by Nick Brown
“Take him home with you, Jan.”
She helped Steve to his feet; neither of them had taken off their coats so they moved directly to the door. As they walked away from him Giles noticed a long streak of grey had appeared in Steve’s long unkempt hair. Must be dirt from the passage he told himself. The camera was on his desk and it occurred to Giles that whatever footage Lisa had taken in there he’d be able to view. The idea of doing that in the deserted Unit seemed unappealing so he shut it in his drawer and set off after the others. By the time he’d locked up and emerged into the gloom of the quad they’d vanished.
Driving back through the inner urban dilapidation one thought continued to circle round and round his head. Why hadn’t they continued the dig? What had happened to make everyone behave so oddly? On any other dig he’d worked, such a find would have archaeologists queuing up to explore and record the chamber. Here some hail and gusts of wind had sent them home.
But rationalise as he might, he knew Steve was right; it had been rubbish archaeology, not their normal method or procedure. The way they behaved, the crap archaeology, the abandoning of the site: that wasn’t their normal modus operandi. It had been a collective lapse of reason and they’d all danced to different tunes conducted from elsewhere. This made him think of Claire, who, after accusing him, had disappeared into the night. What was it she thought they’d unleashed?
CHAPTER 11
THE DISC
The cordoned off crime scene at the end of his road had acquired the obligatory pile of teddy bears and floral tributes. Above them the crudely written banner that a police woman was removing, read: ‘The Godless are punished, the night is not safe.’
The world was going mad. His empty house offered its usual dismal welcome and he was relieved to be distracted by the flashing of the answer machine. He pressed the button and after some traffic noise heard:
“Giles, it’s Leonie, you made a big mistake today, something bad is coming for you. I’m scared and I’m leaving; don’t try to contact me, you won’t be able to. You need to warn Steve. He opened it, he’s in worse danger than you and tell him……tell him I shouldn’t have slapped him.”
There was a pause then, as an afterthought:
“Forget about the pit, leave everything now: don’t touch it, don’t touch anything.”
The line went dead. Giles walked into his gloomy twilight living room and slumped into the sofa. Outside it was dark but the room was eerily illuminated by the orange glow of the street light in front of the window. He turned on a table lamp and saw the mug and bowl from his breakfast on the coffee table by his feet. The house, like always, was filthy, it depressed the hell out of him, but he was too weary to go out or tidy up. The day was a disaster and the excavation a disgrace. Plus, if that weren’t enough, according to Claire Vanarvi he had managed to let loose some demonic entity that should have remained confined: brilliant.
His thoughts were picking up the familiar trail of self pity, sketching out his favourite theme: the acts of a well intentioned individual, himself, being thwarted at every turn by an unfeeling world. He found this strangely comforting and had just reached the point where he quoted T. S. Eliot to himself: ‘Between idea and the reality. Between the motion and the act falls the shadow.’
He’d forgotten the rest so took down his battered copy of Eliot’s collected poems from the shelf and carried it through to the kitchen. He opened a bottle of red wine, filled a large glass and returned to the sofa.
Slouching back with his feet on the coffee table he took a large swallow of the nasty, yet appealingly cheap, supermarket Merlot. The book had fallen open at the last page of ‘The Wasteland’ with the words ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin’ underlined in pencil. He found the beginning of the poem, finished the glass and refilled it. Immersed in this familiar state of melancholy he was able to reflect with grim humour the irony of having chosen a poem whose first section was called ‘The Burial of the Dead’.
He’d always thought ‘The Wasteland’ was a poem designed to suit the thought processes of an archaeologist and was savouring the line ‘for you know only, a heap of broken images where the sun beats’ when he heard the sound of dripping water. By the time he reached the line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ the sound was disturbing his concentration.
