“Is that gun loaded?” asked Jessica.
“I’m not the sort to threaten a man with an unloaded gun. You know that, Jess. Any other questions?”
There were none. George consulted his notebook again, as though preparing himself from a crib sheet for a debating contest, or getting ready to deliver a speech. He adjusted his tie, and we entered the church, leaving Daniel and Daisy posted outside the door. The last time I ever saw Daisy she was holding on to Daniel’s arm as if she needed his protection. He was flattered and quite distracted by the unwonted attention.
Inside, the church was lit by candles, hundreds of them. It was almost empty, with just a few people hunched in the pews. The vicar was standing in the pulpit, facing the altar and praying silently with his eyes closed. There was someone in the organ loft, and something low and I thought menacing was playing in the background.
Tom and Jessica immediately started telling the congregation to leave because of some emergency. They did not seem to be meeting any resistance; people were used to complying with instructions from anyone who seemed to be in authority.
After a minute the parishioners had been shepherded out and it was just us. The vicar had not reacted but remained in his meditative state. George looked disconcerted; he had expected to be noticed. I stood a couple of paces behind him. He coughed loudly, twice, and the vicar finally turned and seemed to wake up. He looked careworn, in a state of nervous exhaustion. He held on to the pulpit for support and looked around in some confusion. Jessica and Tom approached to join us.
“The game’s up,” George told him. “We’re putting a stop to it.”
“You?” The vicar was puzzled. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re putting a stop to your game right now,” George said more forcefully. “We know what you’ve been doing, what you’ve stooped to. You talked to the Whatleys; you knew them. She told you about their plans, and you took Whatley’s damned book.”
“I do have the book, yes,” said the vicar.
He seemed to be in a sort of reverie. Afterwards, when I had seen more men pushed to their limits, I would recognise the sort of mental confusion he was suffering.
“We know everything. How this outbreak is focussed on the church, on your parishioners. There’s a diabolic influence here that drives them out of their minds, and when they finally crack, the earth literally opens up to swallow them.”
George had overcome the awkwardness of addressing a man standing higher than himself; he took the vicar’s lack of response as defeat and pressed his advantage.
“We know how it started with the Whatleys, how they summoned that damned thing. Flora Whatley did it, when she sacrificed her child, that poor innocent baby conceived for that one thing. That was how they opened the gates of Hell. It would have ended there without you, wouldn’t it? But the temptation of the power those books offered was too much for you. Do you just use it to destroy the parishioners you hate most? Or do you really think you’re doing God’s work, helping to bring about the Apocalypse?”
“I can do nothing,” said the vicar. “Except tend my flock.”
“The bishop knows all about it,” George went on. “There may not be any laws to cover witchcraft anymore, but by God I swear you will not escape justice.”
“The creature was sent here,” said the vicar. “I understand that now. The innocent must suffer in the Final Days when the seals are opened for His will to be done. I didn’t understand that before, when they all died and nothing could stop it…” His voice trailed off into a low, hopeless murmur.
The vicar summoned his last reserves of strength, speaking louder.
“We must be humble and accept His will. We must pray. Let us pray together. We…must.”
“Is that all you have to say?” George demanded.
The vicar raised a hand and indicated to the altar.
“That won’t help you now,” snapped George.
“George, look,” said Tom.
I saw it at the same time. It was right there on the altar, squatting like a monstrous, bloated toad. Now I knew what the thing was like, I could see it more clearly. It was not transparent or translucent exactly, but your eyes recoiled from registering it properly and wanted to look through it or around it. Its pallid skin squirmed like a corpse ready to burst with maggots.
“Ibi cubavit Lamia,” said George with grim satisfaction. “Here the night-creature finds its resting place.”
“Isaiah 34:14,” said the vicar, as though scoring a point in the argument.
The camera flash was dazzling, and I thought the thing seemed to recoil. Of course, it preferred the dark, never came out in daylight. Tom reloaded the flash.
“Send it back where it came from,” George ordered the vicar, drawing his revolver. “This instant. I order you.”
The vicar shook his head sadly.
“No exorcism, no holy water, nothing drives it away…We must accept His will, though a third of the Earth perish …”
“Something else I know,” said George, “is that a demon is dispelled by the death of the one who summoned it.”
George raised the revolver and aimed it squarely at the vicar, who looked back at him mutely, patiently, as though the bullet were a blessing which he was not sure he had earned.
“This is your final chance,” said George, pulling back the hammer with his thumb. The vicar stood straighter.
“George,” I said. “That may not—”
The camera flash and the gun went off at the same time. The vicar did not fall, but groaned and slumped over the pulpit. George watched with a look of mingled disbelief, horror, and pride. He had summoned up the courage to shoot a man in the name of King and Country and God. He had overcome all the reluctance and moral scruples that held him back. It was a proof of his manhood and the triumph of his willpower; it showed he was capable of final, decisive action. To him, it was the logical, the ideal outcome: playing the hero and saving everyone, right in front of his friends.
It was also cold-blooded murder.
