“Kristen,” Gordon asked, “is everything ready?”
Gordon’s fingers twitched and his unblinking eyes stared at her intently. Kristen considered telling him that there was a problem with the recorder or offering any excuse that might make him take a break.
“I’m ready if you are, Professor.”
Gordon reached for the black dagger.
The keeper felt the searing heat before the light struck the building down the street. As the building’s door flew open, a roaring shockwave of pure energy nearly brought the keeper to its knees.
But it was too close this time. It would not fail now.
The keeper raced towards the open door and plunged into the light.
The darkness was much too complete for his senses to penetrate this time. Gordon heard a low, throbbing sound and he could feel the air pulsing with electricity.
Suddenly, a thunderous crack sounded somewhere above him. A slow, irregular rumble followed and continued for several seconds. When the noise above finally ceased, Gordon heard nothing but the steady, throbbing sound once again. Slowly, it weakened. After several minutes, it stopped.
Gordon listened intently for some time, but heard nothing further.
The air was still and dead.
He felt cold.
A new sensation suddenly ripped through the keeper’s body. Pain. Terrible pain. The light burned its eyes and the hot air scorched its skin. Unprepared for the experience, the keeper frantically tried to step back outside.
But it was trapped, confined within thick, suffocating layers of bindings woven tightly around its body. The light dimmed after a moment and the keeper recoiled at its bizarre surroundings. Strange looking creatures scuttled about and spoke in tongues so dreadful that the keeper wished it could tear itself apart to escape the sound.
Then, something familiar. It held in its misshapen hand the very object that had long eluded its fragmented thoughts.
And finally, amidst an onslaught of unbearable pain, it remembered.
At long last, the Keeper of the Tower had awoken.
The time had finally arrived.
Moments after touching the dagger, Gordon screamed.
The sound he made was inhuman; Kristen dropped her notebook as she fell from the chair and clamped her hands over her ears. Around the tent, computer screens shattered and sparks flew from every piece of electronic equipment. Evans dropped to the floor in front of her and covered his ears.
Only after the scream ended did Kristen dare to open her eyes. She grasped the edge of the table and pulled herself off the ground.
It was only then that she realized Gordon was gone.
A groan nearby caught her attention and she bent down to help Evans.
“Are you okay, Professor?”
Evans nodded as Kristen pulled him to his feet.
“What happened?”
Kristen shook her head, dumbfounded.
“I…I don’t know.”
“Where’s Gordon?” Evans asked.
“Gone.”
Evans glanced down at the table.
“Wherever he went, he took the last artifact with him,” he said.
Kristen thought back to Gordon’s psychic observations.
“The spire,” she said.
“What?”
Kristen was already running from the tent by the time Evans spoke.
The keeper ripped and tore at its confines, but to no avail. Whatever nightmare it had entered, the keeper knew, would be over just as soon as it performed its appointed task and earned the peaceful slumber it so rightfully deserved.
Although the way to the tower had not changed, the keeper noted that the streets were not as they should be. The ice had receded--that much was clear--but the streets were not clean; they were filled with bits of stone and cluttered by strange objects it did not recognize. Crude looking creatures shuffled past it as it made its way to the tower.
Something was wrong. If those misbegotten things had done something…
Kristen had not yet visited the spire, but the trail Gordon left behind made it easy to follow him. First there was the discarded clothing: his sweater, his undershirt, and his pants.
Then she saw the blood.
Moments later there was another inhuman shriek from somewhere up ahead. Kristen picked up her pace.
What had they done?!?
The keeper screamed again as it beheld the devastation of the tower. It did not know what the destruction meant for those who yet slumbered, but it was too preoccupied with its own physical pain to consider the implications of the tower’s damaged condition.
The keeper clenched the device tightly in its clumsy hand and rushed inside.
Kristen paused when she finally reached the base of the spire. The gaping entrance was dark and seemed to absorb all light. Heart pounding, she took a hesitant step forward just as Evans caught up with her.
“Wait,” he said, panting heavily as he thrust a flashlight into her hand. “You’re going to want this.”
Kristen’s eyes drifted down to the wet ground and she saw the trail of blood leading into the spire. Evans gestured towards the entrance.
“The stairs just inside lead down to the chamber where we found the three items.”
“Only one way to go, then,” Kristen said as she stepped through the entryway.
Something was not right.
The keeper’s gaze lingered on the stone slab in the center of the chamber. It should have awoken here, not outside the tower.
Another wave of pain drove the questions from the keeper’s mind and it resumed its mission.
Most of the wall was covered with frost and the keeper chipped a section away to reveal the locking mechanism for the great gate. It thrust the device into the open slot and turned the handle. The locking mechanisms sprang to life and the stone floor slowly opened to reveal a massive staircase.
