The Ghosts of Sleath

by James Herbert

  Reluctantly, Ash knelt down. But he moved forward a little as he did so.

  Phelan raised his silver eyebrows. ‘Well, now, you were going to give us a hint as to your connection with the Lockwood family. Which one had the bastard who was to be your progenitor?’

  Beardsmore seemed delighted to tell. ‘None other than Sebastian,’ he said. ‘Quite renowned - no, no, notorious, I should say - in his time.’

  ‘Ah yes. A member of the Hellfire Club no less.’

  ‘A member? Not at all. The reverend would tell you, if he were able. Sebastian Lockwood was the founder of the Hellfire Club and Sir Francis Dashwood, who has always taken the credit - or the blame - was merely one of his acolytes. And let me add this: nobody at that time, nor this, knew the true extent of their activities, but I think at least you might now have an idea.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I have.’

  Phelan seemed reflective, but Ash noticed that he, too, had closed the gap between himself and Beardsmore. While the tall man was watching Phelan, Ash pressed the fingers of one hand against the stone floor and raised a knee in a sprinter’s stance. He tensed his body, ready to spring.

  ‘No doubt they were a shoddy lot,’ the Irishman went on. ‘Like the Lockwood family itself, I should say. Yes, indeed, a depraved bunch of lunatics, one an’ all.’

  ‘Be extremely careful,’ Beardsmore advised.

  Ash wondered at Phelan’s change of tactics. Was he deliberately needling Beardsmore because he realized the situation was drawing to a conclusion and a move against the gunman had to be made soon? The Irishman’s eyes flicked this way and that, as though something other than Beardsmore was worrying him. A vibration ran through Ash’s fingers, and he remembered when he had touched the walls upstairs. Was this what Phelan was waiting for? Did he sense that something was soon to happen to Lockwood Hall?

  The Irishman obviously had no intention of letting up. ‘And d’you not think that madness has been passed on to every generation of Lockwoods? Yes, I suppose it’s well ensconced in the family genes by now, the insanity and the wickedness. Now, who would have been the slut involved with Sebastian? A maid to the manor house? One of his society ladies? No, probably a cheap whore from the town or, knowing the man’s baseness, some mindless and toothless hag from the village, someone of no account, you can be sure. But then, you’d know the answer.’

  ‘I think you should be very quiet, little man,’ Beardsmore warned again, levelling the shotgun at Phelan’s head.

  Dust drifted from the ceiling, causing candles to gutter and smoke.

  Phelan was relentless, his tone wheedling. ‘Didn’t you pay someone to trace your family tree? I’m sure your wealth could have afforded the finest genealogist. Isn’t that how you discovered your true identity? I bet the whore even kept her own records just to make it easy for some future person to trace his or her ancestor. Or d’you wonder if she intended to blackmail Sebastian? He would probably have laughed in her face. Or had her horse-whipped. What would he care about some slut and her offspring? Fornication with the woman wouldn’t entitle her bastard to call himself a Lockwood. If Sebastian were alive today, sure wouldn’t he spit in your face?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Beardsmore hissed.

  ‘No, he’d not allow any old riff-raff to join the clan. And that’s what you are, after all. Someone just pretending to be what he’s not and could never be. In their own deviant way the Lockwoods were special, maybe - as you, yourself, pointed out - maybe even brilliant. And isn’t that what you really want to be a part of, a cut above your fellow man? Eh? Am I right?’

  Beardsmore raised the shotgun to his shoulder. But he smiled and pointed it at Grace’s head.

  Phelan faltered. ‘Not … not the girl. She’s a Lockwood, man. You can’t kill your own kind.’

  Beardsmore grinned and took a step towards Grace, the weapon still at his shoulder. ‘You’ve just spent an awful long time telling me I’m no relation. Besides, she should have died years ago, when she was a child. Even then I could tell she would never be a true Lockwood. As I said, she was a weak link, but still one that could be used. She could never be like her father. Like me …’

  He touched the gun to her neck.

  Ash launched himself forward, but Beardsmore had been expecting the move, for even as the investigator was rising he had turned to face him.