It must be from the bathroom upstairs; he went to check. As he reached the bathroom door the sound of dripping changed to a steady flow of water cascading into the bath. He paused for a moment with his hand on the door, this upper landing was only lit by a dirty skylight; it was dark and shadow filled. He’d meant to replace the landing light bulb but hadn’t got round to it. The noise of splashing water increased and for a moment he thought ‘what if someone’s in there?’
But when he’d got back the house had been all locked up, no one else had a key, so the idea of an intruder relaxing in the bath was ridiculous. Still, as he hurriedly pushed open the door, his first motion was to quickly flick on the light switch and disperse the darkness. The cold tap was running, slowly admittedly, but at too great a volume to have just happened unaided. He’d never liked the bathroom. His strongest memory of it was the night Sal left and he’d slumped half drunk in the bath feeling the cold emptiness of the house envelop him. But at least then the bath behaved itself.
He turned the tap off telling himself that he must have left it on, even though he clearly remembered he hadn’t had a bath that morning, and headed for the door. As he was pulling it closed behind him he heard a drip and turned in time to see the tap slowly rotate and the drip become a trickle. His nerve snapped,
“Stop it, stop it.”
The sound of his voice, hysterical though it was, steadied him. He stared at the tap, it was still turning and the flow increasing. He heard himself say,
“You’re only a tap, you’ll do what I bloody tell you.”
He grabbed it in both hands and turned it as far back as it would go. This was difficult as fear made his hands sweat and his heart pound. He began to back towards the door only to come back and give the tap one extra tight turn. He left the light on in the bathroom but removed the key from the key hole, firmly closed the door and locked it from the outside.
Returning to the living room he was no longer in the mood for poetry and introspection. He turned on all the table lamps but left the curtain open. Outside the street lamps had gone off; why was that?
He tried to tell himself that he was overreacting to his time in the chamber. He noticed his guitar on its stand and decided to practise the numbers for New Years Eve when his band had one of their increasingly infrequent gigs. After searching unsuccessfully for the practice disc, he remembered he’d left it in the player so pressed the play button and waited for the music.
In the silence it seemed the room was waiting; then a static hiss began to bleed out from the speakers followed by the sounds that can be heard in any empty room, the odd creak, the distant sounds of traffic, footsteps upstairs. Odd, Giles thought, I don’t remember this.
Then a sound of distant blurred voices, a faint babble of sound and a whooshing noise like the wind. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up; something about these discordant sounds made him very afraid. Then the noise was cut by the sound of a woman’s voice, sibilant and distorted but clear. A sequence of words in a lilting chant, a foreign language and strange cadenza like the disc was running backwards. The sequence of words was repeating itself against a background of static, white noise like that picked up by radio telescopes tracking empty space. The voice was growing in vehemence and the chant chilled Giles to the bone, he’d never heard anything so filled with despair and hatred. Where had this come from? He knew what had been on the disc: not this, never this.
He listened: the same short phrases, a pattern perhaps fifteen seconds long, the cadence of the voice lifting towards the end. White noise was still audible but the terrible voice grew louder, repeating with increasing shrillness. A short repeated threnody rising
in volume to a pitch of frenzy. At the climax a final shriek. Then, just white noise cut off suddenly by the last few chugging bars of a blues number.
He switched the disc off with fumbling fingers. The silence of the room gripped him like a shroud. What was happening, how had it got into his house? Maybe it was a mistake, some interference on the disc. The music had finally started so perhaps it had cleared itself up.
He froze, hesitating, his hand hovering over the play button, then with an effort of will he pressed it and waited for the disc to start in the same agony of stillness in which he waited for a penalty to be taken, or a doctor to pronounce on test results. The hiss bled out from the speakers, please let it be music, but it wasn’t: the first stair creak of background noise, then microwave interference and finally the voice. Hearing the chill sibilance slide over two phrases of the repetitive chant mesmerised by the otherworldly venom his blood froze.
“Christ, I let it out and it’s followed me.”
Now even the sound of his own voice was freaking him; he hit the off button and jumped back from the machine as if it could bite and hovered by the door shifting from one foot to the other frozen with panic.
