The Madness Below: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 20)

by R. L. King

  “If it turns out to really be wiring, I’ll eat my boots.” Stone took another sip and tried to calm down. He didn’t like not knowing where Kroyer and Lang were.

  “But why would they do that?”

  “We’re still working on that. They might have simply wanted to discourage us from staying in Treadley, since there aren’t any other rooms to be had. Perhaps they thought we had important notes in our room that they couldn’t find. I don’t know. All I know is that they almost certainly did it, and now they’re gone.” He glanced toward the curtained kitchen window, almost as if expecting to see them lurking out there somewhere.

  “Okay,” Dez said. “Let’s put that aside for a minute. You’re absolutely welcome to stay here again if you want. You were going to join us for Thanksgiving dinner anyway, and it’s no trouble to have you here. I’ll get the pullout sofa ready when we’re done talking.”

  “Thank you—although we may not be able to join you for dinner after all.” He took another sip of coffee and related the whole story of their mission to Maple Ridge.

  When he finished, with Verity filling in a few parts he’d missed or forgotten, Dez stared at them both in shock. “So there is something out there near that campground, and it sounds like it really did get hold of those kids. I mean, I still don’t believe that they just went bad without help, but it’s nice—or terrifying, depending on how you look at it—to have confirmation.”

  “We only have partial confirmation,” Stone pointed out. “Yes, we know there’s something. But we don’t know what, and we don’t know exactly where. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get through to Brittany Lyons enough to get her to tell us the exact location. I’m not sure she knows, actually. It’s possible whatever that thing is, it sort of…scrambled their brains a bit to make sure they couldn’t reveal its whereabouts.”

  “So what’s your next step?” Dez asked. “Are you planning to go back out there and look around again?”

  “Yes, exactly. I’m going to call my friends a bit later—it’s not too early for the ones in England, but I’m sure Reverend Blodgett won’t fancy being roused from a sound sleep, and this can wait a few more hours. I’m hoping they talked to each other, and between them figured out some more about what we’re up against. But regardless if they do, I think we need to get out there.”

  “Do you think Kroyer and Lang are out there?”

  “Who knows? I wasn’t able to decipher their notes, so I hope my friends can. We’ve got no evidence that they had any communication with the students at Maple Ridge—although we do know they talked to Neil Warby. That might have given them enough to get started, at least.”

  Dez was thinking, staring down into her coffee. “Do you think, if they’re mages, that they’ll have any better chance of finding anything than you do? Could they be stronger at magic?”

  “Unlikely,” Stone said without conceit. “These days I’m fairly high up on the scale, power-wise. If they were stronger I’d likely have heard of them, at least in passing. What I’m mostly concerned about is that there are more like them out there. If they all put their heads together and compare notes, it’s possible they might work this out before we do. Regardless of their magical power level, I don’t doubt for a moment that they’re sharp.” He didn’t add his other fear: that, depending on how long the New Improved Ordo had been pulling itself together, they might have access to research material every bit as comprehensive as he did, and if this knowledge was important to them, it was possible they could put a lot more researchers to work on it.

  “What do you think they’ll do if they do work it out? Is this thing dangerous to more people? If they go out there and find it, and they don’t know what they’re up against, will it make them kill people too?”

  “That’s a good question, and one that’s been bothering me for a while as well,” Stone said. “Presumably they think they can handle whatever it is, but handle it how?”

  “Maybe they just want to study it,” Verity suggested. “See if they can figure out how it did what it did, so they can do it too?”

  “Possibly. I think we’ll need more data before we can determine that, and to get it, we’ll need to go to where it is.”

  Dez looked troubled, as if she had something to say and didn’t want to say it.

  “Is something wrong?” Verity asked.

  “Not wrong, exactly.” She let out her breath. “I told you I’d help you, and I will. If we need to go back out there tomorrow, we’ll go. But—”

  “But it’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve got your family to think about,” Stone said gently.

  “Well…yeah. They’re used to me having to work on holidays, but they know I’m officially on leave now. It’ll be hard for me to explain to them what’s going on without telling them more than we should.”

  “I understand. You don’t need to go with us, though. I know the way now, and I’m honestly not sure you’d be of much help. Guns don’t tend to be very effective against magic.”

  If Stone hadn’t been watching her aura, he wouldn’t have caught the quick flash of relief that went through her. It didn’t show on her face. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because I could—”

  “You stay here,” Verity said. “We got this, don’t worry. Doc and I have been working together for a long time.”

  Stone nodded. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure, I won’t lie to you—it’ll make things easier. But I want you to know I’m here if you need me, no questions asked.”

  “Absolutely,” Stone said.

  “For now, though, you two should get some rest.” Dez got up, collected the coffee cups, and put them in the sink. “Let me get that sofa for you—it’s a little tricky.”

  Stone exchanged glances with Verity, sure she was thinking the same thing: she’d have preferred for the two of them to bunk in the same room. But given the family situation, it probably wouldn’t be wise to suggest it. That, and they’d probably kill each other trying to coexist in a double-sized bed.

  “I’ll take the sofa,” Stone said. “I probably won’t sleep much anyway.”

