by Brian Lumley
“Then it’s time you got out of there!” I said at once. “Time you got June out, too.”
“I know, I know!” he answered, his expression tortured. He gripped my arm. “But I’m not finished yet. I don’t know it all, not yet. It lures me, Bill. I have to know...”
“Know what?” It was my turn to show my agitation. “What do you need to know, you fool? Isn’t it enough that the place is evil? You know that much. And yet you stay on there. Get out, that’s my advice. Get out now!”
“No!” His denial was emphatic. “I’m not finished. There has to be an end to it. The place must be cleansed.” He stared again into the fire.
“So you do admit it’s evil?”
“Of course it is. Yes, I know it is. But leave, get out? I can’t, and June—”
“Yes?”
“She won’t!” He gave a muffled sob and turned watery, searching eyes full upon me. “The place is like ... like a magnet! It has a genius loci. It’s a focal point for God-only-knows-what forces. Evil? Oh, yes! An evil come down all the centuries. But I bought the place and I shall cleanse it—end it forever, whatever it is.”
“Look,” I tried reasoning with him, “let’s go back, now, the two of us. Let’s get June out of there and bring her back here for the night. How did you get here anyway? Surely not on foot, not on a night like this?”
“No, no,” he shook his head. “Car broke down halfway up the hill. Rain must have got under the bonnet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” He stood up, looked suddenly afraid, wild-eyed. “I’ve been away too long. Bill, will you run me back? June’s there—alone! She was sleeping when I left. I can fill you in on the details while you drive.”
~ * ~
VII
MANIFESTATION
I made him take another brandy, threw a coat over his shoulders, bustled him out to my car. Moments later we were rolling down into Harden and he was telling me all that had happened between times. As best I remember, this is what he said:
“Since that day you visited us I’ve been hard at work. Real work, I mean. Not the other thing, not delving—not all of the time, anyway. I got the grounds inside the walls tidied up, even tried a little preliminary landscaping. And the house: the old windows out, new ones in. Plenty of light. But still the place was musty. As the summer turned I began burning old Carpenter’s wood, drying out the house, ridding it of the odour of centuries—a smell that was always thicker at night. And fresh paint, too, lots of it. Mainly white, all bright and new. June picked up a lot; you must have noticed how down she was? Yes, well, she seemed to be on the mend. I thought I had the—the ‘miasma’ on the run. Hah!” He gave a bitter snort. “A ‘summer miasma,’ I called it. Blind, blind!”
“Go on,” I urged him, driving carefully through the wet streets.
“Eventually, to give myself room to sort out the furniture and so on, I got round to chucking the old shelves and books out of Carpenter’s study. That would have been okay, but... I looked into some of those books. That was an error. I should have simply burned the lot, along with the wormy old chairs and shreds of carpet. And yet, in a way, I’m glad I didn’t.” I could feel David’s fevered eyes burning me in the car’s dark interior, fixed upon me as he spoke.
“The knowledge in those books, Bill. The dark secrets, the damnable mysteries. You know, if anyone does, what a fool I am for a mystery. I was hooked; work ceased. I had to know! But those books and manuscripts: the Unter-Zee Kulten and Hydrophinnae. Doorfen’s treatise on submarine civilizations and the Johansen Narrative of 1925. A great sheaf of notes purporting to be from American government files for 1928, when federal agents ‘raided’ Innsmouth, a decaying, horror-haunted town on the coast of New England; and other scraps and fragments from all the world’s mythologies, all of them concerned with the worship of a great god of the sea.”
“Innsmouth?” My ears pricked up. I had heard that name mentioned once before. “But isn’t that the place—?”
“The place which spawned that family, the Waites, who came over and settled at Kettlethorpe about the time of the American Civil War? That’s right,” he nodded an affirmative, stared out into the rain-black night. “And old Carpenter who had the house for thirty years, he came from Innsmouth, too!”
“He was of the same people?”
“No, not him. The very opposite. He was at the farm for the same reason I am—now. Oh, he was strange, reclusive—who wouldn’t be? I’ve read his diaries and I understand. Not everything, for even in his writing he held back, didn’t explain too much. Why should he? His diaries were for him, aids to memory. They weren’t meant for others to understand, but I fathomed a lot of it. The rest was in those government files.
“Innsmouth prospered in the time of the clipper ships and the old trade routes. The captains and men of some of those old ships brought back wives from Polynesia—and also their strange rites of worship, their gods. There was queer blood in those native women, and it spread rapidly. As the years passed the entire town became infected. Whole families grew up tainted. They were less than human, amphibian, creatures more of the sea than the land. Merfolk, yes! Tritons, who worshipped Dagon in the deeps: ‘Deep Ones,’ as old Carpenter called them. Then came the federal raid of ‘28. But it came too late for old Carpenter.
“He had a store in Innsmouth, but well away from the secret places—away from the boarded-up streets and houses and churches where the worst of them had their dens and held their meetings and kept their rites. His wife was long dead of some wasting disease, but his daughter was alive and schooling in Arkham. Shortly before the raid she came home, little more than a girl. And she became—I don’t know—lured. It’s a word that sticks in my mind. A very real word, to me.
