“eeaaarggg…iiilll…il infandus lux…voce…voce…voce…”
Was that Latin? He could make out Latin. Fuck me, this was weird. Beyond weird, terrifying. Dark. Evil.
“infeni…infeni…inferni… Claudi ambulant…Et erit: caecorum videbunt…”
They were chanting now, others were straining their vocal chords, sounding like pigs before slaughter. The noise was so loud. Dan realised he’d stopped in his tracks.
“Patior, pati saecularium hominum ferum…”
The singing, the sound had stopped his progress. He was no nearer to the stairs and his possible exit. He moved forwards and, with another vocal blast, an invisible wave of tangible energy passed through the building. Dan fell against the wall, the sonic wave unbalancing him. Opposite, panes of glass smashed out of their frames. He put his hand to his nose and blood came away on his wrist. They’d made his nose bleed just with sound.
Regaining his balance, he edged forwards. Beyond a protrusion in the wall he could see the door leading to the stairs. It was closed. He didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if it was locked.
Sweat ran down his back. A fear that went beyond mere survival instinct permeated all matter. He could feel a black depressive despair increase with each second the Dark Choir sang. How the hell were they doing this? How the hell were they conjuring such awful senses with mere sound? With one determined scramble, he made it to the door. His hand stretched out and, thank God, it gave way, was not locked. A sliver of light illuminated the stairway up, up, and out.
He stopped. Lighter chords were coming from the mouths of the singers now. This was almost as tangible as music.
Dan knew if he left now, he would never know what the Dark Choir really were. Right now, his rational senses battled with his belief in the impossible. He was not as open as Karl. He didn’t believe this was some supernatural event…yet. All he had to do was to peep around the corner, six feet away, to know the truth. What if he peered around the corner to see nothing but a massive sound system? The game would be up. It would all be Scooby Doo. Some man in a mask. Or perhaps the cult members were all there dressed in black cloaks. Maybe they would throw back their hoods to reveal Widdowson, Gould, Karl, Billy, Mooey, and even Brian, the landlord from The Lamb? They’d all been in on it all along? This theory didn’t hold much weight for him but, still, he had to know. He looked to the tantalizing stairwell then back to the strange dirty yellow glow from the hall.
“Fuck it.”
He moved forwards until he got to the edge of the door jamb. The singing rose in pitch as he prepared to look. He crouched, ready to run as soon as he knew the truth.
Dan poked his head round the door jamb and looked fully into the hall.
On seeing them, shock caused him to fall to his knees in full sight of the Dark Choir, his full body weight taken by his knee caps as he jerked forwards to kneel before them. His eyes were wide as his mind unraveled, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. The choir ceased all noise, and he broke their silence with his screams.
Above the choir, the old, smashed chandelier burned with light again. Cornices had been restored and paint work appeared as new, but in places where the singing had failed to do its work dark, moldering patches of plaster remained.
The children were assembled as they had been for that final performance, Dan imagined, on the stage. The creased, dead flesh of each child was yellowed by the iridescent glow of the chandelier. Eye sockets were empty, grey tongues lolled in dead mouths, and the bare feet of each singer hung down, black necrotic toes pointed to the broken boards of the stage as they floated approximately one foot above the stage. They all wore brown, stained smocks.
The most horrific aspect came not as their mouths moved in forced, abnormal opening and closing motions as they sang , but what really tipped him over the edge was the state of each child’s head.
Wisps of hair could be seen across the skull, but the rough blades that had shaved them all those years ago had left track marks in the hair.
“Oh God, no,” he whimpered from his kneeling position. Each forehead was a network of scars. Scars left from Proctor’s complex operation which had necessitated the removal of the front part of the skull for surgery on the frontal lobe. The lobotomized children sang their horrific aria.