  “I have to say,” Dez admitted, “I’m glad you two made it in and out of Maple Ridge without anyone seeing you. I’ve been nervous all night, waiting to hear you’d been apprehended or something.”

  “We can be pretty sneaky,” Verity said with a smile.

  “I think sometimes it would be nice to have magic—you know, make things easier in a lot of ways. But I’m getting the impression that it also makes things harder in a lot of ways.”

  “Wise words indeed,” Stone said. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

  21

  To his surprise, Stone did manage to get a few hours’ restless sleep on the lumpy, uncomfortable sofabed. He woke when Verity dropped down on the edge of it.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

  Stretching, he ran his hand through his tousled hair. “What time is it?”

  “Almost seven. You must have been tired.” Her hair looked damp from a recent shower.

  “Where is everyone?” He sat up and looked around, still not altogether awake. Normally, he and anything earlier than about nine a.m. didn’t get on too well.

  “The kids are still asleep, and so is Dez’s husband. She’s in the kitchen, putting together some pies for Thanksgiving dinner. I offered to help, but she says she’s got it.”

  “Ah. Right. I thought something smelled good.” He used magic to retrieve his phone, which he’d plugged into an outlet on the other side of the room. No voicemail messages awaited him, so Eddie or Blodgett hadn’t called back yet.

  “Don’t hurry too much—I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “Obviously you haven’t looked outside.”

  He swung his legs around, quickly pulling on his jeans in case Dez decided to take that moment to poke her head in, and hurried to the patio door. When he pushed the curtains aside, he immed
iately understood what she meant: a heavy rainfall was coming down in sheets, so hard he couldn’t even see to the yard’s back fence. “How long has that been going on?”

  “Couple hours, Dez says. And according to the weather report, it’s not stopping any time soon.”

  “Damn.” He’d wanted to get an early start up to Nepauhauk, waiting only long enough to get whatever information was coming from Eddie, Ward, and Blodgett. But from the look of that deluge, even trying to drive in it on unfamiliar normal roads—not to mention the winding, narrow ones leading up to the campgrounds—would be reckless at best and suicidal at worst. He didn’t even know if his rented Ford could handle it, and Verity’s rental car back at the Schooner Inn was even smaller.

  “Well…look on the bright side.”

  “There’s a bright side?”

  She shrugged. “If we can’t get up there, they probably can’t either. Especially if they don’t expect we know where they’re going. If they’re smart, they’ll wait till this lets up, at least.”

  He sighed. She had a point, but that didn’t make him any happier about having his plans thwarted. “Yes, I can’t argue with you there.”

  “Why don’t we have breakfast, and then you can call Eddie. You can do it in my room so you don’t have an audience.”

  “Let me get a shower first, so I can at least pretend like I’m awake.”

  Eddie had other ideas, though. Stone had just sat down at the big kitchen table with Verity and the Griffiths, ready to tuck in to a stack of steaming pancakes, when his phone buzzed. When he saw the number, he leaped to his feet. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to take this. All right if I use your room, Verity?”

  “Go for it,” she said.

  He was already moving, answering as he went. “Eddie! Please tell me you’ve got something.”

  “Good morning to you too, mate.” Eddie’s voice sounded amused.

  “Hey, if you’d dealt with what I have over the past day or two, you’d be in a hurry too. Have you got something?”

  “Yeah. ’Ang on a tick, let me conference Ward and Reverend Blodgett in. Great idea, by the way, ’avin’ the Rev get in touch. ’E popped over ’ere for a bit yesterday, and we compared notes. I think we got a lot further along than we’d have done if we were on our own.”

  Stone pushed open the door to the Griffith’s guest bedroom and dropped down on the bed, waiting impatiently for Eddie to do whatever was necessary to set up a conference call. A few moments later, Blodgett’s familiar voice said, “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, got you, Reverend. Ward, you there too?”

  “Right here. Good morning, Stone.”

  “Morning, Ward. Enough pleasantries—let’s have the information.”

  “Stone’s cranky,” Eddie said. “Not that I can blame ’im. You’re gonna ’ave your ’ands full, mate. I almost wish I could come over there and ’elp. You know, if I was the sort to do that. Anyway, sit back, this is gonna take some time. Reverend, you want to start?”

  “Yes, best if I do. Dr. Stone, you might remember my mentioning that the chant sounded like it was in the language of a long-dead cult, and it sounded like a sort of prayer?”

  “Yes, you said that before.”

  “Well, with the assistance of Mr. Monkton and Mr. Ward, I’ve got more information about the cult. It was known as the Esoteric Brotherhood of Aronai, and it was originally based in England in the middle sixteen-hundreds.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “I’m not surprised. They were a small cult, with members who were ostensibly part of the Church of England until that organization unearthed their existence and excommunicated the lot of them for heresy and grievous acts against God. The only reason they weren’t all executed was that they got advance knowledge of the Church’s impending action and fled for their lives in the middle of the night, only a step ahead of the Church authorities.”

  “Where did they go—as if I don’t have a fairly good guess.”

