A drop formed, but this one didn’t leave the tomb. It dangled on the corner, suspended by a prayer-thin strand. Another joined it. Then another. They fused, growing bigger. Each new drop added to the mass. Before too many seconds has passed, Crawford was staring at a blob floating in the air just above the tomb. It lengthened. The drops began to form quickly, as if the dam of the tomb were giving way, at long, long last. The shape grew longer yet. Now it was a worm. Soon it would be a snake. It pulsed with a bad substitute for life. The plunk, plunk, plunk of the drops was replaced by a steady, trickling, tearing sound. One end of the snake turned. It pointed down toward Crawford’s face. It moved closer. Crawford began to scream.
The scream stopped them, when it should have made them move faster. It should have made them run. Meacham’s heart froze as every bad thing was confirmed. She, Sturghill, Hudson, and Pertwee locked gazes for one panicked moment. Then they did run. Or they tried to. With one flashlight, the best they could do on the sloping, uneven floor was a jog. Meacham still had no idea if they would even find Crawford at the end of this tunnel, but it was still turning and still descending, and there was no other way to answer the screams except to plunge on down.
“James!” Sturghill called. “James! It’s okay! We’re coming!”
The screams were agonized. There was no pause for breath between them. They were one on top of the other, an overdub of terror and pain. They grew louder, then came in short, staccato bursts, as if each was interrupted by a fresh new horror. For an irrational moment, Meacham wished she had a gun. Pertwee was sobbing as she ran. Sturghill’s face was taut and grim.
There was a hysterical, gurgling whine, and the screams stopped. Meacham kept moving. The snake took them down, and at last they reached its belly. The tunnel opened into the huge cavern. Sturghill shone her light forward. In the centre of the cave was the tomb. It was an unadorned sarcophagus, Stone Age in its simplicity. All about the monument was Crawford. His skin had been peeled off and wrapped around the slab.
chapter fourteen
the better part of valour
There were screams, then. And there was running. The devil was at their heels, and the only thing in life that mattered was to outrun him. In the first cave, they almost collided with Gray and Corderman, coming back down with more flashlights and rope. Meacham pushed them back up. The climb to the surface was worse than the descent. The claustrophobia was still present, but now there was danger, now there was something with bad desire in the dark beneath her, and the twisting staircase was too slow an exit. Spiral and spiral and spiral, breath rasping in her chest and legs aching from the run and the climb, and the staircase was a trap, it was never going to end, it was going to keep them in the twist until the darkness with teeth and claws caught up and had its way with them. Her pulse was the pounding of heavy artillery. She was frightened. She was terrified. She thought she had been scared earlier, but no. Not properly. Now she knew what terror pure and true was, for the first time in her life. It was bad. But it fuelled the drive to run, run, run, to stay alive for another extra second.
The staircase finally relented and spat her out into the crypt. She kept moving, and so did the others, and they didn’t stop until they were in the relative illumination of the Great Hall. The electric lights were on. The windows were black. It was night already. She hadn’t realized how long they’d been underground.
“What’s happened?” Gray demanded. He and Corderman were gasping. They looked worried, but more puzzled than anything else. Sturghill, Pertwee, and Hudson were another story. Meacham imagined she must look like they did: eyes rabbit-wide with fright, skin white as the death that pursued them.
“He’s dead,” Hudson wheezed out and then described exactly how he was dead.
“We’re getting out of here,” Meacham said. “All of us. Right now.” She put every ounce of authority she could muster into the command. She wanted no argument or delay. She wanted to be anywhere but here. She was a believer, now. She respected the object of her new faith.
There was no argument from those who had seen what was left of Crawford. They moved for the exit. Pertwee and Sturghill had identically anxious faces. A moment for history. Corderman said, “What about the equipment?”
“Leave it,” Pertwee said. She didn’t look back.
Outside, Meacham’s breath steadied, if only a bit. The night was a giant’s palm pressing down on her. Gethsemane Hall reached out for her, wanting her back. But at least she wasn’t inside.
