The Chapel

by S. T. Boston

  “Protocol,” he said absently. “They have nothing, not a clue, they’ll get a shit time of it for twenty-four hours, thirty-six at most. I can’t see them being able to get a warrant to hold them for any longer without any hard evidence. Do you have anything that I can take to Samuels? ‘Cos if not in about twenty minutes if you look out front, you’ll see those poor sods getting taken in.”

  Tara chuckled softly, "Mike, I'm not sure I can accept it all, there is no way this can be taken to the police. If they don't nick you for wasting their time you might get taken to the local nuthouse. Look, you were right to be sceptical about what I found, don’t beat yourself up about it. But you need to hear what I have to say. If what we have found out today is right, this thing goes deeper and is far worse than you could ever imagine. How long will you be?”

  “I’m heading to Plymouth Hospital,” he replied. He realised that his heart was hammering like a drum in his chest and his hands felt clammy on the leather of the steering wheel.

  “Mike, you need to get back here, what the fuck is in Plymouth?”

  “A possible lead, last night one of the officers on point went into that building and almost died. I want to know what it is was that happened to her and what she saw. Samuels all but told us to leave it alone, thinks it’s a waste of time us being here so I know if something odd happened to her he will just brush it off, he won’t come to me with it. Whatever happened I need to hear it from her.”

  “Okay, Mike. What I need to tell you could wait ‘til you’re back, but I think you need to hear it now, so you can start processing it. I’m not sure I’ve fully digested it yet if I’m honest, or if I can bring myself to fully believe it, but when you look at the whole picture, from the haunting to the missing kids it all fits, like some really fucked up jigsaw puzzle.”

  Chapter 31

  Mike pulled his Jeep into the car park at Derriford Hospital at twenty to nine that evening. He activated the electronic parking brake, killed the ignition and sat for a few moments, just enjoying not driving, enjoying not doing anything for that matter. He needed to get his shit together before he took another step into the rabbit hole that seemed to be swallowing him. He certainly needed to get his head straight before he saw Shelly Ardell, before he spoke to someone who had actually fallen foul of the tragedy that seemed to follow that place.

  Tara’s call had lasted almost the entire thirty-five-minute drive, ending only as he’d pulled in off Derriford Road and onto the hospital’s grounds. By the time she'd finished, he felt an odd mixture of both numbness and disbelief. Witches, warlocks and other dimensional beings, things of make-believe, of folk law, things that had no basis or place in rational thought had been one of the main themes. And yet as hard as it was to swallow, what she’d said did fit. The vanishings of the young women and teen girls, likely pure and formally innocent from sins of the flesh and taken for the purpose of abuse and the breeding of children who were only ever destined to be used in sacrifice. Such things were certainly fitting of some of the more extreme reports of SRA, (Satanic Ritual Abuse). Yet this wasn’t SRA, not in the strict sense of the term. It was something darker than hell, something more ancient. If what Tara had told him was true this was worse, supposedly carried out to aid bridge the gap between this world and another place, a place of unimaginable chaos and evil, The Abyss.

  The idea seemed ludicrous, maybe the loonies involved in the sect, or whatever the hell it was, just believed that? Hell, there were people out there who genuinely thought they were vampires, actually drank blood and avoided sunlight. Maybe those involved with the Device Church had been telling themselves they were more than human for so long they believed it, like some fucked-up placebo fed down through the generations of their members, told so often they believed it.

  His brain could both deal with and accept that the cult was real, even that for the last two centuries it had managed to somehow operate under the radar of the authorities. In the past, certainly even as recently as the vanishing of Lindie Parker, the police had not been so ‘on the ball’ so to speak. Intelligence sharing and information recording then was not a patch on what it was now. But to believe that it involved other dimensional beings and real witches was a step too far. He could even believe that if The Old Chapel had been used as a place to practice such dark arts, and if countless infants had been slain in its walls and acts of unspeakable violence and evil indulged then maybe it was truly haunted, maybe that evil had metastasized into something malevolent that now dwelt there. A cancer that although invisible, had eaten itself into the very core of the building.

