The barkeep now held a lighted oil-lantern which he offered to Drayton with a grunt.
“Follow,” he prompted, pointing towards the fireplace.
Above their heads something thudded heavily upon the floor of The Swine. The disembodied limbs hanging from the rafters shook with the force of it.
“Come” – the voice from beyond the fireplace sounded distant and ethereal – “and bring a light, won’t you?”
At the rear of the fireplace, three or four feet up the chimney, the lamplight revealed an age- and soot-blackened metal door set into the wall. Clambering through the aperture with some difficulty – especially Jonson who was the larger of the two men – the baffled pair found themselves in a damp and draughty passageway hewn out of stone. It was evident that this was a tunnel carved into the very bedrock of London itself. Shakespeare waited there, positively dancing with exhilaration and agitation.
“Now look here!” he snatched the lamp from Drayton’s grasp and jogged off down the passageway.
“Where are you going?” Drayton called before reluctantly trotting after, Jonson wheezing along behind him. “What is this place?”
Shakespeare had stopped and was examining a portion of the wall closely, holding the lamp up to it and throwing long-tentacled shadows from his fingers as he ran them over the surface. He was tracing some ancient, angular characters graven into the rock. They were crudely done and worn away by centuries of dripping damp yet, looking over Shakespeare’s shoulder, Jonson thought he read CORNIGER MATER FILIORUM M.
“Roman,” Shakespeare declared, beaming. “I told you ours was a feast straight out of Londinium. But the Romans did not make these tunnels, they merely improved upon them. Did you recognise the name on the map I gave you? Exham? There was a scandal around the Baron of Exham – Walter de la Poer – a decade or so ago. Beneath his family estate there are Roman remains just such as these, and beneath those... well, Kit told me that all such places – and many remain hidden here in England – have since acquired the nickname of Exham.”
Drayton, moving to the edge of the field of light cast by the lamp, bumped hard against something in the blackness. There was a scraping of metal.
Shakespeare wheeled round and shone the light in his direction. Drayton had collided with what appeared to be an ancient well-head set into the floor, a rusted, metal lattice fastened across its top. His leg stung and when he put his hand to it, it came away bloody. A single drop fell from his finger-tip, shining crimson in the lamp-light as it dripped off and down through the grated well-covering. For the first time Shakespeare looked uneasy and raised a finger to his lips signalling for his companions to be quiet. Curiously tense but silent seconds passed before he spoke again.
“We must be on our way,” he said quietly and was off down the passageway at a run. “And take care where you tread from now on!” he warned, glancing back over his shoulder.
At first Drayton thought it was the wind whistling in the depths of the covered well, but even as he and Jonson resumed their chase, the sound blossomed into a terrible screeching howl. The shuddering light of the lamp showed half a dozen similarly covered shafts as Shakespeare dodged past each one, fleeing along the tunnel. Jonson and Drayton, barely able to keep up, had to try to remember where they had seen the obstacles lest they crash into another. The same terrible sound was coming from all of them – like the baying of some desperate half-starved beast of the forest with its leg caught in a huntsman’s trap, only now it was accompanied by awful long-nailed skitterings and scrabblings.
Ahead of them Shakespeare rounded a corner and disappeared from view, the light fading with him. Making the turning in haste the duo were confronted by a gigantic figure, its head crowned with an array of vicious looking horns or spikes, its caprine eyes blank and white. The statue reclined upon a vast marble plinth. Though it had evidently occupied the centre of the small vaulted temple they now found themselves standing in, the statue had slid a few feet to one side by means of some cunning and ancient mechanism, revealing a hidden stairway beneath. Down this stone spiral Shakespeare was already descending hurriedly.
“We can’t go down there!” said Jonson desperately, grabbing hold of Drayton.
“Will!” Drayton called down the stairs as loud as he dared. “Will! For God’s sake, man!”
Shakespeare stopped and looked up, his eyes glittering in the lamp-light.
“The ghouls will not venture down here. Their graveyard tunnels merely intersect with these and they take their sustenance, and their trophies, from the dead alone. Besides, they know better than to intrude upon the domain of the All Mother.” He flashed a grin which might have been reassuring had not his words been so strange, then continued downward.
Reluctantly Drayton moved to follow him but Jonson, still holding him, stood fast. Behind them the howling was joined now by a scraping, screeching, clattering – the sound of the rusted covers of those wells, or pits, being rattled by whatever had skittered up from their depths.
“This is madness,” he croaked “we don’t know what’s down there!”
The light was fading as Shakespeare continued his descent. Jonson and Drayton stood staring into each other’s eyes, paralysed with indecision. Then, from the passage behind, there came the sound of crumbling bricks and the clang of metal upon the stone floor. One of the howling things had broken free.
Jonson let go of his companion and leapt for the staircase, almost stumbling down the steps in his haste. Drayton followed but having descended a few steps turned to catch hold of the end of the marble plinth. He pulled with all his strength and felt the huge statue shift slightly. It was not enough.
“Ben!” he screamed “Help me, Ben!”
