Here at last

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

St. John the Divine

But now, in this valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him: his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground: for, thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, it would be the best way to stand.

So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish, and they are his pride; he had wings like a dragon, and feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Part One

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 10 2010

Here at last. Small for an ex-Imperial Capital. Buildings, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Greek, Byzantine, Romanesque, Romanov, Roman - piled up in no particular order. For all the Gzel Czaer Matias Corvinus is a ‘majestic palimpsest of three thousand years of European history’ (quote from ‘Let’s Go Vzeng Na’ 2008) it is a very small one.

Looking east across the square - Gzel is the word for square, no idea how pronounced - can see the palace of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, a token of that monarch’s unhealthy fascination with this area. During WW2, the palace was both an SS and KGB headquarters, and an SS General had the unfortunate distinction of being tortured there in his own torturing cellars. Now, it is a museum, the Musé Sissi. To the north of it is the old Polish town hall, originally a mediaeval guildhall, for many years the Soviet Commissary. Now it seems to be the Hilton Matias Corvinus. Polish, Austro-Hungarian and Russian eagles alike sit around its eaves (you can tell the Austro-Hungarian and Russian ones easily - they have two heads). Some of the eagles nursing bulletholes.

Behind where the Zil taxi dropped me off is the Orthodox cathedral, notable for having a Catholic campanile. Easy to see where the Orthodox saints have been excised from the campanile and replaced with Catholic ones. The same process seems to have happened in reverse on the cathedral façade. The city has been swapped back and forth between Cath. and Orth. for the last thousand years, not forgetting a short sojourn under the Mongols. The saints on the upper stages of the façade famously only survived the Mongol conquest because Ogedei Khan was unable to find a stepladder. Guidebook says façade originally covered in gold leaf before Vzeng Na’s glorious forty years under Communism, but cathedral still an imposing building.

Opposite the cathedral, with minarets deliberately built to be a cubit taller, is the Ottoman mosque, abutting a northerly section of the Bey’s wall. To be honest, mosque is mostly minaret. Ottomans did not have much time to build it in before the Hungarian reconquista, but wanted to make their point. Hungarians wanted to make their point too - tops of minarets are flat where the roofs have been remodelled to make them shorter than the cathedral again.

To the left, looking from the cathedral, an archway inlaid with cut and painted tile leads through the Beglerbeg’s wall into the Garden Citadel. Archway v. ornate, but has stone gateposts big and squat and ugly enough to support vault doors of Federal Reserve Bank, not to mention ominous holes in the arabesques overhead that evil head-destroying substances might be poured through.

Air is an enticing reek of strange foods, peculiar and ill-advised automobile fuels, and exotically poorly maintained sewers. Cars are nearly all Czaer 2000’s, products of Vzeng Na’s one and only car factory, bizarre copies of Isetta bubblecars. Driving one a point of national pride, it seems. Only a very few of the most important businessmen, pimps and gunrunners seem to drive Lexi and Mercedes, and there seems to be little middle ground.

Across the Gzel, in what was once a Soviet Museum of the Patriotic War, new American imperialists have set their mark, a branch of Starbuck’s. Notice ‘Starbucks’ spelt out in Roman and Cyrillic characters. In one of the comfy armchairs near the window sits Ivan. Recognized Ivan as only man in caff wearing red carnation in buttonhole (actually only man in caff with buttonhole, but digress). Ivan’s suit, like most suits round here, not a perfect fit, but a reasonable one, and what it’s fitting is quite pleasant too. This police inspector does not live on donuts alone. There is a gymnasium somewhere in Na for certain.

Ran down steps and waved. Heel fell off shoe on period cobbles, went arse over tit into fire hydrant, which still has pointy Communist stars on it just where it kisses the forehead.

Ow.

Saw pointy Communist stars for some minutes.

Ivan a nuclear-powered dreamboat. Shows me a picture of his wife, who is of course gorgeous, the cow. He carries a gun, a dinky little Russian thing which he says is better than James Bond’s Walther PPK. He says the bullets from it go through steel plate.

As day was warm, suggested we sit outside on pavement. He objected as only pimps sit on pavement, with their bitches apparently. Quite excited at thought of being his bitch, so insisted. Smiled at old gentlemen passing by. They all smiled back, but their wives reined them in and scowled at me. Man with a big smart jacket and two girlfriends wandered past and said something obviously rude to Ivan. Ivan in hysterics by the time the sun set. Getting along fine, it seems, and always a good idea to know the local police chief, biblically even.

Na, says Ivan, is and always has been arranged totally around its central tourist attraction. In the very earliest days the Greeks, and maybe even the Persians, built temples here to gods of their respective underworlds. Here, he says, is the site of the world’s only recorded temple to Angra Mainyu. Not sure who Angra Mainyu is, but smile and nod politely. The Romans, says Ivan, were also obsessed with the site, the Emperor Heliogabalus making a pilgrimage here, and the Emperor Trajan conquering all the land between here and the mountains just so he could dedicate a temple. The site was as important to the Greeks as Delphi. At Delphi the single priestess, known as the Pythia, sat on a chair balanced over a fissure in the earth. The fissure was supposed to contain the body of the monster serpent Python, guardian of the Centre of the Earth. Python had been slain by Apollo for some reason or other, and from the corruption of its body foul miasmas rose into the priestess's nostrils, allowing her to foretell the future, possibly insofar as the future was 'sitting on top of this fissure is going to get really old really quickly'. But, says Ivan, Delphi was widely known by everyone who was ayone in the Ancient World to be just a pale imitation of the far older, greater and more terrible Oracle in the cold lands to the north at Na. (Have been to Delphi; have looked down the priestess's fissure. Agree that Na's is the only one of the two that looks as if it really could go all the way down).

There is even reputed to be an old proto-Celtic stone circle round the place. It wasn't just the religious and artistic life of the area, Ivan says, that was dictated by what was revered here, but also the local economy, from the very earliest times - in Roman days, it was considered a prime source of fertilizer from the thousands of bats which used to live inside the entrance, and the locals were known as ‘vespertiliani’ or ‘bat people’, as many of them lived down in the dark among the chiroptera, in little crazy wood-and-raffia villages clinging to the rock. Tacitus complains that ‘these people seem to think Caesar cannot tax them, as they live not on the Earth, but in it’. Since time immemorial, all the sewers of all the surrounding districts have fed into the mouth, and it should, Ivan admits, smell appalling, but it swallows the stench, just as it swallows light, and sound. (Knew this from the guidebook - if you yell into it, you get no echo back, apparently.) (Just checked another, scarier guidebook, which says you sometimes do get an echo, but not in your own voice, because it’s Satan mimicking you from the Pits of Tartarus and trying to draw you down to Hell, etc., etc. Prefer first old wive’s tale, less scary). The town grew in the nineteenth century purely because of this incredible ability to absorb sewage; other cities on the plains around it had to construct huge and elaborate systems for poo disposal. Na, says Ivan, still has, even today, not one single sewage farm. ‘If the devil’s down there’, Ivan grins, ‘we’re all crapping on his head daily’.

Ivan knows about the group of Americans in town who believe it goes right down to the Mohovoric Discontinuity. He says the Soviets believed that in the 1950’s, and had their own Mohole project here. He says their equipment is still visible down there if you squint through binoculars. The Russians, he says, were not successful (looks v. satisfied when he says this).

A street kid tried to tap me up for dollars. Wouldn’t take local currency, cheeky little SOB. At the same time as he was tapping me, another kid was trying to sidle past and grab my wallet. Ivan just looked at him. The kid took one look back and scarpered. Ivan laughed. He says kids like that are a constant problem. They’re the kids of Smoke addicts, he says. The word he uses is Дым, which means Smoke in English. I’ve never heard of it, and he’s quite surprised I haven’t. Oracle Smoke, he says, is the drug of choice hereabouts. I ask him what sort of drug it is, and he waves his hands about vaguely and says ‘probably an opiate’. It certainly sounds like crack or heroin, addicts lose all interest in reality, not even sending their kids out to whore and steal like decent junkies should. The kids do the whoring and stealing off their own bats, as they starve to death if they don’t.

“Where does Oracle Smoke come from?” I say.

He shrugs. “They make it somewhere, I imagine.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it?”

He nods. “I have. It is carried into Smoke houses in glass bottles, wrapped around with cooking foil. Coke bottles, so I hear, are especially favoured. The bottle is heated, inside the foil to stop it cracking, and the family gathers round. As the flame gets hotter the Smoke rises from the bottle and fills the room. It is more addictive, I imagine, than heroin, sex or chocolate. Our narcotics officers have orders to wear respirators. I have lost more than one man to the Smoke who did not.”

“Was that boy on Oracle Smoke?” I ask. Ivan shakes his head. Oracle Smoke, he says, sucks the life out of a user almost overnight. “There is no soul any longer”, he says. “The skin tightens, because the addict fails to eat. The eyes steal back into the head. Besides”, he adds, “Smoke users don’t speak that intelligibly. They talk in strings of gibberish. Some believe what they say predicts the future.”

“And does it?”

“It predicts their own future. They die within a month, invariably.”

Ivan says he’ll show me the Museum tomorrow. I asked him if it worried him, living on the edge of what the Greeks and Romans thought was the entrance to Hell. He laughs and says he spent the first ten years of his life in Hell. He explains - until he was eleven, rock and roll music was forbidden in Vzeng Na, with the exception, it seems, of Pat Boone, as the local party chairman had all the Boonester’s records. Ivan launched into an impromptu solo of Ain’t That A Shame, and his fellow customers in the café responded by throwing litter and good-natured abuse at him.

“You see”, he says with a wink, “the police chief is the only man who can get away with Pat Boone karaoke in this town.”

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 11, 2010

Morning. Hotel room was cold. Modern 'duvet' technology has not yet penetrated this far east. Bed was made up with a gazillion blankets, each as thin as tissue paper and each wound round the mattress so tight I could scarcely breathe when I first got in.

Breakfast a thing they called ‘compôte’, and I called ‘a bunch of very old pears swimming in some very horrid syrup’. There were also boiled sweets, a bit like Pez or Lovehearts. There was something described as coffee. The boiled sweets, being virtually raw sugar, weren’t bad. I found they dissolved in ‘coffee’. Maybe they were supposed to.

Went for an early morning stroll around the metropolis. Doesn’t smell quite so bad in the early morning when nobody’s been for a shit yet. Eveywhere government restoration teams are prising up poor-quality Soviet tarmac to reveal gorgeous mediaeval cobblestones beneath. Govt. seems acutely conscious of the fact that tourism is the only reliable way to draw investment into Na.

(In the cold, the sewers actually steam. You can tell which buildings people have taken a dump in. Maybe getting obsessive on this point.)

Walked into Victory Square (Gzel Lziofang), enormous impressive poor quality Soviet tarmac thing with triumphal statues holding aloft hammers and sickles and submachineguns. Statues covered in anticommunist graffiti. At least one of the statues has a gigantic aluminium phallus, welded on to it by freshman art students, according to the Guide. Victory Square created to commemorate glorious Soviet victory against evil Nazi legions. The Guide goes on to admit the evil Nazi legions included at least one Leibstandarte Dacia, a sort of Vzeng Na Freikorps recruited from local fascist sympathizers. Victory Square a monument to the heroic struggle of the workers against capitalist etc., etc., and was created by bulldozing an acre of tenement housing.

At one end of Victory Square, the Bey’s Wall crumbles - most likely someone in the seventeenth century scored a direct hit with a cannon - and the Beglerbeg’s Wall is visible behind it. On the other side of that wall, signs warn in several languages, is ‘a drop’. Not ‘a ten foot drop’; not ‘a thirty foot drop’. Not ‘a thousand’. Possibly the greatest understatement I have ever seen on public signage. It’s at this end that the Americans from the University of Prague, Michigan are setting up their equipment. Their equipment is big and impressive. It has UNIVERSITY OF PRAGUE, MICHIGAN printed all over it.

Ran into one of the Americans. He’s a big black man called Wilson. He says Wilson is a common name back where his people from. I ask him where his people come from. He grins and says “Africa”.

He explains that the machine is really little more than a giant crane. “The hole’s been dug already”, he says, “we just need brave men to fill it.” He slams his fist to his chest to indicate he’s a brave man. Either that or a Klingon warrior.

I ask Wilson if he’s going to be filling the hole himself - he says “not unless the A team gets sick”. He points out the A Team, a white man working on what looks like it’s going to end up at the end of the Americans’ crane. It looks like a cross between a cable car and a wrecking ball, and I say this to the A team. The A team isn’t nearly so friendly. He’s far too interested in doing important boy stuff to talk to a girl. He seems to be checking the cable connection to the wrecking ball. Fair enough. if I was going down in the wrecking ball, I’d check the cable too.

I ask the A team what he’s going to wreck with his wrecking ball. I don’t even get a smile then. He just grunts 'If I’m Unlucky, Myself', and carries on with his checking. I shrug and stand back and take photos. The whole thing looks more like a naval cable-layer than a crane - after all, it is supposed to dangle things down, not lift them up. All the lifting it has to do is the two yards over the Beglerbeg’s Wall. After that, it’s downhill all the way. I notice that the wrecking ball looks to be made mostly of carbon fibre. I ask Wilson if it was expensive. He says it was paid for by a Japanese corporation, Komatsu. He says Komatsu make cranes. Their publicity department will be along later to get their pound of flesh taking pictures, apparently.

Ask Wilson if his giant crane has a name. He scratches his head, and says its name depends on whether you're asking the official Komatsu supercrane concept development team, or the team who are actually going to be using it. The official marketing name of the K2005 supercrane is, he says, "Vortox", because Vortox sounds impressive and means nothing in any language. I ask him what the team who are using the crane call it. "Mr. Lifty", he replies.

I ask him where Prague is in Michigan, and mispronounce ‘Prague’. Apparently you say it ‘Praig’. It rhymes with the name of Wilson’s unfriendly colleague, which is apparently Craig.

Say goodbye to Wilson, but am forced to promise him a candlelit dinner for two with caviar and champagne before he’ll give me my hand back. Ho hum. Wilson claims to be African stallion but his belly like an old cart horse.

I get to the Museum of the Pit an hour early, wanting to poke around on my own before getting steered around by Ivan. He looks like a steerer. The Museum is entered via the arch in the Beglerbeg’s Wall, and is, even today, the only way for ordinary members of the public to get through to see the sights. The Beglerbeg probably put the wall up himself for that express purpose, and charged admission. Even in 1500, Early Renaissance peasants would have paid to stand and boggle. The Beglerbeg wasn’t daft.

The Museum of the Pit was bombed by both the Russians and the Germans in WW2, and half of it’s been rebuilt all postmodern. It looks horrid, like a handsome face with some really bad corrective burn surgery. The old half of it was once a public bath, perched right there on the edge where all the stinky water could easily be gotten rid of. Supposedly, it’s also built on the site of a genuine old Roman balnea. “In a building on this spot” (says the all-knowing Let’s Go Guide) “Heliogabalus himself might have stewed in his own juices whilst gazing out into a majestic mile of nothingness”.

