Dark Coven

by Nick Brown

  The phone went dead, leaving Ed worrying about what he’d tell Mary. But this paled beside the horrific shock at the mention of Lisa. Life was spinning out of balance again: in the last thirty-six hours there’d been a series of comings, goings and late night disturbances just across the graveyard in Skendleby Hall. Even as he’d been on the phone he’d watched the Archaeological Unit’s mini bus turn into the Hall’s driveway.

  Then there was the question of Olga. His meeting with her had been stimulating but worrying. He couldn’t work out his motives or his feelings, but alarmingly he’d felt an erotic charge when she’d floored the thug in the bulldozer.

  And now he wasn’t being straight with Mary. He told himself it was his responsibility to investigate if the current attacks were linked with the Skendleby exorcism, and he wanted to shelter her from any danger. Some of this was true, as was his worry about what he’d discovered in the archived papers of Dr John Dee. But did this apply to the meeting in the pub and the frisson about Lindow? Well no, he knew that was something else.

  By the time he pulled up at the end of the lane by the cuttings he was twenty minutes late. Olga’s car was there but she wasn’t in it. He got out and looked over the waterlogged cuttings and peat heath woodland. It lay desolate, forbidding and sodden under the cold grey sky.

  He didn’t like Lindow. Prior to his posting to Skendleby it held only two associations for him: as a sinister place in ‘The Wierdstone of Brisingamen’, a children’s book by a local writer, and as the site of the gruesome prehistoric murder exhumed by police and archaeologists.

  “Ed.”

  He turned and saw Olga emerge from the trees lying beyond a swollen drainage ditch. She looked solid and reassuring, but he felt his heart rate increase at the sight of her.

  “Thanks for coming at such short notice; I thought this would be a good place to meet as there won’t be anyone else about in these woods on a day like this.”

  He stepped unsteadily over the ditch and joined her at the edge of the wood. She kissed him on both cheeks and he moved his face awkwardly in response, but there wasn’t time for embarrassment.

  “Ed, you need to be truthful and tell me all you can about Lisa Richardson.”

  “But why? I don’t think anything that poor un…”

  “Because fucking Claire is bringing her to our community, is why. Now do you understand?”

  “What Lisa? I thought she was still in the…”

  He hesitated.

  “Still in the what, Ed?”

  “Still in the secure psychiatric ward.”

  “Oh, great. What was she in there for, Ed? There’s something going badly wrong, you must be able to feel it.”

  “Yes, I can feel it, it’s just I thought it’d gone away. But now, I don’t think it ever really did.”

  A keening wind was sweeping across the flatness of the cuttings; it was getting colder. Ed took Olga by the arm.

  “Come on, it’ll be more sheltered among the trees. I’ll tell you what I know as we walk but I don’t think you’ll like it. Lisa was a damaged young woman with a bullying father, or I suppose an abusive father is a more accurate description. Well, that’s what she told me.”

  “And?”

  “And she was a press photographer at the opening of the prehistoric tomb at Skendleby.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t expect you to believe this.”

  “A witch listening to a vicar? What’s not to believe?”

  Ed smiled at the absurdity of the situation, then made up his mind and told her. A rambling, fragmented and horrific narrative. Olga listened without interrupting then conflated the stark essence of it into an accurate précis framed as a question.

  “You’re telling me that something got out of the tomb when they opened it, took refuge in Lisa and possessed her, and that she attacked one of the archaeologists.”

  “Yes, amongst others.”

  “So, how come she’s out now?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t know that she was…I suppose after the procedure with Claire…”

  “What? Claire did something to her?”

  “Not did something, she helped.”

  “Helped? How exactly did she help?”

  “In a spiritual capacity. Look, I’ve already said more than I should.”

  “No, you’ve not said enough. How did she…?”

  Then the truth Ed was attempting to obfuscate hit her.

  “She attempted an exorcism, didn’t she? She tried to exorcise Lisa.”