Before him, ten feet away, stood the choir master. He had his back to Dan, but Dan knew him. The man moved his arms with staccato, jerky movements as he directed the lobotomized choir. He rested his arms a moment. The choirmaster turned halfway until he faced Dan. The choirmaster’s robe touched the floor. His bald head gleamed in the light, but those dark, sunken eyes, like dead flies in dough, regarded him with intent. The man he’d seen on those dark nights when he’d staggered home drunk from the pub, the man who’d visited Lindsey, he hadn’t been a ghost. He was something worse. In the absolute silence, the choirmaster spoke.
“Sexus…animo…ad…infernum.”
His voice sounded like metal scraping against concrete and he seemed to have trouble forming the words.
“Six…Souls…To…Hell.”
He turned to the Dark Choir and raised both hands. Their mouths opened as one and a high-pitched blast of sound knocked Dan to his back. Terror the likes of which he’d never known filled him and he scrambled to the door. He was still screaming when he reached the top of the stairs.
Forty-Three
He found himself in a corridor, exactly the same as the one downstairs. Opposite from his position, he saw a door, its windows obscured by dirt, and wondered if it led one of the wards. Through the dirty glass of the door he could see high windows across the way. His way out.
He burst into the ward and slammed the door behind him. Mercifully, silence reigned in here. Either the choir had stopped singing or these doors were soundproof, he didn’t know which. As he stood, hands on his knees, trying to control his breathing, another thought entered his mind. What if the Dark Choir were following him? The image of dead children floating up the stairs, their black eyes searching him out, propelled him towards the windows.
The windows invited him to exit. Nothing but glass, which he could smash, stood between him and his freedom. However, first he would need to reach them. All the windowsills were out of his reach. He’d need a bedstead to use as a ladder to get anywhere near the bottom panes. Asylums were made to be escape proof, like prisons. Dan knew this wouldn’t be easy. He scanned the old ward. Metal frames of bed were scattered at angles across the tiled floor. His gaze was drawn to a pale torso hanging midair.
“Oh shit!”
The torso was spinning slowly, arms and legs hanging down, suspended from the middle. Dan stood frozen to the spot. At the far end of the ward a doorway opened to an office or clinic, he couldn’t tell which. From in there he could hear noises, metal objects being moved about. Someone was in there.
He looked back to the hanging torso, the body colored with what appeared to be fresh bruises and lacerations, then noticed how the body was suspended. Dan’s hand shot to his mouth to stop another curse. This body was hanging from a thick, dark rope which ended in thick wire. The wire had been wound around the victim’s testicles and now the man was hanging by his balls. The torso turned slowly again and he found his gaze locking onto a pair of pale, blue eyes. He instantly recognised those eyes, that penetrating stare. This was Connor Pendred. The slight rising and falling of his chest suggested he was breathing, was still alive. If he saw Dan, he didn’t acknowledge him. Shadows in the doorway beyond made him take notice and he got ready to run. Whoever was in there was coming out.
A tall, pale figure wearing a long, leather apron strode into the ward. He looked right at Dan and stopped just short of the hanging Connor Pendred. Dan recognised the furrowed brow, the shape of the mouth. This man could have been Patrick Finn’s older brother. A version that had not been born with disabling chromosomes. This man was full-bodied and handsome. The resemblance was uncanny.
In one ha
nd he held a large board, approximately five feet by five feet across. Dan noticed the surface of the board was punctuated by vicious spikes at least five inches in length, jagged and sharp. Still looking at Dan, he threw the board under the hanging figure of Connor Pendred. It clattered in the silence of the ward, wood hitting concrete. In Patrick’s other hand his deft fingers struggled to hold both a sledge hammer and a sickle. He let the hammer drop to the floor and brandished the sickle.
Connor Pendred began to moan on seeing the spikes below. Patrick stood before him and brandished the sickle, showing it to Connor. Pendred let out an agonized moan when he realised what was going to happen. Slowly, Patrick began to saw at the rope.
Dan looked to the door. If he ran now, he could be out in the corridor before Patrick noticed. He wondered if he would be next. Would Patrick do this to him once he’d finished with Pendred? Alison’s words came back to him. Witness. Retribution.