At a loss to imagine how a mile of nothingness can look majestic, but walked in and paid the entrance fee to a minge-faced old babushkye. The rooms inside are yellow with years of fag smoke, and there are star shapes in the smoke where old Communist insignia have been removed. In the anteroom, there are models of what stood on this site in 200 BC, 200 AD, 1200, 1500, 1700, 1945, and 1962, all crafted with elaborate care and as much love as went into the saints’ faces on the cathedral. There are no English translations on the cases - unthinkable! - and I’m forced to fall back on an English guidebook which is an entertainment in itself, as it appears to have been translated from Maem Na or Russian into Mongol, Swahili and finally English using some sort of online crapulence engine. In the 200 Before Jesus, we are told, there was already being one church to Hades on this locality, and a Soothsayer like the Soothsayer on Delphi. Apparently peoples very important like kings and tsars swarmed to the Soothsayer to learn the future. In 200 AD, the Romanesque Empire conquered the neighbourhood, and builded a Romanesque church. Then followed the Dark Periods and the Barbaric Invasions, and the churches were destroyed. When Christianism came to the Barbaric peoples, they builded more churches, but this time to Jesus. Momentaneously, the Turkic peoples attacked and made this land a colony, but they got defeated by Christianists in the 15th Century, and the Austrian-Hungarians ruled this country then until the 20th Century, when the Big War freeed the peoples of Na. (I particularly liked the ‘freeed’). Unluckily (said the guide), after the Republic of Vzeng Na had been freeed, it then had the misfortune to be liberated by the Nazis and emancipated by the Russians.

The 1945 diorama of the Museum shows much the same drab grey streets I’ve already been out in, Nazi banners hanging from some of the buildings being torn down by victorious Soviet soldiers triumphantly raising the hammer-and-sickle on top of the catholic campanile. Defeated Nazis, still fighting a desperate rearguard, are exiting to stage left behind a huge tank half the size of the Museum building itself. Asked an old buffer standing by the door in a commissionaire’s outfit whether the tank was out of scale, and he said no, the Germans had had very big tanks, he had seen them as a child. One of the very big ones, he said, was still rusting in a square very near where it appeared on the diorama. It had weighed over 200 tonnes, and been called a ‘Mouse’. He finds this outrageously funny and laughs like he has a punctured lung. “I have a punctured lung”, he explains proudly, “although I am seventy-five.”

The 1965 exhibit, meanwhile, shows an enormous structure, pillarbox-red all over, occupying exactly the same place in Victory Square as the American crane is now. The structure is a crane, arching out over the drop, and unlike any normal crane, spans it totally; a gantry crane, I think it would be called. A rather pretty-looking old building on the other side of the drop from the square has been blown up to make room for one of the crane’s feet. It has three feet - a third foot is blocking the entrance to a street one hundred and twenty degrees around from the second. The impression is of a great red spider sitting brooding over the city. Or squatting over a potty.

“They tried to go down”, says the old man in weirdly accented Russian, “to the Discontinuity.”

“The Mohovoric Discontinuity”, I nodded.

“Exactly that discontinuity, yes.”

“What did they think they would find there?”

“What did the Americans think they would find”, said the old man, “when they went to the Moon?” He makes a sign on his chest. Not sure whether it is a cross or not. “A bad thing, a bad thing, to go down there.” He points at the Soviet stars on the model machine. “After they went down there, their empire fell. Heliogabalus”, he says, indicating the Roman exhibit, “his empire fell. Alexander”, he says, jabbing a finger at the Greek exhibit, “his empire fell.”

“Alexander’s empire”, says I, “was founded after he came here. The Soviet empire fell twenty years after they came here. And Heliogabalus’s empire fell two hundred years after he came here. Surely the lesson here is that empires fall.”

“Their empire fell”, warns the old man, still wagging his finger in my face.

“It’s a beautiful display”, I say. “It must have taken many people a very long time.”

“I built it”, says the old man, swelling so much with pride I think he’ll bust his buttons. “I built it all, myself.”

I was amazed. (Am not easily amazed). “How long did it take?”

He shrugged. “I am a very old man”, he said.

The old man’s name, as far as I can make it out, is Gviong - native Vaemna, short build, axeblade face, eyes like knifewounds in pork fat, the works. Says his family gave themselves all German names during the Great Patriotic War - his German name was Georg - but as soon as the wars were over, they went back to the names they were baptised with. (As if any self-respecting Gestapo officer wouldn’t have known a Vaemna at a hundred yards). The Vaemna were put into slave labour in the war, on the Germans’ pet projects. If the war hadn’t ended when it had, they’d probably have been exterminated along with the Jews and gypsies.

He shows me his arms proudly; no tattoos. He’s inviting me to be impressed by this. “I finished the war as a water carrier for the Leibstandarte”, he says. “I was too clever to go into the camps.” This says just about all you need to know about the Vaemna. They are survivors, not moralists. Surrounded by Germany, Hungary, Russia, Greece, Rome, Poland, the Cossacks, the Mongols and the Ottomans, after two and a half thousand years of recorded pig-in-the-middle, they are still alive.

“One year later”, he grins, “I was running errands for Zhukov.”

Beyond the anteroom, the Museum is full of glass cabinets containing stuff that has been excavated. Some of these are the actual stuff, some replicas, as the Soviets and Nazis took most of the originals, and they are only now beginning to be tracked down. Circa 50% of the exhibits are votive tablets (most broken). Chucked into the deep over the millennia, they are chipped into expensive marble in Classical Latin, scratched into half-baked clay in dog-Latin, glazed into Samian terra cotta in aristocratic Greek. The very oldest are scratched into aurochs scapulae in scripts philologists are still trying to decipher. Some of the earliest look like they should be in our own alphabet, but this is deceptive, as they’re some of the first surviving examples of the Phoenician character set. People have been writing prayers to their gods, things they wuld like to happen, letters to Santa or Satan, and lobbing them down into the dark here since before the time of Jesus. Archaeologists have only been hauling them back up, by comparison, since the time of Schliemann.

The newer tablets in the collection are made of porcelain, tourist trinkets from the nineteenth century, saying things like ‘God bless this house and all the little children’ in Romanian. The really modern ones are plastic or titanium, designed to survive the journey all the way down to, uh, whatever is at the bottom. Some of the titanium exhibits are written in Japanese, Hindi or Arabic.

Besides the tablets, there are more valuable items of swag. Scythian gold tinkets from a thousand years before the birth of Christ, sesterces, denarii, drachmas, minissimi, Byzantine necklaces made of amber that found its way to Byzantium on Viking boats picking their way cautiously down the Dnieper. The occasional Turkish dinar. A thing the plaque on its cabinet says is a paiza, a word that doesn’t exist in my Russian dictionary. For the record, a paiza looks like a big wooden coin and was apparently “only entrusted to the most loyal messsengers of the Tartar Khans” for some doubtless very good Tartar Khan reason. Soviet Patriotic War medals. An Iron Cross on which someone has scratched the words ‘Es sterbe Adolf Hitler’. A Rolex watch. A stone age Venus figurine with buttocks even more ample than my own. A Persian cylinder seal.

Persians? I do a double-take on this one. We are, after all, a long way from Persia. But in the days of Xenophon, Demosthenes and Alexander, the Persian Empire stretched to the Hellespont and, from time to time, beyond; and the fact that an entrance to Hell existed in a cold land beyond their borders interested the Great King enough, it seems, to merit a substantial Achaemenid presence here.

As for the replica exhibits, a highly imaginative and doubtless totally fanciful set of shelves details every single pagan idol that existed in the kingdom of the Danubian Ostrogoths, idols “sent down to join the Devil in the dark” when the Ostrogoth king converted. “The largest of these”, the plaque on the Pagan Idols cabinet proclaims, “was over two men high, sat on three legs, and possessed two heads which looked both back to the past and forward to the future, and a fire that burned eternally in its belly.” A likeness of the Ostrogoth idol has been produced for the museum by what looks like Vzeng Na Mixed Infants, who have tried to depict its barbarous splendour in bacofoil and papier maché. Looked like large-headed pig with big willy. (Willy, on closer examination, was third leg.) “This dreadful graven image”, said the cabinet plaque grandly, “has never been recovered.”

In the 1500’s, meanwhile, when the Turks took the town, all the golden crucifixes in its churches were melted down and cast into verses from the Quran in a faience lattice, which were then thrown into the pit “to send the word of God even down to Eblis”. When the Christians recovered the city a century later, the newly-appointed Bishop fired consecrated silver arrows down into the deep to wound the Devil, who the Christians of the town were convinced had been coaxed closer to the surface by Islamic evangelism.

But one thing the Christians, Moslems and Zoroastrians all seem to have been convinced of is this - the Devil is down there, somewhere. The Big D’s face jokingly rendered in the bathhouse murals all round the Museum walls - a grinning Satan, an imperious Eblis, a dark and terrible Hades carrying off a not entirely unhappy-looking Proserpina. The whole room recognizably a bathhouse - marble shelves round the walls used to be seats, a large depression in the floor where most of the larger cabinets stand is decorated with a delapidated mosaic of mermaids and tritons and obviously used to be the bath itself. (The mosaic is bomb-damaged at one end & has been repaired with what I found when I prised one loose with my toe to be little cubes of plastic not even the same colour as the original ceramic).

And at the other end of the room is the Picture Window.

The Window stretches from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall. Its lintel is spanned by an RSJ thick enough to hold up a viaduct, just so bathers and museumgoers alike can have an uninterrupted oggle at what lies beyond.

The bathhouse walls must project over the edge. View goes straight, straight down. How far? Nobody knows. Radar does not return from down there. They say this could be because of scatter from the walls, or radar-absorbent muck (or magma!) at pit bottom. But the locals all know better. They know it goes down forever. Things dropped down it make no sound. Explosive shells fired down it do explode, but at wildly differing depths, implying that they are detonating on the abyss walls rather than on its bottom. Certainly the vent twists and turns as it descends, and spelunkers have so far explored only the first mile. The walls are difficult to climb, overhanging and slimy with bat guano. Aid climbing is necessary, and you have to make your own holes to put protection in; there are hardly any cracks in which to shove a nut or piton. The rock is metamorphic, volcanic rock that was tough to start with and has since been squeezed and fused in the Earth’s guts until it is hard as iron, smooth as glass.

There have been scientific attempts to explain the pit. Thales of Miletus, an Ancient Greek flat earth philosopher, believed it had originally been one of the entrances by which the sun rose each day from the underworld, and that it had simply dried up like an old channel of the river Euphrates when the Sun changed its course and began rising in the East. Nazi scientists believed it to be a possible entrance to the alien kingdoms they knew existed inside the hollow Earth (or, since their leaders cherished an idea that the Earth was hollow but that we were living on the inside, outside it). Soviet and German scientists alike theorized that, if not to the actual inside of the Earth, it might reach at least to the Mohovoric Discontinuity, the boundary layer between the Earth’s crust and its mantle. US scientists wasted millions trying to bore a hole down to the Discontinuity in the States in the 60’s. Here it seems Soviet scientists hoped they might be lucky enough to have found a ready-bored hole in their own back yard. Ufologists believe, in fact, that the pit is an abandoned alien Mohole project built by aliens for whatever purposes aliens build Mohole projects.

Christian ‘scientists’ all around the world still believe, of course, that this is the hole made by Satan when he fell through the Earth from Heaven into Hell.

Certainly, it looks like you’d be motoring some before you hit pit bottom. Birds’ nests and bat colonies streak the walls with guano as far down as the eye can see, and undoubtedly further. Green grass tufts and the occasional tree cling to rocky prominences nearer to the sunlight. As you look further down, the grass grows yellow and eventually peters out altogether, replaced by deep-reaching tree roots, dead white ivy and and shelf fungus feeding off the walls. Some of the streaks round the rim, as most of the city’s sewage and waste water still drains into this one sink, must be human guano. It doesn’t smell from this side of the window, but am not sure it doesn’t stink beyond it, whatever Ivan says.

The official geologist’s term for the rock is abyssite. It is described by my Guide as a ‘schist rich in cryptocrystalline quartz’, which tells me little apart from the fact that I like the sound of the phrase ‘cryptocrystalline quartz’. Although identifiably a schist, it appears nowhere else on Earth in this precise chemical composition; hence it has its own name. One single slender column of abyssite strikes up from somewhere far beneath like a Stone Age spearhead. On top of this uncertain foundation, someone, many years ago, has chosen to build a church; how, I’m not sure. We’re talking about mediaeval engineering here, after all. The church is dedicated, controversially, to Abaddon, the creature mentioned in Revelation as the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Detractors of the church point to the fact that only four angels, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel and Uriel, are officially mentioned in the O.T., and that this angel from Revelation might be a fallen one resident in Hell.

Then: “Don’t look into the abyss”, comes a voice from behind me, “or the abyss will look back into you.”

“You didn’t make that up”, I laugh. “That was Nietzsche.”

“Everyone in this city knows that quote”, says Ivan. “They say Nietzsche was holidaying in Na when he came up with it.” He is in uniform, and what a lot of silver buttons his uniform has on it too. Makes you just want to unbutton them all. He’s wearing a military-style beret - not on his head, but clipped to his shoulder epaulette. The cap badge is stylized enough to look like a heraldic bird, but I realize it isn’t. The wings are more like the wings of an insect, there are four legs, and the head of the creature looks human. He notices I’m looking at it.

“And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men”, explains Ivan.

“And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit”, I say back.

He taps the cap badge. “This has been the symbol of our city for over a thousand years”, he says. “Possibly even longer. Maybe over two thousand.”

I find this hard to believe. “Ivan, the Book of Revelation was written around 100 AD.”

He frowns. “Yes, and that’s the funny thing, you see. This shape, this image, appears on commemorative medals and votive tablets struck here well before the birth of Plato.” Then he grins. “Maybe it wasn’t our artists who took their inspiration from John, eh? Maybe John just wrote down a description of the devil based on the testimony of one of our own people who had seen him.”

“The Angel of the Bottomless Pit isn’t the Devil, Ivan.”

Ivan shrugs. “Lucifer was an angel, once.”

He steered me round the museum as expected. Gviong, the old commissionaire, winked at me as he did so. It transpires the paternal side of Ivan’s family are Russian, not Vaemna, as I might have guessed from the name. His mother’s family, meanwhile, are ethnic Poles, as are many of the shopkeepers and petit bourgeoisie of Na. “The Vaemna don’t breed with outsiders”, he says, and he’s looking at Gviong as he says it. I get the feeling this may be a sore point. Maybe Ivan has attempted to breed with a Vaemna in the past.

For Ivan, whose father was a KGB officer, the story behind the cabinets is different. The Russian troops in the dioramas are defending the motherland against Nazi aggression. When the Soviet era ended, he says, Russia withdrew voluntarily from Vzeng Na, if only because it would have been stupid for one tiny ASSR to remain a Russian island on the other side of Belarus. Russia’s efforts to unlock the earth’s Mohovoric secrets had brought prosperity and employment to the area in the 1960’s, as had the many Russian Army and Air Force bases. “But it is good now”, he says, “that the Russians are no longer here, I think. We must be free to make our own destiny.”

“Does ‘we’ include the Vaemna?” I say, and he replies that over fifty percent of Vzeng Na’s population are now ethnic slavs - Poles, Russians, Byelorussians, Kashubians, Ukrainians, and so forth - which strictly is not an answer, but which, in another equally important sense, is. The Pan-Slavist Party has been in power in Vzeng Na since 1996, apparently. So it seems the Vaemna are, even now they have their independence, not in charge of their destiny.

Then Ivan steers me politely to the mysterious-looking cage at one corner of the room, which looks as if it might contain a dangerous animal. This is a new addition to the Museum; it cuts across the lines of mosaic on the floor. The cage is the only thing allowed to break the line of the big picture window as it crosses the room. A commissionaire dressed like Gviong is standing by it, almost like a sentry. This cage is evidently important. It is made of wrought iron, formed into fantastical art deco designs, and it’s a good few seconds before I realize it’s an elevator cage. The machinery for the elevator vanishes up into the roof. This was doubtless the lift assembly for some swank Na apartment before it was appropriated en bloc; above the lintel of the cage door is a quotation in what appears to be Italian.

