Chapter Thirty

Descent

 

 

31st October 2016

 

ALICE PULLED THE handle, and the bedroom door swung open. It only took a second, but the moment stretched out and out; with every inch of darkened landing it exposed she expected a leering white-eyed face to appear. But none did. The landing and stairs were deserted.

She stepped out, raising the cross before her. “Dark,” she heard John mutter behind her, followed by the clicking of the light switch. The light didn’t come on.

“I think we’re some way from the mains supply right now,” she said. She heard her voice shake and sucked in a deep breath. “Like a couple of million years.”

John moved to her side and took her hand. “What do you reckon Collarmill Road looks like right now?” he murmured. “Is there a big hole where 378 used to be?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe it would only be gone for a split-second, too brief a time for anyone to notice. There and back. When it came back, its return would fit seamlessly into its departure. But before it did that, it could spend a near-eternity here. Or rather now.

She passed the spare room; the doorway gaped blackly at her, the tape across it a weak glimmer in the dark. There was a flicker of something pale and she recoiled with a gasp, but it was only an A4 notepad she’d left on the writing desk at the end of the room. Alice breathed out.

The spare room was empty, and so were the bathroom and the box room at the end of the landing. The staircase was empty too, and the landing below. But there was a light down there: it was pale, bluish in colour and it flickered down in the hallway.

She looked at John. He raised his eyebrows. “What you reckon?”

What, indeed? “We won’t get anywhere by hiding out up here,” she said. “We’ve got stuff to do.”

“What stuff?”

Alice began tiptoeing down the staircase. She could feel her legs shaking, but she gripped onto the bannister and carried on.

“Alice!” John hissed. She glanced behind her, saw him hesitating at the top of the stairs. He was afraid too; as much as her – if not more, because however little she understood, he understood still less.

“Babe,” she said and held out a hand. “Come on. It’s okay. Trust me.”

He let out a short, nearly silent laugh, then sucked in a deep breath. “Okay,” he muttered. “In for a penny and all that shit.”

They reached the floor below; all was silent and still. The doors hung ajar and the rooms beyond were dark. Anything could have been waiting there... but somehow, she didn’t think so. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Okay,” muttered John. “But, uh, where we going, exactly?”

Alice crept to the top of the last staircase and peered down into the hall. That faint bluish light still wavered and danced over the laminate flooring, but there was no other motion. Everything looked still and empty. Of course, that didn’t mean it was. In fact, there would be one part of the house that most definitely wasn’t. The question was whether she’d correctly identified which. She couldn’t resist the impulse to glance over her shoulder at the empty first floor rooms. It would be so easy for one of the children to leap out of the dark and send her headfirst down the stairs to break her neck. But she didn’t think they would.

“Remember the stone I found in the garden?” she whispered at last.

“Stone?” John frowned. “Wait – with the inscription?”

“Yeah. I saw it – the complete version – the first time this place... went back. It was still Springcross House that time, only... derelict. After Thorne died, I’m guessing. Thing is, I recognised it from what Mary Carson put in her confession. A quotation from Ecclesiasticus. I knew I was trying to place the inscription. ‘Their bodies are buried in peace...’”

“‘...but their name liveth forevermore,’” said John. “Ecclesiasticus 44:14.”

“Chapter and verse.”

He shrugged. “I was a star pupil at Sunday School. What’s your excuse?”

“I read it in a book somewhere. Anyway, it was Mary Carson’s favourite spot in the gardens, remember? Right outside the entrance...”

She saw the lights go on in John’s eyes.“To the music room,” he breathed.

“And right under the music room there was...”

“The chute, the shaft, whatever you wanna call it. Down to where he was sacrificing those kids.”

“Yeah.” Alice tried not to think about the Moloch Device or the torments Thorne’s child victims must have suffered. “And more importantly, to the spring. That’s why all this is happening – that’s why it’s this house that’s the haunted one, not the bloody builder’s yard or the place next door. We’re directly on top of it – the shrine, the Fire Beyond, whatever you want to call it. If we can find our way down there, we might be able to pull the plug.”

