The Hole in the World (The John Lymington SF-Horror Library #16)

By John Lymington

Something peculiar was happening in the grounds of Dr Liskard’s remote country home. It was surrounded by enormous, near-prehistoric creatures that could only be seen through the telescope he usually used to study the stars.
Before he could announce the phenomenon to the authorities, he needed independent corroboration—so he invited his publisher to join his niece and her husband at the isolated house to see for themselves.
They quickly discovered that, as incredible as it seemed, the doctor was right.
But what did these strange visitors want? Why did they surround the house every night and just ... watch? What were they looking for?
Then Dr Liskard vanished, and so did his pretty German housekeeper. Psychic phenomena began to manifest itself until the Government sent its top scientist to solve the mystery.
But it wasn’t going to be as simple as that. Something equally terrifying was happening below ground. Something that might just spell the end for humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Dec 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215265369

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

Book preview

The Home of Great

Science Fiction!

Something peculiar was happening in the grounds of Dr Liskard’s remote country home. It was surrounded by enormous, near-prehistoric creatures that could only be seen through the telescope he usually used to study the stars.

Before he could announce the phenomenon to the authorities, he needed independent corroboration—so he invited his publisher to join his niece and her husband at the isolated house to see for themselves.

They quickly discovered that, as incredible as it seemed, the doctor was right.

But what did these strange visitors want? Why did they surround the house every night and just … watch? What were they looking for?

Then Dr Liskard vanished, and so did his pretty German housekeeper. Psychic phenomena began to manifest itself until the Government sent its top scientist to solve the mystery.

But it wasn’t going to be as simple as that. Something equally terrifying was happening below ground. Something that might just spell the end for humanity.

THE HOLE IN THE WORLD

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1974

©1974, 2023 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: December 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Chapter One

ON JUNE 15TH, the day before he disappeared through a hole in the world, Dr Martin Liskard called at the new office of Essef Mag and others. He looked up at the towering characterless face of the building. Welcome, he said, to Castle Mediocrity.

As he approached the wall of glass doors leading into the vestibule, a commissionaire opened one invisible leaf for him.

When I invented those, forty years ago, said Liskard, jabbing the glass with his umbrella, they opened at the approach.

Really, sir? said the attendant, staring.

Liskard had an old felt hat on the back of his head, an open linen jacket from which protruded a formidable waistcoat, a dangling black ribbon letting a pair of old gold pince-nez swing across the prominence, baggy trousers and a pair of gardening boots in which he had been working in a compost heap. He looked like a carefree gentleman of the nineties strolling into Romano’s at 3.30 a.m. for early breakfast.

The attendant’s face suddenly broke into sunlight. Dr Liskard! he said. It’s a long time since I’ve seen you here, sir.

It was in the days of the old building, said Liskard, when you had that fantastic lift with a rope through it, and you pulled the rope and up we went in silence. There wasn’t even a door on it, I remember.

He asked after the attendant’s wife, children, grandchildren and the horses which had sustained the lift man’s meagre income, for he was the bookmaker’s agent, running bets for the staffs of the magazines in the old building. His regular income from racing had been made, not by his own successful betting, but from the fact that he got ten per cent for every loser backed in the building.

You’re looking well, sir.

I’ve retired, Peter. Seven years ago.

Still writing, sir?

No. I’ve changed my hobbies, too. I took up astronomy.

Old Mr Gross has gone, you know, sir. Retired, like you. His son Mr Jason does it all now, but he’s a chip, you might say. Follows the same lines. Here they all think it’s daft, running a paper like he does, but you see, it sells, that one, like it did when you wrote, sir. Yes, sir, it goes on selling, while these other new ones, well, sir— he pulled a figurative chain, —down the pan one after the other. You’d think there was money in losing it, sir. He grinned. I must say, you’re looking fine, sir.

Certainly that day he did not look like a man who proposed, within hours, to leave the world behind him.

THE EDITOR’S OFFICE on the sixth floor was all window on two sides and had to use Victorian-type Venetian blinds to keep the day out. Dr Liskard opened a pair of plastic slats and peered out across odd roofs interspersed with matchbox towers. Farther off there was a cloud of blue black, hanging almost motionless at a low height under the blue sky.

What’s that mess? he said. A fire?

No. There’s a thirteen-mile jam on the motorway, said Gilligan, titular editor of Essef Mag.

It must be better somewhere else, Liskard sighed as he turned away. I suppose things have changed here since I wrote.

The building’s changed, said Gilligan, but damn all else. Jason keeps on the same track as his father did. He thinks it all up, plots, strips, illustrations, and we all discuss it—that is, mostly we all agree with him and the paper comes out just as he thought it. Of course, most of the ideas come from way back, but readers hardly ever seem to notice.

