“He could be hurt,” said Ronnie.
“He could be waiting for us with an axe,” said Hale.
“That’s a bit melodramatic.” Dr. Cruttenden had ventured in and joined the two men.
Chambers had to smile at that. “I wouldn’t call what’s already happened understated,” he said. “We’ve only seen Father Traynor once, and even when he was showing us around I thought he was a bit odd. Who knows, he might have his own reasons for wanting to be here?”
“If they’re down there,” said Hale, “I think we should let him get on with it.”
“Are you just going to leave him down there, then?” Ronnie was in the room now, having followed Karen in. “In view of what’s been happening up here?”
Hale sniffed. “Because of what’s been happening, don’t you think? How do you know that giant thing that’s been painted on the wall isn’t waiting down there for us?”
“Well, there wouldn’t be much room for it to move around,” said Dr. Cruttenden. “Unless, of course . . .”
Chambers’s ears pricked up at that. “Unless of course . . . what?”
“There are documents suggesting that some churches were built on top of natural caverns, places where townsfolk could escape to as a final retreat in times of conflict. If that were true, there could be caves with ceilings a hundred feet high down there.”
“How can you build a church on top of a hollow structure?” Chambers asked. “Surely it would subside and eventually collapse?”
“Not if the cave was deep enough and the rock on which the building was erected was solid enough. It has been done before, which is how we know about the concept.”
“I thought plague victims were buried under here?” That was Karen again.
“Oh Christ, this just gets better and better.” Hale took a step toward the door. “Maybe pushing that panic button isn’t such a bad idea.”
“I wasn’t saying there definitely was a cave system directly under here,” said Rosalie. “And even if there is, the ground wouldn’t be entirely level. There could be pockets of the dead buried between the church and any cavern system that might exist.”
“But they were plague victims?”
“It was a long time ago,” Karen said to Hale, who was starting to look nervous. “They’ll have rotted to nothing by now.”
“You don’t know that,” Hale continued. “What if they didn’t rot? What if they . . . changed? What if one of them is still alive, something that looks like that thing on the wall out there. What if it’s living under here right now, in those caves Dr. Cruttenden’s talking about?”
“Then it won’t be able to fit through that tiny trapdoor, would it?” The situation was starting to get out of hand and Chambers was anxious to defuse it. “Come on, let’s get out of here. If anyone’s really anxious about something coming up from down below we can lock the door.”
“But what about Father Traynor?” Ronnie asked.
“He was happy enough when he’d locked the door himself, wasn’t he? He’ll just have to knock to ask to be let out.”
Hale was still looking panicky. In fact he seemed to have suddenly gotten worse as he had edged toward the door.
“What’s the matter, Paul?” Chambers could see he was staring at the back of the door.
“There’s no keyhole.” Hale’s voice was trembling.
“Then he must have bolted himself in.”
Karen had joined Hale now, and was looking puzzled. “There’s no bolt either,” she said, near-closing the door so the others could see.
“That’s impossible.” But Chambers couldn’t see any way of locking the door either.
“Perhaps he unscrewed the bolt before he went down?” Ronnie suggested.
“No screw holes.” Chambers scratched his head. “Perhaps he wedged it shut.”
“Bob,” said Karen, “you tried that door. I watched you. It wasn’t just wedged, it was locked solid.”
“In that case I have absolutely no idea how he did it,” said Chambers. “And I suggest we leave here now in case the door somehow magically locks with us all inside.”
That got people moving. On her way out, Dr. Cruttenden said, “I hope that whatever Father Traynor is doing down there, he’s not digging.”
Ronnie was following her out. “Why not?”
“Because that’s the very thing the guest in my room was trying to warn us not to do, of course.”
The others heard that, and silence descended upon the group.
It was only broken when they heard Dr. Chesney’s anguished cry from the undercroft.
SEVENTEEN
Thursday, December 22, 1994. 2:23 P.M.
PETER CHESNEY KNEW HE was probably overreacting, but he had never been able to deal with conflict well, and while he would have preferred to be liked, he preferred even more to have the opportunity to further his career in parapsychology.
So far, whatever lived in All Hallows had seen fit to reveal itself to people other than himself. It was difficult to be jealous of Dr. Cruttenden—she had qualifications and academic training. She could understand and appreciate the momentousness of such a materialization. Judging from her attitude, it didn’t seem to have entirely sunk in yet, but he was sure it soon would.
However, that moon-faced Quesnel woman had now been allowed a glimpse into the other world. She was the one who had been permitted to be the first to see the painting on the wall. And he was jealous. This sort of thing never happened to him. In the Brecon Cathedral case it had been the idiot-savant son of a local woman who had insisted he could see monsters climbing out of the walls, and Chesney had had to take his word for it. At Nottingham Castle the specter of a ghostly lyre player had been seen by numerous drunks and nightclubbers during the midnight hours, but no matter how much time he had spent crouched in the darkness by the battlements, he had seen nothing. In Aberdeen a medium had insisted that he was being followed by a tall individual with no face. That was the one that had spooked him the most.
