Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  “The experience varies from person to person,” he said. “Some subjects don’t report much of anything, but the most common experience is a very convincing sensation of some kind of presence. The feeling of being touched or grabbed isn’t unusual.”

  “How does it work?” Hudson asked.

  Crawford hesitated. “Father,” he began.

  “I’m not ordained,” Hudson corrected.

  “Oh. Sorry. I was under the impression that —”

  “A common mistake,” Gray reassured him. “Patrick has that air, doesn’t he?”

  “Just so you understand,” Crawford told Hudson, “that I’m not saying this as a specific attack on your faith.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The helmet stimulates the temporal lobes. It creates an electrical event not unlike an epileptic seizure, but without the nastiness. The theory is that mystical experiences, visions of God or ghosts, and so forth, are actually the result of these events. A lot of seers and mystics were epileptic, so the correlation is there. In other words, the presence of an Other, a presence beyond the self, is entirely an invention of the brain.”

  “That’s rather a bleak vision,” Hudson commented.

  Crawford shrugged then lifted the helmet with one hand. “Maybe. But it works.”

  “Let me try,” Gray said. He sat down.

  Crawford settled the helmet on his head and lowered the visor. “We’ll try the other function, if you’re interested.”

  “What is it?” Gray couldn’t see a thing.

  “Not every instance of haunting can be put down to magnetic field fluctuations,” Crawford explained.

  “Oh, so you admit that much,” Pertwee said.

  Crawford ignored her. “The mind is infinitely suggestible. When it encounters environments that tradition says are haunted, it will often make them haunted. When you step from a bright, sunny day to a dank, dark tomb, for instance, the contrast can predispose you toward certain experiences.”

  “In other words,” Gray said, “it’s all in our minds.”

  “Pretty much. Now, having told you all this, I’ve gone and sabotaged the effectiveness of the experiment. Magic isn’t effective when you know how it works.”

  “Tell that to Penn and Teller,” Sturghill said.

  “What I’m going to do is trigger a virtual environment from the laptop. You’re going to be moving through a setting that I control, with the idea of creating an effect along the lines of what Louise just experienced. Ready?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He heard Crawford click away at his keys, and then other sounds took over. He heard a steady drip of water, each ploc echoing in a huge space. Wind was a sullen moan in the background. The helmet, he realized, had built-in speakers, and they were full surround. He felt the reality of the world before he could see it. The darkness gave way to gloom. He was in a great hall several orders of magnitude beyond the one at Gethsemane Hall. This one belonged to a fantasy version of a medieval castle. There were massive stone pillars rising immense heights to Gothic vaults. Torches in sconces along the walls created pools of brighter light, but the corners of the hall were a harsh black. The image filled his vision and didn’t cut off at the periphery. Gray moved his head, and the perspective shifted. He looked up, and he was staring at the roof. The level of detail was very convincing, though the visuals were the hoariest clichés. “Très spooky,” he said. If Crawford responded, Gray couldn’t hear him. The torches began to go out. Still a cliché, and Gray had guessed that that would be the next event. But the dimming of the light was completely convincing. The shadows spread out from the corners, reaching for him. In spite of himself, he wanted to move away from the dark, and he found that he was. He hadn’t been in the virtual castle for more than a minute, and it was already feeling like a real place. The wind picked up, walloping the outside walls with a huge gust, and he thought, just for a second, that he felt a draft on his arm.

  The last of the torches winked out. Darkness rushed to meet him, and he recoiled. Then he saw a lighter patch to the right. It wasn’t so much illumination as a splotch of grey. He rushed toward it, just to be able to see anything at all. It was a doorway opening onto a winding stone staircase. He could just make out the steps. He started down. He noticed now that he could hear the echoes of his heels. There was another blast of wind outside, and again, he thought he felt a draft, this time against his face. He saw humidity coating the walls. If he reached out, he thought he might feel the roughness and wetness of the stone. He didn’t try. It seemed to him that the detail and reality of the environment were becoming more emphatic every second he was here.

