Everyone knows that the “Fomorians” first appeared in the 1840s, after the dwarves of western Ireland quarantined their own homelands west of the Corrib. The finest minds of the dwarves and the British establishment have failed to uncover the causes of their appearance, beyond that it is a disease dubbed “Fomoritis”. But nobody knows for certain.
Until now.
One corrupt scientist from a dwarven megacorporation runs an illegal experiment to find out. What he doesn’t expect is the Fomorians themselves to object and hand his subjects over to the military.
For the children involved, that was just the beginning.
A self-published psychological horror/dieselpunk novella, set in a dark pre-WW1 version of Ireland. Available from Amazon Bookshop.org, Smashwords and more!
Free access if you support me on Ko-fi and Patreon, and you can read the first chapter below the fold.
Chapter 1
The rain had stopped, leaving puddles in the far-left corner of the courtyard, where the concrete ground dipped slightly. Inside the guardhouse, Sergeant Bartelli leaned back in the hard metal chair, drawing on his cigarette one last time. He glanced at the clock on the wall, exhaled and leaned forwards again, stubbing the cigarette out. Three forty-three PM on a Thursday.
The dull reverie was broken by the sharp bell of the telephone just off to his right. Suppressing a sigh, he lifted the earpiece. “Yes?” He nodded and straightened at the tinny reply, briefly acknowledging it before glancing to his right at the private standing next to the door out to the walkway above the courtyard. “Open the gate, Waters.”
Waters acknowledged the command before pressing a button on the panel in front of him. A two-tone alarm sounded, prompting the guards on the walkway to bring up their rifles with practised ease, fingers carefully away from triggers. A minute later, the private pulled a lever towards him. Bartelli stood up, looking out the window into the courtyard as the gate rolled open.
A khaki-and-grey Austin truck rumbled backwards into the yard, another soldier directing it up to the loading platform. It looked like a run-of-the-mill supply truck from the outside, perfect for a discreet prison run. A casual onlooker would have been surprised to see the armed guards surrounding the back of the truck. That same casual onlooker would not have been allowed within two miles of the place, a detention and research centre for Fomorians somewhere in the Irish countryside between Castlebar and Roscommon.
As soon as the truck had stopped, Waters closed the gate again. From where he stood, the truck was partly blocking Bartelli’s view, but it had come in off-centre, allowing him to see the guards down the far end. He could also see the officer who had climbed out of the front passenger’s seat, a leather satchel
clasped firmly in his left arm. The officer’s mud-stained greatcoat rendered him almost unrecognisable to Bartelli, especially from this distance.
Both watched dispassionately as the guards unlocked the back of the truck. Two more field agents left the truck, each dragging a prisoner with them. Both prisoners looked very young, even from behind. One wore a faded yellow dress, and her brown hair had been shaved on one side. The other one, a boy wearing a
loose grey jumper and faded black trousers, had short black hair. Neither man could see if their hands were cuffed and sealed like procedure dictated, but the boy’s ankles were clearly chained together.
“They don’t look like orcs, Sergeant. Were they recently infected?” The other soldier’s voice was carefully detached. It was a recurring fear in Ireland: that the mutated bandits of the abandoned dwarven cities under Connemara would snatch a soldier or civilian – God forbid, a child – and drag them into their
underground warrens to turn them into…another Fomorian.
Nobody knew for certain how they did that. Oh, the boffins elsewhere on the base had their theories that it was something that had appeared in the air or water since the ‘40s. So did the remaining dwarves, or rather their own church. So did just about everyone.
As far as Sergeant Bartelli was concerned, the “how” was irrelevant. What mattered was that preventing it required thousands of British troops, many on Military Service from anywhere east of Connacht, and the dwarven militia to keep them back. Tens of thousand of entrenched troops, bolstered by motorised equipment and the latest aerial advancements, all to stop some over-muscled bandits from kidnapping people.
And the Fomorians weren’t the only things bottled up in that distorted hellhole west of the Corrib. Bartelli very deliberately put the thought of the snake-people from his mind, focussing instead on the more immediate concern of making sure that nobody escaped. And so, he didn’t reply to Water’s question. He simply watched as the prisoners were pulled in through the door, into the antechamber to the detention block. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before in the two years he had been stationed here.
And yet, as the door slid closed, he wondered what the officer had inside the satchel. It didn’t look like an overnight kit. And the rifles slung over the field agents’ shoulders didn’t look like the standard-issue Mauser that had been in service since 1906.
“All right, back to work,” he grunted needlessly as he glanced at the clock. It read three fifty-one. Still another few hours on shift.