“Didn’t she say she’d looked all over for it and couldn’t find it?”

“Yeah,” said Alice. “Well, let’s just hope she was getting short-sighted in her old age. Come on.”

“They built a whole street over where that house used to be, though,” said John. “The shaft’ll be gone. Filled in.”

“Maybe not. There’d have been some record if they’d found anything when they pulled down Springcross House.”

“Maybe there is, and we didn’t get to it.”

“Could be, but Mary Wynne-Jones would have probably got to hear about it if they had.”

John nodded. “True.”

Alice crept the rest of the way down to the hall. The front door was shut tight. The living room and spare room’s doors again stood open, with only shadows inside.

The kitchen door, though, was almost shut. Almost; it was just open enough for the flickery blue light inside to spill down the hallway. Alice took a deep breath and strode forward.

“Alice –” John caught her arm, but she pulled free. Three more quick strides took her to the door; she flung it wide before she could let herself think about it.

“Fuck,” said John. His hand came up, clutching his cross.

The children were gathered in the middle of the kitchen. The table that had stood in the centre of the room lay against the far wall, broken and shattered. The camera that had been set up in the room was a tangled heap of charred and molten plastic and crumpled metal tubes. The children were silent, hands clasped before them. At first, because they were lit from behind, she saw them only as silhouettes, save for their dead white eyes which stared out at her, almost luminescent. She raised her own crucifix, but they made no move towards her.

Behind the children, rising from the kitchen floor to lick the ceiling, was a column of blue fire. Pale and lambent, it put Alice in mind of the Bunsen burners in the school lab, but was the light blue of a summer sky. It didn’t seem to have damaged the ceiling in the slightest. This flame, she knew, wouldn’t burn her.

As her eyes accustomed themselves to the kitchen’s dimness, the children’s faces began to resolve themselves out of the dark. They were all screwed up in pain. Some looked close to weeping; a couple, she thought, were sobbing outright, but there was no sound.

She took a step towards them, but John caught her arm. “Careful,” he said.

She nodded. Yes, this time he was right to urge caution. It was hard for any mother to see a child suffer, whatever that child had done, but these had tried to kill her, and more than once. And yet they’d helped her too, saving Sixsmythe’s box-file from the Red Man’s fire. Perhaps their goal had changed, whatever it might have been before.

“Jesus,” she heard John say, snapping her out of her reverie. The children were fading, in and out of existence, first growing transparent, then becoming mere outlines before, at the last, the process reversed itself. But no sooner had they regained solidity, they began to fade.

A grinding crack; the floor shuddered. The sound came again, drawn out into something more prolonged and tortured; stone cracking, brick breaking, rock grinding against rock and powdering into dust. There was a cracking, a splitting, a rumbling below them. Alice thought of some huge machine, long-disused, cogs of brick and gears of stone all oiled with dust, stirring finally back into life. The floor shuddered again, then tilted sharply down. Off-balance, Alice stumbled forward, towards the children.

John shouted her name, but she swayed, steadied herself. The children faded almost to nothing, then began solidifying again, but the process was happening more slowly, and seemed less likely to complete. From what she could see of their faces, they were howling in anguish.

The ceiling cracked across and bowed; plaster dust billowed through the air. Alice coughed and spluttered. The blue flame turned the dust to a glowing mist. A shape loomed up beside her: John.

The floor tilted again and there was another splitting crack. As the billowing dust thinned, she saw a huge rent running up the kitchen wall.

“Fuck,” said John. He pulled at her arm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“And go where, John?” Alice shook him off. “There’s nothing out there for us. Our only way back’s in here.”

