Perception, observation. The Fire Beyond. Perihelion.
“Perihelion,” she said. She turned to John. “It’s about proximity. In certain times, in certain places, the Fire Beyond can be reached more easily. A force – and/or a location – that lets you see the past or the future. Or heal the sick or the dying – whatever. Something that lets you make changes to something at a fundamental level.
“We’ve been assuming that all this is supernatural in nature. Paranormal. Magical. But what if it isn’t?”
“I don’t get you,” said John.
“What if all this is natural, scientific phenomena? Just stuff that’s been badly understood and poorly explained?”
“You’ve got a scientific explanation for this? I’d love to hear it.”
Alice snorted. “Don’t know if it’s anything old Doc Peabody back at Salford would have had much time for. You remember her?”
“Don’t I just,” said John. “She was the one always telling us not to get quantum mechanics confused with magic or the paranormal.”
“Just try this for an idea. What if this place – Redman’s Hill, Collarmill Height – what if it was some sort of soft spot?”
“Soft spot?”
“Remember how they told us to picture space and time as a flat sheet?”
“Right,” said John.
“Yeah. But there’s this thin, quantum foam theory, which suggests that space-time isn’t of a constant, uniform texture – there can be areas of instability.”
“Right,” said John. “And this –”
“The Fire Beyond. That’s what it is. It’s a point where everything’s unstable, in flux. And if you can locate that, connect to it in some way, you can control it. You could, say, open a wormhole.”
John clicked his fingers. “Wait a sec, I know the technical name – an Einstein-Rosen bridge, right? It’s like you fold the sheet over and push something through, make a hole going from one side to the other.”
“Yeah.” Alice snatched up an old envelope and a biro, then drew two dots, one marked ‘A’ and one marked ‘B’, at different ends. “Points A and B are separated in space or time or both. But fold the envelope like so, and –” she unfolded one of the Swiss Army knife’s spikier components and pushed it through, transfixing both dots. “Ta-da! You’ve got a hole that links them. You can put something into that hole...”
“And it’ll come out on the other side,” said John. “At a different point in space or time. Instantly.”
“Instantly,” Alice agreed. “Halfway across the galaxy, or a hundred years in the past. Or in the future.”
“And if you created the right kind of bridge,” said John, “you could, say receive light signals through it. From another time, or a remote location.”
“Yeah,” said Alice. “You could see into the past or future, or watch something happening far away. Or you could perceive matter on the quantum, sub-atomic level. And then manipulate it.”
“Creating fundamental changes on the basic composition of matter.” John was nodding now. They were slipping even further back into old intimacies. These were the kind of conversations the two of them had had at university, bouncing ideas off one another over bottles of red wine or rum at silly o’clock in the morning. “Like lead into gold, right? Or, say, miraculous healing. But control it? Control it how? And this is just a freak occurrence? It sounds a little too useful for a natural phenomenon.”
“Maybe it isn’t natural,” said Alice, “maybe a thousand years in the future, someone built a machine to look through time or manipulate matter at the sub-atomic level, and this is just like a side-effect from it, or the result of an accident. Or maybe there’s been some sort of trillions-to-one-against naturally-occurring freak event. Maybe there’s something in the cave walls that amplifies the effect. Essentially it acts as some kind of tachyon detector or attractor. Either way, to see it, to connect with it, you have to be in a particular state of mind, like an ecstatic trance or the state one of the sacrifices went into.”
“A sort of heightened level of awareness, so you could perceive things you normally wouldn’t?”
“Right.”
“But then wouldn’t the sacrifice be the one who controlled the thing?”
Alice shook her head. “The sacrifice would barely be capable of any conscious thought – my guess is that once the Fire Beyond became visible, it would be first come, first served.”
John scratched his beard. “And the children, the ghosts? Where do they fit into it?”
“If there’s some kind of mental connection with the instability,” said Alice – she knew she was winging it, but she knew, knew, she’d make some sort of breakthrough here – “then maybe some trace of their personality gets caught up in it, like old computer files on a network.”
“Ghosts in the machine,” said John. “Literally. Cheery thought, huh? But that might explain the hill’s reputation, the time travel, even the children, but what about...” he nodded out of the window “... those two?”
“On that,” sighed Alice, “you’ve got me.”
“And this ‘Perihelion’,” said John, “that means it’s close – or that it’s stronger than at other times. That tracks with Halloween, because it’s traditionally when all sorts of supernatural shit is supposed to go crazy. So, okay, the Moloch Device makes the initial connection, so the Fire Beyond becomes visible, and then what?”
“What Thorne said he wanted. To enter the Fire itself and use it. He could plug in directly, step outside time and space. In theory, at least, he could live for ever.”
“Except he didn’t,” said John. “He died, remember?” He picked up the Confession and turned to its final pages. “See? She says here they found a body.”
“And you saw what else she said.”
“Come on, that can’t have been –”
“Can’t it? According to whom?”
John sank back onto the bed; Alice slipped the Confession out of his hands.
