The Ghosts of Sleath

by James Herbert

  Ash murmured something in the darkness of the bedroom, but the words had no coherence; they were ill-formed, part of the dream.

  … and mercifully, he is alone again. A small glimmer appears in that blackness - the blackness that has no weight, no eddies or flows, but is equally as oppressive as the water that sought to take him - and soon it is joined by another, and then another, so that he sees they are candle flames. They multiply, become a mass of light that fills the room he is now in with its soft, unsteady glow. Yet there is no warmth from them, no comfort, only a gradual unveiling of further horror. For the light reveals stone coffins set on tiers around the black walls. But that is not the only horror. Before him, in the centre of the mausoleum - he knows this place, he has visited here in another time - is one more coffin, this one smaller than the others and made of rich, shiny wood, its interior plush with white satin. There is movement there, a little hand on the rim of the coffin. The child sits up and seeks him out, her wicked smile never wavering, her cold eyes never blinking …

  The bedsheets were damp with Ash’s sweat. Still in sleep, he pushed the covers away, leaving his chest bare to the night.

  He weeps in the dream and the tears at first blur, then dissolve the scene around him. And now he is by a broad expanse of water lit by moonlight. Its surface is calm, without even a breeze to ripple its stillness, but soon he begins to hear gentle cries, the voices seeming to be a great distance away, perhaps from the other side of the great lake. Yet somehow he knows this isn’t so; he knows the cries - the moans, the sighs, the grieving - are much closer. He knows these sounds come from beneath the great lake itself. The thin, almost translucent skin of the lake stirs. It shivers. It trembles. And the first hand breaks the surface, and is quickly followed by another, this one close enough to be from the same body. The wailing rises in pitch, although it is still contained by the water. Another hand emerges, the movement swift, sudden, and the fingers reach upwards, wetness running from them. Another hand. Another. And then the surface of the lake erupts as a million hands break through together. And the cries break through with them and the lake is a turmoil of sound and motion. The limbs rise until heads begin to appear, and their eyes are wide and their mouths are open and the heads turn towards him and they attempt to call his name but their voices are distorted as if their throats have been rotted by the water that has clogged them for so long. Yet even this is not the worst of the horror …

  He uttered a cry, a whimper.

  … for all the heads that stare across in that moonlit expanse of water are small …

  His leg kicked at the sheet.

  … and all those hands that claw the air are tiny …

  He tossed, he groaned.

  … and all those wide but little eyes still hold the terror of their own premature deaths.

  In sleep, he moaned a long, drawn-out ‘Noooo …’

  And the drowned children moan with him, pleading to be saved, imploring him to help them. But he knows he cannot, that it’s too late, they are already dead and nothing can save them anymore. And so they plead with him to join them in their watery crypt …

  Ash’s eyelids fluttered. He almost awoke. But sleep held its grip.

  The scene - the waving, imploring arms, the small pale heads bobbing on the water like spectral buoys, the silver-coloured lake - vanishes and he is in a field of stubble. He thinks he is alone - he feels desperately alone - but he sees a small figure in white standing by a group of trees in the distance. The little girl wears only one white ankle-sock and he calls her name, this calling hollow to his own ears as if he has not uttered the sound. ‘Juliet!’ She does not respond, for she is as the children in the lake. She is impassive because she is dead, and that is her revenge on him. He will see her - he will forever see her - but he will never be acknowledged. That is his punishment; and his dead sister’s retribution.

  The quietness of his room is broken by his mumblings. In his sleep he calls her name again and again.

  As he watches he hears the crumph of exploding flame and her ashen face is warmed by yellow light. He seeks the source of the fire and sees the burning haystack behind him, hears the screams from within, screams that turn to laughter, distant laughter, and when he searches for the child once more she is gone and in her place is a swirling storm of crisp leaves, spinning in the air … and inside the storm a form slowly takes shape. When the leaves scatter the mutilated figure of a man is left behind and the man’s drooling grimace is really a corrupted smile and the thoughts that came from him enter Ash’s mind and they are degenerate and dirty …

  Ash threw himself onto his side, his fist pounding once against the mattress. But still he did not wake, although a part of his subconscious was now alert to the nightmare.

  He runs from the abomination and as he runs a dry, brittle leaf brushes his cheek. He realizes the leaf, and the next one, and the next, have come from behind him as if in pursuit. He tries to increase his speed, but his footsteps only become slower, his legs heavier, his breathing harder. The leaves circle him, scratching his skin with their sharp edges, and he brushes them away from his face with his hands, continuing to flee, his movement becoming sluggish. He notices a redness spreading across his palms and fingers, and the redness is slick and shiny and he realizes it is blood …

  His back arched and his lips drew back across his teeth as though he were in agony. Consciousness, still far away at that moment, endeavoured to haul him from slumberous depths.

