I’ve been viciously attacked by all kinds of people simply for stating the facts about what happened to Professor Grinstead. They challenge me to prove my claims, and of course I can’t, and then they ask why, then, they should believe me.
This fundamentally misunderstands the situation. I don’t give a fig whether some random internet person or reporter believes me or not. Believe what you want. I was simply asked to explain what happened and I did so as well as I could, and as far as I’m concerned that discharges my responsibility in the matter.
This is my final and last account of it for the general public, and you can take it or leave it. Everyone who knows me, knows that I hate lies like poison, and they’re the people I care about, not some podcaster with a million followers on the other side of the world or whatever, and certainly not the reporter from the local rag, who barged into my house uninvited, whose questions I politely answered, and who published an article on me that was made up out of whole cloth.
As far as I can tell the traditional media are even less inclined towards truthfulness than the vloggers and the sooner their entire industry dies a death, the better. There may be one or two good and decent reporters among them just like there may have been one or two good followers of Stalin or whoever—
Well, at this point my wife, Hannah, happened to read what I was writing, leaning over my shoulder, and advised me to calm myself down a bit. We had a little walk and I drank a tea, and now I’ll try to just stick to the facts.
I’ve known Professor Grinstead all my life. I knew him by the unlikely name of Elton, which was actually his name, although his birth considerably predated the adoption of the name by the famous flamboyant singer.
Elton Grinstead knew my father quite well, and when my father died an untimely death when I was only twelve years of age, Grinstead took it upon himself to be a sort of uncle or godfather to me, often astonishing and fascinating me with his talk of far-off lands and ancient periods of forgotten pre-history.
He kindly paid me well above the going rate to keep his garden in order as best I could. Having lived his previous life entirely in cities, he never managed to acquire any love of gardening. With my mother acting as unpaid consultant, I made a reasonable job of it.
Grinstead, through his work and his public lectures, attracted a lot of strange people, and he tolerated them kindly, and even indulged their odd theories. “Never assume someone’s an idiot just because they sound like one.” he used to say to me, with a twinkle in his eye.
His view was that even if a person espoused the most absurdly outlandish theories, at the very least one could view them as an interesting psychological study.
One thing we always wondered about Grinstead was why, not long before I was born, he had moved to our little Norfolk village. Norwich University didn’t really have the prestige to interest a man of his calibre, and Cambridge was nearly a two-hour drive away; Oxford nearly four hours.
Watling-by-the-Sea, to give its full official name, had really nothing to interest a man like Grinstead, except for some picturesque old cottages constructed largely from beach pebbles and with roofs of slate. And yet, he seemed boundlessly fascinated by it. By the time I was a teenager, there was hardly a person in the village who hadn’t been grilled at length by Grinstead on the topic of the village and its history and local legends. There were those in Watling who, for this reason, took a sudden detour if they saw him coming. Once he’d cornered you it could be difficult to get away.
I was probably no more than fifteen years of age when he first told me about Doggerland. I remember him taking out a huge rolled-up map and unfurling it on his kitchen table.
Tapping an area on the map with his index finger, he explained to me that where there was now only the North Sea, not long ago there had once been a vast plain, connecting England to Holland and Germany, and this land, he said, had existed as recently as perhaps eight thousand years ago.
To me, eight thousand years isn’t “recent”, but to Grinstead anything since the Younger Dryas period is recent, and that ended 12,000 years ago. After this the Holocene began—the period in which we live today, and in which all known human civilisation has taken place—as he has continually reminded me ever since.
At the age of 18 I might have left Watling to attend university somewhere, but for a couple of particular factors.
For one thing, Grinstead persuaded me to allow him to undertake my further education instead. It was quite clear that he wanted a sort of assistant. By then he had increasingly begun to drop hints of a great discovery he had made, and although he did not yet share any real details of it with me, I was so intrigued that I agreed to the idea. He managed to arrange that his personal tuition would count towards an actual degree. While studying with Grinstead, I would be able to continue making a fair bit of cash from odd jobs around the village, which would help a lot.
Then there was the second factor: I was already besotted with Hannah, who was a year younger than me, and I had no intention of leaving Watling as long as she remained there.
When I was 18 years old, in the autumn, Grinstead held his own eccentric enrolment procedure for me in the Watling-by-the-Sea University of Grinstead, so to speak, which consisted of the two of us signing various documents and Grinstead unveiling his big secret to me.
He took me down to the cellar of his cottage; there he switched on lights to reveal a series of clay tablets laid out on several tables. A very modern LCD panel displayed a temperature of 20°C, together with ambient humidity. This was quite unlike anything to be found in the rest of his cottage, which possessed no central heating, nor air conditioning of any kind.
He told me he had found the tablets on an private archeological dig at a nearby town, and they undoubtedly represented the oldest text ever found in England. The tablets, he said, were covered in a Celtic script, which he had partially translated, and he claimed they dated to perhaps 200 BC.
I asked him whether these tablets shouldn’t be in a museum, or at least made available to other scholars, and to this suggestion he gave an adamant and resounding “No!”, and proceeded to explain at some length that mainstream scholars—and here he mentioned some particular names rather disparagingly—would not appreciate or understand the importance of the tablets.
He told me the tablets contained legends which were in fact folk-memories of a highly advanced people who had lived before the Younger Dryas period and had inhabited the now-submerged Doggerland.
Imagine me, at the mere age of 18, having entrusted at least the next year or two of my education to this eccentric if kindly professor, now hearing for the first time that the real focus of his research was none other than a race of beings whose existence was hitherto unsuspected by any normal scholar, and this on the basis of old partially-translated legends found on clay tablets which, I was moderately sure, Grinstead was keeping to himself illegally.
I’m not a legal expert now and I certainly wasn’t then, but I don’t think you can just unearth major archaeological artefacts of enormous importance and keep them in your basement.
At the same time, I was very impressionable, like most 18-year-olds, and my attitude was that if I was in for a penny, then I was in for a pound. I agreed to secretly help Grinstead with his research on the clay tablets.
He absolutely swore me to secrecy and I kept his secret, with the sole exception that I must admit that I told Hannah about the tablets, who I also swore to secrecy. She was immediately entranced by the romance of it all, and told me that my proposed work on Grinstead’s tablets sounded much better than sitting in some lecture hall at some stuffy university.
Over the next three years I became ever-more deeply enmeshed in Grinstead’s research. Hannah remained in Watling to look after her mother, who was ill, so I cancelled my provisional plan to attend a normal university after a year or two.
The fact is also that I increasingly began to form the opinion that Grinstead was really onto something, and the knowledge and skills with which he furnished me were undoubtedly top-notch; I received a first-class education in obscure Celtic and Saxon languages, and in Latin.
The tablets themselves indeed seemed to deal with the inhabitants, whether real or fantastical, of a lost area of land, apparently located somewhere between what is now England and what is now Germany. Nothing quite seemed to fit the region the tablets spoke of, except the prehistoric Doggerland: the plain that had existed in exactly this region when much of the world’s water had still been bound up in polar ice and sea levels had been somewhat lower.
Certainly I found these legends intriguing, although I could hardly view them as rooted in history. Even if these tablets really were more than 2000 years old, Doggerland would still have been long gone by the time they were written.
Intrigued though I was, I began to suspect Grinstead of practising a certain form of psychological manipulation upon me, which, although innocuous at root, I did find slightly annoying.
There are writers who write books an inch thick and then quite consciously place some intriguing hint or mystery every few pages, thus keeping the reader turning the pages while feeding him little but fluff in-between, and I began to wonder if Grinstead wasn’t doing something like this with me, in an attempt to ensure my continued loyalty, periodically hinting at secrets far greater than any he had yet revealed to me.
He needn’t have bothered, if his intention was to keep me on the hook, because I was staying in Watling as long as Hannah was there, and she wasn’t going anywhere as long as her mother needed assistance.
As I approached the end of my third year as Grinstead’s student, or perhaps protégé, he dropped increasingly strong hints of a further, even more astonishing secret, which he would fully reveal to me only if I proceeded to embark on a PhD program with himself as supervisor.
Naturally I agreed. Even aside from Hannah, I was simply in too deep with Grinstead’s theories and research. Leaving Watling-by-the-Sea to study elsewhere would have been like spending three years studying plumbing only to leave and try to become a tree surgeon.
Grinstead had all the proper papers drawn up. After a few more years, I would have a legitimate doctorate in ancient history. To obtain a doctorate, you have to perform some kind of original research, or at least that’s the idea, so that raised the question of what I would actually research.
Grinstead informed me that there was only one topic worth my while, and that with my assistance, by the time I was ready to graduate from this unorthodox postgraduate program, we would be ready to announce our findings to the world and everything the world thinks it knows about ancient history would be upended dramatically.
He then set me to work translating a new set of clay tablets; tablets that he had not previously revealed to me. He explained that he had already translated them himself but that I should attempt an independent translation, utilising all the skills he had taught me.
I set to work in his climate-controlled cellar, and as I patiently worked through the new tablets, a quite fantastic story unfolded before my eyes.
The tablets spoke of an ancient race of demi-gods, who it said had imparted incredible new knowledge to humanity, and had even interbred with humans. This knowledge had enabled humanity to survive in the harsh icy conditions that had once prevailed in Europe.
These beings, which the tablets referred to as “the Tall Ones”, had, according to the text, found their new homeland gradually flooded until only some islands were left. If the adopted homeland of these beings was indeed Doggerland, then this would fit well with the modern opinion that Doggerland eventually became an archipelago before disappearing completely.
The Tall Ones had connected these islands with an elaborate series of tunnels, which ordinary humans were forbidden to enter.
Then a horrific development took place. As the water submerged even the remaining islands, the Tall Ones increasingly came into conflict with humans, even enslaving them as part of an effort to procure the food they needed. Humanity came to fear these highly-advanced beings who emerged from their tunnels only to savagely take whatever they required to sustain their dying civilisation. They had become a race of evil subterranean cave-dwellers.
I also found disturbing hints in the texts of some other creature, which apparently consisted of little other than teeth on a long stalk and a mass of tentacles, but these references seemed heavily allegorical and poetical, and it was hard to fathom what connection these strange beasts might have with the Tall Ones, if any.
In time, humanity apparently triumphed over their erstwhile friends the Tall Ones, the cave entrances were sealed and no more was seen of them.
Grinstead refused to discuss the tablets and their story with me until I had finished translating all of them. Then, finally, he asked my opinion.
I told him I thought the stories nothing but fanciful legends, to be filed alongside mermaids and fire-breathing dragons. By way of reply, he produced a flat rectangular wooden box and told me to open it.
I did so, and inside I found a silvery metal plate with a slight purplish tinge, on which were drawn a series of intersecting straight lines. This, he insisted, was an ancient map of the tunnels of the Tall Ones.
The metal plate looked to me to be of very modern origin. It’s very difficult to date metal artefacts but it looked like something one might have been able to order online, perhaps engraved by a laser.
Grinstead brought out a paper map of Doggerland as it would have existed in its final archipelagal form. Then he produced a perspex sheet on which he’d engraved the same design of intersecting lines that was engraved on the metal plate. By laying the perspex over the map, he demonstrated to me that the lines perfectly connected the coastal regions of the islands of Doggerland.
My view was still that the metal plate was of modern origin. Someone with knowledge of Doggerland’s history had had it made by modern industrial methods. I had to wonder whether it hadn’t been made specifically to fool Grinstead himself, and I began to interrogate him as to where he had found it. I half-feared he’d tell me it had been sent to him in the post, but no, he insisted he’d dug it up somewhere, and when I asked where, he told me there was one final text that I needed to translate before he could reveal everything to me.
His next revelation was a large stone tablet, densely inscribed with runes, which I judged to be of 7th or 8th century Anglo-Saxon origin. Again I asked him whether he didn’t think these remarkable finds should be in a museum, and again he claimed to have sound reasons for keeping them to himself.
I set to work translating the tablet.
All along I remained convinced that we were investigating mere ancient legends, certainly not worth taking seriously as actual history, but I’ll confess even so that the text of this new tablet, which appeared entirely genuine, sent a shiver down my spine.
It was impossible not to draw parallels between the runic text inscribed on the stone tablet and the earlier text found on the clay tablets, except now, the Tall Ones had transmogrified into the Evil Ones, or Latharyans, and were viewed unambiguously as demonic subterranean entities, to be avoided at all costs.
The term given to them in the text itself derived from the name of an older pagan god, Latharia, who was considered an embodiment of evil and of all that is vicious, repugnant and repellant.
There was little trace in this early Medieval text of the charitable view found in the clay tablets, of the Tall Ones as beneficent imparters of knowledge who had fallen into wickedness only as their civilisation had crumbled. Now they simply existed to drag the unwary into some Hellish underworld.
Again there was mention of headless jaws, which seemed out of context and I really couldn’t understand what that was about at all, except it was clear that these things were to be feared.
I could detect discernible Christian influence in the writing, but by and large the stone seemed written from a pagan perspective. There were dreadful hints that attempts had been made to appease the Latharyans by means of human sacrifice, and it was clearly stated that they were not of this Earth, but had journeyed here from demonic realms in the distant past.
Perhaps most intriguing of all, the runes mentioned an actual location which it said had endured terrible difficulties with these demons; a point at which they emerged from the ground to torment humanity. Enough of a description of this place was given that it might almost be possible to pinpoint it on a map with extensive research, although clearly that would be a substantial undertaking given the vague nature of the references in the text and the fact that the coastline has changed very substantially since Medieval times.
