by Stephen Laws
The drive back to Mark’s house was also made in silence. Black and blue shadows chased across their faces. It began to rain and liquid light and shade joined the chase as they moved on through the night. When they finally took the turning into the driveway, the wreck of Mark’s car was hidden in the larger shadow of the house, crouching against the porch. The moon sparkled on the garden pool and Chadderton could just see the rim of the ornamental fountain jutting from the dark water. A tyre track gouged its way across the garden into the shadow. Chadderton parked his car in the drive. As they both moved towards the house, the shattered door frame creaked slightly in the evening air. Chadderton turned to the wrecked car, leaned in and braced himself against the window frame to push. Mark came forward to help but Chadderton shook his head: ‘You’re in no fit state. See what you can do with the door.’ They were the first words that had passed between them in over two hours.
As Mark went into the house, Chadderton heaved against the car, using his anger and feeling the crunch of tires on broken glass as it moved. Minutes later, the car was in the driveway. Mark had found a piece of panelling in the cellar and had just finished nailing it to the shattered door when Chadderton entered. Without a word, they both mounted the stairs to the bedroom. Mark flicked the light switch. The smell of ozone was still strong. Together, they stared at the pile of ashes in the corner of the room; both knowing that it would not have vanished, that the pile would still be there. Evidence of the nightmare.
‘Why didn’t the room catch fire?’ asked Chadderton quietly, almost to himself. ‘Why couldn’t we move?’
Mark tried to say: I don’t know. Why did any of it happen? But the words would not come.
‘It’s time to talk,’ said Chadderton.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened between you and Aynsley?’
‘Not here. Downstairs.’
In the living room, everything seemed more real. There were no shattered doorways, no broken glass, no pile of ashes that had once been a human being. Mark began to speak as soon as he had put on the gas fire and sat heavily on the sofa. He explained what had happened at the surgery: the dream, the hypnosis, Aynsley’s disappearance.
‘The tape? What the hell happened with the tape?’ asked Chadderton.
‘Aynsley told us,’ Mark replied. ‘Something evil attacked me on that train. It got into my mind and hid there like a parasite, feeding on my fear. When Aynsley unlocked that secret and made me remember, it came out of me and invaded his mind.’
Chadderton was looking down as he listened, clenching and unclenching his hands.
‘The tape was playing while all this happened,’ Mark continued, ‘so the evil was taped as well. It had possessed Aynsley but we got rid of it somehow when we came back for Helen and Joanne. God help us, I summoned it up again by playing the tape. That’s how it got into our minds.’
‘Then it’s still in our minds, hiding in there as it did with you.’
‘No . . . Something happened. Helen was involved somehow. Something she was able to do got it out of our minds altogether and chased it back to where it came from. Listen, Chadderton – when you saved me from throwing myself in front of that train, the evil was in me then. But it was . . .’ Mark hunted for a different phrase to express himself from the one that immediately sprang to mind, but could not find it. ‘. . . It was cast out of me by your actions. It was temporarily beaten. It had to get away, feed and grow strong enough to try again. And when that happened I could feel that something had also happened inside my mind. It’s been in there, Chadderton,’ Mark continued, rapping on his forehead with his knuckles, ‘and because it’s been in there, it has inadvertently opened something up. I don’t know what it is but it’s like a new awareness. I can understand how this thing behaves without knowing exactly what it is yet. Aynsley tried to help me. But his mind was really too far gone. I know that it’s a force . . . a very old . . . very evil force. It’s probably been “alive”, if you can call it that, since the beginning of creation. Aynsley called it Azimuth. It feeds on fear, Chadderton. It feeds on our greatest fears and under the right circumstances it can conjure them up. Somehow, it lives and travels on the King’s Cross train. And it’s . . . growing . . . towards something.’
‘I don’t understand. You say that the Evil’s on the line – then it’s in you, it’s in Aynsley and it’s on the tape at the same time.’
