The Ghosts of Sleath

by James Herbert

  Ash caught her scent, that woman’s issue that was so potent. He needed her badly - he ached at his centre for her - but he could not resist this tantalizing prelude, for it had as much to do with homage as it did with lust. He wanted to please her, and he wanted to taste her.

  She shuddered when his lips reached her and his kiss there was as tender as any kiss could be. When his tongue stabbed gently into her, opening her, wetness joining wetness, her arms spread outwards and her hands clutched at the sheets. He explored the outer edges, probing the fleshy folds that protected her, titillating nerve endings, moving higher to find the inner nipple, curling the tip of his tongue around the tiny, hard swelling, arousing it as he had aroused her breasts, making it come alive, erect.

  And as he made love to her in this most intimate of ways, an abstractedness filled his mind; his thoughts gently began to dissolve and melt into hers as they had when he and Grace had kissed earlier that day. It was a brief flow for, like a sea tide, his thoughts withdrew momentarily to wait for the next surge.

  Grace was helpless, pinned there by a muscle that had scant force but great power. Her legs opened wider as she drew in a breath that wheezed in her throat, and when he glided deeper into her, his tongue flexing against the inner walls that themselves were moving with rhythmic restlessness, her hands uncurled from the sheets and held his head, fingers sliding into his untidy hair to take grip, using him. She cried out, a sound that had nothing to do with pain but all to do with pleasure, and she knew she could not take much more of this, that juices inside her were beginning to flow too freely, her movement was becoming too vigorous. She needed him completely when that dam of ecstasy was breached, she wanted his rapture to arrive with hers. She pulled at him, calming her own motion as she did so, and he understood.

  Ash rose, his belt undone and clothing quickly discarded as Grace shifted across the bed so that only her ankles and feet were off the edge. The sight of her lying there - her perfect breasts free from the dishevelled shirt, the skirt pulled high over her parted thighs, but shadowing the small, dark mound of hair that fell between her legs - left him breathless. She watched him from the bed, an alluring, heavy-lidded haziness in her eyes, and raised a hand towards him.

  He went to her, lowering himself gently, pushing himself into her, slowly, smoothly, feeling little resistance, deliberately taking time with the intrusion so that there would be no pain for her, penetrating until he had no more to give, his hips were tight beneath hers. Her hands were like claws at his back as she writhed beneath him and her breath was hot against his cheek as he thrust and withdrew, thrust and withdrew.

  ‘David, oh David …’

  A new, heightened delirium took charge of his mind and his consciousness sped into hers in emulation of his physical penetration; but with this mental ingress there was no withdrawal, no pulling back, there was only a forward thrusting into a place of few boundaries. It was as before, when they had probed each other’s mind in her father’s study, yet so much stronger now because Grace had given herself up to him, physically and emotionally: she was content to allow him into her consciousness, for she was too lost in the pleasure of their lovemaking, too absorbed by its wonder, to send her thoughts into his. He floated in her psyche while their bodies created the mutual joy.

  Ash glimpsed the images, the memories, he experienced her exquisite joy of this moment, all the turmoil that was inside her consciousness, and he travelled on, without lingering, aware of his own physical sensations, but never distracted by them. The vast grey, cloudy area he had viewed earlier that day loomed up before him, so familiar now with its tumbling vapours of denial. A small child’s voice came to him from beyond that gaseous barrier and this, too, was familiar, for he had heard it before. It was Grace’s voice, and it was frightened, appealing for release. Once again, he felt that dragging resistance, as if ethereal hands were holding him back; but he was stronger this time and Grace had given herself up to him. He went onwards.

  Wetness had gathered at the corners of her eyes and a tear, disturbed by her movement, spilled over to glide across her cheekbone into her hair. She was frantic, almost unable to draw breath, for never - never - had she known such agonizing bliss. A long, shivering moan escaped her and her whole being began to clench tight. Every tendon, every muscle, seemed to be drawing itself inwards, and the secretions inside her flowed, became a torrent, all rushing to that one point in the centre of her body, the place she now shared with this wonderful, extraordinary man. The moan diminished to a thin, drawn-out, euphoric cry.

