Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  Sunday morning in Northumberland. The February sky was a grey lid, betraying no hint of the sun.

  Valler had grown up here, but he had always felt out of place, lost in this huge time-steeped landscape.

  Somehow threatened.

  After the encounter with his father this morning Valler had intended to drive by the most direct route back to London, back to his life. But frustration and aggression were still fizzing in his blood.

  In fact his hand still hurt.

  And some impulse had made him swing off the A road to follow this minor route, the Roman road that tracked the line of the Wall. He was heading east; sooner or later he would hit the southbound A1, around Newcastle.

  He came to a church.

  He knew it, in fact: it was called Saint Andrew’s, and it was a squat, ugly Anglo-Saxon pile. He’d spent every Sunday morning of his youthful life here, dragged along by his mother.

  After fourteen centuries the church looked like an eroded, crouching animal.

  He slowed.

  There was a pub opposite the church.

  It used to be called something appropriate – the Wilfrid Arms? – but now it was part of a chain, meaninglessly renamed the Frog and Firkin. But it was brightly lit, replete with chalkboards offering satellite football and Country-Style Hot Food.

  And it was open, of course. Sunday morning.

  Six, seven hours to London from here, Valler. A quick one would calm him down. And it would be a kind of triumph, to drink in sight of his mother’s church.

  He pulled into the pub car park.

  Outside the BMW, the air was profoundly cold: not freezing, but laden with a moisture that seemed to work into his lungs. But he relished the sudden discomfort. The distraction.

  … It had come to a head this morning.

  The whole point of Valler’s weekend visit was to get his father to sign the papers that would get him, at last, out of his miner’s cottage and into sheltered accommodation.

  And then they could sell the cottage.

  And so release the money Valler found he needed.

  Simple. Valler had everything prepared, had rehearsed what he would say.

  But when Valler had called, he found the old man in all his Mithraic finery: the absurd red tunic with its piped sleeves and yellow belt, and the Superman cloak hanging off that wizened remnant of a body, and the patera and sword in those arthritic hands. He was the Father of the Temple: the highest Grade, the earthly counterpart of the Unconquered God himself.

  The old fool was trying, one last time, to recruit Valler. To make him stay here, as the last of the line.

  Family history, he’d said. Two thousand years. Valler should put aside the middle class claptrap he surrounded himself with in London. He should come back here, to what was, in the end, all that mattered.

  Family and blood.

  But Valler hadn’t come here for this tired old bullshit.

  He’d said so.

  And one thing had led to another.

  And then—

  … He found he’d crossed the road, to the church. There were a few cars here, bumped onto the road’s dark green verge.

  He walked along a gravel path to the back of the church, to the heavy wooden door. It was propped open with a wedge. Walking in was like being swallowed by a dry old mouth.

  He let his eyes dark-adapt. There was a battered wooden chair here, notices about services, a box for restoration donations.

  He passed through a second door, and entered the body of the church. There was a sharp, warm smell of incense and flower perfume, and just for a moment Valler was a child again, holding his mother’s hand.

  There were people here, mostly women and children. A brightly robed vicar was reading at a candle-lit altar.

  It was a service, some kind of modern happy-clappy thing for simple minds.

  Of course it’s a service. It’s Sunday, Valler.

  Nobody had noticed him.

  The church’s enclosing, womb-like darkness was barely relieved by the sparsely placed candles.

  Valler found himself standing on the gravestone of a Roman soldier. INTERFECTUS IN BELLUM – killed in the war. It was a warrior’s memorial slab, recycled as a paving stone.

  The women were dowdy, overweight and slumped. The men wore tracksuit tops stretched over beer bellies. The restless kids were of all ages. There was a group of older girls, huddling together like young heifers, whispering and giggling.

  Heifers, yes.

  These people were like cattle, most of them without jobs, without purpose or function or beauty, the fight bred out of them. Like the cattle in the fields outside.

  Like his father.

  Brittunculi. The little Brits. That was what the Romans had contemptuously called those they had conquered.

  Valler despised them all.

  One of the older girls turned and looked directly at Valler.

  She was slim, but he could see the curve of hips, the push of small breasts under the striped football shirt she wore. Her oval, perfectly symmetrical face seemed to shine against the drab background. She looked at him as a child would, without calculation or mockery, her eyes blue windows. But her lips were full.

  She could have been as old as seventeen, as young as fourteen.

  He felt his mouth dry. He was dismayed by the power of his lust for this girl.

  The girl turned away. Somehow he found it hard to pick her out again.

  Now the ancient, reworked stones seemed enclosing, oppressive.

  He walked out of the church. Outside, the sky was unbroken cloud. He sucked in the damp, cold air.

  He headed back over the road. He hesitated at the BMW, then went on to the pub, blood swirling.

  The redeveloped bar was too big, too cold. There were a couple of old men drinking pints of thick black local beer with a steady, practised purpose. A TV mounted in an upper corner carried a rattling, noisy cartoon.

  Valler ordered a bitter from the bored landlord. And then another. He drank his beer quickly. It was pumped, gassy. He could feel it working on his head, but its taste was sour.

