by John Glasby
‘Did you warn Malcolm of this?’ Terence asked harshly.
The other pointed towards the rounded summit of the hill from which they had just come.
‘Malcolm Amberley was a very stubborn man. He came to me about three months before he died with a wild story of the most hideous sort. Vague horrors he had seen on top of Cranston’s Hill yonder, grotesque shapes of coagulated nightmare cavorting and dancing among the Standing Stones. Maybe he was looking for help of some kind. Perhaps, if I could have given him some help, he might still be alive today.’
‘Then you don’t believe the coroner’s findings about Malcolm’s supposed suicide?’
‘I’m sure if my bishop heard me saying this, he would be extremely shocked. Witchcraft in this day and age! Remember though, that I have seen and experienced nothing. I can only speak from hearsay and from what little I have dared to read of those accursed writings.’
‘Perhaps if I might read those old records . . .’ Terence began.
‘I keep them locked away,’ said the other. His tone was suddenly sharp. ‘As I am sure others did before me. However, I am prepared to let you see them just so long as you know what the consequences may be.’
‘I understand,’ Terence nodded.
The mist was now also forming along the road, obscuring the village a quarter of a mile away. For several moments they trudged in silence, then he turned to the other and said: ‘Tell me something, Vicar. Ever since I came to Tormount I’ve come up against a brick wall whenever I’ve tried to question people about my brother. Just why are you so helpful now?’
‘An ulterior motive, I’m afraid,’ confessed the other gravely. ‘You see, your brother was not the first person to die in very mysterious circumstances. There have been others and in every case they were unduly interested in Cranston’s Hill and the Standing Stones. Your brother had a book in his possession — he lent it to me once but I could not bring myself to read much of it — dealing with this region in the Middle Ages.’
‘The Daemonomicon.’
‘Yes. There were things in there which made me doubt the existence of God, at least of a God of goodness and mercy. Such terrible, revolting incidents. Yet the most frightening thing is that, in spite of my present beliefs, they did explain some of the past happenings. It is difficult to conceive of the full, black power of evil in the midst of our cold, everyday experience.’ He rubbed the palm of his hand slowly across his forehead. He was, Terence noticed, perspiring slightly in spite of the sudden chill in the air.
‘It seems unbelievable, but the register in the vestry tells of at least fifteen people, men and women, who have died in strange circumstances over the past two hundred and fifty years. The church yonder has stood for almost a thousand years and over the centuries, my predecessors have laboured incessantly to exorcise the village of the demons of darkness that they firmly believed existed here. Yet they failed in their task. Failed dismally.’
*
There was heavy rain that afternoon, and it was not until evening that Terence Amberley was able to move the few things he had brought with him to the house at the end of the long, narrow lane, the house in which his brother had lived for so many years, which housed all that he had lived for and which, Terence felt certain, also held the secret of his death.
Treherne had attempted to dissuade him from going, maintaining earnestly that he could remain with him for as long as he wished but that talk with the Reverend Ventnor had brought a strange sense of urgency to his mind. Now that he had those dusty old records with him, he knew that it would be impossible for him to do anything else but live in the huge, rambling house, set apart from all of the others in the village, until he had got to the bottom of this mystery which lay like a dark shroud over the village.
He had been forced to leave his car in the main street for the path to the house was too narrow to allow him to drive it there. Although his first sight of the house had brought mixed emotions when he had visited it with Anne Cowdrey, now that he saw it for a second time, this remarkable old building slowly assumed a more normal aspect.
As he closed the heavy front door behind him, he wondered what had prompted Malcolm to buy it and live there. Perhaps a desire for absolute privacy while he carried on with his researches into the occult.
As he placed his belongings on the table in the spacious front parlour, Terence caught a whiff of something acrid, rather like incense at the back of his nostrils; a cloying, musty smell that hung unmoving in the air above the familiar smell of dust and mildew.
Switching on the light, he pulled the thick curtains across the wide windows, then built a fire in the hearth, waiting impatiently for the room to warm up before settling down to begin reading through the ancient parish records.
It was a strange and terrible chronicle. Sitting there at night with the wood crackling in the wide ornate hearth and the creaking sounds of the old house all about him, Terence Amberley felt chill upon chill seize him as he continued to read.
Long-winded, often statistical, genealogical as much of the subject matter was, there ran through it all a deep and continuous thread of utter malevolence that impressed him in much the same way as he guessed it had his brother. He knew now why the good vicar kept such a manuscript locked away in the vestry and was so exceedingly loath to allow anyone to read it.
It began wholesomely enough with a history of the de Grinley family, opening amidst a confused maze of dates, the confusion evidently arising from the varied sources available to the author at that time. At first, there was no record of anything sinister connected with the family. William de Grinley had been a favourite of William the Conqueror and for his services had been given the lands around Tormount, south as far as the marshes and north to the meeting of the two rivers. The manor had been built in 1073 and for the next one and a half centuries the village prospered under the de Grinleys.
