by John Glasby
Terence shrugged. ‘I’m afraid I fail to see what business it is of anyone what I do. I’m not satisfied that my brother committed suicide. Nothing is going to prevent me from finding out the truth of what really happened.’
Treherne leaned forward. ‘No doubt you are doing this with the best of intentions, Terry, but the repercussions as far as you are concerned could be quite serious.’
‘I don’t take kindly to threats, Ralph.’
Harmon took a slim folder from his inside pocket, spread it out on his knee. ‘This is the full report on Malcolm Amberley’s death. You may read it if you wish.’
Terence made no effort to take the report.
Harmon folded the papers and thrust them angrily into his pocket once more. ‘Then I take it that you won’t stop this unwarranted questioning and prying into other people’s affairs?’
‘That’s right. Since I’ve been here I’ve discovered things that convince me that whatever it was my brother was investigating, it was far more than a mere legend. That weird experience in the churchyard when Malcolm was being buried.’ He shot a quick glance at Treherne, saw the other’s face change. ‘You saw it too, Ralph. You saw that — thing — standing there among the trees. You were scared out of your wits then; and you still are.’
‘There was nothing there but the mist and the trees.’
‘Then why were you shaking so much you could scarcely stand? Perhaps whatever evil exists up there on the top of Cranston’s Hill came down into the churchyard just to make certain he was dead.’
‘Don’t say anything like that!’ Treherne said in a harsh whisper. ‘You meddling fool, Terry! You don’t know what you’re doing —’
‘Take it easy, Ralph.’ Harmon gripped the other’s wrist tightly. ‘We’ve done our best by warning him. If he refuses to heed that warning then the consequences will be on his own head.’
He got to his feet, helped Treherne to his. As they reached the door at the end of the hall, Treherne turned to Terence. ‘Your brother was my friend, Terry. I tried to warn him — and now he’s dead. For God’s sake, take warning before the same thing happens to you.’
Terence said nothing, watched as the two men left and walked out into the lane. Just before they vanished from sight behind the tall hedge, he had the unmistakable impression that they were having a heated argument. Then they were gone. He closed the door and went back inside.
The tea on the table was cold. He went over to the small cocktail cabinet and took out the bottle of whisky that Malcolm had evidently bought and only half drunk. He poured himself a stiff drink, carried it back to the fire.
Just what had those two in mind, he wondered? What possible concern could it be of theirs? Were they afraid that he might bring unwanted publicity to this isolated backwater of a village if news of this should leak out? Or was Harmon afraid of his reputation as a doctor if he did discover that Malcolm had not committed suicide?
He sipped the whisky slowly, feeling it bring some of the warmth back into his chilled body. God, but it was getting cold! Finishing his drink, he got to his feet, checked the windows for any draught that might explain the strange coldness in the room. There was nothing.
Going out into the hall, he made his way slowly up the stairs. His fingers closed around the handle of the door to his room when something attracted his attention to the door at the far end of the passage. It was not one of the rooms he had examined and he had no idea what lay beyond that closed door.
He sensed that this seeping wave of numbing coldness came from within that room, emanated there and swept down to blanket the whole house.
On sudden impulse, he went to the offending door, twisted the handle sharply, half-expecting it to be locked. But it opened easily under his touch and he peered inside, trying to make out details in the faint shaft of light that spilled in from the corridor. The room seemed empty, totally devoid of furniture. He fumbled along the wall just inside the doorway, searching for the light switch, but found nothing.
Pushing open the door, he went inside. The room seemed curiously lighter than he had expected, almost as if there were moonlight filtering into it, yet there was no window, or if there was, some heavy curtains had been drawn over it.
Shivering a little, he went further inside. His elbow brushed against something hard and he gave an involuntary cry, staggered back a couple of paces, then saw that it was a tall metal candlestick. At least he could have some light by which to see. Taking out his lighter — which he’d refilled on returning to the house — he lit the candle, the wick spluttering a little before it finally caught.
Suddenly, everything in the room sprang into clarity. Sudden revulsion swept through him. There were no carpets on the floor of this particular room but instead there were odd cabalistic designs in glaring reds and blues; a five-pointed star, at each point of which was a small cup of clear crystal, curiously fashioned and half filled with a pale green, nauseous-smelling liquid. Something like terror settled on him at the sight but that which was still to come unnerved him completely.
In his ears there came a low, distant throbbing, a muted humming which changed continuously in pitch as though voices were muttering in muffled tones a great distance away and at the same time his nostrils were stung, revolted, by the shocking stench which rose up in the room like an invisible, noxious vapour.
Automatically, he began to back away towards the door.
Before he had taken two shambling paces across the bare floor, something incredibly evil and malignant seized him so that it was impossible for him to move. He stared as if hypnotised at the centre of the floor, the oddly bare patch between the points of the pentacle. Somehow, he seemed to have known the moment he entered the room that there was evil here, but even he was not prepared for the horror that met his wide-eyed gaze at that moment,
Out of the floor there steamed and bubbled a putrescent vapourous swirling of mist, a sickish, almost luminous fog which thickened as it hung in the pale candlelight and seemed to develop strange and oddly shocking suggestions of form and shape. The overpowering thrust of hate and malevolence enveloped him, blighting his senses until he would have staggered and fallen to the floor had not this demoniac force held him rigid and unmoving. Shadowy and monstrous, it reared up until it towered above him and now he saw that it had definite shape.
