“So let’s please have no more talk about likes and dislikes or what should or should not be done. It will be the way I’ve planned it.” He turned again to me. “Now, if you’ll be so good as to simply outline the results of your research…?”
“Very well,” I shrugged in acquiescence. “As long as I’ve made my feelings in the matter plain…” Knowing David the way I did, further argument would be quite fruitless: his mind was made up. I riffled through the notes lying in my lap, took a long pull on my pipe, and commenced: “Oddly enough, the house as it now stands is comparatively modern, no more than two hundred and fifty years old, but it was built upon the shell of a far older structure, one whose origin is extremely difficult to trace. There are local legends, however, and there have always been chroniclers of tales of strange old houses. The original house is given brief mention in texts dating back almost to Roman times, but the actual site had known habitation—possibly a Druidic order or some such—much earlier. Later it became part of some sort of fortification, perhaps a small castle, and the remnants of earthworks in the shape of mounds, banks and ditches can be found even today in the surrounding countryside.
“Of course the present house, while large enough by modern standards, is small in comparison with the original: it’s a mere wing of the old structure. An extensive cellar—a veritable maze of tunnels, rooms, and passages—was discovered during renovation some eighty years ago, when first the Marriots acquired the property, and then several clues were disclosed as to its earlier use.
“This wing would seem to have been a place of worship of sorts, for there was a crude altar-stone, a pair of ugly, font-like basins, a number of particularly repugnant carvings of gargoyles or ‘gods’, and other extremely ancient tools and bric-a-brac. Most of this incunabula was given into the care of the then curator of the antiquities section of the British Museum, but the carved figures were defaced and destroyed. The records do not say why…
“But let’s go back to the reign of James I.
“Then the place was the seat of a family of supposed nobility, though the line must have suffered a serious decline during the early years of the seventeenth century—or perhaps fallen foul of the authorities or the monarch himself—for its name simply cannot be discovered. It would seem that for some reason, most probably serious dishonour, the family name has been erased from all contemporary records and documents!
“Prior to the fire which razed the main building to the ground in 1618, there had been a certain intercourse and intrigue of a similarly undiscovered nature between the nameless inhabitants, the de la Poers of Exham Priory near Anchester, and an obscure esoteric sect of monks dwelling in and around the semi-ruined Falstone Castle in Northumberland. Of the latter sect: they were wiped out utterly by Northern raiders—a clan believed to have been outraged by the ‘heathen activities’ of the monks—and the ruins of the castle were pulled to pieces, stone by stone. Indeed, it was so well destroyed that today only a handful of historians could even show you where it stood!
“As for the de la Poers: well, whole cycles of ill-omened myth and legend revolve around that family, just as they do about their Anchester seat. Suffice it to say that in 1923 the Priory was blown up and the cliffs beneath it dynamited, until the deepest roots of its foundations were obliterated. Thus the Priory is no more, and the last of that line of the family is safely locked away in a refuge for the hopelessly insane.
“It can be seen then that the nameless family that lived here had the worst possible connections, at least by the standards of those days, and it is not at all improbable that they brought about their own decline and disappearance through just such traffic with degenerate or ill-advised cultists and demonologists as I have mentioned.
“Now then, add to all of this somewhat tenuously connected information the local rumours, which have circulated on and off in the villages of this area for some three hundred years—those mainly unspecified fears and old wives’ tales that have sufficed since time immemorial to keep children and adults alike away from this property, off the land and out of the woods—and you begin to understand something of the aura of the place. Perhaps you can feel that aura even now? I certainly can, and I’m by no means psychic…”
“Just what is it that the locals fear?” Turnbull asked. “Can’t you enlighten us at all?”
“Oh, strange shapes have been seen on the paths and roads; luminous nets have appeared strung between the trees like great webs, only to vanish in daylight; and, yes, in connection with the latter, perhaps I had better mention the bas-reliefs in the cellar.”
