by steve higgs
Then the table began to rattle. Only a little at first, the gentle sound of the crockery and cutlery knocking together, but then with more vigour and a wine bottle fell over, Patience catching it before it could spill and taking a deep swig to calm her nerves. It was like being in an earthquake, I imagined, but the floor wasn’t shaking, just the table.
To the other side of me, Tempest was calm, but he looked unhappy. I had no idea what was going on and I couldn’t imagine he did either. However, he refused to believe in anything he couldn’t see or touch so I wasn’t sure what he would make of this. I held onto my chair; it was solid and stable which was good because I had to admit I was getting a little freaked out now. Then the moan from the fireplace, which had sounded like an onrushing wind, reached a deafening crescendo and burst forth carrying soot and dirt with it. The candles all went out instantly and Lord Hale cried out in terror.
The room was thrown into utter blackness but only for a second as people touched their phones and little pools of light appeared, followed by bright swathes of light as people activated their torch apps.
I managed to fumble mine out from the little clutch bag too and that was when I saw a sight that would stay with me for the rest of my life. Looking down the table as cries of fear tore from the throats of men and women alike, I saw that a huge monster had a man in its grip. I was rooted to the spot, but the dinner guests at that end of the table were coming my way, all of them trying to get away from the creature.
Like a bear crossed with a spider it had a large body and walked upright but its forelimbs were spindly and long. On its head, eyes glowed a deep orange like traffic lights fitted with a low wattage bulb and blue light spilled from its mouth like warm breath on a cold morning. It was grotesque.
Then, as it lifted the man into the air by his throat, it spoke. ‘All will perish here tonight.’ The sound of its voice was like no sound I had ever heard before. A rasping noise like metal being filed mixed with a lion’s deep roar.
Everyone in the room was frozen in fright or trying to get away from it. With a final snarl, which elicited a fresh round of gasps and squeals, the monster turned and ran, reached the wall behind it and clambered up to disappear through a hole in the ceiling.
Torch light tracked it as it fled and then there was nothing but silence.
Ham Hock Terrine. Saturday, December 10th 2008hrs
The silence stretched for a couple of seconds and then everyone started moving and talking at once. The range of responses was diverse to say the least. Patience ran screaming for the door. I heard a thump as she hit it and it failed to open. I swung my torch to find her sprawled on the floor. Tempest’s mother was crossing herself and saying some kind of prayer while his father held her. Toward the head of the table, Gina and the three professors were talking fast in animated terms; the four of them had formed a huddle but they looked excited more than anything.
Lord Hale appeared stunned by the event. His face ashen, and a hand on the table to steady himself, others soon saw him and came to his aid. ‘Yes, yes, thank you,’ I heard him reply as they settled him into a seat.
But, a whoop of delight caught everyone’s attention. It came from Frank and he had a huge grin plastered across his face. ‘Deny that, Tempest Michaels!’ he laughed. ‘Tell me that was a man in a costume!’
Patience interrupted before Tempest could respond. ‘Hey, stupid white people! We’re locked in! Will someone please join me in panicking.’ Then she went back to kicking and thumping the door.
Tempest made a tutting noise with his mouth; it was the sound he made when he was thinking. I turned my attention to Big Ben. ‘Ben, do you have a cigarette lighter with you?’ In response, a flame flicked into life next to me. ‘Let’s relight these candles, shall we?’
As light from the candle in front of me cast fresh shadows, I turned off the torch on my phone to preserve the battery and sat down. Tempest saw me, flashed a smile of agreement and took his seat too.
Over my shoulder, I called out to get Patience’s attention. ‘Patience, won’t you join us? Our starters look delicious.’ All along the table, the guests began sitting. ‘I’m hungry,’ I announced. ‘I’m not sure what just happened but adding hunger to the confusion will not help.’ Then I picked up my knife and fork, selected a bread roll from the platter and started eating. There was a faint trace of soot from the chimney but not enough to stop me from eating. It gave me something to do while my adrenalin settled. As I swallowed the first bite, I asked, ‘Lord Hale, who was it that the monster took, please? I didn’t get the chance to meet him before dinner.’
From the head of the table, Lord Hale, still looking bewildered, said, ‘His name was Mortimer Sebastian Crouch. He was a paranormal investigator much like you and Mr Michaels. I had to talk him into coming and now I feel responsible for his death.’
‘Are you sure he is dead?’ Tempest asked, deliberately challenging the concept.
I had a better question though, ‘Why did he take Mr Crouch and not you, Lord Hale?’
Lord Hale looked down at his plate, shaking his head from side to side as if having an argument with himself. ‘Perhaps because my birthday is not until tomorrow? He said, “All will perish here tonight.” I think he means to pick us off one at a time. We must work together to defeat it or capture it and escape this place.’