Then in 1202, sickness came upon the village, wiping out more than half of the population. The pestilence even spread to the crops, which produced curiously abnormal growths and for the first time, witchcraft came to the village. People connected the terror with the great stone monument on top of the hill to the north. Special prayers were said in the church and when these brought no alleviation of the horror that had descended upon them, the ways of God were forsaken. The evil rites began, led in 1223 by a man named Edward Cranston.
Amberley sat quite still in the high-backed chair, the yellowed pages of the ancient manuscript open on his knees, staring into the slowly-dying embers of the fire. At last, the man who had given his name to that accurse place had appeared. Feverishly, he continued reading of this abominable creature, a man horribly deformed, who claimed that only by appeasing the Darker Gods, could the pestilence be removed from Tormount.
Amberley found, as he had half expected, that the de Grinleys now entered into the picture. Hubert de Grinley, only son of Edmond, lord of the manor, entered whole-heartedly into these orgiastic rites. He took to reading — and writing — queer books; initiated the human sacrifices on top of Cranston’s Hill, on the huge stone altar in the centre of the Standing Stones. It was not, however, until the death of his father, that Hubert really came into his own. A total of thirty-three victims were murdered during the ritual ceremonies performed during a period of twenty-two years.
The de Grinleys, it seemed, now embarked upon a veritable orgy of terror. The evil madness which had begun with Hubert continued down the line for more than four centuries, culminating with the much-feared Richard de Grinley whose shocking deeds were too much, even for folk long versed in witchcraft. The plague of some five centuries earlier which had provoked this wave of devil worship had long since been forgotten and with witch hunts in progress throughout the whole of England at this time, the people once more began to return to the fold of the church. Unfortunately, there was no enlightenment in the minds of these superstitious folk and many innocent victims perished during the revolt against the exponents of the Black Art.
The royal witch-hunters who roamed the countryside in search of victims seemed to have passed the village by for there was no record of any trials carried out in the vicinity, but in the end, the villagers themselves took the law into their own hands. A band of them, led by the vicar at that time moved against the manor one night during the dark of the moon, dragging out every member of the de Grinley family they could lay their hands on. Brought before the church the next day, they were all condemned to death by burning.
The document ended in much confusion, for Terence could find no mention of Richard de Grinley himself. The author was clearly of the opinion that he had been saved from the stake by his evil masters, those dark monstrosities he had worshipped and served so faithfully and well over the years. Much was made of the curse he was said to have put on the village and the prophecy that he would never die so long as the great altar of Belial remained.
He closed the document, laid it down on the table beside him. Getting stiffly to his feet, he went over to the window, drew aside the curtain and looked out into the night. The pale moon glimmered behind tattered streamers of cloud and here and there a star showed brightly over the hills. If that taint of evil still lived on out there, surely there should be some way to defeat it, to rid the village of its terrible legacy. He glanced at his watch. It was now well past midnight and the fire in the hearth was no more than a pale glow giving out little warmth.
Shivering, he let the curtain fall into place, then made his way up the wide stairway to the room at the rear of the house. He undressed in the darkness, not bothering to put on the light. His thoughts made him uneasy, disturbed him more than he cared to admit. There were those he knew, to whom witchcraft was merely a quaint and rather fascinating relic of the old days, some survival from the centuries of ignorance when men worshipped things they did not understand. Some even dabbled in it still, attracted by the feeling of power that came from probing into the unknown. Others simply scorned the idea, insisted that it could be explained on the basis of mass hypnotism and a wrong interpretation of the facts.
Until a week or so ago, he had been just such a person, only half-believing in God and utterly denying the possibility of evil being a true and potent force. Now, without warning, he had been plunged into this dark nightmare.
Was this merely an old legend, handed down through the centuries, added to from time to time until it had emerged as something greater than reality? Was there any truth whatever in the tattered, stained pages of that document?
Superstition went back much further than religion; back to primeval man watching the lightning flash across the heavens and the deep voice of the thunder rolling back from the hills. Standing at the window, he looked out at the rounded hump of Cranston’s Hill on the skyline and wondered.
*
The revelations of the manuscript must have entered his mind and affected his dreams for as he slept there came to him the most apocalyptic visions. He was out on the north road from Tormount, walking slowly in the direction of Cranston’s Hill, feet dragging as though fighting against something that was urging him on. There was the feel of someone moving behind him, coming up to overtake him.
The other drew level with him and in the pale light he saw that it was Malcolm, yet this was not the face of the brother he had known. The grinning mask was evil and the grip on his arm, hard and tight, was one that could not be shaken off. In his dream, he was led towards that great mound and in the flooding light of a moon he could not see the hard angles of the Standing Stones stood out above him like a nightmare painting by Dali.
