Perhaps the room had been a conservatory, unless some kind of underground growth had broken through the window. The tangle of vegetation was so convoluted that its elements were beyond separating. She could easily imagine that different varieties of withered leaves and shrivelled flowers were sprouting from the same plant. Had the owner of the house tried to create a new species for some purpose? Whatever had grown in the room was dead now, possibly of uncontrolled luxuriance, and no insects were swarming in the mass of sunless pullulation, just shadows. At least she could be certain Ellen wasn't in the room. She wished she could have closed it before crossing the hall to the other open room.
It was just a room, she did her best to think as the light ranged around it, but its very emptiness seemed ominous. It was so bare that it didn't even have a window, let alone a carpet, and she was unable to determine the colour of the walls. She only had to lean through the doorway in case Ellen was hiding just inside, and she didn't know why she should hope so fervently that Ellen wasn't. 'Ellen,' she called, though it felt more like a prayer. Having heard no answer, she ducked into the room.
The shapeless hulk that lurched at her was yet more darkness, brought down from the ceiling by the movement of the light. That wasn't why she gasped with all her breath. She saw at once that Ellen was elsewhere, but the instant gave whatever was in the room the chance to touch her. Her skin began to crawl as if insects were hatching under her clothes, or perhaps not even as if, since she felt the twitching of feelers and the fumbling of many legs. Instinctively she knew that these were the least of the delights the room had in store. Now that she'd been seized she could only stumble forwards to discover what else was waiting, and she wasn't surprised to hear Ellen groaning on her behalf.
But it wasn't on her behalf, because it was in another room. Ellen was still alone and in distress. The thought jerked Charlotte's head up, back into the hall. If the sensation of being infested didn't entirely vanish, at least it felt like someone else's nightmare that was trying to invade her. It had to be less important than her cousin, and she managed to leave it behind as she hurried to the room beyond the entrance to the cellar. Surely Ellen needn't be down there. Surely Charlotte would find her by opening the next door.
It led to a dining-room. Paintings that she preferred not to examine, having glimpsed that they were portraits or self-portraits of a gaunt man with unpleasantly prominent eyes, watched over both sides of a long black wooden table, at the far end of which stood a solitary chair. Someone was sitting on it or, more accurately, perched. Charlotte sucked in a breath that emerged as a word while the flashlight beam steadied. 'Ellen.'
She was lying face down at the table, arms outstretched, hands splayed on the wood. She didn't stir in response to Charlotte's voice, and only a feeble movement of her blouse proved she was breathing. None of the portraits widened their eyes to watch Charlotte venture along the room; that was just an effect of the light, which caught the unnaturally rounded eyes and made them glisten like ice. 'It's me, Ellen. I'm here now,' Charlotte said and, having propped the spade against the table well within reach, took her cousin's right hand.
At least, she tried. It was pressed flat against the wood. If anything, Ellen flattened it harder, and Charlotte was afraid that her cousin was doing the same to her face, as if she wanted to erase it and all sense of herself. Charlotte opened her mouth, but the sound she uttered was wordless and by no means comforting. A portrait had thrust its head forwards to peer at them.
All of its companions on the left-hand wall appeared to widen their bulging whitish eyes in glee as Charlotte swung the beam towards them, so wildly that the flashlight almost flew out of her hand. She'd grabbed the spade before she realised that the frame out of which the face had peered was lower on the wall than the portraits to either side. In another moment she saw it was a service hatch. Beyond it were a kitchen and a revival of the footsteps she'd heard from the stairs. As she made herself advance around the table and past Ellen to look through the hatch, a dark bulk crept out of hiding behind a massive iron kitchen range while the light glared back from a window walled up with clay. A figure was wandering around another table attended by a single chair. He was dodging back and forth as if led by his frantic shadow. 'Hugh,' Charlotte said.
He didn't react, and she had to wait until he strayed towards the hatch again before she could see his face. It looked pinched around a desperate obsession. His eyes were fixed beyond recognising her, perhaps even beyond sensing anyone was there. Perhaps he was conscious only of the light that was showing him his way or rather demonstrating that he couldn't find it – and then another thought appalled Charlotte. How had he and Ellen found their way down the lightless house? There was no sign of a flashlight except for hers.
