by Mark Morris
Lennox leant against a tree, then pulled away. More than ever he wanted to run back up the drive to the road, the car, to Lisa. Her warmth, her embrace, her kiss. She understood him, accepted him, cared, whether his memories were complete or not. But no. He wanted her to be proud of him. Then they could go home, back to London, far, far away from where he’d grown up. Back to the University to teach. Facts. Figures. Reality. He could go back to that. But first of all, this. Not even for Lisa, in fact. Just for himself. Just so he knew, so he remembered, and so he could be proud of himself. He’d always been the timid one, nervous and shy. He’d given his knowledge to Terry and Doug, and they’d given him their confidence and strength in return. Symbiosis.
They would have wanted a den that was like a fort. He would have looked for somewhere hidden but safe. Part of a cellar, perhaps.
A knoll rose up on his left, crowned by broken stubs of wall like jagged rotten teeth. Or the battlements of a mediaeval castle. Yes, that would have caught Terry’s eye, and Doug’s. Of course, there’d be places like this all over the woods, but… but was it wishful thinking, or did it look familiar?
He climbed up the knoll, shining the torch ahead. This had been the corner of a room, because the wall bent into a right angle. The ground had risen up under it since the Hall’s destruction; the wall had broken and cracked into sections. Could this really be the same place his struggling, half-complete memories were trying to convince him it was? The roots would have grown thicker since then, of course – the trees had had another thirty years to change the landscape still further. But even so.
Lennox crouched and studied the wall. The stones were covered with moss. But something was familiar. Something – his hand moved almost of its own volition, to a section of wall that somehow seemed particularly familiar, and his fingers dug into the moss and pulled a chunk of it away. On the stone beneath, three sets of initials had been incised. DT. TW. RL.
Again Lennox was forced to gasp for breath with a constricted chest, but this time it was from excitement and not fear. This had been the place. Enough of a fortress for Terry and Doug – but he would have looked for a cellar.
He swept his hand back and forth across the leaf-littered ground, shining the torch. Dead dry leaves, twigs, soil, grass, stones – and then his fingers found something, under the dirt. A flat, regular surface, of the kind that Nature on her own did not provide.
He scraped up the earth and twigs and leaves, found wooden slats and an iron ring-bolt set into them. How could the searchers have missed this? Maybe they hadn’t missed it; maybe they’d only found no clues. But they hadn’t had what he had. He had the vault and everything locked away in it. Maybe this would unlock it.
Lennox hauled on the ring-bolt. He was afraid it would tear free of the old spongy wood, or that the hatch wouldn’t lift, having warped or rotted into place. But then it moved, so suddenly he almost pitched backwards down the side of the knoll. Beyond the hatch was darkness, and a thick, foetid smell that made him draw back and briefly tempted him to close the hatch again. But no; he could feel the memories trembling at the edge of release, like figures about to emerge from the shadows. Like the two small figures who stood among the trees at the foot of the knoll, pallid faces turned up towards him.
Lennox made a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a strangled cry. He refused to believe what he saw. Whatever had happened to Doug and Terry, and it could have been nothing good, they couldn’t be children anymore.
And they weren’t. When he looked again, there was no sign of them. There were some silver birches among the trees. Their pale bark must have looked like faces in the twilight. Even if one of the figures had seemed to have been wearing a red and blue striped V-neck jumper just like the one that had been Doug’s favourite. Again he was tempted to leave and come back in the morning. Cold light. Day time. He was close enough to remembering now, wasn’t he? It would only take a small push. But what if it didn’t work in daylight? What if the vault took advantage of the delay to seal itself all the tighter? No, he was too close now to turn back.
He shone the torch through the open hatch, and to his surprise saw a ladder leading down. It must have been left over from the original cellar, and yet it looked sturdy enough. More than sturdy enough to bear his weight.