‘It exists on the line. You heard Aynsley. It’s somehow trapped on the line and it’s been travelling there for years. It left a trace of itself in me, a trace in Aynsley, a trace on the tape. It has put a trace of itself into everyone who’s ever travelled on the line and committed one of those atrocities afterwards. Can’t you see it? Someone gets on a train at King’s Cross. The Evil is also somehow on that train, on that line. It chooses him as its . . . its . . . food. It works its way into the person’s mind, feeding on his everyday fears and doubts. But it has to make those fears greater, has to build them up so that it can feed well. It continues to feed, and the fear grows stronger and stronger. Hours later, the person gets off the train at his station in a dangerously psychotic condition. And by that time, a trace of the Evil is able to leave the train with him. But only for a short time, because the Evil is still tied to the line . . . and while the sphere of influence exists in the mind of its victim, the person causes more fear, death and horror. And the Evil can feast again before it’s forced to withdraw its trace and return to the railway line.’
‘You say “the line”. There isn’t a specific carriage or train, then?’
‘No. It’s the line itself.’
‘All right. So the line is . . . possessed or something. There’s something very old – ancient – and evil. It’s not human and it feeds on people’s fear like some kind of vampire. It can conjure up a person’s worst fear in that person’s own mind. Just like it did to us, earlier.’
‘Right. When Aynsley touched my hand, he was somehow able to convey all of this to me before he burned. Somehow, his act has heightened my own awareness and instinct about Azimuth.’
‘But how the hell did it get on the line in the first place? The King’s Cross to Edinburgh line was operative from the 1850s. That’s over one hundred and thirty years ago. How did it get on the line? Why is it trapped there? And if it’s as old as you say it is, where did this thing exist prior to that? Why can it only exist on that one stretch of railway line – why can’t it spread and travel to the other railway networks?’
‘I don’t know yet. Something’s blocking me off. I only have instincts in general about it. My mind’s still closed on certain things. I still don’t know what happened to me on the train; still don’t know what threw me off. Aynsley may have found out, but he wasn’t able to pass it on to me.’
‘What did you mean about standing stones?’
‘What?’
‘When you broke contact with Aynsley – or whatever it was you were doing – you said, “Standing stones”.’
‘Did I? God . . . yes. Aynsley told me something – but nothing specific enough to help.’
‘I don’t think we can ignore their significance in your dreams either, Davies.’
Mark remembered fleeing down the Ghost Train track with Robbie and seeing the standing stones on either side of the line like silent gravestones. He opened his mouth to tell Chadderton about that last deadly fantasy, but then noticed how the other’s gaze was suddenly being directed towards the rows of books above Mark’s stereo unit.
‘You’ve got quite a few volumes up there.’
‘Yes. I’ve done a lot of reading since the accident. That’s all I’ve been really capable of.’
‘Bet you’ve got a book up there on prehistoric remains,’ said Chadderton.
Mark felt his heart lurch for a reason he could not explain. ‘Yes . . .’ he said slowly, ‘there’s a book on them there somewhere. I had it before the acci
dent . . .’ Before the accident . . . now why did I say that? he thought.
‘Ever looked at it recently? Ever tried to tie up some of those dreams that you were telling me about? See if any of the places you dreamed about really exist?’
Mark suddenly felt a small knot of fear in his stomach, the impulse to tell Chadderton that he was being a fool. The standing stone dreams were all part of the fantasy that the Evil had conjured up in his head. There was no relevance. And then he knew he was wrong. The standing stones, the burial chambers and the carved stones were relevant. He had always thought so; had been thoroughly convinced in his last nightmare that they were somehow very important. It was the fear of discovering the Evil’s secret that prevented him from recognising the fact; the fear of what the consequences of the discovery would bring.