  The stock of the shotgun struck the side of Ash’s head and white light exploded in his vision. He felt himself falling, his senses numbed.

  His eyes closed when he hit the floor and when he opened them again nothing in the room was steady. He blinked, opened them again.

  And saw the end of the shotgun resting against Grace’s neck once more. He heard the first click as Beardsmore’s finger pulled back one of the twin triggers.

  But he also heard something else.

  39

  THEY ALL HEARD IT.

  Beardsmore, the twin muzzles of the shotgun still pressed against Grace’s neck, scanned the chamber with suspicious eyes, while Grace, herself, waited with her eyes closed, her body rigid, chin slightly raised. Phelan watched only her.

  The Reverend Lockwood became restless; he flinched and shifted in his seat like a man whose nightmare was beyond tolerance. His chest began to heave and his shoulders twitched; slowly his head lifted and a dazed kind of consciousness returned to those pale, vapid eyes. This new dream he found himself in offered little comfort.

  The sounds were distant at first, but approaching, and soon they could be recognized as voices raised in some discordant anthem. The advance brought with it other strains, sibilations, footsteps, a gabble that rose to a tumult; a dissonant counter-point joined the loudening chorus, music from another era, heard by Ash and Grace when they had entered Lockwood Hall, but played with vigour rather than skill. It seemed to come from the corridors and halls above, from the ruined grand rooms themselves, and it seeped through the black ceiling and from the shadowed walls around them.

  They heard the hymn too and its plaintive line was distinct from all other sounds.

  Seamus Phelan had strayed from the rest of the group, his head cocked slightly as he listened.

  Beardsmore’s reaction was more frantic. The gun was lowered as he turned in one direction, and then another. ‘What is it?’ he said, and there was fear in his voice.

  ‘Listen to the words,’ the Irishman spoke as if mildly rebuking an inattentive pupil. ‘I recognize that hymn, don’t you?’

  ‘We heard it at the empty school,’ Ash told him.

  ‘Ah.’ Phelan spoke the words they could hear: ‘“They buried my body and they thought I’d gone, but I am the dance and I still go on.” D’you see what they’re telling us? It isn’t an old hymn by any means, but the spirits have learned it from the newer ones. Quite fascinating.’ He smiled, looking from face to face to see if they shared his appreciation. ‘It tells their story, do y’see? “It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.” D’you understand what they’re saying? It’s the reason for the hauntings.’

  ‘You’re mad.’ Beardsmore shook the weapon at Phelan.

  ‘Ah, mebbe so, mebbe so.’ The Irishman seemed almost amused. ‘“I am the life that’ll never, never die”,’ he said along with the hymn. ‘It’s damn appropriate, I’ll give ’em that.’ His expression altered. He swung round to Ash, who was now half-crouched on the floor. ‘It’s time we were leaving, David. I’ve a dreadful fear of what’s about to happen.’

  The clamour rose to a deafening pitch and Grace clapped her hands to her ears again, this time deliberately. Tears reflected the soft lights.

  The walls pulsed and dust burst from them, billowing out into the room.

  ‘What do they want?’ Beardsmore’s mouth remained gaping as he continued to wheel about, the gun now raised defensively.

  Phelan’s reply was calm enough, but he had started to make his way back to Grace and her father. ‘Retribution, I should think,’ he said over the commotion.

  The walls shuddered v
iolently as if giant battering rams had punched them from behind. The movement was accompanied by a thunderous crash, and everything in the chamber shook. Tapestries fluttered, candles juddered and toppled.

  Grace sank to the floor and Ash saw her father reach forward to touch her hair. He watched helplessly, his head still reeling from the blow he’d taken, as Beardsmore stepped towards her with the shotgun held low at his waist.

  ‘You can have her!’ he yelled into the air. ‘She’s a Lockwood. Here, I give her to you!’

  ‘No!’ Ash shouted as the end of the shotgun was jabbed against Grace’s temple. He started to rise.

