She looked up into the sneering face of Sir William’s steward a split second before she felt his fist connect with her face. A vicious kick to the chest followed, which sent her tumbling back down the uneven steps, to land in an unconscious heap at the bottom.
“JOIN US,” SIR William said, the goitre beneath his chin wobbling as he spoke. His robe hung open, rolls of fat preserving what little modesty he had left. And, bizarrely, he appeared to be wearing a belt around his expansive waist. “Someone like you – an agent of the crown, no less – could be a valuable asset to us in our great work.”
“Never!” Cassandra spat. Her head ached from where she had knocked it in the fall but she hadn’t lost her senses so much that she would choose to join these freaks and submit to their abominable practices.
“Join us,” the magus repeated, his voice barely more than a whisper, hypnotic, mesmerising. “Join us.”
She felt her head yanked back sharply, the steward pulling hard on her ponytail, the fingers of his other hand pinching her nose shut, so as to force her to open her mouth.
“Join us,” Sir William said one last time and then his head starting to bob backwards and forwards as if he was trying to regurgitate something in his throat. And then Cassandra saw his swollen goitre move. With Sir William’s head craned backwards, the goitre slithered around his neck beneath the flabby flesh of his throat, and the Lord of Lambton opened his mouth wide, jowls quivering.
Fighting to keep her mouth shut, despite the desperate need to breathe, eyes wide in unblinking horror, Cassandra watched as a swollen maggot head pushed its way up and out of the magus’ mouth, forcing the jaws apart unnaturally wide.
The worm emerged from the man’s oesophagus as the goitre collapsed.
Sir William lowered his head and regarded Cassandra with malevolent hunger, the worm wriggling its way still further from his mouth. Its eyeless head and scissoring, leech-like jaws came closer, the creature’s rippling movements hypnotic, mesmerising, almost alluring.
Her sixth sense screaming at her from her subconscious, Cassandra closed her eyes tight and pulled herself out of the steward’s grasp. Kicking her way free and staggering to her feet, she put the steward between her and the magus, one of her brace of pistols already in her hand, cocked and primed and ready to fire, her finger tight on the trigger.
The worm-thing suddenly pulled itself back inside Sir William’s mouth, and the man swallowed hard, the goitre slithering back into place.
Cassandra took a step back, keeping her pistol trained on the peer, and felt the lip of the well against the back of her legs.
“What a waste of a perfectly good vessel,” the magus said, reaching inside his crimson cloak.
Cassandra pulled the trigger.
The acoustics of the chamber made the crack of the pistol painfully loud. Through the white cloud of gunpowder, Cassandra could see Sir William still standing there, smiling at her like some self-satisfied toad.
How could she have missed at almost point blank range?
Then Cassandra saw the bullet hole in his flabby chest, saw thick blood oozing from the wound as he took a step forwards, pulling his own pistol from the belt around his waist.
She hadn’t missed. But the shot hadn’t even slowed him down.
“Such a pity,” he said and fired.
It felt like someone had punched her in the chest, knocking the wind from her. Cassandra felt suddenly, inexplicably cold. Her body crumpled and she toppled into the well, down into the darkness.
VI
Among the Hungry Worms I Sleep
CASSANDRA OPENED HER eyes only to find herself in utter darkness. She lay on her back, not daring to move, trying to piece together what had happened.
Immediately, nightmarish visions of the disgusting white worm sprang into her mind. She remembered the horrific ritual in vivid detail, the abhorrent actions of the cultists, Sir William, the cult’s magus, nothing more than the host for another of the vile creatures. She remembered shooting him and the bullet having no effect. She remembered being shot and then falling. She should be dead.
Only miraculously she wasn’t. Cassandra lay there in the cold, damp darkness, cautiously testing her limbs, seeing if she could still move them, seeing if she had suffered any broken bones. But she could find nothing wrong, nothing beyond a few cuts and minor abrasions. She sat up. She had been lucky; things should have been considerably worse.
Cassandra’s hands were pressing down on damp sand. The bottom of the well was almost dry.
The air was musty with damp and the over-ripe smell of rotting carcasses. She wondered how large this particular underground chamber was. Her eyes were stinging. She squeezed them shut and rubbed at them, hoping the irritation would soon pass.
When she opened them, she could see something pulsing red in the darkness, something the size and shape of a man. He was lying face-down, his arms bound behind his back. She saw him as patches of warm colour, his head, his arms and legs, the trunk of his body; she could even see the pulsing beat of his heart inside his chest.
She gasped, putting a hand to her mouth, as she realised that what she could see was the man’s body heat. Such a thing should not be possible.
And now that she was aware of the fact that there was another person down there in the dark with her, she could hear muffled breathing coming from the prone figure.
She thought Sir William’s bullet had hit her in the chest. Carefully, she probed the area with her fingers and found the hole the bullet had made. Gingerly she felt beneath.
The breath caught in her throat as her fingers came back sticky with blood. Then she had been shot, but how had she survived her encounter with the magus of the Disciples of Dionin?
And then she became aware of a slithering, scraping sound, as of something large dragging its great bulk across the silt covered the floor of the cave.