“Bas-reliefs?” queried Lavery.
“Yes, on the walls. It was writing of sorts, but in a language no one could understand—glyphs almost.”
“My great-grandfather had just bought the house,” David Marriot explained. “He was an extremely well-read man, knowledgeable in all sorts of peculiar subjects. When the cellar was opened and he saw the glyphs, he said they had to do with the worship of some strange deity from an obscure and almost unrecognized myth cycle. Afterwards he had the greater area of the cellar cemented in—said it made the house damp and the foundations unsafe.”
“Worship of some strange deity?” Old Danford spoke up. “What sort of deity? Some lustful thing that the Romans brought with them, d’you think?”
“No, older than that,” I answered for Lord Marriot. “Much older. A spider-thing.”
“A spider?” This was Lavery again, and he snorted the words out almost in contempt.
“Not quite the thing to sneer at,” I answered. “Three years ago an ageing but still active gentleman rented the house for a period of some six weeks. An anthropologist and the author of several books, he wanted the place for its solitude; and if he took to it he was going to buy it. In the fifth week he was taken away raving mad!”
“Eh? Harumph! Mad, you say?” Old Danford repeated after me.
I nodded. “Yes, quite insane. He lived for barely six months, all the while raving about a creature named Atlach-Nacha—a spider-god from the Cthulhu Cycle of myth—whose ghostly avatar, he claimed, still inhabited the house and its grounds.”
At this Turnbull spoke up. “Now really!” he spluttered. “I honestly fear that we’re rapidly going from the sublime to the ridiculous!”
“Gentlemen, please!” There was exasperation now in Lord Marriot’s voice. “What does it matter? You know as much now as there is to know of the history of the troubles here—more than enough to do what you’ve been paid to do. Now. then, Lawrence—” he turned to Danford. “Have you any objections?”
“Harumph! Well, if there’s a demon here—that is, something other than a creature of the Lord—then of course I’ll do my best to help you. Harumph! Certainly.”
“And you, Lavery?”
“Objections? No, a bargain is a bargain. I have your money, and you shall have your noises.”
Lord Marriot nodded, understanding Lavery’s meaning. For the medium’s talent was a supposed or alleged ability to speak in the tongue of the ghost, the possessing spirit. In the event of a non-human ghost, however, then his mouthings might well be other than speech as we understand the spoken word. They might simply be—noises.
“And that leaves you, Turnbull.”
“Do not concern yourself, Lord Marriot,” Turnbull answered, flicking imagined dust from his sleeves. “I, too, would be loath to break an honourable agreement. I have promised to do an automatic sketch of the intruder, an art in which I’m well practised, and if all goes well I shall do just that. Frankly, I see nothing at all to be afraid of. Indeed, I would appreciate some sort of explanation from our friend here—who seems to me simply to be doing his best to frighten us off.” He inclined his head inquiringly in my direction.
I held up my hands and shook my head. “Gentlemen, my only desire is to make you aware of this feeling of mine of…yes, premonition! The very air seems to me imbued with an aura of—” I frowned. “Perhaps disaster would be too strong a word.”
“Disaster?” Old Danford, as was his wont, repeated after me. “How do you mean?”
“I honestly don’t know. It’s a feeling, that’s all, and it hinges upon this desire of Lord Marriot’s to know his foe, to identify the nature of the evil here. Yes, upon that, and upon the complicity of the rest of you.”
“But—” the young Lord began, anger starting to make itself apparent in his voice.
“At least hear me out,” I protested. “Then—” I paused and shrugged. “Then…you must do as you see fit.”
“It can do no harm to listen to him,” Old Danford pleaded my case. “I for one find all of this extremely interesting. I would like to hear his argument.” The others nodded slowly, one by one, in somewhat uncertain agreement.
“Very well,” Lord Marriot sighed heavily. “Just what is it that bothers you so much, my friend?”