  He remembered speaking to Mr. Ryan, the owner of Leap Castle, about the Elemental that supposedly haunted the place. One theory was that this insidious spirit was not that of a single person, it was an entity made up from all the evil and bloodshed that stained the history of that Irish castle, which was now a family home, albeit a very weird one. Maybe, just maybe what caused the occurrences at The Old Chapel was born from the same.

  He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, he was getting ahead of himself. None of them had even set foot in the place yet, all they had was the word of others, accounts and stories with, by the looks of it, a fair bit of legend thrown in. Somewhere, buried in all of that behind the superstition and hearsay, was the truth.

  He accepted now that the disappearances were linked, and that they, and not the police were on the right track, and if what the lady from the museum had told Tara was half right, they had until Friday to work around the police and find those kids. This started out as a simple attend, explain and debunk job, Mike thought to himself ruefully. He hadn’t signed up for this shit, although now walking away was not an option.

  Mike took a deep, steadying breath and exhaled through clenched teeth then opened the door and stepped out into the humid evening air.

  Shelly Ardel was on the Fal Ward in the hospital’s Neurology Department. The hospital seemed like a carbon copy of many others across the country, built in the early eighties during times of more prosperity, times where austerity and cutbacks were still in the distant future.

  The soles of Mike’s timberland boots squeaked their way along the vinyl floor as the smell of disinfectant assaulted his nostrils. Occasionally the clean smell gave way to something bad, shit from an incontinent patient, or vomit, it was hard to judge. Whiteboards hung on magnolia painted walls outside of each ward, patients’ names were scribbled on those boards in black dry-wipe marker next to bed numbers. Mike scanned the names on each board, drew a few blanks and then found her in a private room between two general population wards. Mike knocked on the door and pushed it open a crack. PC Ardell was laid in the bed in a partially upright position, her head was bandaged from the brow up and over the skull. The bandage ran down to the nape of her neck giving the whole thing the appearance of some kind of helmet. Below the bandage her neck was held tightly in a frontal position by a very uncomfortable looking brace. An oxygen feed went in via her nose, a small, clear tube poked into each nostril. By her bedside stood the usual array of machines that measured everything from her brain function to her blood oxygen levels, they beeped and bonged in that usual symphony of hospital noise. In a large visitor chair by her bedside sat a man who Mike figured was in his late thirties. He had soft, kind looking features and a day’s light stubble showed on his face. His dark blonde hair was uncombed, and it looked to Mike as if he’d not left her bedside since she’d been brought in. In his lap, a small girl or three or four with angelic blonde hair slept in a bunny onesie. He stroked at her hair with one hand, over and over, the action seemingly automatic. The other held the hand of PC Ardell, his thumb stroked at the back of her hand, working to the same rhythm as the one that stroked his daughter’s hair.

  “They say she might never walk again,” he said in a hollow voice without even looking at Mike. “She’s woken up, I guess I should be thankful for that,” he smiled an empty smile and finally turned his face toward Mike who’d now slipped completely into the
room and let the door swing silently shut behind him. Mike looked into the man’s brown eyes, they were rimmed with a redness born from stress and tears, a look common in places of misery and pain such as this.

  Mike had not even had the chance to sit by Claire's bedside or that of his infant daughter, both had been dead before the emergency services even got there, the closest he'd had to standing by their bedside was the metal gurney in the mortuary when he'd had to ID them both. He recalled momentarily, and not without a pang of pain, how the tiny body of his daughter had been no more than a small lump in the sheet that covered her. When the sheet had been pulled back he’d had to look upon a face that had been asleep and as angelic as the child who slept now in her father’s lap the last time he saw it, and yet in death, had been smashed to a pulp on one side. The investigators said that she’d been flung clear of the pushchair by the impact of the car and forced headfirst into the central brick support that split the Co-op window into two panes of glass. He cast aside the image, other people’s pain and suffering always brought such thoughts out of that drawer in his mind, the one he never wanted to open but nonetheless opened regularly.

  “Are you – job?” the man asked, turning his face away from Mike and looking back to the woman in the bed who was obviously his wife.

  Mike had formed a plan in his mind, a plan where a few lies would get him the information he needed, but here, now - and seeing the pain in PC Ardell's husband he couldn't do it. "No," he said. "I was, a few years ago now but I left it all behind."