Perhaps there was yet hope…
Another wave of pain lanced through the keeper’s body. Its confines were almost unbearable. The keeper clawed at them desperately. Strange sounds came from the creature’s mouth and the keeper gnashed its fragile teeth in an effort to silence them.
Kristen and Evans stopped their descent when they heard a voice somewhere ahead of them. Kristen switched her flashlight off and motioned for Evans to do the same. They waited and listened.
The voice was vaguely human, but spoke in a language unlike anything Kristen had ever heard. At times, she could almost identify it as Gordon’s voice, but its pitch fluctuated erratically and was accompanied by frequent gurgling. An unpleasant scrapping noise caused her to clench her teeth and shiver.
A loud hiss suddenly overpowered the other sounds coming from the room below and a warm gust of air swept up the frigid stairwell. When the hissing sound subsided, the silence returned.
After waiting for a few moments, Kristen turned her flashlight back on and hurried down to the bottom of the stairs and shone her light upon the chamber.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “He opened it.”
Evans followed down after her and dropped his flashlight when he saw that the floor of the room had been lowered to create a massive staircase leading down to the dim light below.
Something was wrong.
The slumbering ones refused to rise. The womb that should have sheltered and sustained them was utterly without life.
The keeper did not understand what had happened, but it could identify what did not belong in its world. The foul, base creatures above had defiled the sanctity of its brethren and thus doomed them all.
Pain gave way to rage, confusion to hatred.
Evans didn’t bother to pick up his flashlight and instead dashed down the stairs.
“Wait!” Kristen said, giving chase. “He’s down there somewhere!”
The chamber at the bottom of the staircase was huge, far larger than the base of the spire above them. Luminous stones imbedded into the ceiling and walls provided ample light and the walls a
nd floor were lined with narrow pockets about six feet long.
Everything was exactly as Gordon had described.
Evans was crouched next to one of the pockets when Kristen caught up to him.
“Look here,” he said.
Kristen gasped when she peered inside and saw the shriveled remains of a vaguely humanoid creature. It had the general proportions of a man, but its skull was strangely shaped and there was something unusual about the bone structure. The corpse was perfectly mummified, its dry, scaly skin stretched tight over the hairless body. Kristen could do little more than stare as Evans hurried to check the next compartment.
“There’s another one here!” he said.
Kristen looked up at the wall and focused intently upon the scores of pockets that lined the wall.
“There are thousands of them,” she said. “But they’re all dead. He said they were still alive when the chamber was sealed, like they were in some kind of stasis. Why are they all dead?”
She turned back towards Evans and screamed.
So much lost.
It was their fault.
They would pay.
The bloody dagger glistened in the chamber’s natural light as Gordon withdrew it from Evans’s back and let the lifeless body drop to the floor. Red scratch marks scored Gordon’s naked body and something alien shimmered behind his pupils. His face twisted and writhed as if some unseen tormenter assaulted its nerve endings.
Horrified, Kristen took a hesitant step backward.
“Professor?”
The thing that had been Gordon hissed at her and blood ran out the corners of its mouth. She could see that it had bitten off portions of its tongue.
It stepped towards her.
Kristen turned and ran.
The keeper had found a new purpose, a new charge to uphold. It would scour their filth from the streets of the blessed city. Perhaps then it could fulfill its appointed duties.
The pain had become almost unbearable, but the keeper fueled each step with its hatred and rage.
Kristen’s lungs burned as she scrambled back up the stairs. She could hear her pursuer lumbering after her and though it seemed to shamble and stumble more than run, it moved deceptively fast. The steps leading from the upper chamber to the surface were wide and slippery and she stumbled several times. Each time she lost her footing, the hissing thing behind her came closer.
At last, she saw the sunlight a short distance ahead. A loud shriek sounded just a few yards below her and Kristen threw all the energy she could muster into climbing the last few steps. She felt the sunlight hit her face.
Then the thing’s hand clamped down on her ankle.
Kristen screamed.
The creature was fleeing from whence it came, back to the company of its own degenerate kind. But their numbers did not matter. They would all die by the keeper’s hand.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a shrill, piercing sound overpowered its senses.
And then the pain stopped.
“Are you okay?”
Kristen looked up and met the concerned eyes of one of the site’s researchers. She took his hand and he helped her to her feet.
“Yeah,” she said, realizing that the question was only meant to address her physical condition.
Professor Gordon’s naked body was sprawled on the steps just inside the spire’s entryway. It twitched for a moment longer before it finally stopped moving.
The black dagger had clattered harmlessly to the ground next to his body. One of the researchers moved to retrieve it.
“Don’t touch that!”
Her cry caused the researcher to jump back from the artifact.
“Don’t let anyone touch it.”
Kristen watched the medic examine Gordon’s body. He shook his head and said something about a stroke.
Everyone soon turned to her with questions, but Kristen found herself unable to think coherently, much less speak. She pushed past the confused researchers and ran. The ruins of the spire obscured the sunlight and she felt as if the shadow itself sought to crush her.