“’Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’”, translates Ivan before I ask, and sweeps the steel louvres open before the commissionaire has time to. I am acutely, almost uncomfortably aware that Ivan is the local police chief. The museum staff may be terrified with dignity, but they are clearly terrified of him.

The elevator is very small. It has cagework sides through which little fingers can easily protrude and get chopped away. There is nothing to hold on to inside it.

Ivan slams the louvres shut and presses one of only two buttons on the control panel - a big red one marked, in Russian, BOTTOM. The lift jolts and grinds alarmingly, and sprocket teeth whirr above me in the darkness, finger-hungry. Then the cage begins a sedate and altogether quite pleasant descent into the floor, where I see not dark but daylight rising round my ankles.

“The Museum is built out from the edge”, says Ivan. “On iron girders. Look.”

Massive riveted nineteenth century buttresses project out from the cliff. It appears they are holding up the floor I had been standing on. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have walked so close to the window. Underneath them is twenty or thirty metres of fresh air. Underneath that, a narrow shelf projecting from the abyssal wall, looking knifeblade-thin next to the vast gulfs of nothing crowding in on it on either side. Remember thinking - if the cable snaps and we fall, will we hit it? Or will we fall further?

Like the webbing of a finger, the shelf connects the thin shard of abyssite that the Church of the Angel is perched on with the chasm walls. At this shallow depth, there is grass, manky and yellow, growing on it; even a tree, to which someone has fixed a portable ultraviolet light to help it grow bigger. The shelf is actually quite broad as we come closer - wide enough, even, for people to stand up on and move about. There are tents, quite large ones, women with no make-up, men with beards. One of them is grumpily sweeping away a clutter of plastic votive tablets, turning them over the edge of the cliff with a broom.

“Archaeologists”, explains Ivan. “They cannot understand that this place is a work in progress. They think only of unearthing yesterday, and complain when today rains down on them constantly.”

I notice the archaeologists were all wearing hard hats. I ask whether people still threw votive tablets down here. Ivan nods.

“I found a tablet asking both God and the Devil to kill me once”, he says. He shrugs and smiles, but this time his heart isn’t in it.

We are at the level of the grass, now, and still descending. Here, in the middle of all these archaeologists, someone has dug a small square pit exactly the size of our elevator, into which we disappear like a coffin being decorously lowered into an open grave. The inside of the grave has steep spade-cut sides and electric light.

“The Pit has formed here over centuries”, says Ivan. “All around the Abyss, people throw things in, but in places like this, where there are ledges near the top, the things collected. Sometimes the braver, poorer people who feared divine retribution less than hunger would wait until dark and climb in after them. People who did such things were considered anathema, like grave robbers or Indian untouchables. Even Vaemna”, he said, as if this was the crowning insult, “do not talk to such people.” I notices he says do not talk instead of did not.

“And so we have the Museum of the Pit. Archaeologists are obsessed with this location. Western archaeologists in particular pay big money to be allowed down here. But nothing ever leaves the site. Things either remain here or stay in the Museum, and only replicas tour exhibitions abroad. Nothing that enters the Pit leaves it”, he said, “apart from archaeologists, geologists and tourists.”

Archaeologists must obtain state permits, it seems. The Pit referred to in the Museum’s title is not the yawning chasm we are standing on the edges of, but this tiny excavation, only perhaps four metres deep.

The surface level, under the grass, is immediately gruesome. A skeletal head stares out at us from under a hairline of turf. There are femurs, jawbones, ribcages. One of the ribcages, in what I am sure is a piece of pure theatre on the part of the Museum staff, is wearing an Iron Cross.

“It is believed this layer of topsoil was added in the 1940’s after the Soviets slaughtered three hundred SS prisoners here”, says Ivan. I express my revulsion. He reminds me that the next level down consists of Russian and Polish bones, executed with Nazi bullets.

“The Nazis were trying to get to the centre of the world”, I say. Ivan laughs. “To meet up with their master, Satan”, he says. (Dante’s Inferno, I am reminded, is a popular school textbook in Na, along with Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust and Beckford’s Vathek. Their children must sleep really well at night).

Beneath the Nazi and Soviet skulls is a layer of shattered porcelain - “votive tablets”, says Ivan dismissively - and then a clearly visible layer of black soot containing three perfectly formed cannonballs. “The Magyars take the town from the Turks”, he says. “A lot of the town was burned.” Underneath the cannonballs and ashes, a layer of fine ash. “The poorer Turks scatter the ashes of their dead into the Pit”, says Ivan. Then still more soot and cannonballs. “The Turks”, announces Ivan, “take the town from the Magyars.”

The Turks and Magyars both seem to have taken the town twice, though in the deeper layers they don’t fire cannonballs any more. There follows several feet of porcelain of decidedly poorer quality. “Mediaeval”, says Ivan. Finally, more bones, some of them with clearly human teethmarks in them. Ivan sucks in his breath seriously. “The Mongol Khan Ogedei”, he says, “conquers Poland and Russia. He drives the inhabitants of the town of Na, who refused to capitulate when he first rode up to their walls, into the Abyss. Some of them, cushioned from the fall by the dead bodies of their former neighbours, survive the fall and live for many days, taunted by the Tartars far above, living on the abundance of rotting human flesh.” He pauses theatrically a monent, then adds in a whisper:

“Some says their descendants live down here still.”

Still further down, past pottery-shard gravel of steadily decreasing quality, shading from porcelain into actual earthenware, the omnipresent cross motifs on coins, plaques or rotting bits of fabric become ‘T’ shapes. “Worshippers of Thor and Pyerun”, says Ivan. “Back this far, the area is still not entirely Christian.” The quality of the earthenware begins to improve. Crosses reappear, though they are probably better described as swastikas. “The Roman period”, Ivan explains. Down here the quality of the goods thrown into the Pit is better than at virtually any time since. Gold and silver glitter among the litter, among gladii and spathae, denarii and oboli. There is an abundance of statues of Isis, Egyptian goddess of the underworld, popular with the Romans with their mix-n’-match approach to worship. And then, suddenly, the Isis statues become Proserpina - I can’t tell the difference, but Ivan convinces me one of them is holding a pomegranate - and the votive tablets are suddenly addressed Cades Basileus rather than Dis Pater. And then, once the alphabets become confused, like the destruction of Babel happening in reverse, they break out into a mish-mash of Ancient Persian, Phoenician, Hittite, and Linear B. And even here, there are trinkets and articles of fabulous value to bronze age chieftains who doubtless inhabited the most palatial mud huts in their neighbourhoods.

We have reached pit bottom.

“Does it stop here?” I say.

Ivan shrugs. “Excavations continue”, he says.

He presses the green button for the lift to rise.

After the Museum, Ivan suggested food, but apologized for not being able to deliver it until the evening due to “work commitments”. Asked “if it would be acceptable to dine at the Hilton”. Have driven past the Hilton on the way in from the airport. Very big, built on the edge of town beyond the tangle of ancient architecture in the city centre. Lots of glass and steel, very swish. Wondered naïvely how it was that a policeman could afford to eat at that sort of place. Wondered even more naïvely and not a little hypocritically whether Ivan’s beautiful wife had been informed he was dining with another rather less beautiful woman.

Of course, said yes.

Spent the rest of the day queueing in the Interior Ministry, trying to get permission to leave the elevator cage in the Museum of the Pit and wander around taking photos actually inside the mouth of the Abyss. National Geographic have done this successfully in the past, though I find out from talking to a backpacker in the queue next to me that this was only via smuggling one of their cameramen into an archaeological team. Get shunted round three separate ‘departments’ (this involving queueing in front of various different windows in the same office, often to see the same people) and am given three tickets of different colours. Get the colour of my ticket wrong at least once and stand in the parking fines queue, much to everyone else’s annoyance. Queueing is even more of a way of life with these people than it is in Britain, it seems. Am resoundingly unsuccessful in obtaining permit, despite my government connections. Am treated almost as if I’d wandered into the cathedral and asked for a permit to piss in the font.

Spend the rest of my afternoon shopping for clothes. Haven’t got much good stuff with me that Ivan’s not seen me in already. Shameless.

Ivan has a policeman pick me up from the hotel at nine, in a police car. Very nice, but cannot help feeling like a prostitute being pulled in off the street. Policeman says nothing to me all the the way there, doesn’t open the door for me like a taxi driver or a chauffeur, but smiles and waves at me as he pulls away, and is good enough not to leer. The Hilton is swank, as is only to be expected; full of smart suits conversing in German, English and Russian, tucking into fillet steaks and Caesar salads. There appears to be not a single Eastern European dish on the menu.

I have the monkfish (how far does the nearest monkfish have to travel to get here?). I also insist on paying for it myself (all right, insist on expensing it). Ivan pays for it anyway while I’m in the toilet. He knows the waitresses by name, though he doesn’t flirt with them. He listens attentively whilst I talk about myself - Roedean, degree in Modern languages, early desire to be a spy, hence the reason for learning Russian, never recruited at Oxford, hence the reason for currently being a journalist. Not married, no children, one cat fed most of the time by my neighbour, who he must be convinced by now is his actual owner.

Whilst Ivan laughs at my jokes, he doesn’t laugh uproariously, which is good, because I know they’re not that funny.

His own life story is Dr. Zhivago stuff. Grandaddy was a KGB lieutenant who slept with a local Polish shop girl to produce Daddy. As Grandaddy was already married to the daughter of his local party chief back home in Russia proper, Daddy couldn’t be publicly acknowledged, and instead had to be supported by ‘Uncle Ivan’, who paid for his upbringing and made sure he followed his uncle into the Service. He also made sure Daddy had a good Russian name, Mikhail - “though”, Ivan adds, smiling bitterly, “no Ivanovich”. Daddy, meanwhile, prudently made sure Ivan got both a Russian name and a Vaemna one. Ivan’s Vaemna name is Vaereng, which he says means ‘prosperous’. I tell him mine means ‘spinner’.

Ivan, unlike his father, was savvy enough to become an officer in the local police; thus, when the Russians left and the KGB became a dwindling memory, he still kept his job. “My father works as a security guard in a bank”, he adds cheerily. “But I make sure he gets a big package of vodka and salmon once a month”, he cackles, as if to prove he is not, after all, a monster. (I note, however, that Ivan sends his father fish, rather than teaching him how to; he is the sort of man who likes to keep others dependent on him).

Ivan insists on driving me back to the centre of town in his big police car. It is a Zil. “When I was a boy, I always wanted to drive one of these cars”, he says. “Now my junior lieutenants make fun of me for not driving a BMW.” I laugh. We both laugh. We are drunk. He is perhaps too drunk to drive. What, I wonder in my naïveté, if he gets arrested?

He drops me off just outside the the hotel, nice as pie, but as luck would have it, what do you know, he just happens to have the keys to a flat in town, a safe house, used by the police to observe drug traffickers. He is going there to sleep off the booze. He does not want to drive the twenty kilometres home in his condition. I laugh. He laughs. He suggests we go up there together and have a coffee, maybe a little nightcap, who knows?

End up sleeping with Ivan. He is a considerate lover, not half as drunk, surprise surprise, as he appeared to be. He also does not wait till I’m pretending to be asleep and then pretend not to know I’m pretending and slip quietly out of bed into his uniform and leave to drive home to his family. When he leaves, he leaves at daybreak, plants a kiss in the middle of my forehead, and orders a bouquet of flowers sent to my hotel to be there when I arrive.

Walk up the stairs to my room feeling dirty. Shower several times. Cry.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 12, 2010

Slept in till twelve. Spent the rest of the day in the company of the Information Minister, Yaebing Dudayev. This man is Ivan’s diametric opposite, a man who, I am reliably informed, changed his name from Yuri after the Russians moved out. Before being Information Minister, he was a fishmonger. He is a greasy little man with huge windowpanes of glasses and eyes like sushi behind them. He spends an afternoon droning about the highly specialized nature of Vzeng Na’s import/export trades from behind a moustache you could mop floors with. He has many graphs to show me. I suspect that he is showing them to me only in order to proudly demonstrate the fact that he has learned to use his new Western-designed spreadsheet program.

I ask him about Vzeng Na’s illegal export trades. This throws him. He shrugs his shoulders and admits that, yes, incredible as it may seem, people do break the law in Vzeng Na. Under Communism, of course, if was almost obligatory to use illegal channels in order to trade at all. He shifts about nervously in his chair as he says this, and spends a great deal of time inspecting his fingers. I am left under no illusion that Mr. Dudayev is anything other than a born-again black marketeer.

Then, just for fun, I ask him about Oracle Smoke. His eyes swell like poaching eggs. He asks me why I’m interested in such things. I tell him that if Oracle Smoke is an export, it surely falls under his remit, legal or illegal. He says Oracle Smoke is not exported. I say I don’t believe him. He says it cannot be exported. “It is not that sort of product”, he says. He reminds me that if I were a decent human being and a serious journalist I would not be interested in such things. He draws my attention back to his graph of projected bat guano exports against electronics imports, 2011-12.

Yes, you heard me right. Bat guano. They still run two or three big mechanical scoops down into the dark at what he describes as ‘decent and sustainable intervals’, which I take to mean infrequently enough for the bats to cover the abyss walls with crap in the intervening period. In the old days, it seems, people only used to harvest the bird guano from higher up in the Abyss, but the old lodes are now exhausted, and the advent of modern technology now means that the deeper, more mammalian deposits can be worked. It is, says the Minister, illegal to harm a bat in Na, through centuries-old legislation. Ever the investigative journo, I ask if this means the population of Na are at significantly higher risk of catching rabies. He denies this vehemently. Rabies is caught, he insists, by either (a) being bitten by bats, which the people of Na are less likely to have happen to them as they are, as previously discussed, prohibited from bat-molestation, or (b) inhalation of bat faeces. He pounds the table with his tiny fist. “And do I look like I breathe bat shit to you? Well do I? Do I?”

Took my leave of the Information Minister and made my way back to the hotel. Whilst walking back across the square, a street urchin taps me up for money. Specifically, American dollars.

“But I’m not American”, I say. “I’m British.”

“British dollars”, he says, grinning. His face is very thin. He has probably not eaten for some time. But his clothes are bright and new, Nike and Adidas and Le Coq Sportif. He seems able to afford clothes, if not food.

Then I turn around and find the other kid who is attempting, while the first kid distracts me, to rob my purse from my handbag. I grab him by the nose with thumb and forefinger. He makes an amusing noise like an elephant trying to vomit through a gasmask. When I let him go, he runs.

I turn back to the first boy. He grins again, as if it is unthinkable he might have done wrong.

“You’re the boy I saw the day before yesterday”, I realize out loud. “Outside Starbucks.”

He stops suddenly at the word ‘Starbucks’, as if he realizes who he is talking to - and, unquestionably, what I am to him now is ‘the lady who was sitting next to the police chief’.

He frowns, bends, and actually tugs his forelock, and apologizes furiously in Russian. And scuttles away, across the big bright square, like a spider caught in the middle of a room when the lights go on.

Back at the hotel I spent half an hour trying to explain to the desk clerk what I meant by ‘fax machine’ and ‘internet’. Eventually located an internet café, Ezhu Happy Netsurfing-Ngaëar, and managed to plug my laptop into the wall and upload several days’ worth of story.

Went to bed early and watched what passes for local TV, an appalling Vaemna-language sitcom about three old men all trying to sexually harass the same young dolly bird living in their apartment block. Tonight, it seems, Bimaen the Butcher - distinguished from the other two male characters by the fact that he always, always, always wears a butcher’s apron, even in the bath - was able to cop a feel of her left tit, but got his penis caught in a revolving door for his trouble. Expect to see it on Sky One soon.

