The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  Chapter 29

  June poured hot coffee from a percolator that was sat on her desk into three logo bearing mugs that were no doubt available to buy in the gift shop. The aroma of the ground beans now brewed in the scalding hot water had cast away the slightly musty smell that all museums seemed to hold, replacing it with something warm and homely.

  “Milk and sugar?” she asked both Tara and Scotty with a smile, she waved a silver teaspoon back and forth in front of her.

  “Just milk for me,” Tara said.

  The office was reasonably sized, files and lever-arch folders of paperwork lined the walls on black Formica shelving that ran along the side and back wall. A small fan was clipped onto the edge of the furthest shelf, its power cord trailed down to a plug socket. The fan issued a monotonal creak-creak-creak as it swung back and forth, its small blades hardly stirring the warm air inside the room. On the side wall next to the led-lined window was a 2018-year planner. On it was marked the opening days and times of the museum, along with staff holidays all in varying colours of highlighter, just like you'd find in a thousand offices across the country. There were two desks, one of which was pushed against the far wall below the creaking fan, this was the one upon which Tara was half sat, and half perched. The desk was clean and in neat order, biro pens with bitten ends were stood on end in a blue plastic desk tidy, the kind that had three tubes of differing depths. A mandatory pile of coloured paperclips had been stuffed into the smallest tube, a heaped pile of reds, greens and light pinks. A red faux-leather 2018 diary lay by an HP Laptop, the screen was on and featured a picture of the museum from the air, Tara guessed it had been taken by drone. The desk at which June was making drinks was in a little more disorder, papers and letters for filing were untidily stacked in one corner and two now cold cups of tea or coffee were festering having been pushed to the back of the desk. They’d been forgotten long enough to start forming that white scum on the top.

  Scotty pushed the chair upon which he sat back and forth on its coasters, his Nike trainers moving from heel to toe against the industrial blue carpet floor tiles. Tara thought he looked a bit fidgety and his large frame looked too big for the chair, he looked to June and said, "Just as it comes out the pot for me, thanks."

  June nodded and made a slight grunting noise as if in agreement and doused Tara’s in a hefty splash of milk, then poured Scotty’s and placed both on card coasters that bore the museums MWM logo, just as the mugs did. She slowly settled herself into an identical chair to the one that Scotty was sat in, her wiry frame not filling the chair as he did. She collected up her brew and looked solemnly at them both, the way a person might look at a friend to whom they are about to break bad news. Finally, she sighed and said, “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “We need to hear it,” Scotty replied, now cradling his cup of strong black in his hands. He stopped the chair moving and now sat still and focused, the cup held just below his chin. “To be honest I am at the point where I don’t know what to believe.”

  June nodded slowly, her intelligent blue eyes still moving between them. “There are things,” she began in a low voice, “that once a person has heard and knows can’t be unheard, they can’t be unknown. They are with you forever and never far from reach in your mind.”

  “Warning understood,” Tara said seriously. “You got to the point where Jennett was imprisoned for life because she couldn’t pay her prison bill.” She was eager to hear what the old lady knew. Inside she felt an odd mixture of excitement and solid cold dread that lay on her like a stone slab.

  “First,” June said as she placed her mug onto her desk by the stacked post and papers, “I need to know what you know. Why were you asked to investigate the place? Leave nothing out, every detail my dear.”

  Tara looked at Scotty who raised his eyebrows in a way that she knew meant - you got this one, fill your boots! She adjusted her behind on the desk, rocked back on the heels of her Skechers and said, “On Friday just gone, Mike took a call from a lady named Sue Reed. She and her husband, Tom bought The Old Chapel from an estate agency called Winns a few years back now. They renovated it to a holiday home.” Tara grabbed the top of her phone, it was protruding out of the small pocket of her shorts. She crossed the room and crouched by June’s chair and began flicking slowly through a few of the internal shots she had saved to her gallery. “It’s been open for a few months now,” she said, talking as she perused through the images, “So far all but one guest has left before the end of their stay, and that’s not the worst of it. One killed their baby after staying there, drowned the poor little soul in the bath, then took her own life. Another just straight out gassed himself in his car.” Tara stood and went back to the far desk and rested on the edge of it. June nodded for her to continue. “Reports of paranormal activity in The Old Chapel have ranged from shadows that seem to move,” a chill ran through her as she recalled the dream, “to doors closing. Pretty normal stuff when it comes to reports of the paranormal, the kind of thing we have debunked in the past. One guest reported that furniture moved, and one child said that a dark man had been in her room,” Tara let out an uneasy chuckle. “The last two maybe not quite so easy to debunk, nor is the main and most commonly reported phenomenon.”