“Recognition,” I answered at once. “To recognise our—opponent?—that’s where the danger lies. And yet here’s Lavery, all willing and eager to speak in the thing’s voice, which can only add to our knowledge of it; and Turnbull, happy to fall into a trance at the drop of a hat and sketch the thing, so that we may all know exactly what it looks like. And what comes after that? Don’t you see? The more we learn of it, the more it learns of us!
“Right now, this thing—ghost, demon, ‘god’, apparition, whatever you want to call it—lies in some deathless limbo, extra-dimensional, manifesting itself rarely, incompletely, in our world. But to know the thing, as our lunatic anthropologist came to know it and as the superstitious villagers of these parts think they know it—that is to draw it from its own benighted place into this sphere of existence. That is to give it substance, to participate in its materialisation!”
“Hah!” Turnbull snorted. “And you talk of superstitious villagers! Let’s have one thing straight before we go any further. Lavery and I do not believe in the supernatural, not as the misinformed majority understand it. We believe that there are other planes of existence, yes, and that they are inhabited; and further, that occasionally we may glimpse alien areas and realms beyond the ones we were born to. In this we are surely nothing less than scientists, men who have been given rare talents, and each experiment we take part in leads us a little further along the paths of discovery. No ghosts or demons, sir, but scientific phenomena which may one day open up whole new vistas of knowledge. Let me repeat once more: there is nothing to fear in this, nothing at all!”
“There I cannot agree,” I answered. “You must be aware, as I am, that there are well-documented cases of—”
“Self-hypnotism!” Lavery broke in. “In almost every case where medium experimenters have come to harm, it can be proved that they were the victims of self-hypnosis.”
“And that’s not all,” Turnbull added. “You’ll find that they were all believers in the so-called supernatural. We, on the other hand, are not—”
“But what of these well-documented cases you mentioned?” Old Danford spoke up. “What sort of cases?”
“Cases of sudden, violent death!” I answered. “The case of the medium who slept in a room once occupied by a murderer, a strangler, and who was found the next morning strangled—though the room was windowless and locked from the inside! The case of the exorcist,” (I paused briefly to glance at Danford) “who attempted to seek out and put to rest a certain grey thing which haunted a Scottish graveyard. Whatever it was, this monster was legended to crush its victims’ heads. Well, his curiosity did for him: he was found with his head squashed flat and his brains all burst from his ears!”
“And you think that all of—” Danford began.
“I don’t know what to think,” I interrupted him, “but certainly the facts seem to speak for themselves. These men I’ve mentioned, and many others like them, all tried to understand or search for things which they should have left utterly alone. Then, too late, each of them recognised…something…and it recognised them! What I think really does not matter; what matters is that these men are no more. And yet here, tonight, you would commence
just such an experiment, to seek out something you really aren’t meant to know. Well, good luck to you. I for one want no part of it. I’ll leave before you begin.”
At that Lord Marriot, solicitous now, came over and laid a hand on my arm. “Now you promised me you’d see this thing through with me.”
“I did not accept your money, David,” I reminded him.
“I respect you all the more for that,” he answered. “You were willing to be here simply as a friend. As for this change of heart… At least stay a while and see the thing under way.”
I sighed and reluctantly nodded. Our friendship was a bond sealed long ago, in childhood. “As you wish—but if and when I’ve had enough, then you must not try to prevent my leaving.”
“My word on it,” he immediately replied, briskly pumping my hand. “Now then: a bite to eat and a drink, I think, another log on the fire, and then we can begin…”
II
The late autumn evening was setting in fast by the time we gathered around a heavy, circular oak table set centrally upon the library’s parquet flooring, in preparation for Lavery’s demonstration of his esoteric talent. The other three guests were fairly cheery, perhaps a little excited—doubtless as a result of David’s plying them unstintingly with his excellent sherry—and our host himself seemed in very good spirits; but I had been little affected and the small amount of wine I had taken had, if anything, only seemed to heighten the almost tangible atmosphere of dread which pressed in upon me from all sides. Only that promise wrested from me by my friend kept me there; and by it alone I felt bound to participate, at least initially, in what was to come.
