Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  When they emerged from the church, Meacham saw Kate Boulter standing beside the war monument. She wondered how long the detective had been waiting there. Boulter approached. Meacham noticed the pouches under her eyes, the tautness of her lips. “You spent the night here, I take it,” Meacham said.

  “Yes.” And not well, from the looks of it. Good. Nice to know others were being force-fed the gospel. The truth was spreading.

  “Am I still the pain in your ass?”

  “No. Where are you going?”

  “Back to the Hall. We lost another friend.”

  “So did the town. One Roger Bellingham.”

  Pertwee looked like she’d been punched. “What happened?”

  “You tell me,” Boulter said, sounding old and scared and dead. “Many heard him scream. We found his stick. That’s it.”

  Meacham said, “We’re going to try to stop this thing.”

  Boulter’s eyes flicked up to the cross at the top of the spire, then back to Meacham. “Anything I can do to help?”

  Meacham heard her own exhausted sense of duty in Boulter’s tone. “Yes,” she said. “Run. Fast and far away.”

  It occurred to Meacham that they could call a taxi to drive them down to the Hall. They might have been able to beg a ride from someone, too. Maybe even Boulter. But she didn’t suggest the idea. She didn’t want to bring anyone else nearer the house than necessary. And she wasn’t in a hurry to be there herself. So they walked, as they had before. The first time, she had thought she knew what she was heading into. Now, all she knew was bad trouble. She didn’t want to go. For all her cheerleading, her most conscious desire was to flee the country. Going back, though, was easy.

  When they reached the gate, they found it open, Gray or Gethsemane Hall welcoming them back. She had hoped she would feel a gravity-pull of reluctance as she crossed the threshold back into the Hall’s domain. She was walking into a jungle with a very large predator loose. Her fight-or-flight instincts should be screaming holy hell. Instead, the return was an easy, comfortable slide down a chute, a surrender to the pull of the house. Her body was almost relaxed, relieved not to be fighting the current anymore. She noticed that she was starting to trot, her legs eager to be back. She forced herself to slow down, saw the others catch themselves. She feared her acceptance, wondered if she would ever again be able to leave of her own will. It’s laughing at us, she thought.

  Down the path and through the woods, out from under the guardian yews (their branches reaching out in hungry welcome), and there was Gethsemane Hall again, brooding over the strength that coiled within. As they approached, Pertwee asked, “Where do you think he is?”

  “In the caves,” Hudson answered, no hope in his voice.

  He was wrong. They entered the open door and found Gray in the Great Hall. He was lying on the table. He raised his head when they entered, lifting a great weight. He blinked at them for a moment, then creaked upright, rubbing night from his eyes. “Were you attacked?” Meacham asked.

  “Sideswiped.” Meacham saw him do a headcount. “Where’s Edgar?”

  “Gone,” she said. Meaning: dead and eaten. Like Crawford.

  “And why are you back?”

  “To stop this.”

  Gray nodded. He seemed detached, as if watching a philosophical debate that he found interesting but in which he had no investment. He cocked his head at Hudson. “Not here for the truth, Patrick?”

  “That, too,” Hudson said. “That’s how we’re going to stop this thing.”

  Gray thought that one over. “Good enough,” he said and clambered off the table. He stretched. Joints cracked. Meacham noticed bruises on his arms and the side of his face. He saw her looking. “Fell hard,” he told her. “So, fellow truth-seekers, where do we start?”

  Meacham felt Hudson stiffen beside her. Gray’s flippancy was weary, hard-earned, but it was still flippancy. His face, meanwhile, wasn’t joking. It looked driven. It was the face of a man who knew a truth or two and wasn’t planning on keeping it to himself. “The caves,” Meacham said. She would parse Gray’s attitude later.

  “The tomb,” Pertwee said, specifying.

  Gray smiled. “Where else?”

  They brought rope. They brought lamps. They brought nerves. It’s still early, Meacham told herself. It’s still day. No way to know that down in the caves. Noon or midnight, no difference there. She wondered if the anger in the Hall cared for the time of day.

