“Here?” David’s story was beginning to make connections, was starting to add up. “Why would he come here?”
“Why? Haven’t you been listening? He’d found something out about Kettlethorpe, and he came to make sure the Innsmouth horror couldn’t spread here. Or perhaps he knew it was already here, waiting, like a cancer ready to shoot out its tentacles. Perhaps he came to stop it spreading further. Well, he’s managed that these last thirty years, but now—”
“Yes?”
“Now he’s gone, and I’m the owner of the place. Yes, and I have to see to it that whatever he was doing gets finished!”
“But what was he doing?” I asked. “And at what expense? Gone, you said. Yes, old Carpenter’s gone. But gone where? What will all of this cost you, David? And more important by far, what will it cost June?”
My words had finally stirred something in him, something he had kept suppressed, too frightened of it to look more closely. I could tell by the way he started, sat bolt upright beside me. “June? But—”
“But nothing, man! Look at yourself. Better still, take a good look at your wife. You’re going down the drain, both of you. It’s something that started the day you took that farm. I’m sure you’re right about the place, about old Carpenter, all that stuff you’ve dredged up—but now you’ve got to forget it. Sell Kettlethorpe, that’s my advice—or better still raze it to the ground! But whatever you do—”
“Look!” he started again and gripped my arm in a suddenly claw-hard hand.
I looked, applied my brakes, brought the car skidding to a halt in the rain-puddled track. We had turned off the main road by then, where the track winds down to the farm. The rain had let up and the air had gone still as a shroud. Shroudlike, too, the milky mist that lay silently upon the near-distant dene and lapped a foot deep about the old farm’s stony walls. The scene was weird under a watery moon—but weirder by far the morbid manifestation which was even now rising up like a wraith over the farm.
A shape, yes—billowing up, composed of mist, writhing huge over the ancient buildings. The shape of some monstrous merman—the ages-evil shape of Dagon himself!
***
I should have shaken David off and driven on at once, of course I should have, down to the farm and whatever waited there; but the sight of that figure mushrooming and firming in the dank night air was paralysing. And sitting there in the car, with the engine slowly ticking over, we shuddered as one as we heard, quite distinctly, the first muffled gonging of some damned and discordant bell. A tolling whose notes might on another occasion be sad and sorrowful, which now were filled with a menace out of the eons.
“The bell!” David’s gasp galvanised me into action.
“I hear it,” I said, throwing the car into gear and racing down that last quarter-mile stretch to the farm. It seemed that time was frozen in those moments, but then we were through the iron gates and slewing to a halt in front of the porch. The house was bright with lights, but June—
While David tore desperately through the rooms of the house, searching upstairs and down, crying her name, I could only stand by the car and tremblingly listen to the tolling of the bell; its dull, sepulchral summons seeming to me to issue from below, from the very earth beneath my feet. And as I listened so I watched that writhing figure of mist shrink down into itself, seeming to glare from bulging eyes of mist one final ray of hatred in my direction, before spiralling down and disappearing—into the shell of that roofless building at the mouth of the horseshoe!
David, awry and babbling as he staggered from the house, saw it too. “There!” he pointed at the square, mist-wreathed building. “That’s where it is. And that’s where she’ll be. I didn’t know she knew... she must have been watching me. Bill—” he clutched at my arm, “—are you with me? Say you are, for God’s sake!” And I could only nod my head.
Hearts racing, we made for that now ghastly edifice of reeking mist—only to recoil a moment later from a figure that reeled out from beneath the lintel with the Dagon plate to fall swooning into David’s arms. June, of course—but how could it be? How could this be June?
Not the June I had known, no, but some other, some revenant of that June...
VIII: “THAT PLACE BELOW...”
She was gaunt, hair coarse as string, skin dry and stretched over features quite literally, shockingly altered into something... different. Strangely, David was not nearly so horrified by what he could see of her by the thin light of the moon; far more so after we had taken her back to the house. For quite apart from what were to me undeniable alterations in her looks in general—about which, as yet, he had made no comment—it then became apparent that his wife had been savaged and brutalised in the worst possible manner.
I remember, as I drove them to the emergency hospital in Hartlepool, listening to David as he cradled her in his arms in the back of the car. She was not conscious, and David barely so (certainly he was oblivious to what he babbled and sobbed over her during that nightmare journey) but my mind was working overtime as I listened to his crooning, utterly distraught voice:
“She must have watched me, poor darling, must have seen me going to that place. At first I went for the firewood—I burned up all of old Jason’s wood—but then, beneath the splinters and bits of bark, I found the millstone over the slab. The old boy had put that stone there to keep the slab down. And it had done its job, by God! Must have weighed all of two hundred and forty pounds. Impossible to shift from those slimy, narrow steps below. But I used a lever to move it, yes—and I lifted the slab and went down. Down those ancient steps—down, down, down. A maze, down there. The earth itself, honeycombed...!
