MONOLITH Read Free Page B

closed his eyes more tightly and tried to prevent himself from screaming. Not that it really mattered any more.
    His final thought was simple.
    Please don’t let it hurt.
    The lift had increased its speed to just over ninety miles an hour by the time it smashed into the concrete at the base of the shaft.

 
    ISOLATION
    LONDON; JUNE 1933
     
    No one but the old man ever entered the cellar.
    The two people who sometimes helped him out in the shop had no need to descend into the subterranean room; everything they needed to perform their duties was on the ground floor.
    For the most part he was alone in the shop anyway, just as he was alone in the small flat above the business so he had no need to explain why he was the only one allowed to go into the cellar. Not that anyone would have been in any great hurry to explore the large dark underground area anyway, he reasoned.
    It was damp down there and the smell was sometimes overpowering. A dank musty odour of wet stonework and mould and occasionally of sewage. One of the waste pipes in the street had ruptured a while ago and residents of the area were still waiting for it to be fixed. Exactly how much human waste was leaking into the cellars of his and other houses in the vicinity no one knew but the authorities seemed content to allow the festering filth to keep voiding from the damaged conduit. The old man didn’t know if other residents had the same problem because he rarely spoke to anyone who lived near him.
    But the smell didn’t bother him, just as the darkness didn’t. When he made his sorties down in to the subterranean room he carried just one lamp with him, the sickly yellow light giving him enough illumination for what he needed to do. He had heard movement down there and he was sure there were rats or mice, possibly both, either living down there or using the cellar as some kind of temporary shelter. There were stories that some of these creatures grew to unnatural sizes and he had actually seen one that he would have sworn was close to a foot long including its bald, scabrous tail but even the thought of sharing the room with rodent and vermin didn’t bother him and they never came near him when he was down there, frightened off by the glow of his oil lamp.
    And then there were the spiders. Webs so thick they looked like muslin were spun all over the ceiling of the cellar, particularly thick at the four corners where it seemed such was their density they were actually holding up the brickwork in places. The old man wondered how big spiders would have to be to create webs of such thickness and complexity. He also wondered what they fed on because there couldn’t possibly be enough flies or other insects down there to satisfy the appetites of arachnids of such obviously large size. Perhaps he thought, smiling, they ate the mice.
    The smell, the rats, the mice and the spiders, all combined to make the cellar a forbidding place to anyone but the old man who never seemed to bother he was sharing it with so many other creatures.
    The darkness seemed to welcome him, sliding a black conspiratorial arm around his stooped shoulders every time he entered the cellar and the old man liked that feeling.
    When he was down there he would occasionally hear people on the street above passing and sometimes he heard them when they spoke but most of the time he paid them little heed. What they had to say didn’t interest him. When he was in the cellar he had only one thing on his mind.
    Now he stood outside the cellar door and selected the large key he needed to unfasten the padlock that helped to make the underground room so secure. A padlock and two deadbolts as well as the lock on the door itself all combined to make access to anyone other than the key holder impossible.
    One of the people who sometimes worked for him had asked him once what he kept down there but the old man had merely smiled and waved away the question and it had not been raised again.
    He removed the