She stared into the impenetrable murk before her and a mass of cold colours coalesced. There could be no doubt as to what this was. Even though she could only see the monstrous worm as shades of chilling blue, Cassandra could hear the wet slap and slurp of its slimy advance, as its rippling musculature dragged it across the cave floor on a carpet of oozing mucus. She could picture its eyeless head sweeping the darkness before it, homing in on her position by means of its own preternatural senses, hear its constantly working mouthparts masticating in gluttonous excitement.
Panic and the natural instinct to survive suddenly took over from cold, clinical thought, shaking her from her nerve-deadened stupor. Her heels kicking against the sandy floor, she began to back away from the slithering advance of the monster.
For a moment Cassandra wondered – nay, hoped – whether the monster might stop to feed on the bound man, now groaning as he started to come to. But then the great worm was past the lucky wretch and Cassandra was worrying at the second pistol still in its place on the bandolier.
Her hands shaking, she screamed in frustration as she fumbled for the weapon.
Finally she drew the pistol and fired. The bullet flew from the muzzle and into the spongy flesh of the worm’s pulsating body. But like its faithful devotee, the bloated Lord of Lambton Hall, the wound didn’t even cause the creature to recoil. It just kept coming, jaws working as it devoured the darkness between them.
The man was screaming now as he came to and found the abomination sliding over the ground beside him. Cassandra smelt the hot, ammonia stink of fear as he emptied his bladder.
Then the worm was practically on top of her. With its bulbous head and mashing jaws mere inches from her face, she put up her hands to defend herself. The pain of what felt like dress-makers’ pins pushing up through the tips of her fingers stopped her screams and made her open her eyes as she took a sharp intake of breath.
Cassandra could see the piercing wire tendrils bursting from her fingertips, pulsing the same hot red colour as her own flesh.
The tendrils kept growing, from every finger and thumb, like needle claws, unt
il they pierced the pulsating offal-white flesh of the worm – and they didn’t stop, even then.
And now it was the worm that was screaming. It was the first time Cassandra had heard it make any kind of sound at all, and dreadful it was too. A high-pitched shrieking that drowned out her own screams and the terrified howling of the bound wretch still lying on the sandy floor.
The worm started to convulse, twisting in on itself like a salted slug. She could feel it writhing between her hands, but she couldn’t let go of its slime-slick flesh, no matter how much she might want to.
Its convulsions lifted Cassandra from the floor of the cave and hurled her against the low ceiling of the chamber, but still she held on, the wire finger-claws buried deep inside its body uniting the woman and the worm in an inseparable embrace.
Face to face with the screeching worm, through eyes that could now register colours beyond the visible spectrum, she saw the brightness of its body dim, seeing its flesh shrivel and blacken and turn to slime in her mind’s eye.
Gasping for breath, she did not have enough air left in her lungs to scream now. Slowly the worm’s piercing screams faded and died too and then, at last, its peristaltic writhing stopped.
Cassandra lay back on the floor of the cave, the liquefied flesh of the creature dripping from her wire-talons as it melted in a pool of stinking slime, bubbles forming within it, only to pop a moment later, releasing gusts of noxious fumes.
And then the only sounds that remained were the blasphemous curses of the terrified prisoner and Cassandra sobbing to herself in the darkness as the impossible claws drew back into her fingertips.
VII
The Screaming Skull
CASSANDRA STARED AT her hands in horror. The impossible metal claws had gone, but she knew that they had simply withdrawn back inside her.
“What just happened? In God’s name tell me! Am I going mad? Is there anyone there? What was that thing and... and... what happened to it? Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me!”
The man’s desperate shouts shook Cassandra out of her bewildered reverie and she realised that she knew that voice.
“Dick?” she gasped, her tears now tears of relief. “Galloping Dick Runyan?”
“Yes?” The highwayman’s voice sounded suddenly small within the echoing acoustics of the worm’s lair.
“It’s me, Dick. Cassandra. Cassandra Tyrell, from the stagecoach!”
“Milady? Is that really you?”
“Yes, Dick, it’s me. You’re safe. You’re going to be all right.”
“What happened? I can’t move my hands and my feet are bound.”
“It’s going to be all right. I’m going to get us out of here.”
“I can’t move.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, feeling a knot of anxiety form within the pit of her stomach. “I think I have something for that.”
THE HIGHWAYMAN FREE of his bonds, old instincts taking over, Cassandra searched for a way out. She already knew that if she were to stop the cult she would need help and, under the circumstances, the highwayman seemed as good an ally as any.
She was pleased to discover that the well-shaft was not the only way out of the cave in which the monstrous worm had been kept. Following the circumference of the cave, they came upon a narrow cleft in the rock. It was far too narrow for the worm to have ever been able to squeeze even its boneless body into but it was big enough for them.
Cassandra and Dick followed it as it became a rough-hewn passageway which ended in a metal door which was, inevitably, locked.
But locked doors were something almost cosily familiar to Cassandra. She could deal with locked doors. Gigantic flesh-eating worms were another matter altogether. Taking her tools from a waistcoat pocket, in only a matter of moments she had the door open and they found themselves in a darkened brick-built passageway.