They must have been shown the route or led through it, and she couldn't doubt who their guide had been. 'Where is he?' she blurted.
Hugh might not have heard. He didn't falter in his wandering, which had begun to remind her of the kind of mechanical toy that recoiled whenever it encountered an obstacle. She repeated the question to Ellen, hardly expecting an answer. When her cousin stayed prone and mute Charlotte saw she was as locked into her obsession as Hugh. They were out of her reach, and she'd spoken in a last pitiful attempt to make contact. She already knew the answer.
As she turned towards the hall she saw the light leave her cousins behind and heard Hugh's footsteps falter to a stop. At least he mightn't injure himself in the dark where she was abandoning him and Ellen. While that distressed her, she was afraid she would be facing much worse. 'This is for you,' she told them and realised she was talking to herself. She walked almost steadily out of the room and didn't break her stride until she was at the cellar. Taking hold of the doorknob, which looked and felt fungoid with verdigris, she eased the door open.
Darkness wobbled away from the flashlight beam, not far enough. As she leaned forwards the beam illuminated steps that led down into a room perhaps half as extensive as a floor of the house. The floor and walls were composed of bare brick, but had she glimpsed something that distracted her from any claustrophobia? Had there been the faintest glow through the gaps between the steps – a glow that had made them look coated with lichen? The appearance had vanished, and she couldn't revive it however she moved the beam. Perhaps it would become visible again if she were to switch the flashlight off, but the mere thought had her struggling to breathe. The cellar was sufficiently daunting, and she had to recall the state in which she'd left her cousins before she was able to set foot on the top step.
Possibly the steps were overgrown even if she couldn't see it. They felt slimy, so that she clutched at the single banister and nearly lost her grip on the spade as the shadows in the corners of the basement performed a gleeful dance. Was there a better way to support herself? Planting the spade on the next step, she leaned on it as her foot joined it. The steps no longer felt slippery, and she wondered if the impression could somehow have been produced to deter intruders. The idea scarcely had a chance to form, because stepping down resembled sinking into thin chill mud.
No, despite the lack of substance, it felt worse. Even shining the light on the steps couldn't dispel the sense of treading in an essence of darkness, of an utter absence of illumination rendered tangible. It was just a trick to ward off trespassers, she did her best to think. It had seized her imagination but not her body, even if she shivered from head to foot as she took another step down, helped by the spade. An ordinary cellar was bound to be cold, and how much colder would it be under an entire buried house? She was managing to tame the latest shiver with that argument when she began to distinguish exactly where the steps led.
The floor wasn't as bare as it had looked from the hall. It was inscribed with signs, an arc of them that lay closer to the walls than to the steps. As she trained the flashlight on the characters, releasing formless shadows from the corners of the room, Charlotte saw that they formed rather more than a semicircle; indeed, it seemed very possible that t
hey encircled the steps. Perhaps the years had faded them, unless they were meant to be nearly invisible. They were easy to mistake for a ring of black lichen, the negative image of a fairy ring in a field, until they fastened on the imagination, when their nature became more evident if not entirely clear. If they were runes, they could well be depicting a pack of misshapen creatures, their jaws gaping in terror of the pursuit or to close on their prey ahead of them, unless both meanings were intended. Charlotte thought of nightmares that grew worse in order to devour their victims, and her skin crawled with the memory of infestation. That was just a nightmare, not even her own, but suppose it was only a hint of the horrors that might be lying in wait? As if to confirm her fear, she heard Ellen groan like someone desperate to wake.
She was expressing her own plight, not suggesting that Charlotte was in someone else's nightmare. Her voice sounded more muffled, so that Charlotte imagined Ellen's face crushed against the wood, while Hugh was no longer able to move for disorientation if not for the darkness in which she'd left him. Nobody except Charlotte could release them. 'I'm going,' she promised, perhaps too low to be heard by anyone outside the cellar, and took the deepest breath she could. Although it tasted subterranean, she vowed to make it last until she was standing in the cellar. It was the nearest she seemed able to come to a prayer.
