“Even if we find some kind of proof or something, what will we do with it?” I pressed. It was a bit late for this kind of reasoning, but I went on. “Harmondersly was right, the papers won’t buy it. No one will.”
Walther turned sharply, staring down my torch. “Michael, two things: secondmost is that if I can spanner their works in some way then, as God is my witness, I will. But firstly, when we find out, then I’ll know. I’ll know what it was for. I’ll know why. And that, that’s the point.”
“Walther,” I said. “It’s a cellar. They keep their cheese and wine down here.”
He smiled and directed his torch behind me. I looked and saw the door. It fit one of the archways that led beyond the cellar, dark old wood with a big ring handle. Tilting his hat at a cocky angle, Walther led the way to it and tried to open it. His smile slipped slightly when it wouldn’t turn. My own torch found the big rough-cut keyhole.
“Would you do the honours?” he asked. I knelt down and reached in my pocket for my picks. It’s a grand old art form that’s dying out in a lot of places these days. Kids would rather knock in a window and just grab stuff. There aren’t so many people like me who care about the trade. Anyway, I almost needn’t have bothered here. It was a simple old lock, well-oiled, and big enough that I could probably have lined up the tumblers with my finger. As it was my pick was too delicate but I managed by using an actual key to flip them straight. Walther and I exchanged another glance and I pulled the door open.
The room beyond was pitchy, and we flashed our torches about a weirdly civilised scene, seeing flashes of silver plate, polished wood. Then Walther leant in and flicked the lightswitch.
The chandelier above us glowed into life, and revealed the grandest dining room I ever saw, let alone the poshest one ever put in a cellar. It was the same décor from upstairs, same carpet even. The walls made up in portraits and framed legalese papers what they lacked in windows. There was a massive fireplace, wood stacked neatly beside it. The table, which could have seated fifty people with elbow room, was made from a single slab of some kind of wood, varnished dark red and inlaid with… scenes.
I tried hard to make out what those scenes were showing. Some sequence of events, that was obvious. Done in a mediaeval style – everyone with big heads and standing weird, all half-front on to me – it went right round the table’s edge in one continuous sweep, making it impossible to say where things started. Some of the figures were hunting. Some of them were on boats. There was a knight-looking chap lying dead beside a black lake, who could have been King Arthur for all I know. A comet or a falling star turned up a few times. Two blokes on a horse were doing a Saint George act, and while normally Saint George is killing a dragon about the size of a cat, this one made up most of the table’s centre. It was all coils of neck and tail, claws and teeth. Someone had a lot of red and black left over, after finishing the edge, because they’d spent a lot of time and table on that dragon.
I couldn’t help but recall that the furnishings upstairs had been lots of reddish and dark shades, just like the colours in here. There was even a red cross as part of the table inlay, a fancy-pointed one. There was a lot going on in that table. The background turned out to be more of the foreground, when you looked closely. Balancing the red cross was the pyramid-eye thing the Americans use on their money, and I’ve flogged enough trick rings to recognise the set square and stuff that the Freemasons use.
“Walther, you have got to see this table,” I told him.
“Look,” was all he said.
I’d passed over what he’d found, because I’d thought it was just one of those lists of names. People who died in the war or maybe a list of the club chairmen. It was just like those, names and dates, black with gold lettering. Walther was pointing to the most recent addition.
“James Vanderfell,” I read. “Two thousand and six.” I shivered, but it was excitement as much as anything. “We were right. You were right.”
“I was,” Walther agreed. “And they’re all there. Everyone I’ve linked to the club, and a few I couldn’t prove, and…” He looked on and on.
“Every seven years,” I said. Each name had a single date. Each date was seven years before the next. Before Vanderfell Junior was a Captain Graham Cordwright, nineteen ninety-nine.
It was a big board, taking up half the space from floor to ceiling. It had three columns, in medium small writing, and little Jimmy was halfway down the third. Our eyes were drawn inexorably up and up.