  He tries to swat away another leaf that has clung to his cheek like some blood-sucking parasite and this time he feels its substance is different: it’s soft, and long tendrils stirred by his own motion hang from it. He tears the raw and bloody meat from his face and dashes it to the ground, all the time moving, never allowing his exhaustion to bring him to a halt. He sees the dismembered hand before it attaches itself to his wrist and with a shriek he snatches it away, but even as he does so a deep red sliver of flesh hovers before him, its end trailing behind like a long, dripping tail and, searching for a natural home, the tongue tries to enter his open mouth. His clamped teeth stifle the scream and with both hands he pulls at the slithery flesh, turning his head aside at the same time. He throws the alien tongue away from him, but more and different lumps cling to his own flesh, arriving more rapidly and in greater numbers as though it is their intention to smother him completely, to use him as the infrastructure for their own eventual shape. He pulls, tears, pushes, but still they come, and he slips on something pulpy and slimy, something that is from inside a body, an organ that glistens and steams in the grass. He goes down and his fingers curl into the soil as he hides his face in the grass. He feels the weights on his back, his neck, his shoulders, his legs, his ankles, feels them slide over him to adjust their positions, to find a part of him on which to nestle, and he rolls over to crush them and cannot help the scream that erupts when he sees the air above filled with loose meat and organs, so many pieces, so many bits. And they land on him and he wonders, as they darken his vision, as they hinder his breathing, how many bodies have been torn asunder to make up all these cuts, these portions, these segments, and he tries to rise, using his elbows against the ground, but there are too many layers, they are too heavy, yet still he tries, for he knows if he succumbs to their load they will draw his life from him so that they can live as a whole once again. He resists them, his neck strains to lift his head, his shoulders shake with the effort, and his back is off the ground. But they insist, they bear down on him, filling his eyes and his mouth, and he screams and screams again, and he rises, rises, rises …

  And he awoke.

  He was frozen there in the darkness of the room, with only a slip of light from the hallway outside shining through the gap at the bottom of the door, and it was several moments before he realized he was sitting up in bed. His naked body dripped with perspiration and his breath came in sharp gasps. Only a dream, he told himself.

  ‘Only a dream,’ he said in a hushed, frightened voic
e. His breathing deepened, the trembling diminished. The dream visions lost their colour.

  He was awake, and he was safe. Safe from the nightmare.

  But if it was only a dream, and now he was awake, why was the little boy standing by the bed watching him? Why could he see him so clearly in the darkness?

  Why was the boy so still, so silent?

  And why was he now slowly fading … dissolving … to nothing …?

  18

  GRACE LOCKWOOD’S EYES snapped open.

  The single bedsheet that covered her was twisted and rumpled; one of her legs was exposed, bent at the knee so that the sheet lay across her hip. She stared at the ceiling, her mind a tumult of thoughts and images. The dream … it had been so real, so vivid; yet it had been so confused.

  She pushed the clammy covering away from her breasts and lay there in the darkness, calming her breathing, trying to make some sense of the after-images that continued to tumble through her mind; but as she concentrated, so the images scattered - scattered like dead leaves in a fierce wind.

  She remembered children’s faces, their eyes wide and pleading, tiny hands clawing the air as if beseeching … someone. Not her, though. She was merely a witness, somehow an observer to someone else’s nightmare. She remembered a fire so bright that in the dream she had shielded her eyes with her hands. She remembered another storm - no, no, this had not been a storm at all, but a cascade of human flesh.

  Grace shuddered, even though the visions were rapidly fading, their impact lessened, their reality undermined by her own reviving senses. But a memory remained while these others dwindled to vague impressions.

  She, the observer, was watching David Ash. Beyond him, by a group of trees, stood a small girl dressed in white. Incongruously, the girl wore only one white sock and she, too, was watching David.

  The child was smiling. But her smile was not pleasant.

  Grace wondered how she knew the little girl’s name was Juliet.

  19

  SHE KNEW IT WAS David before she even opened the door. She knew before he’d even rung the bell. Before she had heard the car draw up outside.

  She knew it was him because she had been expecting him. At least that was what she told herself as she went to the door.

  ‘David …’

  He looked gaunt standing there on the doorstep. No, not gaunt. Grace almost smiled as she reconsidered. There was a bleakness to his stare, a darkness around his eyes. David Ash looked haunted.

  ‘Can I talk to you and your father?’ he asked.

  My God, she thought, that bleakness was even in his voice. ‘Of course. Father’s in the garden.’

  She stood aside to allow him through, but he entered and stopped beside her. Now she saw confusion in his eyes. And something else, something locked away but not quite hidden. She sensed it was fear.

  ‘Have you heard the news in the village?’

  Dread seeped through her, long cold fingers that dragged at her spirit, and suddenly, irrationally, she wanted to walk away from him, to close her ears against whatever he was about to tell her. Something more was wrong in Sleath and she did not want to hear of it, because she shared the fear that was in David Ash. She could not comprehend it, but neither could she deny it.

  ‘I got back from the community hall a little while ago,’ she told him, ‘but I didn’t hear of anything while I was there.’

  ‘It’s only just breaking. The landlord at the Black Boar told me a gamekeeper was killed in the woods last night. He was shot through the heart by an arrow from a crossbow.’