“What do any of this lot want?” he said at last. “The kids, the Red Man, the Beast, any of them? I mean, if we knew that...” He snorted. “Like it matters anyway. We should have just left this place behind and forgotten about it.”
“You could have,” Alice pointed out. “I don’t think the place is done with me. The kids, the Red Man – they’ve all got plans that seem to involve me, somehow.”
Whispers came back to her, from when she first moved in, Does she know? Will she help? Help who? Him or us? She’ll help him. It’s why she’s here. Can’t have that. So we’re going to have to –
“She’ll help him,” she said.
“What?”
“When I first moved in, I heard whispers – the kids again, I guess. They were talking about me helping someone else. ‘Him’, that’s all they called him. Whoever it was, they didn’t want it happening. And not long after that –”
“They tried to kill you.”
“Yeah.” She plopped down on the bed beside John.
“So, who’s this ‘him’?”
Alice took the Swiss Army knife and the remaining rowan twigs from her pockets, fumbling at her scalp until she found a few more longish hairs. She snipped them off. “At a guess, the Red Man. Or Arodias Thorne, if there’s anything left of him.”
“Always assuming they aren’t one and the same.”
Alice stopped and blinked. For some reason that had never occurred to her. “I don’t think they are, you know.”
“Why’s that?”
She bit off another piece of sellotape and wrapped it round the juncture of the twigs, over the hair that bound the cross. “Something about the Red Man himself. There’s something almost... kind... about him, somehow. Maybe not kind, exactly. I can’t put it into words. But he isn’t cruel. Arodias Thorne was.”
John puffed out his cheeks. “He might have been two hundred years ago. If he’s still around now – if he managed to reach the Fire Beyond – he might have changed.”
“
Yeah.” Alice passed him the second cross and got up. “He might be worse.”
Chapter Thirty
Descent
31st October 2016
ALICE PULLED THE handle, and the bedroom door swung open. It only took a second, but the moment stretched out and out; with every inch of darkened landing it exposed she expected a leering white-eyed face to appear. But none did. The landing and stairs were deserted.
She stepped out, raising the cross before her. “Dark,” she heard John mutter behind her, followed by the clicking of the light switch. The light didn’t come on.
“I think we’re some way from the mains supply right now,” she said. She heard her voice shake and sucked in a deep breath. “Like a couple of million years.”
John moved to her side and took her hand. “What do you reckon Collarmill Road looks like right now?” he murmured. “Is there a big hole where 378 used to be?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe it would only be gone for a split-second, too brief a time for anyone to notice. There and back. When it came back, its return would fit seamlessly into its departure. But before it did that, it could spend a near-eternity here. Or rather now.
She passed the spare room; the doorway gaped blackly at her, the tape across it a weak glimmer in the dark. There was a flicker of something pale and she recoiled with a gasp, but it was only an A4 notepad she’d left on the writing desk at the end of the room. Alice breathed out.
The spare room was empty, and so were the bathroom and the box room at the end of the landing. The staircase was empty too, and the landing below. But there was a light down there: it was pale, bluish in colour and it flickered down in the hallway.
She looked at John. He raised his eyebrows. “What you reckon?”
What, indeed? “We won’t get anywhere by hiding out up here,” she said. “We’ve got stuff to do.”
“What stuff?”
Alice began tiptoeing down the staircase. She could feel her legs shaking, but she gripped onto the bannister and carried on.
“Alice!” John hissed. She glanced behind her, saw him hesitating at the top of the stairs. He was afraid too; as much as her – if not more, because however little she understood, he understood still less.
“Babe,” she said and held out a hand. “Come on. It’s okay. Trust me.”
He let out a short, nearly silent laugh, then sucked in a deep breath. “Okay,” he muttered. “In for a penny and all that shit.”
They reached the floor below; all was silent and still. The doors hung ajar and the rooms beyond were dark. Anything could have been waiting there... but somehow, she didn’t think so. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Okay,” muttered John. “But, uh, where we going, exactly?”
Alice crept to the top of the last staircase and peered down into the hall. That faint bluish light still wavered and danced over the laminate flooring, but there was no other motion. Everything looked still and empty. Of course, that didn’t mean it was. In fact, there would be one part of the house that most definitely wasn’t. The question was whether she’d correctly identified which. She couldn’t resist the impulse to glance over her shoulder at the empty first floor rooms. It would be so easy for one of the children to leap out of the dark and send her headfirst down the stairs to break her neck. But she didn’t think they would.
“Remember the stone I found in the garden?” she whispered at last.
“Stone?” John frowned. “Wait – with the inscription?”
“Yeah. I saw it – the complete version – the first time this place... went back. It was still Springcross House that time, only... derelict. After Thorne died, I’m guessing. Thing is, I recognised it from what Mary Carson put in her confession. A quotation from Ecclesiasticus. I knew I was trying to place the inscription. ‘Their bodies are buried in peace...’”
“‘...but their name liveth forevermore,’” said John. “Ecclesiasticus 44:14.”
“Chapter and verse.”
He shrugged. “I was a star pupil at Sunday School. What’s your excuse?”
