“Well, never mind magnetic fields for the moment,” Hudson said. “What about all your other equipment?”
“It’ll take me a few hours to review the video,” Pertwee answered. “The audio should be faster.” She had brought her laptop with her and plugged in the digital recorder. Meacham watched over her shoulder. Pertwee called up an audio editor and loaded the file. There were eight hours of sound, but she zoomed out until the entire track fit on the screen. There was a single big spike interrupting an otherwise flat line. Pertwee zoomed in on that segment, placed the cursor at a point just before the spike, and clicked on “play”. There were a few seconds of ambient static and hissing. Then it came. At first, Meacham thought she was hearing a rumble of distant thunder, had time to wonder if she’d missed a storm last night before the quality of the rumble changed. It became a roar. It stormed out of the laptop’s speaker like a runaway freight. The blow rocked Meacham back. Pertwee recoiled and tried to lower the volume. She was too late. The sound was out. It built even as she fumbled with the controls. The freight train derailed and smashed the room to flames with its anger. Meacham’s breath was sucked away from her by the fury. Her knees buckled, and she grabbed at the table for support. She was buffeted by the wreckage of anger. She thought she might bleed. The throat that howled couldn’t be human. It was too big, too powerful. But it held the memory of humanity in its teeth, and it bit down hard through the sinews of dreams and flesh of hopes, crunching bone and hammering the soul to dust. When the roar finally faded, its echoes covered the stones of the Hall like an oil slick, ready and waiting for the spark to burn again.
Meacham had her eyes closed, so she didn’t know who was sobbing.
chapter thirteen
waiting stone
Hudson combed the Hall, looking for Gray. He had drifted away after they had taken Pertwee to her room, and an unspoken consensus had called a moratorium on the research for a little while. Hudson finally found him emerging from the former stables. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with sledgehammer and pickaxe. “What are you planning to do with those?” Hudson asked.
“Confirm a suspicion,” Gray answered. He began to move forward again.
Hudson blocked his way. “I thought we were taking a break.”
“Go ahead. Take one. By the way, Patrick, tell me again what your role is in the investigation?”
“Very funny. But since you ask, to be a voice of sanity and reason.”
“I thought that was Crawford and Sturghill’s territory.”
Hudson shook his head. “They have their own dogma. I think it might be just as dangerous as Pertwee’s. Let’s say I’m here for spiritual sanity.”
“That would make you the lone voice in the wilderness, wouldn’t it?” Gray was smiling, but it was still that sour smile. He no longer seemed capable of any other kind.
“I’m not kidding.”
The smile vanished. “No,” Gray said quietly. “I don’t suppose you are.”
“Don’t you think this has gone far enough? Don’t you think you should stop?” If Gray was working a hoax, it had crossed the line. They had all been upset, but Pertwee might have suffered some real psychological harm. If Sturghill was wrong, if Gray hadn’t embedded speakers in the walls, if the manifestations were real, then all the more reason to pull out now, while the screams were still disembodied.
“Why?” Gray asked.
“Why? Didn’t you hear that recording this morning?” Or did you make it? And if you did, how? Whose voice was that?
“I take it you don’t want to know what’s behind that sound.”
“No.” He hadn’t meant to put so much force into the word. He hadn’t realized how desperately he wanted Gray to be a hoaxer and how little he believed in that possibility. Most of all, he hadn’t realized how much he feared the answers Gray was seeking. Calling a halt was necessary for his own spiritual survival, too.
The emotions that flickered over Gray’s face were hard to read. Hudson saw pain, gratitude, tenderness, anger. “I’m not being much of a friend to you,” he said. “You really should go. For your own sake.”
Gray was wrong about that. “I have to stay,” Hudson told him, “for your sake and for mine.” Don’t just listen to me, he prayed. Hear me.
Gray didn’t hear. Or perhaps, which was worse, he did. “You’ve had your warning, then.”
“You say that as if you’re making a threat.”