  He reached the bottom of the staircase. “Jesus,” he whispered when he saw where he had arrived. He was standing at the entrance to the Gethsemane Hall crypt. The recreation was perfect. There was no detail missing, nothing that differed from the real thing, except that the source of the grey light was the southwest recess. He moved into the room. He had trouble speaking. “How ...” he began. He started over. “How did you do the modelling so quickly?” Still no answer from Crawford. He was alone. He stayed away from the centre of the crypt, but as he passed by, he felt the cold. Goddamn it, he felt it, an icy stab on his arm. He broke out in goose flesh. He looked down and noticed now that he could see himself, and that he was wearing the same clothes as in the real world. What kind of power was Crawford packing in that equipment of his? He hadn’t realized this kind of simulation was possible. Now that he had moved out of the hackneyed castle of the upper floor, there was no longer anything artificial about the world he was moving through.

  The recess had changed. Its rear wall had collapsed, revealing a hole that plunged straight down. Its bottom was obscured by the light, which was a pulsing, twitching grey. He stared at the movement. He was mesmerized and revolted. His heart began to beat with the rhythm of the light. He’d had enough. He took a step backward. Hands of shivering mist shot out of the hole and grabbed his arms. He resisted. They tugged him. They ignored his struggles and hauled him towards the lip of the hole. He tried to shake them off, but they had him by the elbows, and all he could do was flap his hands. He moaned. He lost his balance and fell towards the grey. It grinned. He screamed.

  Click. Blackout. And then the helmet was being removed from his head. He tumbled off the chair onto his hands and knees, gasping, his pulse an erratic snare drum. He was drenched in sweat. Hudson was at his side, trying to help him up. “Richard?” he asked. “My God, Richard, are you all right?”

  Gray nodded, shook his head. He looked up at Crawford, who was holding the helmet and gazing at him with alarm. “Have you ever considered selling that to the film industry?” he croaked, desperate to reconnect with the mundane. “You would revolutionize horror movies. Make a mint, as long as there weren’t too many strokes in the audience.”

  “Christ,” Meacham said. “If he came up with something worse than what I could imagine, I’m glad he didn’t run the movie for me.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Crawford said. “I’ve never had a subject react as strongly as you did. If I’d know this would happen, I would never have —”

  Gray waved off the apology. He staggered to his feet, leaning on Hudson’s arm. “Just tell me this. How did you create the setting that fast? It was incredible.”

  Crawford looked puzzled. “I didn’t create it just now. My programming colleagues and I have been working on it for ages. It’s the kind of environment that is most suited to generating the effects we’re looking for.”

  “I didn’t mean the castle. I meant the crypt.”

  “The crypt?”

  “The one here.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, neither processing what the other was saying. “What,” Crawford asked, “exactly did you experience?”

  Gray told him. He became aware of wide eyes around him. When he finished, he said, “I knew graphics were becoming incredibly realistic, but this ...”

  Crawford said,
“There is no simulation of the crypt in there.”

  Gray felt his breathing going funny again. “But I saw —”

  “How could there be?” Crawford asked. “I’d never seen anything of the Hall before yesterday. I’m not a programmer, and even if I were, nobody’s that fast, or that good.”

  “So what happened?” Meacham asked.

  “Maybe nothing to do with the machine,” Pertwee said. “Have you considered that?”

  Gray was. His arms felt bruised from the grip of those hands. Pertwee sounded pleased and excited. He wondered if the event would seem so glamorous if she had been the one grabbed.

  “I’m not one-hundred-per cent ready to make that conceptual leap yet,” Crawford said dryly. “I’m just speculating,” he told Gray, “but at a guess, I would say that your brain responded to the visual and aural stimulation in much the same way Lou’s did to the magnetic waves. I provided the stereotypical image of a haunted castle. Your subconscious took over and built a simulacrum of the crypt.”

  “So I was in a dream state?”

