Underhill

by Harper Fox

  “Why did you want to meet it at all? I wasn’t a nice man. Much worse than even Tyack knows—I used to sell drugs around Redruth and places like that. Nasty stuff, addictive and cut with God knows what. I... I’ve probably killed people.”

  “Ah, but I’ve only been killed once, so you were special to me. I wanted to come here and devour your soul. But now I think I’m meant to do something else with it entirely.”

  He looked down at her calmly. “All right.” Then he turned and threw one last look back over his shoulder at Lee. He had a nice smile, did Bill, or must have done once, before he’d waded into his lifetime of mud. “Hoi, Tyack. I’m right sorry, I am, for all those things I said. Where do you reckon we’re going, then, Mrs Cadwallader?”

  She patted his shoulder with her free hand. “I don’t know. But we’re on our way, aren’t we? My, it’s exciting, isn’t it? Come on!”

  Oh God, Lee thought. Don’t leave me behind here. Take me with you! He got his mouth shut just in time. He couldn’t get up from his ridiculous sprawl on the floor, but he did understand what it would mean for him to follow the woman and the transformed, light-stricken man out of this place now. It was just that anything—anything at all—seemed better than lying here alone. “Gideon,” he whispered into the thickening dark. Bill and Ruth were gone now, even that last-exit, last-ditch tunnel closed. Strength melted out of his bones. He fell onto his back, hands clutching at scraps of wood, at straws. At nothing, nothing at all.

  Chapter Six

  “Zeke, get out of here. Take the car and drive back to wherever you can get a signal. Call Jenny Spargo. She’s off duty, but if you tell her Lee’s in trouble at the Underhill house near Gotheglos, she’ll know who to send.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “For God’s sake. Why not?”

  Zeke looked up from his inspection of the concrete-sealed join at the base of the wall. His glimmer of Halloween mischief had vanished. He was dressed in as much of a party costume as his character allowed—jeans and a discreetly patterned shirt—but suddenly Gideon saw him in priestly black. “Perhaps a dark presence has passed through this room,” he said. “It must be something to do with the Nancarrows. They died right here.”

  “Whatever passed through here took Lee with it.”

  “We can’t know that.”

  Gideon banged the flat of his hands off the wall. “I know. And I’m not bloody having it. Go on!”

  “What good could Sergeant Spargo do?”

  “She can send me a battering ram. Or the fire brigade, or a demolition squad, or whatever it takes to get through this.”

  “Gideon, listen to yourself. There’s nothing behind this wall but wasteland and a graveyard.”

  “Then how do you explain a thread from Lee’s sweater being caught where it is? Please don’t try to rationalise this, like you did when they found that gold necklace inside a lump of coal.”

  “I won’t, although the evidence for that is shaky to say the least. I don’t deny that something bad, something inexplicable, has happened here.” He pushed upright to look Gideon in the eye. “Which is why I’m not about to leave you alone with it. You’re not equipped to cope with that kind of spiritual evil.”

  “Great. Thank you. I appreciate your saintly companionship. I need help, though, Zeke. What are you going to do?”

  Zeke folded his arms grimly. “I’m going to pray.”

  No good for Gideon to yell at him in frustration, shake him, try to knock him down. For a start, Zeke could handle him. And secondly, he knew from experience that his brother’s prayers were anything but a peaceful communion with his God. When Zeke climbed into the pulpit of his newly built chapel, he expected his congregation, the spirits of the place, and probably God himself to fall into line and get busy. “Right,” Gideon said in resignation. “Worth a crack, I suppose.”

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I do best. I’m gonna kick down that wall.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Pray for me, then.”

  He squared up to the wall. Zeke was right, of course. But Gideon had learned over time that, where Lee was concerned, appearances could be wildly deceiving. Even though he’d banged his fists off the concrete in front of him, if he made a big enough leap of faith—not Zeke’s kind but his own—he might be able to blast the stubborn flat reality to glittering dust. “On my way, sweetheart,” he whispered, because that was part of it, part of the magic, believing against all the evidence of sense and sanity that Lee could hear. He’d kicked down doors by the dozen in his time with the police. It was easy when you knew how, confidence half the battle. He eased back onto his injured thigh, because the power would come from his good one, exploding outward from the hip.