Finally Lavery declared himself ready to begin and asked us all to remain silent throughout. The lights had been turned low at the medium’s request and the sputtering logs in the great hearth threw red and orange shadows about the spacious room.
The experiment would entail none of the usual paraphernalia beloved of mystics and spiritualists; we did not sit with the tips of our little fingers touching, forming an unbroken circle; Lavery had not asked us to concentrate or to focus our minds upon anything at all. The antique clock on the wall ticked off the seconds monotonously as the medium closed his eyes and lay back his head in his high-backed chair. We all watched him closely.
Gradually his breathing deepened and the rise and fall of his chest became regular. Then, almost before we knew it and coming as something of a shock, his hands tightened on the leather arms of his chair and his mouth began a silent series of spastic jerks and twitches. My blood, already cold, seemed to freeze at the sight of this, and I had half risen to my feet before his face grew still. Then Lavery’s lips drew back from his teeth and he opened and closed his mouth several times in rapid succession, as if gnashing his teeth through a blind, idiot grin. This only lasted for a second or two, however, and soon his face once more relaxed. Suddenly conscious that I still crouched over the table, I forced myself to sit down.
As we continued to watch him, a deathly pallor came over the medium’s features and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of his chair. At this point I could have sworn that the temperature of the room dropped sharply, abruptly. The others did not seem to note the fact, being far too fascinated with the motion of Lavery’s exposed Adam’s apple to be aware of anything else. That fleshy knob moved slowly up and down the full length of his throat, while the column of his windpipe thickened and contracted in a sort of slow muscular spasm. And at last Lavery spoke. He spoke—and at the sound I could almost feel the blood congealing in my veins!
For this was in no way the voice of a man that crackled, hissed and gibbered from Lavery’s mouth in a—language?—which surely never originated in this world or within our sphere of existence. No, it was the voice of…something else. Something monstrous!
Interspaced with the insane cough, whistle and stutter of harshly alien syllables and cackling cachinnations, occas
ionally there would break through a recognisable combination of sounds which roughly approximated our pronunciation of “Atlach-Nacha”: but this fact had no sooner made itself plain to me than, with a wild shriek, Lavery hurled himself backwards—or was thrown backwards—so violently that he overturned his chair, rolling free of it to thrash about upon the floor.
Since I was directly opposite Lavery at the table, I was the last to attend him. Lord Marriot and Turnbull on the other hand were at his side at once, pinning him to the floor and steadying him. As I shakily joined them I saw that Old Danford had backed away into the furthest corner of the room, holding up his hands before him as if to ward off the very blackest of evils. With an anxious inquiry I hurried towards him. He shook me off and made straight for the door.
“Danford!” I cried. “What on earth is—” But then I saw the way his eyes bulged and how terribly he trembled in every limb. The man was frightened for his life, and the sight of him in this condition made me forget my own terror in a moment. “Danford,” I repeated in a quieter tone of voice. “Are you well?”
By this time Lavery was sitting up on the floor and staring uncertainly about. Lord Marriot joined me as Danford opened the library door to stand for a moment facing us. All the blood seemed to have drained from his face; his hands fluttered like trapped birds as he stumbled backwards out of the room and into the passage leading to the main door of the house.
“Abomination!” he finally croaked, with no sign of his customary “Harumph!” “A presence—monstrous—ultimate abomination—God
help us…!”
“Presence?” Lord Marriot repeated, taking his arm. “What is it, Danford? What’s wrong, man?”
The old man tugged himself free. He seemed now somewhat
recovered, but still his face was ashen and his trembling unabated. “A presence, yes,” he hoarsely answered, “a monstrous presence! I could not even try to exorcise…that!” And he turned and staggered along the corridor to the outer door.