She was amazed how calm she felt. But then again, she thought she understood. There was a purpose to this, and she was a part of it; that purpose wouldn’t allow her to be hurt by chance. Or perhaps that was delusion on her part – perhaps no purpose governed events here, only chaos and randomness. Maybe every theory – hers, Arodias’, Sixsmythe’s – were all just hopeless attempts to find method in the madness. And after Emily, wasn’t she desperate to find a meaning, a reason, behind all this? Hadn’t even her atheism been shaken by her daughter’s death?

The kitchen window shattered, and they both ducked, arms raised to guard their faces. The rumbling died away; the house wasn’t shaking now and the dust was settling.

The blue glow dimmed. As the dust dispersed, Alice saw the flame had dwindled to a thread. The children had faded to shadows on the air; a moment later, they were gone.

The flame lingered like a thread of luminescent smoke, wavering and sputtering towards extinction as it rose from the floor – no, Alice realised, not from the floor, but from the gaping hole in it.

The kitchen floor had sagged in the middle. The lino had split and rucked to expose the stone beneath, which in turn had split into wedge-shaped segments, separated by narrow crevasses. The kitchen sink had pulled loose from the wall.

The floor had sagged down, and right in the middle of it, at the bottom of the shallow, cracked bowl it had become, there was a hole – a perfect circle by the look of it, the edges smooth. And from its exact centre issued that last surviving thread of a flame.

Alice pocketed her cross, braced herself and started down the incline.

“Alice,” began John, then broke off. “Fuck it,” she heard him mutter, and then he was following her down.

She had to place her feet carefully. The wedges of floor tapered to their narrowest points as they neared the centre, the gaps on either side of them widening. She didn’t have that blind a faith that there was a purpose to this – and, after all, blind chance and accident stood ready to fuck up any purpose you had at the best of times, so it was hardly sensible to assume this would be any different.

Through the broken floor, she could see the pipes that had run below it. No smell of gas, at least – but then, the gas that supplied her home in 2016 was probably still brewing somewhere under the earth.

Below the stone floor were the brick foundations; below that, raw earth, and then –

And then, gaping at the centre of it all like a ravening throat, there was a brick-lined shaft, leading down.

“No fucking way,” John said.

Alice leant forward, peering down into the dark. The blue flame was almost cotton-thin now; tiny flecks of it gleamed off the damp bricks and rusted iron rungs.

“Hang on a second,” John said, and inched back the way they’d come, to where the gaps between floor sections diminished. Plaster dust hissed and pattered down from the ceiling above them.

“Where you going?”

John brushed at his dust-clogged goatee and spat. “Ain’t gotta be Sherlock Holmes to know you want to go down there.” Gingerly, he put some weight on the section of floor beside theirs. “Right?”

“Yeah? So? Jesus, John!”

He’d already leapt onto the neighbouring section. Now he inched across it towards the shattered sink unit. “So, I seem to remember seeing a couple more of those clockwork torches in that drawer.” He tested his weight on the floor section where the unit belonged, then stepped across.

“John, be careful!”

“You said it yourself,” John didn’t look back at her, his eyes on the floor. “Our only way back’s here.” He nodded at the shaft. “Or rather, down there.”

In the shaft, the last of the blue flame flickered, then went out.

The sink unit’s floor section canted badly; John swayed fighting to steady himself. Alice felt her hands rise to her mouth. There was nothing she could do. If he fell, what then? The gaps between sections looked quite big enough to swallow him up, and what would be waiting for him? Even if there was a purpose for her, it didn’t necessarily extend to John. He was expendable. But he managed to pull open the drawer and pick out first one, and then a second torch. Each had a rubber lanyard dangling from the butt; John looped both over his right wrist and picked his way back towards her. Twice he wobbled, nearly losing his balance, and she flinched; another time, one of the floor sections sank a few more inches with a harsh grating noise, but he barely wobbled and the floor section halted. A moment later he was beside her again, handing her a torch. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Glad to be of help.”

With the torches switched on, they shone them down the shaft. The rungs were intact, all the way down to the clinker floor below.

“Right,” said Alice, climbing down. This time John didn’t protest.