Went to sleep with the window open, perhaps a perilous thing to do this close to Transylvania. There were flowers in my room from Ivan when I got back, of course, and an invitation to dinner the next night. No intimations that I should wear something sexy, or prepare for a big night with Captain Sexy Trousers, and that only seems to make it worse.

Dreamed I was falling into a deep, deep pit.

Above me, the moon stares down the pit, illuminating the walls, which are too far away for me to touch. I have no idea how quickly I’m falling.

I hit the bed and wake up with a jolt.

Almost as if it’s with the voice of another person, I hear myself scream. The wind is blowing in through the open window, making the curtains dance about like creepy scooby doo ghosts. Outside, the town is a huddle of silent roofs, a jumble of schist and slate.

And I can still hear it, out there. Not my voice, but another human one. Screaming.

Probably a domestic or a schizophrenic or an alcoholic, I imagine to myself. But I get to my feet and go to the window anyway. I could drag a few lines of copy out of it, after all. Crappy Eastern European republic fails to care for its loonies shock.

But the voice is not shouting “You bastard what time do you call this”, or “I’ll fight the fuggin lot o’yer”, or even “I am Napoleon, do you hear me? First Emperor of France!”

No, what it’s shouting - in, I presume, Russian and Vaemna, though I can’t understand the Vaemna - is “Help me, for the love of God.” It is, I realize, as I lean out of the window, shouting very loud, loud enough to wake me, and I can sleep my way through a transatlantic flight in Economy class. And yet no lights are going on, no police sirens are sounding, no-one is coming to the poor bastard’s aid. If I squint down into the dark against the streetlights, I can see a trio of figures dragging one, smaller figure across a constellation of cobbles. He is yelling and shouting and his captors are not even trying to silence him. But nobody is doing anything, though all the world must hear.

They are dragging him down the Aeveny Gabyzaï, which is a dead end street, connecting only with the Museum and the expanse of empty wall at the east end of Victory Square, which connects only with...

No. They wouldn’t.

It transpires they would. As they walk, I notice one of the three is not helping with the manhandling and the dragging, but is instead trundling along a sort of little handcart, almost like a wheelbarrow with a solid platform on top of it. This on its own is making a noise like a steamroller on the cobblestones. Its wheels must be solid wood. I wonder what purpose this little geegaw might serve, and then they come to a stop in the square, and I realize.

I think of shouting out, but this man - this boy, I realize, from the high pitch of his yelling - has been shouting out there for the last ten minutes, and no-one has so much as twitched a net curtain. The only thing quick enough to stop what is going to happen would be a rifle bullet, and I have no such thing.

The three silent figures push their barrow to a halt right next to the wall. They are all wearing hats, for some peculiar reason, and some sort of smart jacket - almost as if they dress for this sort of occasion. Their captive continues to scream. They drag him onto the top of the barrow, yelling at him in Russian and Vaemna. The Russian is too fast and guttural for me to understand.

Two of them have to jump up onto the barrow in order to get him to stand upright, whilst the third holds it firmly by the handles, stopping all three of them from getting dumped down into the street. There is a little bit more struggling, and then a final bout of screaming high pitched enough to surely test even prepubescent vocal cords, and as they hoist him over the capstones so his head is hanging over absolutely nothing, the moon catches his face like a searchlight and I realize why his screams are so familiar.

It’s the boy from outside Starbuck’s. The boy from Victory Square.

Then they grunt and give one final heave, and the moonlight shows him fluttering down into the dark like a ghost.

Their task finished, the three figures dust themselves down, straighten their clothing, crack their knuckles (audibly, even at this distance), and trundle their cart away unconcernedly across the square, brilliantly picked out in bright moonshine.

I close the curtain and sit back on the bed. I still don’t shut the window. After that, vampires are nothing.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 14, 2010

Back from Belarus. Belarus appalling. These are people whose great grandfathers fought with guns to keep them from being ruled by Moscow, and they’re falling over themselves to kowtow to their new suited and booted czars. The Russian state automobile, the Mercedes, is everywhere, whilst ordinary White Russians queue out of the shop and down the street for bread. Russian fascist graffiti everywhere. Russian communist graffiti everywhere else. White Russian local politics boring (in fact nonexistent - Lukashenko’s grinning fizzog everywhere. He’s one of those democratically elected leaders who, gosh, just keep on getting democratically elected again, and again, and again...).

Was in Belarus as a token Russian speaker to support what were described to me as real reporters from head office in London. This was, of course, not necessary - everyone in Russia, White or otherwise, speaks English nowadays. And White Russian dialect is so impenetrable, might as well not have been there. Ended up shrugging shoulders and grinning gamely half the time. Real reporters glared at me disapprovingly.

In any case, now back to my ongoing project for the Thursday travel pullout. Made the mistake of returning directly to Na from Belarus. Man on customs went over my British passport with a fine toothcomb, examined and re-examined my visa, asked me suspiciously why I spoke Russian. Would not believe that I’d learned it in school. Asked me questions about the current make-up of the Man United squad, and became still more hostile when I professed no knowledge. Eventually escaped from customs man’s clutches after two hours of continuous questioning. Make mental note to go back via Warsaw next time.

Travel piece is now turning into investigative journalism. One of the local papers, Gaziëta Gabyzaï, which translates as The Abysmal Gazette, is printed in both Russian and Vaemna-language editions. Picked up the Russian edition, read it cover to cover, and found no record of any murder having been committed in the last two days. Two days ago, I saw the boy being thrown into the pit from my hotel window. Attempted to ring Ivan on his mobile, but received no reply. Remonstrated with myself for having failed to report a murder I’d seen happen with my own eyes. Why didn’t I report it? Apart from the fact I wasn’t sure, in the morning, whether or not I’d been dreaming, I have no idea.

Decided to report the murder now. Or, at the very least, to walk out to the break in the Beglerbeg’s Wall and assure myself I hadn’t been dreaming. Crossed the main square in front of the cathedral, walked in front of Starbuck’s, and saw Ivan sitting there on the turd-brown sofa with a blonde bit who certainly wasn’t his wife. They were talking in English, she with an American accent. Had no idea Ivan even spoke English. She had a dictaphone out on the table and was scribbling away notes absent-mindedly in shorthand whilst hanging adoringly on his every word.

A pimp passed Ivan on the pavement, flanked by bitches. He said something rapid to Ivan in Vaemna. Ivan laughed manfully. The pimp smirked and moved off. My Vaemna must be getting better. I think I had a pretty good idea what they had been saying to each other. I turned, unseen by any of them, and found myself looking at my own reflection in Starbuck’s shop front.

I hurried on. The American deep-down-dangling machine was growing steadily, and had moved closer to the Beglerbeg’s Wall. It had KOMATSU written ostentatiously all over it. Like two Komatsu executives buggering each other, it now rested on four sturdy yellow legs.

There was nothing by the wall. What, after all, would there have been? Blood? A signed confession written by the three who dumped the boy over?

Maybe it had all been a dream.

Halfway along the wall, though, I saw something passing strange. A man with a completely unnecessary torch strapped to a hardly more necessary construction helmet strapped to his head, dressed dapperly in a plastic sack saying FISONS with armholes cut out for his head and arms, was standing arguing with a city policeman. I couldn’t help noticing that the man appeared to be tied to a lamp post.

“Why not?” said the man in English. I felt the familiar sinking in my stomach all English people feel on realizing an idiot encountered abroad is also English. The Englander had a partner in crime who was dressed as quietly as he was, and whose grasp of haute couture even ran to air cylinders and flippers.

“Is danger”, explained the policeman. “Very big danger.” He held his hands out wide to illustrate how big the danger was. For the record, it was about three feet wide.

The man turned and pointed at the big fuck-off American crane. “You see that? Why are they allowed to go down there?”

The policeman shrugged. “They have permission.”

“And I haven’t got permission.”

“I know if you have permission or you not have permission. You not have permission.”

“Look, one of our friends may be hurt down there. Maybe even dead.”

At this point, Air Cylinder Man tugs his associate’s shoulder. “Look, Pete, maybe this isn’t the time.” It certainly isn’t. The police monkey’s hand is crawling over his left buttock behind him towards his gun, which is one of the little Russian ones that can punch a hole through steel. And the policeman can’t understand a word they’re saying now. They’ve lost it and started talking far too fast. He is also a small man – most Vaemna are – and both of them are much, much, bigger than he is. He is scared.

I interpose myself.

“Excuse me, officer”, I say, in perfect Russian. “These are two colleagues of mine. They are concerned a friend of theirs might be lost and hurt in the abyss.”

Captain Head Torch is hurt at being interrupted. “Barisef –”, he says, in Russian so dreadful it really shouldn’t be spoken by a human being.

“Shut up”, I say, in perfect English. “He will shoot you. You are not in North Yorkshire now, grobag boy.” This stops him. I switch back to the policeman. “I apologize for any inconvenience my coworker here may have caused. He fears his friend may have suffered a fatal accident.”

The inspector’s hand eases on his left buttock, and comes round in front of him again. He looks me up and down slowly.

“You have White Russian accent”, he accuses. I cringe. I hadn’t realized it was starting to rub off.

“I was born and bred in Minsk”, I lie.

He nods slowly. Then, he holds up a finger, to indicate he is about to say something important.

“Where people go when they die”, he says, “they stay, whether that place is a good place or a bad. It is not the job of your friend to bring people back.” He makes that little religious sign in the air, the one I’ve seen Gviong make, the one that may be the sign of the cross, and then again might not.

“You may go about your business”, he says. “Legal business”, he clarifies darkly, and departs.

***

“You can untie yourself from that lamp post now”, I say. To do him credit, Captain Head Torch finds this amusing.

“It’s a belay point”, he says.

“It’s a lamp post”, I say.

“We weren’t lying about our friend”, says Air Cylinder Man. “He disappeared down the Abyss yesterday.”

“Entering the Abyss without a permit”, I say, “is illegal. And what was he doing in there on his own, anyway?”

Pete shrugs. “He’s that sort of guy.”

“A tosser”, clarifies Air Cylinder Man.

“We’ve come here all this way from England, he’d promised us we were going to do the whole first mile down together, by the book, and then he takes off from the hotel while we’re asleep with half our gear.”

“Can’t do anything in our company”, says Air Cylinder Man.

“He’s an experienced caver”, says Pete. “Happier underneath Yorkshire than on top of it. If he comes up and tries to walk back to the minibus across the moors he gets lost.”

“The caves in North Yorkshire”, I say, “aren’t over a mile deep.”

“He’s been a mile down before and come back up”, says Pete. “We’ve been down Sarawak Chamber in Borneo before. That goes down about a mile.”

“Course”, adds Air Cylinder Man, “you have to climb a mile up a mountain before you get to down the mile. So you might as well have just stayed put, really, for all the buggering about.”

“This guy who went down the Abyss”, I say, “is over five feet in height and weighs more than seven stone, I take it.”

Pete nods. “Try six foot six and fifteen stone.”

“In that case, I haven’t seen him.”

***

Take Pete and Air Cylinder Man under my wing and off the street. Passers-by point and laugh and giggle and find them amusing, but obviously know they’re cavers rather than some sort of new wave of gay fashion. Cavers are common animals around here. Caving is illegal - the city authorities protect the sanctity of the Pit with an almost superstitious reverence - but it’s usually only possible for the police to arrest spelunkers after they’ve penetrated the hallowed chasm and are on the way back up, and even then all they can really do is fine them. Cavers gather round the Abyss like jackals round a carcass, waiting for the beat coppers to be otherwise occupied giving directions to tourists, before wrapping a rope round the nearest streetlight, cycle stand or traffic bollard, hopping over the Beglerbeg’s Wall and abseiling down into the void. It’s more usual for them to do their dirty in the hours of darkness, though. These guys must be genuinely worried.

Take them into the Xotel-Restavran Vugromaen in Victory Parade. ‘Vugromaen’ means ‘The Three Romes’, an old slavic church expression meaning Rome, Byzantium and Moscow. Russocentric toadying of the worst sort, but an interesting name for a gin palace. I buy them Russian coffees, on expenses - it’s a cold day, and they’re too northern to be lying about their friend.

It transpires Pete is a Business Process Reengineering Consultant, whatever that may be, and his friend Vernon (Air Cylinder Man) is a lecturer in mathematics. I knew they had to work hard to be able to afford all those shiny nuts and karabiners.

It is obvious Pete and Vern - and their missing friend, Sean - have been dreaming of this trip since they dug their first hole at the seaside with a bucket and spade and sat in it. “Course, you realize, it’s the challenge”, says Pete between quaffing.

“This thing must be twice as deep, shit, maybe three, four times as deep, as anything I’ve ever done”, he says. “Counting Wilhelmina Tranter at St. Paul’s Secondary”, he adds, in some personal surprise.

“And in the caves in Sarawak”, interjects Vern, “the water’s warm.” He sounds disgusted, as if caving in warm water has something vaguely homosexual about it.

“And the guano”, says Pete with relish, “the guano adds a challenge.”

“It changes to bat guano a few hundred metres down”, says Vern, obviously excited.

“Gosh”, I say, hoping I sound adequately impressed.

Pete and Vern seem to pay the sort of attention to inanimate chasms in the ground that most men do to women. Under the current circumstances, I find their total lack of attention to me refreshing, and buy them more drinks. They buy me more drinks. I learn a great deal about clints and grikes. You should always, it seems, take air cylinders of the more modern round-ended type down caves, as the older square-ended ones can catch in a cave roof and drown you. You should always climb rope ladders sideways-on.

Leave the Xotel-Restavran Vugromaen drunk and singing rude songs about swallow holes. Glad to have run into idiots from my home country. Pass a pimp in the street (probably the same pimp, still sporting a moll on each shoulder). Offer him fifteen hundred Minim for his bookends in heavily Belarus-accented Russian. He does not understand.

The Troglodytes are still going down the pit. They say the edges of the pit are quite well-patrolled, even after dark, and the top ten or twenty metres are crumbly with a thin coating of earth (and also, in place, human sewage) so it would be difficult, not to mention dangerous, to take that route. They say they have found another. I’ve already asked them if they’re going down the town sewer system. They say they aren’t.

It is still daylight. I still have time for a shower and a few minutes’ scribbling; the feature isn’t finished, maybe I can add a subsection on how to cave effectively in Na. I’m halfway back to the hotel when I remember my original reason for being out here.

The police station is on the other side of the square. It’s a big, squat, solid building that seems to have taken the last few hundred years of cowboys and Indians and Commies and Aryans in its stride. It has a line of shiny POLISIC cars parked up outside it. These cars are the very fastest Eastern Europe has to offer, Skoda Superbs, Czech on the front of the bonnet, German underneath it. Slow as fuck. It’s well known a savvy joyrider in a stolen Clio can outrun virtually any police car on the road here.

And the car at the end of the line is even slower. The big Zil. The police commissioner is in. Maybe the woman at Starbuck’s had more self-respect than some people I could mention.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn.

“Very poor, pretty lady”, says someone from the level of my shoulder. “Need dollars. Dollars will go up against Sterling Yen and Euro by close of play today.”

I look down. A face stares up at me. It looks like an ordinary face that has had the head sucked out of it. The skin is stretched taut over a cage of bone. The skin is also that of a seventy-year-old man, and this is odd, because I’m almost certainly looking at a thirteen-year-old boy.