“I don’t mean to.” He looked Hudson in the eye. His expression was a tug of war of concern and barely contained vengeance. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“Then you do think what’s happening is dangerous.”
“I know it is.”
“Then why go on?”
Gray didn’t answer for a moment. He seemed to be struggling to keep rage in check. “Because I’m on the verge of a big, hard, truth, and I want to know what it is.” Some of the rage slipped out when he said truth. The word sounded like an awful thing. This truth would not set you free. It would stamp your face into the ground and break your spine. “Since you ask, no, I don’t think the investigation has gone far enough. Not nearly far enough.”
Gray had the crypt to himself. There was still some equipment lying around, and he moved it out of the way of the wheelbarrow. He approached the recess of the crypt. He ran his hands over the brickwork of the rear wall. He half expected it to crumble at his touch and reveal the hole that he had seen while wearing Crawford’s helmet. It stayed firm, abrasive and faintly slick under his fingers. He took a step back and shone a flashlight over the recess. The difference was subtle, but he could see it now. The bricks of the rear wall were a shade lighter than those of the rest of the crypt. They were younger. He put the flashlight down and hefted the pickaxe. He paused, giving himself time to reconsider. He thought about the pulsing grey light of his vision, of the night screams and the harm and hostility he had already experienced. He let himself be afraid. He let himself be afraid, too, for the people in his home, and for his friend. Then he thought about God’s laughter and let himself be angry. He waited, turning on the fulcrum. Once he brought the wall down, there might be no turning back. He let the battle run its course. Rage won. He felt the tug and answered it. He raised the pickaxe.
Meacham heard the noise. She knew what it meant even before she recognized it for the chunnnggg of metal against stone. It jabbed her nerves, a cold steel spike. No, she thought. Stop, she thought. Instinct ran fast, outstripped rationality. Who? she wondered, but only for a moment. Gray, she knew. She stood up from her chair and began to walk in the direction of the crypt. “Stop.” She said the word aloud and was speaking to herself. Keep it together. Do your job. Be who you are. She rallied her skepticism and her cynicism, the pillars that had seen her through wind and gale. She had her breathing under control by the time she left the library. Her heart was less co-operative. It was enslaved by the rhythm of the blows. It jumped with each clash. Gethsemane Hall echoed with the tolling of a stone bell.
She was the first to reach the crypt. She couldn’t see Gray right away. He was hidden in the recess. But the flashlight on the ground magnified his shadow and threw it up the height of the vault. It flailed with expressionist violence. The sound changed as Meacham approached. The ringing of the pickaxe became the deeper blow and sharper cracks of failing masonry. She moved forward until she could see Gray. He was drenched with sweat. His clothes clung to him like sodden rags. He was hammering at the wall with a rhythm as metronomic as it was manic. Chunks of stone flew from his attack. Shrapnel pinged off the walls. The bricks fell. Behind them was darkness. The black seeped into the crypt. The flashlight dimmed. So did the hurricane lamp that lay in the centre of the floor, its power cord an umbilical connection back to the light of the rest of the house, light that seemed now to Meacham to be conditional, an eccentricity allowed only at the sufferance of the Hall’s true owner.
More bricks fell. More darkness crossed the growing threshold. “Lord Gray,” she said
, but her throat was dry, and her voice cracked. She tried again, called louder. Gray didn’t respond. Momentum had taken him. He was an automaton constructed for this one motion. Meacham stepped forward, thinking of grabbing his shoulder. But the pickaxe swished the air with each savage backswing, its point inviting her flesh to step on up. She shouted Gray’s name. She might as well have yelled at the Hall itself. More brick shattered. The hole became a maw. Soon it would be big enough for someone to fall through. It was already big enough for something bad to crawl out from. The blows became the pounding of a dark heart. Gray should have been exhausted, but he didn’t slow. Instead, Meacham heard the heartbeat pick up speed. There was excitement to the pulse. Anticipation.