Dr Lyndon Parrish was the first to offer an opinion on the monster itself. ‘What I believe we just saw was a demon. It manifested physically, so we can quickly conclude that it is not a ghost or spectre. Apparitions such as memories of the dead cannot take physical form. It was clearly not a lycanthrope, skinwalker or shifter of any other kind and did not resemble any creature that I have ever read about. Demons, however, can take any form they choose.’
From the far end of the table, Gina spoke up, ‘Our field of expertise is paranormal psychology. My colleagues and I are somewhat lost with physical supernatural beings, but whatever that was, it was not a ghost.’
The man next to her chipped in. ‘Our equipment might have been able to measure energy readings from it, but alas, it isn’t yet set up. It was our plan for after dinner.’
I felt the chair move next to me as Patience returned to the table. ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘We are going to sit and have some nice dinner now? That guy just got eaten by a monster, why is no one else freaking out?’ The answer to her question was that I was indeed freaking out. I was doing my best to keep a lid on it though because it would do me no good to panic.
Tempest cleared his mouth with some water and spoke, ‘As the eternal sceptic in the room, I will say that I cannot yet explain what we saw.’ Frank whooped again. ‘However, once I have eaten this lovely ham hock terrine, I plan to find my way out of this room and then start looking for the missing man. Something is going on and I would like to get to the bottom of it.’
Sitting opposite him, his mother poured herself a generous glass of red wine and downed half of it. ‘That thing said we would all perish tonight. I think I would like to go home now. Perhaps, Tempest, you would be so kind as to locate the nearest exit for us before you spend too much time working out what that thing was.’
‘Of course, Mother.’
‘It should be possible to summon the creature and trap it,’ said Dr Parrish between bites. ‘We need to know its name to do that and a few other vital pieces of information, but it might be possible to draw it into a demon trap if it returns for any of us.’
Frank rummaged in a pocket. ‘I have a pocket watch.’
‘What’s that for,’ I asked.
Dr Parrish answered, ‘To hold the demon, we need to freeze time. We can do that symbolically by stopping the hands of the clock provided the pocket watch is inside the circle when we close it.’
Tempest laughed at me. ‘You really should learn to not ask questions.’ He was right, it just encouraged their craziness. ‘This ham is lovely,’ he commented as he scraped together the last few morsels on his plate. ‘I think though, that we shou
ld start looking for a way out. Don’t you agree?’
I did, and so did most of the others, though the scientists had gone into a huddle and were arguing about something. I left them to get on with it as I pushed back my chair and stood up. I planned to do something productive now. I had no idea what that might be, but I wasn’t in the mood to be trapped anywhere so whatever I was going to do, the intended enterprise was escape.
Just to my left, beyond Big Ben, another man was also getting to his feet. I hadn’t paid him much attention until now, but the flamboyant swish of his arms caught not only my attention, but that of almost every set of eyes in the room.
‘I think,’ he started, ‘that perhaps it is time for me to announce myself.’ He was the man I mentally labelled as a magician when I first saw him in the bar. In his late fifties, his grey hair was shoulder length and pulled into a ponytail behind his head, his grey beard was close-cropped but also full, so it covered his entire face and he wore round glasses with a wire rim. ‘My name is Caratacus Soulfull. I am a representative of the British senior council of wizards. Like the rest of you, I am here at Lord Hale’s request.’
‘Of course you are, dear chap,’ said Big Ben, smiling down at the smaller man. ‘Can you do the one with the rabbit? Hold on. No, how about the one where you make a saucy assistant appear? That would be good.’ When the wizard ignored him, Big Ben persisted. ‘You must have a saucy assistant. Even the rubbish magicians on television have a saucy assistant.’
‘I am not a magician!’ the wizard roared, and with that he took several paces back and began to move his hands in circles.
‘This should be good,’ whispered Tempest who had come to stand close to my back, the material of his jacket brushing against the exposed skin of my shoulder.
Dim light appeared to emanate from the man’s fingers as they twirled. Then I began to feel the air moving and the strange sense of static electricity in the air. ‘I shall conjure a spell to detect our exit from this room,’ Caratacus announced, his focus and gaze absorbed by what his hands were doing.
It was an impressive display of convincing nonsense, if that was all it was. However, in the darkness of the room, I couldn’t tell that the man wasn’t actually weaving a spell. A ball of light now began to grow in his right hand. Sparkling and fizzing as if alive, his right hand stayed still as his left hand continued to dance around it, then with a whispered command I could not understand he pushed his right hand down to the floor and the ball of light vanished into the wooden floorboards.
Fascinated, I watched, transfixed just like everyone else in the room as the spell started moving across the floor. It appeared to have a life of its own, the sparkling light now mostly hidden as if inside the wooden floorboards so it appeared only as pinpricks visible through small knot holes or bore holes from long-dead woodworms.