“...What were they for, those burrows? What purpose were they supposed to fulfil? And who dug them? I didn’t know, but I kept it from her anyway—or thought I had. I couldn’t say why, not then, but some instinct warned me not to tell her about... about that place below. I swear to God I meant to close it up forever, choke the mouth of that—that pit!—with concrete. And I’d have done it, I swear it, once I’d explored those tunnels to the full. But that millstone, June, that great heavy stone. How did you shift it? Or were you helped?
“I’ve been down there only two or three times on my own, and I never went very far. Always there was that feeling that I wasn’t alone, that things moved in the darker burrows and watched me where I crept. And that sluggish stream, bubbling blindly through airless fissures to the sea. That stream which rises and falls with the tides. And the kelp all bloated and slimy. Oh, my God! My God...!”
...And so on. But by the time we reached the hospital David had himself more or less under control again. Moreover, he had dragged from me a promise that I would let him—indeed help him—do things his own way. He had a plan which seemed both simple and faultless, one which must conclusively write finis on the entire affair. That was to say if his fears for Kettlethorpe and the conjectural region he termed “that place below” were soundly based.
As to why I so readily went along with him—why I allowed him to brush aside unspoken any protests or objections I might have entertained—quite simply, I had seen that mist-formed shape with my own eyes, and with my own ears had heard the tolling of that buried and blasphemous bell. And for all that the thing seemed fantastic, the conviction was now mine that the farm was a seat of horror and evil as great and maybe greater than any other these British Isles had ever known...
***
We stayed at the hospital through the night, gave identical, falsified statements to the police (an unimaginative tale of a marauder, seen fleeing under cover of the mist toward the dene), and in between sat together in a waiting area drinking coffee and quietly conversing. Quietly now, yes, for David was exhausted both physically and mentally; and much more so after he had attended that examination of his wife made imperative by her condition and by our statements.
As for June: mercifully she stayed in her traumatic state of deepest shock all through the night and well into the morning. Finally,
around 10:00 p.m. we were informed that her condition, while still unstable, was no longer critical; and then, since it was very obvious that we could do nothing more, I drove David home with me to Harden.
I bedded him down in my guest-room, by which time all I wanted to do was get to my own bed for an hour or two; but about 4:00 p.m. I was awakened from uneasy dreams to find him on the telephone, his voice stridently urgent. As I went to him he put the phone down, turned to me haggard and red-eyed, his face dark with stubble. “She’s stabilised,” he said, and: “Thank God for that! But she hasn’t come out of shock—not completely. It’s too deep-seated. At least that’s what they told me. They say she could be like it for weeks... maybe longer.”
“What will you do?” I asked him. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course, and—”
“Stay here?” he cut me short. “Yes, I’d like that—afterwards.”
I nodded, biting my lip. “I see. You intend to go through with it. Very well—but there’s still time to tell the police, you know. You could still let them deal with it.”
He uttered a harsh, barking laugh. “Can you really imagine me telling all of this to your average son-of-the-sod Hartlepool bobby? Why, even if I showed them that... the place below, what could they do about it? And should I tell them about my plan, too? What!— mention dynamite to the law, the local authorities? Oh, yes, I can just see that! Even if they didn’t put me in a straightjacket it would still take them an age to get round to doing anything. And meanwhile, if there is something down there under the farm—and Bill, we know there is—what’s to stop it or them moving on to fresh pastures?”
When I had no answer, he continued in a more controlled, quieter tone. “Do you know what old Carpenter was doing? I’ll tell you: he was going down there in the right seasons, when he heard the bell ringing—going down below with his shotgun and blasting all hell out of what he found in those foul black tunnels! Paying them back for what they did to him and his in Innsmouth. A madman who didn’t know what he wrote in those diaries of his? No, for we’ve seen it, Bill, you and I. And we’ve heard it—heard Dagon’s bell ringing in the night, summoning that ancient evil up from the sea.
“Why, that was the old man’s sole solitary reason for living there: so that he could take his revenge! Taciturn? A recluse? I’ll say he was! He lived to kill—to kill them! Tritons, Deep Ones, amphibian abortions born out of a timeless evil, inhuman lust and black, alien nightmare. Well, now I’ll finish what he started, only I’ll do it a damn sight faster! It’s my way or nothing.” He gazed at me, his eyes steady now and piercing, totally sane, strong as I had rarely seen him. “You’ll come?”
“First,” I said, “there’s something you must tell me. About June. She—her looks—I mean...”
“I know what you mean,” his voice contained a tremor, however tightly controlled. “It’s what makes the whole thing real for me. It’s proof positive, as if that were needed now, of all I’ve suspected and discovered of the place. I told you she wouldn’t leave the farm, didn’t I? But did you know it was her idea to buy Kettlethorpe in the first place?”
“You mean she was... lured?”
“Oh, yes, that’s exactly what I mean—but by what? By her blood, Bill! She didn’t know, was completely innocent. Not so her forebears. Her great-grandfather came from America, New England. That’s as far as I care to track it down, and no need now to take it any further. But you must see why I personally have to square it all away?”
I could only nod.
“And you will help?”
“I must be mad,” I answered, nodding again, “—or at best an idiot—but it seems I’ve already committed myself. Yes, I’ll come.”
“Now?”