The flashlight beam swayed, spilling across the bricks. Each step she descended showed her more of the characters whose meaning and purpose she might very well prefer not to learn. She felt as if they were closing around her like a noose. Was it only because of their undefined threat that she gripped the flashlight harder, and the spade? She was growing fearful that as she lowered the spade for support it would be snatched through a gap between the steps. She tried not to let it make a sound as it encountered each step, but her timidity aggravated her nervousness, and the light was already betraying her presence. She slammed the blade against the wood, and once more. Then it struck bricks with a clang that resounded like some kind of bell in her ears as she leaned on the spade and set foot on the floor of the cellar.
A shiver climbed her body and seemed to lodge deep in her brain. It was only the chill of the bricks, she tried to think, although they felt not quite solid enough, as if they might give way beneath her. When she turned to peer past the steps the light danced so wildly that she could have fancied it was as anxious to escape the noose of runes as she was struggling not to feel. They did indeed form an endless chain, though the tottering shadow of the steps obscured a few. The shadow disguised something against the back wall – a crouched shape to which it was surely lending movement. Charlotte dodged around the steps, no less desperate than afraid to see, and the shadow lurched away, exposing the shape.
Her first impression was that it resembled a dead spider – long dead – and she tried to find it as unthreatening, despite its size. It looked not merely withered but drawn into itself. Its arms were hugging its raised knees, its fleshless head buried among all its scrawny limbs, as if it had been trying to rescind its own birth. What had it been so frantic to hide from? She needn't wonder so long as it had been rendered immobile. Surely it was just a husk, and the last of its lingering influence had seized on her and her cousins only because they'd spent too long above its house or slept there. It was so decayed that she couldn't judge whether the discoloured material through which its bones showed was all that remained of its skin or of its clothes or both. A few blows with the spade ought to scatter it and any remnants of its powers beyond reconstitution, and Charlotte did her best to feel encouraged by the incongruous pathetic spectacle of socks drooping on the shrivelled ankles. Or were they the remains of blackened rotten skin? Either ought to mean that the former owner of the house was incapable of any action. Charlotte stepped forwards, lifting the spade, only to realise that she would need both hands to wield it. She was making to leave the circle and place the flashlight on the floor outside it – she was attempting to decide which to do first, because it seemed somehow important – when she heard movement above her in the hall.
She was able to hope it was one of her cousins – Hugh, since she recognised the footsteps as a man's. Perhaps they were so heavy and deliberate because he was relearning how to find his way. She managed to believe this until the newcomer blocked the doorway and began to descend the steps, so deliberately that it seemed not so much careful as gloating. He didn't bother to hold onto the banister with the hand that wasn't flourishing a knife half the length of Charlotte's arm.
He was dressed in hobnailed boots and a butcher's apron: nothing else. His arms and legs and torso were grotesquely muscular beneath a thick simian pelt, which was as black as his ropes of greasy hair. His tread sounded like blows of a hatchet on the trembling steps. Charlotte was striving not to panic but to think whether she should stand her ground and defend herself or try to elude him until she could flee up the steps – she was attempting to overcome the shudder that had reawakened in her brain, shaking her thoughts apart – when he turned away from the steps, and she saw his face.
It was swollen and purple with many veins. Its width made his cracked eyeballs look even smaller. It bore a clown's wide fixed idiotic grin, and the thick lips and malformed nose were drooling. As the man stalked towards her, raising the knife, the hem of the striped apron rose in sympathy, hoisted by an erection sprouting from a bed of matted hair. Charlotte jerked the flashlight up in the hope that it would blind him. While it made his eyes redder still, he didn't falter. The light showed her that his pelt was swarming with parasites, and it revealed another aspect of him. He'd forgotten to bring his shadow, or his creator had overlooked the need.
Either detail might have proved too much for Charlotte. He was an amalgam of nightmares, an overload of them. The fears that constituted him – collected, she thought, in the dreadful bare room overhead – were reduced to nothing but themselves, far less than the victims who'd been forced to suffer them. They had no personality, no substance. They were no better than stale horror stories hollow with clichés, mechanical devices void of any function other than to terrorise. They had nothing to do with Charlotte; how could they have been dredged from her own mind? 'Unbelievable,' she protested in a voice that barely shook, and stepped out of the circle. The instant both her feet were outside, the figure vanished like a bubble that had been pretending it was flesh.