He was in almost complete blackness now. To his terror Drayton felt the heat of panting breath upon him and smelt the stench of fetid meat. Jonson’s hands joined his, grasping at the barely visible slab, and together the pair pulled with all their might. It moved slowly at first then, aided by whatever unseen mechanism enabled its motion, closed so suddenly and with such force that it slipped from their grasp. The sound of the statue thundering into place overhead was mingled with a pained, bestial scream giving the men hope that whatever had sought to peruse them had been crushed, or at least injured, by it.
The spiral staircase was tight, its steps and walls treacherously slimy and uneven. For a time, the pair moved in silence, their quick breaths and pounding hearts the only soundtrack to their blind descent. Then there came the sound of Shakespeare’s whistling – the same cheerful tune as earlier – echoing up out of the darkness. He sounded as if he were fathoms below and neither man had it in him to call out to their insane guide.
After what seemed like an age they saw light coming up from below. They soon discovered it came not from Shakespeare’s lamp but from flaming torches set into soot blackened niches along the walls. These burned with curious flames of blue and green. At the same time the duo became aware of the sound of water somewhere below, and as they continued downward a hiss became a roar.
Shakespeare stood on the near shore of the rushing black river. He still held the lantern in his hand, a mere fraction of the cavernous space being lighted by the strange flames of blue and green. He greeted Drayton and Jonson with a smile and a cheery wave, beckoning them.
Not knowing what else to do, the weary pair trudged across the ebon sand toward him. With a shudder Drayton noticed that the subterranean beach was littered with bones. Jonson stopped to examine an incomplete skull whose pseudo-humanoid aspect looked unsettlingly like that of that swine-thing slain the cellar-room somewhere far above their heads. He retched and kicked the thing away in disgust.
“Where are we?” Drayton had to shout almost into Shakespeare’s ear to make himself heard above the roar of the river.
“At the threshold,” grinned Shakespeare “at the very edge of the world we think of as our own. What a piece of work is man! How feeble in reason! How infinite in delusion! Our domain is nothing more than a layer of
scum upon the surface of the true world. As the tiny beasts which suck blood while we sleep might suppose the bed and its occupant to belong to them, so we imagine that the Earth is ours, made for us.”
“You are ill.” Jonson was standing at Shakespeare’s other side now. “We must get out of this place. All of us. Together. You must return to Stratford. Return to Anne!”
Shakespeare laughed. “Indeed. So I shall. So shall we all. But I must show you first. Show you what Kit showed to me.”
There was an almighty thud, followed by another, and another; like the beating of some unbelievably vast heart. The pounding rhythm, beat out on some unseen gigantic drum, filled the air and rattled the bones of the trio. On the far shore an eerie crimson light began to glow into life, illuminating a previously unseen cave. Within the mouth of the cavern a host of silhouetted figures seethed and cavorted. Though the river was wide and the light but dim, it was clear that many of the shapes did not belong to anything human.
A many-legged, shadowed thing on the far shore waded into the rushing water, dragging a coracle-like boat behind it. For the first time Drayton became aware of a mossy, aged rope suspended high above the water, linking the two banks. Reaching half a dozen of its spindly limbs up to take hold of the rope, the thing scrambled crab-wise into its vessel and began pulling itself across the river towards them.
Jonson set off at a terrified sprint along the black beach into the absolute darkness of the cave. Drayton tried to call after him but, to his horror, discovered that he could not even hear his own cries above the roaring water and the echoing thunder of the drum. Shakespeare stood beneath the vibrating rope dancing from foot to foot, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the inhuman ferryman. Desperately, Drayton considered his options.
He did his best not to look directly at the thing as it scuttled up on to the shore, dragging the boat with it. Its body was roughly the size of a man’s and he glimpsed a quasi-human head set necklessly into the swollen torso. An impression of too many eyes set into a face that was covered with thick black hair threatened to overpower his strained composure but he forced himself to look away.
Hanging his lantern from a hook which projected from the prow of the little boat, Shakespeare eagerly clambered aboard and gestured for Drayton to do the same. There was not enough room in the craft for the spider-thing as well as the men, and at first Drayton thought the creature had merely shoved them off into the river. The boat was spun sideways by the current but then caught and held fast.
Despite his best intentions Drayton, now seated at the rear, glanced up at the rope only to see the abomination dangling between it and the boat. Three of the thing’s hands – almost child-like in their delicacy, yet repulsively skeletal – held on to the lip of the craft. It began to pull itself hand over hand over hand along the rope.
Drayton, struck with the full force of terror and revulsion, rained down a succession of two fisted blows upon the creature’s digits which he felt crack hollowly. The boat whirled away only to be caught by the tips of another set of the thing’s fingers.
Shakespeare was grabbing at Drayton now, shouting unheard angry words into his face. Drayton kicked hard at the bony fingers which burst pulpily beneath his heel. To his horror he saw Shakespeare launch himself sidelong into the raging river. Again the boat spun, this time uncontrollably, the lantern swinging wildly upon its hook as he fought to steady himself. As he was borne by the current, Drayton saw Shakespeare dragged out of the water by the spider-thing, the rope bending under the increased strain of his weight.