  They made their way slowly, Gray in front and testing the ground. He stopped when they reached the lake. He shone his light on the blackness. “Don’t touch it,” he warned. “Take a good look, though.”

  Meacham crouched at the shore, examined the liquid where Gray’s light skimmed it. She saw the slow shifting movement, not so much tide or ripples as breath. She saw droplets that were still ink in the light. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Ectoplasm,” Gray said.

  “Black ectoplasm?” Pertwee objected.

  Gray shrugged. “Come up with a better name if you want to,” he said.

  Meacham backed away. The urge to plunge into the lake hit like a nightmare. Her heart stumbled as it sprinted. “Jesus,” she muttered.

  Gray moved on. When they reached the site of the cave-in, they tied themselves to the rope and skirted the hole one at a time. Meacham gave it as wide a berth as she could, clinging close to the wall. Once everyone had crossed, Gray made them pause again. He shone his light so the beam passed horizontally over the hole. “Keep watching,” he said. Then: “There. See that?”

  Meacham had. Just. A drop of black liquid falling up toward the roof of the cave. She aimed her own light up, saw the reflected shine of dampness above. Her throat felt painfully dry.

  Sturghill was looking up, too. “Why isn’t the lake defying gravity?” she asked.

  “Because it doesn’t have to,” Pertwee answered. “Sometimes you stand, sometimes you sit, sometimes you lie down. Nothing says you have to do one or the other.”

  “So it’s conscious,” Sturghill said. She was shielding her eyes, as if the droplets might come back down and target her. “Is it a ghost?”

  “No. It’s more like the residue of the ghost. It isn’t conscious. It’s a bridge between worlds. It’s what gives the ghost material form.”

  Like an empty bag of skin, Meacham thought. Just waiting for the bones and the will to fill it up and move it around.

  Sturghill was looking back in the direction of the lake. “Why is there so much of it? Are there many ghosts?”

  “I don’t know,” Pertwee admitted.

  “Things build up,” Gray said simply and moved on.

  Meacham thought about the lake at their back as she followed. They were putting the reservoir of hate and pain between them and the outside world. The strategy sucked. The strategy didn’t matter. Think hotel. Think Corderman. If it wanted them, it would come to them. Location was irrelevant.

  She felt better. She felt worse.

  They descended. The stone throat twisted, happy to swallow them again. It took them along its ride to the destination. They reached the cave with the tomb. Meacham winced in anticipation as they entered. She was half-braced for the return of Crawford’s mutilation. There was nothing. Only the steady drip from the slab in the centre of the space. They gathered around the tomb, shone lights on it, watched the drops form and fall up. The sound of the dripping was time’s slow metronome.

  “Build-up,” Gray said. “Think about it. One drop of water with one grain of mineral. Given enough time, you get stalactites.”

  “No,” Sturghill said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “We aren’t below the lake. If this stuff has been dripping up out of this sarcophagus, or whatever the hell it is, for all this time, why isn’t there a huge pool of ectoplasm above our heads? Why is the big deposit fifty metres to the side?”

  Gray looked up, looked down, looked thoughtful. He didn’t answer. He crouched over the
tomb, ran a finger along the seal, careful not to touch any of the liquid.

  “I don’t care where this shit comes from,” Meacham said. “I just want it gone. I don’t suppose it’s flammable? No? Well, worth the thought.” She turned to Hudson and Pertwee. “Okay, you two. This is your show.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Pertwee objected.

  “I’m not a priest,” Hudson said, just as outraged.

  “You’re close enough,” Meacham told him. “How does it work, then?” she asked Pertwee.

  “We find the source of the problem, and we resolve the issue.”

  “And if the issue is a few hundred years old?”

  “Usually, if the spirit realizes things are long in the past, that’s enough, and it leaves.”

  “Usually.” Meacham didn’t have to put much sarcasm into the word. She spread her arms, reminding Pertwee of where they were and what had already happened.