As if insulted by the display, Tempest swung his torch to the floor and got onto his hands and knees to follow the light as it moved away.
Across the table, Frank cackled again. ‘I told you, Tempest. I told you there was more to this universe than you could explain.’
The wizard’s spell hit the wall and split off, heading both left and right as it tracked along the wood panels. It vanished behind oil paintings and tapestries but always emerged again, the faint sparkles seemingly inside the wall as the spell continued onwards.
‘What’s it doing?’ asked Patience, her voice hushed and quiet the way mine might have been if I had spoken.
Caratacus was watching the light just as intently, or perhaps even more so than the rest of us, but swung his attention to Patience now. With pride in his voice, he boasted, ‘It is finding our way out of this room. It is a seeking spell of my own design; one I have been perfecting over many years.’
‘How does it work?’ asked Tempest with no sense of sarcasm or irony in his voice.
The wizard shook his head. ‘The occult arts are not for mortals to know.’
‘You’re immortal then, are you?’ asked Big Ben. ‘Can we test that? I’ve always wanted to meet someone that thought they couldn’t die.’
‘I am demi-mortal,’ Caratacus explained. ‘I live a significantly longer time than a normal man. I am currently in my one-hundred and fifty-first year, but I am not immortal as you suggest and can die just like anyone else.’
Big Ben just sniggered. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to cater your birthday party. Imagine all those candles.’
The spell had now tracked all the way to the grand fireplace at the end of the room where it stopped. Where it had split into two parts, the other half tracked a longer route to arrive at the same place. Tempest continued to track it along the wall, knocking on the wall, presumably to find a hollow point or work out how the effect was being produced.
‘There is an exit behind the fireplace,’ announced the wizard, snapping his fingers. The sparkling lights extinguished to leave the wizard smiling at us with a triumphant expression. ‘All we need do now is work out how to access it.’
‘Really?’ asked Tempest’s father. ‘A secret exit behind a fireplace? Isn’t that a little clichéd? What next? Trap doors?’
‘Don’t wish too hard,’ I murmured to myself as I started following the wizard, and pretty much everyone else, toward the fireplace.
Patience caught hold of my arm. ‘Amanda, is this a wind up?’ she asked. I could hear the hope in her voice.
I offered her a wry smile. ‘Patience, I wish I had the resources to organise this kind of wind up for you. I have no idea what is going on, but I do intend to get out of here. Whether there is a way out through the fireplace or not, remains to be seen, but there are enough of us here to force our way out if it comes to it.’
That was a good point actually. Patience had hammered on the doors and announced them locked, but no one else had tried to open them since. I changed my direction, bumping into Big Ben in the dark but gave him a shove. ‘I need your muscles, big boy. Come along.’
‘Now we’re talking,’ he replied, swinging around to follow me. ‘Nothing like a near-death experience and the threat of a horrible end to make the girls want some action.’
I rolled my eyes and tutted. ‘Ben, you are such a dickhead. I want to see why this door won’t open. We came through it not long ago and it looked like an ordinary door to me. Now it won’t open? There’s something screwy going on.’
I reached the door with Patience and Big Ben on my shoulder. We weren’t alone though; another man had detached himself from the crowd. It was the dwarf. ‘Shouldn’t we all be helping to get out through the fireplace?’ he asked.
‘Why?’ I asked in reply without turning away from the door. ‘This is the door we came in through. Why don’t we go back out through that?’
‘I thought your friend said it was locked?’ he replied.
‘It is,’ said Patience.
‘And the wizard believes there is a way out for us over there,’ the dwarf added.
I got on my hands and knees, being careful to sweep my ballgown out of the way so I didn’t kneel on it, then used the light from my phone to look underneath the door. Scanning all the way along, I looked for a bolt or some other kind of physical barrier that would prevent the door from opening. The gap under the door was small, maybe three or four millimetres but it was enough to be certain that there was nothing visibly preventing the door from opening.
I stood up again. ‘Ben, can you look at the top? See if there is something physical to stop the door from opening?’
He replied and took my phone when I offered it. He had to stand on his tiptoes to look but he found nothing there either.
‘It will be magnetic,’ came Tempest’s voice from behind me.
The dwarf turned to face him. ‘I think we should all help with the search to find our way out through the fireplace, don’t you? You seem to be the sceptic of the group? You saw the wizard’s spell, are you able to deny what you saw?’
‘Yeah, Tempest,’ said Frank, clearly enjoying himself. ‘What
about the wizard’s spell?’
Tempest chuckled to himself. ‘Frank, I want you to really enjoy these moments, because when I show you the man orchestrating all these neat little tricks, you will be eating humble pie for a long time.’ He turned to his dad, someone who I knew had some experience as an electrical engineer. ‘What do you think, