Session Overview
They went in through an oasis in the North African desert and came out on a freezing headland in occupied France. In between: a dimension that didn't obey physics, geometry, time, or the basic social contract. The resonance pillar dragged them somewhere else — somewhere that knew them, judged them, and found them small but sufficient. What they saw there, in the visions woven through that impossible cathedral space, may haunt them longer than anything that has ever pointed a gun at them. Welcome to December 1942, gentlemen. You've only been gone six weeks.
The Space Between
The water took them.
One moment there was the oasis, the ritual, the chaos of gunfire and sand and the thing that would not die — and then there was this. A vast, dimly luminous space with warm smooth ground underfoot and air that tasted of salt and ozone, thick with humidity, heavy with wrongness. Sound behaved as though it had opinions: voices carried unpredictably, and echoes arrived before the words that caused them, as though the space itself was listening ahead of time.
"Where on earth are we?" was the first coherent thing said, which was, in retrospect, a deeply optimistic use of the phrase "on earth."
"There's some questions that spring to mind," Taffy offered, with typical economy of feeling, "and the chief among them is what the fuck has happened and where the fuck are we?"
Nobody had an immediate answer. Hertz admitted to being thoroughly discombobulated and quietly noted that Haze had more occult knowledge than he did, which was not the reassuring opener the group might have hoped for. They took stock. They had what they'd been carrying when the oasis swallowed them. The pillar from Drexler's ritual had come through too — transformed, different, but unmistakably present: ten, fifteen feet away, its familiar shape now trailing long waving filaments like seaweed in an invisible current, glowing from within, emitting a deep harmonic that resonated not in their ears but in their teeth.
Then the worse discoveries.
Lance Corporal Singh was with them. Singh was there in the flesh, responsive to touch — but not to voice, not to command, not to Haze's best parade-ground bark of get yourself together, soldier. There was nobody home behind Singh's eyes. Hertz attempted to reach him, tried everything in his psychological toolkit, and the verdict from whatever waited inside Singh's mind was silence. A broken shell. A man who had looked at too much and simply gone somewhere safer, deep inside.
And kneeling nearby, clutching her books to her chest like a lifeline, was Doctor Erica Brandt.
A Hostile Alliance
Aldridge cut straight to it: "What mess have you gotten yourself into?"
Brandt, to her credit, did not flinch. This was Drexler's plan, not hers. She had been following his lead. She had trusted him. The resonance pillar — that was Drexler's term for it — was meant to be a means of navigating this place, a faster route home than flying through an Allied offensive. But it had to be quietened first, through ritual, before it could be safely used. What the agents had done, by interrupting that ritual at the oasis, was leave it broken and unmoored. And without Drexler, she admitted, they were adrift. "Only he knew how to navigate this place."
Haze's immediate solution was to tie her up. Aldridge, pragmatist that he is, argued for keeping her alive and lucid — she knew more about what was happening than any of them, and that intelligence had value. "We're not one for executing," he said. "Her intelligence might be useful to the war effort when we get back." Haze relented, though he kept his shotgun aimed at her back as a statement of principle.
No sign of Drexler's possessions. No sign of Hanover's. Just the team, Singh's empty shell, one increasingly nervous German scientist, and the pillar, humming.
Then the crashing began.
Something large, something furious, something that had apparently followed them through the threshold. Aldridge ordered weapons drawn. Seconds later, Das Ungenhauer tore through like a bull through a fence — flesh knit back together, entirely unharmed by everything they'd thrown at it in the desert, and looking for the people responsible.
It charged. The team braced. And then one of the pillar's filaments simply extended, like a considered thought, and touched it.
Ungenhauer stopped. Not paralyzed. More like a clock whose battery had been removed. And then — three heartbeats — it began to come apart. Slowly, methodically, layer by layer. The scales faded. The monstrous musculature softened and shrank. Somewhere near the end, for just a moment, there was a flicker of something human in its eyes — recognition, perhaps, of what it had once been — and then it was gone. Reduced to raw biological substrate. Decompiled.
"It corrected the hybridization," Brandt said, starting in German before catching herself and switching to English. "It's like it was correcting an incorrect draft. It just took it back."
The machine-gun belt they'd poured into that creature had done nothing. The pillar unmade it without apparent effort. The lesson landed quietly and stayed there.
Brandt then turned to address the group with an expression of academic dryness and asked whether any of them actually knew what the resonance pillar was.
"No," Aldridge admitted.
"Then perhaps," she replied pointedly, "you might reconsider the conversation you were having moments ago about shooting me."
She had a point. Hertz pressed the case for cooperation. She confirmed she did not wish to die here. A provisional, deeply suspicious alliance was formed.
The Cathedral and Its Visions
They walked. Brandt led, following something she seemed to sense more than hear — a subtle gradient, like walking ever so gently downhill. Hertz guided Singh along, doing his best to coax a man whose mind was simply elsewhere. Haze walked behind Brandt. The shotgun stayed out. Aldridge kept eyes forward and told the group not to poke at anything.
"Not poking unknown things," Taffy observed sagely, "is the first rule of demolitions."
The resonance pillar, behind them, never moved closer or farther — but its filaments grew longer, its glow deepened, and its edges became less defined. Hertz's watch, to their collective unease, confirmed that several hours had passed. It did not feel like hours. Time, here, had its own opinions.
Then the corridor opened.
The space they walked into was vast. Cathedral-vast. Soaring colors instead of stone, impossible geometry instead of vaulted ceilings — something that put one in mind of a great basilica stretched to a scale no human architect had ever attempted. Beautiful in the way that things which should not exist are always briefly beautiful before the mind catches up.
And then the visions began.
They weren't on a screen. They weren't projected. The party walked through them like ghosts moving through another world entirely, present but invisible, observers of a future they hadn't yet failed to prevent.
The first was a newsreel. Rome, the 1960s, an Olympics. Athletes performing at the Games — except they were wrong. Too smooth. Too fluid. Slightly too-long fingers. Skin like wet stone. Sounds that weren't quite the sounds human throats make. Haze looked at it and despaired. "This is what we failed to stop."
"Not yet," Hertz said firmly. "Not yet. Maybe there is something here we can do to change it."
The second was worse. A coastal facility, all of its windows facing the sea. Women in hospital gowns. Charts on walls detailing a breeding programme with statistics that climbed in one column — successive pregnancies — while maternal mortality climbed alongside them. A nurse was speaking gently to a sobbing young woman, explaining the process with the clinical calm of someone for whom this had become normal. The words appeared to the operatives in English.
Hertz specifically, standing amidst the horror, found himself looking at equations. They were woven through the vision like watermarks — mathematics describing the integration of Deep One biology with human physiology at mass scale. He stared at them. He felt their pull. They were beautiful. They were perfect. He wrenched his gaze away before the beauty ate him whole.
Next to him, Brandt was not so disciplined. She stared and quietly repeated, over and over: "They finished what I started."
Hertz rounded on her. The accusation needed no elaboration.
The third vision was London. Recognizable, but wrong — subterranean excavations beneath the streets, wide corridors with low ceilings flooded with saltwater drawn from the Thames estuary, something moving through them that you couldn't quite see. And above Parliament, the Nazi eagle.
Aldridge stared. "Have we lost? Is this the future?"
"It's 'a' future," Haze said quietly. "Not necessarily the one."
As they moved through, there was a glimpse — just a glimpse — of a document. A civil service paper. Whitehall stationery. The heading read: Biomass Optimisation Report, Eastern Territories, Q4 1958. Resource recalibration proceeding on schedule. Fuel reserves adequate.
The full weight of it settled over the group like a physical thing. Hertz held the line: "It is just a vision, gentlemen. There is no guarantee this will come to pass." Aldridge's response was the response of a man who had just watched Nazi emblems fly above his Parliament: that it felt very real, and it might just be taunting them with their own failure. Haze told him to breathe.
The visions faded. The vast space narrowed back in around them.
The Pillar Opens
Then the resonance pillar opened.
Impossible geometric structures unfolded from its interior — planes that bent the wrong direction, surfaces that were simultaneously concave and convex, colours that had no names in any language the group had studied. It was hypnotic in the way gravity is hypnotic: not a sensation but a pull, a fundamental force operating below conscious thought.
Hertz felt it specifically. He is, after all, a man who finds mathematics beautiful on a good day — and this was mathematics given form. He had to physically look away. "Don't look at it," he managed. "Turn away. Certainly don't look at it directly."
He turned to Brandt. "You said your boss wanted to silence it. How did he mean to do so?"
The ritual, Brandt explained. The appeasement ceremony Drexler had been performing at the oasis — that was the key. The pillar had to be placated before it would allow passage. What they'd interrupted wasn't just a ritual; it was the key to the door. The destination had been the headquarters of the organisation Drexler answered to — a castle in the mountains of Bavaria.
Aldridge's eyes lit up with the particular gleam of a man who has just spotted an opportunity disguised as a catastrophe. "If we can get to Germany, we can dent the war effort. Surprise attack."
Hertz, meanwhile, was applying every scrap of his theoretical physics to the problem. This space — this unplace — was consistent with theories of interstitial spaces between universes. A corridor between two points. Which meant, if you could influence it, you might be able to choose where it led. The observer effect, he mused aloud. In standard quantum physics, observation changes the observed. Here, that principle seemed to be operating at a rather more literal level.
Haze had a suggestion. Last time they'd been somewhere like this, reducing the number of observers had had an effect.
"Not yet," Hertz said, with the cautious optimism of a man who knows he's going to need that option later and wants to hold it in reserve.
"I just follow orders," Taffy said, helpfully, from somewhere nearby.
The Stubborn Welshman vs. The Fabric of Space
The group, lacking better options, settled on a destination. Cairo. Back to Egypt, back to solid ground, back to something that made sense. Hertz fixed the image in his mind with the focus of a man accustomed to holding complicated ideas — Cairo, Cairo, Cairo — and encouraged the others to join him.
The space responded.
Not well.
The light dimmed. The pillar's harmonic became discordant. The walls began to press inward, as though the space itself was offended by the suggestion and intended to make its feelings physically manifest. The claustrophobia was immediate and suffocating, the kind that bypasses rational thought and grabs something older.
They pushed back. And then, one by one, the mental effort snapped — like a tendon overstretched — and most of them simply stopped, which was when the pressure immediately and completely lifted.
Brandt laughed. It was the laugh of someone oscillating rapidly between insight and the edge of sanity.
Taffy did not stop.
To be entirely clear: the others had given up, the space had reasserted itself, and Taffy — Taffy — was still in there mentally bulldozing his way toward Cairo through sheer, bloody-minded, Welsh stubbornness. The space registered this. It began to make him bleed from the nose. Taffy registered this and categorised it as acceptable losses. He compared it, sincerely, to being willing to sacrifice a kidney to win the war.
Hertz, to his credit, turned back and tried to join him. His nose started bleeding too.
Brandt watched the two of them give themselves nascent aneurysms in silence, and then offered a reflection born of six years studying things that should not be studied: "I was wrong. These entities cannot be controlled. They cannot be negotiated with. They are like weather. You do not fight weather. You survive it."
She gestured at the blood on their faces. Evidence, she said, of what happens when you resist. And then she used a metaphor that cut through the noise: "A mighty river. You do not swim against it. You go with it."
Aldridge grabbed Taffy by the shoulders and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stop. He looked at Hertz and said the same. Enough. Let it go. Let it carry them.
The pressure receded. The discordant harmonic returned to something approaching harmony. The pillar retreated to the middle distance — and then transformed, from the modest glowing cylinder they'd been looking at, into something that branched and sang in every conceivable direction and several inconceivable ones. Vast. Infinite. It had simply been politely waiting for them to finish.
They stopped fighting. They went with it.
The Current Takes Them
Walking through the pillar's geometry was not like walking through a door. It was more like being read. Pressed from every side simultaneously, examined at depths no physical instrument could reach, assessed by something of incomprehensible size and patience that looked at each of them and found them — small, yes; limited, certainly; but sufficient.