  Suddenly he wanted to tell her, needed to tell her, needed to share this with someone else, someone who hadn’t been part of it.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it like that…Ok, all right, a type of exorcism, and it worked, it must have, because from what you say Lisa’s recovered.”

  “So, where did it go to, the thing that came out of the tomb and possessed her? Into Claire?”

  “No, of course if that had happened we wouldn’t have been able to conduct our act of spiritual sealing, nothing could have worked.”

  “Ed, there’s a lot you’re still hiding about Skendleby.”

  “Yes, and for very good reasons, and believe me, you need to be grateful you don’t know; once you do know it’s too late.”

  He pulled away, putting his head in his hands. He knew now it was back, the nightmare wasn’t over, he could feel his heart hammering and his mind start to unravel like last time. He needed one of his tablets but he hadn’t taken them for months so didn’t have any on him. He was jogging around from one foot to the other when he crashed into a beech sapling, which deposited icy rain drops from its leaves over him, almost bringing him round.

  It was Olga who did bring him back to his senses; he felt her strong cool hands on his cheeks.

  “Ed, come on, it’s all right, calm down, breathe steadily - you’re Ok. You’ve told me enough, I won’t push you for more.”

  “No, it’s not all right and it never will be. I think your community in its present state is the last place Lisa should be. She was highly disturbed, her father killed himself; she threatened me, almost killed Steve, and two police officers. She did something to the throat of one of them; he had to be invalided out of the force. I think Claire’s got this wrong.”

  “Or maybe, for her purposes, she’s got it right.”

  “No, you’re wrong, whatever she’s doing I know she’ll be doing it to help, to bring good and to heal.”

  They’d been walking in a circle and were almost back at their cars. He needed to unburden himself of other things before going home. Last year he would have turned to Davenport, but since his stroke the old man was too frail. Outside the shelter of the trees, sleet was being swept horizontally across the bleak peat cuttings towards them – Ed could feel it stinging his cheeks.

  Why had he come here? The place felt like it invited evil, welcomed it. He looked across the acres of dark mud, scrub and peat, thinking of the Iron Age murder which was contemporary with the original village excavated at Skendleby. He remembered Giles saying Lindow was where the villagers at Skendleby might have run to after they’d found the tomb. It was such a vast area of peat, he figured there must be other bodies hidden under there.

  “Ed, I said do you want to go for a coffee?”

  “Sorry, I was thinking about something else. No, I don’t want a coffee but there’s something else I want to tell you.”

  They pulled back into the relative shelter of the trees. The light had an underwater murkiness; this wasn’t a good place to be. But he couldn’t wait, his nerves were stretching, and although he felt cowardly, he wanted to share the burden of anxiety with her. If she was expecting more about Claire she’d be disappointed.

  “I came across some papers that had been found under unusual circumstances by an archivist working for Giles. He’d concealed them but left clues.”

  “Why couldn’t he just pass them on to you?”

  “Because he’s dead. He was the victim of a motivele
ss knife attack on holiday in Nice.”

  Ed surprised himself by the matter-of-fact way he dropped such a horror into the conversation, and he saw by Olga’s expression that it had disconcerted her. They were standing by a curve in the brook flowing through the woods, just far enough in to be sheltered from the worst of the wind and sleet. He began to articulate his fears about what he’d read and how it was keeping him awake at night.

  “The papers, the earliest of which are fourteenth century, link the Davenport family with a local tradition of the supernatural, and not in a good way. But the most concrete evidence comes from Dr John Dee, conjurer to Elizabeth I.”

  “Yes, I know about him.”

  “Well, towards the end of his life he was serving in Manchester as rector of Manchester College, which is now a music.....”

  “I know, get to the point, Ed.”

  “He got involved in Skendleby; they called him in when something went badly wrong. Reading between the lines it seems that the Davenports were facing something like we are today, and they tried to end it. Not only that but this wasn’t the first time they’d tried, and it didn’t work. But the worst thing is that it seems from what Dee imputes that this involved removing certain bones from a living victim. The diary indicates this occurred at a farmhouse some distance away, towards Handforth.”