He hesitated again; he could imagine the rungs giving way underneath him, pitching him to the floor. Broken bones, unable to move, and then watching the hatch fall shut above him again. Perhaps Doug and Terry were still down there. But did that make sense? If they’d become trapped, what had happened to him? Why had he locked away all memory of that evening?
He extended a leg through the hatch and put a foot on one of the rungs, leant his weight on it. It held. “Sod it,” he muttered to himself, then put the torch between his teeth and climbed down.
The odour intensified. He smelt decay, and an ammoniac reek. When his feet touched the floor, things crunched beneath them. He wanted to believe they were twigs or old leaves or dead insects, but he knew they weren’t. Any more than the faint sounds he could hear, like kittens mewing, were in his imagination.
He shone the torch around. The space was huge, a vast earthen chamber, and there were holes in the walls – tunnel entrances. He shone his torch down one. It looked ribbed, as if they’d been dug out by hand.
Bones on the floor. Scattered and broken. Too large to be those of animals, surely. Urban deer, he thought again, trying to convince himself. Urban deer. But then he saw a skull on the floor, and it wasn’t that of any animal.
Out. Get out. He had to. It was nearly dark, and what if he hadn’t imagined the voices in the woods? But his limbs refused to obey him, and he hadn’t remembered yet. He hadn’t remembered, and yet he was close to it, he knew, closer than he had ever been or might come again, closer than he could bear to come and not remember.
At the end of the chamber, a number of long white objects dangled from the ceiling, and as far as he could tell, the mewing came from them. He steeled himself and advanced. The beam of the torch wavered in his shaking hand. What looked like fronds of white lace also hung down from above; when they touched his face they clung stickily to it until he clawed them away, rubbing the strands that stuck to his fingers off on his clothes.
The white objects were large, and of different sizes. Now that he’d reached them he could see there were more than he’d thought, and that the chamber was longer than it had appeared; dozens of the shapes dangled in rows, reaching back. Whenever he shone the torch on one of them, the woven fabric that composed its surface twitched and stirred. Lennox’s stomach churned queasily: he thought of the cocoons that insects wove.
They were people-sized, he realised. Some as large as adults, and some the size of children.
He shone his torch at the closest cocoon, and the light probed easily through the gossamer veils of fabric – of cobweb – and found a face.
It was gaunt, wizened, mummified. A skull with leathery skin stretched taut across the bones, with faded, straw-like hair still clinging to its scalp. Its eye sockets gazed upwards, and its mouth yawned open in a soundless cry.
Until it felt the light upon its face, and tilted its head to look at him.
Its eye sockets weren’t empty. Something still glistened inside them; something that still saw. The shrunken mouth moved feebly, and that thin, beseeching mew emerged. Lennox backed away; the beam of his torch wavered down to the cobwebs shrouding its chest and picked out the faded blue and red stripes of a V-neck jumper.
“Hiya, Robbo.”
Doug dropped through the trapdoor and landed in a crouch in front of him, straightening up to give his old familiar gap-toothed grin. Terence climbed down the ladder, pulling the hatch closed. “Pleased to see us?” he said.
“Too good to talk to the likes of us, are you now?” said Doug.
Soft movements sounded behind Lennox; he turned and saw low, squat figures
in sacking robes emerging from the tunnels. Their cowls hid their faces, and Lennox was glad of that as their hands were bad enough; in fact, they didn’t really have hands at all. Instead, a single curved, chitinous claw, sprouting from a clump of stiff black hairs, emerged from each rough sleeve. The creatures began to make a sound: a low, chittering hum.
“Welcome back,” said Doug, and his mouth stretched impossibly wide.
Lennox saw something bristling and black starting to squeeze out into view, and finally he remembered. But if they’d expected it to paralyse him, it didn’t.
It was a matter of fight or flight, he realised, and he couldn’t flee because he was surrounded and the exits barred. Very well, then: he’d fight. He found himself crouching and picking up one of the long bones on the floor to wield as a club; he was surprised how easily it came to him, along with rage. Now his memory had returned, he was battling to keep it back, to prevent it swamping his awareness. But he remembered enough to feel fury and disgust, and, born out of that, the desire to smash and wound. To kill.