  “They fled to the New World—to what’s now the eastern United States. No records remain describing where specifically they went, but it’s not unreasonable to think that they ended up in this area. They did apparently gain some followers over here, but the cult remained both very small and quite well concealed, probably because they were concerned they’d get the same treatment over here if they were found out. Perhaps worse.”

  “Yes, the Puritans weren’t known for bein’ a tolerant lot about that sort o’ thing,” Eddie added.

  “Okay,” Stone said. “Tell me about the cult. What was their purpose in life? Who—or what—did they worship?”

  “That’s harder to determine. They didn’t worship any individual god, but more of a…sort of pantheon of things from what they called ‘the darkness beyond the other side.’”

  “That sounds ominous,” Stone muttered.

  “It does, yes,” Ward said. “As nearly as we can determine—some of this came from what we could decipher from the Ordo’s notes, by the way, so they know this too—they believed that somewhere out there beyond human perception, immensely powerful beings were waiting for the time to be right to cross over to our world and destroy it.”

  “And they wanted this?” Stone asked. “Bit short-sighted, isn’t it?”

  “Think Old God stuff,” Eddie said. “Those crazy cultists always figure that if they kiss enough tentacled arse, they’ll be the chosen ones who get to live and be honored. They never catch on that it just means they’ll probably be the last ones devoured. Nobody said barmy people ’ad to make sense.”

  “True,” Stone admitted. “All right, so is there any legitimacy to any of this? Obviously something is out there. We got confirmation of that last night—staged a little covert operation to get into the facility where the students are being held, and managed to get through to one of them enough that she revealed they’d visited some kind of buried building out in the middle of the woods and interacted with some strange red-and-green thing with ‘eyes and tentacles,’ as she described it. She said it was on a table, but that it seemed to move. Do you think this could be related?”

  “Quite possibly,” Blodgett said. “There was a strong rumor that at least some of these cultists—perhaps all of them—were mages. That might be why they believed they would be spared by whatever crossed over.”

  Stone sighed. This wasn’t looking good. “And that’s likely why the Ordo’s interested in this whole business. So you’re telling me this Lovecraftian claptrap is real? That they’re trying to summon—what—Cthulhu or something?”

  “No,” Eddie said. “No mention of Cthulhu or any of his mates, fortunately.”

  “But remember,” Blodgett added, “many old legends have some basis in reality—usually magical reality, which most mundanes have no idea ever existed. Lovecraft did live and write in this area, so it’s possible he might have run across some of the legends and borrowed them for his stories, with suitable embellishment. Once we knew what we were looking for, I reached out to a couple of colleagues in the area, and they had more. They’re very concerned, by the way.”

  “Yes, well, tell them to join the bloody club,” Stone grumbled.

  “Given the language of the chant and what you’ve told me so far,” Blodgett went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “along with some information from the notes you provided to Mr. Monkton and Mr. Ward, I believe we’re looking at a being known as ‘the Lurker Beneath the Woods.’”

  “That sounds even more ominous.”

  “It should. This thing isn’t terribly powerful on its own—at least by the scale these other things were judged on—but it didn’t need to be. It’s meant as more of a…herald.”

  “What do you mean, a herald?” Stone, unable to remain seated on the bed, got up and began pacing around the small room. He tweaked the curtain aside and saw that the torrential rain was still falling as hard as ever.

  “It was left behind, in a sort of suspended state, until conditions became right again.”<
br />
  “Conditions for what? And do you know what these conditions are?”

  “Conditions for calling its master to our world,” Eddie said.

  Stone stopped pacing. “And who is its master?”

  “It…doesn’t have a name. Not that any ’uman tongue could pronounce, anyway. But trust me—we do not want to see it around ’ere. The only thing I could find about it was that its description is consistent with what you mentioned: all eyes and tentacles, and it’s said to drive any mortal who looks upon it mad. Supposedly it lives under water. Another place Lovecraft might have cribbed for Cthulhu, maybe.”

  “What water?”

  “Any water, from the sound of it. It can be summoned from any body of water. Though I wouldn’t try doin’ it from a bathtub or summat. Ancient Old Gods can get pretty shirty when they get their arses stuck in their portals, or so I ’ear.”

  Stone sighed. “So wait—you’re saying this thing out in the woods is nothing but a lackey? It’s been out there for hundreds of years—maybe longer—and its whole purpose is to bring something else over?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Blodgett said. “Remember, our research is incomplete—a lot of the records were lost, and I doubt any of the cultists remain in our time. My best guess is that they completed an elaborate ritual several hundred years ago to summon the Lurker into being, and planned to be around—probably their descendants, anyway—when the time was right for it to call its master.”

  “So what happened to them? Did something eat them? Did the cult just die out because their kids didn’t turn out to be raving nutters like they were?”

  “No idea,” Eddie said. “All we know is that there’s no record of them persisting past around the early seventeen-’undreds. Maybe the church finally caught up with ’em and managed to either break ’em up or kill ’em. Maybe their records were destroyed, and through the generations they forgot where they parked their beastie. I’m not sure we’ll ever know the true story.”

  There was a soft knock on the door. “Doc? Can I come in?”