Dark Coven

by Nick Brown

  “Well, why don’t you take them?”

  “Because it’s not me who needs to bond with them.”

  She could see from his eyes how serious he was; he was going out of his way to be helpful and besides, what else did she have to do. She called out:

  “Ok, it’s been a hard day; let me buy you all a drink.”

  They walked, minus Theodrakis, in a crocodile through the dark of the rush hour to a pub behind the town hall, their way illuminated by the Christmas lights; an incongruous backdrop to their morbid quest. The pub was typical of the faux-traditional modern anachronistic movement that had dominated inner city style over the past couple of decades and was accepted as the norm by punters who probably never knew the far less comfortable original.

  It was crowded with a mixture of city types relaxing after a day in the office, and some hard looking specimens whose activities probably never troubled the tax system. Some of the latter obviously recognised them as cops and eased away from the centre of the room to hover at the periphery, making space for Viv and Anderson to make their way to the massive slab of mahogany that comprised the imitation nineteenth century bar. The price of the round of drinks surprised her and, after a few minutes standing in a circle at the bar, they drifted into groups at the few tables where there were seats available. Soon, except for Jimmy, she was alone at the bar, lost in a swirl of captains of commerce and criminals.

  “Well, so much for your theory of team building, Sergeant.”

  It sounded much harsher than she’d intended and she was relieved when he appeared to ignore, it saying only:

  “Look, there’s a couple of stools over there come vacant.”

  She followed him across to a small alcove with a high table flanked by two tall bar stools. They sat opposite each other, leaning forwards, elbows resting on the wood and chrome surface. It occurred to her that they probably looked like a couple, and it made her desperately sad. This is probably why she said out of nowhere:

  “It was my birthday yesterday.”

  “Happy Birthday for yesterday then, Ma’am, did you do anything nice?”

  “Nothing.”

  She felt she was on the point of tears sitting in this horrible pub buying drinks for people who couldn’t wait to get away from her, in a job she couldn’t handle, in a place she didn’t have a single friend.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  His question surprised her. Obviously the mask she wore professionally wasn’t as effective as she thought. She blurted out:

  “What?”

  “Whatever it is that’s making you so unhappy. The case, Zorba, the team, Manchester. I don’t know where to stop.”

  “No, I don’t. In fact, I don’t want to talk at all, so why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  He talked; she picked up bits and let the rest flow over her. After his progression from a second class degree at a second rate university, the rest got lost in the fog. But she started to feel better and two drinks later found that she’d begun to drip feed bits about herself in reply.

  Three large white wines were beyond her drinking capacity, she usually stopped after the one she had to be sociable. The crowd in the pub had thinned out and her team had long since departed, thanking her as they drifted out into the night companionably in dribs and drabs. She was feeling light headed and beginning to wonder how she’d get back to her lonely, but strangely noisy, apartment. Jimmy sorted that out: they’d share a taxi which would drop her off on the way.

  On the way back she tried to focus on his face as he recounted some anecdote about her predecessor; it was quite a nice face really. Then they were outside the sterile apartment block where she would re-enter solitary confinement. He was reaching across her to open the cab door when she heard herself say:

  “Do you want to come in?”

  Chapter 21: From What Universe Does This Stuff Come?

  “You obviously acquired a taste for Greek food over the summer?”

  Jim was sitting with Giles by the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, looking out into the early evening Manchester murk at the rear of the town hall.

  “Yeah, suppose I did, and this one’s easily the best. Good peasant cooking. Oh, and this is on me, Jim. Can’t remember when I last paid.”

  Jim couldn’t remember when he’d last paid, either or even if he’d ever paid, and he intended to make the most of it. He’d set this very late lunch or early dinner and expected to pay, which was fair enough as he intended to pump as much information out of Giles as he could, so for the moment he was prepared to let Giles rattle on about his new enthusiasm.

  “It’s a family run place and an offshoot from the original, smaller one in Stockport. Let me order for us both. Listen, what’s really good is revithia for a starter then the rosto with salad. They serve the salad on the plate with it. No upmarket place would do that, but it tastes good so we’ll go along with it. Oh, and they do a brilliant red from Nemea at a great price, so we’ll have that with it, Ok?”

  Seemed fine to Jim who just nodded. By the time the rosto arrived they’d exhausted the small talk. Outside it was as good as dark now and Jim knew he couldn’t delay asking the question he’d been avoiding since they’d arrived, but Giles got there first.

  “You’re going to ruin all this and use the S word aren’t you?”

  “Skendleby? Yes, how did you know?”

  “It’s all over your face. You know, the way people who’ve been contaminated look when the place is mentioned. Why? You got away relatively unscathed last time, why not stay away?”

  “Can’t, I’d like to but I can’t, I have to report what happens, I can’t delegate this to anyone else.”

  Jim paused and took a slug of the heavy dark wine as if to strengthen himself.

  “I’m working with the police, whatever they say, they’ve no idea what’s going on. It’s all happening again, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it ever stopped. I can’t escape, but you have: don’t go back.”

  “Tell me what’s happening, Giles. What did you find under the chapel?”