It didn’t seem to impress Doug or Terry or the other creatures. A cold hissing laughter came from Doug and the others, gloating and repellent. Terry’s laugh was still that of the child he’d been as he came forward. “Ooh,” he said. “Look who’s a big hard guy now. Reckons he’s gonna take us all on. That right, Robbo?”
“Get back,” he heard himself say. “I’ll fucking twat you.” The language of the playground. Lennox hefted the thighbone; Terry opened his mouth and laughed out loud.
They were closing in, all around him. Terry reached out to snatch the bone from his hand. Lennox jerked the weapon back out of his reach, stumbling backwards, then jumping sideways to avoid something that tried to grasp his shoulder. And that just made them laugh louder, and louder, and louder.
His rage flew to a peak at their mockery, but even as he swung the femur, he felt sure that if it didn’t shatter into dust on impact, it would have no effect on his attackers. He was resigned to defeat already, to going down with at least a show of defiance, and so he was more astonished than any of them, even than Terry, when the makeshift club connected with his old friend’s skull and Lennox felt things break and collapse beneath the blow.
Terry staggered sideways, eyes rolling, and fell to his knees. Lennox brought the thighbone down again, on the top of his head, and Terry pitched to the ground. Dead, stunned: Lennox neither knew nor cared, only that he’d managed to land a blow and make it count. He yelled and whirled about, swinging the bone again; the hooded things retreated. He spun back the way he’d come. Doug was advancing, his mouth now closed and what had been about to emerge from it concealed again, but Lennox ran at him, screaming, and swung another blow. Doug’s forehead collapsed beneath the impact, and he too fell.
Some of the creatures scattered as Lennox ran for the ladder; others stood their ground and made for him, but he had even fewer qualms about striking at them than he had at the things that bore the semblance of his friends. He struck and kicked – he stamped and trampled as one of them went down, but then stopped himself. He must escape, that was the priority: there were too many of them here to fight. Brittle though they seemed, they were far from strengthless or without weapons.
With the bone in one hand and the torch in the other he charged for the ladder. The bone was torn from his hands as he smashed it down on a hooded shape; either claws had seized it, or it had embedded itself in its target. Lennox looked back once as he scrambled up the ladder with the torch between his teeth, kicking out at the hands and claws that snagged at his clothes. To his dismay Doug and Terry had risen to their feet again, and the hooded shapes he’d felled were stirring too.
Doug and Terry ran for the ladder and climbed, swift as insects. Lennox heaved himself back outside into the near dark, slammed the hatch down on their pale, laughing faces, and began to run. But the woods were trackless, and as he blundered and stumbled over the uneven ground he heard the chittering sound coming through the trees. There were more of them, and they were swarming.
But then the ground began to level off, and he could see a long gap in the trees ahead – the driveway. He crashed towards it. Thorns and branches cut at his face and brambles dragged at his feet, but he broke through them and the lumpy ground gave way to the tarmac. He could see the streetlights gleaming on the road ahead, nesting among illuminated leaves, and ran faster, refusing to look behind him, willing his thundering heartbeat and rasping breath to drown out the sound that followed him.
He remembered it all now. The three of them climbing down into the cellar, finding the tunnels and the hanging things. The creatures humming as they’d emerged. He and Doug making it out, only to find the woods full of them. The icy, agonising bites, the paralysing venom. Being dragged back to the cellar to join Terry, and woven into their shrouds. The long, immobile days, hanging there, barely able to move, unable to make any noise other than a faint, kittenish mew. More bites, keeping them immobilised as the creatures fed off them.
Realising the venom’s effects wore off more quickly for him, that somehow he must have had a greater resistance to it than Terry or Doug. Clawing his way out of his cocoon; fleeing through the seemingly endless tunnels, evading pursuit and reaching the light again by sheer luck. Collapsing, shaking and spent, as his mind shut itself down and locked away the traumatic and impossible events he had endured.