  The tenseness in Ash’s chest stretched to the rest of his body, seizing his muscles so that they were rigid in his limbs and stomach. His hips worked even more forcefully and he buried his hands in her hair as her head tilted backwards and her neck arched in the final throes before ecstasy. She collapsed away from him as if all her muscles had suddenly loosened, but immediately came back at him, almost lifting his body. He stayed with her, matching her motion, their rhythm perfect, falling, rising, falling, rising, her feet now on the edge of the bed to give support. This union between them began to peak and together they soared to a new level of rapture, reaching, it seemed, towards a blinding white light.

  And the part of Ash that was remote from this - although it heard her cries, it felt his pleasure - plunged through the barrier that stood between her conscious and subconscious and he saw - his mind saw - the memory that Grace had kept hidden from herself for so very long. And as the final paroxysm of complete glorious fulfilment swept through their thrusting bodies, he discovered her secret, he understood her own self-duplicity …

  32

  THE IRISHMAN’S SHADOW was cast long and black across the chapel’s stone floor, and the colours around it, the blended reds, greens and blues that were reflected through the stained-glass windows high in the wall behind him, were now less vibrant as the sun sank lower in the hazy sky outside. Phelan lingered there among scattered papers, his brow furrowed, his body shaking.

  So, he roared to himself, the whole business started with the monstrosity entombed in this chapel, the first Lockwood to govern Sleath! A knight of the Crusades, venerated by fools and feared by those who were wise to his unholy course. Phelan breathed a tremulous sigh and turned his attention to the stern countenance of the sculptured warrior; he considered the black soul once held by the husk that now lay beneath its own stone image. No soldier of God, this one; more a mercenary of the Devil. A scholar, undoubtedly, and someone who had studied not only the black arts of the Egyptians, but also the occult ideologies of the Chaldeans and Babylonians, such knowledge to be used on his return from foreign wars when he had been rewarded with lands and governance of his own.

  Phelan picked up his silver-handled cane and hurriedly left the tiny chapel, entering the main body of the church. He walked along the side aisle, his steps wearied, his senses shocked. He paused by the fifth row of pews, turning to look back at the altar. In the name of God, his mind cried out, how could these things happen? How could they be allowed to happen? There came no answer. He rested in the nearest pew, placing his cane against the seat in front.

  The colours of the high window behind the altar were now subdued and the altar itself seemed bleak, almost sterile, in its simplicity. How apt, he thought, for this temple was no more than a vacant shell that mocked the Lord’s glory rather than honoured it.

  He drew in a long, shivery breath and as his thoughts ranged over the history of this place called Sleath, so the shadows grew deeper around him.

  The jumbled writings of Sir Gareth Lockwood were full of obsessions; they hinted at strange rites, ceremonies designed to corrupt rather than enhance, rituals that only the degenerate could perform and endure. This depraved knight boasted of how he had brought the Mysteries back with him from Egypt, after the thwarted Fifth Crusade, of how he had shared that forbidden mysticism with others of his kind - or others he had persuaded to his ways - and of practices that more than once had caused Phelan to slam the journals shut i
n disgust, only to go back to them when his nerves and his anger had settled. One of the basic tenets of this clandestine order created by Lockwood was that the dead, through certain evocations and rituals, could encounter the living. One particular rite learned from the Egyptians was the rejoining of a severed head to its body so that the person could live again, and Phelan could only wonder how many times this had been practised, and how many wretched victims had given their lives to this worthless and insane cause. Just as worrying was the insinuation in those crazed writings that occasionally the exercise had indeed been successful. How had the man deluded himself so? Was he so mad he truly believed in the impossible? Beyond doubt he had many followers, so how could they be witness to this ridiculous miracle of regeneration? In his journal Lockwood also claimed to converse with the dead and in particular with those spirits specially indoctrinated into his ways before their departure from this world, those still susceptible to his influence. And worse, he considered children to be the ideal ‘agents’ for such communion, for he professed that their souls were more vibrant and their will more malleable.