There were the outlines of a leering face, of glaring eyes filled with unbridled cruelty and devilish intent. This was the Devil incarnate, supernatural evil that passed beyond all human comprehension. There was no way of fighting it. He could feel himself being drawn irresistibly forward, his feet dragging reluctantly as he attempted to call upon every nerve and fibre of his being to resist.
What terribly potent powers it drew upon, he did not know; nor why it had come. Clearly those terrible designs had been made to call this thing from whatever realms beyond human knowledge it came. Desperately, he tried to tear his gaze from that terrible face, the pointed chin and drooling mouth, the low, slanting forehead topped by two four-inch horns. It was no good.
He felt himself falling forward into a bottomless well of utter blackness.
Unable to help himself, feet shuffling forward like a drunken man he moved closer to that demoniac spectacle. The arms reached out for him, the tremendous force exuded by that blasphemous abomination pressing on his chest until it felt as though he could no longer breathe and his heart threatened to stop its frenzied beating.
When something splintered with a tinkle of broken glass beneath his foot, there was a simultaneous surge of sound inside his skull; a wild, echoing shriek of rage and savage pain that clove through the mists shrouding his brain.
There was a swirling of mist before his stultified vision, a cloying, sickly smell as of an opened grave and then slowly, painfully, reeling from the terror and exertion of the experience, he fell back against the wall, his knees buckling beneath him as he sank to the floor.
Gradually, his eyes focused. In the middle of the pentacle, a tiny th
read of the liquid from the smashed cup oozed across the dusty floor.
Chapter Five – The Haunted and the Damned
Amberley’s condition was, for long moments, one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether he was sleeping or awake, whether he was mad or sane, he somehow pushed himself up on to his knees, staring fixedly at that thin trickle of liquid on the floor.
Somehow, he struggled to his feet. The spluttering candle flame flickered as he brushed past it, was extinguished as he reached the door and burst out into the corridor, half running towards his own room. The bolt on the inside slid home with a rasping of metal on metal and it was not until then that he managed to relax a little.
He did not undress, but sat for a while on the edge of the bed near the window, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. The sheen of perspiration on his forehead felt cold and clammy to the touch. At that moment, he was not willing to say whether what he had witnessed was a nightmarish hallucination or a hideous fact. The lingering stench tended to confirm that it had been real, that what he had seen in that terrible room was one of those blasphemous monstrosities spoken of in the old records and hinted at by generations down the long centuries. Such fiendish designs as those on the floor were said to possess strange properties and no doubt Malcolm had known of this from those weird books in his library.
This legacy of an insane legend which had haunted Tormount for more than five centuries might well have acted on the minds and imaginations of the people who lived there, bringing a form of contagious madness to them all, with only a few exceptions and now it was affecting him to the same extent. Who could be sure of what was reality and what was nightmare after reading those hideous tales written on the documents that the Reverend Ventnor had given him, documents he kept under lock and key for fear of what they might do to imaginative men? Was it at all possible that this latest occurrence was simply delusion, some form of self-hypnosis?
He stretched himself out on the bed, in his ears the moan of the wind around the time-weathered eaves.
Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep, but drowsiness did not come. In the distance, he heard the faint chime of the distant clock in the church steeple as it struck the half hour. Turning over on to his side he fixed his gaze on the pale square of the window where the moon was just beginning to come into view behind the slow-moving clouds that obscured it at intervals. He found that he was subconsciously listening for something, a sound which he dreaded but to which he could put no name. The church clock chimed the hour of three. Still there was no other sound but the groans of the ancient woodwork and gradually a fatigue settled over him so that in a little while he dozed off into a dreamless sleep.
It was grey dawn when he woke, his body stiff and uncomfortable. Swinging his feet to the floor, he got up. What he had been through that night was now highly uncertain in his mind; yet he felt that there was something unutterably hideous in the background.
Was this what Treherne had been trying to warn him about? The fact that this aura of evil that lay over the village could, at times, when the signs were right, materialise into something more than mere legend?
He stayed in his room for the best part of an hour before shaving and going downstairs, deliberately averting his gaze from the half-open door of the room at the far end of the corridor. He ate a hurried breakfast, was on the point of carrying the dishes through into the kitchen when there came a knock at the front door.
‘Good morning, Terry.’ Anne gave him a bright smile, stepped past him into the hall. She noticed the dishes on the table, turned. ‘I came over early to cook you some breakfast. It occurred to me that you might not be eating well, having to fend for yourself. It seems I’m too late.’
‘I didn’t sleep very well last night,’ he said defensively. ‘I got up early and cooked something for myself.’