I stare. I stare shamelessly. I stare not just because this is the first Oracle Smoke victim I’ve seen. I stare because I saw this boy fall a mile (two miles, three miles, four?) to his death only a few days ago.

“I’m sorry”, I say. “I’m English.”

The boy shrugs. “English dollars. And to him shall be given a sword, and he shall go forth conquering, and to conquer.”

I feel something pull at my other arm. I turn and notice I no longer have a handbag. Instead, I have a leather strap looped redundantly round my arm, and a boy even shorter than the one at my right elbow is absconding with the bag. Far too late, I move to yell. Realizing yelling will do nothing - they are already away and running - I move to run after them, and run into a stationary police officer, a kindly old gent of 50 or 60, watching them go with a look of unconcern. He holds up a hand to stop me.

“No further, if you value your neck”, he says, pointing at the inch-long sliver of sharpened steel the younger boy is carrying. “That went through your handbag strap with very little trouble, I believe. They are only very small, but they will kill you.” He pulls out a whistle and blows it. The boys continue running. “See? They are unafraid even of my whistle.”

Suddenly I’m not quite so sure I want police assistance. “I don’t want to cause trouble for them. They’re only stealing for food.”

He grins and shakes his head all-knowingly. “They don’t steal for food or shelter. They steal only for the Smoke, and they will steal for it until they starve.” He spits out the whistle and pulls out a gun. “This is my little boy gun”, he assures me. “7.62 millimetres only. It will hardly hurt a sparrow.”

He fires a warning shot to one side of the boys. It zings off distant cobblestones. They continue running. He fires again. One of them drops to the ground, blood jetting from his leg. But the other, the boy who went down the pit, is still running free. He even stops to grab my bag off his downed friend's body.

And it is the body. The dead body. A terrific amount of blood has come out of it for so short a time and so small a frame. The boy probably died of shock.

“Alas”, says the policeman, “God sees every sparrow that falls.” He makes that peculiar Vaemna religious symbol, and tucks his gun away. He jerks a thumb across the square to where a big black Merc has suddenly moved off from the kerb, its motorized mirrored windows closing.

“The mafia, they make a living robbing Smoke couriers. Once they break the chain of supply, the addicts must steal money to pay to get their Smoke bottles back. Otherwise the addicts would have no interest in you. You do not come in a bottle, and are not wrapped in aluminium foil.”

This puzzles me. “You mean the mafia don’t produce the Smoke.”

He shakes his head.

“Then who does?”

He smiles, and shrugs. Then, he walks off, ambling slowly along the cobbles at policeman speed, smiling at the beautiful morning.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 15, 2010

Luckily, I didn’t have my passport in my wallet, or any credit cards. I have been travelling in Eastern Europe for a long time, and know the value of the hotel safe. The handbag, mind you, was a valuable one, a limited edition.

I did not visit the police station to report the death. Several passing tourists took snapshots of the body. I exchanged addresses with one of them and offered him money for negatives. A journalist must do these things.

Got back to the hotel again to find more flowers in reception. Suspect Ivan has definitely been blown out by his American floozie. Cannot criticize however as am personally below even floozie status.

Birds preen after getting a shock. I read magazines. Strolled out to the foreign language bookstall and scored several out-of-date copies of Cosmo, Bella (The Magazine For Today’s Independent Woman), and Vogue. Did not escape even then; discovered seven new ways to please my man. (Also bought FHM, as it was in English - discovered seven new ways to Make My Woman Want It). Penned an extensive piece on the evils of living in a corrupt police state. Drank too much.

During the afternoon, visited the state of Na’s second most imposing tourist attraction, the Paerca Episcopa Maercus Andréëvici, a former gravel pit on the outskirts of town where trees have been planted and it is possible to hire bicycles and ride them for up to several kilometres without passing the same tree twice. The Vzeng Na Ministry of Tourism are obscenely proud of it. It is named after one of Na’s great national heroes, Bishop Maercus Andréëvici, who is historically lauded for having the common sense to retreat in good order from the Tartars at the Battle of Mohi, abandoning his feudal overlord Bela (King of Hungary, not the Magazine for Today’s Independent Woman) to his fate. This allowed him to ally himself, later, with the Ottoman armies of Beyazid I and free the lands of the Gzaere Valley for Islam. The main thing being, of course, that the land was under the Tartars no longer. As I have said, the Vaemna are nothing if not pragmatic.

Returned to the hotel having put down many, many pages of pure evil grossly misrepresenting the Vzeng Na Ministry of Tourism as Cthulhu-worshipping paedophiles in the back of my taxi. Picked up a message from the Troglodytes in reception. It appears I strategically forgot a promise to have dinner with them in the Zum Abgrund, a German-themed jolly beer-drinking thigh-slapping panzer-driving venue across the Cathedral Square. They had, if the date on the message was to be believed, already been there an hour.

Went there. What the hell. Was glad to see them. Got drunker. Sang more rude songs about limestone formations. Tights come down, apparently. They were sitting in an unobtrusive corner attracting rude stares from tourists and resigned sighs from locals, surrounded by coils of rope, nuts, karabiners, pitons and descenders. They confided to me in whispers that they were planning a caving expedition that very night.

“Really?” I said, flickering my eyelashes, wide-eyed.

They still will not divulge their secret route down into the Abyss, though, even when I accuse them point blank of planning to use the government’s deep bat guano shovel. They seem not to know of any such shovel, and its existence makes them pause for thought.

But in the end, they don’t like the idea. “We’d have seen it parked up on the pit edge”, says Pete. “It would only get parked up there when they were going to trawl for guano, yes? So while they’re still in this intermediate period where they wait for the bats to poop enough for it to be worth their scraping it off the walls, the shovel’ll be in storage in town somewhere. No way down there.”

“So which way are you going down?”

Pete taps his nose with great care, as if he might miss it if he doesn’t. “None of your beeswax.”

“It is my beeswax. Because I’m going with you.”

This startled the pair of them.

“Um. We work alone”, says Pete.

“Alone apart from each other”, clarifies Vern.

“I’ve been climbing before”, I say. “Climbing can’t be too different from caving. And I, which is to say, my employer’s expenses department, will pay you handsomely for the privilege.”

“Aha”, says Pete. “Money, huh.”

“Not sex, then”, says Vern hopefully.

“Sex is where I draw the line”, I say firmly (with you, at least, I add to myself, glancing at the muscle definition on the insides of Pete’s thighs).

“Rats”, says Vern.

“This isn’t like ordinary caving”, says Pete. “It’s a lot longer and a lot more treacherous. It’s like doing El Capitan underground.”

“I’ve been up the Old Man of Hoy”, I lie. This appears to impress them. They butt heads together and whisper at length, then break apart for further information.

“Aided or unaided?” says Pete.

“What’d’you take me for, some sort of shandy-diluting fairy?”

They huddle again.

“All right”, says Pete. “Pending successful financial negotiations, you’re in.”

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 16, 2010

Ten minutes before closing time, we’re inside the Museum of the Pit again. I have paid good money to goggle at Hellenic Imperial Votive Tablet Number 59,993, once again.

The place is full of backpackers, much more so than normal. Why is it full of them? Because Pete and Vernon have been hanging around outside it for the past hour offering vacillating hippies wads of worthless Vzeng Na currency to pay their way into the exhibition, claiming they no longer need the money as they’re leaving town and can’t change it. The backpackers are lumbering around like moonmen among glass cases filled with delicate exhibits, and the museum commissionaires, unused to such volumes of visitors - particularly visitors who insist on wearing hundred-pound Bergens at all times - scurry around anxiously, trying to discreetly stand behind the bigger and more dangerous-looking individuals.

Meanwhile, we - who have quite small rucksacks, by comparison - have finally entered the Museum ourselves, and are skulking unobtrusively behind the Vzeng Na Mixed Infants’ bacofoil recreation of the pagan idol.

“D’you think they’ve recognized us?” says Pete to me furtively.

“Almost certainly”, I say. “But I think they think they’ve other things to worry about.” Gviong, for one, has already thrown me a flummoxed stare of recognition, even in this woolly hat and outsize Gore-Tex parka I’m inhabiting as a temporary disguise. I find the fact that he recognized me so quickly both sweet and flattering.

“Is it behind us yet?”

Pete throws a nervous glance back over his shoulder. “Just about.”

“And you’re sure it’s unlocked.”

He ums and ahs. “Er, you might need to push it a bit.”

This isn’t encouraging, but in the event it (it is, in fact, a cleaning cupboard) opens with only the merest of shoulder barges, and as I barge, some pimply Oxbridge twot on the other side of the room just happens to loudly inform his travelling companions that “Nietzsche is only Schopenhauer reinvented, yah?”, masking the noise.

Inside, it is dark and there are cleaning materials. Luckily, far too many cleaning materials - huge numbers of cardboard boxes which we promptly hide behind. It smells very unclean for a cleaning cupboard. Our rucksacks are unpacked rapidly to reveal caving and burgling equipment. No air cylinders, though. Vern has been pressured into leaving them behind.

“There is”, asserts Pete, “a dead rat in here somewhere.”

“Dead rats”, I say, “are not what I’m bothered about. I can live in here with a dead rat till closing time.”

“Well”, says Vern ominously, “what do we do to pass the time?”

“If one green bottle”, says Pete, “falls, however accidentally, off one wall, you are for it, Vernon Hollingsworth.”

In the event we pass the time by being bored stiff in a cupboard, though this is alleviated by the thrill of being bored stiff in a cupboard we’re not supposed to be in. For many hours, there is the sound of shuffling feet and voices saying “Doch Nietzche ist nur Schopenhauer in neuen Kleidern, das weißt jeder.”

Then, finally, there is silence. The Museum has finally closed for the day.

“What if the cleaners come round?” whispers Vern.

“This is a former communist country”, I reply. “If the cleaners are in evidence first thing in the morning, which they are, they will not come round again in the evening. By the smell of things, we were lucky they came round in the morning.” And as neither Pete nor Vern seems willing to do so, I sneak out from behind the pile of pine fresh windowcleaner, push open the cupboard door a fraction, and poke my nose out into the bathhouse.

Leaf litter of fallen Wrigleys wrappers. A collage of Nike prints. Rows and rows and rows of silent votive tablets lying in state in cases, saying things like MAKE ME RICH and KILL MY ENEMY.

“Why are you so interested in going down there anyway?” hisses Vern.

“Put it this way - if you saw someone fall a mile to certain death, and then ran into them to talk to only a day later, wouldn’t you be curious?”

This is no answer, of course, but it shuts him up. The room is empty. The door to the elevator cage in the corner is unlocked (actually has no lock).

“The elevator shaft is open once it leaves the Museum”, I tell Pete. “Girderwork. A thin man could climb through it.”

He nods, opens the outer and inner elevator doors, and examines their locking mechanisms.

“I think the door on the elevator itself locks solid once the car is moving”, he says. He turns his attention to the louvre door. “And this has to be locked shut before the car will move.” He pulls a wad of chewing gum out of his cheek and squishes it into the door lock. “Now it thinks it has a bolt inside it.” He reaches through the lift cage and pushes the BOTTOM button, having to snatch his hand back quickly as the lift jolts into motion and begins to motor downward. “Et voilà.”

And even he, a man I supposed ought to be comfortable dangling at dizzy heights, took a good long look into the gulf beneath his feet, and took a good deep breath to steady himself.

Then, he swung himself into space above the drop, clambered down among the cantilevers as if walking downstairs, unlooped a coil of rope from round his shoulder, and began securing it around a handy girder. Vern followed him down like a big Helly Hansen’d spider.

This part of the descent was not so bad - began to think the whole thing might be a cinch, like going down a big climbing frame. After all, people who go to, say, Stanage, go there with intent to deliberately target the most difficult parts of the face. These guys just wanted to get to the bottom.

Erm. Didn’t they?

We were soon standing at the base of the cagework, on the actual face of the saddle at the foot of the actual pinnacle that had the actual Church of the Angel on its summit. Above us I could see the actual single-arch stone footbridge built by yer actual Matthias Corvinus after two unsuccessful tries which both fell into the void during construction. He finally used an unnamed English cathedral mason who constructed a marble arch so close to being flat that a marble placed anywhere on it took over ten seconds to roll off. But roll it did, from any point on the surface, the whole bridge being as precisely cut and planned as any of the onyx statues of saints that flanked it on both sides of the gulf, nailing down the weight. Even the Mongols were impressed by the bridge, and let it stand while churches galore burned around it. Today the bridge is helped to stand by lengths of steel cable pinned through its masonry, which is cheating in my view.

But we were standing a good twenty or thirty metres beneath it . Looking up at it. From underneath.

Nearby, tents full of archaeologists dozed in the dark. From one of the nearer tents, a ratbag voice said: “Those fucking museum faggots are using the fucking elevator after hours.”

“Fuckers”, came a voice back.

We made our way to the edge of the gulf, difficult in the dark, and Pete began casting about for places to put his nuts with a head torch. There were cries of “TURN THAT FUCKIN TORCH OFF” and “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, MAN, CAN’T YOU PEE STRAIGHT WITHOUT A LIGHT?” Eventually, Pete and Vern belayed the line to the base of the elevator shaft, which bent and whined alarmingly, but held. The rock was not good for climbing, but slimy and covered in patches of crumbling earth - not even one solid piece of cliff in places, but collections of frost-split gravel held together only by grass and soil. And the light was bad (for ‘bad’, read ‘nonexistent’). If I looked up and stared into the dark a little while, I could just about make out a pool of stars far above. Basically, Pete led the climb, Vern removed our protection all good-neighbourly behind us, and I scrabbled down between them making maximum use of the rope. I slipped two or three times; luckily, Pete’s nuts and bolts held. I tried to cover up my lack of experience by swearing at the slime and dark, and on this occasion at least they seemed to buy it. No idea whether they’ll buy it next time.

And so eventually, after what must be hour upon hour of scrambling, we finally arrive at the bottom of something.

It is not the bottom of the pit - that it cannot be. We’ve probably only gone around a hundred metres, an incredible distance for a novice climber like me who’s never been up anything more challenging than thirty feet of V Diff. But compared to the massive wound in the earth beneath us, it's a papercut. It is a shelf we're standing on, though, solid flattish ground, temporary respite whole handspans across. Room to stretch legs, maybe even lie flat to sleep. Pete says that we don’t need to sleep yet, but that we’ll do well to remember spots like this.

It also stinks to high heaven.

“Switch off your torches a minute”, says Pete. “And don’t put your weight on owt you haven’t felt out first. And what’s that FUCKING SMELL?”

As our eyes became accustomed to the gloom - it can take this long for the cones in the human eye to reach maximum sensitivity, as any astronomer lying on his back on a hillside squinting through a cardboard tube will tell you - the outlines of the underworld became more visible. Long black and white streaks of human and avian waste striped the rocks, some fresh enough to raise trails of steam. They streak down, down, down, converging, coalescing, until they sink into what is unmistakeably -

“A lake of shit”, says Vern; and he’s not wrong.

“It’s not marked on any maps”, complains Pete. He stares out into the dark. “Maybe it’s an optical illusion.”

“None of the maps are official anyway”, scoffs Vern.

“It must be yards across...”

“Tens of yards.” Vern seems to be trying to poke around it with what looks like a tentpole, which he must have taken from his rucksack. “It’s huge...”

“It has to be”, I say. “It contains all the accumulated bum waste of the entire city of Na. Must be an outflow somewhere, though.” I search the blackness for said outflow, but can’t see it.

“It can’t be a natural formation”, says Pete.

“It isn’t. It’s had two thousand years to form, like a pothole forms at the base of a waterfall.” I pause for dramatic effect. “A waterfall of poo.”