“He is always there,” she had said. “I am surprised you have not felt him.”
Of course it was difficult to know who were charlatans and who were genuine. As time had gone on, however, he had come to the sorry conclusion that he lacked any kind of paranormal sensitivity, and that he was about as likely to see a ghost as he was to fly unaided.
It still didn’t stop him from being jealous of the people who could see, though.
It was the lack of respect that was the worst. Here he was, having decided to devote his life to the study of the paranormal, having made quite a name for himself as a crusading investigator into the unknown; and now, at one of the most haunted sites in Britain, he was being treated as an extraneous member of the team. Ignored, forgotten about, shunned.
That was why he had lost his temper with that bloody reporter woman. How dare she suggest that he, Dr. Peter Chesney, champion of the occult, would have turned down the invitation to investigate this place had there been the suggestion of danger!
Danger.
He hadn’t gathered it might actually be dangerous, he had to admit that. All the sites he had previously visited had been quiet, unremarkable, with just a few stories of strange goings-on in the distant past to keep them on the paranormal investigators’ map. All Hallows Church was different. He hadn’t expected it to be, but it was.
All Hallows Church hadn’t just been haunted in the past. It still was.
What worried him was that the realization of that fact should have filled a specialist like himself with eager anticipation, but it didn’t. It didn’t at all.
Peter Chesney was terrified.
He couldn’t admit that, of course. To do so would be to push the self-destruct button on a career built on lies and half-truths; and if he lost that, he would lose everything. The real reason he had exploded at Karen Shepworth was because she had been right. If he had known that three people had been plagued with dreams of this place surrounded by an ocean of the undead, of something hi
deous that lurked within the building of which they had only been permitted occasional glimpses, and that those same three people had been witness to an event in Dr. Cruttenden’s rooms that was on a par with one of the biblical plagues, he might just have decided that he had been prebooked for a different event that he could not possibly postpone.
But he hadn’t, and now he was here, standing in the undercroft of this hateful place, away from those dreadful people who probably knew his secret and despised him for it. He had claimed he was going to sit in Dr. Cruttenden’s apsidal in the hope that the ghost she had seen might materialize for him, and to some extent that had been true. But he had known before he had gone in there that it would be useless. He never saw anything. The real reason he had stayed in there for so long was the same reason he was down here in the undercroft now. He needed to get away from the others because he had come to realize that they were all against him.
At least one of them—most likely that Chambers bloke—knew the truth about him and had told the others. And because Chambers had “real” qualifications and had respect for doing what they considered a “real” job, they were bound to believe him, weren’t they? It hadn’t been so bad when they had first entered the building but now, even just a few short hours later, he knew they had turned against him. He only had to be close to them to feel their disdain.
He took a pint glass down from the cupboard to the left of the sink and half-filled it with water. It tasted strange, brackish, a mixture of earth and the rust from the pipes. He drank as much as he felt able, and then poured the remainder into his cupped left hand, using it to wash his face. The liquid felt cooling and reassuring, especially when he rubbed it into his eyes. When he looked at the dim chamber again, it didn’t seem quite as forbidding.
Perhaps I am just overreacting, he thought. Perhaps it’s this place. It’s making everyone else on edge, so why not me?
Because I am a professional? the conceited part of him reminded. I am the one these people will be turning to for reassurance, for guidance, for advice on what we should do next, and I haven’t the slightest clue.
They will not ask anyway, said another voice.
They all hate me already, he conceded, and even if I was to suggest anything they would just laugh in my face.
And what would you do if they were to do that? asked the other voice. If they were to laugh in your face? Would you punish them?
Shouldn’t you?
Chesney froze. That wasn’t internal dialogue. That was a voice, an actual voice, entirely unlike his own. Deep, authoritative, commanding.
And yet it still seemed to come from inside his head.
“Who’s there?” He didn’t know what else to say. His voice sounded dull in the gloom, soaked up by the stone rather than resonating off it.
Silence.
“Who is it?” He wished he could turn the light up, instead of having to rely on that damned solitary bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. If only there was a way of having more light in here.
It was only when the buzzing of the refrigerator next to him started to interfere with his strained attempts to hear a reply that he found he could open the door. A blast of chill air made him shiver as the middle third of the undercroft-cum-kitchen was filled with a pallid blue glow. The ends of the room were a little better illuminated as well, but for the most part were still in shadow.
At the end furthest from the door, where all the food cartons had been stacked, something moved.
Chesney heard it rather than saw it, a flickering movement of something long and fine and thin, almost spider-like in appearance but much too large to be such a creature.
“Hello?”
There was no response from whoever had spoken to him, nor any reaction from whatever was crawling among the boxes. Because they could not possibly be one and the same.
His throat had suddenly gone dry.
Could they?
He pulled the refrigerator door wider, propping it open with a two-liter bottle of soft drink. It did little to make the room any lighter, but now he could move forward without fear of it shutting.
As he did so, there was a muffled pop, and the bulb above him burned out.
