Netherworld

by Lisa Morton

Diana moved to tug Quilby to his feet, but then decided she could do what had to be done alone. Quilby had served his purpose—he’d brought her to the isolated country church in the dead of night—and there was no need to expose him to what came next.

  She feared it might be beyond anything Quilby could comprehend. Her mind was disciplined, her will strong, and her experience already deep for a woman who had just barely turned thirty.

  Her eyes reflecting the fiery effulgence, she took her satchel and followed Mina to the door, pausing there long enough to place her ear against the old, thick wood to listen.

  What she heard made even her experienced breath quicken.

  The voice beyond the door was plainly not human. It was deep and had a coarseness to it no man’s larynx could produce; it was more like the roar of some large, savage animal—one that could speak while making that horrible sound, that is. And the words…they were an eerie gibberish, and yet Diana sensed there was something familiar about them.

  “Live morf su reviled tub, noitatpmet otni ton su dael….”

  She ran through the words in her mind, comparing them to facts about the myriad of demons, monsters, creatures, vampires, warlocks and fallen angels she’d studied, and she finally had it:

  It was The Lord’s Prayer—backwards.

  Mina began to howl and scratch frantically at the door, and Diana knew her opportunity was limited; this gateway opened at exactly 12 a.m. on Hallowe’en, but she had no idea how long it would remain open. If she hesitated, she wouldn’t have another chance to seal this gateway for a year.

  She had to move quickly.

  She reached into her satchel and considered the items therein. She unsealed the lantern, and by its light flipped The Book open to a banishment spell she’d previously bookmarked. Then she rummaged through the other contents of the satchel—garlic cloves, candles, herbs—and selected a dagger with a double-edged blade and a black handle. She stashed the knife in a pocket of her outer jacket, balanced the open book in her left hand, and while holding the lantern with her right she cautiously opened the church door.

  She blinked and turned away, blinded by the intense radiance; despite the hellish hue, the interior of the church was even colder than the sodden grounds outside.

  Looking down, waiting for her vision to adjust, Diana saw Mina bolt in and rush straight down the center aisle, pausing at the base of the altar to look up and hiss at—

  —Satan.

  Diana squinted, paralyzed by the sight of him. Even forty paces away, at the opposite end of the church, he towered over her. He was the classical depiction of the Devil come to life, with reddish skin, large ivory horns sprouting from either side of his brow, pointed ears, bearded cheeks and chin, and long, clawed fingers. He wore priests’ robes, and his cloven hoofs were visible beneath its black hem. Smoke and fire poured from his mouth as he continued the obscene prayer, his voice booming, multiplied as it echoed down from the rafter:

  “…eman yht eb dewollah, nevaeh ni tra ohw….”

  Diana assured herself that this couldn’t be Satan; although she still had no idea if Lucifer actually existed or not, she felt certain that if he did he was far too important to risk a journey out of the netherworld merely to play a grotesque Hallowe’en joke on some small English village. No, this was merely some lesser demon, and as such he could be dealt with.

  He’d have to be confronted, because he was standing in front of the gateway. Mina stood now at the foot of the dais, hissing – but not at him. Instead she was fixated on the unseen something directly behind him.

  The fiend stopped his reading and glanced up, froze when he saw first the spitting, snarling cat below him, and then the petite woman in masculine garb holding up a lantern in one hand and a book in her other.

  “You’ve got that backwards, I’m afraid,” Diana said to the demon, as she advanced on it, “and I also don’t care much for your tone.”

  The demon gaped at her in disbelief.

  “In fact, I’m so unimpressed by your performance that I’m going to send you right back to Hell.”

  The demon snarled at her and she felt the heat from its flaming breath. Diana had to admit that was impressive, at least.

  She paused halfway down the center aisle and, after placing the lantern down onto a pew, began a strange spell, reading from the book: “By the sacred names of Adonai and Elohai, by the angels Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel and Michael, I adjure thee o foul spirit to return to your realm of darkness—”

  The monster roared, trying to drown out her voice, but Diana could out-shout it.