‘I’ve never looked in the book. It would have been like giving my nightmares some kind of credence, substantiating all the fears that I was trying to hide. I think you’d better get the book now, Chadderton.’ Mark was suddenly beginning to feel a little sick. ‘It’s on the third shelf.’
Chadderton crossed to the shelves, rummaged around and finally found the volume he was after. Seconds later, he had the book spread open on the coffee table in front of Mark.
‘Before we start,’ said Chadderton, and Mark could see that his hands were shaking badly as he turned the pages, ‘I’ve got to tell you that I can’t make myself believe everything you’ve told me. I just can’t do it. But there’s something about what’s happened to us, something about what you’ve told me, that I can’t ignore. I’ve seen things that I can never explain and I don’t want to believe them. But I’ve seen them and I know I’m not mad – so I know I’ve got to believe them. But something inside me is fighting it all the way. I’m following the logic of what you’ve said and of what Aynsley was babbling before he . . .’ Chadderton suddenly could not find the words to describe what had happened. ‘I think I might know the relevance of these things. But before I say any more, I want you to go through this book with me and tell me every time you think you recognise any of the sites. Okay?’
He turned to the first page. Instantly, Mark saw a familiar grouping of ancient, weatherbeaten stones from a familiar nightmare.
Meanwhile, two miles outside Bamburgh, in an isolated cottage, the Catalysts were in commune with their Master.
An hour later, Mark finally sat back from the three-inch thick volume. The spasm of fear which had first curled in his stomach at Chadderton’s mention of standing stones had stayed with him as he crouched over the book. Now that he was sitting back, the weariness of the last two days was settling on him like a dark mantle. His shirt was soaked in sweat, clinging to his back.
Chadderton had pulled down an RAC road-map from the bookshelf and spread out a map of England on the coffee table beside the book. And every time Mark had recognised a grouping of stones or an ancient burial mound from one of his nightmares, Chadderton marked its position on the map with a large cross. Chadderton had scribbled down the name of each site as Mark recognised it and, with each identification, the memory of the nightmares had flooded back to Mark with a startling intensity. The map was covered in crosses.
Chadderton gazed at the map for a long time. He was clenching and unclenching his fingers again. Mark closed his eyes, fighting back the weariness, afraid to sleep in case his nightmares should return, despite his new-found inner conviction that when the . . . thing . . . had left his mind, so had his bad dreams. He closed his eyes, feeling the strain pounding on the nerves behind them, and heard Chadderton scribbling something. When he looked over to him, the other man was sitting back in his chair, taking the volume with him and pulling the map roughly across the arm of the chair.
‘What are you thinking . . . ?’ began Mark, but Chadderton silenced him with an impatient gesture. Mark’s eyes were closing again. Despite himself, sleep was going to win. His body needed to recover. The last thing he saw before unconsciousness overtook him was Chadderton hunched over his book, his eyes far away; lost in the depths of some undeniable, inescapable conclusion.
Mark’s sleep was deep and dreamless.
Eighteen
When Mark awoke, sunlight was streaming in through the curtains. His sleep had been untroubled and somehow ‘cleaner’ than he could remember since the accident and his final drifting back from coma into the land of the living. For the first time for months, he felt refreshed. There had been no purple mist, no scenes of horror, no desolate moors and jutting crags of ancient stone.
Chadderton was still in the armchair opposite Mark. He was asleep, the RAC map spread across the chair like some giant party streamer. His stubble was beginning to thicken into a beard. The thick, ruffled hair was more dishevelled than ever. It seemed to Mark that he had known the man for a long, long time – not merely twenty-four hours. He moved, sat upright and groaned at the stiffness in his limbs; the familiar nagging pain of a body that had once been so badly broken and had so miraculously recovered. He wondered if his ‘miraculous’ recovery had been due in some way to the malignant parasite which had been hiding in his mind, realising that perhaps he would never really know. Chadderton was in a deep slumber and Mark supposed that he would stay that way for some time. The book on prehistoric sites was open on the coffee table but, even upside down, he could see that Chadderton had been scribbling in it, underlining passages. A single sheet of paper from the bureau lay across the pages. Mark leaned across and picked it up. The names of the sites which he had identified were scrawled on it, some of them with a scribbled page number, obviously related to the book. Mark read the list, pulled the book round to face him and turned to the page numbers which Chadderton had indicated:
1The Merry Maidens (Boleigh). It is claimed that the stones are still charged with enough ‘ancient power’ to give some people a shock when they lean against them. The stone crosses erected nearby may have been put there to negate the pagan influence of the site.