“Now then,” said George, turning to the altar.
I think he expected the thing to dissolve in a bubbling pool, or disperse into smoke, or sink back into the ground like Faust. But it remained unmoved.
What happened next happened quickly, with events piling on one another faster than I could understand them. It was all confused at the time, and I only managed to piece it together some months afterwards. My sensory impressions were mixed up; I did see what happened, even if I did not realise how or why or what it meant.
George calmly stepped forward, aimed carefully, and fired again, twice. The bullets struck home, but with no effect. It was exactly like seeing stones thrown into a waterfall. The surface was disturbed only for a fraction of a second.
Jessica was getting something out of her handbag and Tom was raising his camera when the thing struck George.
As before, it did not exactly move but somehow extended, translocating itself, more like a bolt of lightning that changes shape than a physical object. I don’t believe his bullets could have harmed it—not from what Daniel said afterwards—but it recognised an attack had been made and it retaliated. It passed through the spot where George was standing, knocking him over.
The thing stopped ten feet behind us, motionless again.
When I went to give George a hand up, I saw he did not have any hands.
Jessica screamed.
I stared at George, at what had happened to George, at that hideous writhing shape on the floor without comprehension.
An extra dimension gives additional possibilities. As three-dimensional beings, we could pick up a two-dimensional being like a square and flip it over, like turning a tortoise on its back. And that, Daniel said, was what happened to George. The thing struck him and flipped him through another dimension so that when he landed he was turned completely inside out.
George’s vital organs were all on the outside now, his lungs pumping like bellows, his heart sti
ll beating, his liver and kidneys flopping about among a mass of uncoiling intestines, while his brains, suddenly freed from the imprisoning skull, glistened like wet cauliflower.
Jessica recovered first. She was holding a mirror in each hand and she advanced on the thing. I heard her speaking, but it was an unrecognisable language. She was chanting and thrusting the mirrors forward, averting her eyes from the entity.
I picked up a brass candlestick, the only weapon I could see, and when I turned back the thing was staring at Tom, and he, paralysed, stared back. Then he gasped and a ripple ran through his body as the stone ran through him. His flesh burst apart, replaced by a stone copy, and my friend became a statue. The statue creaked and started to swell, and the stonework erupted further, joining with the floor and growing into a spire that ran up to the ceiling.
Tom, who had wanted to see the thing, who would not believe in it until he had photographed it, had seen it and believed. He was, in Daniel’s terms, the observer who triggered the collapsing wave state so that R’lyeh could burst through into our world.
Instead of just a floor or a chamber or section of wall, this was a tower that was still expanding, tearing through the roof of the church. This was not a small rip through which something could be glimpsed; this was the highest tower of R’lyeh breaking through as the whole fabric which constrained it crumbled away. Was it because Tom was in some way a better observer, one who could see more deeply? Or because of the place? Or just because the stars were right at that instant? These are questions I have asked myself many times since, with never an answer.
Jessica stood before it undaunted, still holding the mirrors and looking away, chanting something that did not sound like human language. The toad-thing seemed to waver before her, and something seemed to emanate from the mirrors that made the alien stonework ripple and shrink back like cobwebs shrivelling in flames. But farther from her it was still growing, breaking through into the church.
There was a terrible groan of rending stonework, and a crevasse opened in front of Jessica, splitting and surrounding her until she was standing on a single pinnacle of stone. She stopped in her chanting and the pinnacle dwindled and she pitched forward into the dark with a small cry. She fell into fathomless depths, truly fathomless. There are no bottomless pits on Earth, but where she fell appeared to be just such an abyss without end. Her cry faded and Jessica was gone forever.
I was facing the thing and I was alone and it was looking at me.
The yellow eyes grew until they enveloped the world and I was sucked into it. Our minds touched. It was a whirling phantasmagoria, a scene by Hieronymus Bosch redrawn by Escher and brought to life. I hung in between two worlds. Logical, meaningful thought was impossible, but I knew on some level that I was seeing through into the other dimension, that I too was becoming a gateway for that chaotic other world.
“Gachhaa!” I felt myself shouting the word, clinging to it like a man in a whirlpool grabbing hold of a fragment of wreckage. Because of where I was, I understood that word, I knew what it meant and it had power. It came from before the earliest human language. It meant, roughly, I AM, and it was a charm against this shifting, unstable being that thrived on chaos and dislocation. Was it from the incantation Jessica had been speaking?
The thing, the spawn of Cthulhu, could not speak or use language. But it understood language. I knew, because I was inside its mind, and it was inside mine. I believe now that this was some extension of the mental dimension that Daniel has theorised, and that this must have been what happened to the others just before their minds gave way and that other world tore through into ours.
“Gachhaa!” My feet were on the ground again; things were almost stable.
Something was wrapped around me like the suffocating coils of a python. It was metaphysical rather than physical, but it was pitting its strength against mine and I felt myself being dragged back into the vortex.
“Gachhaa!” But the word was not enough to wrench me free, and I felt myself slipping and spinning.