The text concluded with the assertion that this gateway to the underworld had been stopped up by means of rocks and earth, but there, right at the very end of the inscription, the tablet had undergone significant damage, and it was hard to be sure about the precise meaning of what fragments of intact text remained.
I remember that the night after I had more or less finished translating the stone, I suffered a terrible nightmare, so vivid that I was completely unable to get back to sleep and I was heartily glad when the first rays of sunshine surmounted the horizon.
I dreamed that I was being pursued through endless dark tunnels by a force of indescribable malevolence; an entity of enormous intellect and intense malignity. The tunnel seemed to go on and on, without end. My flashlight, the sole source of light, gave out and I stumbled on through inky blackness. Finally I ran headlong into a surface, which I perceived to be made of metal and which seemed to be a kind of door. I knew that I was close to salvation, but try as I might, I couldn’t find a way of opening the door, and I began to form the view that perhaps it wasn’t a door after all, but only a thick sheet of metal intended to keep whatever was in the tunnels with me from getting out.
Then I collapsed against this metal plate, exhausted and terrified, and stared sightless into the darkness.
I thought I saw the faintest glimmer of an unholy reddish purple, like putrescent cyanotic flesh, and I became transfixed by it. I couldn’t tell whether it was approaching or whether it was still; whether it was a fifty yards away or right in front of my face, but gradually I began to think it was drawing closer and closer. It was so dim that I could only perceive it by looking to the side of it, allowing light to fall on the sensitive edges of my retinas. I began to think I could discern teeth; flat like human incisors, but sharp like razors. Then, just as I was arriving at the horrifying conclusion that it was no more than a few feet away from me, a horrific inhuman scream rent the air and I awoke to find that I myself was screaming.
During the course of the morning, waiting for the sun to come up while I did my best to steady my nerves, I firmly resolved to extract every last secret and morsel of insight or theorising that Grinstead had left. He would tell me everything he knew, and reveal every last secret, or else I would withdraw from his somewhat absurd one-man educational establishment right then and there, and enrol in something online altogether more normal and conventional.
When I met Grinstead at his house that morning, as usual, it was as if he had anticipated my resolve. He said that now was the time for me to finally know everything, and he hoped I would understand his reasons for keeping so many secrets for so long.
I said that I wasn’t sure if I entirely did understand his motives, but he only smiled patiently.
He then proceeded to claim that he had located the entrance to this realm of the Latharyans, and in fact, it lay underneath his house, which is why he had bought the place.
As soon as he told me this, I immediately thought of all the allusions to various ancient landmarks and alleged ley lines in the text, and I saw that his house could very well mark the spot of the buried gateway.
Particularly impressive was the fact, long known to me, that from Grinstead’s house the sun could be seen to rise at the summer solstice precisely over the tip of a certain rock out at sea, and while the language of the ancient runes inscribed on the stone tablet was rather unnecessarily poetical, even while reading it I had briefly wondered if certain lines weren’t an allusion to this very phenomenon.
Grinstead informed me that he had worked quietly for nearly a decade to pinpoint the mouth of the tunnel under Doggerland that led to the English coast, before finally arriving at his present conclusion and successfully persuading the owner of his cottage to sell it.
I asked him where, then, the entrance to this tunnel was, if we were sitting right over it. “Come.” he said to me, and together we went down to his cellar again.
There was a steel manhole cover in the floor of the cellar, to which I’d never paid very much attention, assuming it was necessary for drainage somehow. This he pulled up using a pair of tools designed for that purpose, revealing a ladder descending below. He proceeded to climb down it. I asked him whether it was safe to go down there and he assured me that it was. Accordingly, I followed him down.
The ladder went down an awful long way. How he had managed to install it without any help, I don’t know. The shaft itself was already there when he took possession of the cottage, he told me; it had only been necessary to uncover it and then fix the ladder there bit by bit.
I’d say it was about fifty metres to the bottom of the shaft. At the bottom I found myself in a cave of natural origin, lit by lights Grinstead had fixed up, facing an archway inscribed with various early Medieval runes.
The feeling I got from being down there was quite unpleasant. One clearly felt oneself to be a long way underground. The air was damp and still, and not the slightest sound could be heard that didn’t emanate from ourselves. I swear I could hear the beating of my own heart.
I asked him where the tunnel led, and he said it led to an unnamed submerged island, which he had termed only The Wheel, since from there numerous other passageways led off like spokes, at least according to the supposedly-ancient map engraved on the metal plate.
The metal plate itself, he told me, he had found fixed to the archway.
