Dark Coven

by Nick Brown

  She didn’t appear very reassured and he shamefacedly shambled out, pausing only to grab a coat and a torch from the cavernous cloakroom under the stairs before leaving the house. He made his way through the graveyard to the Skendleby estate wall, which he followed kicking through piles of frozen, dead leaves until he reached the gate. It was rusted and as he tried to force it open, he remembered the last time he’d been through this gate. It had been with Davenport on the night Liza Richardson ran berserk. Eventually the gate swung back with a screeching sound Ed thought must have been loud enough to wake the dead.

  On the other side he peered anxiously around, fearful that maybe this was a set up and he’d be arrested for trespass. But Suzzie-Jade had been true to her word, the place seemed deserted, deserted, cold and desolate. He made for the chapel, keeping under the cover of the trees for as long as possible before crossing the patch of open ground towards the door.

  The crumbling sandstone of the chapel stained a darkish green over the centuries radiated decay. He didn’t want to be there long so forced himself inside. The door opened surprisingly smoothly and he was confronted with the tombs of the Davenports.

  It was still a house of God so his initial instinct was to kneel in front of the altar and pray, but once he was standing before it a feeling of despair swept through him. This wasn’t a place where prayer had ever worked. Whatever had been worshipped here, it wasn’t his God.

  Other than that, by torchlight, the place wasn’t intimidating, just bleak, cold and empty. He made his way to the steps leading to the lower level. Down there though there was a different feeling - earthy and morbid. He made his way through the mausoleum architecture, its shape distorted by the flickering torch beam, trying not to look towards the dancing shadows and concentrating on keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  This had been a mistake; he shouldn’t have come on his own. Then he saw the other steps - rougher, cruder -crumbling their way down to the dark and his fate was sealed. As he began to pick his way gingerly down the worn stone his first reaction was mild surprise: it didn’t feel as bad down there as it had in the crypt under the chapel. So when his feet detected the change in gradient at the point where stone step gave way to earthen ramp, he had just enough confidence to carry on.

  The passage at the foot of the ramp was cramped and narrow, with a low roof forcing him to stoop. It was a claustrophobe’s nightmare, exacerbated by the tree roots pushing their way down into the passage and catching at him like febrile skeletal fingers. It smelt alive down here too, that couldn’t be right. His confidence had betrayed him like it had Hector when it made him think that he could face Achilles. He was about to turn and get out as fast as he could when the passage wall to his right disappeared and he was there, in the chamber. The place where Hikman, Dee and, he presumed, others over the millennia had gathered to practise their desperate necromancy.

  He moved his torch from side to side, watching the weird shapes the beam flickered through as it traversed the darkness. What in God’s name was this? It looked to Ed as if the chamber had collected the essence of every childhood nightmare and made them real. Most of this, maybe all, was pre-Christian, like the complete panoply of the early churches’ shibboleths gathered together in one foul cache. It was the morbid compulsion of this that drove him to take his final step away from commonsense and ignore the warning of the fading torch beam.

  He made his way between two blinded stone heads set on rough pillars, taking care to avoid a patch of dark organic earth that appeared to defy logic by containing the remnants of a tree growing down into the earth, and picked his way towards an image that the torch beam seemed to have stuck on. It was a slab of rock, resembling a tall altar, which had been painted – it was like the Palaeolithic cave images he’d seen as a boy in Spain.

  But this one was far more sinister, depicting the image of a figure with a bleeding gash where the heart should be. But it wasn’t the heart he was looking at: it was a head. A woman’s head, he thought. A head that had burst open from the inside and was releasing a huge black bird.

  Everything about this particular image appalled him, and it engaged his concentration to such an extent that at first he was unaware of the crunching noise his feet had begun to make as he approached this terror of life in death.

  Then the torch beam failed and he was plunged into darkness, his squeal of terror amplified to an unnatural volume, which reverberated right round the chamber. Something was round his feet, impeding movement. Then, thank God, the beam was back, weak and indeterminate but he could see enough to get out of there anyway. But first he needed to see what it was catching at his feet.