  But Edmund Lockwood had understood Beardsmore’s intent, for he had seen the hatred and the panic in his distant kinsman’s eyes. And he knew why the ghosts of Sleath had come to this place. He understood so much now. It had all been so wrong, this interference in God’s way, but neither the sins nor the proclivities could be passed on, each generation to its own; every man, woman or child possessed self-will, and the corruption of a soul could only begin by choice. Grace, unlike her mother, would not pay for an election he, himself, had made.

  He weakly raised his hand against his daughter’s assailant, aware that the sickness of his soul had led to the atrophy of his flesh. Nevertheless, he gathered whatever strength remained to him and levered himself from the chair.

  No longer stooped, his bearing as straight and as tall as the man who stood before him, the clergyman grasped the gun barrel and lifted it from his daughter’s face, pulling it towards himself as he did so.

  Beardsmore’s finger jerked against both triggers, and the blasts unified, became one, the noise overriding all other sounds.

  Grace felt the heat from the fire-bursts that bloomed from the weapon, and her eyes blinked against the sudden glare. She did not see the disintegration of her father’s head, nor did she feel the bloodied lumps that splattered into her hair. She screamed because there could only be one outcome to the gun’s roar.

  Edmund Lockwood’s gnarled and crippled hands remained locked around the heated double-barrel, even though there was no brain left to instruct them, and it was the gunman, himself, who released his own grip. Beardsmore watched in horror as his unintended victim slowly toppled backwards. The heavy wooden butt of the weapon clattered against the stone floor.

  Like driven steam, clouds of vapour poured into the room and candle flames flickered, tapestries flapped against the walls. The noise renewed itself, filling the space with its insistent chanting, its wailings and whisperings, its music and its footsteps. The walls began to tremble, their pulse occasionally broken by a furious juddering; even the floor quaked as if picking up the resonance from some seismic disturbance far below.

  Ash hauled himself to his feet and hurried to Grace, who appeared to be in deep shock. Phelan joined him and together they pulled her up.

  ‘We mustn’t stay here any longer,’ the Irishman said close to Ash’s ear.

  ‘What in God’s name is happening?’ Ash yelled back, slipping an arm around Grace’s waist.

  ‘Not in God’s name,’ came the barely heard reply. ‘Their power is drawn from another source. And you and the girl are part of it. You’re both psychic catalysts, like others in Sleath. When you arrived, you only added to their force.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Ash shook his head incredulously.

  ‘No time to discuss it now, boy. Let’s be on our way.’

  They started to drag Grace towards the entrance, but a hand swiped at Phelan’s neck, shoving him aside. Ash winced as his hair was caught from behind and he was forced backwards. A clenched fist struck him on the side of the head.

  He dropped to the floor once more, but this time rolled over onto his back, and then over again. A foot stamped the space he had just vacated and as he came up on one knee he saw the huge bulk of Beardsmore looming over him. Without waiting to be felled again he threw himself forward, the top of his head aimed at his attacker’s midriff. Beardsmore staggered back, his legs taking fast, retreating steps, and Ash drove onwards, his hands grasping the other man’s clothing.

  Tall candles on thick posts were sent toppling, and Ash’s shoes dug into the dusty floor for leverage. The long stone-topped table was at Beardsmore’s back and he collapsed onto it, sprawling there while Ash struck at him with a torrent of blows that were as unrelenting as they were desperate. Despite the punches raining down on him, Beardsmore was aware of a peculiar vibration running through his shoulders, coursing down his spine. Frightened by the sensation, he pushed Ash away.

  Ash stumbled back, managing to keep his balance and startled by the big man’s strength. He swooped up a fallen candlestick holder and raised it as a weapon, ready to launch himself into the attack again. But he stopped mid-step.

  Beardsmore was staring past Ash at the entrance to the chamber, his mouth agape, his eyebrows raised in a look of almost comical surprise. Tenuous drifts of mist swirled around him and powdered dust continued to float from the ceiling so that his hair and shoulders were covered in a fine grey layer.

  Ash turned to find Grace and Phelan also watching the wide opening to the chamber.