Cassandra surmised that they were in the cellars under Lambton Hall itself now, the tunnel they had followed having wound its way through the hill for quite some distance.
Having encountered nobody in the tunnels beneath the house, they climbed a set of crumbling stone steps to another door which, Cassandra suspected, would lead into the main body of Lambton Hall.
“Screaming,” Cassandra said after having placed her ear to the door. She turned to face the highwayman. “I can hear screaming.”
She carefully eased the door open and they entered Lambton Hall, following the echoing screams along the servant’s passageway.
The house was in disarray.
Cassandra and her confused companion turned a corner only for a middle-aged woman, who was naked under the scarlet robe she was wearing, to run straight into them, howling like an animal. She fixed Cassandra with a wild, accusing stare, put the knotted claws of her hands to her head and screamed into the young woman’s face.
“Make it stop! Please, make it stop!” she sobbed, snot running freely from her nose. And then she turned and fled back along the corridor.
The woman had been there at the ritual. Cassandra had seen her swallow one of the hideous albino worms and the cultist, in turn, had watched as Cassandra was dragged before the corpulent magus of the Disciples of Dionin. There had been recognition in that mad-eyed stare of hers, but there had been something else as well. There had been incredible, agonising pain.
Dumbfounded, and yet morbidly fascinated at the same time, their minds reeling from all they had experienced during this long, dark night of the soul, Cassandra and Dick were like observers during the last days of Rome, as madness consumed Lambton Hall and its guests.
The Disciples of Dionin – made up of the great and the good of British society – appeared to be fleeing, all of them clutching their heads and screaming in pain.
One of Captain Drysdale’s soldiers ran past – his shirt and his fly unbuttoned – paused, realising that the redcoats’ prisoner was loose within the house. Dick’s uppercut sent the soldier spinning into unconsciousness as he collapsed against the wall.
Cassandra and Dick followed the fleeing cultists towards the main doors. Cassandra had not even realised that they were passing the alcove containing Sir John Lambton’s armour, until she heard the voice, chiming like cut crystal inside her head.
She winced, in shock more than pain, and closed her eyes. But when she opened them again, she wasn’t in Lambton Hall any more.
OUT OF THE darkness stars appeared and for reasons that she couldn’t begin to fathom, Cassandra knew that she wasn’t on Earth anymore.
And the voice spoke again.
She could hear it quite clearly inside her head and although it sounded like no other language she had ever heard spoken before, at the same time she could understand every word. However, from the faltering way in which the voice spoke to her – in the same voice in which her own thoughts spoke to her – she felt that it was struggling to use concepts that she would understand.
The voice told her about the worms – creatures from another world, parasites – and more visions of the monstrous maggot-worms assailed her, causing her to recoil.
The images of the grotesquely writhing worms dissolved and swam, resolving into the rolling landscape of England, only an England pre-dating the world she knew at the end of the eighteenth century. This was England from long before the concept of an England had ever even existed, and the voice told her that centuries ago the worms had fallen to Earth trapped within their frozen meteorite cocoons.
Then she too was falling towards the Earth, granted an impossible vision of the planet as seen from beyond, the curve of the watery sphere disappearing as she fell at a terrifying velocity through the dense white clouds smothering the planet. The clouds parted and she was hurtling towards an arid, desert landscape. She was unable to tear her gaze away even as flames licked at her body. And then, ground-fall.
The voice told her that it too had come to Earth, centuries ago, to hunt the parasite down and eliminate it before it could cause significant harm, but the ship in which it had sailed across
the heavens, had fallen from the sky, landing amid the trackless wastes of the continent that would one day be called Africa. It had been killed in the crash. The crystal skull was all that remained of this hunter.
And only then did Cassandra realise that it was the crystal skull – Lambton Hall’s screaming skull – that was speaking to her.
SUDDENLY CASSANDRA WAS back in the long gallery, standing before the glass display case, staring into the voids of the orbits of the inhuman skull, the empty eye-sockets boring back into her.
As she watched, a scaly, crystalline hide began to cover the sparkling skull. Eyes like balls of marble swelled within the empty sockets and Cassandra could discern features rising from the blue-tinged mineral flesh. At the same time she saw a silver metal, that flowed as freely as mercury, fill the flaws within the crystal, running like blood in the needle-thin channels. The voice told her that in life it had been artificially joined with a symbiote, a creature of living metal, that provided it with weapons and other tactical abilities.
And suddenly her mind escaped the confines of her physical surroundings and she was no longer within Lambton Hall any more. She was...
...SOMEWHERE ELSE, AN arid wind, heavy with the scents of spices, tugging at his drifting body.
Cassandra’s mind reeled as she listened to the voice. And it had so much to say, in words that she barely understood, and now using concepts that made even less sense.
Looking down, through the rising dust storm, she saw cloth-swathed figures digging in the shifting sands of the desert, and the voice told her that the sentient star-metal was recovered from the crash-site, along with the hunter’s crystalline remains, both eventually coming into the possession of Sir John Lambton whilst he was crusading in the Holy Land, and so at last to England.
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