  He directed the puny beam down and saw they were caught up in the leprous white tendrils of some inverted creeper or sucker living its unnatural existence in the dark. Trying not to think about how it had come to wrap itself round his ankles, he pulled his feet free. The tendrils sloughed off with a sickly sucking noise and seemed to retreat beyond the narrow pool of torchlight. He stood shaking in the cold and dark, fighting panic and gasping down lungfulls of the freezing stale air.

  The silent dark pressed down on him and he had to force himself to move. It was only then he became aware of the other sound, the crunching sound he hadn’t previously paid heed to.

  Forcing his gaze back downwards, he discovered the cause: his path to the image had taken him across a litter of skeletons. They were the remains of birds and there must have been hundreds of them. He didn’t want to have to walk back through them, to have to touch them in any way, so, unwisely, he hesitated, looking for another way back.

  It was while he was scanning the bizarre cavern for an alternative exit that he sensed movement at the chamber periphery. Movement and an intensification of the timbre of blackness; if such a thing could be possible down there.

  And a different sound, faint but growing. The nearest he could come to placing it was as a type of rustling. Something rotten was rustling nearby, he could hear and smell it. Now he was terrified, his breath coming in strangled gasps. This was terribly wrong, no human was meant to be in this place. He looked round for the best way to leg it out, but it wasn’t a way out that his eyes locked on. The deeper blackness at the very limits of the torch beam appeared to be spreading, growing and moving. It was certainly growing louder.

  He couldn’t bear to look and then luckily didn’t have to as the torch beam died. Died finally, its photons dispersed to another frequency. Jesus, this was worse, now he daren’t move, but in the impenetrable blackness he could sense this black mass drawing closer.

  The sounds were certainly nearer now. He thought he could feel leprous tendrils re-encircle his ankles and begin to inch up over his socks and under the edges of his trouser legs. He felt the useless torch fall out of his limp hand onto the mass of skeletal bird debris on the floor. He was beginning his first scream of terror when an image of his cell phone came to him. It had a torch app, he’d used it, and he could get it to work down there.

  The anxiety of fumbling in his pockets for the phone seemed an eternity, but then his fingers located it. He turned the phone on, its batteries were low but if he got the app it’d last long enough to get him out of there. And it did work, thank God it did work. He directed the beam in the direction he thought was the way out.

  There was no way out: he was closed in Hell.

  A Hell specifically created for him. Now he understood the sound, it was the soft rustling of ink black feathers. They were all around, crowded densely together, on top of each other: a mass of crows, stacked as tall as he was. He swung the light round three hundred and sixty degrees. They filled the chamber, packed from floor to ceiling, inching towards him - every dead black eye trained on him. All the crows in the world, the universe, and whatever exists beyond.

  Not living crows, all the crows there’d ever been. He knew this because there were young healthy crows, freshly dead crows, partly decomposed crows and skeletal vestiges of crows. He spun in a circle, there was no
way out now, there had only ever been a way in.

  The front row of carrion was almost touching him; he stood in a circle of space with a diameter of little more than a metre. It was a rapidly shrinking circle. The noise was so loud now he almost didn’t notice it and besides, he had something else to take his attention.

  The smell: the foul taint of their carcass breath. Rotten, meaty and bloody, filling the fetid air of the chamber. He could tell more and more carrion were packing into the chamber, squeezing in at the back and pushing the others further forward. They’d had to let him go last time. Now he was theirs down there in the dark. What had he ever done to deserve this?

  Then there was a change: the noise of rustling ceased. Scarce centimetres from him they paused and he could see every living and dead corvid eye fixed on him. There was no sympathy in their gaze, all he could discern was a type of feeding lust. But there was still sound, quieter but no less chilling. The sound of the crows breathing, rumbling back towards the far off walls of the chamber.