  The man nodded slowly, “You read about this stuff in the papers or see it on the news. You know, PC in hit and run, PC stabbed or attacked. It’s always someone else, though. You know that it could be you, or someone you know every time you go to work, but you kinda know it probably won’t be.”

  Mike placed a hand on the guy's shoulder, pulled the second chair around. This one was made of nasty looking orange plastic, the kind found in a school exam hall, and not as comfy as the large green vinyl one in which the man sat. It creaked a little under Mike’s weight as he lowered himself onto the hard plastic. “Did you work together, too?” he asked.

  “Not now, but yeah it’s how we met,” the man’s face creased in slight confusion as the child stirred and murmured softly in her sleep, her lips parted and spoke something silently, then she settled again. "Did you work with Shelly?" he asked. "You know, when you were still in."

  Mike shook his head, “No, I was Sussex,” he answered. PC Ardell’s eyes flickered and opened slowly, she didn’t move her neck, she likely couldn’t. The man took his hand from the child and took a pink sponge on a stick from a white plastic cup on the bedside table and wetted her lips with it.

  “J-ohn,” she croaked. “More, w-ater – please.” He obliged and dipped the pink sponge lolly back into the water and held it back to her lips, this time she took the whole thing into her mouth before he withdrew it and placed it back into the cup.

  “I’ll cut straight to the point,” Mike said, these people didn’t need his pre-planned bullshit, he needed to be straight with them. “I’m trying to find out why your wife went into the building she was guarding and what caused her to have the accident.”

  A cloud seemed to fall over John’s face, “Is this some kind of internal investigation?” he spat. “Don’t you think it could wait?”

  Mike held his palm up, “Hold up, John – can I call you John?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” John replied.

  "I'm not with the police anymore in any capacity. You could say I'm, well – freelance. In all honesty, private and paranormal investigation is my new forte." John Ardell's face switched from anger back to confusion. Mike glanced quickly at Shelly, whose head was fixed staring straight ahead, yet in her eyes, he saw a hint of something, some kind of recognition.

  "Before this business with the missing kids I was asked by the owner to look at the place, there have been some, well let's just say odd happenings there. Also, sadly many tragic accidents linked to it."

  “You have to be kidding –“ John Ardell began, his voice brimming with fury. The child stirred again in his lap, reacting to her father’s voice.

  “E-evi-l,” Shelly croaked from her dry, cracked lips, cutting him off. “Th-a-t, pl-a-ce. E-vil,” she managed as a tear broke free of her right eye and ran down her cheek.

  “Shhhh,” John Ardell encouraged. “You need to rest Shelly.”

  “Mr. Ardell, John – I’m sorry, really I am, but I just need a few minutes of your wife’s time.”

  “I think you’ve done –,” John Ardell began, but once again he was cut short by his wife’s croaky voice.

  "J-ohn – no, it's fi-fine. Mo-re wat-er, pl-ease," her words were coming a little more freely now as if the act of speech was lubricating the cogs in her throat. John lifted the small, pink lolly sponge clear of the cup, it dripped water across the bed before he popped it in her mouth. He repeated the process twice more before Shelly said in a clearer voice, "Enough – t-thanks."

  Mike leaned forward, “Can you remember why you went in, Shelly?” he asked.

  “A l-light,” she began. “I t-thought some-one w-was inside.”

  “Good,” Mike encouraged. “Really good. Where was the light, Shelly?”

  “In t-the wind-ow,” she said in her partly broken voice. “I-it look-ed like a t-torch,” another tear ran down her cheek and John leaned over and wiped it with a blue tissue.

  “And when you went in?”

  “The cry-ing.”

  “You heard crying, Shelly – is that right?”

  “It’s a-all a b-bit foggy,” she said, her face creased with pain, either pain from an injury or pain from the memory, Mike couldn’t tell which. “S-sounded l-like a b-baby.” More tears escaped her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

  “I think that’s enough,” John Ardell cut in. “Just what is it you’re getting at here?”

  “A d-ark man,” his wife said, ignoring her husband’s plea. “So, darrrkkk,” Shelly’s eyes widened until they looked like saucers, her paralysed body remained motionless, but her face looked terrified.

