by John Glasby
Eventually, they reached the burial chamber and for a moment, Park played the light from the torch over the boxes ranged along the walls but there was nothing out of the ordinary there and they seemed to have been undisturbed. Down the even steeper, darker passage at the far end and into that terrible inner chamber and now Terence felt his fear beginning to get the better of him. The overpowering sense of evil foreboding struck at him like the force of a physical blow as he felt his feet touch the level ground at the bottom of the passage.
Was the holy water they had brought with them sufficient to defeat the powers of darkness, which Malcolm, in his ignorance, seemed to have put in motion? And if they failed, what then? Park had spoken of a fate much worse than death itself and now, in the whispering blackness, the words struck home to him.
Clivedon Park did not hesitate. Keeping a tight grip on the torch, he advanced towards the massive grey shape of the altar reposing in the middle of the chamber. Then he paused and turned to the others.
‘We’ve got to find the way to remove the top of this altar,’ he said harshly. ‘There has to be a way.’
‘But —’ began Ventnor, puzzled.
‘Don’t you see?’ demanded the other, his eyes blazing fiercely. ‘There is no record of when or how Richard de Grinley died.’
‘The legend says that he never did die,’ Terence put in hoarsely.
‘It wasn’t until we were on top of the hill that it came to me what the legend meant.’ Park was speaking eagerly now, almost in a frenzy. ‘This is where he’s buried. Inside the Altar of Belial. That is why he swore he would never die so long as it remained within the boundaries of the parish, why it was brought here. Out there among the Standing Stones it was too vulnerable. It had to be brought somewhere safe. What we saw on Cranston’s Hill tonight was the evil entity that was Richard de Grinley. His bones are inside this stone sarcophagus.’
Even as he spoke, he was moving slowly around the massive slab of stone, holding the torch in one hand and feeling along the stone with the fingertips of his other.
Slowly, he made his way around it, then paused, uttered an exclamation of satisfaction. ‘Just as I thought.’ He pressed one of the tiny carvings.
Nothing visible happened, but a faint rumble came from somewhere seemingly deep within the stone mass.
‘Give me a hand. Both of you,’ he commanded. Resting the torch on the ground, he seized the edge of the altar and began to push with all of his strength, teeth clenched tightly. Terence hesitated briefly, then threw his own weight against the lid of the stone. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then slowly, ponderously, the slab on top of the altar began to move, grinding across the base.
He sucked in a deep gust of air, shuddered at the stench that rose into his nostrils. An inch at a time, the lid of the altar moved, grating sideways with a leaden motion.
Then, abruptly, there was another sound within the confining walls of the chamber, or rather it came from outside. The sweat streaming down his face with the exertion, Terence straightened sharply. For several seconds, it was impossible to guess from which direction this new sound came. His first thought was that some of the villagers had somehow plucked up sufficient courage to follow them into the ruins but then, as his thoughts orientated themselves, he realised that this was not so.
The sound came from the other side of the vast chamber, from behind that blocked up arch that they had discovered that morning!
‘What is it?’ muttered the vicar, wiping the perspiration from his face with the back of his hand.
‘Some of them must have worked their way along that tunnel from the hill.’ For a second, there was a note almost of fear in Clivedon Park’s voice. He picked up the torch and flashed it on the wall in the direction of the tall archway. Even from where they stood, it was just possible to make out the wide cracks that were appearing in the wall. Quite clearly it had not been blocked by stone as they had thought, but merely dried mud with some smaller stones mixed with it.
Desperation now gave them added strength. Gripping the stone slab in both hands, they thrust with all of their might and slowly, it ground its way over the top of the huge altar, finally tilting on the far side and toppling to the floor with a resounding crash.
‘All right, Vicar. You know what you have to do,’ snapped Park. He stepped to the end of the altar, flashed the torch momentarily into the gaping black opening that leered before them. Flashing it only for a few seconds to reveal what lay inside.
His face was impassive as one who has seen too much horror in his lifetime as to be steeled against it, but there was a tiny muscle twitching high in his right cheek and his eyes closed momentarily as he stepped back a pace. Deliberately he switched off the torch, leaving the vicar in the darkness. But he did not do it quickly enough to prevent Terence from catching a glimpse of the body that lay there in that great stone coffin. That it was the remains of Richard de Grinley, he did not doubt; yet there came a sharp surge of vomit into his mouth at the sight of the skeleton that lay there, dressed in what had once been rich wrappings of silk.
It was not the bones so much that brought the terror welling up inside him, nor even the grinning skull that leered at him from sightless sockets. Rather it was the fragmentary glimpse he had seen of the two five-inch horns that grew out of the forehead.
The Devil Incarnate as the old legends would have it — or some terrible freak of nature, the last in the line of a degenerate family?
Hesitantly at first, but with his voice gaining strength with each succeeding second, the vicar began to pronounce the words of absolution, at the same time sprinkling the holy water from the flask over the interior of the coffin.
Scarcely had he begun to do so than a terrible scream of demoniacal fury seemed to fill the chamber, echoing and re-echoing back from the looming walls on either side.
Then, abruptly, there was silence, deep and final and when Clivedon Park finally summoned up the courage to turn on the torch once more and shine it into the coffin, there was nothing there but a small pile of white dust that eddied greyly over the once rich brocade.
*
There were still some bees murmuring among the chrysanthemums in the sharp, cool sunlight the following afternoon. Yet now there seemed to be a very different atmosphere over the entire village, as if some terrible, cancerous growth had been removed.
That morning, the vicar had driven Clivedon Park back to Nottingham in his wheezing old Ford and now Terence Amberley was standing here with Anne beside him, looking out over a village that seemed to have come to life after having been in some dark and nightmare-haunted sleep for a hundred years.
It still seemed incredible that no one recalled anything of what had happened the previous night or on the other nights when they had left the village in answer to a summons they could not resist and had gone up there to Cranston’s Hill, now slumbering in the afternoon sunshine, and taken part in the most diabolical rituals.
A small group of men had gone out to the Standing Stones on the vicar’s instructions early that morning and there they had found the body of Malcolm Amberley, lying almost as it had been found before. But this time, so they had told Terence, it was as if he had died peacefully in his sleep, almost with a smile on his face. He would be buried again in the quiet grave beside the church.
Anne glanced up at him, wondering a little at his long silence, then linked her arm through his. ‘You still haven’t told me what happened last night,’ she said softly. ‘I know something did because everyone is — well, somehow different — today.’
‘There isn’t much to tell,’ he said gently. ‘Just let’s say that the evil which once existed is no more. Malcolm is dead, but he can rest in peace now.’
‘And you. What are you going to do now? Go back to London?’
‘For a little while,’ he said, almost regretfully. ‘I have to. But I think I’d like to come and live in a place like this where everything is so peaceful and time doesn’t seem to matter at all.�
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‘I’m sure you would be doing the right thing if you did come back and live here. It seems that house there has known so much evil, it needs a chance to live again.’
They walked slowly down the winding lane, between the fields over which the sunlight hung like a golden curtain. At the corner, where they were hidden from the village, he put his arms around her slim waist, kissed her on the lips, feeling her respond. Now this, he thought, was the first wonderful thing that had happened to him since he had arrived in the village.
*
THE END
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Table of Contents
Chapter One – The Grey Shade
Chapter Two – The Coming of the Fear
Chapter Three – The Standing Stones
Chapter Four – The Dark God Hunters
Chapter Five – The Haunted and the Damned
Chapter Six – The Satanists
Chapter Seven – The Shadow Over Tormount
Chapter Eight – Flight from Evil