  Phelan leaned forward, his feet on the pew’s cushioned kneeler, and rested his head in his hands as he thought of the slaughter perpetrated by Sleath’s first lord. These innocents had had their throats cut, had been starved, poisoned and subjected to all manner of perversions so that their master could pursue his bizarre purposes. Surely villagers were aware of the evil in their midst? Could the disappearance of children and loved ones have been so common in those troubled times - or at least, not so uncommon - that it was accepted? Only a few years before Lockwood’s arrival thousands of young ones had been led away to foreign parts on the Children’s Crusade to the Holy Land, many of them dying from malnutrition or sold into slavery on the way, never to return to their homes. Had this dreadful episode in history contributed to the sanction of such losses, or were the people of Sleath merely too afraid to voice their suspicions? An even more sinister notion struck him: Could the villagers themselves have cooperated with their lord and master? What value had human life in that harsh century when food, warmth, and the means to stay alive were all that mattered?

  The disordered writings defeated clear analysis, but the Irishman, against his own better judgement, wondered if Sir Gareth truly had achieved his goal, this communication with and the direction of the dead, the knight presumably gaining some kind of divine - or diabolic - power by doing so. Oh, he implied his success, but was that merely the false bragging of a lunatic, the demented scribbling of someone whose own madness led to grandiose self-deception; or was there genuinely some value to his cryptic claims? If the latter, then why veil his own dubious accomplishment in coded ramblings? Perhaps secrecy was a prime rule of the Mysteries, the cabalistic nature of the occult.

  Phelan straightened in the pew, then relaxed his spine against the seat’s backrest. He noticed that the church was growing darker around him, the shadows more subfusc. And was it cooler than before, had the old building retained none of the day’s heat? He rubbed his bony knees, more for the sake of activity than blood circulation.

  Working through the afternoon, and helped earlier by David Ash, he had managed to bring some order to the disarranged and, worse, ravaged papers and ledgers, and had organized the journals into successive historical periods. Much was missing in terms of progression down the centuries, and even more had been rendered illegible, or beyond repair, by the vicar’s vandalism. But time and time again, Phelan had been drawn to particular stages in Sleath’s development, a puzzle even to himself until he realized his own psychic ability was guiding his mind towards details relevant to his searches. It was as if certain passages in the texts exuded a dark energy which his own extra sense had become attuned to and on each occasion that this happened he took extra care to decipher the awkward writings. Ash had been perplexed, but soon accepted the Irishman’s strange ability as more elements of Sleath’s past had been unravelled.

  Sir Gareth Lockwood’s outpourings had ended abruptly and Phelan assumed that this signified the man’s death or chronic ill health, perhaps the final decline into utter dementia. By then his script had become completely illegible and even Phelan’s psychic ability did not enable him to pick up any more than a sense of tortured confusion from the faded pages. Unfortunately the evil had not ended with this ungodly knight’s passing, for it seemed that other generations of Lockwoods had continued with the Black Arts, no doubt inspired by their ancestor, his base corruption carried through in the bloodline.

  However, it was not until almost a hundred years after Sir Gareth’s apparent demise that the wickedness became evident once more, the outrages then chronicled by the depraved lord’s descendant, Hugo Lockwood. How opportune for this heir to evil when the Black Death had swept through the country, devastating cities, wiping out whole villages, and allowing him to use its terror for his own ends. The plague, carried by the fleas of black rats, had spread from Asia to China, and on through mediaeval Europe, wiping out millions in its wake, eventually reaching England, bringing with it a new order called the Flagellants, men and women who literally whipped themselves into a frenzy, using metal-tipped scourges, to atone for the sins they believed had brought God’s wrath down upon them. Like the pestilence itself, these Flagellants had proliferated throughout Europe, although their influence in England was limited. Whether ideology or cunning caused the lord of Sleath to embrace their masochistic ways, the writings gave no clue, but embrace them he did.