  His foot slammed off solid concrete. His effort rebounded with equal and opposite force, as if the wall had kicked back. He landed with a thud on the unyielding stone floor, knocking air out of his lungs.

  “Oh, shit,” said Ezekiel. He ran to crouch beside his brother. “Your poor leg. Does that hurt very much?”

  It hurt beyond endurance. Gideon let Zeke haul him into a sitting position, then buried his face in his hands so he wouldn’t scream the house down. Zeke patted him awkwardly. “Fuck,” Gideon was eventually able to say. “Fuck, hell, bugger, shit, fuck.”

  “Really, Gideon.”

  “You started it.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I will be in a minute. That didn’t work too well, did it?”

  “Nor did my prayers.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “You could try using that brain of yours, instead of just muscle.”

  Gideon groaned. “Oh, my so-called brain! I do my best, and Lee provides a lot of cover, but I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, Zeke. We both know that.”

  “Rubbish! You’d never have got as far in your career as you have if you weren’t smart. You could’ve joined CID if you hadn’t been injured. You’ve got a Queen’s Medal, for heaven’s sake.”

  “That’s for acts of... conspicuous stupidity, not smarts.” He struggled to sit up without Zeke’s kindly prop. “Wait, though. I’ve got to think this through. All this week, Lee’s been coming home and telling me he wasn’t getting anywhere with this place, that... despite the awful stuff that’s happened here, it just feels quite peaceful. Not really haunted at all.”

  “If that means the spirits of the Nancarrows are at rest, I should think he was happy.”

  “He was. But he’s got his show to do, and Jack and Anna have worked really hard on this series. He wanted to get a good Halloween special in the can for their sakes, if nothing else.”

  Zeke took this in thoughtfully. “Still, it’s unlike him to go on... tugging at the sleeves of the departed, if I can put it like that. Not for a whole week.”

  “You’re right. But he did keep going back.” Gideon heaved himself upright. He put his hands on his hips and stared at the wall again. “I dunno. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree here. Maybe I am.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—the Nancarrows weren’t the only people to die here under strange circumstances. I remember a case from sometime back in the sixties. A lady had come here—a writer—to do some research for a book she was working on. She was on the elderly side, but very healthy. She kept herself to herself, so nobody noticed she was missing for a few days, until the weekly cleaner came along.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yes. The old girl was in quite a state. But she was tucked up in bed, no signs of violence or forced entry, and the autopsy showed a heart attack, so...”

  “No-one investigated?”

  “That’s right.”

  Zeke came to stand beside him. “On the face of it, I don’t see why anyone would.”

  “No. There was just one weird detail in the newspaper report, and it caught my eye for...” A shiver passed through Gideon. “For some
reason. A mask was found near to the bed, a cheap Halloween thing you could get from Trago or anywhere.”

  “What sort of mask was it?”

  “Some kind of Bodmin Beast, I suppose. A wolf.”

  Ezekiel caught the shiver, as if Gideon had passed on a dose of flu. “That is strange. And horrible, somehow. She doesn’t sound like the sort of person who’d play around with masks in the privacy of her bedroom at night.”

  “No, not at all. She was quiet, respected. I wish I could remember her name.”

  “I’m not sure how you know anything about the case at all. It was long before you were born. Quite a while before I was, ancient though I am.”

  “When I was first training to be a copper, I used to spend quite a bit of time researching past cases in the Bodmin area. I don’t know why—it wasn’t required reading or anything. I just felt as though the place was my turf, my patch, and in some weird way I owed it to people who’d died there before—mysteriously, at any rate, unsolved cases—to pay them some attention.”

  “You were right.”

  “What?”

  Zeke didn’t take his gaze from the wall. Blindly he put out a hand to grasp Gideon’s shoulder. “It was right for you to acknowledge them. Some of them ended up feeling like nothing. But nobody’s nothing.”