  “See what you’ve done?” John Ardell growled, and his face didn’t look so soft and kind now, a storm was brewing on it. He leaned forward over his sleeping daughter and placed his hand on Shelly’s bandaged forehead and began to shush her.

  “I don’t want to go into that darkness,” she said, her voice now perfectly clear, her words coming fast. “Please don’t make me, you can’t make me!”

  “I think you best – “

  Mike held a hand up, cutting John off, “No one is making you,” Mike said in a reassuring voice. “You’re safe now.

  A guttural chuckle raked its way through PC Ardell’s ruined body and for a second it seemed to Mike as if it rattled every one of her broken bones. Her wide eyes were on Mike now, eyes that no longer seemed to belong to the same woman, eyes that had succumbed to a darkness. A reptilian smile formed on her cracked lips, they peeled back to reveal her teeth and gums before she said in a raspy voice, “You’ll die if you go in there, Mikey. You – Scotty and your whore. I’ve got so many beautiful things to show you, ALL OF YOU!”

  Chapter 32

  The steady creak of the door hinge broke the deep silence and stirred Ellie from a shallow and fitful slumber. She rolled painfully onto her side, her little-used joints and muscles shouted out in protest at the movement and she groaned in discomfort. As the orange light yawned itself into the room, she turned her face away. It was likely dim yet after her prolonged period in the choking darkness it burned at her retinas as fiercely as if she’d stared directly at the midday sun.

  For the first time, she began to make out the size and shape of the room in which she was held. To call it a room was being generous, it was more like a cell. Small, cramped and square. No more than fifteen feet from one side to the next and totally devoid of furniture, save for the old grubby mattress on which she lay. Damp stone walls reached from the floor to a ceiling
decked with roughly cut beams of wood. There were no windows, but that much she had already figured out for herself. The room did have two wall-hung oil lamps, yet they were unlit and looked not to have been used for many years. When it came to matters of going to the loo she’d been reduced to crawling on her hands and knees in the darkness, blindly feeling her way until she reached the furthest wall from her bed, where she'd been forced to suffer the embarrassment of defecating on the floor. At least it was dark, and no one could see, a small mercy but one she was glad of, nonetheless. Last time she’d needed to pee her own hands had found the dampness of her urine that had soaked into a hard-packed dirt floor. Hour by hour the smell of the place had begun to work its way into her skin, her own stench gagging the very air she had to breathe.

  In the dimness of that orange light Ellie propped her aching body up and leaning her back against the uneven stone wall she took a steadying breath, trying to quell the fear of what was about to happen. She felt the cold and uneven surface of the stone through the fabric of her t-shirt and a shiver ran through her. Still squinting and blinking, but her vision clearing with every second, she looked down at her hands. They were filth covered from her toilet trips across the floor, dirt made damp from having to feel her way through her own urine was now caked under her nails. She’d never felt so unclean in her life and she longed for a hot shower, somewhere free of this hell where she could scrub her skin until it was out of her, if that was possible.

  She still wore her Ramones tee and the leggings she’d had on when she’d gone to bed, only now the clothes were creased and smeared with the same filth that was on her hands, her feet were bare and soiled with dirt and everything about her felt unclean.

  “I’d imagine you have some questions?” a voice asked. The tall silhouette of a man filled the light that shone through the open door and Ellie thought that voice sounded familiar. The man stepped into the room and she instantly knew why she recognised it. It was Seth Horner, husband to the lovely Lucinda Horner who’d welcomed them to The Old Chapel, who’s barbeque she’d been at and who she’d chatted and joked with, drank expensive champagne with and had even grown to like. “Have some water,” he said, offering one of two bottles toward her. Ellie reached for it, snatched it from his hand, her thirst suddenly remembered. She had no real recollection of when she’d last drank and she unscrewed the cap feverishly then cast it aside onto the dirt floor before lifting the bottle to her lips and drinking deeply. The plastic bottle crackled and caved in as she emptied it in a few hungry gulps. A million questions raced through her head, but only one came to her lips as she swallowed the last of the cool water and dropped the now empty bottle to her lap. “Henry, where’s my brother?”