There are only seven plots, dear boy, said Liskard. It’s hardly likely that anybody anywhere is going to find any more. And besides, today’s eleven-to-fourteen- year-old boys will have grown past it tomorrow and there’s a new lot waiting. The old routines are new to them, Grosser used to say.

Do you write still?

No. I retired professionally and wrote a few boys’ books which made a rather surprising amount of money—still do, in fact, there being several born every minute—but my wife died suddenly and I—changed everything. Started anew. No, I wanted to see Jason on quite another matter.

He asked if Gilligan were married, had children, lived where, and with professional skill obtained a willing picture of Gilligan in tension and repose. Liskard had been an old-fashioned doctor who believed that if you knew a person you might know a cure. The blanket penicillin handouts had never been his practice.

Which one was Grosser? said Gilligan.

Jason’s father. Jason was Gross, his father Grosser, and his father, who owned a newspaper, was Grossest. We liked that kind of feeble humour.

JASON’S OFFICE CONCEDED nothing to the building, the date, or whatever had changed outside. He had had the windows altered to casements which that morning, stood open.

Pollution and all, said Jason, the outside stuff is better than that bloody dehydrated, scented, poof-bound muck they pump up through the old tin tubes.

The room had a grand piano, covered with piles of old numbers, rival productions, files and other matters. Jason had brought his models of steam locomotives of long and not so long ago, in glass cases; aspidistras in pots on four-foot Doric columns and a dummy fireplace with velvet mantle cover with bobbles and ornate gold framed mirror over. His desk, rich mahogany with gold-inlaid red-leather covering, and on the floor, Indian silk carpet. Around the richly papered wall were framed covers from the magazine, through its various titles, beginning in 1919 with Star Travels down to Essef Mag. The decorative covers showed intrepid adventurers stepping out of spacecraft on Mars, Venus and a dozen other drifting worlds, all worlds looking much the same as a half-hacked salt mine, and housing a considerable and ingenious variety of Bug-Eyed Monsters, or in the words of ancient mariners, dragons.

Liskard saw several of his own special creations as interpreted by an assortment of artists.

Always managed ten thousand words a week, he said, sitting down in a red-buttoned leather armchair, come plague, come wrack. I can’t think how I managed it as a student at that hospital, but it was just getting something out of my system, a sort of total relaxation nothing else could bring. Do you still use that? He pointed to an ornate brass paraffin lamp standing on a corner of the desk.

Of course. Inspiration. It belonged to Dickens.

To the point, said Liskard pleasantly. I’ve come to talk to you about something I’m going to do, and when I do it there’s a strong possibility that you may never see me again.

What!

Sit down. Stop gawping. Not suicide. I got over that. This isn’t an extension of the wish. This is a great experiment. I want you to come down.

Where? When?

"Tomorrow. To Sussex. When I wanted to break clean of old places and associations I rented a biggish Anne house down there, in a kind of park, in which I have to allow local sheep and so on. This house is crown property, you see.

"Built in, during Victoria, is a fairly large conservatory of iron and glass, and this at some time was converted into an observatory, which is why I took the place. To study the heavens, about which I wrote so much, and knew so little.

"The telescope is fairly big, built to foundations put in the floor, though shaky now, and I have to keep that in good condition, not remove it, you see. It is, in fact, a rather primitive old thing by modern standards and that’s the reason for its value. It’s a museum piece.

"This old spyglass can be depressed below the horizon. When you do this it looks towards my wood through a piece of the original glass of the conservatory, and the glass is cracked. A prism splits light, and so does cracked glass. In this case the crack plus the magnification of the lenses makes it possible to see frequencies of light not normally visible.

Night after night recently I have watched extraterrestrial creatures landing in my park, resting and vanishing again. The place is being used as a staging post for some regular space travel.

Jason sat back and watched the doctor carefully.

Yes, I know it sounds like one of my old ones, said Liskard, "or at least a twist of my saturated brain, but it’s nothing like that.

The time changes forward slightly every night, but the period of staging is always the same; roughly eight minutes, that is about two degrees of rotation of the earth at the point I watch.

Jason got up and went to the window, then he turned his back on it and sat on the sill.

You ought to get some of these research bods down there, he said. They’d be leaping mad with joy.

My dear boy, I’ve seen what I want to see from a distance. I want to meet these creatures.

You’re barmy, grandpa.

That isn’t respectful.

It’s what we used to say to the Grossest. We were always right. These things—you can’t see them normally but the crack splits the light somehow and then you can? What do you propose to do? Crawl through the crack?

If you come down, said Liskard, pleasantly, I’ll demonstrate.

Of course I’ll come down. I can use this sort of thing. Get it off tax, too. Are you by yourself down there? No, can’t be.

I’ve got a housekeeper from the village and her husband, a handyman and gardener, he says. I have never seen him do anything handy nor any gardening, though I have seen him doing bayonet drill with a broom stick. His father was a German prisoner of war over here, though how the fathering came about I’m not too sure. He and his wife are both rather odd.