He said he hadn’t been far into the tunnel because the air in there was not very breathable. Since finally uncovering it four years earlier, after endlessly digging about in his cellar like an obsessive, he had gradually laid plans and accumulated supplies for a full investigation of the tunnel, and with this he wanted my help, of course.
I half wondered whether this hadn’t been Grinstead’s motive all along in undertaking my education free of charge. Grinstead was a kindly old man, but he was something else too. He possessed a ruthless ambition which, I now fully understood, had driven him his entire life like an absolute maniac, and he needed someone energetic, young, in good health, and above all, absolutely trustworthy, to help him complete his investigation without having to share his finding with the wider academic community, whom he almost seemed to hold in contempt.
The origin of his dislike of sharing his findings—supposedly quite out of character for an academic, although in reality, I believe, quite common—was undoubtedly that some of his earlier work on legends alluding to the Latharyans had been ruthlessly mocked by certain of his peers, and treated rather shabbily by certain journals.
And yet, there we were, certainly looking at something that must at least partially vindicate at least some of his theories.
Without doubt the archway had been inscribed during the early Medieval period, and the runes around the archway were clearly a warning of some great evil that supposedly lay within.
Grinstead was at pains, however, to point out that Medieval scholars knew nothing of oxygen and very little about respiration in general, so if people had gone into the tunnel and died due to lack of air, their deaths might well have been chalked up to malign influence.
I was relieved to ascend the enormous ladder and arrive back above ground, and I’ll admit that Grinstead’s discoveries, and his plans, were quite exciting, if only I could push the ominous feeling that was growing on me to the back of my mind.
Specifically, he proposed an expedition into the tunnels. He wanted to journey to the intersection he called The Wheel, and from there take a certain spoke another forty miles to a point that he believed had harboured the last surviving remnant of the civilisation of the Tall Ones, or the Latharyans as they later became known. The entire round trip would be nearly three hundred miles: a substantial voyage.
The floor of the tunnels had been levelled, either by mechanical means as Grinstead thought, or by an immense expenditure of human labour. The tunnels themselves—or tunnel, since we had no direct evidence of the existence of these other hypothesised tunnels—I presumed to be of obscure natural origin, while Grinstead insisted the Latharyans had excavated them using what he called “advanced machinery”.
Thus, Grinstead proposed to make the journey via modified quad-bike. The chief problem was the lack of oxygen. According to Grinstead’s preliminary experiments, oxygen levels dropped rapidly as one penetrated into the entrance tunnel’s dark depths, and he considered it likely that the air was unbreathable throughout the entire hypothesised tunnel system.
He proposed we build a quad-bike, that is, a motorbike with four wheels, essentially, capable of carrying us both, together with around twenty oxygen cylinders. The cylinders would supply the engine with oxygen, and were also for our own use.
We would use adapted rebreathing technology to filter the surrounding air and combine it at the correct levels with oxygen, simultaneously scrubbing it of excessive carbon dioxide, which he expected would be a problem in the tunnels.
As he described his plans to me, the sense of adventure really began to get a grip on me. Here was a truly exciting project. There was, of course, one obvious objection to his plans: what would happen if the engine were to fail while we were in the very depths of the tunnels?
We wouldn’t have enough oxygen to walk home, if the tunnels were really as long as Grinstead thought.
He had anticipated my objection, and his reply to it was twofold. Firstly, we would carry an electric bike, fitted with two seats and large, thick tires, to serve as a last-resort emergency escape vehicle, together with multiple spare batteries. This would add to the weight the quad-bike would have to shift, but it would mean that we weren’t completely doomed in the event of serious mechanical failure.
In the worst case, if the quad-bike failed irretrievably at the furthest point of the journey, we would have to both escape via this one electric bicycle, which would then have to travel perhaps nearly 150 miles.
The second part of Grinstead’s reply was that we would both learn the ins and outs of quad-bike repair inside out, and we would take sufficient spares and tools with us to be able to carry out emergency repairs if needed. In the event of anything going wrong, we would abandon the voyage and return home as swiftly as possible.
To me, the entire plan sounded absolutely insane, but also absolutely intriguing. What was this? Was it madness? Obsession? Or was Grinstead exactly the kind of person who takes humanity forwards, leaping over impossible chasms that others fear to traverse?
Grinstead proposed we take our time. We would make the voyage in two years, and meanwhile we would prepare intensively. Afterwards I would have a year to write up our findings for my doctoral thesis.
And so it was that I found myself spending most of my time learning about e-bikes, quad-bikes, four-stroke engines and oxygen supplies.