“I name this lake”, says Pete, “Lake Vladimir Pootin, on the grounds that it contains almost as much shit as he does. And I claim it”, he adds, “for Britain.”

Vern salutes. They perform an impromptu duet of Rule Britannia.

“Is there a way round it?” I say. And as I say it, I’m looking up at the arc of darkness obscuring the stars and thinking, what part of the city is above us right now?

“Think so”, says Vern from somewhere out there. I can see his headtorch bobbing. “Not bivouacking here, that’s for certain.”

Ah. So it was a tent pole.

“Do you often bivouac in caves?” I say.

“Frequently, in some of the really deep ones”, says Pete. “It can take days to get in and out.”

I look up again. “This is directly under the part of the edge that backs on to Victory Square.”

He grins. “Someone should tell the Americans. They’re going to be dipping their balls in the shit.”

I look down. “How deep do you think this pool is?”

He shrugs. “Can’t tell. Might be able to guess in daylight. Waterfall plunge pools are usually a metre or three at least. Why?”

“Do you think it could cushion the fall of someone dropping right from the top up there?”

He stares at the steaming cwm of ordure.

“I don’t know”, he says, shrugging. “Why? Did somebody?”

I name our new body of ‘water’ Lake Avernus. But I don’t tell either of them that. It is indeed, by Abyssal standards, enormous - maybe twenty metres across, perhaps ten or fifteen wide, a substantial bite out of the footprint of the pit. The Abyss wall behind it is set back in what, from here, looks to be a classic waterfall erosion pattern. It’s a wonder no-one has ever recorded that the pool existed.

“Maybe they were embarrassed”, says Vern as we finally rejoin him. “Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know they had a lake of cack down here.”

And at one end of the lake, there is a waterfall, though I’m loath to go up close and feel the spray on my face. It looks more like a sort of anaemic mudslide, and must ooze from the mouths of Lord alone knows how many civic sewage outlets far above. At the inward end of the lake, there is another waterfall, going down into depths which we prudently decide not to abseil down.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to stay here longer than strictly necessary”, says Pete, and I agree. I’ve no desire to step on a discarded AIDS-infected heroin syringe or jagged fragment of Oracle Smoke bottle.

Suddenly, we hear Vern’s voice call from near the exit waterfall.

“What is it?”

“Footprints!” he yells back. “I’ve found fucking footprints!”

***

There is someone down here who isn’t us.

To detract from the general drama, it seems they also have a penchant for Reebok trainers.

There is more than one set of footprints, and they, or their feet at any rate, are all human. They come down to the lake, then leave it. Sometimes they are dragging heavy objects as they do so.

“Scavengers”, says Pete. “Like the people who live on Smoky Mountain in Manila, or the muck-rakers in old London. People who make a living out of other people’s shit.”

“They must know a way back up to the surface”, says Vern, then seems to think about this a minute and goes very quiet. Somehow the thought of human beings who live down here all the time seems far, far worse than the idea of people who just commute here daily.

Some of the footprints have shoes; some are barefoot. Some appear to be wearing odd shoes, one manufacturer’s logo on the left foot, another on the right. There is at least one odd pairing that appears on two separate pairs of feet so that if the owners of these feet pooled their shoes, they’d have two matching pairs between them.

“Why do they come here?” says Vern.

Pete shrugs. “Everything that gets chucked down the sewers ends up here. It’s a shit-shark’s Aladdin’s Cave.”

Pete and Vern begin following the footprints off into the dark to see where they end up. I am growing uneasy about this.

“I just don’t want to come up against these guys after dark”, I say.

Pete shrugs. But he doesn’t argue, which basically means he feels the same way as I do, but doesn’t want to admit it, because he’s a big strong tough hairy man.

The footprints, we discover, lead away from the lake and along a broad ledge, joining many other prints, leading not up but down. A small car could be driven down the path they walk along, were it not for Vern’s next discovery.

“Steps!” he yells incredulously. “The damn thing’s cut into steps!”

A Devil’s Staircase, spiralling round and round the Abyssal wall into the depths. The steps are there, all right. And what’s more, they’re worn with the pressure of many, many feet.

“The opposite of Jacob’s Ladder”, says Pete.

Vern doesn’t think it’s the Devil’s Staircase.

“Satan’s Escalator”, he says. “Have you ever noticed how the shops on the High Street always have escalators to take you in, but only stairs to take you out?”

Not far along the Devil’s Escalator, there’s a small waterfall which I call Nightingale Falls, where a whole gaggle of tiny night-birds are washing themselves in the water, twittering like fuck. Since the birds seem to think it’s OK, we risk it, and it seems clean enough. It’s amazing how much human ordure can creep onto your clothing in the pitch dark. After ten minutes or so, we’re cold and soaking wet, but clean. I am aghast at the fact that Pete and Dave just peel off every inch of their caving gear and stand there unashamedly probing their every bodily crevice, but after a few moments’ indecision, I join them. We can hardly see each other in the dark anyway. (But if they try probing any of my bodily crevices, they’re for it...)

At this point Vern suddenly supports himself with one hand on the waterfall wall and goes into a coughing fit so bad I expect to see bits of lung coming up. Pete v. concerned. Vern says he thinks it’s just hay fever. Makes a joke that there couldn’t be much pollen down here. Pete says it’s no joke, as there isn’t pollen but there are zillions upon squillions of bats, and the amount of airborne batshit in some caves can be v. high. This is normally fine, but can be v. dangerous if bats are infected e.g. with rabies. Vern goes white as a bleached sheet and stops coughing forthwith, bless him. Have a feeling he is now trying to breathe as little as humanly possible.

Who cut the steps? We have no idea. We’re certainly not about to try and find out till we’ve had a good night’s sleep. So we roll out big comfy waterproof sleeping bags and get on with the snoring and the lying recumbent. I thought this sort of thing only happened when pimply little adolescents played Dungeons and Dragons, but we actually do post watches and I really, really do see the necessity for them.

I can’t sleep during my allotted sleeping time for excitement, so I doze off during my watch. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night. Out there in the dark, something is screaming. Maybe it’s an owl. I tell myself it’s an owl.

I’ve roped myself to the cliff so I don’t roll over in my sleep and fail to wake up from a falling dream. Penned these notes while I was on watch. Took my helmet off and put it down on a rock nearby so I could write by its light. Remember hearing from a friend who was in the army that a torch held in front of your body is the only point a sniper can see to shoot at in the dark. That may be why the police hold torches high up and reversed in the hand.

Hopefully, we will all wake up in the morning.

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”, sniggers 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 Consulate in very poor Russian indeed.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 20, 2010

“It is simply not possible that such a weapon could have remained undiscovered by our security forces”, says the head of the security forces. Ivan (for it is he) looks thoroughly ill at ease sitting in a huge floral print armchair with a cup of bone china tea on his lap and a slobbery labrador at his left elbow. Ivan being treated with the utmost hospitality, but a sort of hospitality thoroughly un-Russian, making him look like a vodyanoi out of water.

In his best dress uniform, with every silver button, star and eagle polished, Ivan is also heavily overdressed. Her Majesty’s consul to the Republic of Vzeng Na, Sir Reginald Washburton, OBE, is in his carpet slippers, slyly feeding scraps of breakfast bacon to his dogs beneath the eyes of Mrs. Washburton.

“Well”, announces Sir Reginald, “we do have a problem there, I’m afraid.” He goes on to say that he fully appreciates how much of Vzeng Na’s GNP is dependent on tourism, people flying in to look at the big hole in the ground and so forth. Her Majesty’s government, he says, have no wish to inflict damage on the Vzeng Na economy by issuing, for example, an official advice against travelling to Na. But the safety of British citizens also has to be considered. As Her Majesty’s representative in Na, not only has he to receive assurances that no danger of weapons of mass unpleasantness exist under his and Ivan’s feet, but his own staff have to see that it does not.

Ivan fidgets with his cap badge and replies that he cannot prove that a thing does not exist. At this point, I posit loudly that Ivan has just conclusively proved his own brain doesn’t to my full satisfaction. Ivan shoots me a look of crocodilian coldness, then claims not to have understood my Russian.

There are five of us in the room, the best room in the British Consulate, a place my social-climbing grandmother would have called a drawing room, and which Sir Reginald slummingly refers to as ‘the back parlour’. The floral curtains match the chintz on the armchairs. Despite this, everything manages in some bizarre impossible manner to clash with everything else. The flowers on the chintz curtains are red, green and orange. The wallpaper is blue and pink. The carpeting can only be described as Battenburg.

Seated round the fire - a roaring log fire, very jolly, technically illegal inside Na city limits - are Sir Reginald, Ivan, and myself, having a cosy fireside chat, along with a young man who remains standing behind Ivan and who has been introduced only as “Mr. Keogh, our technical advisor”, and Lady Washburton, without whom the presence of Sir Reginald would be inconceivable. I am recovering well from my terrible ordeal (in actual fact, the worst physical damage I’ve sustained is skinned knees and blisters). Sir Reg., though, is of the opinion that I’ve also suffered untold invisible trauma to my psyche, and has been trying to convince me to undergo counselling ever since. Said counselling, however, seems to involve being flown back to England at government expense whenever he suggests it. This would mean letting go of the sort of story any decent journalist needs to be prised away from with tyre levers and blowtorches. It’s the “at government expense” part that makes me particularly suspicious. Normally anyone who, say, accidentally cuts off their own head in foreign parts can whistle for any government assistance whatsoever for the price of a sticking plaster, no matter how much invisible trauma they may have undergone.

No, Sir Reginald does not want me in his back parlour, so to speak, and for this reason I am determined to stay lodged in there like a bad piece of sweetcorn.

Sir Reginald asks if it would be possible for an armed police detachment to be sent down into the caves or catacombs or whatever they might be to ensure no risk to human life remains. And whether it would be possible for this detachment to be accompanied by Embassy staff. Ivan clearly does not like this one little bit, and points out that all that is known so far of these so-called drug caverns is derived from the story of one excitable, possibly sex-maniac woman with an overactive imagination, who might in any case have inhaled drugs whilst on an illegal visit to the Abyss. Ivan claims never to have heard of Oracle Smoke. He denies ever having discussed it with me.

Sir Reginald looks at Ivan for a very long time.

Then, still in his carpet slippers, he gets up out of his floral armchair, and walks over to a small window in one corner of the room. The window is covered by a curtain. Sir Reginald opens the curtain, then opens the window, then climbs out of the window and beckons for Ivan to do the same.

Sir Reginald is standing in the centre of a light well sunk into the Consulate building. In the centre of that light well is a metal grating, and on top of that grating is what looks like the engine block of a Czaer 2000.

Patiently, and with some difficulty, Sir Reginald shuffles the engine block aside into a corner. Then, standing on the opposite side of the grating from Ivan, and looking him straight in the eye, he lifts the lid and flourishes a hallmarked silver teaspoon, which he must have palmed before he went out the window. Then, still looking Ivan dead in the eye, he drops the spoon carefully down into the dark, and theatrically cups his hand to his ear to listen for any impact.

There is no impact...

...until there is an almighty BANG. Ivan, myself, and even Sir Reginald himself, jump.

“Spoons being fairly aerodynamic”, muses Sir Reginald, “I imagine that to have been the sound of a spoon hitting the bottom of something over five hundred metres deep at an appreciable percentage of the speed of sound.” He peers into the darkness worriedly. “I shouldn’t really have done that. It might play havoc with the foundations.”

He replaces the grating, and looks up at Ivan again.

“Sewers”, he says, “and cesspits, and wine cellars, even subways, don’t tend to be five hundred metres deep.”

“Perhaps”, says Ivan stolidly, “it is a mineshaft.”

“Perhaps”, says Sir Reginald. “But mining what?”

Somehow, this shuts Ivan up.

“We will supply members of our Embassy staff”, says Sir Reginald, “as observers.” He nods across the room at Mr. Keogh, who I already know speaks execrable Russian, and whose only talent seems to be possession of (a) buttocks fit to crack walnuts, and (b) if the bulge in his breast pocket isn’t the world’s biggest mobile phone, a gun. “If, as Miss Simpson claims, this Oracle Smoke is any sort of military hardware”, continues Sir Reg., “Mr. Keogh is well qualified to recognize it. Her Majesty’s government can recommend his services. He has many years’ experience of working with the IAEA in Iraq, South Africa and the Ukraine. We are fortunate he happened to be here.”

“You are very interested in old Soviet military hardware”, notes Ivan. “I remember that it was the British who first discovered the German nerve gases sarin and soman, yes? And that you later developed them further to produce newer and still more exciting substances.”

Sir Reginald nods. “V-agents”, he says.

“VX”, says Ivan.

“VX was one of ours, I believe, yes.”

Ivan nods back. “You are the world’s experts in poison gases, I believe. Is Mr. Keogh one of your poison gas experts, I wonder?”

Sir Reginald shakes his head and sips his tea. “Well, I certainly wish, Captain Gushin, that we were as expert as everyone seems to think. If Miss Simpson’s story is to be believed, it would seem that there were people sixty years ago who could knock our poison-making skills into a cocked hat. And if those people existed here once, we can only assume a second, third and fourth generation of them might exist today, in Russia or the United States of America, because certainly, to my knowledge, no such expertise exists in Britain. Which means, Captain, that it is our duty to find out as much as possible about these people, because one day, we might have to defend ourselves against them.”

“Just like you defended yourself against Iraq”, says Ivan.

Sir Reginald nods, smiles, and sips his tea. “Quite right. Britain has a terrible history of inventing things, you see, only to see them put to actual practical use by foreigners.” He looks across to me. “Obviously, I’m not expecting you to go back down there with the investigating officers, Miss Simpson; that would be far too traumatic.”

“But I’ve got to go down”, I say.

He blinks like a startled toad. “Why ever would you want to do that?”

“Because if I don’t, you’ll discover some sort of new nerve poison down there, come to an agreement with the Vzeng Na government to keep quiet about it, and synthesize it yourselves; and no-one will breathe a word, and the world will never know until you actually use it.”

Sir Reginald blinks again; more this time, I think, like one of those big carnivorous toads that squirts blood at its enemies out of its eyeballs. It is a look of blood he gives me. I reckon I’ve hit the toad on the head.

Then he becomes the kindly old vicar again, rather than the shifty serial non-executive director with share options in fifteen Eastern European oil, nuclear and defence companies that I know him to be.

“Well, really, this is most untrusting”, he says. “All I can do is assure you Her Majesty’s Government really aren’t like that any more. What would the editor of your paper say? I went to school with him, you know.”

“I’ve already mailed my story to five newspapers”, I say. “The enclosure I’ve mailed is encrypted. Only I have the key. Whoever bids highest gets the key.”

He nods sagely. “As I say, I went to school with him. Frightful little tick. We all thought he was homosexual.”

“He is homosexual. He lives quite openly with a gay restauranteur called Jeremy.”

This nonplusses Sir Reginald badly enough for him to pour scalding hot tea into his lap. He screeches in pain and yells for water. Servants (did I mention the servants? They’re always there in the background, but one doesn’t notice them, dahling) scurry in and scuttle for taps and buckets. Lady Washburton actually titters behind her hand and winks at me. Even Ivan’s glacial composure breaks for a moment, and he grins daftly for a split second before realizing he has a reputation to maintain as the sinister secret police captain.

Sir Reginald’s groin is eventually mopped down with cold water by a nice young Vaemna maid. He seems to enjoy the mopping process rather too much for Lady Washburton’s liking, and she sends the girl back out to disinfect her dishcloth. Sir Reginald’s groin bacteria are going nowhere near Lady Washburton’s best silver, oh no. After all, the silver gets put in her mouth.