  “Jim, last time you said…”

  “I know what I said last time but things change. Please, Giles, tell me what new horrors you’ve raked up.”

  The waiter brought across another bottle. Jim hadn’t noticed Giles order it but he wasn’t going to refuse.

  “Why always me? Why does everyone think this is somehow my fault?”

  “Because things happen to you, Giles.”

  Giles leant over his plate and began to shovel down forkfuls of the tender, slow-cooked lamb. Jim watched and waited until Giles surfaced for air, then asked again:

  “Giles, what did you find under there?”

  Giles refilled both glasses from the new bottle.

  “I’ve tried to warn you off this, Jim, so don’t come crying back to me when it all turns bad for you like last time.”

  Jim realised he’d hit a raw nerve but sat sipping his wine hoping Giles would open up. He didn’t have long to wait. Giles finished his wine, poured another glass, then said wearily:

  “I’m out of my depth, Jim. I don’t understand what’s happening with the archaeology or with my life. You know the police locked me up for a time, said I was a suspect. All I was trying to do was help but that bitch running the case tricked me into saying things then deliberately misinterpreted them. If it hadn’t been for Claire I think I’d have gone under these last weeks. Now even she’s showing signs of strain.”

  Jim didn’t want the personal stuff, he wanted the story. He asked:

  “If you’re out of your depth with the evidence why not contact Steve, he could h…”

  Giles cut him off.

  “No one’s going to be getting in touch with Steve, certainly not me and I’m one of the only two people who know where he is.”

  He added almost beneath his breath,

  “The only two people who can properly be considered as alive, that is.”
>
  They sat in silence; there was no one else eating. Their table, with its candles, was like the last inhabited island in the dark sea of the taverna. Outside, in the night, streets were being slowly smothered by creeping tendrils of fog.

  “I don’t know where to start, Jim, before I even touch on what’s under the chapel let me tell you about the timescale. There’s a stratigraphy down there, Jim! Do you know what that means?”

  “Of course, it means you’ve got layers of things building up on top of each other. That’s common enough, isn’t it?”

  “On occupation sites, yeah, but this is a chamber under a chapel, a type of big, underground hole. No one ever lived there; the place is only about death and what comes after.”

  “Ok, I see.”

  “No, you don’t see, Jim. You’ve no fucking idea. I don’t see and I’ve been down there in the middle of all this weird shit for days. So just stay quiet and listen.”

  Jim kept quiet and watched Giles take a slurp of wine, too much to swallow it seemed as some dribbled out of his mouth and down his chin onto his shirt. He dabbed at it absentmindedly with his food-stained paper napkin before finishing the glass and starting again.

  “There’s stuff in there which, if it’s not a hoax, dates the early phases of that assemblage way back before the Great Interglacial to a time after which Britain was deserted for a hundred thousand years.”

  “But that’s impossible, surely?”

  “There’s a piece of bone in there which the bone expert at the uni thinks might be from the shin of a Homo heidelbergensis - that would make it about five hundred thousand years old. So yes, it’s impossible. It’s impossible because what we recognise as Skendleby wasn’t even there back then. Since then ice sheets a mile thick rolled over whatever was there then and tore and ground it up into what it is now. See the difficulty, Jim?”

  Jim nodded. It was obviously all that was required of him because Giles swept on.

  “Then there’s the incredible amount of material down there: it’s like the ground zero of every cult and fetish on the archaeological record. It’s packed with stuff from all over, since the time when Europe was first inhabited, plus some from before that. Very interesting and not in a good way.

  “It’ll take months to sort it all out, but here’s a taste of what we have found. There are stone heads with the eyes scored out and real skulls overlaid with painted plaster faces that have been deliberately smashed. There’s even a tree buried upside down like it’s meant to be growing down into the earth. There are complete burials, evidence of sacrifices and human bones butchered for eating. That enough for you?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Oh yeah, there’s more, plenty more. Listen, you’ll appreciate this bit: remember the crows?”

  “Crows?”

  “Yeah, the ones all over Skendleby before we opened it.”

  Jim remembered them all right, sometimes he dreamt about them. Giles must have seen the look on his face because he favoured him with a sour smile, belched softly, then said:

  “Well, the place is full of their bones; they’re in every level like they’re some sort of old favourite. There’s even a small figurine of a woman’s head with a crow coming out of it. Then there’s bulls’ heads in piles, weird antler tools. We don’t even know what some of this stuff is, never mind its provenance or what it means.”

  “So it must be a hoax.”

  “If it is, it’s one that’s been kept up through the millennia because some of these things are in a dateable context. I think we can safely assume that it’s beyond the expertise of Carver and it seems that since the end of the sixteenth century, the Davenports have kept it shut down and buried.”

  Giles let out a loud exhalation of breath, drained his glass, then said:

  “Jim, we’ve been sorting through a stratigraphy of the impossible. There are artefacts we can date, and each level was hidden and kept separate from the others. So we’ve got some type of sequence. It’ll take years to sort it all out. I mean, what kept bringing people here and making them do all this ‘Blair Witch’ stuff?”

  “So, what’s your best guess?”

  Jim had to wait for an answer: the waiter materialised with two glasses of a clear spirit and exchanged a few words with Giles, which Jim supposed must in be Greek.