  “I didn’t say it would be easy,” Pertwee said

  “No, you didn’t,” Meacham admitted. She looked at Hudson. “Any ideas on your side?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure what to suggest. The original 1649 edition of the Book of Common Prayer had a form of exorcism as part of the ceremony of baptism, but —”

  “Do you know it?” Meacham cut him off.

  “More or less.”

  “Good enough for government work. What do you need to do this?”

  “Nothing. Just my faith.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. “And how is that holding up?” she asked quietly.

  “I’m not sure I’m up to the test.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Your faith and Anna’s are all we have,” she told him.

  “What about you and Kristine?”

  “We were the rationalists, and we were wrong. We may admit that, but we don’t have anything to fall back on. You do. After all, you’re seeing proof that life, or something like it, keeps going.” Over Hudson’s shoulder, she saw Gray pause in his examination of the tomb and glance her way. She couldn’t read his expression. “You or Anna must be right. Maybe you both are.” Another look from Gray. His lips twitched, the movement so small it could have meant anything.

  Hudson nodded. He turned around, and Meacham watched him face his friend. “What do you think, Richard?”

  “I’m here for the truth. Do your thing.” He moved away from the tomb and presented it to Hudson. Step right up.

  Hudson approached the tomb. He knelt before it. He took his time and looked for strength. The others had backed off and were standing with their backs against the cave wall. He was aware of their eyes on him; he had locked gazes with each before he turned to the rock. Three of the looks were hopeful. Meacham’s was also encouraging. The look that worried him was Gray’s. It was noncommittal. It was unconcerned. But it was also interested and curious. He wanted to believe the man he had known for decades was still there. He wanted to believe there was still something more there than the many-coloured robe of anger. He wanted to believe. Instead, he doubted.

  He tried to compartmentalize his doubts. They were about Gray. They weren’t about God. Meacham was right: everything that had happened was proof of the spiritual. The precise dogma might be off, but that was all. He had said he didn’t think he was up to the test. His wording was a giveaway he now clung to, a test. If he thought he was being tested, then his faith and belief went deeper than he had been crediting. He brought his hands together. I’m here for You, Lord, he thought. Please be here for me.

  He began to speak. The words came easily. He remembered them because he had been struck by them. He had run across the prayer for deliverance while doing research during that period of his life when it had seemed he would take official orders, that he wasn’t going to be too much of a rebel for the entrenched establishment of the Church of England. He could see why the passage had been removed from subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer. They were too harsh for a baptism. There was too great a presumption of evil. Or so he had thought then. Now, the words seemed timid. He spoke them slowly, feeling the meaning of each syllable, gathering strength from that meaning.

  “I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from ...” He hesitated. The next words were “these infants, whom our Lord Jesus Christ hath vouchsafed to call to His holy Baptism, to be made members of His body, and of His holy congregation.” They hardly applied in this instance. Make the substitution meaningful, he told himself. Maintain the ritual’s power. He regrouped. “Depart from this world,” he said, “which our Lord Jesus Christ hath vouchsafed to call to His holy Baptism. Therefore, thou cursed spirit, remember thy sentence, remember thy judgment, remember the day to be at hand, wherein thou shalt burn in fire everlasting, prepared for thee and thy Angels.” The prayer became momentum. He felt himself drawn into the strength of the words, of the iron faith they embodied. His old convictions and joys resurrected themselves. He knew he was not alone. “And presume not hereafter to exercise any tyranny toward this world, which Christ hath bought with his precious blood, and by this his holy Baptism calleth.”

  He opened his eyes. At first he thought that nothing had changed. Then he noticed that the droplets of ectoplasm emerging from the seam of the tomb were vibrating. “Go,” he said. “You don’t belong here. Your time is done. Go.” He repeated the rite, revelling in its force. He kept his eyes open this time, watching the vibration, willing it to feel what he knew to be the truth. He thought he saw a recoil. Then he knew he did. A bit of black ectoplasm withdrew inside the seam of the stone lid. “Go!” he shouted. “GO!”

