by Simon Clark
‘Uncle, I’ll find a doctor. We need to get you X-rayed as soon as possible.’
‘No.’ The grip tightened on David’s hand. ‘Will an X-ray show you the words inside my head? David, listen to me: the time has come. Don’t you remember?’
David shook his head. The old man was verbally coherent but his mind must have been scrambled by the blow.
‘David. Remember when you were young? Four — five years old? I took you into the cave. I beat the bars with the iron rod. What did you see coming towards you out of the darkness? What did you see walk up to the bars?’
David shook his head. The old man’s eyes had a strange glittery quality; yet the face was expressionless, as if the man spoke in a trance. ‘David, tell me what you saw then?’
‘I saw nothing, uncle.’
‘You did. There in the cave. What did you see?’
‘Nothing. I saw nothing.’
‘Listen to me, David. Read the family history I gave you. The Leppingsvalt legend is all there.’
‘I’ll read it when I get back to the hotel. Now relax, please, uncle.’
‘Ah…don’t humour me. You can’t avoid the truth now.’
‘Uncle.’
‘Your mother has built a brick wall in your mind. It divides you from your memories of what you saw here when you were a little boy. It’s time to break down that wall. You’ve got to remember.’
David turned to Bernice and said, ‘Will you find a nurse or Dr Singh?’
‘No. Listen to me. Listen. Open your mind.’ The grip tightened painfully on David’s hand. ‘It’s up to you now, David. You must take control of them. You must lead them. If you don’t they will kill everyone. They will be a disease that destroys humanity.’
‘David,’ Bernice spoke in a small voice. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘I don’t know. He’s concussed.’
‘David. You are their king. Take control. If you don’t everyone will die. Do you hear me. Everyone will die. This will be Ragnarok — the end of all…’
The old man’s grip suddenly relaxed on his arm; the eyes that had glittered and stared so brilliantly closed.
‘Oh, my God,’ Bernice said hushed. ‘Is he…’
‘No.’ David felt the old man’s pulse. ‘He’s sleeping again. His pulse is strong.’
‘What did he mean about you being king — about taking control?’ David didn’t have a chance to reply. The curtain rings rattled and swished behind them.
‘Ah, Dr Leppington.’ Dr Singh beamed as he entered the cubicle. ‘How’s our patient?’
‘He’s been conscious.’
‘Conscious?’
‘He was speaking to us before you came in.’
Dr Singh gave a smile of disbelief. ‘Speaking? Really? I believed he was deeply unconscious. The concussion really appears quite severe. Are you certain he was speaking?’ Again the quizzical smile as if he suspected a joke was being played on him.
‘Yes,’ Bernice spoke earnestly. ‘He sounded completely lucid. He was telling David…Dr Leppington…’
She trailed off.
‘Telling him what?’
‘My uncle was confused. I think he was mixing reality with a dream.’
‘Oh,’ Dr Singh nodded as if he understood, but David noticed the way he rocked forward. That’s an old trick you learn in casualty, rock forward onto the balls of your feet, to surreptitiously try and smell alcohol on someone’s breath.
With a prickle of sudden anger David realized that Dr Singh suspected that he and Bernice were either drunk or high, or both.
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ Dr Singh said (patronisingly, David thought: he was obviously dismissing the notion of the injured old man talking just now as a delusion on their part). ‘I’ve just had the call to take your uncle up to X-ray. Then we can find him a more comfortable bed.’
David looked down at the sleeping old man, with the red-stained dressing fastened to the side of his head. The prickling sensation still continued across his skin. This time it wasn’t anger. He felt as if a sudden tug-of-war had started up inside him — the two opponents were memory and forgetfulness.
At that moment he realized there was a memory deeply hidden inside his head. Something he’d rather stayed forgotten. But it was tugging relentlessly towards the surface.
He stood back as the hotel porters came into the cubicle to wheel the bed to X-ray. His skin prickled as though insects were marching across his stomach and his back.
And at that moment fear — cold and blue and terrible — began its stealthy creep through his body.
3
Daylight had just begun to grey the sky when they left the hospital — Bernice still red-lipped and wrapped warm in the big sheepskin coat.
His uncle hadn’t regained consciousness again and now lay in an observation ward. David had satisfied himself that the man’s colour was good, that his respiration and pulse were strong and even. Now there was nothing else they could do but wait for nature to run its course. With luck the man would simply wake up of his own accord in a few hours. He’d have a headache like the mother of all hangovers, but at least he’d be back on the road to recovery.
As they climbed into the black Volvo in the car park David said, ‘Before we go back to the hotel, do you mind if we check on my uncle’s house? I want to make sure it’s all safely locked up.’
Bernice nodded, but there was clearly something troubling her. ‘Your uncle seemed to be warning you. What was all this about you taking control and if you didn’t we’d all die?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story.’ David gave a tired smile. ‘A fanciful fairy story, at that.’
Bernice smiled back, but her voice was serious. ‘Maybe I believe in fairy stories.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘Why don’t you run this one past me?’