“Today? At this hour? That would be madness! Before you know it, it’ll be dark, and—”
“Dark, yes!” he broke in on me. “But what odds? It’s always dark down there, Bill. We’ll need electric torches, the more the better. I have a couple at the farm. How about you?”
“I’ve a good heavy-duty torch in the car,” I told him. “Batteries, too.”
“Good! And your shotguns—we’ll need them, I think. But we’re not after pheasant this time, Bill.”
“Where will you get the dynamite?” I asked, perhaps hoping that this was something which, in his fervour, he had overlooked.
He grinned—not his old grin but a twisted, vicious thing—and said: “I’ve already got it. Had it ever since I found the slab two weeks ago and first went down there. My gangers use it on big landscaping jobs. Blasting out large boulders and tree stumps saves a lot of time and effort. Saves money, too. There’s enough dynamite at the farm to demolish half of Harden!”
David had me, and he knew it. “It’s now, Bill, now!” he said. And after a moment’s silence he shrugged. “But—if you haven’t the spit for it—”
“I said I’d come,” I told him, “and so I will. You’re not the only one who loves a mystery, even one as terrifying as this. Now that I know such a place exists, of course I want to see it. I’m not easy about it, no, but...”
He nodded. “Then this is your last chance, for you can be sure it won’t be there for you to see tomorrow!”
IX: DESCENT INTO MADNESS
Within the hour we were ready. Torches, shotguns, dynamite and fusewire—everything we would need—all was in our hands. And as we made our way from the house at Kettlethorpe along the garden paths to the roofless enclosure, already the mists were rising and beginning to creep. And I admit here and now that if David had offered me the chance again, to back out and leave him to go it alone, I believe I might well have done so.
As it was, we entered under the lintel with the plate, found the slab as David had described it, and commenced to lever it up from its seatings. As we worked, my friend nodded his head toward a very old and massive millstone lying nearby. “That’s what Jason Carpenter used to seal it. And do you believe June could have shifted that on her own? Never! She was helped—must have been helped—from below!”
At that moment the slab moved, lifted, was awkward for a moment but at our insistence slid gratingly aside. I don’t know what I expected, but the blast of foul, damp air that rushed up from below took me completely by surprise. It blew full into my face, jetting up like some noxious, invisible geyser, a pressured stench of time and ocean, darkness and damp, and alien things. And I knew it at once: that tainted odour I had first detected in the summer, which David had naively termed “a miasma.”
Was this the source, then, of that misty phantom seen on dark nights, that bloating spectre formed of fog and the rushing reek of inner earth? Patently it was, but that hardly explained the shape the thing had assumed...
In a little while the expansion and egress of pent-up gasses subsided and became more a flow of cold, salty air. Other odours were there, certainly, but however alien and disgusting they no longer seemed quite so unbearable.
Slung over our shoulders we carried part-filled knapsacks which threw us a little off balance. “Careful,” David warned, descending ahead of me, “it’s steep and slippery as hell!” Which was no exaggeration.
The way was narrow, spiralling, almost perpendicular, a stairwell through solid rock which might have been cut by some huge and eccentric drill. Its steps were narrow in the tread, deep in the rise, and slimy with nitre and a film of moisture clammy as sweat. And our powerful torches cutting the way through darkness deep as night, and the walls winding down, down, ever down.
I do not know the depth to which we descended; there was an interminable sameness about that corkscrew of stone which seemed to defy measurement. But I recall something of the characters carved almost ceremoniously into its walls. Undeniably Roman, some of them, but I was equally sure that these were the most recent! The rest, having a weird, almost glyphic angularity and coarseness—a barbaric simplicity of style—must surely have predated any Roman incursion into Britain.
And so down to the floor of that place, where David paused to depo
sit several sticks of dynamite in a dark niche. Quickly he fitted a fuse, and while he worked so he spoke to me in a whisper which echoed sibilantly away and came rustling back in decreasing susurrations. “A long fuse for this one. We’ll light it on our way out. And at least five more like this before we’re done. I hope it’s enough. God, I don’t even know the extent of the place! I’ve been this far before and farther, but you can imagine what it’s like to be down here on your own...”
Indeed I could imagine it, and shuddered at the thought.
While David worked I stood guard, shotgun under my arm, cocked, pointing it down a black tunnel that wound away to God-knows-where. The walls of this horizontal shaft were curved inward at the top to form its ceiling, which was so low that when we commenced to follow it we were obliged to stoop. Quite obviously the tunnel was no mere work of nature; no, for it was far too regular for that, and everywhere could be seen the marks of sharp tools used to chip out the stone. One other fact which registered was this: that the walls were of the same stone from which Kettlethorpe Farm—in what original form?—must in some dim uncertain time predating all memory, myth and legend have been constructed.
And as I followed my friend, so in some dim recess of my mind I made note of these things, none of which lessened in the slightest degree the terrific weight of apprehension resting almost tangibly upon me. But follow him I did, and in a little while he was showing me fresh marks on the walls, scratches he had made on previous visits to enable him to retrace his steps.
“Necessary,” he whispered, “for just along here the tunnels begin to branch, become a maze. Really—a maze! Be a terrible thing to get lost down here...”
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