  His ears popped as if the air pressure in the cave had just plunged. The droplets vanished inside the tomb. Their flight was so quick, Hudson thought he should have heard a sound like a cracking whip as they disappeared. He turned around to face his expectant audience. “The enemy,” he said, smiling with the real first hope he’d felt in a long time, “is in retreat.”

  “To where?” Gray came over to see for himself.

  “Inside the tomb.”

  The others approached more warily.

  “Well,” Gray said with cheerful cynicism, “that was easy.”

  “I said it was retreating, not that it was vanquished.”

  “What do you think?” Meacham asked Pertwee.

  “Maybe,” she conceded. She looked at Hudson, gave him a hopeful smile. “If the spirit hears the message that it’s time for it to move on, maybe it will. And since the ghost is a Christian one, it might well have a strong response to that rite.”

  “Who says it’s Christian?” Sturghill asked.

  “It’s Saint Rose,” Pertwee said simply. She looked to Hudson for confirmation.

  “Ah ...” he hesitated. “I don’t know that it is.” Pertwee was still clinging, he thought, to the Hall’s mythology. Her insistence on the spiritual presence of Saint Rose bothered him. It struck him as dangerously dogmatic. She had believed in the benevolence of the Hall upon arriving here, and she’d been wrong. But instead of a full questioning of her assumptions, she was just revising slightly. She was granting that the presence here was a dangerous one, but only because it had been curdled by time. Saint Rose could be restored to her better self. The story was too neat. It had a narrative arc. Reality didn’t. Tidiness was the sign of a lie, however generously believed. And there was this: he hadn’t felt anything human as he reached out to strike with his prayer. He had seen black drops and felt a resistance that had all the personality of electricity. Saint Rose the Evangelist was not here. He didn’t think she ever had been.

  Gray said, “What if this isn’t a tomb?”

  A stymied silence. Hudson spoke first. “What else would it be?”

  “Why make a stone sarcophagus and leave no sign of who is inside it? I’ve heard of unmarked graves, but not unmarked monuments.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Hudson persisted. “If not a grav
e, what then?” He wasn’t sure why he wanted the thing to be a tomb. It shouldn’t make any difference. If prayer worked, it worked. Perhaps the problem was a question of assumptions. If he were wrong about the nature of the stone, he might be wrong about other things. He looked at the slab. He worried. He saw something other than a tomb. He saw an altar. I’ve been praying at that, he thought. There was a squeeze in his chest.

  Gray crouched beside the slab. He touched a point on the seam. “I was looking at this earlier,” he said. He pushed. Hudson saw his finger disappear up to the knuckle. There was a click of stone unlatching. Gray stood up. “Most graves don’t have mechanisms,” he said.

  Neither do altars, Hudson thought, feeling irrational relief.

  Gray grasped the edges of the lid. “Anyone going to help me with this?” he asked.

  Hudson took a step back on instinct. Meacham was eyeing the lid speculatively.

  “Come on,” Gray said to her. “Ye seeker after truth. Information is power. You of all people should know that.”

  “That’s cheap,” Meacham said, but she moved in to help anyway. They strained. The lid rotated. Stone scraped on stone. The sound was rough. The sound was hollow. The echo ran deep and straight down.

  chapter seventeen

  the cold spot

  They shone their lights inside the stone box. They saw stairs. The descent looked long.

  Meacham said, “I was wondering when we’d find the doorway to Hell.” She tried to sound like she was joking. She wasn’t able to. The steps were rough and steep. She couldn’t see the bottom. She aimed her flashlight beam at the roof of the staircase, caught a glimpse of the ectoplasm as it pulled away from the light. Are you retreating or luring? she wondered.

  Gray climbed up over the lip of the stone and started down.

  “What are you doing?” Hudson asked, horrified.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Gray said, and Meacham had to agree. Backing off in terrified self-preservation had ceased to be a useful option some time back. She followed, with Pertwee hard on her heels. Hudson would be there too, she knew. He wouldn’t want to be left behind, alone. She knew she wouldn’t.