Authors: David Annandale
Meacham had. Just. A drop of black liquid falling up toward the roof of the cave. She aimed her own light up, saw the reflected shine of dampness above. Her throat felt painfully dry.
Sturghill was looking up, too. “Why isn’t the lake defying gravity?” she asked.
“Because it doesn’t have to,” Pertwee answered. “Sometimes you stand, sometimes you sit, sometimes you lie down. Nothing says you have to do one or the other.”
“So it’s conscious,” Sturghill said. She was shielding her eyes, as if the droplets might come back down and target her. “Is it a ghost?”
“No. It’s more like the residue of the ghost. It isn’t conscious. It’s a bridge between worlds. It’s what gives the ghost material form.”
Like an empty bag of skin,
Meacham thought. Just waiting for the bones and the will to fill it up and move it around.
Sturghill was looking back in the direction of the lake. “Why is there so much of it? Are there many ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” Pertwee admitted.
“Things build up,” Gray said simply and moved on.
Meacham thought about the lake at their back as she followed. They were putting the reservoir of hate and pain between them and the outside world. The strategy sucked. The strategy didn’t matter.
Think hotel. Think Corderman.
If it wanted them, it would come to them. Location was irrelevant.
She felt better. She felt worse.
They descended. The stone throat twisted, happy to swallow them again. It took them along its ride to the destination. They reached the cave with the tomb. Meacham winced in anticipation as they entered. She was half-braced for the return of Crawford’s mutilation. There was nothing. Only the steady drip from the slab in the centre of the space. They gathered around the tomb, shone lights on it, watched the drops form and fall up. The sound of the dripping was time’s slow metronome.
“Build-up,” Gray said. “Think about it. One drop of water with one grain of mineral. Given enough time, you get stalactites.”
“No,” Sturghill said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“We aren’t below the lake. If this stuff has been dripping up out of this sarcophagus, or whatever the hell it is, for all this time, why isn’t there a huge pool of ectoplasm above our heads? Why is the big deposit fifty metres to the side?”
Gray looked up, looked down, looked thoughtful. He didn’t answer. He crouched over the tomb, ran a finger along the seal, careful not to touch any of the liquid.
“I don’t care where this shit comes from,” Meacham said. “I just want it gone. I don’t suppose it’s flammable? No? Well, worth the thought.” She turned to Hudson and Pertwee. “Okay, you two. This is your show.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Pertwee objected.
“I’m not a priest,” Hudson said, just as outraged.
“You’re close enough,” Meacham told him. “How does it work, then?” she asked Pertwee.
“We find the source of the problem, and we resolve the issue.”
“And if the issue is a few hundred years old?”
“Usually, if the spirit realizes things are long in the past, that’s enough, and it leaves.”
“Usually.” Meacham didn’t have to put much sarcasm into the word. She spread her arms, reminding Pertwee of where they were and what had already happened.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” Pertwee said
“No, you didn’t,” Meacham admitted. She looked at Hudson. “Any ideas on your side?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure what to suggest. The original 1649 edition of the Book of Common Prayer had a form of exorcism as part of the ceremony of baptism, but —”
“Do you know it?” Meacham cut him off.
“More or less.”
“Good enough for government work. What do you need to do this?”
“Nothing. Just my faith.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. “And how is that holding up?” she asked quietly.
“I’m not sure I’m up to the test.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Your faith and Anna’s are all we have,” she told him.
“What about you and Kristine?”
“We were the rationalists, and we were wrong. We may admit that, but we don’t have anything to fall back on. You do. After all, you’re seeing proof that life, or something like it, keeps going.” Over Hudson’s shoulder, she saw Gray pause in his examination of the tomb and glance her way. She couldn’t read his expression. “You or Anna must be right. Maybe you both are.” Another look from Gray. His lips twitched, the movement so small it could have meant anything.
Hudson nodded. He turned around, and Meacham watched him face his friend. “What do you think, Richard?”
“I’m here for the truth. Do your thing.” He moved away from the tomb and presented it to Hudson. Step right up.
Hudson approached the tomb. He knelt before it. He took his time and looked for strength. The others had backed off and were standing with their backs against the cave wall. He was aware of their eyes on him; he had locked gazes with each before he turned to the rock. Three of the looks were hopeful. Meacham’s was also encouraging. The look that worried him was Gray’s. It was noncommittal. It was unconcerned. But it was also interested and curious. He wanted to believe the man he had known for decades was still there. He wanted to believe there was still something more there than the many-coloured robe of anger. He wanted to believe. Instead, he doubted.