‘OK,’ David nodded, wondering why she was so interested in what the old man had said. ‘I’ll tell you what he told me.’
As Bernice slipped the car into reverse and backed out of the parking space, David began to talk.
CHAPTER 25
1
The sky was a solid grey by the time they pulled up at Mill House. David had related the family legend to Bernice during the ten-minute drive. She’d listened intently. Almost as if what she was hearing had importance and relevance to her own life.
David didn’t know why the story should interest her so much. Divine blood? Vampire armies? God-given quests to build new empires? David had written off the story as nothing more than an unusual curiosity.
After switching off the car’s motor Bernice sat there for a moment, pale oval face serious as she digested the story. Not for the first time David felt as if he’d turned over two pages in the book and missed some vital element of the plot. Was he too dense to see it? Why did he have the feeling that all these events — Electra’s confession that she heard noises in the cellar of the hotel; the disappearance of the couple from Room 101; his uncle’s injury — all added up to form a coherent picture? Only for some reason he didn’t see what that picture was. Or he was seeing it from the wrong angle.
The wind blew, rocking the car slightly. The trees surrounding his uncle’s house shook like great shaggy beast-shapes. The monsters are waking up, he told himself. The monsters are waking up.
What monsters?
The trees. Because that’s what they looked like. Great woody monsters, waking from a night’s sleep, shaking the dew from their skeletal limbs.
No, he thought, I sense something else waking.
Monsters are waking.
They are coming to life.
He shook himself out of the cold sensation that had been settling on him ever since he had heard his uncle speak in the hospital.
‘It’s nearly morning,’ he said, deliberately breaking a silence that was becoming almost palpable. ‘Tired?’
Bernice gave a little smile and shook her head. ‘Too much excitement.’
He opened the car door; cool air gusted in. ‘This shou
ldn’t take long. Coming?’
‘Just try and stop me,’ she said obliquely.
They entered the garden through the gate set in the fortress-like walls. The wind sighed through the branches of the trees, shaking off big drops of water. Bernice pulled up the collar of the sheepskin coat.
David had been given the house keys (they’d been collected by the police, then handed into hospital reception). He checked the doors of the house. They were all soundly locked.
‘Picturesque.’ Bernice spoke in a small voice, as if the surroundings made her feel tiny. ‘Look, there’s even a stream flowing through the garden.’
‘The source of the Lepping, so I’m told,’ David said. ‘Wait here, I’ll just lock the workshop door.’
The door had been left open and swung in the wind.
‘Nothing been tampered with?’ Bernice said, arms tightly folded as if she was feeling the cold.
‘I don’t think so, but I’d best check. The last thing my uncle needs is to come back and find the place ransacked by burglars.’
‘Does he live up here all alone?’
David nodded. ‘His wife died about fifteen years ago.’
‘Nothing seems to have been touched.’ David looked quickly around the workshop. The bottle of whiskey was still on the shelf; the fire in the forge was now out but he could feel the heat still radiating from the stones. The sword his uncle had been making lay across the anvil.
‘Very Arthurian, eh?’ he said, nodding at the sword. ‘My uncle was making a replica of the magical family sword.’
‘Oh, the one found in the fish?’
‘The very one.’ David tried to sound light-hearted about it, but the atmosphere of the whole place seemed pregnant. As if something colossal was waiting to happen. The monsters are waking…
‘I’ll lock up,’ he said and they both stepped back outside through the heavy door. He locked it.
‘So why was your uncle using dynamite?’
‘He was using it to destroy steel bars that had closed off a cave entrance in the hillside across there.’
‘But what on earth for?’
He stopped and looked at Bernice. She looked back at him, her hair blown across her face in the wind; her eyes large, serious.
‘Like the man said,’ David told her. ‘To set the dead upon the living. He’s unleashed the vampire army on us all.’
‘You believe that?’
David laughed, yet he felt a touch of sadness too. ‘Of course not. The poor old boy’s probably been out here on this windy hillside far too long. The old Leppington fairy stories have been preying on his mind.’ Suddenly he shot a surprised look at her. ‘Why, do you?’
As she opened her mouth to answer a loud bang echoed across the back yard. It came from the building that capped the opening to the cave. David saw that the heavy doors were blowing backwards and forwards in the breeze; every so often one would slam back into the timber frame.
He sighed. ‘I should think my dear old unc has made a mess of the cave. Dynamite? Good grief, I imagine the police will be asking him a few questions about that one.’ He walked towards the stone building with the twin timber doors flapping to and fro in the breeze.
‘Careful,’ Bernice said. ‘If there’s been an explosion the cave might not be safe.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He smiled. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t drag me inside. I’d best lock the doors, though, in case any kids take it into their heads to go exploring.’
He held one door shut, then slid the bolt down into its drilled hole in the floor to hold it. Then he grabbed the other door, ready to lock it.