  He paused, remembering she wouldn’t be aware of the significance of the bones, but it was too late, he’d said it.

  “Dee links the Davenport chapel with the farm, and whatever it was that happened in the ritual, he also infers they feared some type of entity watching over the mound that was excavated last year.”

  “Ed, there’s a lot you’re not telling me.”

  “I know, but what I am telling you is that history is repeating itself here. Over and over, and it never ends happily. I’ve got so much evidence, it all triangulates.”

  He felt overwhelmed; she sensed this and placed a hand gently on his shoulder.

  “Sorry, this type of thing is difficult to relate, particularly when you’ve been involved. It can make you paranoid, so much so that when I read in Dee’s journal about a skryer he was using and who he didn’t trust I…”

  “What Ed? What’s so bad about that?”

  “A skryer is a type of......”

  “I know full well what a skryer is.”

  “This one was called Hikman, add a c and that’s your name, Olga. Your name and an action at a farm near Handforth. You live in a late medieval farm near there, Olga, think about it.”

  She didn’t respond, just looked steadily at him.

  “Whatever he saw here messed him up; I think he became deranged because the extract finishes with a terrified reference to something dreadful, which watches from the shadows. Almost the same phrase was used by one of my eighteenth century predecessors in this parish, a man so scared that he preferred to jeopardise his immortal soul by suicide rather than face what he feared.”

  Olga said nothing so Ed stumbled on.

  “Things didn’t end much better for Dee. When he got back to Manchester he found that his family had contracted the plague. Soon after he returned to London and disappeared from history.”

  “And you think that it’s all happening again? That whatever you thought you’d achieved at Skendleby has come undone? If you want my help, Ed, you need to trust me, tell me all of it.”

  “That’s a two way street, there’s things you haven’t told me, like what your coven is really about.”

  He wanted to kick himself; he’d meant to say community, where had coven come from? Mortified, he kept his eyes down staring at the brook. Particularly at a small layer of dead white fungus that seemed to be growing out of the bank just above the waterline. He hated fungus, always had. It frightened him as a child. He aimed a kick at it. It didn’t detach and flow downstream as he’d expected it to, it just flopped into the water and remained inert. Olga was saying something now but he wasn’t listening, couldn’t listen. The fungus had grown fingers, five of them, and it was attached to something bigger.

  “Ed! Are you listening?”

  But he still wasn’t. He was shifting some sodden conifer branches that were obscuring the main part of the fungus. For a moment he stared back at the wide open eyes that were staring at him from under the water, then he jumped back with a scream.

  “Ed, what’s wrong?”

  “In there, under, look it’s there, a body - oh God.”

  He felt her push past him and heard her scream, then she was shouting at him.

  “I know who it is, I know who it is.”

  Chapter 17: What Was Under The Chapel?

  Looking out from the minibus, Giles caught a quick glimpse of Ed in the rectory window. He looked worried, and Giles wished he was with him: he didn’t feel good about this. What Theodrakis had told him about the chapel had brought all the horrors crawling back. Following the police car down the drive, Giles had the opportunity to study Skendleby Hall.

  Time hadn’t treated it well. The ancient seat of the Davenports stood bleak and weather stained against the winter sky. The post Davenport modernisation programme implemented by its new owner looked unreal, like a film set, a perspective reinforced by the plethora of CCTV cameras liberally scattered round the grounds. The combination of archaic decay and modernist vandalism gave the place an aura of desolation and despair, and in that spirit, saving the best for last, came the abandoned and waterlogged pit where the sad and semi-disarticulated remains of Marika had been dumped.

  “Sorry about the conditions, but the DI needs this done quickly; our crime scene guys are already in the pit, they’ll show you what we need you to look at.”

  Anderson was by the minibus door waiting for them to get out, huddling behind the turned up collar of his raincoat.