Walther had already got there. I’d heard his hiss of breath. When I joined him, the top of the first column, the style was illegible, for all someone had touched it up in gold leaf recently.
“Sir Geoffrey Martlet,” Walther said, his voice shaking a little. “Eleven Forty-five.”
The silence crept in after that. Walther stepped back almost reverently from the board. “Photo it,” he told me. I did, on my phone.
He was looking at something else when I’d done that. There was a big glass-fronted drinks cabinet but on top of it, close to eye level, were three things.
Two were cups or bowls, one silver and the other gold, both set with twiny patterns. Between them was a little golden stand, just a block with two fingers sticking up at each end. It was crude as anything but it was almost certainly solid gold. The prongs were holding a knife.
The knife had a blade of copper, and a hilt wound with cold wire. I touched it, and it cut my finger a touch, almost no pressure. You can get copper sharp enough to shave with, you see, although it blunts in no time. We looked at the cups, which were broad enough and big enough to be bowls, really. When I got them down we saw that the golden one had a certain discolouring, on the inside surface.
“Enough of it,” Walther said what I’d been thinking. “Over and over, enough of it, and even the most diligent staff can’t quite get the vessel clean.
“It’s a cult,” I said, because labels are useful when you’re scared.
“Onwards,” was all Walther said. There were two doors to this room. One of them, on cursory investigation, proved to be a kitchen.
That gave me a funny turn. I couldn’t make myself go to the back where the freezer was. It’s one of those things, those unspeakable things that just won’t go away. There’s a kind of horrible awe to the idea of eating other people. It’s all kinds of symbolism and power. The Dissipation Club were rich and greedy. To eat their own species would be in reality what they did every day metaphorically. To eat one of their actual own would be… fitting.
There was a bit of meat in the freezer, or so Walther said. He recognised venison and boar and steak and some kind of small birds. It didn’t look well-stocked, but he said, “Seven years to the next feast perhaps? And there aren’t any leftovers from Vanderfell Junior, if that’s what you’re thinking. If they ate him, they ate him all up.” He said it like he was telling Goldilocks, just to make me shudder.
The kitchen didn’t go anywhere else so we were left with the other door. There was a draft from under it, colder than cold.
The door was locked, but the lock was the same clunky old thing as the last and I had it open in a moment. It opened onto another set of stairs, spiral again, going down.
“We’ll either hit the sewers or the Metropolitan line in a minute, won’t we?” I asked.
“I’m willing to bet they made a special detour for both, to avoid this place,” Walther said bleakly. “Come on.”
I didn’t want to. The feeling about the freezer hadn’t left me. I’m not imaginative but my mind was full of ghouls and Morlocks and things just then. Walther, in the doorway, looked back to give me a smile. It would have been pointless to ask whether he had any idea what was down there. He didn’t, and that was why he had to go look.
“Walther, you’re all kinds of psychic,” I said. “Aren’t you… feeling anything?” I was. I really was.
“No,” he said, with a little frown. “Not a thing.” He turned and went into the dark.
It was a count of
seven before I could follow him. I was sweating despite the cold, my teeth jumping. I’ve seen some stuff in my time, but I was scared here. It wasn’t what had been done, or was being done, whatever that was. It was that rich people were doing it. Monsters you can sometimes reason with. I was scum off the streets, and a monster would have had more time for me than Mr Harmondersly.
But I followed Walther in there, God help me. I followed him down those stairs. They were grey stone now, and the stones were quite big, all different sizes. To take my mind off it I asked, “How old?” to Walther, two turns below me.
“Early medieval,” he said and then, “Older.” The echo told me he was at the bottom.
I joined him. The ceiling here was even lower, making me stoop. Walther had taken his hat off. Our torches were all the light there was. When you’ve only got the beams of two torches, it’s very difficult to completely get the feel of a place, seeing it only in small slices. The room was big. There was what I took to be a big stone coffin in the centre, like a knight’s tomb. It was just a slab, though. The cupboard-things at the sides were stone basins. There was a certain amount of staining there, as well.