You gather ’em, if I remember. Is that all?

No, a young chap and his wife. He’s mad, too, but about anything supernatural, creatures from outer space, BEMs, levitation, ghosts and haunting in particular. I brought him into the world. He’s always been avid to learn, and in watching for the fish is always falling in the pond. Miles Mallow. You’ll like him.

The wife?

Oh, my niece, a charming girl, but over-anxious for Miles. Not that that’s out of place, in his case, but she’d fear him falling into a pond in the middle of a desert. They’re both full of ideas. You’ll get on well. He’s all invention from sheer enthusiasm, but she imagines more than he does—for his sake. They never stop.

Sold, said Jason. Got a car up here?

No, I train. Grilke—that’s the handyman—meets me at the station with the car. It has to be a Volkswagen. He likes to imagine he’s in the Ride of the Valkyrie.

I’ll pop round and leave directions, Jason said. Help yourself to Scotch. It’s in the piano stool seat.

There’s no hurry. You’d better think it over. You were always rushing into things.

But this sounds like a good thing, and a very unusual thing has happened since you came in here.

What?

I believe you. That is, I believe what you see down there, though how you propose to shift yourself through that time slot I can’t wait to know.

The suspense continues, said Liskard, and took a cigar from his waistcoat pocket. I’ll smoke while you discuss things with your staff.

There is one thing, said Jason. If you do manage it and disappear, can I have exclusive rights on the story?

Liskard laughed. Jason went through into Gilligan’s office.

I’m going down to Sussex for a couple of days. I’ll ring you tomorrow. Meanwhile get Chance about the copy. We must have it earlier, and see what’s happened to the Ape Monster pictures. Is that artist drunk again or what? It’s not safe contracting a Russian artist who lives in the attic over a pub. You never know what’s going to emerge.

I’ll call over tonight, Gilligan said. Last time I did he was sitting at his drawing board paralytic. I had to get hold of his hand, put a pen in it, start him on a line and he drew the bloody thing off without a pause. What’s happening in Sussex?

"Old Doc Liskard has come up with a real Funny. He’s got space-travelling ghosts in his park. He can see them. I couldn’t turn up a chance like that."

You believe it? Or anything for a trip?

We deal in fantasy, Gillie, but in my time here I’ve seen what once we thought fantasy become reality. So we go on inventing new fantasy until, one by one, they too are made real. I’ve known Liskard ever since I was born. He dreams fantasy, but he lives reality. That’s more than you do, you dreamy bugger. You’d sit here and dream about it, but I go and see for myself.

You have no wife to control you exploding in any crackpot direction, Gilligan said. It’s about time you did. You can’t go around forever with a scattered train of popsies wailing behind you. One day one of the worst of them will get you by the short hairs and you’ll be too old and worn to resist. Better to decide for yourself while you still have the strength.

Bloody envy, said Jason.

Just be careful one of those lovelies doesn’t serve you up an intervening neuro-decelerator.

What the hell’s that?

A knockout drop.

Get Fisher about that geology bit—that fill-up. I think he’s got it wrong.

I’ve done that. He’s coming in later today. What exactly are you going to do down in Sussex?

Jason told him, and Gilligan sat back.

You sure you know what you’re doing? he said. If the old chap disappears, awkward situations could develop, legally and otherwise.

What otherwise have you in mind?

What he’s seeing may not be the telescope at all. If he has a gift for the occult, you’d better watch out. That sort of thing is very catching. My mother suffered. She got interested in spiritualism, got infected somehow and found herself being spoken to by traces from other worlds. It was a great interest to the psychiatrists, but in the end they decided she really had got it, and this dabbling had roused it.

My imagination is quite superficial, Jason said. You ought to know that by now. Also it’s disciplined by years of training ideas into the story format. That stops it going any deeper.

If Liskard disappears, you’ll be seeing something that’ll shake your little imagination inwards.

Jason sat on his desk.

You’re worried, he said. Are you fey, like your mother? Why worry about this trip? I don’t remember you doing it before.

Some time last year, you went ghost-hunting with some so-called experts. You came back different and thinking on a far from superficial plane. You didn’t see anything that night, but you felt a presence and it got you for quite a while after. Now Liskard is a man you’ve known all your life. You’re going to watch him carry out some experiment which may end in his vanishing off this earth. That could affect you badly, Jason.

You really have got a thing about this, haven’t you?

Yes. I have a feeling. I’d keep away from this if I were you.

Why this feeling? Jason said. It’s a fantastic idea and need be nothing more. The doc isn’t a dreamer. He’s spent his life dealing with fact, with real people, and just amused himself writing those yarns for us. His business is with reality, and if he says he can see these things, I believe he can. Before anyone, he’d know if his sight was beginning to drift or his mental grip loosening.

"I