He tried to compartmentalize his doubts. They were about Gray. They weren’t about God. Meacham was right: everything that had happened was proof of the spiritual. The precise dogma might be off, but that was all. He had said he didn’t think he was up to the test. His wording was a giveaway he now clung to, a test. If he thought he was being tested, then his faith and belief went deeper than he had been crediting. He brought his hands together.
I’m here for You, Lord, he thought. Please be here for me.
He began to speak. The words came easily. He remembered them because he had been struck by them. He had run across the prayer for deliverance while doing research during that period of his life when it had seemed he would take official orders, that he wasn’t going to be too much of a rebel for the entrenched establishment of the Church of England. He could see why the passage had been removed from subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer. They were too harsh for a baptism. There was too great a presumption of evil. Or so he had thought then. Now, the words seemed timid. He spoke them slowly, feeling the meaning of each syllable, gathering strength from that meaning.
“I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from ...” He hesitated. The next words were “these infants, whom our Lord Jesus Christ hath vouchsafed to call to His holy Baptism, to be made members of His body, and of His holy congregation.” They hardly applied in this instance.
Make the substitution meaningful,
he told himself. Maintain the ritual’s power. He regrouped. “Depart from this world,” he said, “which our Lord Jesus Christ hath vouchsafed to call to His holy Baptism. Therefore, thou cursed spirit, remember thy sentence, remember thy judgment, remember the day to be at hand, wherein thou shalt burn in fire everlasting, prepared for thee and thy Angels.” The prayer became momentum. He felt himself drawn into the strength of the words, of the iron faith they embodied. His old convictions and joys resurrected themselves. He
knew
he was not alone. “And presume not hereafter to exercise any tyranny toward this world, which Christ hath bought with his precious blood, and by this his holy Baptism calleth.”
He opened his eyes. At first he thought that nothing had changed. Then he noticed that the droplets of ectoplasm emerging from the seam of the tomb were vibrating. “Go,” he said. “You don’t belong here. Your time is done. Go.” He repeated the rite, revelling in its force. He kept his eyes open this time, watching the vibration, willing it to feel what he knew to be the truth. He thought he saw a recoil. Then he knew he did. A bit of black ectoplasm withdrew inside the seam of the stone lid. “Go!” he shouted. “GO!”
His ears popped as if the air pressure in the cave had just plunged. The droplets vanished inside the tomb. Their flight was so quick, Hudson thought he should have heard a sound like a cracking whip as they disappeared. He turned around to face his expectant audience. “The enemy,” he said, smiling with the real first hope he’d felt in a long time, “is in retreat.”
“To where?” Gray came over to see for himself.
“Inside the tomb.”
The others approached more warily.
“Well,” Gray said with cheerful cynicism, “that was easy.”
“I said it was retreating, not that it was vanquished.”
“What do you think?” Meacham asked Pertwee.
“Maybe,” she conceded. She looked at Hudson, gave him a hopeful smile. “If the spirit hears the message that it’s time for it to move on, maybe it will. And since the ghost is a Christian one, it might well have a strong response to that rite.”
“Who says it’s Christian?” Sturghill asked.
“It’s Saint Rose,” Pertwee said simply. She looked to Hudson for confirmation.
“Ah ...” he hesitated. “I don’t know that it is.” Pertwee was still clinging, he thought, to the Hall’s mythology. Her insistence on the spiritual presence of Saint Rose bothered him. It struck him as dangerously dogmatic. She had believed in the benevolence of the Hall upon arriving here, and she’d been wrong. But instead of a full questioning of her assumptions, she was just revising slightly. She was granting that the presence here was a dangerous one, but only because it had been curdled by time. Saint Rose could be restored to her better self. The story was too neat. It had a narrative arc. Reality didn’t. Tidiness was the sign of a lie, however generously believed. And there was this: he hadn’t felt anything human as he reached out to strike with his prayer. He had seen black drops and felt a resistance that had all the personality of electricity. Saint Rose the Evangelist was not here. He didn’t think she ever had been.
Gray said, “What if this isn’t a tomb?”
A stymied silence. Hudson spoke first. “What else would it be?”
“Why make a stone sarcophagus and leave no sign of who is inside it? I’ve heard of unmarked graves, but not unmarked monuments.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Hudson persisted. “If not a grave, what then?” He wasn’t sure why he wanted the thing to be a tomb. It shouldn’t make any difference. If prayer worked, it worked. Perhaps the problem was a question of assumptions. If he were wrong about the nature of the stone, he might be wrong about other things. He looked at the slab. He worried. He saw something other than a tomb. He saw an altar.