Grinstead and I argued repeatedly over the exact method by which we were supposed to navigate the tunnels. At one point I tried to persuade him that we should use electric motorbikes, but he persuaded me that the range of them simply wasn’t enough, and spare batteries too heavy.
Neither could we string electric cables the whole way, which was another of my suggestions. The cost would be prohibitive and the danger of them snapping too great.
Grinstead’s house and garage, where we both worked and studied, became a mass of mechanical parts, oxygen cylinders and all kinds of diagrams. Fortunately mountain climbers and firemen had already solved the problem for us of surviving in an oxygen-depleted atmosphere. We also discovered that people living at very high altitudes are already used to supplying their engines with oxygen, so that was also already figured out for us.
We carried out our first proper experiments about a year into the project, riding along country tracks and beaches on our quad-bike, e-bike strapped to the back, wearing oxygen masks and the whole thing festooned with oxygen cylinders.
I daresay we looked quite a sight.
We scheduled our efforts for very early in the morning, starting out well before sunrise, but in case anyone spotted us we had a cover story: we planned to tell people we were planning to undertake some archaeological research in the Himalayas and needed to prepare for that.
Grinstead, normally a cautious man, seemed to abandon all caution when the Latharyan tunnels were involved, and his idea was to made one grand attempt on the trip, but I insisted we make preparatory forays into the tunnels themselves.
It’s true that we were running somewhat short of money and all that equipment wasn’t cheap, but I felt strongly that we ought to thoroughly test all our apparatus under the actual conditions under which it would all have to perform.
Accordingly we painstakingly lowered everything to the bottom of the ladder, disassembling the heavily-modified quad-bike in order to get it down there, and began to make longer and longer exploratory forays into the tunnel.
These excursions seemed to bear out Grinstead’s theories, since the tunnel seemed to go on for an extremely long way without ever deviating from its course. The situation with regard to oxygen turned out not to be quite as bad as predicted. There was some oxygen down there, but also extremely high levels of carbon dioxide. As long as our breathing apparatus filtered out the CO2, only modest levels of supplemental oxygen would be necessary, decreasing our load considerably.
Finally we were ready to undertake the full trip, all the way to the destination Grinstead had selected as being of the greatest scholarly interest. By then we had managed to procure a quantity of blasting explosives, in case we should become trapped by a cave-in and needed to blast our way out. Now I believe only those explosives, in the end, prevented even a far greater tragedy than the one that unfolded in those tunnels.
I told Hannah more of our plans than anyone, but I kept the most bizarre aspects of it from her, for fear of frightening her. She knew only that we intended to cautiously explore a tunnel.
Once everything was finally prepared, we set off on the quad-bike early in the morning, having told the rest of our friends and relatives only that we planned to immerse ourselves in important archaeological research and would likely not return until the next day.
We rode the quad bike into the thick darkness, oxygen masks on our faces, for over five hours, eventually arriving, incredibly, at The Wheel, exactly as Grinstead had theorised. Five tunnels led off in different directions from a central column, which was covered in writing in an impenetrable script, not resembling anything we had previously seen.
After photographing the column carefully, we took the branch preselected by Grinstead, and proceeded for another two hours.
In all of this journey we encountered no especial difficulties. The floor of the tunnels was remarkably smooth. I sat at the front of the bike, while Grinstead was perched behind me on a chair we’d fashioned from an office chair. He was positively festooned on both sides with our supplies; spare fuel, oxygen cylinders, water, food and so on, and right at the back was the emergency e-bike.
Every couple of hours it was necessary to stop and change the oxygen cylinders supplying the engine, and this went without a hitch. We had prepared thoroughly and well.
Finally, after eight hours of travel, during which we had taken only short breaks and our main enemy had been only boredom, we arrived at a branching series of tunnels which we began to cautiously explore on foot, marking our way using paint from orange spray cans.
Grinstead behaved like a man on a mission—a mission within our mission, of which I knew nothing—and I followed him nervously but resolutely, thinking probably there were still things that he had kept from me.
We passed vast quantities of wrecked and decaying artefacts, both artistic and technological, which Grinstead didn’t allow me time to examine. Since I was worried about our oxygen running out, I was content to follow him to our final destination, and simply took photographs of whatever I could.
After another hour, we arrived at a vast structure that somewhat resembled the interior of a cathedral, but clearly served some kind of industrial or technical purpose.
We set up all the lights we had carried with us from the quad-bike and were able to more or less illuminate most of it. Then we saw that the initial impression we had received, in the near-darkness, of austere beauty combined with high technology, had been misleading. Clearly the structure, whatever it was, had once been beautiful, but now it was in an advanced state of disrepair and decay, like everything else in the tunnels, and appeared even to have been vandalised and deliberately destroyed.