“I read it in a book somewhere. Anyway, it was Mary Carson’s favourite spot in the gardens, remember? Right outside the entrance...”
She saw the lights go on in John’s eyes.“To the music room,” he breathed.
“And right under the music room there was...”
“The chute, the shaft, whatever you wanna call it. Down to where he was sacrificing those kids.”
“Yeah.” Alice tried not to think about the Moloch Device or the torments Thorne’s child victims must have suffered. “And more importantly, to the spring. That’s why all this is happening – that’s why it’s this house that’s the haunted one, not the bloody builder’s yard or the place next door. We’re directly on top of it – the shrine, the Fire Beyond, whatever you want to call it. If we can find our way down there, we might be able to pull the plug.”
“Didn’t she say she’d looked all over for it and couldn’t find it?”
“Yeah,” said Alice. “Well, let’s just hope she was getting short-sighted in her old age. Come on.”
“They built a whole street over where that house used to be, though,” said John. “The shaft’ll be gone. Filled in.”
“Maybe not. There’d have been some record if they’d found anything when they pulled down Springcross House.”
“Maybe there is, and we didn’t get to it.”
“Could be, but Mary Wynne-Jones would have probably got to hear about it if they had.”
John nodded. “True.”
Alice crept the rest of the way down to the hall. The front door was shut tight. The living room and spare room’s doors again stood open, with only shadows inside.
The kitchen door, though, was almost shut. Almost; it was just open enough for the flickery blue light inside to spill down the hallway. Alice took a deep breath and strode forward.
“Alice –” John caught her arm, but she pulled free. Three more quick strides took her to the door; she flung it wide before she could let herself think about it.
“Fuck,” said John. His hand came up, clutching his cross.
The children were gathered in the middle of the kitchen. The table that had stood in the centre of the room lay against the far wall, broken and shattered. The camera that had been set up in the room was a tangled heap of charred and molten plastic and crumpled metal tubes. The children were silent, hands clasped before them. At first, because they were lit from behind, she saw them only as silhouettes, save for their dead white eyes which stared out at her, almost luminescent. She raised her own crucifix, but they made no move towards her.
Behind the children, rising from the kitchen floor to lick the ceiling, was a column of blue fire. Pale and lambent, it put Alice in mind of the Bunsen burners in the school lab, but was the light blue of a summer sky. It didn’t seem to have damaged the ceiling in the slightest. This flame, she knew, wouldn’t burn her.
As her eyes accustomed themselves to the kitchen’s dimness, the children’s faces began to resolve themselves out of the dark. They were all screwed up in pain. Some looked close to weeping; a couple, she thought, were sobbing outright, but there was no sound.
She took a step towards them, but John caught her arm. “Careful,” he said.
She nodded. Yes, this time he was right to urge caution. It was hard for any mother to see a child suffer, whatever that child had done, but these had tried to kill her, and more than once. And yet they’d helped her too, saving Sixsmythe’s box-file from the Red Man’s fire. Perhaps their goal had changed, whatever it might have been before.
“Jesus,” she heard John say, snapping her out of her reverie. The children were fading, in and out of existence, first growing transparent, then becoming mere outlines before, at the last, the process reversed itself. But no sooner had they regained solidity, they began to fade.
A grinding crack; the floor shuddered. The sound came again, drawn out into something more prolonged and tortured; stone crac
king, brick breaking, rock grinding against rock and powdering into dust. There was a cracking, a splitting, a rumbling below them. Alice thought of some huge machine, long-disused, cogs of brick and gears of stone all oiled with dust, stirring finally back into life. The floor shuddered again, then tilted sharply down. Off-balance, Alice stumbled forward, towards the children.
John shouted her name, but she swayed, steadied herself. The children faded almost to nothing, then began solidifying again, but the process was happening more slowly, and seemed less likely to complete. From what she could see of their faces, they were howling in anguish.
The ceiling cracked across and bowed; plaster dust billowed through the air. Alice coughed and spluttered. The blue flame turned the dust to a glowing mist. A shape loomed up beside her: John.
The floor tilted again and there was another splitting crack. As the billowing dust thinned, she saw a huge rent running up the kitchen wall.
“Fuck,” said John. He pulled at her arm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“And go where, John?” Alice shook him off. “There’s nothing out there for us. Our only way back’s in here.”
She was amazed how calm she felt. But then again, she thought she understood. There was a purpose to this, and she was a part of it; that purpose wouldn’t allow her to be hurt by chance. Or perhaps that was delusion on her part – perhaps no purpose governed events here, only chaos and randomness. Maybe every theory – hers, Arodias’, Sixsmythe’s – were all just hopeless attempts to find method in the madness. And after Emily, wasn’t she desperate to find a meaning, a reason, behind all this? Hadn’t even her atheism been shaken by her daughter’s death?
The kitchen window shattered, and they both ducked, arms raised to guard their faces. The rumbling died away; the house wasn’t shaking now and the dust was settling.
The blue glow dimmed. As the dust dispersed, Alice saw the flame had dwindled to a thread. The children had faded to shadows on the air; a moment later, they were gone.
The Feast of All Souls Page 31