The Peacock Cloak

in two. Finally, when they couldn’t think of any other games, they began picking up rubble and dumping it into Graves’ bin, settling in spite of themselves into a slow rhythm that was certainly more pleasant than doing nothing at all, though both of them would have strenuously denied it.

    Then Pennyworth’s counter began to bleep.
    “What the…?”
    Before Pennyworth could finish the sentence, Shoe’s counter went off as well. Both men laughed raucously.
    “So are we going to go and tell that Graves guy?” asked Pennyworth at length.
    “Are we shit!” said Shoe. “This might be something interesting.”
    Pennyworth nodded and tried to turn off his counter. Unable to find the switch immediately, he lost patience with the thing and silenced it by banging it repeatedly on a rock.
    “Piece of shit,” he growled.
    “You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe, turning off his own device. “The switch is right here on top. Where it says ON/OFF.”
    “Yeah, well,” grumbled Pennyworth.
    He poked the switch, found it no longer worked, and tossed the counter aside.
    “Come on then,” said Shoe. “Let’s find out what this is.”
    Working at a speed that would have delighted Graves’ heart, they shifted more stones and finally reached something that looked like a circular lid, about a metre across, made of shining and untarnished metal.
    “It’ll be locked, or rusted up underneath,” Pennyworth said glumly. “Then we’ll bloody well have to go and get help.”
    “You never know,” said Shoe, tossing aside a cigarette and kneeling in front of the lid with his fingers under the edge.
    Pennyworth joined him with a sigh.
    “One – two – three,” Shoe called out, and they both lifted.
    The lid came away quite easily, and they found underneath it a well. This explained the name of the place, of course, but that was not what was on their minds just then. The thing that struck them was what they saw inside it. There was no water in that well, nor was there the dark echoing space you expect in a well that has dried up. There was – nothingness.
    Of course the human eye doesn’t see the essence of things, but can only detect light or its absence, and you might argue that what was visible there must therefore have been amenable to description in such terms. But it didn’t seem like that to them. There was neither light nor darkness down there. There was no surface, solid or liquid, rough or smooth. There was just nothing.
    “Holy crap!” intoned Pennyworth.
    Shoe turned his radiation counter back on. It was bleeping away so fast that it was pretty much giving out a continuous screech. He listened to it for a moment, then laughed.
    “Sweet!” he exclaimed.
    Others might have worried that the radiation would do them harm, but to these men danger and uncertainty felt like home.

    Shoe and Pennyworth hadn’t known it, but their counters were connected to a monitor back at the sorting area which Graves checked at regular intervals. He had picked up that they had detected radiation and, running and scrambling across the ruins, he quickly reached the broken wall at the top of the shaft and looked down at the two of them standing there on the edge of the well, with Shoe’s counter still giving out a continuous plaintive screech.
    “Hey guys,” he called to them softly in what he hoped was a calm, kind voice, “you’re going to need to back off from there.”
    He squatted down so that only his head was above the wall, in order to minimise his own exposure to whatever force of nature was pouring out of the well.
    “Take a couple of steps back,” he called, “mind you don’t trip on the stones, and then come up here and get behind this wall with me.”
    Shoe and Pennyworth looked up at him peeking fearfully down at them. Then they glanced back at each other, and laughed.
    “What is this thing, then?” Shoe asked.
    Graves made a further effort to control his voice.
    “Not sure guys, but it looks as if you may have come across some sort of spatial gateway. We’ve never come across a live one before. But never mind that for the moment, eh? Really, guys, I’m not kidding. It’s a lot of radiation we’re all soaking up right now. I need you to step away from the edge and then we really ought to get away from here.”
    Gateway? They had no real idea what Graves was talking about, but ‘gateway’ sounded like a way out. Shoe looked at Pennyworth. Pennyworth nodded, and, with a defiant yell, both of