I’ve been praying at that
, he thought. There was a squeeze in his chest.
Gray crouched beside the slab. He touched a point on the seam. “I was looking at this earlier,” he said. He pushed. Hudson saw his finger disappear up to the knuckle. There was a click of stone unlatching. Gray stood up. “Most graves don’t have mechanisms,” he said.
Neither do altars,
Hudson thought, feeling irrational relief.
Gray grasped the edges of the lid. “Anyone going to help me with this?” he asked.
Hudson took a step back on instinct. Meacham was eyeing the lid speculatively.
“Come on,” Gray said to her. “Ye seeker after truth. Information is power. You of all people should know that.”
“That’s cheap,” Meacham said, but she moved in to help anyway. They strained. The lid rotated. Stone scraped on stone. The sound was rough. The sound was hollow. The echo ran deep and straight down.
the cold spot
They shone their lights inside the stone box. They saw stairs. The descent looked long.
Meacham said, “I was wondering when we’d find the doorway to Hell.” She tried to sound like she was joking. She wasn’t able to. The steps were rough and steep. She couldn’t see the bottom. She aimed her flashlight beam at the roof of the staircase, caught a glimpse of the ectoplasm as it pulled away from the light.
Are you retreating or luring?
she wondered.
Gray climbed up over the lip of the stone and started down.
“What are you doing?” Hudson asked, horrified.
“Don’t be stupid,” Gray said, and Meacham had to agree. Backing off in terrified self-preservation had ceased to be a useful option some time back. She followed, with Pertwee hard on her heels. Hudson would be there too, she knew. He wouldn’t want to be left behind, alone. She knew she wouldn’t.
The footing was treacherous. The steps were uneven, barely hewn from the stone. The rise of each step was different from the last, but all were high. Edges caught at Meacham’s shoes, convex surfaces became concave with no warning. The walls were very close. There was nowhere to fall but straight ahead, onto stone that would smash bone with the bluntness of clubs and the tearing of flint knives. There was no curve to the descent, no slipknot twist like the stairs down from the crypt. This was a straight diagonal. Meacham sorted out her bearings. They were heading, she thought, to a point that would bring them beneath the ectoplasm lake. The stairs ended at last in a short, level corridor. Meacham looked back up and couldn’t see the top of the steps. She wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been able to see the bottom from the other end. So no, she wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t happy either.
Gray had walked forward a few steps and was reaching up to touch something on the wall. “What is it?” Meacham asked and caught up. It was a sconce, its iron deeply rusted.
“Should have brought torches,” Gray said.
“I’m cold,” Pertwee complained. No one answered, but she was right, Meacham thought. It was cold. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees as they’d come down. The ectoplasm raced ahead, disappeared.
They moved on again, and the corridor dead-ended in a vast room. They shone their lights around. They took it all in. Gray didn’t say anything. Neither did Meacham or Sturghill. Hudson breathed, “Oh, no.” Pertwee began to cry.
The cave was almost as big as the one where Crawford had died. It was just as artificial as the rest of the network, but it still seemed out of place. The other tunnels and rooms had the shapes dictated by the contingencies of mining. There was no real planning, and the system
felt
natural. Here there was stonework on the walls. The stairs leading here were slap-dash efforts, but the room had had time, money, and attention. With its ribbed vault, it was a close sibling to the crypt, its fraternal if not its identical twin. And much, much larger. Plenty of room to strut its stuff. Tapestries hung along the walls. They were a series. Meacham could see a progression to them, but she couldn’t tell what was the beginning of the narrative, what was the end. Each tapestry spilled into the other in an Escher loop, the story growing worse with each spiral.
“Christ, Louise,” Sturghill said. “You were right.” She wasn’t joking. Her voice cracked.
They’d found Hell. The tapestries were the arc of pain. They were faded, dank with humidity and time, muddy pinks and tarnished yellows. The souls of the damned were being tortured, broken, sundered. The screams of agony were frozen in medieval formality, flattened by the lack of perspective but as credible as photographs. They weren’t being tortured by other human beings. As initial visceral recoil faded, Meacham frowned, puzzled by the iconography. She was as far out of her field as it was possible to be, but things still struck her as wrong. There were plenty of Christian images here. Christ showed up on the cross several times. But the crucifixion didn’t come across as tragedy, as hope for redemption, as supreme act of love. And Christ was being hurt by more than nails, thorns, and spear. He was being twisted and shredded by the same teeth and claws as the other souls. He was no better off. If anything, the pain on his face was a despair that passed all understanding. His eyes were wide with terrible epiphany. The tapestry tore into him with enormous stylistic glee. There was fun to be had. Meacham frowned. The vibe was all wrong.