  "Go on my dear," June encouraged. "You are among likeminded here, nothing you say will be laughed at or treated with scepticism."

  Tara smiled weakly then continued, "The most common phenomenon reported, and I will add experienced by the owners too, is the crying. Sue told Mike and me that on an almost nightly basis the cries of infants can be heard echoing through the building. No specific time, they just come and go. Sue Reed was quite disturbed by it, she actually broke down in tears and wanted to know what could have happened to those babies to make them cry the way they do.”

  "Dear Lord," June said, then took a drink from her mug as if it contained something stronger that she needed to settle her nerves. For a moment they sat in pensive silence, the slow creaakkkk-creaakkkk-creaakkkk of the fan the only sound as it moved back and forth, but now it somehow seemed more drawn out than it had a few minutes ago.

  Tara sipped at her hot coffee then continued, “Tragedy seems pretty common when it comes to The Old Chapel, too. Obviously, Minister Deviss died there, and you have the infant murder and two suicides. But going further back, a guy named Bough owned it before the Reeds, he fell to his death working on the roof. One of Tom Reed's young labourers on the site quit then hung himself. Lastly the day it was sold the estate agent who done the deal was killed in a head-on not half a mile down the road.” Tara sighed, “’I’ve tried to research the place but it’s dead-end after dead-end. I do know that the building was never officially registered as a place of worship,” she paused, her throat was dry again and she wetted it with a swig of coffee. Tara wiped the back of her hand across her lips and continued. “When those Harrison kids went missing Sue asked us to head down and see if we could help. Before we got involved with the show, Mike was a PI and before that a cop.”

  "I know of Mr. Cross' backstory from watching the show," June said with a smile. “I’d imagine though, that there was not much you could do without treading on the toes of the police.”

  “Exactly,” Tara agreed. “Knowing what we did about the place we agreed to try and come at this from an angle the police would never dream of.” Tara paused and took on some more coffee. It was a good blend, maybe a five or a six on the strength chart and not a cheap one. “Did you know they still can’t figure out how the Harrison kids got out of that building?” she concluded.

  “I have been following the story with some interest,” June replied. “But no, that’s not been mentioned in detail, how interesting. Do you have any theories?”

  "No," Tara said with a shake of her head. “Neither do the police. Mike just happens to know the DI in charge, that's where he is now, out at The Old Chapel meeting with him." A look of concern flashed across June's face that didn't help the way Tara was feeling. "Anyway
," she continued, the windows were shut and secured, doors locked and deadbolted from the inside!” Tara paused again as June looked like she was about to speak, she didn't, instead she just nodded and accepted what Tara had told her as fact. “We can’t even get in to have a look around the place at the moment, it’s locked down. We came down here on the request of the Reeds but we were all starting to feel a bit useless, I mean what is there that we could possibly do? Today I got fed up with feeling like a spare part, so I thought I’d just poke around the records that are held online to see if there were any other missing persons cases that didn’t add up. You know, ones that might have been overlooked by the police.”

  “And you found a few didn’t you my dear?” June’s voice was laced with knowing.

  Tara nodded. June’s words had made her stomach turn, her throat felt impossibly dry again, she swallowed, and her throat issued an audible click. “All girls, all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen,” she began. “There were other cases of course, but the ones I refer to all fit a similar, what Mike would call modus operandi. They all disappeared without a trace, all from stable homes and from what I can see were steady stable kids. Not long after going missing some piece of evidence turns up that suggests they drowned." Tara paused reflectively, giving her words time to sink in and be processed. "And yet,” she continued, after a final swallow of coffee, “the disappearances are spread out over more than two hundred years, and that’s as far as I could go back. There is no specific pattern to them, the last one, for example, was in sixty-nine. Sometimes a few decades pass and there are no vanishings, some years there are a couple." Tara scratched at the back of her head, unintentionally highlighting her puzzlement. "There's just no real cycle or pattern to it."

  June nodded in understanding and said very matter-of-factly, “I’d imagine that if you could go further back, you’d find more, many more.”

  “The cases were all too far apart for the police to ever link together, but I had a hunch there was something there. It was Scotty who suggested that they could be linked to the occult.”

  “It seemed like a logical step to take,” Scotty cut in. “I mean if there is a link that’s the only rational way to explain why they would span such a period of time. But still, abuse that spans that length of time is unheard of."