  The mists had become yellow-tainted clouds, the fog that had smothered the village now invading these secret cellars, as if earlier tendrils had been no more than antennae for the mass. Amidst the rolling, tumid vapours were odd shapes, configurations of dust and shadow and mist itself, umbras that sought to resemble the human form, but never completing the image, misshaping and melding into other conformations, never still, always moving. Their advent had been announced by the continuing clamour - the ululation of voices and music and stampings - the disordered declaration now given tenuous and disarranged portraiture. Inchoate faces presented themselves inside the tumult, loose shimmerings that soon lost their arrangements and dissolved amorphously back into the broil. The vision lay awesome and grim before them.

  Steadily the accumulation began to surge into the chamber, following its flimsy harbingers, flowing over the curled body, the dead thing whose soul was not among their legions but secure in another place that was neither hell nor paradise, spreading into the great subterranean chamber to purl and sweep, touching the walls, dimming the candle flames, circling the people who stood transfixed, its incoherent callings persisting all the while in their outrage. The gloom began to fill with chimerical spectres, their likeness to earthly form still tentative, their patterns sheer, without substance, but nevertheless more delineated than before, the assembly swelling so that it seemed all the ghosts of Sleath had been assigned to this sanctum.

  A nebulous veil brushed Ash’s cheek, its feel so glacial his skin prickled as if with sudden frost, and he saw Grace recoil, as though she, too, had been touched.

  Beardsmore flailed his arms to disperse the mists that swarmed around him. His large hands dispelled emerging faces, scattered transparent hands that reached for him. But more shapes took their place, clamouring around him as though he were chosen, peculiar to the others, the wailings increasing, the sibilation of their breeze like a harsh sighing.

  A hand, this one real, heavy with substance, clamped on Ash’s shoulder.

  ‘Come, David,’ Phelan shouted above the uproar. ‘No more time to lose.’

  ‘Grace …?’

  ‘More bewildered than you, I’m thinking. And in deep shock.’

  She was standing as before, watching the mists and the wraiths within them pour into the room. Her dirty hands were held to her face and when Ash drew near he saw her lips were moving. He could not hear her words, for they were as nothing against the cacophony of other sounds.

  Even when Ash called her name and pulled her to him she seemed lost to something else, no recognition in her eyes, no acknowledgement of his embrace. Her gaze followed the flow, her head craning round to look past him. A force pushed at the three figures, a power as invisible as the wind, causing them to lurch. Both men steadied Grace as she almost went down.

  ‘Oh, God help him …’ P
helan was looking back at Beardsmore, who leaned against the stone table, one hand gripping the edge, the other still swiping at the busy air before him. A flap of skin hung from his forehead.

  The whole chamber began to tremor violently. Candles toppled, dust fell in great showers from the ceiling. A grating of stone rumbled around the room.

  A fallen candle, still burning, lay at the foot of one of the alcoves and its light caught movement inside. Ash watched mesmerized as something shuffled forward from the darkness. His hold on Grace made her gasp.

  The mummified cadaver that had been propped up inside the recess, giving it the illusion of strength beyond death, was emerging into the flickering light. Another, close by, toppled out, its shrunken head breaking loose as it struck the floor.

  Phelan had also witnessed the spectacle and he quickly assured Ash. ‘It’s the shaking of the building, that’s all it is. It’s causing them to move!’

  One candle had fallen against a tapestry, igniting its dry weave. The fire billowed out, catching the grotesque in its parody of life, and it too roared into flame. And now the husk did seem alive, for its absurd head lifted from its chest and its torso twisted as its leathered skin shrivelled and tightened. Its arms twitched, then curled, and its maw stretched, the black pit of its mouth yawning wide as if to protest the assault. Purple flames engulfed it and it fell writhing to the floor, blazing crisply with no sizzle, for its meat was juiceless and brittle. It burned for the waste it was.

  A fearsome scream, a high screech that Ash thought had come from the fiery husk itself, rang round the chamber and he felt Phelan’s fingers tighten on his shoulder. Blazes danced in the little Irishman’s eyes and his countenance was grim. A draught, carrying with it a mist trace, ruffled through his silver hair like country air on a windswept day, and he faced away from the burning carcass, his gaze fixed on the frenzied figure at the core of a crowded maelstrom. Grace sagged against Ash, as if her strength - or perhaps her resolve - had left her.