“Stop,” she screamed. But the moment had arrived. The remains of the wall collapsed all at once. There was a rumbling crash that was almost swallowed up by another sound. It was a sigh, and Meacham felt herself being pushed back by a giant’s palm. The darkness rushed in, and the lights went out. Black felt coated her eyes. There was no sound from Gray. The rumble faded, replaced by the ticking of pebbles against each other and the restless settling of dust. Then silence. Meacham strained her ears. They felt smothered. Old field training resurfaced, never once used during the length of her career. She was poised for a fight. But she couldn’t see or hear. The enemy would snatch at her from the dark. Her enemy was the dark.
And then she realized she wasn’t blind. She was seeing something. From the recess, on the other side of the threshold, there was a light. She could see the faint shape that was Gray’s outline. He was slumping, motionless, his strings cut. There was light. It was grey. It pulsed. It was wrong. Her eyes widened.
Light flashed back on. She blinked. She breathed. She turned her head and saw Crawford stepping into the crypt. Pertwee was close behind him.
“What are you doing?” Crawford asked. “Why did you unplug the light?”
We didn’t, Meacham thought. The cord was plugged into a socket in the outside corridor. We didn’t touch the light, she tried to say, but she wasn’t speaking yet. So she just shook her head.
Pertwee pushed past him, looked into the recess, and saw what Gray had done. “Oh,” she said. There was a world of wonder in her single syllable. There was joy, too. You should have been here, Meacham thought. A new light would have shone down on your optimism, oh you bet.
The pickaxe slid out of Gray’s hands. It clunked on the ground. Safe now, Meacham went up to him. “Are you okay?” she asked.
His skin was dust and sweat and pallor. His hair was soaked limp. His eyes were trained in the direction of the breach, and they were unfocused, twitching back and forth. When Meacham touched his shoulder, he jumped and turned his head to face her. After a moment, his eyes saw her again. He grunted. He looked at the collapsed wall, then back at her. He gave her a faint, despairing smile. “Well,” he said and made a sound in his chest. A small, hurt laugh. “Well,” he said again. “Here we are.”
Gray went off to dig up two more flashlights and fresh batteries. The rest of the party gathered at the mouth of the hole, no one yet taking a step down the revealed staircase. Pertwee and Corderman crowded the front, eager as kids at Christmas to explore, only courtesy for their host holding them back. Meacham didn’t appear to feel their hurry. She was sticking to the entrance of the crypt, close to the light of the rest of the house. Crawford peered into the depths. There wasn’t much to see. A half-dozen steps dropping steeply into blackness. Vertigo entered his bloodstream. A dark invitation, it tried to make him topple forward. He backed out of the recess. He tore his eyes away from the void, forced them to look at the details of the breach, tried to analyze what he was seeing. This was rearguard action on behalf of rationality, and he knew it. He made the effort anyway. He wanted to see evidence of a hoax. He knew about as much about dating construction work as he did Swahili, but he still hoped, clutching at straws in the wind, that he would see traces of plaster and Styrofoam rocks. Nothing. He looked up and saw Meacham gesture him over. She had already corralled Sturghill. He joined them.
“Well?” Meacham asked.
“I wish I could say it looked fake.”
“I could have told you it wasn’t.”
“What have I been telling everybody about believing the evidence of their eyes?” Sturghill said. She sounded annoyed. Crawford wondered how genuine her skepticism was. She might be fighting the same losing war as he.
Meacham seemed poised on the edge of unconditional surrender. “He didn’t fake smashing down that wall,” she told Sturghill.
“So it looks good. But consider the evidence. He puts on the helmet, says he sees things that the helmet couldn’t possibly be showing him, claims he has a vision of a staircase behind the wall. He takes down the wall. Lo and behold, there it is. And in his own home, too. Now if I had had the vision, I might be a bit more convinced.”
“Have you found any speakers in the walls?” Meacham asked.
“Not yet,” Sturghill admitted.
“Any hard evidence of any kind to support the hoax theory?”
“No.”
“Then how long can you pretend that thesis is viable?”
“Until I see hard evidence to the contrary. Lacking empirical evidence on either side, which is easier to believe: hoax or ghosts?”