There were big stone-stoppered jars, two feet high. I counted eighteen of them. When Walther lifted a fist-sized stopper the smell was weird and vinegary, and very strong. He closed it hurriedly.
There were designs on the walls. They were made of lots of little pieces of stone, and a lot of the pieces had gone missing. Walther’s torch beam searched them out, trying to find them, seeing hands, feet, trees. Too much was gone to tell, but the odd piece just reminded me of that table. I saw the same falling star or whatever it was, almost intact.
“There’s more stairs,” I said. Walther nodded. Not a spiral flight, but a straight descent, and one that nearly killed us more dead than any monster because the stone was worn into bows, and it was so steep I reckoned they could have put a lift in without taking the stairs out.
I had lost track of how deep we were, now, but when we got to the bottom I couldn’t but notice that the walls were just faced with big slabs of stone. A bit of torchwork told me that it was rock behind them. We were in a cave that had been cut out to be bigger than the dining room, with pillars keeping the cramped ceiling in place, and there was nothing in there, no decoration, nothing: just another doorway beyond. Our breath plumed white in the little lights we had brought with us, and we took turns to change batteries, because the light was failing. The air smelt of something musty.
The opening on the far corner was cut roughly rectangular, and it led into an identical room. Our torches picked out the same pillars, the slabs that made the walls, before they settled on something pale at the far end, next to a further dark hole.
We advanced cautiously and I stopped when I saw what was there, although it was clear enough they wouldn’t be making trouble for us.
Something had been done to them. Their skin had gone like leather, dried over their bones. Someone had given them a real beef jerky treatment, and I thought of the room back there, with the slab and the sink and the jars, and what they might do there, after the business with the knife and the bowls was finished with. The man furthest from the opening was recognisable though. We’d both seen his face in the file enough times.
“I think we’ve found Junior,” I said.
There were three of them, sitting with their backs to the wall as though guarding the opening, or as though waiting in line. They had their legs crossed, their arms folded across their chest. I didn’t touch them, but when Walther did it looked as if their skin was hard as wood. Each had a long line across their throats, the edges peeled back a little, that told just how they’d ended up. They wore white robes, and they had gold necklaces, a disc on a woven gold chain. The disk had marks on it, but they just looked like lines. Walther lifted one up, peering intently, not caring how close he brought his face to a mummified dead American.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, hushed. “Nowhere near here. There are stone tombs, the Scottish islands… old writing, Michael. Old.”
“What does it say?”
“Alas, I don’t know. Nobody does. Or that’s what I thought before coming down here. Perhaps it’s a curse on those who disturb this place.” He grinned, half desperation, half desperate cheer at having found out so thoroughly much more than he’d thought. “Perhaps Junior and his friends are symbolic guardians, to stop us going further.”
“And will they?” I asked.
“Only one way to find out,” he said, and walked straight past into the low opening. I was frozen to the spot for a second, and there was utter silence. “Walther?” I said, and then “Walther!” and damn the echo, but there was nothing.
I made myself follow him. The dead trio didn’t move. Walther was there, just beyond the doorway, but he was frozen and I froze too. For a very long time neither of us had words for it. At last it was me who found something to say.
“Disneyland,” I said in a raw, horrified voice.
Walther blinked and snapped out of it, turning his torch on me. “I’m sorry what?”
“Disneyland,” I said again, because that was all it reminded me of, in the whole world. If you haven’t been to Disneyland then any big fun park will do. It’s the same with all of them, the way they make use of their space. You spend most of your time there queuing, and they make you line up, up and down, up and down, the interlocking barriers compressing a half-mile queue into a neat little box. It was Disneyland. It was Disneyland for the dead. The barriers here were almost the same, and everyone was waiting in line, except that they were sitting down, white robes in graded stages of decay, legs folded, arms crossed, and each with their lucky medallion.