Kristen fell to her knees and cried.
The keeper thrust itself against the door with a hellish fury, but it was no use. Staggering back, the keeper looked around the city street and knew that what it saw was a lie. It had to get back through the door to finish its work. There was no other reason for it to exist other than to fulfill its charge.
The keeper stepped back from the door and waited.
It would open again…
Turlington Manor
Originally published in The Body (13 O’Clock Press, 2016)
One of my pre-graduate school stories, “Turlington Manor” sat around collecting virtual dust on my computer for quite some time. For a long while, I didn’t bother submitting many of my older stories because they showcased a lot of bad habits from those early years. As I got better at revising and editing, however, I found that most of those old stories were structurally sound; they just tended to be wordy and, at times, overindulgent. The revised version of “Turlington Manor” which saw publication didn’t change much from its original draft, but it was certainly tighter and more focused. As a concept, the story is fairly representative of my early horror stories in that it tries to put a spin on a traditional genre trope.
“There! I think that’s it,” Alicia said, pointing insistently at the narrow gravel path ahead on the right.
“Is that even a road?” Jason asked as he slowed the car down enough to make the sharp turn. The road was barely wider than the car and led deeper into the woods they had been driving through for the better part of two hours.
“Well, it’s right where that old guy back in town said it would be,” Megan said from the back seat.
Jason rolled his eyes at his girlfriend’s comment.
“Don’t get me started on that guy. There was something seriously wrong with him. What was that he kept calling you, Alicia?”
Alicia’s skin shivered just thinking about the old man’s raspy voice and piercing eyes.
“I don’t remember,” she lied.
“Christ, you would have thought you were his long lost daughter or something,” Megan said.
“I just hope that other stuff he said wasn’t true,” Alicia said.
“What? You mean that story about the place catching fire back in the seventies?” Megan asked.
“Yeah, this could be the biggest haunted house find ever but it won’t amount to much if the only pictures Jason can take are of pile of ashes.”
“Oh, that’ll look really good on the cover of your book!” Megan said.
“Hey, a good photographer can make anything look good,” Jason said.
“Well, it looks like the road ends just up ahead,” Alicia said. “Guess we’re going to find out one way or another.”
The gravel road emerged from the woods and Alicia’s eyes widened with both amazement and fear as Turlington Manor came into view in the distance.
“Oh, my god…”
The mansion was more grotesque than she ever could have imagined. It perched amidst the grounds of the estate like a vulture, despoiling everything around it. The branches trees that now surrounded them reminded her of rolls of jagged razor wire. Alicia had been to dozens of haunted houses in her time and even thought she’d heard a ghost or two, but she couldn’t recall seeing anything so discomforting.
“Alicia?” Jason asked quietly.
She found it was difficult to speak for a moment.
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t you say that nobody’s lived here for years?”
“Uh huh.”
“Then why does the house look like it was just built?”
Alicia forced herself to look closer at the house and gasped in surprise. Not only was the surface of the mansion clean, but the grounds around it were looked as if they had just been landscaped.
“I…I don’t know,” she said.
Jason pulled the car up to the front of the m
ansion and turned the engine off. No one moved to exit the car.
“After you, Alicia,” Megan said, breaking the silence. “This is your little adventure, remember?”
Slowly, Alicia opened the door and stepped out of the car. Turlington Manor loomed above her as she ran her gaze across its death’s head face. Deep within the curtain framed windows, she thought she saw the faint flickering glare of candlelight.
“Wow.”
Alicia jumped when she heard the sound of Megan’s voice beside her. She heard Jason rummaging through the trunk to find his camera behind them. They didn’t seem to share her intense unease.
“So you see places like this all the time, huh?” Megan asked.
“No,” Alicia said. “Not like this. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Megan walked back to the car and said something to Jason as he continued to gather his equipment. As Alicia continued to study the mansion, something in one of the upstairs windows caught her eye.
Something that moved.
Alicia gasped and took a step back.
“What’s wrong?” Megan asked.
“I…I think I just saw something move in the upstairs window.”
“It’s your imagination again,” Jason said. “You’re always hoping for the worst, remember?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
But Alicia knew what she had seen. Years of documenting the history of haunted houses had sharpened her senses considerably and she had learned not to doubt them, even when what they saw flew in the face of logic. After all, logic told her that the mansion shouldn’t even be there if it was supposed to have burned down forty years ago earlier. And yet there it was, towering over her as if waiting for the precise moment to pounce.
Alicia jumped when Jason slammed the car trunk shut. He and Megan walked up behind her and looked closely at the immense house.
“I wonder if it was rebuilt after the fire or if there was enough left to restore it?” Jason asked.
“I don’t know,” Alicia said. “As far as I know the last owner died shortly before the fire.”
Distant Worlds Volume 1 Page 9