“Occam’s Razor,” Meacham muttered.
“I was thinking more of David Hume and what he had to say about miracles. What’s more likely: that the eyewitnesses are wrong, however many there are, and however much they may be in good faith, or that the laws of the universe have been violated? The miracle loses out every time.” She cocked her head at Meacham. “You don’t sound like you’re fighting too hard for your own agenda. You’re the one who wanted us here, remember.”
Meacham nodded. “I also saw what I saw.”
Sturghill smiled. “I don’t think you’d see much of anything with the light unplugged. I can get freaked by sudden blackouts too.”
“That wasn’t the problem. I did see something.”
“Well, it wasn’t a ghost.” Sturghill said. She left them to turn the magician’s eye on the rubble.
“You’re being quiet,” Meacham said to Crawford.
He decided to be open with her — and with himself. It helped that she was voicing her own anxieties. “I don’t like where this is heading,” he said. “I’ve never experienced anything like this. And I haven’t had a single reading on any instrument that makes the slightest bit of sense.”
Meacham looked at the ground for a moment, then at him. “When you asked me if I had a dream the night before coming here,” she said, “I lied.”
“I thought maybe you had,” he said.
Then Gray was back with the flashlights.
“Well?” their host asked.
Meacham still had her doubts. She doubted that heading down these stairs was in any way a good idea. She doubted that she was going to come out of this fiasco with anything that would satisfy Jim Korda and salvage her career. And though she suppressed the idea as soon as it rose, she was beginning to have concerns for her personal safety. Gray’s behaviour was becoming erratic. People who wielded pickaxes while in a trance were to be approached with caution. That was the lost-cause rationalization she used to keep the anxiety from growing any worse. She didn’t let herself ask why he was in a trance. She would hold off that question and its darkness just as long as she could. But oh, going down the stairs was a bad idea.
The light from the rest of the hall barely reached the recess. It died five steps down. The grey light was gone. Perhaps, now that the flies had been lured to the web, its job was done. There were three flashlight beams to light the way. They were strong enough, and even with their jouncing and the seizure dance of shadows, Meacham had no trouble with her footing. It wasn’t the light’s strength that she mistrusted. It was its permanence. It had already been taken away once in the last hour. She didn’t want to lose it again down here.
The walls narrowed, and
the staircase twisted, as if they were descending a Gothic cathedral’s tower. Meacham reached out a hand to steady herself. The stairs were becoming thin wedges. If she moved too near the interior wall, there wouldn’t be room to place her feet, and she would fall. The exterior wall was dank. She felt something slick and bristly crumble against her fingers. The brickwork here was very dark, as if soiled by centuries of candle smoke, or as if, given enough time, the darkness had seeped into the stone itself.
Gray’s voice drifted up towards Meacham. He was at the front of the line, hidden from her by twists of the spiral. “The nitre!” he called out. “See, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults.”
Meacham looked back at Crawford. He was bringing up the rear with her and had one of the flashlights. His face, shadowed, twisted in distaste. “Poe,” he said. “‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ He picks his time and place, doesn’t he?”
“He’s enjoying this,” Meacham said.
“I do believe he is.”
Hudson was just ahead of Meacham. His shoulders had slumped when Gray had spoken. “That’s the first time I’ve heard him enjoy anything since his family died,” he said.
“If he’s having this much fun, maybe Kristine is right after all,” Meacham offered. No one took her up on it. She didn’t buy it, either. The words were thin, fragile. The dark snatched them, and they tore, parchment in wind.
The spiral tightened. The walls on both sides whispered against Meacham’s shoulders. She fought against dizziness. They had to be near the bottom, she thought. If the staircase narrowed any further, it would become a dead end. They had to be closing in on the centre of the nautilus shell. But the walls did come closer, and now they weren’t being subtle about it as they rubbed up against her. She heard exclamations coming from below, and braced herself for worse. It came. She had to turn sideways. The stairs became steeper, and she hugged the interior wall as she crab-walked down.
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