Mark felt a chill creeping round the nape of his neck. With startling clarity, he saw a network of living, pulsing veins in a slab of cold rock; saw himself in a dream standing in a stone circle while robed figures dragged a young girl to the sacrificial altar, her lips sewn cruelly together. He tried to shrug off the feeling and, almost submitting to his previous temptation to resist finding out the the truth, found himself about to put the book down. Angrily, he forced himself to look back at Chadderton’s scribbled list.
2 Chysauster. An Iron Age village. Thought to have been a prehistoric ‘university’. Possibly inhabited by astronomers and geomancers. Considered by some that the underground chamber was possibly a storage chamber for some form of accumulated cosmic energy.
3 Boscawen-Un Stone Circle. Regarded by many as the most important megalithic power centre in Cornwall. The stones lie between Catchall and St Buryans in a perfectly unbroken circle. There is a multiplicity of astronomical orientations.
4 The Fogou (Carn Euny – near Sancreed). Another Iron Age village with a semi-underground structure set into a trench . . . a deep trench, leading into a round chamber used for many different purposes. Although its original function is still a mystery, it remains one of the most remarkable prehistoric monuments in the country.
Mark knew the purpose of the trench and the round chamber; not wanting to read further, he continued anyway.
5Bowerman’s Nose.
6The Nine Maidens.
7The Hell Stone. A chambered long barrow on the crown of a hill near Portesham. It was a druid site and a place of divination where blood sacrifices were made.
8Stonehenge. Britain’s most famous circle of standing stones. It lies on an east-west ley line with Glastonbury Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, running all the way into the Welsh mountains with numerous earthworks marking its route.
9Stanton Drew.
10Silhury Hill.
11West Kennet Long
Barrow.
12The Rollright Stones. Seventy-six stones situated between Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. Legend tells of a conquering king and his army who were turned to stone by a witch on the hill overlooking Long Compton. At certain times, the stones are said to go down the hill at midnight to drink from the spring and kill anyone they may meet in their path. Some say that on one night each year, the king and his warriors congregate at a feast under the hill to celebrate the day when they will resume their flesh and blood roles and march again to conquer England. Detailed dowsing of the stones has found that they are transmitting energy between themselves; also, that the flow has two exit points and traverses the countryside above ground in straight lines – called ‘overgrounds’ . . . The site is unguarded and there have been reports that black magic rites are believed to be performed there. In 1975, police were called in on Midsummer’s Eve to a disturbance on the site and found the body of a puppy, believed to have been used as a sacrifice . . . Diameter of the stone circle is thirty-five yards – the same as Stonehenge.
13Heydon Ditch. Associated with legends of spectres, this is an ancient earthwork rampart about five feet high which runs for several miles. Archaeologists’ excavations have revealed burial pits containing decapitated skeletons.
14Royston Caves. A bell-shaped chamber hewn through chalky soil which was discovered by workmen enlarging the crossroads over two hundred and fifty years ago. Only fragments of bone and cloth have been found so far. Although more recent mystical carvings were found inside, it is believed by some that the cave dates back to prehistoric times and was used for magical underground ceremonies.
15Arbor Low. A stone circle with double-entrance enclosure. Five miles south of Bakewell. The site is an earth circle with a large cairn built over the bank to the south. Inside this is a ring of stones, now completely flattened.