Sir Reginald agrees to allow me, even in my traumatized condition, on a “fact-finding expedition” into the abyss depths, to which Ivan also agrees to contribute two police officers. Ivan also agrees, warily, to the inclusion of Mr. Keogh the International Atomic Energy Agency Expert, who has MoD written all over him more clearly than a quadropheniac’s knuckles. Keogh makes me nervous. He is as perfectly formed as an Action Man. I wonder if he has a completely smooth, hairless plastic crotch.

I ask if the police officers will be armed. Ivan reminds me that all Vzeng Na police officers are armed. I ask if they’ll be armed with military weapons. Ivan replies that a few heroin addicts and the odd spelunker who has lost his way (and possibly mind) are hardly likely to present a military threat. He asks me whether we located the missing caver, the man called Sean, on our visit. I reply that we didn’t. Ivan nods sagely and announces that this is obviously the explanation. Mad from hunger, possibly even dosed with illegal opiate painkillers self-administered to kill the pain of an injury sustained in a fall, this man failed to recognize his companions in the dark and attacked them, perhaps with a sharp climbing piton or a heavy rock. We, meanwhile, bewildered by the sheer ferocity of the attack, and possibly tired and confused in our turn, mistook the repeated and determined assaults of this one man for an entire horde of narcotic addicts.

Then he sits back in his chair, hands clasped round his knee, evidently hugely pleased with himself. I suggest to him that he do the worst thing I can possibly think of in Russian.

“Hardly”, he says. “My mother was a very ugly lady.”

He smiles.

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 21, 2010

I am now resident in the British Consulate. Sir Reginald has sent minions out to obtain my things and check me out of the Novotel. This means they probably found the Pauline Réage bondage novel hidden in the back of my suitcase, but they probably don’t read English in any case. Half of them might not even read the Roman alphabet - Na’s Russian population are as cosmopolitan as they are educated.

My room in the Consulate is obviously the emergency Tourist Who Cut Off His Head By Accident room. It seems not to have been redecorated since the 1930’s, and has a carpet which is worn right down to the matting next to the shaving mirror. Also, the bed has a protruding spring, sharp as a bacon slicer and just as pleasant to sit on.

Worst of all, it looks out on the light well at the bottom of which is the Nazi Abyss.

Luckily, the Czaer 2000 engine has been replaced over the grating with a larger 1 litre model. In fact, the grating itself looks newer, as if Sir Reg. has had a new cover put in. One which locks. But it’s still there. And there’s still that horrid giddy feeling that my bed, being close by the window which is close by the grating, is still sitting vertically above five hundred metres of twisty turny staircase lightly frosted with glass and blood and human excrement.

Five hundred metres. That means, potentially, another hundred storeys underneath the ones we know about, containing what? Ordnance factories full of weapons no Allied historian ever heard of, storage facilities full of enough Oracle Smoke to drown a city in, never mind poison it? Why did they need to dig down that deep? Surely that deep down, you’re not digging through rock, but magma.

The room has a TV, communist-era, which doubles as a heating radiator when it’s turned on. A polite note in English and Russian on the wall behind it enjoins guests not to put anything flammable, or indeed meltable, on top of it. The wallpaper is the colour of dirty marzipan. It was probably a recognizable shade of something once, but is now a uniform nicotine.

It is nine p.m. in Na. Seven p.m. in Britain. Right about now the sun is just setting over the Houses of Parliament. Here, it’s black as pitch and the night life is well underway. The sounds of drunks singing, gypsy violinists annoying diners, and police sirens blaring penetrate faintly through the night even to the bottom of my own little abyss in the light well. I stretch out on the bed and discover that it is slightly shorter than even I am tall. Maybe the couple of pouffes lurking underneath the bureau are supposed to be appended to the bed in some way to make it a more normal length. They have zip fasteners on their sides...

The police siren is blaring around, and around, and around, almost as if it’s circling the building. Maybe the coppers are chasing someone who has his steering lock stuck full on. Although deafening, it’s hypnotic. It could send a body to sleep -

I’m falling down a rabbit hole. There are bits of furniture, heroin syringes, tinkly broken glassware and an entire suit of cards flying with me. Some of the cards are animated, with tiny arms and legs and arms, yelling at me that this is all my fault, shaking their little pink fists.

Then I open my eyes with a start and see a Czaer 2000 engine block flying up past my window.

The building shudders. I must have been woken by a loud bang, but I can hardly remember it.

I sit up in bed and see the same Czaer 2000 lump flying downwards. I wait for a very, very long time. Then there is a second almighty bang, as of a Czaer 2000 engine lump hitting the bottom of a five hundred metre deep shaft at an appreciable portion of the speed of sound.

That will definitely not be good for the foundations.

I open the windowsash and lean out. The concrete bottom of the light well has disappeared. I am looking five hundred metres down a vertical shaft. Down in the dark, deep beneath, I can see tiny neon wasps of what might be tracer fire.

Three metres directly beneath me, on the other hand, gawping out of the back parlour window, I can see Sir Reginald’s bald head. He appears to be wearing purple floral pyjamas. He looks up, and sees me. He is furious.

“Little sod’s trying to sweep it all under the carpet before we get down there”, he says indignantly. He brings his right arm into view. He’s holding a pistol and slotting a magazine into the handle. Then he disappears.

What I think at this point is: I’m not missing this. Besides, Vern might still be down there.

I grab my notebook from under my pillow and struggle into my day clothes.

***

Sir Reginald is dressed to kill - or at least, has a gun. I know nothing about guns, but it is a big, nasty-looking gun that looks like it would make big nasty holes in people. The rest of his ensemble is less deadly - sturdy hiking boots, socks rolled over his corduroys, and the inevitable Barbour. Tom Keogh, meanwhile, seems to have produced an automatic weapon - a Kalashnikov, complete with folding stock and nightsight.

I ask if he smuggled the gun in in a diplomatic bag. He shakes his head and says, no, he just bought it off the black market once he got here, it’s easier and cheaper. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem to find the irony of the situation amusing.

We are in what I suppose Sir Reginald would refer to as the embassy’s Front Parlour. The police siren is still circling the building. It does not appear to be chasing anything. Possibly it was only there in the first place to distract us from a gunbattle happening five hundred yards beneath us. Sir Reg. is on the phone - his mobile phone, as our land line has predictably and inexplicably malfunctioned - to both his masters in the UK and Ivan’s masters in Vzeng Na by turns.

Tom Keogh also just happens to have an impressive collection of caving and mountaineering gear, which he’s laying out on the front parlour floor and securing to the wall next to the street - i.e., the wall in the house furthest from the Abyss - with an industrial bolt gun. He also has helmets, head torches, and climbing boots, but I have my own helmet, boots, etc. in any case. Right now he’s telling me there’s no way he can let me go down into the Little Abyss, as it seems to be a combat zone right now. I tell him he can either give me a harness and a descender, or I’ll try to swarm down the rope by hand. He looks at me critically for a very long time, then nods, shrugs, and chucks me a harness and descender.

I ask him what the plan is. He says it’s “to go down and assess the situation.” He lowers his voice and says Sir Reginald thinks he’s coming too. This, he says, is unlikely. Sir Reginald’s mission function, he says, is to stay on the other end of the phone up here and keep us alive by making sure whoever is remotely friendly down there doesn’t think we’re unfriendly and attempt to neutralize our threat. He explains that, by neutralize our threat, he means shoot us. I ask him what he thinks is going on down there. He says he thinks the local police have probably attempted to “pre-empt the situation. They were probably going to plug the shaft a hundred yards down with concrete and prevent further access”, he says. “Looks like the junkies are a little more resistant to non-military weapons than the police chief thinks.”

I think it sounds like rifle and submachinegun fire coming from the well, and tell him so. He agrees, with one addendum; he thinks it’s two sets of rifle and submachinegun fire. Right now, both the junkies and Ivan’s policemen have got out the heavy iron. “Very heavy iron”, he clarifies. “I think what blew the top off the stairwell was probably an RPG launcher. The bad guys used it, probably. Anyone using a weapon like that in a confined space has to be assisting their normal mental processes with chemistry.”

I ask him how it is that junkies can be using military weapons. He ignores me. Instead, he looks up and nods at four armed men who have just entered the room, also carrying Kalashnikovs, though ones not quite nice as his. Their suppliers don’t seem to have been able to run to folding stocks. They appear to be dressed for some sort of fetish party. Respirators are hanging from around their necks on straps, and they are wearing a great deal of black plastic.

“More friends from the International Atomic Energy Agency?” I ask. Tom Keogh doesn’t reply. Instead, he looks me up and down concernedly. “I’m afraid that no matter how much you stamp your tiny feet, we just don’t have an NBC suit in your size. Or indeed any spare NBC suits.”

“It’s all right. I have my own gasmask.” He stares at me oddly. “And mine”, I add, “is designed to stop Oracle Smoke, unlike yours.”

He absorbs this.

“Okay”, he says finally. “You can go first, then.”

In the event, he goes first, which is very nice of him.

I had thought we were going to abseil down like James Bond ninjas into the middle of a big scary explody firefight. Thankfully, Mr. Keogh doesn’t seem to be insane. He waits for a very, very long time indeed before thinking about dangling any part of himself down into the deep.

The first thing he and the others do, in fact, is remove the carpet from one of the upstairs rooms, and drape it over the entrance to the Abyss, closing off any holes with duct tape and rags, blanking out any light from above. “Be like running in banging a big gong yelling ‘DINNERTIME’ otherwise”, he observes.

Every few minutes afterwards, Mr. Keogh ropes himself up with a climbing helmet on and creeps and crawls all mousy-quiet up to the edge of the abyss and peers down carefully through night vision goggles into the dark.

A long, long time after all sound of gunfire has stopped way below us, he crawls back out from under the carpet and gives a thumbs-up to his team. He seems to think something over a minute, then turns to me and asks - in a whisper, as if he’s expecting someone to be listening - “Did you see any NBC suits down there?”

I shake my head.

“Thank Christ for that. Out of the fucking monkey suits, guys. We’ll only be needing the masks.”

There is a general chorus of relief.

“Keep those chemical sniffers turned on, though.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Stay very, very close to me. Hold on to my shoulder strap, put your hands and feet where I say, and don’t move if I don’t tell you to.”

“I’m not hanging on to you like some sort of blind woman.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to be doing. We don’t have any spare night vision goggles.”

***

Going down a rope you can’t see the end of, in the dark, five hundred metres above a very hard landing, in a confined space where people have been firing guns, is scarier than scary. I slow them down to an appalling extent. Tom Keogh has to keep reaching up and grabbing my ankle to get me to go down further. He has to have been hanging on one hand for most of the way down. And then, after we’ve abseiled down what seems like half the way to the Earth’s core and finally alighted on a merciful thin sliver of steel and concrete sturdy enough to stand on and I get to stand rigidly in the same position and ‘rest’ for a handful of seconds to get my breath back, they clip in another length of rope and start the same process all over again.

Whenever we find a place to stand, I freeze like a mannequin - that is to say, I freeze after the first time, when I assumed I was standing all safe and cosy on the stairwell that used to be down here, and Tom Keogh hissed at me Not To Move, You Stupid Bitch, and then unclipped his own night vision goggles and clipped them on to me for a moment. The world was green inside them, as if seen through the bottom of a beer bottle, squaddie vision. There is no staircase down here any longer. The force of the RPG explosion, and possibly also of Sir Reginald’s experiments with teaspoons, has torn the fragile structure clean out of the walls all around us, leaving only twisted stumps of steel and concrete joists, like blackened, rotten teeth. The metal of the staircase was probably rusted to hell anyway - the grenade only gave it that little extra push.

Keogh’s men are very, very quiet. They are not IAEA men, and they have done this sort of thing many, many times before. I, on the other hand, have done it a grand total of once, and cannot see the surface I am jumping down like a moonman, paying the rope through my descender as I do so. I feel like a traction engine acting as the pace car to a starting line of Ferraris. My descender feels cold in my fingers as I go down. As I stand cramped on the second ledge down next to Tom Keogh, I brush against his descender for a second, and it’s so hot I have to snatch my hand away.

We have to go through this whole ghastly process four times before we get to anything solid enough to risk standing on for more than a matter of seconds.

For the first time in a long time, I can see a dim, almost imperceptible light below, the right height and width to be a doorway. The light is yellow and low-powered, like the ambient glow from a torch not pointed in our direction.

I hear a few soft THUMPs in the dark, like a cat coughing furballs. I hear a soft shuffling, as of a lady in a long skirt flouncing down a hallway. The light in the doorway crazes as if the torch that casts it has been knocked off balance.

“It should be safe for us to go down now.” A hand feeds a rope into my descender.

“What about the Smokers? There might be Smokers.”

“There were seven.”

There were actually more than seven, it transpires; more cat-coughing from the dark, and a series of THUDs which I am sickeningly certain are bodies hitting the floor. Tom Keogh’s hand tugs at my ankle. Gingerly, I set off down the rope. Nobody shoots me as I descend. Eventually, I feel my feet touch terra firma. Concrete. Solid concrete.

I slump down against the wall, exhausted, relishing the chance to bend my legs.

“Hang on”, says Keogh from somewhere out in the dark. “This one isn’t a Smoker.”

“How do you know?” says another low voice.

“I’ll lay a bet Smokers don’t often wear police uniforms.”

“Shit.”

I’ve got a horrible, awful feeling about this.

“Does it smell like it’s gone for a shit in its pants?” I say.

There is a pause for sniffing, and then someone answers, “Er - yeah. Very much so, actually.”

“Then it’s a Smoker and a policeman. Probably inhaled Smoke fumes. Oracle Smoke addicts you that fast.”

“Jesus, so that’s why there were two sources of tracer fire”, says a disbelieving voice, and then: “GET THOSE BLOODY GASMASKS ON NOW.”

There is a sound of muffled fumbling and tugging, and not a little discreet swearing. The modest hubbub dies down slowly. There is the sound of someone shooting a Smoker somewhere out in the dark.

Then a shot rings out around all four walls of the chamber. I see it as well as hear it, careering around the room like a light sabre. A tracer round.

“WHO GOES THERE?” yells someone. Unfortunately, he yells it in Russian, so nobody can hear that he’s coherent.

“Kill him”, says Keogh, his voice hissing through his respirator.

“He’s not a Smoker”, I say. “Smokers don’t ask you Who Goes There, they tell you Elvis, Saddam Hussein and Lord God Almighty will be going there tomorrow.”

“You want me to kill him, Cap?” hisses a voice back.

I pounce victoriously. “Aha, so you’re a Captain, are you?”

“Nice one, Corporal. Can you see him?”

“Up the end, Cap, on his own. Sat behind a big pile of metal sheeting. Probably thinks he can’t be seen. He’s putting a gasmask back over his mouth.”

“Kill him”, says Keogh. “He may be friendly, but if he keeps firing the mob downstairs’ll know we’re coming.”

This is too much. I stand up.

“SIT DOWN!” rasps Keogh.

“Мйстер Полицейский!” I yell out. “WE’RE FRIENDLY! COME OUT AND PUT YOUR GUN DOWN!”

There is an ominous pause.

“He’s getting up, Cap”, comes Jimmy’s voice.

“Good”, says Keogh - and then: “Kill him.”

“For FUCK’S SAKE -“

A cat coughs twice in the dark.

“Sit DOWN.”

“I will NOT sit down. That encryption key I was talking about is also in the keeping of a friend of mine, and she will be emailing it to every single one of the papers who have the story if (a) I do not come back from this trip alive, or (b) you do not stop shooting our friends and allies. And I can see that laser dot you’ve just moved on to my chest, thank you so very much.”