  “—the white powers obey me, and will cast thee from this plane into the bottomless abyss between worlds—”

  The demon flexed and ripped most of the monk’s cassock away as if it were made of paper. It revealed huge, rippling muscles and stepped to the edge of the altar, apparently about to launch itself at Diana. Five-inch long, half-inch thick claws reached towards her.

  She saw the motion and calmly reached into her jacket pocket, removing the dagger, which she held point-up before the demon.

  “I did not come unprepared. But you did.”

  It saw the blade and screamed in terror. Diana pressed her advantage, momentarily forgetting the incantation to simply advance on the monster with the upheld blade. “Yes, it’s iron. Something you don’t much care for.”

  She renewed her chanting. “By the sacred names of Adonai and Elohai….”

  It lunged at her.

  The move wasn’t entirely unexpected, though, and Diana dropped the book as she leaned back, feeling the demon’s hot breath on her cheek. Its other hand shot towards her throat, and she simultaneously ducked and thrust upward with the knife. She felt it drive through the flesh of the creature’s hand and she yanked it out. Shrieking and clutching its wounded palm, the demon staggered back.

  Diana wiped the blade clean with a handkerchief, then returned the cloth to a pocket to retrieve the book. She found her place and continued reading. “…by the angels Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel and Michael….”

  The demon continued to back away, until one hoof vanished from view, and Diana knew it had passed through the gateway. Too late it realized its mistake. Diana tossed the book aside and leapt up onto the altar, where she thrust the knife into the monster’s face. It bellowed its impotent rage, and this time Diana felt pain as she was singed. She was dimly aware that something on her face was smouldering, but it would have to wait….

  …because the demon had just fled back through the gateway, and now Diana had her chance to seal it forever.

  She held the knife between her teeth and quickly tore off her jacket, flinging it carelessly behind her. Then she undid the cuff on her left sleeve and rolled it up, baring her tender skin between wrist and elbow. Taking the knife in her right hand, and without hesitation she drew its sharp blade across her left arm, drawing a two-inch thin line of blood. As she waited for the blood to well, she called out in a clear, steady voice:

  “By my will and by my blood is this gateway sealed forever!”

  She flung her bloodied arm at the gateway, showering it in crimson droplets. She heard a final roar of fury from the other side and briefly saw the outline of the fiend behind the frozen beads of her blood—

  —and then the air before her was clear and silent.

  Diana hesitated a moment, just to be sure. It took another few seconds for her to realize that the only light within the church now was her lantern, and the only sound was the voice of Quilby from behind her:

  “Lady Furnaval, are you—did that thing—!”

  She turned and saw Quilby staggering with his coat askew and capless up the center aisle towards her and she forced a smile at him. “I’m fine, Constable, thank you.”

  She stepped down from the altar, but her knees nearly gave. Now, with the task accomplished and the energy of her fortitude draining away, she allowed herself to drop into the nearest pew, limp and exhausted. Mina rubbed happily around her ankles, purring in triumph
.

  Quilby leaned over her, eyeing her with great concern. “Mum, your face….”

  “What?” Diana cried out, involuntarily reaching up, feeling for serious damage.

  “I’m afraid that beast’s fire…well, it seems to have burned away an eyebrow.”

  Diana ran a hand over her forehead, and discovered that indeed, most of one eyebrow seemed to be missing. Still, it was a relatively small price to pay for victory (and was easily remedied with cosmetics).

  Quilby comically bobbed his head, swinging between the altar, the rest of the church, and Diana. “When it fell backward and disappeared—”

  “Through the gateway,” Diana added.

  “The gateway—is it…did you—?”

  “It has been sealed,” she told him. “No more midnight Hallowe’en processions in your parish, I’m afraid.”

  “This must be some blade!” he picked up the knife to better see it. “Is it blessed?”

  “Iron,” she told him. “Demons can’t touch it. Burns them worse than fire burns us.”

  Then he saw her wound, and actually squeaked. “You’re bleeding, mum—!”