“Shit.” The word came out as little more than the breath that steamed before his trembling lips. The fridge light was still working, but that just meant that now the room had taken on the appearance of a blue neon-lit nightmare. He knew the way out was on the opposite side of the room and just to the left, but for some reason he couldn’t see it. The entire wall had disappeared into blackness.
There was the noise again, a loud scuttling and scraping, as if something with spindly, insectoid limbs was scrabbling to be free of the boxes that were keeping it trapped.
Oh God, help me.
There was nothing else to do—he was going to have to feel his way toward the exit. He walked to where the wall should be, and stretched out his arms, expecting to feel chill stone.
Nothing.
He took another pace forward.
Still nothing.
He turned back to see the blue fridge light, much farther away than it should have, or could possibly have been. He reached out for the wall once more, but his groping fingers only connected with nothingness.
Go back, he told himself. It’s the only thing you can do.
Slowly, his arms held out before him, Peter Chesney made his way back to the source of light.
Or rather, he tried to.
Because now the light was receding. For every step he took, the light seemed to move even farther away. In three shaking steps it was reduced to a size where he could blot it out with his outstretched thumb.
And now the scrabbling sound was coming from behind him.
He started to run, the light leading him on, something terrible in pursuit. As he ran on into the blackness, not caring whether he was about to tumble off the edge of some supernatural precipice, he could not help but feel how unfair it was. One of them had seen a ghost, another had sensed a painting. Why did he have to be the one who was being dragged to Hell?
He was too panicked to be able to draw sufficient breath to cry out. All he could do was run, on and on, toward the only marker in this purgatory of a landscape. The ground beneath his feet had changed also. Stone slabs had been replaced by a fine dust that was more difficult to run on than dry sand at the height of summer. It was finer, too, as if he were trying to run on chalk, or ground wheat.
Or ground bones.
His stomach lurched at the thought. Could it be true? Was he running on the accumulated dust of a billion damned souls? Would he run forever until he tired, and rotted, and his bones, after thousands of years, eventually joined the remains beneath his feet? And would he still be conscious? Still aware? As his eyes fell from his face, his ears shriveled and closed; as his skin and muscles withered and his bones became exposed to the wind that even now was beginning to whip up around him?
He stopped in the darkness, the light ahead of him now just the merest of pinpricks. He knew he had tears on his cheeks because the wind had chilled them. What could he do? Was that thing still chasing him? He crouched down and lifted a handful of dust, feeling the powdery consistency of the ancient dead sift through his fingers. Was that thing still following him? He couldn’t know. His own footsteps made barely a sound on this surface, so any crawling, scuttling, hopping thing would be silent also. There was no light for it to find him, but somehow he suspected it would have other ways of detecting its victim.
Exhausted, terrified, and close to giving up entirely, Peter Chesney sank to his knees, dust puffing up around him and making him cough. He resisted the urge to cry, although he didn’t really know why. There was no one here to ridicule him, like there had been in school.
Don’t think of that or maybe you’ll get sent there next, he thought.
For he had no doubt now that he was in Hell, that somehow he had died. Perhaps in his anger and shame he had tripped and fallen down the steps to the undercroft. O
r perhaps he had never entered All Hallows Church at all. Perhaps the entire thing had been some elaborate form of purgatory for past sins before his final, eternal punishment.
Why not cry, he thought, if it makes you feel better?
But he couldn’t. All he could manage was a dry, pitiful croak that came from the back of his throat and was sucked up by the abyss of darkness around him. He tried again, and this time no sound came out at all.
Then he felt something on his shoulder.
Something thin and hooked and lined with bristles that dug into the fabric of his shirt.
He raised a hand to brush it away and then stopped. What if it didn’t brush away? What if the hooks caught on his hand? Buried themselves in his skin? Tore his flesh from his bones before he could even draw another breath?
So he stayed there, on his knees in the darkness, the feeling of something large, insectoid, and alien behind him. What might it look like? Mandibles the size of garden shears? Black, multifaceted compound eyes the size of saucepans that would stare dispassionately as the thing picked him to pieces?
If he inhaled too deeply he could smell its musty scent.
And if he listened carefully, there was the faintest sound of clicking and wheezing, as the creature itself drew breath through its spiracles.
You are right to fall to your knees, especially as one so miserable and insignificant as you has been afforded so great an honor.
There was the voice again, the one that had spoken to him in the undercroft. It had probably only been moments ago, and yet it already felt like an eternity. It took all his strength to reply.
“An honor?”
The moment the words left his lips they were absorbed by the cloying darkness, but if he imagined they had fallen on deaf ears, he was mistaken.
Yes, honor. It is rare for one to be touched by Him as you have been.
Chesney tried to rise, but the claw pressed down on his shoulder, holding him there.
You dare to rise in His presence? Do you dare risk arousing His displeasure?
He still couldn’t tell if the voice was inside his head or coming from elsewhere. As the pressure on his shoulder increased and he felt himself being forced toward the ground, he coughed more words into the emptiness around him.
The Lovecraft Squad Page 17