  “That’s very astute of you both,” June said sounding genuinely impressed, “What does Mr. Cross think?”

  Scotty laughed briefly and said, “He thinks we are barking up the wrong tree.”

  “He is a good investigator from what I have seen,” June said in Mike’s defence. “However, he is a former police officer and PI, his decision making will still be influenced by his training, and that’s hard to work out of someone.” June drained her cup, she let it swing by the handle on her fore and middle finger as she looked from Scotty to Tara, taking them both in once again. “There are those who move in the same circles as myself,” she said, her voice now serious once again, “that think that the things I am going to tell you about that place, the Device family and the village of Trellen as a whole are no more than folk law, urban myth you might say.”

  “And what do you believe?” Scotty asked.

  “I believe beyond a doubt that the place is evil,” she replied instantly. “I believe that no good will come of you going there and investigating it. I’d go as far as saying if you do, you will put yourselves in mortal danger and I’d appeal to you to walk away now.”

  Scotty chuckled and leaned back in his chair, it creaked under his weight. “That’s quite some speech,” he said smiling. “Like the one in the horror film where the main character gets told whatever you do don’t go down in the basement, or out after midnight.”

  “I’m being deadly serious, Mr. Hampton. This is no horror film; I say it because I mean it. Because I believed it to be so.”

  Tara suffered another chill, her hackles rose from just how dead-pan serious June was, she believed her, too. Right then, and at that point she both wanted badly to investigate The Old Chapel, and she also wanted badly to play no further part in this, to do just what June had suggested, get in the car and drive away from it all, leave it well alone. However, she knew that to truly uncover the secrets of The Old Chapel they would need to go there, experience the horrors for themselves and live it. Somewhere outside a car horn sounded, then another honked louder in reply, it shook her from the momentary daydream. “I think it’s time you told us just what really happened to Jennett Device in Lancaster Gaol,” she said a little reluctantly.

  “Very well,” June agreed with a nod. “As I told you Jennett was pardoned for her alleged crimes but still ended up incarcerated as she could not pay the bill for the time she’d spent in prison. History, which wants us to believe that witchcraft and occultism is all nonsense, reports that Jennett likely died in prison, but there is no official report.” June smiled wryly and added, “History assumes, and we all accept. Just as most modern dumbed down people believe what the news tells them and takes it as the truth. The way we understand the truth of it is that one night a large black crow flew into her room. The crow was a physical embodiment of the demon Mamillian and he came to her after she conjured him forth from the Abyss.”

  "The Abyss?" Tara questioned, "As in Hell?"

  June chuckled, “That’s Christian dogma,” she said. “Although certain religious symbols of good can be empowered to work against that ancient evil, simply from the belief that is held in them.”

  “You said she summoned a demon, surely that’s Christian based belief?” Scotty asked.

  “No,” June said, with a shake of her head, it caused a few strands of her greying blonde hair to fall over her face, she swept them away with a hand. “Many religions believe in demons, things that have never lived in this reality, nor do they have any place here. It is one of the main constants that seems to be agreed upon between faiths.” She halted for a second to make sure that both Tara and Scotty were with her, neither spoke so she carried on. “Although you could call The Abyss Hell, it’s a fitting description for the place and without doubt the basis for it. The Abyss is much older than the idea of Hell as a place where sinful human souls go to burn. The Abyss is as old as our known universe, and as I said a place where the things dwell that have no business being here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tara said.

  “Witchcraft is about tapping into magical powers of this Earth, and conjuring things not of this realm that are not governed by the laws of the physical world, and yet can have influence here.” June adjusted herself on her seat. “Some spells heal, some curse and others conjure. Some are so old that we don’t know of their true origin. What I am saying, my dear, is now we understand that there are many layers to reality, more than we as mortals can comprehend. This thinking is backed up by the science, by the work and thinking of establishments like CERN, a union of the old ways and the new. I follow what they do there closely, and if you doubt me read up on it, I'm sure you will find it quite compelling. There have been many links to the occult and that establishment, and the dark arts side, too. These other realities are all around us now, like the layers of an onion, we just can’t see them. However, as was found in old times, certain ceremony and sacrifice could help bridge that gap, could allow things from realms not governed by our physical laws to interact here, even cross over to this reality. I can’t explain how or why they do. I guess in a way that no one understands we and they are all interlinked. I have long believed this universe to be a complicated place, it is not our job to question its workings, and the more questions you ask of the universe, the more questions it gives you in reply.”