Page 30 of No Man's Land

“Josef, wait.” Alex followed him to the door. “Look, perhaps I could have broken this more gently. We don’t—that is, I’ve never had to explain it to an outsider before. It’s … not encouraged.” He gave a soft laugh. “To put it mildly.”

But Josef had had enough. “Keep it. I’m not interested in your lies.” He levelled a finger at Alex. “But I’m not letting this rest, Beaumont. I know what I saw tonight. I know what I saw at the front, and I’ve got the photographs to prove it. So tell your masters, whoever they are, that I’m on to them. I’ll find out what you bastards are up to, and I’ll blow it so wide open they’ll think a fucking mine went off under their arses.”

With that, he stalked to the front door and yanked it open.

He told himself the only thing he regretted leaving behind was his boots.

Chapter Ten

“You’re telling me a man is living in the sewers?”

May was walking at a fast clip along Carmelite Street the following morning, Josef trotting at her heels. He’d spotted her leaving the station and pounced before they reached the office. “Not a man.” He was breathless from running to catch up. “Well, he was a man once. But he’s been changed, dehumanised. I don’t know how—electric shock therapy, perhaps? Or poison gas? His brain must have been altered or—”

May turned abruptly, and Josef almost bumped into her. “Joe, stop.” She put her hand out, touching his chest. Her expression was grim. “I think—Joe, perhaps you need to rest and stop thinking about everything you’ve seen. The photographs, the pamphlet. They can wait. You’re—”

“They can’t wait! It’s down there right now. It attacked me last night, and it’s killing people. Eating them, perhaps? I don’t know. Beaumont knows, but he’s not saying. Well, he’s saying it’s goblins. Or ghoulies. But—”

“Josef.” Her cold hands cupped his face, and he was astonished to see her eyes shining overly bright. “Please, stop.You need to rest. Let me take you home.” One thumb brushed his cheekbone. “When did you last sleep?”

“I’ve not gone mad,” he said, pulling back. “Is that what you think? May, it’sreal. I know what I saw. I have bruises. My head—” He pulled off his cap, turned around so she could see the cut. “I hit it when the creature pushed me down the stairs.”

“Oh, Joe, you hit your head?” She pulled him back around. “You should see a doctor.”

“I can’t afford a doctor.”

“You could have a concussion.”

“May—” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen. The government is … is altering men, turning them into monsters. Beaumont said so—hesaidit had been altered. They’re turning men into weapons of war. Imagine an army of them tunnelling under no man’s land.”

She closed her eyes. “All right,” she said. “All right, Joe. Listen. Go home, write it up, and bring it in tomorrow. We’ll look at it together.”

They wouldn’t, though. He could see that in her face. Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he stepped back, dismayed. “You don’t believe me.”

“It’s an extraordinary allegation.”

It was—of course it was. He could hardly believe it himself, and he’d seen it with his own two eyes. “What if I get proof? A photograph.”

“Well… all right. But, Joe, don’t go back into the sewer. Promise me. Monsters aside, it’s not safe down there.”

“I promise.” And he wasn’t lying; the thought of returning to that claustrophobic darkness filled him with horror. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways to investigate. “I’m not letting this drop, though. I’ll find the truth, and when I do, you’ll have to publish it because it’ll be the biggest story theClarion’sever had. Or any paper.”

She didn’t respond, just watched him with sad and steady eyes until he turned and walked away.

Well, let her think he was shell-shocked or driven mad by the war. He knew better. What had happened last night would haunt him for the rest of his life if he didn’t get to the bottom of it, Alex and his lies be damned.

Avoiding the tube—if he ever went underground again, it would be too soon—Josef took an omnibus to St. Thomas’s hospital. Rattling along on the top deck gave him time to think, and his thoughts turned back to last night and the horror that had attacked him in the dark.

But then, irritatingly, he found his heart skipping as he remembered Alex and his friend coming to his rescue like knights of yore. No, not like knights; he refused to romanticise them like that. If anything, they were more like zookeepers desperately trying to keep their escaped tiger from mauling the visitors. Because Josef had no doubt that they were responsible for the man—if he was still a man—prowling the sewers.

Still, no amount of rationalisation could keep his mind from drifting back to Alex’s mansion flat and those few moments of connection, even intimacy, they’d shared while Alex had tended his wounds.

Before he’d thrown it all away with his offensive lies.

Josef was still furious. Baffled, in fact. What had Alex been thinking? There must be a hundred plausible lies he could have spun. Why mock him with one so ridiculous? Although now he thought back on it, there had been no mocking in Alex’s tone. For whatever reason, he’d delivered the lie with utter conviction—as if it had been a genuine attempt at deception.

As if Josef would ever believe such nonsense.

He considered, briefly, that Alex might believe it. Was he the sort of spiritualist fanatic who harboured delusions about ghosts and ghoulies? No, that couldn’t be true. Alex had been atthe front, actively involved with whatever the government was testing in the salient. And he’d stolen Josef’s bloody camera to keep it secret.

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