Gray said, “Are you sure that you saw —”
“Yes,” Meacham snapped. She started up the drive. Just leave. She had fantasies of being on a transatlantic flight within the next twelve hours, flying home to the joyous everydayness of a shattered career. Maybe she would be lucky. Maybe, if she ran far and fast enough, the peeled-potato (with ketchup, thank you) corpse of James Crawford would be the worst thing she would ever see. And that would be a good thing, because, and here was another maybe, maybe, with enough time, she might reassemble something like her old understanding of how the world worked. But if she saw what had killed Crawford, then that would be the end of all things.
She didn’t check to see who was following her, but she heard footsteps on gravel. She wasn’t walking towards the embrace of the yew trees alone.
Gray’s voice again. “What about the ambulance?”
She stopped and turned around. He hadn’t moved. He was standing alone in the wide, parking area of the drive, facing the retreating troops. She couldn’t make out his face. “It’s too late for that,” she said.
“It’s still on its way.”
“Then wait for it at the gate.”
“And tell them what? ‘Sorry, boys, the man’s well dead. Needn’t have bothered you. Off you go, then.’”
He was right. A corpse meant officials doing official things. For a moment, the prospect of authorities from the mundane world once again swarming all over Gethsemane Hall comforted her, tempted her to think that reality would reassert itself through sheer bureaucracy. She could almost be lured back. But then, she was one of those authorities. She was one of the officials. She was the bureaucracy. And she was running for her life. Right now, it was night. She knew better than to believe happy lies. “Fine,” she said. “You want to greet them, you wait.”
“You aren’t leaving town, are you? You’ll be wanted.”
Shit. The first opportunity for escape receded. At least she’d be away from the Hall. “We’ll be at the Nelson,” she said and started up the drive again.
“Richard,” she heard Hudson plead. He was right behind her.
“I can deal with this,” was the response. Meacham admired his confidence. She wondered where it sprang from and if it was lethally foolish. “Why don’t you stay and help?”
The question was cruel, whether Gray intended it to be or not. Hudson sighed so he would not stop, and kept walking. Up ahead, the night gathered strength as the drive rose into the woods. The darkness was thicker there. It was the fault of the yew trees. They gathered the black in their branches, hugged it close and squeezed out solid shadow. Hudson still had his flashlight, but the beam wasn’t parting the dark, just pointing to it. Meacham slowed down a bit as she approached the trees, giving the rest of the group a chance to catch up. They bunched together. They were a turtle of defensive fear. Meacham remained at the front, leading a retreat as anxious as an over-the-trenches assault. She stepped first into the embrace of the yew trees. She was half-surprised when she didn’t encounter a wall. She kept moving, waiting for the dark to gather substance and push back, slowing her down until its quicksand strength held her fast for the thing in the Hall to find. The retreat was slow. Hudson kept the flashlight trained on the ground so they could see to place their feet. The circle of illumination was weak magic. For Meacham, it was nothing more than a place to keep her eyes focused so they wouldn’t look up and perhaps see something she didn’t want to see.
The woods held the night but did not unl
eash it. Nothing reached out to touch Meacham. She walked a slow and steady pace, found a rhythm that moved her forward without risk of stumbling. She didn’t want to fall. The others were in lock-step behind her. Footsteps crunched gravel in unison. It’s a forced march, she thought. We’re abandoning Moscow. Around them, the scorched earth waited.
At last, the woods relented. They loosened their grasp. The trees parted. Hudson’s light stretched farther, as if pulling in air for the end of the race. There was the gate. Meacham had a panicked thought: that a combination would be needed to leave as well as to enter the grounds. She was wrong. On this side of the gate, there was only a button. She pushed it, and the gate opened.