His hands flew up to cover his mouth when Pendred fell heavily onto the spikes. Pendred lay prone across the spiked board moaning in pain. Slowly and theatrically, Patrick picked up the hammer and held it above him to let Connor see it.
Patrick was going to smash him down onto the spikes. Dan had seen enough and knew Patrick wasn’t going to hurry to do this. Patrick circled his prey and when he turned his back to him, Dan made a run for it.
Out in the corridor the first agonized scream reverberated through the building. Dan knew now Patrick wasn’t going to follow him. Dan had seen what he’d needed to see.
He ran along the corridor and took a left, running blindly, still planning to find a window to get out. After running down corridors and pushing through two sets of doors he stopped to get his bearings. He’d only managed to go deeper into the asylum. Down along the corridor to the left were stairs heading down. Dan hoped to God these would lead to the reception area, so he could get out. He’d witnessed Patrick’s vengeance. Dan had no clue how he’d changed from the thin young man with Down syndrome he’d seen in Willow House into…well…a handsome maniac.
Dan piled down the stairs, certain they’d lead to that big set of stairs at reception. However, they seemed to go down too many flights. He’d only come up one flight of stairs to get to the ward, now he’d just gone down three flights.
The stairs ended in a low-ceilinged passage. Pipes followed the ceiling along into darkness. To his left he saw a lift door, the dented metal rusting from what he could make out in the gloom. Directly ahead, Dan faced a set of double doors. The functional white lettering on brown background simply said:
MORTUARY
From behind the doors he heard a faint cry. Someone was in there. He looked back to the stairs then back to the doors. Perhaps, he reasoned, someone else was trapped in here and needed to get out. The thought of meeting another person in this mad house filled him with hope. Taking a deep breath and still shaking from his last encounter, he pushed open the doors.
Daniel fell against the doors when he laid eyes on what waited for him on the mortuary slab. Dan instantly recognised the young woman standing over the mutilated torso on the slab. The long, dark hair-plat, the middle eastern eyes, her earthen skin shade. This was Shelly. Her strong hands pinned the woman to the slab with a dark fury. Shelly’s modesty was maintained by a battered brown leather apron she wore, identical to the one worn by Patrick upstairs.
This, then, must be Angela Teal. Dan was about to witness another horrific event, but by the look of Teal the worst had already been done.
On a trolley beside the woman lay bloodied surgical instruments. Angela’s ankles were literally up beside her ears. On first look this seemed an anatomical impossibility. Dan knew enough about anatomy to see what Shelly had done. She’d sawed through the muscle and tendons of the upper legs then dislocated each of her hip bones from their sockets.
Dan half-collapsed and vomited.
He dared to look again. Shelly had sutured the veins and arteries to stop any fatal bleeding. She was looking Dan right in the eyes. Teal was moaning, barely conscious enough to feel the pain. With careful, measured steps, Shelly walked around to the side of the table. She took from the lower, obscured second shelf of the trolley, a handful of thick vicious spikes, identical to the ones which had punctuated the board Patrick was using upstairs.
Demonstrating a sadistic clinicism, Shelly inserted the first spike into the gaping flesh of Angela Teal’s vagina. Crystal clear screeches from Teal caused Dan to block his ears.
“I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen enough!”
He dashed out of the mortuary and scrambled up the stairs. Even on the final flight his nerves were raked by the acute sounds of agony from the mortuary.
“Insane,” he gasped. “This is insane. Insane. Insane. They’re all insane.”
He staggered and fell against a wall, vomit exploding from his throat. He let the wall support him, gasping.
To his right he became aware of a breeze, a stab of cold air. An inch wide crack in the brickwork gave a narrow view of light beyond dead winter branches. He was at the outer wall of the building. All he had to do was find a window. Down the corridor he could see a door that was half open. Escape was imminent!
He didn’t creep but openly ran for the door which was ten yards away. It looked as if it had been boarded up but later broken into by someone, kids maybe. He wanted to thank these kids personally, but as he ran, he heard someone approaching in the pitch blackness of the corridor beyond.