“Anyway, the Deep Ones took her, gave her to something they called out of the sea. She disappeared. Maybe she was dead, maybe something worse. They’d have killed Carpenter then, because he’d learned too much about them and wanted revenge, but the government raid put an end to any personal reprisals or vendettas. Put an end to Innsmouth, too. Why, they just about wrecked the town! Vast areas of complete demolition. They even depth-charged a reef a mile out in the sea ...
“Well, after things quieted down Carpenter stayed on a while in Innsmouth—what was left of it. He was settling his affairs, I suppose, and maybe ensuring that the evil was at an end. Which must have been how he learned that it wasn’t at an end but spreading like some awful blight. And because he suspected the survivors of the raid might seek haven in old strongholds abroad, finally he came to Kettlethorpe.”
“Here?” David’s story was beginning to make connections, was starting to add up. “Why would he come here?”
“Why? Haven’t you been listening? He’d found something out about Kettlethorpe, and he came to make sure the Innsmouth horror couldn’t spread here. Or perhaps he knew it was already here, waiting, like a cancer ready to shoot out its tentacles. Perhaps he came to stop it spreading further. Well, he’s managed that these last thirty years, but now—”
“Yes?”
“Now he’s gone, and I’m the owner of the place. Yes, and I have to see to it that whatever he was doing gets finished!”
“But what was he doing?” I asked. “And at what expense? Gone, you said. Yes, old Carpenter’s gone. But gone where? What will all of this cost you, David? And more important by far, what will it cost June?”
My words had finally stirred something in him, something he had kept suppressed, too frightened of it to look more closely. I could tell by the way he started, sat bolt upright beside me. “June? But—”
“But nothing, man! Look at yourself. Better still, take a good look at your wife. You’re going down the drain, both of you. It’s something that started the day you took that farm. I’m sure you’re right about the place, about old Carpenter, all that stuff you’ve dredged up, but now you’ve got to forget it. Sell Kettlethorpe, that’s my advice, or better still, raze it to the ground! But whatever you do—”
�
��Look!” He started again and gripped my arm in a suddenly claw-hard hand.
I looked, applied my brakes, brought the car skidding to a halt in the rain-puddled track. We had turned off the main road by then, where the track winds down to the farm. The rain had let up and the air had gone still as a shroud. Shroudlike, too, the silky mist that lay silently upon the near-distant dene and lapped a foot deep about the old farm’s stony walls. The scene was weird under a watery moon, but weirder by far was the morbid manifestation which was even now rising up like a wraith over the farm.
A shape, yes, billowing up, composed of mist, writhing huge over the ancient buildings. The shape of some monstrous merman— the ages-evil shape of Dagon himself!
I should have shaken David off and driven on at once, of course I should, down to the farm and whatever waited there, but the sight of that figure mushrooming and firming in the dank night air was paralysing. And sitting there in the car, with the engine slowly ticking over, we shuddered as one as we heard, quite distinctly, the first muffled gonging of some damned and discordant bell. A tolling whose notes might on another occasion be sad and sorrowful, which now were filled with a menace out of the eons.
“The bell!” David’s gasp galvanized me into action.
“I hear it,” I said, throwing the car into gear and racing down that last quarter-mile stretch to the farm. It seemed that time was frozen in those moments, but then we were through the iron gates and slewing to a halt in front of the porch. The house was bright with lights, but June—
While David tore desperately through the rooms of the house, searching upstairs and down, crying her name, I could only stand by the car and tremblingly listen to the tolling of the bell, its dull, sepulchral summons seeming to me to issue from below, from the very earth beneath my feet. And as I listened so I watched that writhing figure of mist shrink down into itself, seeming to glare from bulging eyes of mist one final ray of hatred in my direction, before spiralling down and disappearing—into the shell of that roofless building at the mouth of the horseshoe!
David, awry and babbling as he staggered from the house, saw it too. “There!” he pointed at the square, mist-wreathed building. “That’s where it is. And that’s where she’ll be. I didn’t know she knew... she must have been watching me. Bill—” he clutched at my arm, “—are you with me? Say you are, for God’s sake!” And I could only nod my head.
Hearts racing, we made for that now ghastly edifice of reeking mist—only to recoil a moment later from a figure that reeled out from beneath the lintel with the Dagon plate to fall swooning into David’s arms. June, of course—but how could it be? How could this be June?
Not the June I had known, no, but some other, some revenant of that June ...
~ * ~
VIII
“THAT PLACE BELOW . . .”
She was gaunt, hair coarse as string, skin dry and stretched over features quite literally, shockingly altered into something ... different. Strangely, David was not nearly so horrified by what he could see of her by the thin light of the moon; far more so after we had taken her back to the house. For quite apart from what were to me undeniable alterations in her looks in general—about which, as yet, he had made no comment—it then became apparent that his wife had been savaged and brutalized in the worst possible manner.