She had thought, when the gate closed behind her, that she would breathe glorious new air. She had thought she would feel the exhilaration of release. She didn’t. Instead, she felt a sharp tug of regret, and to her horror, she turned to look back down the drive, and she knew, even as the blood drained from her face, that the look she bore was one of longing. She knew this because Hudson, and Corderman, and Sturghill, and Pertwee wore identical expressions. They were all facing back.
The approaching flash of ambulance lights broke the spell. Meacham turned around to face the vehicle. As she did, she locked eyes with Sturghill. They shared the fear.
They’d left him. He was alone with the Hall for the first time since the investigation had begun. Surrounded by the night, he turned to face the house. It stared back at him, and it was not impassive. Its eyes, lit from within, were eager. So was he. He was charged up for a fight, could feel the tension thrum of victory, even if he didn’t know why. He was winning a war.
The Hall tugged at him. Come back inside, it said. In due course, he told it. Now, it insisted. It reached out for him. Its tentacles were shadow and anger. They coiled around him. They squeezed. His confidence wavered. The nature of the war blurred. The fear, clamped down but only just by bravado, broke the surface. The reality of Crawford’s death hit like a nitrogen-cooled spike to the base of his neck. He hadn’t seen the body. He didn’t have the visceral knowledge that Meacham and her group had. But he had seen the terror. He had seen Meacham, of all people, run from the place. The woman who believed in nothing believed in something now, and she was fleeing its pursuit. Crawford was dead. Whatever had killed him waited in the heartless depths of the Hall. For a moment, he tried to imagine a human killer, then dismissed the idea as dangerous. Clinging to rationality would be a lethal rigidity. He would be snapped in half.
And still, through the fear, through the growing sense that he was alone with something enormous, he could feel strange tickles, fragments of satisfaction, slaked anger, excited victory. He clenched his hands into fists. One to defend against the disturbing pleasures. The other to hold onto them.
He could hear the siren of the ambulance now. With an effort, he turned away from the house and looked up the drive. After a minute, the night began to pulse with red and blue glows. They grew brighter, turned into flashes, and the ambulance emerged from the woods, taking the last bend in the drive at speed.
“I hope you’re up to a fair bit of climbing,” he told the paramedics as they piled out.
He led them into the house. There was troubling relief in giving in to the tug and returning to the Hall’s embrace. The paramedics were in a hurry. He told them Crawford was dead, and one of them called in for the police. Gray pointed the way, and they jogged ahead of him, humping a stretcher down the spiral of the staircase. Their halogen torches lit up the dark, turning the walls into a harsh-faced wasteland of edged shadows. “Don’t fall,” Gray said. “We’re too late to be of any help.” They didn’t listen to him.
With more light, the cave itself looked even more like a maw, only this time Gray could see the jaws as they prepared to close. He tried to shrug off the sense of teeth descending when he wasn’t looking and led the way down into the tunnels. When they reached the cave-in, one of the paramedics shone his light down into the hole. “Can’t see anything,” he said. “Too high up.”
They continued the descent. As they went deeper and came closer to the cave where Crawford had fallen, Gray tensed, bracing himself for the bad sight. The tunnel bent. The cave opened up before them. Halogen lit it.
The paramedics stopped. One of them dropped his end of the stretcher and rounded on Gray. “You taking the piss?” he demanded, livid.
Gray blinked, ran his eyes over the cavern. There was nothing here. No Crawford. No body. No blood. “I was sure this was where they said he was,” he said, confused. The man who had spoken lifted his lamp. The ceiling was distant and barely visible, but Gray could see the hole where Crawford had fallen. He shook his head. He looked down and saw the tomb. “This is the place,” he said. He approached the tomb.
There was no mistaking it for anything else. It was a massive black slab, rough-hewn but rigorous in its lines. It appeared to be granite, a harsh intrusion amid the hard chalk walls. The stone would have had to have been hauled from a fair distance away and then wrestled down to the caverns. There were no inscriptions. Gray couched beside the stone, looking for a trace of Crawford. Nothing.