  The stench of this was suffocating; the oxygen was used up now the chamber was just crows and carcass breath. He didn’t want the light any more. He didn’t need to see this. He’d done his best, that was all God could have asked of him. He’d failed but at least he’d tried.

  He turned off the phone, put it back in his pocket then fell to his knees. In the blackness he felt the bird’s begin to rustle the last inches down on to him. He began to pray.

  Chapter 25: While Cold Blood is Raining

  Giles knew he had to do it; he’d learnt it wasn’t possible to avoid fate. He’d been one of the last people Mary had contacted and the fact that he’d been contacted at all was a pretty good indication of the levels of desperation she’d reached. Ed was missing. The last person he’d spoken to had been Mrs Carver at the hall but she wasn’t there and Mr Carver wouldn’t come to the phone (according to the barely articulate creature who’d answered it).

  Ed had gone out for a couple of hours in the morning and now it was only a couple of hours before midnight. No one in the parish had seen him and after his history of mental health problems had been explained forcibly to them, the police were now taking it seriously. Still no leads, so at the scraping-the-barrel stage, Mary had tried Giles on his mobile number.

  She’d tried Claire first, who told her not to worry and, certainly, Claire herself hadn’t sounded in the least worried. In fact, she’d even made an inappropriate joke that maybe Ed had a lover. This had taken Mary by surprise, she’d always thought of Claire as a caring person. The fact that Giles seemed to take it very seriously was even more surprising: she’d had him down as irresponsible and feckless.

  Giles was in the pub when he got the call and he knew at once this wasn’t down to Ed’s depressive mentality. He thought about contacting the woman who’d smashed herself up on the restaurant window, remembering her warning for Ed.

  A split second later he thought of the chapel. The decaying deserted chapel standing sentinel over its underground chamber of horrors. He still hadn’t made any sense of what he’d found under there. The nearest he got was an archaeological equivalent to the theory of quantum tunnelling; worm holes through the multiverse. He didn’t want to go anywhere near the place, but if Ed was down there he couldn’t leave him. His first solution was to tell the police, but his instinct kicked in, this wasn’t something they’d understand, certainly not that bitch who’d locked him up. Any connection with Skendleby would just give her more ammunition.

  So he had to go himself. He thought about ordering a quick rum chaser to steady his nerves but didn’t and left his half finished pint in its half empty pot and went out.

  There was light snow covering his windshield and the skies held the promise of heavy falls to come, a whiteout was predicted. It would be freezing under the chapel. The main roads were clear but the minor ones near Skendleby hadn’t been gritted and he had to concentrate hard on stopping the car from sliding around. This was good because it prevented any attempt at a critique of his intentions. The only way to reach the chapel without being picked up by Carver’s CCTV was by parking on the Skendleby mound site and climbing the estate wall at the back of the Hall. He got his torch from the back of the car and made his way to the wall, being careful not to look at the mound. If anything was going on there he didn’t want to see it, he was scared enough as it was.

  Each step seemed to make a sound loud enough to wake the dead as he crunched over the earth, which rang iron-hard beneath the frost. He slipped twice trying to climb the wall but on the third attempt managed to push himself over and landed in a heap the other side where, through good fortune, the stunted undergrowth under the trees broke his fall. He was sweating and breathing heavily. It was even darker in among the trees than he’d imagined, and he wondered if he was up to this. Maybe he should climb back over the wall and ring the police from his car. He could have kicked himself: he didn’t need to incriminate himself, he could ring Theodrakis.

  Then something weird happened. He got a clear image of Theodrakis by the chapel. Not by the chapel when they’d both been there during the investigation, but by the chapel now, in the dark. He turned on the torch, directed it down at the earth and began to pick his way through the wood.

  It was clear, crisp and dark and, apart from the occasional crack from a twig underfoot and the sound of his breathing, it was silent. He felt like he’d walked out of the wardrobe into Narnia. The woods had a weird dark magic about them, this must be happening to someone else, it was almost enjoyable.