  “Or something very analogous. Yes, I think so. Has anything like this happened to you before?”

  Gray thought about the dream in London. The chance of an empirical explanation hovered almost within reach. It was tantalizing. He distrusted it. He wanted it. He wanted to dismiss it. “Yes,” he said.

  Crawford nodded. “It may be that you’re prone to the very condition the magnetic waves simulate.”

  “I’m not epileptic.”

  “Have you been tested?”

  “No,” Gray admitted.

  “I’m not diagnosing you. I’m just pointing out a possibility. In any case, I don’t think you should try the helmet again.”

  “No fear.” Gray wouldn’t go near the thing again, even if Crawford held a gun to his head.

  “I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the experience,” Pertwee said. “It might be a mistake to shrug it off as a hallucination.”

  “Do you mean dangerous?” Gray asked her. He thought so, even if she didn’t.

  “Of course not.” She was emphatic.

  “The spirit world has never hurt anyone?”

  She hesitated. “There’s some disagreement in the community over that issue,” she admitted. “But there’s no way anything here could be harmful. This is not a tainted house.” The hesitation had been momentary. She was vehement. “What I meant was that your vision might be important. It might have been a message.”

  Gray snorted. “If it was a message, it wasn’t a friendly one. I don’t fancy being dragged down to the abyss, thank you. I ...” He trailed off, wondering all at once if Pertwee weren’t right. He thought about the recess in the crypt, an architectural loose end he had never been able to figure out. He thought about the cold spot that gathered strength with depth. He had been assuming that the crypt was the terminus, its force radiating up to the Old Chapel. He felt the force of those hands again. Their impulse was unambiguous. Down.

  “What is it?” Hudson asked.

  “Nothing.” Think this through. Pertwee was watching him carefully. He could see the wheels turning in her head. She knows, he thought. She could smell victory. Well, let her wait a bit longer. Let’s do this carefully. If he speculated aloud, she’d be calling in the bulldozers before the hour was up. “So,” he looked at Crawford, then at Pertwee, “I realize my brain is very fascinating and all, but where do you begin the actual investigation?”

  “The crypt,” Pertwee said.

  Crawford nodded. “I also want to take some readings elsewhere in the house. Try to establish a control, if possible. I want to know if the mean strength of the magnetic field in the crypt is different from the rest of the house.”

  Corderman returned half an hour later, and the set-up began. Gray, Meacham, and Hudson followed the teams of Pertwee and Corderman, Crawford and Sturghill, as they moved through the Hall. As he recovered from the helmet trip, Gray found his sense of irony returning. Crawford and Pertwee weren’t simply using much of the same equipment for opposite ends, they were treating their devices in the same way. As they set up sensors and meters, cameras and recorders in the crypt, in the Great Hall, in the bedrooms, and in the drawing room, they treated the digital messengers with kid gloves. They placed them in rooms only after gridding the spaces and choosing spots with the care of fanatical Feng Shui consultants. They were priests and acolytes handling the Host, Gray thought. The disposition of the technology was along patterns as rigid and formal as any pentagram or mystic circle.

  They were back in the crypt. Crawford directed Sturghill’s placement of a sensor. Pertwee was setting up a camera with an infrared trigger. Corderman was moving back and forth in front of it, first closer, then farther away in stages, until he was standing in the recess. Pertwee had the camera covering a field of view that went diagonally through the cold spot to that corner. All four of them were speaking very quietly. Gray was standing beside Hudson at the entrance to the crypt. He heard Hudson mutter, “Likewise after supper he took the Cup; and, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood of the new Covenant.’” So he had picked up on the ceremonial atmosphere, too.

  “Be nice,” Gray whispered, surprised. “Show some respect.”

  “I am,” Hudson answered. There was no sarcasm in his tone.