Her brows drew together. ‘Something wrong, Terry? You look as if you’d just seen a ghost.’ Her smile faded as the implications behind her words struck home. Hesitantly, she added: ‘You haven’t, have you? Seen a ghost, I mean.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to relate to her what he had seen, or had thought he had seen in that room at the top of the stairs. He decided against such a course. There was no point in frightening her any more than was absolutely necessary.
He shook his head slowly. ‘I spent too much time reading those curious books of Malcolm’s before I went to bed. And I had some harsh words with two of the village’s most respected citizens.’
‘Oh?’ She looked up from the cup of coffee she had just poured for herself.
He forced a faint grin. ‘Doc Harmon and Ralph Treherne came to see me last night. They were very insistent that I should stop prying around in the village. They were certain it would be dangerous if I continued, that I would end up the same way as Malcolm did.’
He saw her eyes cloud a little. ‘And will you stop?’
‘Not now. I can’t. I’m beginning to convince myself that Malcolm was on the track of something diabolically evil, which will have to be rooted out and destroyed. What happened six or seven hundred years ago in Tormount must have been so terrible that the evil associated with it still persists. There are some scientists who believe that both good and evil emanations can cause vibrations in the ether which live on long after their originators are dead and forgotten.’
‘I wonder why Treherne and the doctor were so anxious for you to give up,’ mused the girl. ‘Now that you mention it. Doctor Harmon tried to dissuade Malcolm, almost to the point of threatening him.’
‘Either Harmon is afraid of losing his reputation as a doctor, or there is a deeper meaning for all of this. It may be that —’ He broke off at a sudden rattle on the front door letterbox.
Anne smiled. ‘You’ve got mail.’
He rose quickly to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine anyone writing me here — unless someone in London wants to see me urgently, although that doesn’t seem likely.’
He came back holding a small envelope. ‘I don’t recognize the writing.’
‘Perhaps if you opened it, you might find out who it’s from!’
He nodded absently, slit the envelope and took out a single sheet letter. The address as the top was a street in Nottingham, but he did not take much note of this until later. It was the letter itself that mystified him.
It was brief and to the point:
‘Dear Sir,
I understand you are investigating certain happenings in and around Tormount. It is imperative you see me as soon as possible. This could be a matter of life and death.’
He handed it to the girl without a word. The look on her face as she read through it was a blend of surprise and bafflement. ‘Who on earth is Clivedon Park?’ she asked, staring at the signature at the end of the letter. ‘Do you know him at all?’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Terence said truthfully. ‘Unless he was some acquaintance of Malcolm’s, although he never mentioned the name to me. It certainly isn’t one you would forget easily once you heard it.’
‘What do you think it means? A matter of life and death. Perhaps he’s just another crank, some dabbler in the occult.’
‘That’s more than likely. On the other hand, it is just conceivable that he may have some important information.’
‘Then you’re going to see him?’
‘Yes.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s only eight-thirty now. I could be in Nottingham in less than an hour.’
‘May I come with you? This is getting more interesting every day.’
‘Somehow,’ Terence said grimly, ‘I have the feeling that it will turn out to be far more dangerous than interesting.’ He thought of that fiendish thing he had seen in the room upstairs and felt on the point of refusing to take her with him. Then it came to him that perhaps she would be safer with him in Nottingham, rather than alone in the village.
‘All right. I’ll get the car ready and meet you in the main street in fifteen minutes.’
*
A
gentle daylight rain misted the air as they drove through the outer suburbs of Nottingham an hour later. Fortunately, Anne knew her way around the city and the street they were seeking, not far from the banks of the Trent, was easy to find. It was a narrow, winding street, unlike the broad thoroughfares through the centre of Nottingham and as he stopped the car outside the small house, set back from the road behind a thick hedge, Terence had the feeling that here, time had passed by leaving little evidence of its passage.
There was no sign of life as they rang the bell and waited, but a few moments later the door opened on faintly creaking hinges. The figure that stood there was that of an elderly woman, tall and stiff as a ramrod with a tight bun of grey hair on the back of her head. She looked at them inquiringly in silence so that Terence was forced to speak first.
He held out the letter. ‘I received this from a Mister Park,’ he said pleasantly. ‘He asked me to call and see him as soon as possible. My name is Terence Amberley.’
‘Oh yes.’ The woman nodded stiffly. ‘Mister Park told me to expect you. Please come inside.’
Lowering his head as he passed beneath the low lintel, Terence followed the other into the narrow, dingy hallway. It was difficult to know what he had been expecting, but certainly nothing like this. The walls were decorated with hideous death masks and over one door at the end, a white skull grinned eyelessly at them as the woman rapped on the door with her knuckles and called loudly:
‘The visitor you expected is here, Mr. Park.’
There was an unintelligible bark of sound from beyond the door but the woman evidently understood for she thrust it open and motioned them inside. The man who stood at the narrow window, his back to them, must have been well over six feet tall, but his stooped posture made him seem much smaller. He was as thin as a rake, the jacket much too short for him so that the almost skeletal wrists showed bonily at the ends of the sleeves.