  ‘Oh dear God,’ she said and Ash reached out and held her arm to steady her. ‘Not Jack Buckler, surely?’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘He was such a gentle man, so good with the animals …’

  ‘That was the name the landlord was told. The police contacted Ginty to see if any strangers were in the bar last night, or anyone behaving suspiciously. He told me because he had to let them know I was the only guest staying at the inn. No doubt they’ll want a word with me at some stage.’

  ‘I don’t understand, David. Yesterday someone was almost beaten to death, a few weeks ago a boy was drowned in his bath - and now this.’

  ‘I need to know what else has happened here. Not just recently, but over the past few years.’

  ‘But there’s no link, there’s nothing to connect any of these things.’

  ‘Only Sleath itself,’ he said.

  ‘How could -’

  He cut her off. ‘I’ve no idea. But sometimes a place - it could even be a room, or a house - can acquire an atmosphere that’s conducive to evil.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Believe me, it happens. Will you tell your father I’m here?’

  ‘I’ll take you to him.’ She hesitated though, taking a half-step towards him instead, so that their bodies were close. ‘You look … tired. Are you all right?’

  ‘I slept badly, that’s all.’

  And did you dream, David? she asked silently. Was it his dream she’d glimpsed? ‘Who’s Juliet?’ she said, this time voicing the question.

  He appeared stunned. His eyes searched hers and, for a moment, the fear she thought she had sensed earlier shed its chains and ran rampant. It was controlled within seconds and his gaze became cold, isolated.

  ‘How did you find out about her?’ His tone was so emotionless that Grace felt a shiver run through her.

  ‘I dreamt about you last night,’ she said to him. ‘It was confused, I couldn’t make any sense of it. I can’t even remember much, but I do know I saw a little girl watching you. She never spoke, she didn’t do anything, but somehow I knew her name was Juliet. Perhaps you spoke to her, or called out her name - I just don’t remember.’

  That cold stare transfixed her for several more moments before he lowered his head and said: ‘Juliet was my sister. She drowned when she was eleven years old.’

  It came as a further shock to Grace. Yes, she had seen water, someone struggling; she had almost felt the water choking her own lungs. But the girl had nothing to do with that. Like Grace, she had only been there in the dream as an observer, a witness.

  She found her voice. ‘I’m sorry, David. I had no idea …’

  ‘No, how could you?’

  She was startled by his bitterness. When he said nothing more Grace turned away and walked down the hall towards the rear of the house.

  ‘Grace.’

  She stopped and looked back.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘It’s just that, well … things have happened that I’d rather forget.’

  ‘I sense them, David. I don’t know how, but I can feel some of the misery you’ve been through. Last night I think I saw into your own dream. Your nightmare, I should say.’

  ‘Did you …’ He looked beyond her. ‘Did you see all of it?’

  ‘It was too muddled, there was too much happening. Falling leaves, children’s faces …’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘The girl is the only clear thing I remember. She was dressed in white. And there was something else, something I can’t quite recall … Oh yes. Yes. The girl was wearing only one sock. Silly to remember something like that.’

  But Ash didn’t appear to think so. He was staring at her so intensely she felt like turning away again, turning away and walking out into the bright sunshine, for never before had the house seemed so cheerless, not even on the day her mother had been buried.

  Ash spoke. ‘Last night you told me you weren’t psychic. I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘Surely I’d be aware if I were,’ she said quickly.

  ‘It might be a gift - some call it a curse - that’s lain dormant in you for most of your life. Maybe it was something you had when you were a kid, then lost it over the years. Sometimes adult things crowd out certain perceptions. Or maybe you, yourself, denied the faculty because it frightened you. Believe me, I’m someone who knows the truth of it.’

  ‘You’re psychic yourself.’ It wasn’t a question.r />
  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was a sometimes thing.’

  ‘Events - traumas - can trigger it off.’

  ‘And you think that’s happening with me?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. But yesterday, when I first met you at the church, something happened between us.’

  ‘I felt as if I’d been hit by a thunderbolt. Are you suggesting that you and I have some kind of psychic link?’ She recalled the experience before she’d entered the restaurant last night and a similar feeling only minutes ago before he’d arrived at the house, a ‘knowing’ of his presence; neither one could be described as a thunderbolt, but they were peculiar sensations, all the same.

  Ash had followed her down the hallway so that now he was close to her. She laid a hand against his chest. ‘You did dream of Juliet, didn’t you?’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘And other things.’

  ‘A storm of some kind? Children’s faces?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had no desire to describe all those dream-visions in detail.

  ‘What does it all mean, David? Why should I react in such a way to you?’

  He touched her fingers against his chest. ‘It isn’t me, Grace. It’s the village itself. Something’s going on here that I don’t understand yet. These incidents - the drowning of Simon Preddle, the boy who was almost beaten to death yesterday, and now the gamekeeper who was killed last night - those are physical manifestations. The metaphysical manifestations are the ghosts seen by your father, Ellen Preddle, Ruth Cauldwell. And by myself.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I saw - I think I saw - the ghost of a little boy last night.’