How long he remained performing this terrified jig he didn’t know, but gradually a semblance of coherence returned: he needed someone to calm him down and explain what was happening. Averting his eyes from the CD player but not turning his back on it, he crossed to the phone and dialled Claire Vanarvi. To his relief she answered immediately and he poured a mixture of fear and gibbering down the line.
She’d been a good choice being used to the deranged and, although what he was gabbling made no sense, she recognised he’d reached the end of the tether.
“Dr Glover, stay calm and bring the disc here to me.”
“What? Touch that thing, you must be mad.”
“The disc itself can’t hurt, just take it out of the machine and bring it to me, stay calm you’re quite safe.”
By the end of the conversation her soothing voice calmed him sufficiently to extract the disc from the deck. Without daring to take his eyes off the malignant sound system he groped his way backwards to the front door, got out of it and careered wildly out onto the dark street. Behind him in the deserted house all the taps began to run.
His hands shook as he unlocked the car: where should he put the disc? He didn’t want it where he could see it but if he put it on the back seat he wouldn’t know what it was doing. He settled on the glove compartment, tossed it in and closed the door.
Once the mechanical task of driving took over he began to calm down a little and by the time he turned off the motorway heading towards Lindow he was sufficiently in control to stop glancing over his shoulder at the dark. He located Claire’s house, an old gentrified terrace in a lane facing onto Lindow Moss.
He’d frightened himself like a child and he was about to make a fool of himself in front of a woman who already had a low enough opinion of him. He stuffed the disc into his pocket and with as much control as he could muster he walked down the narrow path to the front door. The terrace had a small well kept front garden and through the curtains of the front room a warm and soft light suggested a subtle and calming ambience. After ringing the bell and waiting for the door to open he thought, too late, about his appearance and also what she would look like in her own house and even what she would be wearing. His own clothes were dirty from the excavation; he felt sweaty and anxious and could detect a rank body odour seeping out from under his coat. He breathed into the palm of his hand to check if the suspicion that his breath smelt foul was correct and realised unhappily that it was.
The door of the house opened and she stood there in a soft white woollen dress, long dark glossy hair falling over her shoulders, backlit by the subdued yellow light he had noticed from the road. Clean, soft, warm and inviting. Giles felt a childish desire for comfort and security matched by a long forgotten impulse to cry.
***
Claire heard the doorbell and paused for a while before opening it. She hadn’t been surprised by the call; the disaster at the dig had terrified her, but wondered at the wisdom of inviting him here. He was unreliable: creating havoc in his mad rush to excavate the mound. But even someone as boorish as he was must have been affected by the extraordinary events of the afternoon. His performance on the phone bordered on hysteria but his fear of the disc increased her unease; what had they let out?
Eventually she opened the door and seeing him blubbing on her doorstep she felt pity so brought him in and put him on a sofa in the living room.
***
To Giles the difference between their homes couldn’t be more pronounced. The room was clean, comfortable and softly lit. It radiated space and well being, its colours coordinated, the walls hung with pictures and tapestries, the polished wood floor mellow with age scattered with rugs. He recognised the strains of the Brahms Sextet coming from the speakers in the room’s corners. She poured him a glass of chilled white wine, which from the label on the bottle he identified as a Sauvignon Blanc, and sat watching him as he drank. Never had he been more aware of the gulf between the screwed up mess he’d become and someone else.
On her first visit to the site she seemed wild and mad: now their roles were reversed and he sat trembling in dirty clothes in her clean home. He tried to tell her about the disc but failed to make sense, managing only to hand it across to her. She understood she was dealing with a man on the verge of nervous exhaustion and further dealings with the disc or any other of the day’s proceedings would be counterproductive. What he needed was sleep but that wouldn’t be possible until he was relaxed.