I remember, as I drove them to the emergency hospital in Hartlepool, listening to David as he cradled her in his arms in the back of the car. She was not conscious, and David barely so (certainly he was oblivious to what he babbled and sobbed over her during that nightmare journey) but my mind was working overtime as I listened to his crooning, utterly distraught voice:
“She must have watched me, poor darling, must have seen me going to that place. At first I went for the firewood—I burned up all of old Jason’s wood—but then, beneath the splinters and bits of bark, I found the millstone over the slab. The old boy had put that stone there to keep the slab down. And it had done its job, by God! Must have weighed all of two hundred and forty pounds. Impossible to shift from those slimy, narrow steps below. But I used a lever to move it, yes, and I lifted the slab and went down. Down those ancient steps—down, down, down. A maze, down there. The Earth itself, honeycombed! ...
“What were they for, those burrows? What purpose were they supposed to fulfill? And who dug them? I didn’t know, but I kept it from her anyway—or thought I had. I couldn’t say why, not then, but some instinct warned me not to tell her about... about that place below. I swear to God I meant to close it up forever, choke the mouth of that—that pit! with concrete. And I’d have done it, I swear it, once I’d explored those tunnels to the full. But that millstone, June, that great heavy stone. How did you shift it? Or were you helped?
“I’ve been down there only two or three times on my own, and I never went very far. Always there was that feeling that I wasn’t alone, that things moved in the darker burrows and watched me where I crept. And that sluggish stream, bubbling blindly through airless fissures to the sea. That stream which rises and falls with the tides. And the kelp all bloated and slimy. Oh, my God! My God!” ...
And so on. But by the time we reached the hospital David had himself more or less under control again. Moreover, he had dragged from me a promise that I would let him—indeed help him—do things his own way. He had a plan which seemed both simple and faultless, one which must conclusively write finis on the entire affair. That was to say if his fears for Kettlethorpe and the conjectural region he termed “that place below” were soundly based.
As to why I so readily went along with him—why I allowed him to brush aside unspoken any protests or objections I might have entertained—quite simply, I had seen that mist-formed shape with my own eyes, and with my own ears had heard the tolling of that buried and blasphemous bell. And for all that the thing seemed fantastic, the conviction was now mine that the farm was a seat of horror and evil as great and maybe greater than any other these British Isles had ever known . . .
~ * ~
We stayed at the hospital through the night, gave identical, falsified statements to the police (an unimaginative tale of a marauder, seen fleeing under cover of the mist towards the dene), and in between sat together in a waiting area drinking coffee and quietly conversing. Quietly now, yes, for David was exhausted both physically and mentally, and much more so after he had attended that examination of his wife made imperative by her condition and by our statements.
As for June: mercifully she stayed in her traumatized state of deepest shock all through the night and well into the morning. Finally, around 10:00 A.m. we were informed that her condition, while still unstable, was no longer critical, and then, since it was very obvious that we could do nothing more, I drove David home with me to Harden.
I bedded him down in my guest room, by which time all I wanted to do was get to my own bed for an hour or two, but about 4:00 p.m. I was awakened from uneasy dreams to find him on the telephone, his voice stridently urgent. As I went to him he put the phone down, turned to me haggard and red-eyed, his face dark with stubble. “She’s stabilized,” he said, and: “Thank God for that! But she hasn’t come out of shock—not completely. It’s too deep-seated. At least that’s what they told me. They say she could be like it for weeks... maybe longer.”
“What will you do?” I asked him. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course, and—”
“Stay here?” he cut me short. “Yes, I’d like that—afterwards.”
I nodded, biting my lip. “I see. You intend to go through with it. Very well, but there’s still time to tell the police, you know. You could still let them deal with it.”
He uttered a harsh, barking laugh. “Can you really imagine me telling all of this to your average son-of-the-sod Hartlepool bobby? Why, even if I showed them that... the place below, what could they do about it? And should I tell them about my plan, too? What!—mention dynamite to the law, the local authorities? Oh, yes, I can just see that! Even if they didn’t put me in a straigh
t jacket it would still take them an age to get round to doing anything. And meanwhile, if there is something down there under the farm—and Bill, we know there is—what’s to stop it or them from moving on to fresh pastures?”
When I had no answer, he continued in a more controlled, quieter tone. “Do you know what old Carpenter was doing? I’ll tell you: he was going down there in the right seasons, when he heard the bell ringing—going down below with his shotgun and blasting all hell out of what he found in those foul black tunnels! Paying them back for what they did to him and his in Innsmouth. A madman who didn’t know what he wrote in those diaries of his? No, for we’ve seen it, Bill, you and I. And we’ve heard it—heard Dagon’s bell ringing in the night, summoning that ancient evil up from the sea.
“Why, that was the old man’s sole reason for living there: so that he could take his revenge! Taciturn? A recluse? I’ll say he was! He lived to kill—to kill them! Tritons, Deep Ones, amphibian abortions born out of a timeless evil, inhuman lust, and black, alien nightmare. Well, now I’ll finish what he started, only I’ll do it a damn sight faster! It’s my way or nothing.” He gazed at me, his eyes steady now and piercing, totally sane, strong as I had rarely seen him. “You’ll come?”