Keogh absorbs this.

“All right”, he says. “We won’t shoot anyone else wearing a mask unless they shoot first. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

I still can’t see shit (though I can smell it right enough, all over every smearable surface). I find a torch on the floor and switch it on.

I am surrounded by bodies.

All of them have been shot. Some of them have also been finished off with a knife around the throat. I don’t recall having heard any ricochets.

“SWITCH that BLOODY TORCH off -“

“There was a torch on up here before. That means the ones downstairs will still be expecting a torch up here now.”

“Er...yes. Yes, good point.”

There appears to have been a firefight between policemen still wearing their anti-Smoke masks and policemen happily breathing Smoke. There is more glass glistering around the bodies here than I remember...

“They used Smoke bottles as bombs”, I say. “Lobbed them into the middle of Ivan’s police. A few of them were too daft to be wearing their masks, perhaps, or too slow to put them on in time. They turned on the others.”

I search the dead men’s faces with my torch. None of them is Ivan. But then again, I never expected them to be. Ivan would send someone else down here to do his dirty work.

Keogh’s team are working their way through the machinery chamber. There seems to be nobody else in here, or at least, nobody we can see.

“If they can use this stuff like a hand grenade”, says Keogh, who is poking through shards of bottle with his boot, “I’m surprised they don’t break out and use it to take over the town.”

“I don’t think you appreciate how difficult wasting Smoke in that way would be for them. I think it would have been like throwing your own children at the enemy. Take your foot out of that. You might touch your boot later.”

He’s incredulous. “It isn’t that poisonous, is it?”

The outer offices have been stormed through by Ivan’s men, but are empty - in the case of the filing cabinets, even more empty than before. All the files and papers have vanished, leaving only the bodies and the graffiti.

And then there’s only a manhole and a steel door between us and the outside world. One of Keogh’s men sticks his head up through the manhole and pronounces it safe up top. Cautiously, watching each other’s backs, they emerge and spread out.

“Seems OK.”

“All clean this way.”

But a third voice, sounding puzzled, says instead:

“Is this a Smoke bottle?”

“DON’T TOUCH IT”. I actually yell this. When I get myself back together, I go on to say: “And don’t go anywhere near it either.”

Then I move up to the manhole, stand directly underneath it, and yell:

“OKAY, GUSHIN. YOU CAN COME OUT NOW. UNLESS YOU HAVE A THING ABOUT WATCHING OTHER MEN.”

There is a long, long pause. Then there’s a distant answering yell, echoing round the Abyss:

“BUT THEY LOOK SO ADORABLE IN THEIR NBC GEAR.”

Luckily for Ivan’s health, this exchange is taking place in Russian. But Keogh, at least, seems to be understanding some of it.

I keep Ivan talking. “THAT NBC GEAR’S KEPT THEM ALL ALIVE SO FAR. THOSE SHITE SOVIET-ISSUE MASKS YOUR MEN ARE WEARING KILLED HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD. OR RATHER, FORCED YOU TO KILL HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD.”

"SADLY I AM FORCED TO ADMIT THIS. THEY WERE GOOD MEN, PENELOPE."

I poke my head up, cautiously, from the manhole, and take a look around. Nothing but stone, steel and concrete in all directions.

"WELL, NOW THEY'RE GOOD CORPSES. ARE YOU COMING OUT WHERE WE CAN SEE YOU OR NOT?"

In answer, a number of figures detach themselves from the rock walls uphill and downhill of us.

"Good work", says Keogh. "That won't be all of them, of course."

I hadn't even thought of that. But of course that would be how Ivan would think, and fight. Dirty. I climb out of the hole and squat on the concrete. A kaleidoscope of stars stares down a hundred-metre-deep rock tube at me.

One of the figures cups its hand to its mouth and yells downhill at us in Ivan's voice. "DON'T GO NEAR THE SMOKE BOTTLE."

"WHY NOT?" yells Keogh.

"IT'S GOT A SOVIET ARMY ANTIPERSONNEL MINE BURIED UNDERNEATH IT."

"I KNOW", I yell. "I KNEW IT HAD TO BE YOU, GUSHIN. SMOKERS DON'T USE A BOTTLE OF JUNK AS BAIT, NOR DO THEY LEAVE THEM LYING AROUND."

"AND NO REAL HUMAN WOULD GO ANYWHERE NEAR ONE. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE PROVED BRITISH PEOPLE ARE REAL HUMANS."

He comes down the slope towards us, holding an AKM as if he's used one all his life. He probably has. All this stuff about Daddy being the only ex-KGB man in the family was probably all lies. Ivan was probably the last beardless youth saluting the Soviets through the border crossing when they left for Moscow in '91.

"Ought to shoot him now", says Keogh, "if I didn't know he still had a few men up there in the rocks that I can't see, I would do." I’d applaud Keogh’s willingness to shoot Ivan if I didn’t know he’d been drawing a bead on me too just now.

The men that we can see number seven, but they're policemen - too young, too old, too fat, or too skinny to cause Mr. Keogh's men any trouble. Keogh's men look like they only recently evolved into men. They could probably deal with Ivan's tired old coppers without even needing to fire a shot, if they got close enough.

But those tired old coppers were also clever enough to set a trap that would have taken half of Keogh's men out if I hadn't warned them. I'm not so sure.

"I take it you were going to tell us about the mine", I say in Russian.

"Of course", says Ivan in English, grinning. "At first, we could not easily see who you were, you understand. You came down the stairwell underneath the Consulate, yes?"

I nod. Ivan calls his men around and gets to talking soldier and policeman stuff with Tom Keogh. Luckily neither speaks the other's language perfectly, so I catch all of the conversation as a lot of it needs to go through me. Ivan's men came down during daylight, secured the bridge - 'Мост' is the Russian word he uses for the German gantry crane, and this means bridge - and then moved on into the tank and rocket factory. All that went well, until they went down to the lower levels, "where", Ivan admits, "there appears to have unfortunately been a contamination of my personnel by some variety of toxin.”

Keogh interrupts at this point.

"So", he says, "she was telling the truth, then."

Ivan's face squirms into several expressions at once.

"It would seem so", he says. "I apologize", he says to me with the briefest of nods.

Keogh and Ivan agree to "have another stab" (Keogh's words) at the tanker chamber. I realize with sudden clarity that this is a jolly-hockey-sticks way of saying they are going to go downstairs and kill everybody. I should feel appalled at this, but I really can't work myself up to it.

They leave seven men - mostly Ivan's - on the Bridge upstairs, and send the others back into the factory chambers. I am told to stay put on the Bridge pier together with one of Keogh's troopers, and for once I don't feel like disobeying. If Vern's still alive down there, thin as a rake, eating nothing and scooping up piss from the deck whenever he needs to drink, I've no desire to watch one of Keogh's australopithecines disembowel him. The real Vern saved my life, and is as dead as he is dignified.

I'm actually really tired. I stretch out on the concrete and try to sleep, but it's too damn cold and wet. Down here, even in the big Abyss proper, there's always water dripping down onto your head from somewhere.

I resign myself to getting no sleep, and work on the very notes you are now reading for a while by the light of a card torch - a Christmas present, it fits into a wallet and provides enough light to ruin your eyes by. My australopithecine tells me it'll get seen by Oracle Smokers. I shrug and recommend that he shoot me. Luckily he doesn't.

After a while, I become aware that things are happening around me. The disposition of our troops on the Bridge pier is changing subtly. Two of them are still on guard uphill and down - the downhill road from the Bridge pier looks just as untechnological as its uphill counterpart, and winds around overhangs and spurs until it vanishes from sight in the blue dark far beneath. Two of them are making holes in the top of the pier with an Hilti gun, almost as if they intend to begin rappelling downwards. A fifth man, meanwhile, appears to have found a welding kit from somewhere, and is hard at work on the steel door at the head of the Bridge pier, fusing it strongly shut. A sixth man is cleaning a long hunting knife on the Bridge girders, dangling his feet over the drop. A seventh is communicating with somebody or other on a field radio. An eighth -

An eighth?

At that moment I suddenly also realize that the eight (or nine, or ten) or so troopers I can currently see are all Ivan's men. What has happened to Keogh's man?

The last time I saw him, he was sitting inside the Bridge girders, sheltering from the drizzle. Clouds had come over the sun, just before sunrise. The sky up above is still just a dim blue circle, but my dark-accustomed eyes are beginning to be able to take in my surroundings without torchlight.

I cross to the edge of the Bridge pier, trying not to appear too urgent. I look down. The body of Keogh's man is lying down there on top of the girders, a dark, sharp line ringing his throat from jawjoint to jawjoint. A dark liquid seems to have leaked out of him onto the iron.

I look up and see Ivan's man, still cleaning a dark liquid off his knife - with a handkerchief now, he's wiped off most of the thick stuff on the Bridge steel. He nods at me and smiles. He's wearing a hat, a peaked cap, the sort of big daft dinnerplate hat Eastern European military officers tend to favour. He's also now wearing Keogh's man's night vision goggles, and looks very much the gay fashion icon.

And then I remember I've seen hats like that before, not only during the day stalking around menacingly looking for opportunities to get bribed, not only during rush hour directing traffic, but also in a dark square in the wee small hours, on the heads of men dragging something screaming across the cobbles, towards a wall...

"You", I say - in English, forgetting myself. "It was you who threw that kid down the cliff." And I call him a rude name in Russian.

He shakes his head and tells me his anus is open only to outgoing traffic.

I suddenly realize what it is the two men with the bolt gun are fixing into the concrete over by the manhole cover. There are three of these things, and they are roughly oblong, mounted on four sturdy steel legs. From above, their shapes curve inwards like a canteen. On the inward-curving face is stencilled, in the Roman alphabet:

M18A1 CLAYMORE

FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

Why these guys are using American rather than Russian hardware, I have no idea - maybe American hardware actually works. I may be a mere sweet slip of a girl who seldom if ever reads Commando War Picture Library, but I've been an assistant understudy to a war correspondent, and I know what a Claymore mine is. It works in one direction only, against people rather than armoured targets, like a giant shotgun shell. And the faces of fall three of these Claymores are pointing inward, towards the pier - towards, in fact, the manhole cover, which now that the downstairs door is being welded shut is the only remaining exit from the Bridge.

I take a step down onto the Bridge girders, next to the knife cleaner. Next to the body of Keogh's man. After they've set the Claymores in place, they set about covering them with greatcoats and uniform tunics, disguising them from whoever might emerge from the manhole, and then retire a few steps back up and down the Devil's Escalator, trailing detonator wires behind them, before concealing themselves behind rock outcrops sturdy enough to take blast damage.

I walk backwards, gingerly, on the rusted surface. It feels as safe as a giant engineering project made of gingerbread. The knife-cleaning guy looks up at me, leers again, and runs the blade of his knife over his tongue, as if stropping it on a leather to sharpen it rather than cleaning it. His tongue begins to bleed, and must be bleeding heavily for me to see it in the dark. He grins at me round a mouthful of blood.

"Your repertoire is stale and unoriginal", I say. But I say it in English, as I don't want him to kill me just yet.

But he's in no hurry to kill me - after all, he knows I'm backing away towards a blank rock wall set into a solid concrete pier with no internal rooms or chambers, no doorways and no hidey holes.

He is so confident of his ability to deal with me, in fact, that he puts down his gun, very carefully, and draws his nice clean knife, seeming quite prepared to get it dirty all over again.

But I know a thing he does not know.

Keeping my eye on the nice gent with the knife, I move to the side of the Bridge, and begin working my way, as careful as if climbing through a house of cards, hand over hand over foot down the metal, being careful to keep at least seven points of contact between me and my climbing surface at all times. The man upstairs seems to find this hugely amusing, standing staring down at me with knife in hand, knowing I have to come up some time. All he has to do is wait. But he also knows that if he doesn't want to wait, he'll have to brachiate down all this rusted crapulence after me.

The metal is a nightmare to hold on to - huge chunks of it just come away in my hand, and I take to giving each rung a good tug and twist, hard enough to give me hepatitis, to take off the swarf before I put my weight on it. My hands are bleeding before long.

But I can see it now. The thing that he doesn't know is down here, though he must be blind if he can't see it, or at least infer its existence from what he can see from where he is. I reach a hand out to touch it, and am safe. Or at least safer.

I give it a tug. It holds. I ease my weight down onto it, very gradually. It continues to hold.

I work my way down it, into the dark. I have no idea where it leads to. All of a sudden, the man up top realizes what is happening, and panics. He begins yelling to his companions in Vaemna, then in Russian (presumably becoming aware that half of them can't understand him in Vaemna). He's telling them to shoot, shoot, shoot the British bitch. But they can't shoot me, because half of them have the body of the bridge between me and them, and the other half can't see me in any case. I can't see me, for Christ's sake. But I don't know how far down Sean's climbing rope will let me go before it peters out - just about to where Sean stopped climbing and started falling, I imagine. I will probably feel the end of the line before I see it, and if I'm hanging in space next to a sheer rock wall without any handholds, what then?

Shots begin raining down out of the dark - luckily, wildly inaccurate ones. I can see just how inaccurate because they're obliging enough to use tracer bullets. The worst that could happen seems to be that the sound of the shots might cause some sort of freak rockslide. The one man who can see where I am perfectly - i.e., who is wearing a pair of stolen night vision goggles - is standing on the other side of a thousand-tonne climbing frame, and therefore irrelevant.

After a little while, the rope bends over what must be an overhang, nearly trapping my fingers against the face. Only a little further down, I find a ledge beneath my feet. I’m safe. I realize I’ve just climbed a terrifying distance - gosh, maybe as much as twenty whole metres - down a sheer rock face without a safety harness. My granny would disapprove.

Shortly after this, they cut the rope and send it down after me. But I expected that, of course. What I didn’t expect is that they’d tie a filing cabinet to the upstairs end of it. I hear nuts and bolts ripping out of the cliff below me, and if I’d still had hold of the rope, I’d have gone down with them. I hear something big, heavy and metallic bouncing down interminable depths beneath. But I hear no enormous BOOM as it hits bottom. No matter how long I wait.

Maybe there’s a lake down there. Or some big pool of volcanic mud. Maybe the pit’s not bottomless after all. There has to be a rational explanation, right?

But down there on my own in the dark, I know that all of that is just wishful thinking, just as I was certain that the trees rattling around in the wind and the dark outside my parents’ house when I was a kid were a vampire’s long sharp fingernails tapping against my window.

It’s still blacker than Hell’s own coal-hole down here. But maybe once the sun rises a bit higher I’ll be able to see a way to climb down. Down because I’m hoping the Devil's Escalator might continue downhill from the Bridge – might, I try to convince myself, be only a ten-foot pitch away.

Or maybe I’m sitting on the only three- by two-foot ledge in an expanse of sheer cliff the height of Half Dome, Wyoming. But right now, nothing, not even the thought of falling forever, is going to stop the accumulated weight of late nights from hitting me like a sledgehammer in the back of the skull.

...And while my mind is still working through the late nights, I have a dream....

I dream I am a drowned woman, feet tangled in the anchor chain of some enormous filing cabinet-shaped ship that sank while I was trying to swim away from the wreck, and I have been pulled down into a dark crevice between continents, an Abyss, a subduction zone where one landmass is being sucked under, rocks and fossils and all, into the dark and the murk and the globigerina. And then, all of a sudden, something new enters my universe. Something brash and noisy. A bright bauble dangling on a length of silvery cable snaking down from far, far above. There are floats spaced out along this cable like parasites feeding on a larger life form, an