  “It’s raki, good stuff too, on the house.”

  Giles threw his back in one gulp and stared out at the night. Jim had to coax him.

  “Go on, what do you think?”

  “Think? Don’t really know, it’s hard to rationalise some of it. The nearest I can get is that it might have been intended as a protection or antidote to whatever lurks in Skendleby. And whatever it is, it predates the mound we excavated last year. Some of this stuff predates that by hundreds of thousands of years. But we can be pretty certain that whatever creatures laid all that stuff down over the years were pretty desperate.”

  “So what does this give the police?”

  “Nothing, there’s nothing. I doubt that there’s anything later than the seventeenth century. So they won’t be pleased. I won’t know for sure until all the bones have been sorted through and obviously their people get first dibs on that. I’m quite sure though that they’ll find some pretty close parallels with the cutting of the murder victims.”

  “What cutting? How do you know that?”

  “A bit from Skendleby last year and the rest from what I saw on Samos.”

  Jim couldn’t think of anything else to ask: he’d drunk too much and Giles was drunk. So they sat opposite each other, avoiding eye contact, lost in alcohol-fuelled reverie. After a time, which Jim couldn’t gauge, Giles suddenly said:

  “As archaeology, nothing about this makes any sort of sense. So it must be the place, somewhere that drags people to it over the millennia to perform these bloody rituals and practise magic. I don’t understand any of it, it’s not archaeology. I mean, what bloody universe does all this stuff come from? It’s like it’s both real and impossible at the same time.”

  Jim thought Giles was talked out, but then, as if dragging something up from the depths of his memory, he mumbled to himself.

  “You know, while I was on Samos, Theodrakis interviewed this guy, Vassilis or something, and this guy really freaked him, told him that we miss most of the things that are right in front of us and that most of the stuff we do see is illusion. You know, like multiple universes and all that quantum crap.”

  He’d started to ramble. Jim was surprised. He’d seen Giles put away far more booze and manage to remain lucid. He was also beginning to think that with Giles in this state he would end up having to foot the bill. He gestured to the waiter that they wanted to pay and turned back to Giles to get him moving.

  “Come on, Giles, we need to...”

  There was a tremendous crash, something smashed into the window. The glass held and the considerable thing that hit it bounced off. Someone was screaming: Jim scrambled to his feet and headed for the door. Outside, a large, fair-haired woman was lying sprawled on the pavement, her skirt round her hips and her coat open. There was blood on her face and it was seeping from her nose. Her head hung off the pavement over the road at a worryingly oblique angle.

  A small knot of spectators had gathered, none of whom looked as if they were in a hurry to do anything helpful. Jim went down on one knee to examine the woman’s head and check for a pulse. He was aware of Giles and the waiter behind him. To his surprise, as he touched her, the woman opened her eyes and gasped:

  “Where is it? Has it gone?”

  Her eyes were wild and it was clear to Jim that she was in a state of shock and terrified.

  “No, don’t worry, you’re going to be all right, help is on its way, just keep still.”

  “Where is it? Has it gone?”

  “No, listen, you’ve had a nasty shock, you must have walked into the window in the fog.”

  But he could hardly believe that just walking into a window could cause that much da
mage. Also, it was clear that she’d been running. A woman standing watching with a clutch of shopping bags said:

  “She just came running out of that passage like a wild thing, then turned and hit the glass.”

  He heard someone else say:

  “I called an ambulance, innit.”

  Jim wondered if they should leave her until medical help arrived, or get her up off the cold hard ground. The waiter was trying to lift her.

  “Come on, you, help, we carry her inside, is warm in there, out here she freeze.”

  Jim was glad someone else had taken responsibility and it wasn’t down to him anymore. With Giles’s help they carried her into the restaurant and onto the sofa by the bar. As they lowered her onto the cheap fake leather surface she took Jim’s hand.

  “Has it gone?”

  She was obviously concussed so there was no point in reasoning.

  “Yes, it’s gone. You need to stay still and rest. You must be very careful, don’t move until we’re sure there’s nothing broken.”

  She didn’t seem too reassured and made a move as if to get up. Then there were other people behind Jim. He turned and saw that it was a couple of paramedics. While one of them crouched down by the woman, the other one lectured Jim about having moved the patient and health and safety in general. Over at the bar he could see Giles and the waiter drinking raki.

  After what seemed an age they got her on to a stretcher, even though by now she was asserting she could walk and wanted to go home. This was refused and, as she was being taken outside, where light snow was starting to fall, Jim, relieved he had no further serious role to play, asked her if there was anyone he could contact.

  “Yes, warn him. It’ll come after him now, you need to warn him.”

  “Warn who?”

  “Warn Ed. Warn Ed Joyce.”

  Chapter 22: Master of the House

  The phone was still ringing: why hadn’t one of them Polish sluts answered it? Then he remembered they’d gone back home and their British replacements, Tegan and Jay-Jai wouldn’t be here till midday: they were sleeping off their early hours’ efforts entertaining the punters at one of his ‘Elite Nite Club’ venues. He’d have to fix that and get some more live-in staff.