  Diana realized she’d forgotten about the cut. “Oh, yes….”

  She had Quilby retrieve her satchel for her, in which she kept materials for cleaning and bandaging the wound. Quilby watched her, dismayed to see the scars that ran up her arm. He counted five—no, six….

  “Lady Furnaval,” he finally asked, “the scars on your arm…one for each gateway?”

  “Quite. One for each gateway,” she replied, then went on after a small, sad pause, “…and all for my William.”

  “William?” Quilby asked, then remembered. “Oh, right—your late husband. Sorry, mum.”

  “It was three years ago, Constable, no need to offer condolences.”

  Quilby shifted uncomfortably, and Diana patted his shoulder in what she hoped was a friendly manner. “I believe you’re catching on to this gateway-closing business at last. Perhaps you’d care to join me in Cornwall, where they believe in a group of demonic huntsmen called Dando’s Dogs, and are unaware their wild hunters are merely trespassers through a gateway that needs closing…?”

  “Not me, mum!” Quilby answered, and then sneezed three times. “Besides, I think I’ve got a cold coming on.”

  She drew a calming breath and gazed about the beautiful, lantern-warmed sanctuary. Moments before, it had been a hellish place; now, even shadowed, it was inviting and serene.

  Diana retrieved her jacket, then snuggled Mina down into the satchel, which she hefted up as she moved to the doorway. “Something tells me it’s going to be a nasty cold, Constable Quilby…but I think you’ll survive.”

  Chapter II

  November 5, 1879

  (and memories)

  London

  Diana was happiest when she was in London.

  Even though she’d spent the five best years of her life in the country (when William was still alive and they’d lived together at the Furnaval’s ancestral home of Hampstead Hall in Derby), she was really, at heart, a creature of the city. She loved its crowds, its intensity, its energy, its boisterous clattering streets, its shops.

  As comfortable as she found her masculine attire, she still enjoyed the latest fashion, and always looked forward to a visit with her London tailor. William had sometimes accompanied her there, and she still heard his voice complimenting her when she tried on a lovely new morning dress in a princess-line, mentioning that its pale blue print matched her eyes. He might have teased her about how she needed to cut her auburn curls before they became the scandal of the society pages, but he’d always offer up such comments with a half-smile.

  London was admittedly bittersweet now, without William, but the great metropolis still held Diana in its thrall. She was excited by the city’s progress, by the growth and new industries. Even though the factories belched filth into the skies and could be savagely unsafe, those evils still felt like the future to her; she trusted, as did other believers in reform, that the poor would soon be lifted up by the powers of business and government. She was intrigued by new discoveries and inventions; she’d recently acquired a new gadget invented by a clever American, called a gramophone, that could actually replay recordings (admittedly tinny) of music inscribed on wax cylinders. She’d even traveled to London merely to see the display of electric lights outside the Gaiety Theatre on the Strand, and had been as dazzled as the thousands of onlookers. Her breast had swelled with the great promise of science.

  A passionate reader of classics, she also studied Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man when it was first released eight years earlier, and although she found Darwin’s theories about female inferiority truly appalling, she thought the rest of his work to be quite remarkable. Diana felt (with an irony she was well aware of) that man would not truly progress until he gave up his superstitions and put his faith in a world he’d studied, categorized, and created himself.

  She often pondered the clash between her reliance on science and progress with her dealings in darker matters. Before meeting William, she hadn’t believed in ghosts, monsters, demons, or the existence of the soul. She was raised a Protestant, but even as a child had doubted most of what she heard in church. By the time she’d reached adulthood, she’d become an atheist, although she’d confessed that fact to very few.

  William had laughed when she’d told him, during a lunch he’d arranged on a boat floating down the River Avon.

  She’d found his laugh musical and charming, but had asked, “Why the laughter?”

  “Diana, you may be in for a few surprises,” he answered. Then he kissed her, and that was a most pleasant surprise. William, she discovered, might have been a member of British aristocracy, but he was also playful and impulsive.

  Several months after they were engaged to be married, he introduced her to her first ghost.