  “Zeke, are you okay?”

  “Yes. But you have to remember her name.”

  “I don’t think I can. It was so long ago. Wait, though. Her surname was unusual, and makes me think of Kerdrolla, although who or what Kerdrolla is, I have no idea... Oh, Ruth Cadwallader! That’s it.” He straightened up, letting the name out like a summoning bell. “Ruth Cadwallader, what have you done with Locryn Tyack-Frayne? Ruth Cadwallader!”

  The third time was always the charm. A faint tremor shook the foundations of Underhill House, and the concrete wall disappeared.

  Chapter Seven

  “I can’t go down there,” Ezekiel said. “God forgive me. I can’t.”

  “That’s okay.” Gideon didn’t even glance up at him. He was too distracted by the leap it would take to reach Lee without landing on him, without damaging himself beyond repair. Too concerned with the size and shape of the hole to worry about the fact of its existence. No wall, no floor, just a thin ledge where he and Zeke were now precariously perched, and beneath them—red-black, roiling with half-seen shapes in the darkness—some kind of bloody crypt. “Just hang on here so you can help me get him back out.”

  “I don’t want you to go down either.”

  “Zeke, my husband is lying down there. I know he’ll be all right, because it was just like this in Ray Tregear’s cellar in the Kelyndar house, but I’ve got to get down there.”

  “What has the Kelyndar house got to do with it?”

  Nothing. Nothing, when Gideon thought about it. His mind had simply dropped a fire curtain to save the theatre from bursting into flames, and on that curtain was painted the final happy outcome of the last time he’d found Lee lying unconscious and bleeding, flat on his back in a hole. “Shut up, Zeke, okay?”

  “You don’t get it.” Zeke scrabbled back a little way, sending shards of broken concrete bouncing into the pit. “I’m a coward.”

  “Of course you’re not. You are a bloody nuisance, though, yapping on when I’m trying to think.”

  “When we were all out at the Cheesewring last summer, and Tamsyn stopped the rock from falling with my little lads underneath it—when she held it in the air, and you walked right underneath it to rescue them...”

  “You don’t need to think about that. It’s all over.”

  “I think about it all the time. I couldn’t go in and save my own kids, and I can’t go down there now.”

  Gideon understood. He’d have been racked with shame every day, in Zeke’s place: there were worse things to life than ending it under a falling rock. He saw a place where he could land without hurting Lee, and the rest of it didn’t matter, not really. He jumped.

  The floor of the narrow space was scattered with little metal discs. Lee was lying in a heap of them, the shards of a shattered packing crate all around. Gideon’s feet shot out from under him. He thumped to the ground at Lee’s side, hauled up onto hands and knees and leaned over him. “Lee? Lee, darlin’, wake up.”

  No change in the colourless face. This was better than Kelyndar, Gideon decided. That time, Lee had been bleeding from a terrible head wound. The impact of his fall had been bad enough to knock his psychic gifts into abeyance for a while. This was nothing like so fearsome. There wasn’t a mark on him. Gideon laid a hand to his cheek. “Lee.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Gideon flinched. Ezekiel was kneeling opposite him, eyes wide. “Jesus, Zeke. I thought you were too scared.”

  “I was.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “I... I slipped.”

  Gideon clapped a hand to his mouth. He didn’t want to burst into a gale of laughter here, not in a crypt with his poor husband lying hurt and unconscious. “Oh, my God,” he managed at last, voice strangled. “I swear, it must’ve taken more balls to admit that than it took me to rescue those kids.”

  “Is Lee all right?” Zeke demanded with severity. “What is he lying on?”

  “Gold coins of some kind, I think. Can’t really see in this light.”

  “Have you checked him over?”

  Yes, of course. He’s fine, just out cold. Gideon couldn’t say the words out loud. If he did, he’d be faced with their blatant untruth. Instead he began his assessment, the procedure drummed into every junior copper upon finding a fallen body. The first step was to press your fingertips against the big artery under the jaw.