Drayton remembered little of the journey through those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, barely glimpsed by the light of a single flickering oil-lantern as he clung feverishly to the ever spinning water-craft. He recalled but dimly the chance grounding of the boat upon a sandbank close to which a herd of pallid grunting things grazed upon stinking heaps of refuse, and how Jonson, half mad with terror but also relief, had leapt into the craft, shoving it off into the current once more. London has more than its fair share of lost and forgotten subterranean rivers and eventually their boat made its way out into the Thames. There they lay upon their backs and drifted freely beneath the night sky thanking God until the sun rose above them.
William Shakespeare died on the 23rd of April 1616, at the age of fifty-two. He departed this world within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in “perfect health”. No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died, yet fifty years later John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote the following in his notebook:
“Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for all grew ill and Shakespeare died of the fever there contracted.”
Shakespeare was buried in Holy Trinity Church upon the banks of the River Avon in Warwickshire. In accordance with the custom of the time there was no coffin, only a winding sheet to cover his body. The stone marking his final resting place was inscribed with the following verse:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare
To digg the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones
Many believe that the Bard himself penned the curse, arguments once made for Ben Jonson’s authorship now largely overlooked and forgotten.
The warning was thought to have proved effective for four centuries, the grave showing no signs of ever having been disturbed. Yet, in 2016 a strange discovery was made. A team using ground-penetrating radar in an archaeological probe of the tomb found that something was missing. Shakespeare’s head – his skull – was gone.
Beneath the spot where his head had lain, the archaeologists detected a curious disturbance in the soil; it was as if the skull had not so much been exhumed as dragged downward. Radar evidence which seemed to show a collapsed network of tunnels beneath the church and its graveyard has been dismissed as mere supposition and “bad data”. Nevertheless it is now widely believed that the head of William Shakespeare was taken as a trophy, and a ghoulish one at that.
Epilogue
“Life’s but a walking shadow… it is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Graham McNeill
Act I: Tempt Not A Desperate Man
I.
Don’t listen to this.
Seriously, don’t.
I’m not joking, put down the damn phone or whatever the hell it is you’re listening to me on, and do yourself a favour by smashing it with the first heavy object you can find. Or if you’re somehow reading this, burn it. Find some matches and light it up. Please.
I know, I know, why bother recording this if I’m just going to tell you to smash it up, right? Well, if you know who I am, then you’ll know I’m an actor; a narcissistic, egomaniacal prick of an actor. If you don’t know me, then for God’s sake go and see a play sometime.
Still here? Have it your way then. Let me introduce myself. My name is Mackenzie Baladan, and if you’re going to stick around to listen to my last words, then I damn well want you to pay attention to what I’m going to say. So what if I ended the world? What actor could ask for a greater curtain call than that?
Right, let’s get on. I probably don’t have much time left. I can hear branches scratching at the door to the roof, roots gnawing the earth and leaves thrashing at the glass. The woods have come to Dunsinane, just like it said they would in the Bard’s play.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to tell you what coaxed me out of London and brought me to this isolated rooftop in Scotland.
It was the Whenschal Sisters, that’s what.
I should have bloody known.
* * *
II.
I don’t remember when I first heard rumours of the part. Last year sometime. Spring maybe? No, not spring. I remember it
being dark. The arse end of winter maybe, sometime black. Anyway, word was going around the usual Soho bars and clubs patronised by the luvvie community that something special was in the wind (though calling that pack of raptors and four-faced liars a community is a joke).
No-one could say for sure where it started, but there were whispers that a juicy script had turned up that was going to be a star-making turn for whichever lucky bastard was able to land the lead role. Of course it was a role for a man; big parts like that don’t come up for women these days, no matter how progressive we like to think we are. No, this was going to be a doozie, a role that would open the doors to Hollywood royalty, a chance to be King of the World!
Naturally I had Imogen do some digging. If anyone could get to the truth of the matter it would be her.
Imogen Boite (never once was it expected she would take my name when we married) is my wife and manager, someone who, even if you only have a passing acquaintance with this business we call show, you’ll have heard some wicked stories about, most of which are probably true. Her nickname in agency circles is Chainsaw, which, publically, she brushes off with a spotless hand, but behind closed doors...
Oh how she revels in it. She’s fought tooth and nail to get me parts in productions up and down the country and even secured a couple of lowbrow movies across the pond. Nothing major yet, nothing that’s going to land me one of those cute golden statuettes in February, but there’s a steady stream of scripts been sent our way over the years. Tosh, mainly, but it never hurts to keep one’s options open.
By means both fair and foul, she’s found ways to get me roles earmarked for actors who, if I’m honest, were much better choices. But Imogen can be very persuasive. She’s not averse to spreading the odd bit of salacious gossip to trip up some younger wannabe sniffing around a role she has her eye on for me. Remember that dashing young star from Casualty everyone was touting as the next big thing last year? The one who was in the running for a role I was after?
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 31