She refilled his glass and went to draw a bath infused with calming oils which she directed him to supplied with a large warm bath towel. When he’d gone she went into the pantry at the end of her kitchen and opened the door of her herbarium. Satisfied with the ingredients she prepared a drink disguised as a type of herbal tea and took it upstairs and told him to drink. When she returned to the bathroom in ten minutes he was relaxed and sleepy. She handed him the towel and left to prepare the spare bedroom having decided before sedating him that he was in no condition to return home that night. By the time a quiescent Giles had slipped between the clean sheets a feeling of languor was suffusing his body, and shortly after his head touched the pillow he was asleep.
Claire went downstairs to the living room and picked up the disc. Something had been let loose as her dreams foretold and this was part of it. For a moment she considered locking it in a drawer until the morning, then she got up, inserted it in her music centre and pressed the play button.
CHAPTER 12
PARTY NIGHT
“Dad, you’ve been in like forever, hurry up I need to wash my hair now!”
Jim’s soak in the bath was interrupted by the voice of his daughter pitched in the wheedling tones perfected by adolescent offspring. He realised from the tepid temperature of the water he’d lost track of time. Wrapping a towel around his waist he left the peaceful sanctuary of the tub and re-entered the chaotic world of family life. His daughter pushed past into the bathroom slamming the door behind her. Whilst he was dressing in the bedroom his youngest son shouted at him through the door, “Dad, Mum says to hurry up or you’ll be late” before thundering up to his lair on the second floor from where the bass sounds of a music system turned up loud began to boom down through the floor.
Jim ran his hands through his hair and inspected himself in the mirror. The reflection staring back at him reminded him of his father; how this had come about he didn’t know but he seemed also to have inherited a wardrobe of sports casual clothes. Unless he was dressed in his work suit or for a formal do he looked like any one of millions of anonymous pretend golfers. It didn’t matter what he chose to wear it always happened that he was perfectly turned out for the nineteenth hole and as he hated golf, and only ever played as part of his work or hospitality duties, the thought stank.
He wandered downstairs, where son number two wa
s sitting at the large kitchen table in front of a spread out pile of school exercise books, to be greeted by a cheery ‘you look nice dear’ from his wife, who was over by the Aga stirring something in a large stainless steel pot. This scene of domesticity made him want to sit in the ancient leather armchair by the side of the kitchen’s chimney breast and pour himself a drink. However, Alice repeated that he was late so, after a perfunctory kiss and a ruffle of Liam’s hair, which evoked nothing but an ‘aw dad leave me alone will you’ type of shrug, he wandered into the hall and picked up his car keys. After a shout of ‘bye, I won’t be late’, which went unanswered, he left the warmth of the domestic hearth, carefully locking the front door behind him.
Outside it was cold and dark with driving conditions on the narrow country lanes treacherous. He hated Richardson’s parties: pretentious affairs with people he didn’t know or like but to whom he had to be polite. For Derek this was the whole purpose of the parties, which he described as ‘the place to be seen’.
Jim didn’t want to be seen and Alice always found an excuse not to come, usually the children. He knew it would be at least three hours before he could excuse himself and leave. All things considered it had been a rubbish day. He’d thought about the excavation whilst soaking in the bath, but being an unimaginative man, categorised it as one of those things that just happen, like the peculiarly bad service on the day he and Giles had eaten in town. The thought of that made him feel hungry and he cheered himself with the memory that the hospitality chez Richardson was lavish and there was always an ample and expensive hot and cold buffet.
The drive took him past the site and through the woods on the fringe of the estate but in the warmth of the car, listening to Classic FM, he scarcely noticed. Turning into the lane of large detached new houses on the small exclusive estate where the Richardsons lived, he found it difficult to find a space to park. About fifty or so cars occupied every inch of the lane leaving only narrow gaps at the exits of driveways. Most of the cars were Mercs, BMWs or Range Rovers with obligatory blacked out windows and many, he reflected morosely, bore personalised number plates of the worst self advertising kind.