  And that was why he hadn’t done it. Because he knew—had known from his first glance down into the crypt—that the crucial difference between Tregear’s place and this one was that, down in the Kelyndar pit, injured and broken as he was, Lee had had a pulse. “No,” he whispered. “No.”

  “What?!” Zeke jolted forward. He knocked Gideon’s hand away. Urgently, gently, he too carried out the check at Lee’s carotid. He picked up one wrist—Gideon observing, from galactic distances out, how the strong, elegant hand fell lifelessly back—and searched for a beat in the vein. Lifted one of Lee’s eyelids: at last pressed an ear to his chest, listening. “Oh, Christ,” he said, sitting up. “Oh, Christ, Gideon.”

  “No.” No was the only word left to Gideon now. The floor was falling out from beneath him, his innards turning to cold sludge. “No,” he said again, and this time his brother seized him by the neck of his jumper, big fist twisting hard. “Damn right, no,” Ezekiel rasped. “Gideon! This isn’t how it happens, not for him. Make it not be true!”

  So Gideon detached Zeke’s grip on him, then lifted his husband into his arms. God only knew what spinal injuries Lee might have, but they hardly fucking mattered if he was dead. Gideon pushed one knee beneath Lee’s shoulders, raised him so that he was cradled, held tighter than Tamsyn when they comforted her after a scare, as close and completely as a kid in the womb. He took the poor cold hand and tucked it against his own cheek, pressed his brow to Lee’s. “Come back now,” he said, a growl of command in the words. “I know you have to help people cross, but you don’t have to bloody go with them. I’m here. Come back to me.”

  Lee’s hand twitched. Gideon didn’t feel him take a breath, didn’t pick up a reanimating jolt in his chest. There was a pure, keen eeriness in the touch of one chilly fingertip to his cheekbone. “There’s a tunnel,” he said, suddenly seeing it. “One of them’s real as can be, and it starts in the corner over there and goes down in a coil, and it meets one of the old smuggling tunnels from Polmenear Cove.” A chuckle shook him. “God almighty, the old pastor of this place was involved with it! Up to his hips, he was, making deals and passing on the goods. All these coins are his, the profits he hid away down there. And... the land’s called Underhill, not the house, because that’s where all the action was. Under the hill.”

 
Zeke cleared his throat of the concrete dust hazing the air. “How can you know all this?”

  “He’s showing me. It’s nothing to do with what happened to him, but he’s down there now with all the layers of time and the memories, so he can see.”

  “You said one tunnel’s real. What about the other?”

  “Oh, the other...” Again came the brush of Lee’s fingertip against his cheek. “The other’s where he is. You take one step out of this place and you’re in it, one turn and you’re lost forever, unless someone brings you back. I’ll bring you home, my lad. Take a fix on the light of my mind. Put a hook in my flesh if you need to and pull yourself home, hand over hand on a rope to me.”

  The moth-wing touch described an arc. Gideon read it—this hieroglyph, this sweep of a wing to his soul—with perfect clarity. The first weary movement of Lee’s journey back to him. Gideon slackened his grip a little so the hieroglyphs could continue: another arc, and another, and then the unsteady outline of a kind of labyrinth curve. In and round, a delicate caress of Gideon’s lower eyelashes, down to the corner of his mouth...

  Lee sucked a huge breath and sat up. He flung his arms around Gideon’s neck, loosed a yell that sounded like death or the world’s best come, and burst into tears.

  Gideon held him fast. “Fucking hell,” he said against his ear. “What a fright you gave us! Where have you been?”

  Lee couldn’t answer. Instead he turned his face to Gideon’s, fastened as much of a grip as he could in the short hair at his nape, and pulled him down into a kiss.

  Ezekiel sat gazing at this reunion for almost twenty seconds. “Really,” he rumbled disapprovingly at length. “Do I have to remind you that this is sacred ground?”

  Two pairs of startled eyes met his. “Are you bloody serious?” Gideon began, with a dangerous rumble of his own.

  But Zeke was grinning from ear to ear. “Course I’m serious,” he said. “Honestly, the pair of you. Get a tomb!”