She gazed at the floor where it had stood or seemed to stand, and listened to her heartbeat insisting that she was in more of a panic than she could afford to acknowledge. The bricks within the circle looked even barer for the disappearance – bare enough to be assuring her that the house had finished playing tricks. Perhaps whatever power it had accumulated was spent, having done its worst. The shape that was cowering behind the steps hadn't altered its position; if it appeared to have moved, that was only because the light had.
Charlotte made to lay down the flashlight, and blackness dropped towards her as silently as a spider. It felt as if the ceiling had sagged, and she could do without inviting any threat of claustrophobia. On the floor the flashlight would bring down too much darkness without providing sufficient illumination, she saw now. It would be best left on a step, and she was about to return to the circle when she heard another movement somewhere in the house.
It was a scurrying or scuttling, which suggested rats if not a creature excessively provided with legs. Though her heartbeat was rehearsing her panic again, Charlotte was determined not to be impressed by another vanishing trick. The menace seemed banal, a conjurer's cheapest illusion, too uninspired to be magical. 'No imagination,' she tried to scoff, 'don't put yourself to any trouble' – and then she recognised the sound. The intruder wasn't animal or insect. Earth was trickling into the house.
As she strained her ears to reach beyond the pounding of her heart she was able to locate the sound. It was at the top of the building. Earth must be falling through the skylight, because she heard it strike the attic floor on the way to becoming more muffled as it spilled onto the carpet
below. It wasn't simply trickling, it was piling into the house as if somebody were shovelling it in. Its fall didn't quite cover up another noise – a series of creaks that grew louder and more numerous. Was a floor about to collapse? The noise seemed too shrill to be wooden. Just as Charlotte identified the sound of glass under pressure, the highest windows gave way with a clangour that was followed by the thunder of earth filling the rooms. It hadn't lessened when the windows on the middle floor began to creak.
This was too much, Charlotte wanted to believe: not just the windows caving in but the amount of earth that was falling through the skylight. It wasn't her nightmare, it was a version of the terror that had turned upon the occupant of the house. It must have driven him into the cellar once he'd abandoned clawing at the trapdoor to the attic. 'It's all yours,' she cried over the uproar, of which perhaps only her heartbeat was real. The cowering figure shivered, or its shadow did as the beam of the flashlight enacted her nervousness. The movement suggested that the light was capable of threatening the figure, quelling any last remnants of its power. She thrust the beam at the shrivelled crown of the head, and the bony shape reared up to its full height to knock the flashlight out of her hand.
She thought jaws were gaping wide until she saw the entire face was. The beam just had time to exhibit this, and how the denizen of the cellar was beginning to stoop as if to mock her height or to bring its lack of a face level with her eyes, before the flashlight hit the wall. It emitted a flicker that seemed almost taunting and then died for good.
Perhaps the utter darkness was even worse than being buried. It clung like soil to her eyes and seemed to fill her nostrils. Certainly the smell of burial did – thick clay and a staler odour. The sounds of weakened glass and falling earth had ceased as if they'd never been, only to isolate the sound of shuffling in the dark. She'd backed towards the flashlight, but how far? The advance of the footsteps seemed too rapid, not nearly blind enough. She wanted to believe this was yet another trick, but no mere nightmare could have dislodged the flashlight from her grasp. She would never be able to find it before the occupant of the cellar found her, and in any case there was little chance that she could make it work. She would have thrust out the spade to defend herself, but suppose the enlivened remains snatched it from her? She was retreating further when she realised that she didn't even know which way: back into the circle, perhaps. She didn't know why this should aggravate her dread, unless it was stressing her blind disorientation – and then she remembered that she still had light, however meagre. She was almost too terrified to keep hold of the spade with just her right hand while she groped in her hip pocket. She heard the bony shuffling close in on her before she managed to catch hold of her mobile. As she dragged it out, it emitted a pallid glow. Dim though this was, it didn't need to reach far. Her pursuer was within arm's length.
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