There were other presences too that he could sense, moving along with them and all the while, he was acutely aware of a distant, muted throbbing which seemed to soak through every pore in his body, a penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than mere sound. The familiar things which he had seen that morning now assumed in his dream the most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of a vast stone set in the circle of tall columns, of hideous, blasphemous shapes that cavorted and leapt just at the edge of his vision. Then Malcolm released his grip on his arm, thrust something into his right hand and stepped away.
Looking down, he saw the white shape laid across the altar before him and beyond, the most demoniacal features his dreaming mind could conceive, staring into his while at the same time, an emanation of pure, unadulterated evil flooded around him.
There was the feel of something outside of him, struggling to enter his body, to take over his entire being. His right arm lifted of its own volition and the pale light glimmered off naked steel.
In his nightmare, the paralysis of utter fear seemed to hold him rigid for a terrible moment while all the time, his mind screamed at him that this was not real. His body was straining itself for flight, striving to tear itself from the grasp of terror. The deep throbbing in his mind went on and on. Voices seemed now to be murmuring, now to be shrieking, at him. The rest of the dream was monstrous and shadowy. In the nightmare he knew that he screamed out aloud, that somehow the terrible spell which held him in its grip loosened and he had turned from that dreadful place, was running back down the hillside, among those oddly-shaped growths and stunted trees while terror rode the wind at his back.
With a start, he woke, his body jerking spasmodically in the bed, his limbs bathed in sweat. Thrusting himself upright, he tried to slow the frenzied palpitations of his heart, telling himself it had been nothing more than a remarkably vivid nightmare brought on by reading that manuscript so soon before coming to bed.
Outside, there was a pale greyness in the sky. The dawn was already brightening. Stiffly he rubbed the muscles of his right arm where they had become cramped, then stared with a sharp sense of horror at the object clutched tightly in his fingers, his whole hand numb with the effort he had been exerting, Shocked, he dropped it on to the floor beside the bed.
He knew with a sick certainty, that he had left the knife he had found on Cranston’s Hill in the study the previous evening. How then had it come to be clenched so tightly in his fist?
Shakily, he swung his legs to the floor, then stopped, staring at the mud spattered on the carpet and caked on his bare feet!
Chapter Four – The Dark God Hunters
‘The only possible explanation is that you must have been walking in your sleep,’ Anne Cowdrey tried to suppress a shudder. ‘A nightmare. And that house would give anyone the creeps.’
‘I’ve never walked in my sleep in my life.’ Amberley’s voice was light but his face was deadly serious. ‘No. There’s something more to it than that. Something connected with that knife I found.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Anne rose to her feet, brought more coffee. ‘You mean that is what might have happened to Malcolm although in a slightly different way?’
‘It’s more than likely.’
‘But how can a simple object like that still possess something which can affect us today?’ she protested.
‘It’s stretching coincidence a lot further,’ he told her. ‘I’m positive that Malcolm was driven to his death. So far, the only links I can find between the way in which he died and my own experience last night are that he was investigating these bizarre happenings on Cranston’s Hill and he had the same kind of knife as that which I found.
‘I think my next step is to have a word with Lady Parrish. She may be able to tell me something about the ancient history of the manor. There are one or two things which don’t tie in with the old church records which the vicar lent me yesterday.’
‘Would you like me to come with you?�
�� Anne got up. ‘Lady Parrish can be a little eccentric at times and she may not be quite as open with you as she would be if I came along.’
As they stepped outside, there was the crunch of footsteps on the gravel and a moment later, Doctor Cowdrey came along the drive. He gave Terence a friendly nod of greeting. ‘Sorry I always seem to be out when you call, Terry,’ he said warmly. ‘I noticed you at the funeral — a tragic business that — but my former colleagues had bustled you off before I could have a word with you.’
‘Of course, you retired from practice some time ago,’ said Terence, remembering. ‘It doesn’t seem like five years since we last met.’
‘Retired at the end of last year,’ said the other. ‘I still keep my hand in though with one or two of the older patients. They prefer me to Harmon. Don’t know why and they refuse to accept the fact that I’m no longer the official doctor in the village. Still, Richard doesn’t seem to mind and it gives me something to do in all of the spare time I seem to have now.’
It was on the tip of Amberley’s tongue to ask the other if he knew of the weird occurrences that surrounded Malcolm’s death, but the other spoke before he could get the words out.
‘I’ve just been in to see Miss Munderford — our post-mistress. You may remember her, Terry.’
The other nodded. He vaguely remembered a tiny woman, grey-haired, with a pair of rimless spectacles balanced somewhat precariously on the end of her nose, always associating her in his mind with the large bicycle that she kept propped outside the tiny post office in the main street.
‘A strange case,’ went on the other quietly. ‘The last person in the world I would have considered to be highly imaginative. My guess is that someone was playing a practical joke on the poor woman. I told her she should have had a word with Sergeant Willingham about it, but she seems convinced it was no joke.’ He hesitated, looked ill at ease.