade click out of a handle and lock.

“Is that what they call it?” says Vern. “Samarobrin?”

“It’s Nostradamus”, I say back. “From his prediction of the end of the world. They talk in shitty prophecies, remember. He probably read it in a book.”

“He said it in English, Pen.” And it’s only then that I realize he’s right.

Now that really does put the frighteners on. And now that they’ve identified a threat to their nest, the Smokers are swarming up towards us with a vengeance, like a nest of big sick-looking termites, some of them collecting shards of spent bottle held like knives, oblivious to the fact that what will slash our throats will also sever their fingers. Oblivious to all things but the need to protect their precious Smoke.

And suddenly, I see our way out of this. Quickly, I reach forward and snatch up a bottle of the black junk.

I nearly drop it - what I’m not expecting is for it to feel so cold, as if something more frigid than a politician’s heart is rolling around inside it. And when I look into it, into the glass, the smoke or dust or gas inside it really does seem to coil and roil like some sort of infernal eel.

It’s also letting loose tiny puffs of black smoke from out of its stopper, round the carefully-made wax seal at its neck. Puffs of smoke that seem to go out of their way to seek out the bare flesh on my arms. I quickly develop second thoughts about having picked up the thing.

But it has the desired effect.

They all, to a junkie, go silent. An indeterminate number of angels could be heard tapdancing on a dropping pinhead. It is as if I’m the villain in the scene in the bad movie where the bad guy threatens to shoot the baby/child/dog/cat/girlfriend if the hero doesn’t drop his gun.

As I have said before, these are not stupid people. These are perfectly intelligent and rational people whose rationality has been entirely perverted to the aim of acquiring Oracle Smoke. And I’m holding a bottle of the stuff which I could break at any time.

The goons on the stairs are equally impressed with the gravity of the situation. They stand down, holding (it transpires) a motley collection of firearms ranging from fowling pieces that look like they were made for Czar Nicholas to full-on military hardware. We pass them on the stairs at kissing distance as I dangle the bottle over the bannisters. I have to support Vern with my other arm. We don’t attempt to bring the rifle. It wouldn’t be much use in any case. Half the artillery these people have looks set to blow up in the face of anyone fool enough to fire it.

We make it up to the machinery level, but they’re still following near enough behind us to twang my knicker elastic. It’s at this point that Vern refuses to be lugged any further. He’s breathing like a fat Yankee nudist climbing Everest. And Vern, I know, enjoys a spot of fell running when he’s not caving. He probably has twice the number of red blood cells of any normal man.

“Come on!” I yell, nearly dropping my bottle in the process, which would surely kill us both. But he ain’t budging.

“Go on without me”, he says; and of course, I can’t. I look up and the number of flights above seems interminable. If I stay down here with him, I am going to die. Unless I stay down here with him, on the other hand, he is going to die.

That makes both of us dead, then.

Then, suddenly, with more energy than I’d thought he still had in him, he snaps out, grabs the bottle from my hands, twists round, and dashes it on the stairwell behind him.

He turns back, and his face is spattered with some substance like black living mercury. As I watch, one of the droplets slithers uphill against gravity into his nostril.

“RUN!” he yells.

An almost living cloud of glass and gas and dust and droplets fills the air. A religious moan of lamentation comes from the crowd behind us. The front rank of stoners drops to the steps, searching on hands and knees, trying to literally lick up the spilled junk.

“Only one thousand shall be saved”, intones one.

“We foresee the development of high-bandwidth Eastern European optical infrastructures progressing at an ever faster pace following deregulation of markets in fledgeling EU member states”, mumbles another.

I cast a look back at Vern. He is, surely, already dead, and worse than dead. I run.

Nobody runs after me. A continuous stream of jabbering prophecy chatters excited out of the dark behind me, and I swear that after a while, at least one of the voices, yelling “ENGLAND WILL NEVER FALL WHILE RAVENS REMAIN IN THE TOWER”, is screaming in Northern English.