Grinstead was entranced by it. He informed me that he had expected something of this sort.
According to his theory, in the final stages of the destruction of their society, the Latharyans would almost certainly have splintered into various factions, some bent on purely selfish aims, while others would have adopted extreme religious outlooks in the face of terrible anxiety over their own continued existence. In the end, the more organised religiously-motivated factions would certainly have won out, he claimed, over the disorganised selfish factions, but not before fighting many terrible battles and suffering many casualties.
Grinstead, for reasons that I still don’t completely understand, believed we had arrived at the site of the Latharyan’s last stand: the very place where the last of them had held on to life, before finally expiring.
“Look!” he shouted to me suddenly, and he shone a flashlight on a mural on the wall.
The mural was overlaid with crude graffiti in an alien script, and smeared with unspeakable ancient excreta, but it clearly depicted a vast grassy plain, dotted with clusters of trees, gentle rolling hills in the distance, with herds of ungulate animals, perhaps deer, grazing here and there.
The mural, Grinstead explained, was a stylised depiction of Doggerland as it once was. I saw that there were tears in his eyes. He explained, in-between taking gulps of oxygen from his oxygen mask, that by the time this artwork had been created, Doggerland had undoubtedly become only a distant memory for the artist or artists who had painted it.
Indeed the idea was touching. They had become confined to this underground realm, fearing the savage human tribes who lived on the land that remained, and could only paint pictures of how their lost world had once looked.
Grinstead’s view was that, by the time they had created this mural, they would likely have lost most of the technology they once had, amidst their fight for survival. Most likely, he said, they had expected the entire globe to soon become completely flooded, and had settled in to await their end, perhaps praying to unknown idols who were powerless to help them.
And then, I happened to move the beam of my own flashlight off past the right edge of the mural, and I saw something in the gloom that almost gave me a heart attack. Lined up against the wall were a series of freestanding transparent pods, shaped rather like tulip buds, and each contained a person, apparently in deep sleep.
We began to excitedly examine these pods. The people inside were immersed in some kind of liquid, and every one of these people were strikingly perfect in appearance. They were both male and female, and of a range of ages, although we saw neither children nor the very elderly among them. We counted forty of these pods, and it seemed likely that there could well be more of them somewhere else within the structure, or elsewhere in the complex.
Grinstead said he had anticipated the possibility of these pods. I asked him how he could possibly have anticipated such things, and he said that he expected the last remnants of this dying civilisation might have taken steps to preserve themselves until such time as the flood water, which they doubtless expected to cover the whole Earth in time, would eventually recede.
Their appearance was so perfect, so handsome and beautiful, that I could not help but wonder, if these people had interbred with humans, then what had we looked like before? If anything they looked more human than the Professor and myself.
Grinstead was skittering about looking for controls which he said would awaken them from their sleep. I asked him whether awakening them was really a good idea, but said they deserved to know that the rising of the waters had largely ceased, and once awakened they could teach us all kinds of unimaginable things.
He ran about pressing buttons and pulling levers, both of which were in plentiful supply, and to my astonishment, the pods began to glow a soft green and to gradually split and dissolve from the top, the liquid they contained gushing out onto the floor and down through metal gratings.
One by one they awakened, naked as the day they were born, and soon three of them were standing in front of us, two men and a woman, steaming slightly, while we backed away in fear and they gradually seemed to get their bearings. Their facial expressions, handsome though their faces were, seemed strangely blank, which I assumed at the time—wrongly, it turned out—to be an effect of their prolonged sleep, which may well have lasted even 8,000 years.
Grinstead got a grip on himself and stepped forward, proffering his hand.
“Welcome to the Late Holocene.” he said, pulling down his oxygen mask to speak.
One of the men turned his blank face towards Grinstead, then towards me, and then back towards Grinstead, who was still holding his hand out hopefully, like a used car salesman trying to conclude a deal.
The man’s face seemed to split, causing both Grinstead and I to gasp in horror, and he began to claw away the remaining skin with his hand, the skin also falling away even from his hand. A sort of jaw attached to a long leathery pipe emerged from the confused red mess underneath the human mask and abruptly shot out and fastened itself on Grinstead’s face. Grinstead screamed pitifully, then two more such jaws shot out from the other two creatures, the human head-masks exploding, and began to bite at his body.
Clearly they were hungry.