  “Mr Carver’s been very specific about where you can go and you’re limited to the pit and the chapel. Anything else and you have to ask me.”

  Giles brushed past, tossing back over his shoulder:

  “Anything else and I’ll ask Theodrakis. He can talk to you.”

  Theodrakis looked cold and unwell as they shook hands and Giles said, loud enough to be certain Anderson heard him:

  “Vu levi sto ekklesia exi?”

  It was poor Greek and probably inaccurate, but good enough to irritate the detective. Theodrakis must also have had a score to settle, he replied:

  “Nai, nai, parme.”

  Giles ushered the other three from the minibus towards the pit and followed Theodrakis into the Davenport chapel. Passing under the lintel, Theodrakis indicated the Latin motto and asked,

  “So, who’s watching now? Whatever it is, I hope we don’t see it.”

  They sat in the front pew for a time, letting their eyes get used to the light. The windows were so cobwebbed and dirty as to be virtually opaque.

  “This place looks like it hasn’t been used for centuries.”

  Theodrakis replied with a sardonic smile:

  “Well, would you want to spend time in here?”

  “No, not here.”

  “Tell me what you know about it anyway.”

  “From what we know it’s built over an earlier chapel and there are suggestions that this spot might have been regarded as a site of significance even before that, before the Davenports. This current chapel dates back to Richard II at the end of the fourteenth century and was apparently started by a Hugo Davenport who then, for reasons we don’t understand, disappears from the record leaving it to be finished by his younger brother, Edward.”

  Theodrakis interrupted him.

  “I think I can tell you about Hugo: Steve showed me that strange letter from one of your colleagues, the one killed in Nice, about the documents he’d recovered showing that Hugo went travelling in Europe after some indiscretion and ended up on Samos.”

  He looked as if he was about to say more but checked himself, so Giles continued.

  “The records must have got a bit mixed up because if all the things at
tributed to Edward are authentic then he lived to an unnaturally old age. He’s also the one who had that motto carved on the chapel. It’s the first mention of it, even stranger, the last authenticated documentation of Edward places him at the battle of Blore Heath during the Wars of the Roses, which must be a false attribution otherwise he’d...”

  Giles paused and Theodrakis prompted him.

  “Otherwise he’d what?”

  “Otherwise it would make him older than a hundred.”

  “We saw stranger things on Samos, did we not? Remember Father John?”

  “I’d rather not. Anyway, I suppose we’d better have a look at the crypt. I assume you’ve got the key?”

  Theodrakis produced it and they made their way down an uneven flight of stairs to a solid door with iron studding. The lock was rusted and it took Giles several minutes to get the key to work, then the door swung open surprisingly smoothly and they walked through. Down there they needed torches; Giles was surprised at the size of the space they found themselves in. It was far bigger than was needed to accommodate the few tombs it contained.

  “Hardly overused is it? But it’s certainly older than the chapel; this must be the crypt of the earlier one. Medieval mortuary structures was my special paper at Uni, you never know when something’s going to come in handy.”

  Giles began to examine the stone catafalques.

  “Yeah, look, these are all older than the chapel: it looks like all these must have been laid down when the older chapel was in use, it’s as if they stopped using the crypt when they built the current chapel. What’s the point of that? Where did they bury the later dead? Where are Edmund and his successors?”

  He got no answer, and when he looked round he couldn’t see Theodrakis, but he could still hear him.

  “Come here, to the right of the door we came through, there are more steps going further down.”

  Giles was excited now, there wasn’t a precedent for this: a deeper layer must be either older or have been submerged to keep something hidden. He could see the light from Theodrakis’s torch descending in a kind of spiral; he followed it.

  Down there was a deeper shade of dark, and the air lost its fusty, churchy smell, becoming earthy with feral hints of rotting vegetation and animal. His torch traced the steps down: they were uneven, roughly fashioned, and just before he reached the bottom they petered out into a short earthen ramp. He was in a passage narrow and claustrophobic; there was no sign of any torchlight ahead: the passage must twist and turn.