  He lit up a cigarette, filling his nose and mouth with the smoke.

  … The girl, though.

  He’d never been able to understand how such beauty was able to emerge from the herds of Brittunculi, with their lousy diet and precocious smoking and drinking. But emerge it did, in every generation, and the girls bloomed like etiolated flowers for their few short years. Long enough for them to attract the fumbling hands and stiff dicks of the local boys. Pretty little heifers.

  With mothers who were probably younger than he was.

  And the boys who were like he used to be, awkward and useless, aching with lust.

  But it was different now, for him.

  Valler worked in computers in the City.

  He had made a lot of money out of the year 2000 panic. Selling the work of underpaid Third World programmers to lazy, scared corporations. His world was lit by bright fluorescents, indifferent to weather or season, textured by an unceasing social buzz of wine and cigarettes and videos and sex. More wine than sex nowadays, now he was forty and his belly and hair showed it …

  He hated to come back here, from where he’d escaped, hated to have to handle all this family history bullshit, the business with his father.

  But the year 2000 bubble was bursting, and Valler had a lifestyle to keep up.

  He needed his father’s money.

  He wished he was in London now, surrounded by the press of people and traffic noise and the stale stink of cigarette smoke and car exhaust.

  The girl, though.

  He imagined touching her.

  Her hands would be weak, the bones fragile, unable to match his greater strength. The muscles of her belly would be flat, lean. Like an animal’s.

  He turned his thoughts away, disturbed by their intensity.

  He looked out of the grimy window, across the road towards the church.

  … He thought
he saw the girl – the same girl – standing on the far side of the road. That oval face like a coin, turned to him.

  She was gone, lost in the grime of the glass.

  He drained his pint and walked out of the pub.

  He found himself back at the church, without conscious intent. The service was over; the cars had gone.

  He was out of breath just from walking across the road. He could feel the beer inside him, too much this early, sour and flat. The world was sour too, just blocks of greasy light, livid green and dun sandstone and the sky’s pervasive dull grey.

  He reached the door of the church. It was locked.

  Behind the church was a small stand of trees, leafless and stark. And there was movement, against the background of the trees. Black and white stripes.

  He turned that way, panting. He stepped off the path. He could feel long, dead grass crushing under his leather shoes, lapping at his heels.

  Soon he was out of sight of the road, and the BMW.

  He pushed through the damp undergrowth at the back of the church, on the fringe of the copse. There was rubbish, plastic bags and lager cans. He was probably walking over layers of old graves here, he thought, strata of ancient mouldering corpses.

  He couldn’t see the girl. He felt a frustrated tightness in his lower belly.

  … But what if you do find her, Valler? What do you want?

  He should just walk back to the pub, take a piss, get in the BMW.

  He felt pulled apart – by the road to London, the girl – his father in his ridiculous robe, cowering when Valler had approached him.

  To stop the clamour in his head he plunged through the grass, ignoring the dew soaking into his shoes.

  He found a hole in the ground.

  It wasn’t railed off or marked: it was just a gaping mouth in the damp, worked earth.

  He remembered this now. Another piece of his childhood mythology. This was the crypt: even older than the rest of the church, long abandoned.

  He bent, wheezing a little, and peered inside.

  There were steps: steep, awkward-looking blocks. There was no sign of a light.

  He looked around. The girl was nowhere to be seen. She could only be in the crypt.

  He couldn’t find his lighter in his pockets. He pictured it sitting on the sticky pub table.

  He shouldn’t go down there. If he fell—

  The first step was the hardest, a good two feet deep and no handholds.

  Bracing his hands on the slimy walls, he worked his way down, from step to step. He had to tuck in his arms to force his shoulders and head into the hole. It was like some bizarre inverted birth.

  Deeper still. His head sank beneath the level of the turf.

  There was a stink of dampness and moss, of half-digested things. The sky shrank to a rectangle of silver-grey.

  A face, in the deeper darkness below. Shining like an oval medallion at the bottom of a pond.

  Then it was gone.

  He pushed on, breathing hard, impatiently working his way down the worn, slick steps.

  He reached the bottom. It was so unexpected he stumbled.

  There was no light save a dim greyness behind him, no sound save the scratch of his own breath. He raised his arms and stepped forward.

  Walls, damp and slick, to either side. He was in a tunnel.

  He took a step forward. Then another.

  He could scarcely get lost, darkness or not. It wasn’t even cold. It was like climbing through some rocky intestine.

  The last murky daylight glimmer died. He walked on, deeper.

  The beer seemed to be working at his temples now, filling his head with a banging pulse, obscuring the darkness with splashes of retinal blood.

  He didn’t have any firm intention. Nothing planned.

  He was strong. She was weak. He had money. Fifty quid was nothing to him, but would be a hell of a lot to a girl like that. Enough for—

  Enough for what, Valler?

  Nobody knew he was here.

  Those old boys in the pub wouldn’t remember him. He could be back in the BMW and gone in five minutes. After—

  After what?

  She was just a pretty heifer.

  On he walked. Obscurely tempted.