  The ritual was complete by late evening. Gray braced himself for what might be summoned.

  chapter twelve

  the trace of anger

  The scream jolted Meacham awake. She lay, eyes big-O wide against the dark, body vibrating with shock. I dreamed it, she thought. She had time to repeat this to herself, but not enough time for her heart to believe what she told it, before she heard the scream again. It tore itself out of the wall behind her bed, slammed into the window, bounced back and shrieked in her face, then rushed up through the ceiling. Silence slammed the echoes down. The room was taut, quivering. Meacham’s hands had turned into claws around the sheets and blankets. Old instincts, forgotten but now revived, drew the covers over her face.

  The scream erupted once more, too loud and mobile to be human. It rose from the floor, from under her bed where the monsters lived. It blasted up through her. It scraped her nerves like a metal claw over harp strings. It whirled around the room once, then blew through the door. Meacham half-expected the sound to shatter the wood. And the noise was here again, but now she realized there were two different screams, coming in pairs. The first was a howl of agony and fear. It was the despairing cry of prey being brought down. The second scream was sharper, more aggressive.

  Meacham had always been a city girl, but when she was ten, the family had stayed with one of her father’s drinking buddies out in the country, where the boys could bond and kill things. The first night in the Maine woods, she had heard a fox hunting. At first, she thought she was hearing a woman screaming, and she had come within a hair of wetting herself from the horror. But the cry had repeated at too steady a rhythm, each repetition identical to the last, the howl too short to be coming from a person’s lungs. The scream she heard now made her think of that fox. It wasn’t an animal’s hunting cry (she should be so lucky), but it had that quality. The scream was rage and pursuit. It was predator. When it doubled back to roar in her face, it was making her a victim, not begging for her help. She disappeared under the blankets.

  The screams, hunter and hunted, came back twice more, then stopped. The room lost its tension. Meacham stayed under the covers until she thought she was going to suffocate from the heat. She poked her head out, gasping. The bogeyman wasn’t hovering overhead, waiting to grab her. She reached to her left and turned on the bedside lamp. It created a small island of light around the bed. That was just enough for her to jump out onto the floor and scramble for the wall switch. The ceiling light still left shadows in the corners, but they were a sullen brown, and weren’t big or deep enough to hide anything dangerous. Meacham leaped back into the bed and curled up in
the centre. She watched the walls. She waited for the horror.

  She stayed like that for hours. She didn’t feel silly at all. She was operating on an atavistic level. Shame and logic were irrelevant. Dawn finally came, the window turning from a black pane to grey. She began to relax. The grey grew lighter. The shadows diminished, retreating to bide their time until night would come again. Meacham allowed herself to lie down again. She was exhausted. Enough hours had gone by that she could almost kid herself into believing she’d had a nightmare. She tried the theory out. It wouldn’t fly. She tried to close her eyes and sleep again. She couldn’t. The idea of being woken again the same way kept her revved up and wide awake. What was that? she thought. What the fuck was that?

  Then she thought, Why are you alone?

  The corridors would be light enough, now. They should be clear of monsters. She threw on some clothes and went looking for company. She chose Sturghill and Crawford. She needed rationalism right now. She didn’t want to hear about ghosts and their needs from Pertwee or Corderman. She wanted to hear that there were no ghosts.

  Sturghill had the lights on too. She opened the door when Meacham knocked. “You heard it?” the magician asked. She was wearing an oversized Betty Boop T-shirt, and to Meacham, she suddenly looked about twelve years old. When Meacham nodded, Sturghill said, “Tell me what you heard. Precisely.”

  Meacham did. Sturghill began to smile as she spoke and was visibly more relaxed by the end. “What?” Meacham asked. She didn’t see what was so goddamn reassuring about mobile screams.

  “I heard exactly the same thing.” Sturghill started to say more, but there was movement and the sound of low male voices coming from the next room. “It’s okay, boys,” she called out. “Come on in and join the slumber party.”

  The connecting door opened. Crawford and Hudson poked their heads around, looking sheepish. Crawford was in T-shirt and boxers, but Hudson had the whole pyjamas-and-dressing-gown thing happening. He was the only one in the room who fit with the decor.