Hertz, in those impossible seconds, had a particular experience. A theoretical physicist who had spent his life believing the universe could be understood through mathematics found himself, briefly, inside an equation. Not looking at one. Inside it. The mathematics he had devoted his career to — rendered a child's counting game by comparison with what surrounded him. And yet — and this is the thing about Cameron Ferguson — he found it beautiful.
Then: cold.
Salt-sharp Atlantic wind instead of ozone. Grey light instead of green-blue glow. Wet rock underfoot. They were standing on a headland, all of them, in the dark, in December, dressed for the North African desert.
Below them: a fishing village. Somewhere in the middle distance: a church bell ringing the hour.
Occupied France. December 1942.
Brandt came through with them. She did not struggle. She looked at the coast, at the cold, at the solid ordinary world around her, and said her last words with the quiet clarity of someone who has just understood something it took her six years to get wrong:
"I was always looking at it through a microscope. It's not a specimen. It never was."
Behind them, the impossible geometry folded itself back into three dimensions. The pillar was still there — but inert now. Dark. Filaments limp. Glow faded. A cylinder of inexplicable material, sitting on a French headland, entirely uninterested in them.
On the ground nearby: Hanover's battered pouch. Two vials smashed, their contents lost to the between-space. Two intact. Hertz picked one up and held it aloft like a man who has found water in a desert — the substance, still viable, still theirs.
Then footsteps on the scree path below.
Aldridge ordered weapons up. The team braced — and a young man came up the path from the village below, carrying a canvas bag, and tipped his hat.
Harry Lane. Looking thoroughly unsurprised to see them.
He knew Haze and Hertz by name. He recognised Aldridge and Taffy as "the SOE lot". He opened the canvas bag and produced duffle coats, scarves, and a thermos flask of tea with the manner of a man who has been expecting exactly this and planned accordingly.
"There's a safe house in the village," he said. "Fire's lit. Papers in the bag to cover you as a work gang. Let's get out of the weather."
Nobody argued.
The Fifth of December
The cottage was warm. It had a fire and food and beds — luxuries so basic that after wherever they had just been, they felt almost obscene in their comfort. Harry Lane stoked the fire and set out bread and cheese. Singh sat and stared at the flames. Brandt, coming round, seemed to be seeing too much when she looked at the walls. Taffy held his hands toward the heat with the single-minded focus of a man who has been cold long enough.
Haze picked up the newspaper on the table.
The headlines were about the war. The date was the thing that mattered: December the fifth, 1942. They had gone into the oasis in late October. Six weeks had passed in a space where several hours had felt like no time at all.
"Good news," Haze reported. "Nothing about fish people in the paper." He paused. "Bad news is we've traveled forward in time about a few months."
He asked Lane how long he'd waited. Lane deflected with the ease of a man who deflects professionally: he hadn't had to wait long. He'd been told. Finch had told him.
Of course Finch had told him.
Lane asked whether they'd brought the pillar with them. They had — Taffy had wrapped it in canvas and carried it down from the headland with the careful, respectful handling he would give gelignite. What to do with it? Lane considered this, and offered the only honest answer available:
"I don't know. Sleep for now."
Outside, Cap de la Hague waited in the dark. The clock, as it turned out, had been ticking all along.
"It is December the fifth, nineteen forty-two. And the clock is ticking."
To be continued...
This session, the party: successfully survived an Euclidean-optional dimension, watched an unkillable Nazi monster get corrected like a grammatical error, saw the future they're trying to prevent laid out in three increasingly awful visions, attempted to use brute stubbornness as a navigation tool (Taffy's approach; not recommended; produced nosebleeds), accepted advice from the enemy scientist they were debating executing twenty minutes earlier, walked through the inside of a cosmic equation, and ended up on a French headland in December dressed for the Sahara.
Sanity: somewhere south of where it started. Singh: physically present. The resonance pillar: wrapped in canvas and being treated like gelignite, which is probably correct. Alchemical vials remaining: two of four. Harry Lane's ability to be exactly where he needs to be: undiminished. Brandt's final observation: haunting. Finch's involvement in all of this: as expected.