The beginning was the worst; she had to hold on as best she could to the cracked and crumbling end of the floor section, testing first one, then another rung with her full weight before stepping down, until she was at last low enough to take hold of the topmost rung. After that it got easier. Above her, she heard John muttering as he moved into position to climb down after her.

The air got colder: chill, and dank. The shaft’s brick walls gave way to an open tunnel. She hung from the last rung, her feet in empty space. When she looked down, the torch hanging from her wrist showed the floor below her – how far below? She couldn’t tell. John was climbing down above. Alice took a deep breath and let go. The impact was jarring, she’d only dropped a couple of feet.

She stepped away from the shaft and shone the torch around. The tunnel – brick-lined, like the shaft – extended both in front of and behind her.

John landed beside her. “So,” he said, “which way now?”

Had Mary Carson’s account specified the direction? If it had, Alice didn’t recall. “This way,” she said at last, and started up the tunnel.

It curved round as they followed it, and soon enough an archway appeared on the right. It opened into a room. More archways lined the walls there on the left and right, but they were screened across with iron bars.

Alice stepped inside. This room felt colder than the tunnel had, and there was a smell. Decay, filth, or at least the memory of them. In one corner were a table and chair. A tin mug and plate sat on the table, beside a bunch of rusted iron keys.

“Ah Jesus,” John said.

He was facing one of the walls, shining his torch back and forth through the arches. “Don’t,” he said as she approached. “You don’t want to –”

No, she didn’t, but perhaps she had to. She aimed her own torch through the nearest arch. The tiny room inside was perhaps six feet wide, only a little taller and no more than ten or twelve feet deep. There was a wooden pallet and the remains of a blanket, a few pieces of straw at one end that might be the remains of a rough pillow. A tin bucket at the back of the room; a plate, a mug, a knife and fork beside the bars. She inspected the rust-pitted bars more closely. On one side there were hinges, on the other a lock.

“Cells,” she said. “He kept the children here.”

“Yeah,” said John. “Fucking bastard. Now come on, we need to –”

“John?” There was a thickness to his voice she didn’t like, something that suggested he’d seen more than just an empty cell. “John, what is it?”

“Don’t,” he said, turning away from the arch that neighboured hers and spreading his arms, trying to ward her – no, she realised, herd her – back towards the tunnel. “You don’t want to know.”

But of course she did; she had to. Anything left down here was necessary. It was information, it was a clue; it was fuel for her anger, her resolve. She side-stepped, dodged past him, and John lowered his arms, head bowed, acknowledging defeat as if he’d always known this would happen. He probably had as well; after all, he’d known her long enough. But at least he’d cared enough to try.

Something stuck through the cell bars. Her first thought was that it was an old broom, the kind with a brush made out of bound twigs, but then realised it wasn’t. The twigs were too few and too thick; both they and the broomstick were too light a colour.

“Oh,” she said. She understood now. But still she shone her torch through the cell bars, and onto the pathetic huddle of rags and bones from which the outstretched arm protruded. The skull was angled back and propped against the wall; the jaw hung open, dangling by a hinge.

She went to the next cell, then the next, then stumbled across the room, ignoring John’s voice calling her name, to check the other row. Each wall held ten cells; no more than a third, in total, had still been occupied, but that was enough. It was too many.

“They were... just left here,” she said. “To starve.”

John nodded. “Thorne.”

“Not Thorne,” she said. “Kellett. Whether Thorne was dead or... somewhere else, Kellett would’ve known they were down here. He just took his money and scarpered, and I bet you he never even thought of them again.”

“Bastard,” said John.

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath and let it out, tried to stay calm. She’d need a clear head down here: to give way to rage, terror or grief would be fatal. “Come on. We’ve got stuff to do.”

They went back into the tunnel. Another archway appeared on the right, but the room it opened into was empty and featureless. No cells in the brick walls, and nothing else, but Alice was sure there was something about the room she ought to notice.

The next room was the same, except that there was something propped against the wall. Alice went inside, shining her torch on it. “A shovel?”