“So?” the other paramedic asked, sounding no more happy than his partner.
“He was here,” Gray said.
They joined him and shone their lights over the ground, then up towards the roof of the cavern, and back down again. “You say he fell all this way,” said one.
“Yes.”
“Banged himself up good and proper,” said the other.
“That’s right. He broke his leg and his back.”
One of the men lit a cigarette. “Bounced back pretty quick.”
Gray tried to stare him down. “Do you take all your calls this seriously?”
The man returned his gaze steadily. “We do when they’re hoaxes, sir.” His “sir” had the warmth of dry ice.
“Listen —” Gray began.
“No, sir, I think you’d better listen. You say a man fell down here and died. And there’s no corpse.”
“I didn’t actually see the body,” Gray wavered.
“Pulled himself back together and crawled away, did he?”
“I didn’t say —”
“But you said you saw him fall.”
“I saw that he was down here, yes.”
“Fell all that way, and now he’s gone.”
“You don’t understand what’s —”
“And I don’t see any blood here. Do you?”
He didn’t.
“Oi, Chris,” the paramedic said to his partner. “Isn’t there a legal consequence or two for this sort of thing?”
“Do believe you’re right, Mike.”
Mike drew on his cigarette, blew smoke at Gray. “We’ll be off, then.”
“But —”
“Save it for the police.”
They left. Gray didn’t follow them. He shone his own flashlight over the ground beside the tomb, then studied the slab again. He heard something drip. He almost called the paramedics back but thought better of it. He followed the sound and saw the liquid forming at the corner of the tomb. He watched the drop form. He saw it fall upward. He recognized the ectoplasm for what it was.
The instinct was to run. He believed what he’d been told. He knew that Crawford was dead. He knew that a great many things, all bad, were possible. He didn’t run. He was frightened, but he also still felt the giddy exhilaration of imminent victory. He walked, steadily, without rushing, out of the cavern and started back up the tunnel. He made his way to the lake. He ran the light over its surface. He wondered how he could have ever thought this was water. It was far too taut. It was a huge muscle waiting to be flexed. He stepped closer and crouched at the edge of the shore. The lake was motionless. He wondered what made the muscle act. He reached out to touch it.
Rage took him.
The bottom fell out from Meacham’s gut while she was on the phone to the local police. She hadn’t been full of comfort and joy before. She’d seen
the ambulance go by, had thought its hurry was a pointless irony. She’d led the retreat back to the Nelson, and there were plenty of rooms available, but they’d still doubled up. She was sharing with Sturghill. Hudson had gone on to the church rectory to bunker down with a brother in arms. She called the constabulary from her room, less than half an hour since the flight had begun. She was out of the grasp of the house. She was away from the layered age of Gethsemane Hall. The Nelson had been around a good hundred years, but it had been renovated and polished, its wood and brass a sanitized tourist fantasy of the antique. It was mundane in the purest, most life-affirming sense of the word. She could feel grief about Crawford, but she should feel safe.
She was talking to a Constable Walker. “You went down into where?” he was asking, and the alarm in his voice was distressing in and of itself, and then something hit. It rippled through Meacham, a shockwave of absence. It sank into her like the thinnest of stiletto blades, a hypodermic needle long and strong enough to pierce to her marrow and inject a concentrated lack of hope. The poison flashed through her system, and she remembered feeling this way before, in the wake of the lost dream the night before arriving at the Hall. She choked on her answer to Walker. She looked up and saw Sturghill clutch the comforter on her bed, saw her turn to look at Meacham with eyes that shone a new and deeper pain. But the worst thing wasn’t anything she saw. The worst thing was what she heard. She heard Walker grunt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Silence moved over the face of their waters. The silence was slick. It was contemptuous. It promised much.
Then the wave was over. It had been brief, but it did its damage. She heard Walker’s breath catch and start again. “Oh, Lord,” said the constable. He spoke with feeling. “What have you done?”
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