The teeth. The claws. More problems. If Meacham were looking at Hell, she should be seeing demons, she thought. There was monstrosity here, but not the right kind. Meacham looked for any trace of the old clichés: the horns, the hooves, the pitchforks, the wings. Nothing. She wasn’t even sure if what was inflicting the pain was a single being or several. There were teeth, there were claws, there were scales. There was immensity. Meacham had the sense of fragments, of desperate representations pointing to something too huge to be contained by art. The sweep of the tapestries was a picture of sadistic, reptilian triumph. The hands that had crafted this work were humbled and exhilarated by the scale of what they were having to convey.
Meacham turned to Hudson. He was moving from one tapestry to the next, staring at the little details of torture, backing up to take in the whole blow, then circling round again. Meacham thought he should stop. She could feel the intensity of the narrative ramp up every time she turned around, and she didn’t have a faith that was being assaulted. “Patrick,” she called, trying to break the trance. He jumped, shook himself and joined her. His eyes were squinting from the pain. Meacham said, “I don’t understand these. Have you ever seen anything like them?”
“No.” He glanced at the tapestries, then away, as if they had stared back. “They aren’t Christian by any measure I know of.”
“What about the crucifixion imagery?”
“That’s part of what I mean.” He looked terrified. “This isn’t even a repudiation.”
“The triumph of the devil?”
“I don’t think so. If there’s a victor, there’s a war. I don’t see any sign of there having even been a contest here, do you?”
No, she didn’t.
The rest of the room was, Meacham thought, what made Pertwee weep, even more than the tapestries. The metal on the machines was rusted, the leather rotted, but they still looked potent. Rack. Maiden. Wheel. Executioner’s block. Heaped blades and hooks. Decomposed but still barbed whips. Dark stains on the stone floor, on stone blocks, on metal edges. On the other side of the cavern from the entrance, a metal throne sat on a rectangular dais. The ironwork of the chair was writhing muscle. It was sharp. If Meacham sat in it, she would bleed. There were manacles on the side. Pertwee had taken a few steps toward the chair but was standing still now, shivering. “There,” she said. “It happened there. They killed her there.”
They gathered beside Pertwee. The temperature plummeted. Meacham edged a bit closer to the chair. The cold bit into her face.
“They tied Saint Rose to that chair and tortured her to death,” Pertwee whispered. She was creating a new mantra.
“No, they didn’t,” Sturghill said. She sounded definite.
“What?” And Pertwee sounded offended.
“Trust me, I’m a magician. I know from devices. Look at the placement of the manacles.”
“I don’t see it,” Meacham said.
“Watch.” Sturghill moved to the chair. She jumped just before reaching it. “God
damn
that is cold.” She hugged herself for warmth and sat down, very carefully. Her teeth chattered. She shifted with discomfort, as if sitting on a bed of nails. “This is vicious sharp,” she muttered.
“Of course it is,” Pertwee said. “No one would sit there unless they were forced to.”
“Or they were seriously fucked in the head,” Sturghill countered. “Go on. Use the manacles. Chain me down here.”
Meacham got it. The chains were too short, the clasps at the base and side of the chair. There was no way anyone sitting there could be held. “People were held
next
to the person sitting there,” she said.
“Exactly.” Sturghill stood up. “This is a throne.” She danced away from the chair. “It’s also bloody absolute zero right there.”
Meacham walked over to the dais. The cold became more and more intense as she approached. When she reached the dais, the temperature turned into a scalpel. It sliced flesh and nicked bone. Meacham winced and forced herself to stand on the platform. She looked out at the cavern. From this position, every instrument in the space was visible. Fine perspective. Best seat in the house. She had a vision of the possessor of the chair, roaring joy and hatred at sadistic spectacle and masochistic pain.
And who, do you think, would be sitting here?
she wondered. She examined the back of the chair. “Check this out,” she said. It was hard to speak. Her lips were numb. The others approached, shivering. There was an emblem in the iron. It was a black rose. Its petals were blades. Its stem was python twist of thorns. “What do you think of your saint now?” Meacham said to Pertwee.