Beside it was a pick-axe. John shone the torch around the room, frowning. Alice crossed the floor towards him, and that was when she realised what was different. The floor sloped up, then down again. A mound.

She let out a muffled cry and scrambled clear, flashing her torch over the chamber floor. Yes, it was a mound – a low one, but a mound none the less. She pushed past John, went back to the chamber before and studied the floor.

“Burial chambers,” she said. John stared into the chamber with the shovel and pick, then looked back at Alice. She took more deep breaths, forced herself to stay calm, then walked on. “Those are mass graves, in both of those rooms.”

Her legs were trembling again. She kept walking; it was easier than trying to stand still.

There was another archway to her right. She made herself peer through it. There was a door of iron bars here too, but set in the archway itself, although it was standing ajar. It squealed as she pushed it further open and stepped through.

There was a bed – a rusted iron frame and the rotten remains of blankets and a mattress – a desk and chair with a jug and ewer on them, a shelf with a few mouldering books, a cobwebbed chamber-pot. The books were swollen with fungus and damp, their pages beyond reading. Even the leather bindings were so badly cracked that she couldn’t read the titles on the spines. Lanterns hung from hooks on the walls.

Compared to the cells it was almost palatial, but in a way that made it worse. It was still a prison, and Alice thought she could guess whose. She backed out of there quickly; the air itself there smelled, felt, horrible and wrong in a way she couldn’t define. John put his hands on her shoulders. She started, gasping, then relaxed when she realised who it was.

“Easy,” he said. He didn’t sound any better than she felt.

She patted his hand, slipped free and walked on. The tunnel bent round. From up ahead she heard a sound of trickling water. Then the tunnel opened out into a chamber; into the chamber.

It had to be. It matched Mary Carson’s description: a semi-circular room with stone and brick walls and a stone ceiling buttressed with stout wooden beams. Unlit lamps hung at intervals and a narrow brick-lined gutter crossed the floor to empty into a sodden, weed-clogged drain in the corner. And the straight wall was living rock, and in it was a hole – the cave entrance – from which water coursed to fill a bowl-shaped hollow that drained off through the gutter. The Collarmill Spring, the Grail-beck’s source.

And, in front of the spring –

“Oh Christ,” said Alice, and nearly dropped the torch. But she gripped it tight; she wouldn’t look away.

“Fuck,” said John.

It was a chair, or at least it resembled one at first. Until you got in close and saw the clamps and straps that held the occupant in place, the tangled mass of gears and cogs crouching underneath it, the long brass lever with the ivory handle that stuck upwards from its base and the blades and hooks and other implements it bristled with. They were barely tinged with rust; in fact, what had looked initially like rust looked more like something that had dried and crusted on them. Stainless steel? Unlikely, if this was of Thorne’s making: his death had come long before its invention. Silver plating, perhaps; whatever it was, the machine’s parts were barely touched by decay despite the damp air.

The same could be said for the Moloch Device’s occupant. Comparatively speaking, anyway. The other children who’d died down here were rags and dust and bones, but this one was more than that. No rags, because there would have been no clothes: Arodias Thorne would have put him naked into the Device’s embrace. But both the skin that hadn’t peeled off him and the skin that had were still there, had dried hard like perished, buckled leather. Alice had no idea how it could have happened, because she’d always thought it took dry heat to make a mummy – or freeze-drying, maybe, in a handful of cases. She could feel the air’s dampness here, and, while chill, it wasn’t even close to either of the extremes of temperature that would have preserved the corpse.

And yet, and yet, here he sat. Yes, it was, had been a he – she couldn’t keep her gaze from straying to the dead youth’s groin, and what remained of the genitals, little though it was, was unambiguously male. Beneath the holes in the skin the Device had made – gaping bloodlessly now, stretched wide by the skin’s drying – the muscles were gnarled, blackened cords, the viscera hardened and translucent. Shrinkage had turned the victim’s last expression monstrous, pulling the jaws tight shut, while the lips writhed back in a simian grimace from teeth turned to blade and chisel-like fangs by the withering of the gums, and the nose had shrunk to a crumpled little snout. The eyelids retained their natural shape, but the eyes themselves were gone, unless their shrivelled and deflated remains still rested inside the emptied sockets; hair hung down to the shoulders, bleached and faded to white.