And all this time, the things in the ruins and the woods had been waiting, for the return of the one who’d got away.
Well, they’d get their wish, because he would come back again. With help if he could, and if not, alone. Pour petrol into the underground chambers. Burn them all. It was the least he owed Terry and Doug, after leaving them behind.
Tomorrow. In the cold light.
He could see the gates, and beyond them the car. Lisa got out and dashed across the road, squeezing through the gates towards him. He wanted to shout at her to get back, to stay out, to get back to the car and be ready to drive as fast as she could. To get away from the New Hall while he babbled out what he remembered and hoped she believed it. But he saved his breath to run.
She reached out to him; he fell into her arms. “I remembered,” he said. “I remembered.”
And he opened his mouth to tell her the rest, but she only said, “I know,” then pushed him away and slammed the gates behind her.
She advanced on him, her arms outspread. The chittering hum rose behind him. Lisa’s mouth stretched wider and wider still. Stiff black fur, long curved chelicerae and eight coal-black eyes squeezed themselves into view, but the creature beneath her skin still spoke in her loved, familiar voice. “Admit it,” it said. “It’s better this way.”
The Importance of Oral Hygiene
Robert Shearman
I have been trying to write to you for some little while now, but every time I do it comes out wrong. But time is of the essence, I fear it may already be too late – and so however this letter turns out, I will send it – I shall bite the bullet, let the words fall where they will. And even now I can tell, with all this circuitous preamble, still I am putting off getting to the heart of the matter, and I must push on. I must concentrate, although concentration is such a hard thing for me nowadays. And I had not realised what a fine thing presence of mind can be until I had squandered it forever.
I urge you to read on. I do not presume to offer advice. Not advice, and not judgement neither. I fear you may be in grave danger. And you will understand that in my heart of hearts I truly care not that you are in danger, at times I would rejoice to see all manner of dreadful fates befall you, damn you, I say, damn you. But I think and hope and believe that I am a good Christian woman. In spite of all I have done. In spite of all I have become.
And still I labour the point…! Let me, at last, be blunt.
Point One. I believe that you are in love with my husband. Point Two. Moreover, I believe he is in love with yo
u. Point Three. Moreover still, I believe you have already enjoyed certain carnal pleasures with each other. Point Four (and this may be the most important Point). I know what form these carnal pleasures will have taken, and to what depths they will proceed if left unchecked, and the thought fills me with nausea. For my own jealous sake, naturally, but also, and I hope you can trust me, so very much for yours.
You must not see him again. You must break it off. When you have read this letter, I advise you immediately to pack your things. I advise you to tell your husband, if you have one, that you want to leave this town. Insist on it if you must. Because it is the only way you can be sure to put Crispin behind you. And then burn this letter, so it will never fall into the wrong hands, and cause such scandal to your reputation (and to mine, I suppose, but what of that, really, what of that now?).
I repeat – I do not judge you. I would say, there but for the grace of God go I. But I have gone, haven’t I? I have been, and I have wallowed in it, and I suspect God had really very little to do with the matter.
The man we love is sweet and even-tempered, for all that he trades in pain. But I fear the consequences of his finding this, and what actions he might be obliged to take against us both. Because I suspect he may be the very dev
* * *
I apologise for the interruption. Sometimes I lose control. Sometimes I go quite numb, and then I might stare out as if dead, or in a trance. Crispin gives me smelling salts, but they do not always bring me to my senses. He calls these my Deep Moods, and laughs at them as if they are a perfectly normal thing. I do not know for sure how I behave when the Deep Moods set upon me, I think very little at such times. There is a kind of peace to it, a rather melancholy peace but a peace nonetheless. It is taking me more and more frequently, so Crispin says. Crispin may be lying, but I do not think so. For all that he is a deceitful man (as you must already know so well) I do not believe he lies easily.