He paused for a moment, looking into the dark throat of the cave that lay beyond the entrance. On the floor were drops of blood. He imagined his uncle dynamiting the steel fence that sealed the cave: the force throwing him back against the wall, then him staggering groggily from the cave to the house where he managed to telephone the emergency services, blood streaming down his face.
The maw of the tunnel drew his eyes back. He found himself staring into utter darkness. A darkness that seemed more than just absence of light. That darkness seemed a palpable thing veined with purple. That darkness had presence; it had form.
Bernice stared too, he noticed. As if there was something hypnotic about that dark roadway into the heart of the hill. And who knew what lay beyond? The caverns. The lake of the legend; complete with a great silver-sided fish that swam round and around the underground lake in sluggish circles.
There was a quality so compelling about it. You just wanted to walk forward; to go into the cave; to allow that velvet dark to swallow you Bernice said in a low voice, barely more than a whisper. ‘David. Your uncle asked you to remember what you saw in the cave.’
David nodded, mute.
‘He said it was important. That when you were little he’d take you into the cave and strike the bars of the fence with an iron rod.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You might rattle the bars of a cage to attract the attention of an animal locked inside, mightn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ David’s voice was a whisper. His muscles had locked up tight. Suddenly the world seemed distant; Bernice’s voice could have come from the bottom of a deep, deep pit.
All his attention was fixed on the cave running away into the hillside like an artery worming deep inside a man’s chest to connect with his beating heart.
‘Do you remember what you saw as a child, David?’
He shook his head slowly, feeling that the world had turned dreamlike. ‘You saw something in the cave, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You stood in there with your uncle. He rattled the bars of the cage — clang, clang, clang — then what did you see?’
Suddenly he gripped the door hard, his teeth clicking as his jaw muscles clenched. There was a sense of something rushing inside his head. A wall had come down; now whatever lay behind it came gushing through.
‘David. What did you see?’
‘I saw them…’ He turned to Bernice. Inside he felt cold, very cold. ‘I saw them…they were coming out of the dark.’
‘Them, David? What are they?’
‘People.’ His throat muscles had clenched as his body had made a last-ditch attempt to prevent the memories coming out. He shivered convulsively. ‘In the cave. There were people. Dozens of people. I remember the faces…they were white. White as a piece of bone.’ He locked his eyes onto Bernice — wide, frightened eyes. ‘And they were monsters.’
2
Leppington, the town, made the transition from night to day. Already the newsagent’s was open. Paper boys pedalled through town, their bags heavy with Sunday newspapers that were fat with supplements their readers would never get through.
The vast slaughterhouse glowered over the town, its red-brick flanks still shining after the storm. Inside, the huge killing rooms were silent. Floors were clean, the air still and heavy with disinfectant.
The River Lepping, swollen with rain, gushed noisily over boulders, the waters turning white with froth.
Most houses still wore their curtains closed as people slept late.
Briefly, in the Moberry household on the council estate at the edge of town, Dianne Moberry’s father woke. He stared at the shadowed ceiling for a moment, listening to the breeze gusting up the valley. Dianne hadn’t come home last night. Another boyfriend, he supposed. She was probably away on another of her frolics to Whitby or Robin Hood’s Bay or wherever. The proper parental attitude would be one of disapproval, he thought.
Primly, most mothers and fathers would tell a gallivanting daughter of twenty-something to settle down; get married; have babies. But life in Leppington was shackled to monotony. Most newly-weds lived on this estate on social security. He watched teenage mothers pushing their babies in buggies. Those mothers looked as if they had had the vitality sucked right out of them; already they wore the tired express
ion of put-upon housewives who faced another day of mechanically going though their chores — washing, Hoovering, ironing, nappy changing, you name it These people were bloodless; if he let his imagination freewheel away from him he could picture them as the modern living dead. They had bugger-all to look forward to.
At least Dianne’s life was different. Wherever she was, whoever she was with, he prayed she was having fun.
Then he turned over and went back to sleep.
3
The drive back to the hotel was a mixture of silences and quick-fire bursts of conversation. The world, to David Leppington, still seemed dreamlike, even in this hard, iron-grey light of dawn.
Bernice Mochardi spoke quickly, like a detective on the very brink of solving some particularly baffling murder mystery. ‘Do you remember anything else?’
‘No…nothing.’
‘You said you remember seeing people in the cave when you were a little boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘As if they were caged in there? Prisoners?’
‘I suppose so.’ The dreamlike sensation wouldn’t quit. David bit his lip. He felt so…so bizarre…there was no other description for it.
Bernice indicated a right turn and swung the car onto Main Street. ‘You said you thought they were monsters.’
‘Monsters? Yes, well, that was the six-year-old me’s interpretation of what I saw.’
‘But what are these monsters? Where did they come from?’
‘Bernice, look. I don’t know if what I saw all those years ago was real.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I might have imagined it all — or I might be remembering a childhood nightmare.’
‘David. You had a repressed memory. Now you’ve released it. I’ve read books where people —’