“Mary Carson’s kid,” said John. “Right?”

“I think so.” Her throat felt constricted, choked; tears stung her eyes. Another dead child. How old would he have been? Arodias Thorne’s death, if it had really been a death, had been in December 1851, six months before the boy’s fourteenth birthday. Thirteen years; six more than Emily had ever got. But at least Emily had known the light, the sun, green grass and rain. What had Mary’s child known except this dark? She thought of the cell with its shelves of books and iron-framed bed. Had he lived out his whole life there, like some pale grub in the dark? Christ, had Thorne even troubled himself to give the child a name?

“Babe?” John’s hand settled on her arm. Alice realised that she was crying. She shook her head, squeezed his hand and stepped away from him. “I’m okay,” she said at last, but she wasn’t, and she doubted John was stupid enough to believe it either.

If he’d ever had a name, this boy of Mary Carson’s, it had gone unrecorded. All so long ago now, long ago and far away – but it still felt close. He’d lived in the dark and died in it, this nameless boy – alone and companionless, without love or comfort, and his last minutes had been a crucifying agony as the machine had pulled him apart. Alice found herself kneeling by the chair, wrestling with unoiled clamps and stiffened, dusty straps, freeing the mummified limbs from their bondage. Wrists, ankles, chest and waist, then finally the head. The body didn’t slump or sag; it lolled stiffly sideways, the whole of it in one unyielding part, like stone. Something crunched in its side, and dust shivered from its hair.

“Easy,” muttered Alice. She rose and steeled herself, then reached out to touch the body.

John said nothing, thank God. This was hard enough even with everything she had focused on the task. Her skin writhed at the prospect; when she’d been a child even the sight of a dead bird had made her recoil, and now this. She shut her eyes and bit her lips, clasped hold of the body, afraid it would break apart at the pressure of her touch.

It didn’t, though. It held. Alice stepped back and lifted, and the mummy came with her. It was heavier than she’d expected; the thing in the chair had looked like an empty husk, desiccated to the point of weightlessness.

She looked down at the floor, so that she could see where she was going without looking at what she carried. The corpse’s bare feet swung below her. Bony as they were, with the nails grown long and black until they resembled talons, they looked like the paws of an animal.

She knelt and lowered him to the floor. Finally she allowed herself to look at the boy. He’d suffered no further damage, but he’d never look peaceful in death. His father had seen to that.

Alice stood, then stumbled back, her revulsion at what she’d touched kicking back in; she scrubbed her hands frantically against her jeans until they were sore.

Her torchlight was waning. “Shit,” she muttered, and began winding the handle. The darkness fell in upon her; it made her think far too much about being buried alive, about tons of black, silent soil flooding in to drown her. So dark. She looked around, but couldn’t see the other torch. “John?” she said.

No answer. She turned, flashed her torch at where he’d been, but there was nothing. The torch dimmed again. She wound the handle frantically, shining it around, but found nothing and the beam continued to fade.

Then light bloomed on the walls.

The lanterns hanging around the chamber first glowed, then brightened, all in perfect unison. There was no-one near them; no hand she saw lit the wicks. The yellow light that spread to fill the chamber might have been comforting, Alice thought, in another place or time.

“John?”

“Alice,” said a voice. Voices. None of them John’s.

It was a voice that sounded like four speaking in eerie chorus.

It came from behind her, and so she turned.

The Red Man stood behind the Moloch Device, his pale left hand pressed to John Revell’s forehead, bending his head back. In his right was a knife. Its silver-shining blade, flashing where it caught the light, rested on John’s throat.