  The snow had started to come down heavily by the time he reached the chapel door; there was no sign of Theodrakis. Giles wasn’t too bothered because in a way Theodrakis had played his part by making sure he got there. The feeling of hyper reality sustaining him was heightened by the strange sensation of a rushing noise, which sounded like a great flock of birds suddenly disturbed from roosting, climbing into the sky. He looked up, he was out of the trees and there were no birds.

  Inside the chapel he made the sign of the cross. Where had that come from? He wasn’t a Catholic, wasn’t anything except confused. Footballers did it on TV when they ran on to the pitch but he didn’t: even Ed didn’t go in for all that stuff. But in a way it gave him an unexpected measure of reassurance so he repeated the gesture when he found himself confronting the altar. He’d hoped Ed would be in the chapel but wasn’t surprised when he wasn’t because inside him he knew that if Ed was here it would be underground, walking through the underworld.

  He forced himself down the steps to the under-chapel. Still no sign, but there was sound, a type of dislocated echo coming from somewhere below. He headed for the steps down and, by the time he’d reached the earth ramp, the torch beam had reduced to only about a couple of meters in length. He didn’t feel cold anymore, in fact, it was warm. He remembered Theodrakis telling him something about reality warping on Samos. Well, now it was warping in Skendleby.

  At the foot of the ramp he groped his way along the passage towards the chamber. It was definitely getting warmer and there was a thick, cloying odour pervading the passage: rank, sickly and sour. He didn’t want to go any further or see what he was pretty sure would confront him in there. He came to a halt, choking on the foul air slithering down his windpipe. He was very alone and thought of Steve, wishing he were there with him. He was too weak to do this alone. Why him, why always him?

  The sound had gone now and he’d reached the chamber. As he passed the first of the fetish objects buried there, the unreality of the place almost overwhelmed him: it was a false assemblage. What had put it together? There was no way that these things could ever have co-existed. His feet were moving through soft things that littered the floor. He directed the light down and saw that he was moving across a mass of feathers. Some were shiny black and new, others were mouldering, and some appeared to have been preserved in some perverse embalming process. Then he heard the sound. Low but distinct, a susurration of muted cawing. The torch beam reached the periphe
ry of the source of the chanting and he saw what was in the centre of the beam.

  There, a few yards in front of him, the light flickered on a moving black mass. A rippling and slithering contagion of undulating feathery bodies swarming around a static object. A mass so large the beam could only illuminate a fraction of it. Almost by instinct he directed the beam towards the centre of the mass towards what they were worshipping, and it partially revealed the thing at the centre.

  He found himself peering at what looked like a crudely sculpted humanoid figure mummified in a cocoon of organic material. In the constantly shifting perspective of occluded vision it was impossible to be certain but his instinct knew what his eyes couldn’t grasp. This was the end of the trail; he’d found what had once been Ed.

  *******

  Jed Gifford saw the old man stumble out of the phone booth. He looked frail enough to drop down into the snow beneath his feet. Jed didn’t feel cold at all, which was weird because he wasn’t wearing a coat. He knew what he was here to do but didn’t know why. He couldn’t figure how he’d got here, where ever here was. One minute he’d been bullying Dave into buying him another drink in the Bull’s Head and thinking about the street walker in Maccy he had his eye on for the way home. Now he was in the middle of fucking nowhere in a bloody snow storm.

  So why did he know what he was going to do when he didn’t know why or what would happen to him when he’d done it? But there wasn’t time to worry about that now because the old man was moving off. He looked like he could hardly walk but he set off up a lane that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere. Must be off his head; still, it made it easier with no one else about and it would give him plenty of time to go through his pockets afterwards.

  It was dark out here and once the old man had left the light of the call box and the single street light that illuminated the minor junction where it was located, he should have disappeared into the night. But funnily he hadn’t, Jed could still see him. Even stranger, the man was walking up towards him, which meant that Jed must have overtaken him and he didn’t remember having done that. He didn’t even remember leaving his position opposite the call box. Then again, he didn’t remember how he got to the phone box either.