But up above, far up above, beyond stairway after stairway after stairway, is a glint of daylight.

It might be the false daylight of a fluorescent tube, but it’s something to aim for. I can force myself to push for it despite the fact that my lungs are searing and my leg muscles are tying themselves into crochet and my pulse is hammering like a steam locomotive in my brain.

And it is daylight. Genuine live daylight, coming in through a grille in the concrete ceiling scarcely larger than a microchip. Fading, bluing daylight creeping towards dusk, and distinguishable as such from any cheap fluorescent imitation. And if I could leap up ten feet in the air and bite through steel with my teeth, I’d be through it in half a jiffy. But as it is, caked in my own sweat at the top of the final staircase, up here in the twilight with real rain dripping through that tiny matrix of fading evening sky above me, and the smell of the outside air and freedom soft and cool on my face and certain death closing on me from below, I think this looks very much like the End Of The Line.

The top of the stairwell is blocked off. It obviously once opened into somewhere - there are doorways, many doorways, which someone has painstakingly bricked up. This is why there was no glass and shit on the upper storeys. No-one ever comes up here. This way doesn’t go anywhere any more. When the Russians abandoned their underground venom-manufacture complex, they bricked it up and concreted it over, and probably ploughed the ground with salt for good measure. Whoever lives or works up top probably doesn’t even know what lies beneath them.

I can hear the enemy gasping and wheezing as they lope up the stairs towards me, out of condition due to their Smoke habit. But however unfit they might be, they can and will cut me to pieces. It’s only a matter of seconds now.

Then I realize suddenly that the distance from me to the grille in the roof does not have to be ten feet. Not if I stand on the balustrade before I jump.

The drawback to this is that both grille and balustrade are positioned above perhaps one hundred metres of vertical space. Right in the middle of the stairwell, in the case of the grille. If I miss it, I fall; and if I fall, I die.

But any danger of death is better than death as an absolute certainty. I hop up onto the rail and waddle out towards the grille like an overstuffed budgerigar. I sit there for a second or two, testing my weight distribution, plucking up courage. And jump.

My hands hit the grille. My small and puny fingers pass through it and hold on; the bars are heavy enough to hold my weight. But what do I do now? I’m dangling forty storeys above pit bottom. And the grille is an iron manhole cover set into concrete. And it opens, if it opens at all, upward. I can feel rain on my face now. I could cry.

But I am not giving up. I will die before I give up.

After all, the difference between the two options is only measured in seconds right now. There’ll be time enough for me to make my peace with God on the way down.

I jerk my entire body, punching it upwards against the grille. Beautifully, miraculously, the grille moves, lifting out of the concrete slightly. I jerk harder. This time it comes out completely. I jerk again, and this time, twist as I do so. Nearly, but not quite. The grille drops back into its hole, back to where it started.

I hold on again for another couple of seconds, summoning up everything I have, and spasm upwards, and yell like a karateka.

And the grille catches on the edge of the hole. And holds. And I see four thin slivers of daylight round its edges.

I twist further, making the slivers bigger, big enough to writhe a finger through. Then I cautiously unstick the fingers of one hand, and slap them onto the concrete up above. Then I follow them with the other hand, and finally I’m hauling myself up out of the manhole onto a tiny square of rain-sodden cement at the bottom of a brick shaft lined with drainpipes and sash windows. Steam hisses from drain covers all around me. Somewhere, I hear a toilet flushing. I’m in a light well sunk into some big old building. A building with flush toilets. Smoke houses, I imagine, do not usually have functioning flush toilets. Smoke users are not the sort to go in for domestic plumbing.

I can still hear them down below, issuing threats and dire predictions in the dark. But they cannot come up here. They can’t go where I can. The drug has destroyed their bodies too efficiently.

Idly, I push the metal cover back over the abyss, and get to my feet, just as a lady in an unconvincing blonde wig pulls down one of the nearest windows and asks me what I think I’m doing in the British Embassy in very poor Russian indeed.