Pertwee shook her head and backed away from the chair. They all did. The cold was too intense. But as she stepped away, Meacham’s eyes dropped to the dais. There was another rose, in the same design, carved into the stone in bas-relief. She held back against the cold, hanging on for answers. The dais, she now saw, was not square. It was rectangular. If it hadn’t been for the chair, she would have recognized the shape of the marble slab immediately. “Here,” she said. “She’s buried here.
This
is her tomb.”
“That makes no sense,” Pertwee said. There was a flash of hope in her objection, as if the logical problem might restore Rose to sainthood. “How could she have a throne on top of her own grave?”
Meacham was wondering the same thing. She was still on her hands and knees. She ran her flashlight and her fingers along the base of the slab. It was like touching dry ice. Her fingers burned. It was hard to feel anything other than the pain. She saw the indentation as she touched it. “There’s a mechanism here, like the other one.” The edges she touched felt jumbled, chaotic. She pulled her fingers away, peered at the tiny recess in the stone. “It’s been smashed,” she said. She could withdraw from the cold spot, now. She felt frostbite in her cheeks and the tip of her nose. But she stayed where she was, as if the ordeal granted her authority, her words the weight of truth.
“Meaning what?” Pertwee asked, stubborn.
“Meaning she had her tomb constructed before she died,” Gray answered. “Meaning that she sat on her own grave as she watched others tortured and killed.”
“I won’t believe it,” Pertwee pleaded.
“She’s here,” Meacham said and slapped the top of the marble.
Even through the deadening cold, she felt the vibration through her fingertips. She looked down at the grave. The vibration became a rumble. She threw herself backwards as the ectoplasm erupted from the centre of the rose emblem. It geysered up, hit the roof of the cavern, followed the curve of the vault. It flowed into the keystone. Meacham scrambled back, staring at the black flow. Here was the source. Here was what fed the lake that was directly above them now.
Hudson had his back against the wall. “Why?” he kept repeating. He finally choked out a sentence. “Why did it play possum?” Then another: “Why now?”
“To prove you wrong,” Gray answered.
“To show I’m right,” Meacham said, at the same moment. She spoke more quietly than Gray. His response had a sharp edge of triumph. The problem was, she thought he was correct. Hudson’s faith had been teased in order to lure them all here. That thought led her to another
why?
There was sentience here, not mindless energy. It was playing a game. It had an agenda. Rose had not stopped her wanting with death.
“Can we leave?” Sturghill asked, eyes wide and breath short and fast. “Like
now
?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She ran from the cavern. Meacham tore her eyes away from the pulsing stream of black. She began to run, too, conscious suddenly not of questions but of Crawford and of Corderman, and what the strength she saw could do to her. She was on the heels of Pertwee and Hudson. As she reached the staircase back up, she became aware of an absence at her back, and she looked over her shoulder. She had expected to see Gray right behind her. He wasn’t. He was coming, but slowly, walking down the tunnel reluctantly, giving the cavern and its torture and the ectoplasm pillar-of-salt looks. He was mesmerized. Meacham ran back. “Come
on
,” she said and dragged him by the collar. He resisted at first, then seemed to shake himself awake and fell into step.
Up the staircase, the ascent more difficult and treacherous than the descent, each stone ledge finding its own uneven way of trying to make her fall and smash her face open. She stayed on her feet, made it out of the false tomb. And then they were still underground, deep underground, and there was more running through the rocky darkness, still the snake curl to navigate, still the black lake to run past, and it was choppy now, restless, vexed to nightmare, though it did not reach out for her. And after that, there was the spiral up to the crypt. And then at last they were on the ground floor of Gethsemane Hall, and there was air and space, but there was very little light, because time had slipped by and withered while they were in the caves, and night had come again, closing its stone roof over them once more.
They didn’t regroup in the Great Hall. They stood in the courtyard. Gray stayed in the doorway to the outer hall, as if reluctant to step outside the house, away from what was
his
. Sturghill was eyeing the gatehouse tower. “Do you think we can still leave?” she asked Meacham. She looked as if she were expecting a portcullis to slam down, keeping them in for good and for all.
“Do you think we should?” Meacham countered. They’d accomplished nothing so far.
“You say that like we have a chance,” said Sturghill.
Hudson looked broken. He took a half step in three different directions, seeking flight or faith, then rounded on Gray. “So?” he asked. “Are you happy now? Do you have your truth?”