Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery

My adventure began in the least portentous way possible: an invitation from an old University acquaintance by the name of Gregory Shaw to attend a meeting of "Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," a society that he had joined in the years since our parting. I was surprised to hear from him after so long, for although we exchanged Christmas cards, we had not met in person in nearly ten years, having gone our separate ways after our time at Oxford. The last I had heard, he had been living in Scotland, but the address he included in his letter was far closer to home, a small coffee shop in the outskirts of London. 

On the appointed day, I took the train down to the area and met him. We talked happily of things in our pasts, drank tea and coffee and ate small pastries, simply passing the time as we waited for the hour, later in the evening, when this so-called lodge was to meet, in a private house nearby. Gregory, good-humored as he had been in our earlier days, nevertheless dodged all my questions about the lodge or indeed his involvement with it, saying only that he thought I would enjoy my time with his fellows, and I pressed the matter little, for I was happy to simply chat with him once again. Although, to be completely truthful, it must be said that even then I noticed something a little off about him. He had never been a fat man, but now he was almost skeletally thin; his eyes darted around, and though he often smiled the emotion did not reach his nervous stare; and he had taken up smoking.  At the time, however, I put it down to his vague protestations of working a "government job" and his natural worry about the business on the Continent. I could not have been more wrong.

As evening began to fall, Gregory and I at last left the little coffee shop and headed up the street towards the house where, he told me, Sharpe's Lodge held their meetings. We stopped outside the door of a small row house and he turned to me and spoke, quite seriously.

"Now, Charles." he said. "You may see things in here that will, ah, surprise you."

"I've seen surprising things before, Gregory," I said, "But thank you for the warning. Shall we go in?" Gregory didn't move.

"I mean it, Charles. If you want to leave, I won't blame you. You can go, and we can meet for coffee again tomorrow before I head north again."

"I suppose I'll have to be the judge of that myself, shan't I?" I said. I will admit that at this point I was beginning to have reservations; Gregory's behavior was so unlike how he had been in the coffee shop earlier. My concern was entirely overshadowed by my curiosity, however. What could Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery possibly hold within its shabby halls that made Gregory so loath to enter?

Gregory waited for another moment and then smiled, a great, genuine, smile of relief that put me completely at ease. He opened the door and we stepped inside the house's front room, a large and almost completely empty space, floored and roofed with wood slats that smelled of ancient must. The only furnishing was an elevator car, newly installed, its brass and iron railing glinting in the dying light that filtered through the cracks in the curtains. Gregory boarded the thing and beckoned me alongside, then hit a button to start the mechanism. We immediately began to descend.

"I have to say, this isn't what I was expecting," I shouted over the squeal of metal. 

"You'll be saying that a lot, Charlie," Gregory shouted back. Then we broke out of the narrow shaft into a large and brightly lit space, and for a moment I forgot how to speak. 

The headquarters of Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery lay beneath north London in a shelter built during the Great War, a hastily-converted series of root cellars and basements linked together into one cavernous space. In the center was a series of generators, providing power to the lights that arced and flickered overhead, as well as a number of more strange and esoteric devices ringing the edges of the cave. Wooden panels divided one section into offices and private rooms; another was lined with steel cages that appeared to have ben sunk into the floor. There was an echoing bang and I flinched instinctively; Gregory, seeing my discomfort, slapped me on the back and pointed to the far end of the space, where a man was shaking some kind of rifle at the ceiling in celebration. The elevator juddered to a halt and Gregory stepped out, a huge smile still plastered on his face. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," he said.

"Name?"

"Charles Wentworth."

"Age?"

"Thirty-two."

"A bit young to have seen action in the big one, eh? No matter. Know how to handle a gun?" The man across from me was white-haired, white mustached, and possessed of one glass eye. He was currently using his real one to fix me with a stern stare. 

"I've done a little hunting," I said. "My uncle used to take us on trips at his estate."

"Well, that may come in handy." said the man, who was dressed in a military uniform of some kind, although adorned with no badges of rank. "Have you ever handled a pistol."

"I never have," I admitted. " Why exactly are you asking me all these questions?"

"Didn't Gregory tell you?" said the man, surprised. "I swear, these recruiter lads get more and more lax every day." He stroked his mustache and thought for a moment before speaking again, picking his words carefully. "Any man with eyes can see that the Hun is up to his old tricks again, eh? The Germans and the Italians are planning something, and if things keep heading the way they've been going, we'll be at war here before too long." I nodded reluctantly. "Now that's the easy part. You look like a bright boy, so I won't bore you with explanations, but suffice it to say that the next war will not be fought solely on the battlefield, slogging through the trenches and all that."

"The advance of machinery, tanks and the like." I said, anxious to seem like I knew what he was talking about.

"That's one way, aye," he said, and stood up suddenly. "Maybe it'd be easier if I just show you. Follow me, Wentworth." He walked out of the office and back into the bustle of the Lodge. I saw Gregory speaking to an engineer engaged in some sort of repair on the generators, and tried to catch his eye, but his back was turned. The military man led me across the cavern to the banks of cages and down towards the end. It was dark here, the lights above sparking and sputtering. 

"We keep it dark back here on purpose," said the military man conversationally, pulling a service revolver from somewhere inside his coat. "We think it likes it that way."

"What likes it that way?" I said.

"That." said the military man, and pointed with his gun at a crumpled body lying in the cage. It was shapeless and pathetic, the husk of a human being. Clearly, it had been dead for many years. It didn't even have a smell that I could detect over the pervasive motor oil stink of the cavern. I turned away, bewildered and a little disgusted. "A dead body?"

"Not quite," said the military man, and slammed the butt of his pistol into the bars of the cage. There was a dull ringing, and the "corpse" turned its head to face me, its eye sockets empty, its jaw missing. It raised one skeletal hand and reached out towards me, its wasted, mummified flesh slithering across the broken concrete. I stood transfixed, unable to look away, until at last the military man clapped his hand on my shoulder. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery, Wentworth." he said, and pressed his revolver into my hand. "Keep this. You'll need it."