Dan stopped. These weren’t footsteps but a kind of scraping followed by a muffled groaning. What the fuck was this?
Just as he was contemplating making a dash for it, he saw movement. The approaching creature could just about be seen as pale outlines that writhed on its approach. The nearer it got the more he saw of it.
At first sight, the beast appeared as if it were a huge maggot crawling along on its belly. Another two inches revealed stunted limbs and a face. Dan recognised that face. It was a teacher from school. Mr. Hereford. This was Jason Hereford. The man who’d taken Greg into this place and he and his mates had chased Greg around wearing masks.
“Oh, fucking hell…oh….” Dan cut his sentence short with a retch.
Hereford’s arms had been sawed off above the elbow, the skin crudely stitched over the stumps. Blood leaked from the stitches. His mouth had been sewn shut. In the darkness behind Hereford, Dan could see two stumps of legs dragging behind. Dan hopped to one side as the thing crawled past.
Leaping from the darkness came another shape, upright and bipedal. Dan screamed and stepped back.
Greg had grown to almost double his height. He was six foot tall now and built like a rugby player. Greg’s foot landed on Hereford’s head, stopping the mutilated prey in his tracks. Greg turned and looked Dan in the eye.
His broad jaw and handsome features showed no emotion. However, prey and tormenter were now between Dan and the door. Greg continued to stare.
“Why?” gasped Dan. “This is…fucked up. Fucked up beyond belief!”
Greg didn’t answer.
“I’ve been your witness. I’ve fucking seen enough tonight. Too much. Let me go. For fuck’s sake, let me go!”
Greg moved aside and gestured to the door. Dan was forced to step over the mutilated form of Jason Hereford. He burst out of the door and found himself outside, the freezing fog hitting him full in the face.
He ran, ran into the darkness, crashing into dead trees and undergrowth, screaming, screaming out in horror, hoping someone would hear him and take him out of this place, away from this madness.
He stopped by a tree, clung to its wet trunk. He retched again, wiped the moisture from his eyes, and looked up.
“Light,” he said, gasping. Through the trees three soft rectangular lemon lights from a single storey building glowed like light penetrating deep sea murk. “Willow House? Must be.”
Shaking uncontrollably, he staggered onwards, snagging his trousers on brambles, being face-whipped b
y branches, making towards the lights ahead.
Forty-Four
He journeyed towards the lights, stumbling, tripping and falling flat on his face a few times. In the maelstrom of his near- madness, Dan had to admit Karl was right. Karl had been right all along. This was happening because of a supernatural force, because the Dark Choir were singing. They made all this possible somehow.
How had Hereford, Teal, and Pendred been brought here?
Who the fuck knows?
Who had given them those metal, barbed spikes and brown leather aprons to wear?
Ditto.
How in the name of God had they changed bodies like some biblical miracle healing had taken place?
No answer. No logical answer. Nothing. Void.
The horrific things he’d seen threatened to unhinge his mind. He needed to get to a civilization. Sanity. When he broke through a tangle of dead branches and fell onto a weed-strewn tarmac, Dan thought he’d reached it. He’d assumed the single storey squat building ahead—light shining from oblong windows like a beacon of hope—was Willow House. However, the broken tarmac and the peeling paint on the building told him this was not Willow House.
Where the fuck was he? A private house? A storeroom with lights on? He vaguely recognised it. When he approached the heavy door, he saw a sign, rusted with faded lettering on the wall.
BLACKTHORN WARD
This was where Lindsey had spent some time. It was one of the old wards of St. Brendan’s learning disability site. The place where much of the abuse detailed in Ann Prendergast’s report had occurred.
A dread filled him. After all he’d seen this was the last place he wanted to be. He looked behind him at the dark forms of other units and the dead branches of trees.
He swallowed hard. Someone was there. Someone was using it or the lights wouldn’t be on. He could get help from whoever was here. Dan pulled open the door and stood in the dark hallway. Up ahead, light spilled from an open doorway. He could hear running water. Perhaps some workmen were here late. He could only hope.
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