Walther was counting, depth by width, and I really didn’t want to know the answer. I couldn’t stop looking though. My torch just went from rank to rank of dried-kipper faces, a study in gradual dessication in seven-year intervals.
“Gaps,” I said. It was true. Every so often there was a space, five or ten or so bodies wide, just left empty. It was as though the whole thing would make a picture or spell something out when viewed impossibly from above.
“That’s awkward,” Walther said. “If we had all hands present and accounted for there would be space for two hundred, but if they’re going to leave gaps I won’t bother.” A moment of calculation and he said, slightly shakily, “But even if one out of spaces is just punctuation we’re already beyond Sir Geoffrey Martlet. We’re before the Norman invasion, at one every seven years.”
My torch was shaking and I brought it down to the floor at my feet. I tried several times before I could say it. “In – in the far corner, Walther. There’s – another hole.”
I didn’t think I could bear it, to go queue-jumping in that place: to sidle along the waiting ranks, brushing against the paper-dry dead, but when Walther went, I followed. I’m stupid like that. Sometimes I just cannot believe how stupid I am.
Neither of us suggested vaulting the barriers. The ceiling was low and the barriers were wood that might not have borne us, and besides, it would have been disrespectful. So Walther and I wound our way in and out of the patient corpses, speeding when we found a gap, slowing again at the next of the deceased.
Walther actually chuckled, halfway there. “I’ll say one thing,” he said. “This is certainly very British.” And we pushed our way to the front of the queue.
It was not the front of the queue. The hole led into another carved out cave, and that one was full as well with the snaking lines of the ancient dead. I saw Walther’s lips move a couple of times, seeing the same pattern: economy of space with a shotgunning of random gaps, some of which must have been twenty dead men long. There was little deterioration of the bodies, even compared to Junior two rooms back, but it was there, and I said, “How long?”
Walther shook his head. “They can’t be every seven years. I won’t believe it. If they were all here we’d be… before the Romans came here. Before the birth of Christ.” He swallowe
d. “Before the Roman Empire even started maybe.”
“Walther,” I said slowly. “There’s another –”
“I know. I don’t care. I won’t believe it.” He said that, but he was already moving down the zig-zags of the dead. I had no trouble following him now. That was because I had realised that the room of ancient dead people in front of me was matched by a room of ancient dead people behind me, and I wasn’t going to get left there.
We were halfway through the room when the light went on. It was another torch but it was a big, bright white one. Suddenly everything around us was better lit up than either of us wanted. We turned automatically, trapped in a maze of corpses. Of course we just saw the light but someone said, “I really must commend you.” He said it quietly but the only other sound was us and so we heard it very clearly.
The voice was familiar, and when the light was turned a little we could make out Mr Harmondersly standing in the entrance we had come through, all smart in his blazer as though we were not standing waist deep in a dead-man’s theme park. He had a gun, and although it was pointed at us it was almost a relief to see something I could understand.
“Mr. Cohen,” Harmondersly said. “You have done remarkably well.”
“Not quite well enough,” Walther noted, actually leaning on one of the barriers, as though he and Harmondersly were just chatting, without gun.
Harmondersly began to make his careful way towards us. I could see he was used to it. He didn’t jog a single body and the gun never wavered. “You might as well continue,” he said. “You might as well see all of it.”
“How many more rooms?” Walther asked.
“The next is the first. Go on ahead of me, if you would.”
“What if I’d rather just push you into shooting me now?” Walther asked him, not going anywhere.
“Oh but you wouldn’t, Mr Cohen,” Harmondersly said. “You’d rather find out, and then be shot. Tell me it isn’t true.”
Walther’s face showed that it was, and with a shrug he went on, weaving down the lanes of the dead. Their skin was taut over skull and bones, this far in. There was not even a rag left of any robes they might have worn. The air was cool and dry, though, and there was not a hole or mark on them, save for the cut throats. Seeing so many, I was an expert on the subject right there. Each man had his throat slashed cleanly, without ragged edges. The angles were all so very similar, like whoever did it was copying from a book.
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