  He could feel a texture in the blocks that made up the walls. Parallel grooves, the characteristic of Roman-dressed stone. But, when he explored the joins in the walls, he found the stone blocks had been crudely cut, jammed together with gritty, crumbling mortar. This was stone mined by the Brittunculi from the abandoned towns of the Empire. Like gulls pecking over corpses.

  Valler’s fluttering fingers found a wall, ahead of his face. To his right, an open space. A corner, then.

  He stepped forward—

  Light.

  He threw his hands over his eyes and cried out.

  —But had there been just a glimpse of movement – a slim form, an oval face – ducking out of sight?

  He forced himself to open his blinking, streaming eyes.

  He was in a small chamber: an arched roof of stone blocks, a roughly levelled floor. The only light came from cressets - wicks floating in what smelled like tallow, set in recesses that were stained black with soot.

  The only light.

  And yet those primitive lamps had seemed, briefly, as bright as the sun.

  It was just dark-adaptation. He’d been taken in by a medieval special effect.

  He laughed, deliberately, out loud.

  His voice returned no echo.

  He walked forward.

  There was an altar here, just a crude block of dressed stone. Before it was a pit, dug in the earth, the size of a coffin.

  It looked to him like an ordeal pit.

  Aside from the tunnel, there was no way out of the chamber.

  He turned, letting his eyes become accustomed to the light. The cut-up Roman stones contained fragments of friezes, inscriptions, even bas-relief carving, sliced apart and jammed together.

  They were fragments of an image.

  As he looked round the room he could piece it together, like assembling a jigsaw.

  A young man kneeling on the back of a bull, which he had forced to its knees. Some kind of incised starburst effect around the man’s head. With one hand he was forcing back the bull’s head, and with the other he drove a sword into the bull’s body. A dog and a serpent leapt up to the wound to drink the blood, and a scorpion was collecting the bull’s semen.

  There was an inscription, in three pieces. DEO INVICTO SOLI MITHRAE.

  Valler, startled, knew the image. He had grown up with it, thanks to his father.

  This was the primeval bull: the source of all brute force and untamed vitality, the first creation of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Creation. And the god was releasing that flood of primordial, beneficial energy into the world.

  The god was Mithras: Lord of Light, protecting, avenging.

  The emperors had manned their Wall with dark-skinned men from the eastern provinces. The soldiers, far from home, had brought their own old gods to protect them from whatever untamed beasts lay to the unyielding north here.

  They had brought Mithras. DEO INVICTO, the Unconquered God.

  But the early bishops had reviled Mithras, Christ’s dark, ancient twin. They had banned his rites, burned his books, desecrated his temples. And thus, here was this image, a tauroctony, once found in every mithraeum in the Empire: a sacred tableau sliced to pieces to make up the walls of the crypt of this dismal church. A demonstration of Christ’s triumph.

  But maybe, in the end, the bishops had failed. Maybe Christ hadn’t prevailed here after all.

  His father told Valler he’d understand when he was old enough to join the Temple as a Raven, the lowest of the seven Grades. Old enough to descend into some dank cave like this one, and undergo the initiation ordeal.

  But Valler had understood already.

  He hated what he had glimpsed of the exclusively male, secretive, unforgivingly strict cult. He hated his father’
s absences and distance. He hated his dead mother’s bemused, tolerant Christianity, her readiness to forgive her husband’s eccentricities.

  … Or maybe, Valler, you just hate your own weakness. You could never survive a Mithraic initiation, could you? And maybe you just hated to witness your parents’ relationship, more flexible and more subtle than any you’ve proven capable of …

  His father’s disapproving, disappointed face superimposed itself on Mithras’s stone glare.

  His father’s face: filled with stubbornness, his refusal to give up the Temple, to move into the sheltered flat, to start waiting to die.

  His father’s face: as Valler drove his fist into it.

  His father used to be a big man: strict, always disappointed, always punishing. But he wasn’t big any more.

  His father’s face, at last: fixed with a glare. An unspoken promise of revenge. A look that had presaged a beating for the child Valler.

  But that didn’t matter a cold damn now. What could he do? Valler was the strong one now, and would take what he wanted.

  Valler had taunted him.

  Where is Mithras now, old man? Where is your protector, the Unconquered God? Gone. Dead two thousand years. As you will be, soon.

  His father’s face—

  He heard footsteps. Remote, echoing.

  It must be the girl.

  He felt blood surge in his loins. He stood in the middle of the crypt, hands huge and clammy at his sides.

  He must be crazy to have got himself in so deep. His car was separated from him by fifty feet of earth, London by three hundred miles.

  … But he’d seen the way she’d looked at him.

  His father’s face.

  His father would probably warn him off.

  Valler blood ran deep and wide here.

  For – it was said – a Mithraic Temple had survived in this lost corner of Northumberland, its small flames kept alive for two thousand years, by the descendants of a Sixth Legion centurion. A man who had never gone home.

  A man called Valerius.

  That was the family history, anyhow, the reason it mattered so much to his father.

  She might be your cousin.

  But even if she was, it didn’t matter. He had money. He would be gone in an hour.

  He had condoms.

  Footsteps at the base of the stairs.

  Heavy.

  It was the girl. It must be.