The thing wanted to haul me towards chaos, but I needed to fight my way back towards order, the natural universe, the world of rational logic. I needed to fight it with logic. It had no words; it thought in visual images: words were my weapons. I dredged up the words which held most logical power for me.
“One,” I declaimed. “The world is everything that is the case.”
I found my feet and pressed the advantage.
“One point one. The world is the totality of facts, not things. One point one one. The world is determined by the facts!”
It shifted and squirmed and backed away. It tried to come at me from another direction, but I was beginning to understand this mad game. I shifted too, and I struck first from another angle, striking with poetic logic.
“Night town a glass,” I declared, a sorcerer casting a spell. “Colour mahogany. Colour mahogany centre.”
The thing paused, confused, turning back on itself.
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose!”
It lost purchase and tumbled backwards, clinging to the edge of an abyss which stretched away in two different directions in a way I could not comprehend. It was an abyss between our worlds. Before it could recover I struck again, hurling myself at it, with an incantation of absolute truth.
“The dialectic of relativity resolves paradoxes by abolishing absolute frames—there is no privileged view of reality!”
We plunged together and held on, sinking back into the real world, the one with three solid dimensions, in which objects have a definite outline they stick to and are undoubtedly at rest or on motion. My world, a world in which blasphemous multi-dimensional grotesques did not and could not exist. The fabric of its being was shredded, disintegrating into atoms, into something less than atoms which vanished like smoke. It could not survive for an instant when it was wholly in the world where I had dragged it by desperation and luck, and borrowed logic.
Then the church was collapsing around me with a tremendous roar. It was a waterfall of stone and wood and slate, and I got one glimpse of it before the dust and the darkness obliterated everything.
VIII
When I came round I was crushed flat. Around me everything was dark, and all I could hear was a rushing noise which seemed to be coming from inside my head. I could not move, and bright pain shot through my left leg and arm. I could not breathe properly, and when I tried to take a breath, sharp agony erupted in my chest.
Something shifted above me. I tried to call out, but it was no good. There was more shifting and a flicker of light.
“There’s someone down there,” said a man’s voice.
I lay there, half-aware, the different pains in me clamouring and threatening to submerge me, until a weight was lifted and the light of an electric torch shone on me.
“It’s your friend,” said the voice, and I recognised him: Dunning, the churchwarden. Soon there was a circle of faces above me.
I tried to speak, to tell them not to move me. But Dunning, who had been in the war, knew how to treat a casualty. I was gently lifted on to a coat and carried away from that dreadful scene. The air was full of dust or smoke, and I did not recognise my surroundings.
My injuries were severe, and I was not expected to live. My left arm and leg had been crushed, my skull was fractured, and half a dozen ribs were broken, in addition to many other minor injuries. I lay in a coma for a week.
After that I came back gradually. I have a sort of memory of lying in a white room with white curtains and sunlight streaming in which seemed to continue forever. There were presences nearby, people, and sometimes the sound of their talking drifted past me, but I never thought of making a sign or trying to speak. It was enough just to keep looking into that light, in particular the top corner of the room where the ceiling and the walls made a perfect, fixed, right-angle triangle. It was all solid and real. It was all fixed in three firm dimensions, and the shadows that swept through each day as the sun made its round were pe
rfectly geometrical and true. That ceiling was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, and I wanted nothing more than to lie back and look at it endlessly.
My mind wandered from this firm centre, from geometry to abstracts, to time and the universe. I rediscovered the sensations of my own body. I started to taste the food that was spooned into my mouth each morning. I noticed the sensations from my skin, my eyelids, and my hands. Then I started hearing; I had not been deaf before, but I had not noticed the sounds all around me, in the way that Londoners cease to be aware of the traffic noise.
One day a nurse came to open the curtains. Some reflex action worked in my brain, and I wished her a good morning. There was no thought behind it, but a barrier had been breached and soon I was talking again and back in the land.
Daniel was my first visitor, after I had seen my parents. He had been chosen as the one to break the news to me about what had happened. He looked strained and tired, and perhaps a bit older, but still the same Daniel. I must have looked very much worse.
“How much do you remember?” he asked.
I had had plenty of time to piece together my recollections, and told him as much as I could. This was when he told me what I had seen happen to George.
“Some of the bodies were pretty ugly,” he said. “As you’d expect. I helped identify them. Including you, when they thought you wouldn’t make it.”
“Is it all over now?” I asked.
He gave a long, weary sigh and looked down.
“The two intersecting dimensional sets separated again,” he said. “Our world and R’lyeh are no longer touching. All the stonework is gone, the chamber, all that.” He sighed again. “But it took Daisy.”
“What?”
“She was in the churchyard, right next to me. Then the grass under our feet turned into stone. I leapt back; she just stood there. She underwent a translation”—only Daniel would use such language!—“getting smaller and smaller without moving as I watched. A curious thing—it was as though she was on a moving staircase. Then the dimensions realigned, everything closed up, and it was grass again. It was…remarkable.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 8