  She remembered it well. William had taken her for a nighttime walk to the edge of his estate; the moon was full and so bright they required no lantern. They strolled past the hulking ruins of the old hall and the landscaped gardens, and he told her there was something very important she needed to know about him—something that might change her mind about their coming marriage.

  Diana had stopped him; there, in the moonlight, she’d taken his hands in hers, and assured him nothing could change her mind. She was deeply in love with the handsome young Lord Furnaval, her William, with his easy grin and waving black hair and the jokes he whispered in her ear when they attended stodgy society functions. And she knew that love was well and equally shared.

  “Still, darling, I do think you need to know of this,” he’d told her. Then he’d turned and gestured behind him, as if they were just taking a nature walk and he was serving as guide. “Do you see that slight ridge, the one with the trees growing on either side of it?”

  Diana could easily make out the ridge, which of course she’d seen before. It rolled up from the surrounding landscape, standing perhaps ten yards higher. Only grass grew atop it.

  “That’s one wall of an ancient Roman fort which once existed here,” William told her. “If we were to dig into the earth, we’d find the old stones.”

  “Yes?” she’d asked, wondering why William was bothering with this if he had something so important to tell her.

  And then she’d seen the ghost.

  It had seemingly appeared from nowhere, and at first looked perfectly solid: A Roman soldier, fresh from battle in muddied mail and tattered cloak. Oh his head he wore a plumed, dented helmet. He’d materialized perhaps twenty yards away, and was walking towards them, sword in hand; yet he trudged forward with stooped shoulders and obvious fatigue. As he neared, though, Diana realized that she could see parts of the moonlit ridge directly through him.

  There was no denying that Diana had felt a chill course up her spine, that first time.

  The ghost walked towards them but stopped, glaring with some indefinable rage.

  “William—�
�� Diana cried out in alarm.

  “It’s fine, dear, just watch,” William assured her.

  She had…and after a moment the spirit turned away from them, as if bored, and walked on. After perhaps another dozen steps it vanished from sight. Diana was too stunned to move or speak.

  And that was when William explained the gateways.

  The Furnaval family had been the keepers of the Derby gateway for generations. They carefully watched what apparitions came through their gateway, and performed banishment spells on any especially troublesome manifestations. Others that were harmless—like the war-weary Centurion, or an old man who looked like a groundskeeper—were allowed to exist, and had even become minor local tourist attractions.

  After the sighting of the ghost, William had taken Diana back to the house, and shown her the family’s copy of Dr. Martyn Fox’s The Book of Gateways, Conjurations and Banishments. Fox was a sixteenth-century magician who had lived near a gateway in Dartmoor, and somehow harnessed a demon who then revealed the location of all the gateways to Fox, along with certain useful spells on controlling what came through them. The Furnavals’ copy was an original first edition of the book, bound in leather with brass hardware and with marvelously antiquated type; the page margins were crowded with numerous handwritten annotations made by various Furnavals over the centuries, noting where certain spells hadn’t functioned or more precise locations for some gateways (the book gave very specific directions for finding some gateways, while others were apparently obvious to detect by the amount of activity that occurred around them; a Welsh gateway, for instance, not only attracted numerous spirits but was centered in a fairy ring).

  Over the next few days they spent all their daylight hours in the library. Diana read through the book, consumed every other occult volume she found and deluged William with questions: Did he know all the other gatekeepers? (No. In fact, he wasn’t even sure there were other gatekeepers.) Were there more gateways in Britain? (Yes, there were eleven, including locations in Little Chester, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and even one on the Isle of Man.) How many times had it been necessary for him to perform banishment spells? (William answered this by giving her his own journal to read, and she read with astonishment of his two banishings: Once of a pesky will-o’-the-wisp that insisted on leading nocturnal travelers over cliff edges, and once a genuinely frightening demon that slew several local children before William trapped it and returned it to its netherworld). What was on the other side of the gateway? (William didn’t know, and hoped to never find out.) Why not just close the gateway permanently?