I could do nothing to help him. By the time I had got over the initial shock well enough to formulate any kind of plan, Grinstead was on the floor and had lost so much blood and flesh that it was clear his remaining lifespan would now be of the order of minutes at best, no matter what I did.
One of the jaws detached itself from Grinstead and lashed out at me. I jumped back and it made a horrible screeching noise. I couldn’t even understand what I was seeing; the creature now looked like a mass of bloody tentacles with a roving jaw attached to it. It began to scuttle towards me, and one of the other jaws waved at me as yet another bit into Grinstead’s skull with a loathsome crunching sound.
All around me the creatures were beginning to hatch out of their sleeping pods, some stumbling forwards in their human disguises, others casting off their human masks like snakes shedding their skins.
I did the only thing I could do; I ran.
I ran for what felt like hours, all the while conscious of the slithering, scuttling sounds of the creatures in pursuit behind me, desperately hoping my oxygen tank would hold out long enough for me to get back to the quad-bike.
Fortunately, it did, and was only half-empty by the time I got there. Immediately I jumped on the bike and attempted to start it, but of course it didn’t work. Looking back, there was probably nothing wrong with it; I was just scared witless and couldn’t think straight. I was probably doing something wrong.
Shining my flashlight into the darkness, I couldn’t see any of the creatures, but I could hear them, slithering gradually along towards me in the darkness, looking for their next meal.
I jumped off and detached the e-bike. Even in my terror I was still compos mentis enough to check the attached spare batteries and oxygen tanks, and I judged that I had enough of both to make the journey back. I cycled off into the blackness, which was alleviated just enough to safely make progress by the powerful headlamp we’d attached to the bike.
Then, I stopped. Staying absolutely still, I could still hear a certain slithering and hissing, but it seemed far off. The creatures weren’t, apparently, very fast on their tentacles.
I put the bike down and ran back to the quad-bike, where I rooted out the explosives with shaking hands and set a timer on them. Then I ran back to the bike and cycled off with all possible speed.
Five minutes later I was rewarded with the noise of an explosion, followed by the sound of a section of tunnel behind me collapsing. A substantial shock wave hit me, deafening me and almost knocking me off the bike, but not quite.
Still, there was a high chance that one or more of the creatures had made it past the quad-bike when the explosion occurred, and was now hot on my heels, so I continued on my way with all possible haste.
I didn’t stop till I had scrambled out of the manhole in Grinstead’s cellar, eight hours later. There, I replaced the manhole cover and dragged everything heavy I could find over it. After that I ran to find Hannah, and I embraced her and cried unashamedly like a child. But I couldn’t tell her what had happened. It was weeks before I was able to really speak about what exactly had happened down there. I could only tell her that Grinstead was dead.
She somehow mistakenly got the idea that he had died in a tunnel collapse, and that was the story I went with, initially. I knew no-one would believe the actual truth of what had really happened, except perhaps Hannah herself.
It took me a couple of hours to stop shaking and calm myself to the point where I could think what best to do next. Then I went back to the cellar and gathered all our remaining explosives, along with anything that I thought would burn well.
Believe me, I did not want to open the shaft up again, much less go down it, but I knew I had to. I proceeded very cautiously, flooding the entire shaft and the beginning of the tunnel with light from all available sources, and I took the explosives a good three hundred metres or so into the tunnel before setting the timer.
Two years have now passed since those terrible events. I completed my studies at Norwich University, mostly remotely, on the basis of the clay tablets and other artefacts. Hannah and I are now married with a child on the way. I have lobbied endlessly to have Grinstead’s cellar filled in with concrete, and there are hopeful signs that this may actually soon happen, although nothing is yet certain.
Perhaps it was a mistake to have finally told people about the creatures. I took care to do so only after acquiring my doctorate. Few believed me, and those who do are generally the type who’ll believe anything.
What actually were they? I presume they did indeed come from outer space some time before the end of the Younger Dryas period, and perhaps had disguised themselves as humans, initially in order to cooperate with us, for our mutual benefit, and later perhaps to exploit us. This is only conjecture.
I find the idea that they interbred with us entirely unlikely given their repulsive inhuman forms, and the idea in any case always seemed to me quite unsupported by genetic evidence.
I don’t believe they should be regarded as uniformly evil, in the way that they came to be viewed by early Medieval scholars. Doubtless there were many factions among them just as there are among humans. Perhaps only the longest-surviving subgroup among them settled into an exploitative relationship with humans, out of desperation, as their way of life crumbled due to the rising seas.
Grinstead has no grave, due to the manner of his untimely death, but tomorrow, on the anniversary of his being consumed by the aliens, Hannah and I will light a candle to his memory.