  Phelan gave a slight shake of his head in despair. How easy it must have been for this new Lockwood, now the village’s spiritual leader as well as its master, to convince his people that punishment meant appeasement to their Lord God, and how easy to snatch the living when death was at everybody’s door. At the first sign of illness - any illness - the sufferer was whisked away, never to be seen again. And who could complain, what relative or loved one could protest, when the country’s entire population was so cruelly being decimated? How the author had gloated over the deceptions, and how lovingly he had detailed the manner and improper purpose of each victim’s death. A shudder ran through the Irishman as he considered the damnable passages of text he had been forced to read through, those tortures, slayings, defilements and sexual violations therein recorded as if testament to something prodigious.

  After a while he had insisted that Ash return to the inn to rest, aware that the investigator had hardly slept the night before. Besides, there was not much more that Ash could do here in St Giles’ now that the records had been sorted through and laid out in some semblance of order, those papers and books dealing with the mundane accounts of village and church expenditure and announcements of births, marriages and deaths set to one side. Reluctantly, the investigator had agreed, leaving Phelan to continue his work with the arrangement that they would meet later at the inn to confer. Never had the Irishman felt quite so alone as when he heard the porch door close behind Ash.

  There were many gaps in Sleath’s history - the Reformation apparently had meant little to the village folk here, or their lord - but the English Civil War around the mid-1600s brought with it a renewed programme for secret activities and foul play. Again and again, Phelan mused, history had conspired with generations of Lockwoods and their sinister objectives. In this particular era of unrest, young men were sent off to fight an internal war that few would have had stomach for. How many of those reluctant conscripts from these parts failed to reach the separate armies of the King or the Parliamentarians, disappearing without trace, casualties not of war, but of something even more insidious? Who would know, save for the person who had organized their conscription, the master these unfortunates served?

  Phelan’s head tilted back and he stared into the church’s high, vaulted ceiling. Images of script and events weaved before him and he realized there was too much to take in, too much to comprehend. His temples throbbed with the effort of it all. It wasn’t just a matter of reading or translating words, for his sixth sense had
picked up far more, revealing to him confused scenes of terrible malevolence. He began to wish he had bid the investigator stay, for each new horror unearthed deepened his own dread; Ash’s presence might have strengthened his own resolve to remain in this iniquitous place.

  It was so peculiar that generations of Lockwoods should feel obliged to log these outrages, as if they represented an inventory of wickedness, their sum total adding up to … what? It was beyond him. Could such an accumulation have any purpose, or any consequence? Unless they served as a guide - perhaps even as some warped kind of inspiration - to future Lockwoods.

  He reflected on another tragic episode, this some twenty-odd years after the Civil War and around the time of London’s great fire. It had been recorded by possibly one of Edmund Lockwood’s vilest ancestors, Robert Guy Lockwood. London was rife with violence, prostitution, law-breaking - and bubonic plague; only the fire that swept through its squalid streets had purged it of its own degeneration. Retribution for its sins, this Lockwood had proclaimed to his followers, the Almighty’s vengeance on the profane and the diseased, the sick of mind and imperfect of body. Aberrancy of soul had manifested itself in abnormality of health and limb, this pious hypocrite had declared, and a visitation of fire and plague would be on Sleath itself if they themselves did not cleanse the corruption.

  Such inglorious cunning! Such guileful distortion! He had led his gullible cohorts on a purging of all that was ‘bad’ in the village and its surrounds in what he described as ‘the night of purification’. Sick infants, children maimed by accident or deformed from birth, the unsound of mind - these unfortunates who perhaps were the results of Sleath’s own iniquities and perversions - were dragged from their homes or snatched from their cots, their families, those with courage enough to resist beaten into submission. The victims were carried or dragged to the black pit at the village’s centre: the pond of unnatural depths. There they were drowned, their pitiful cries dashed from their lips by cudgels as they desperately tried to cling to the banks.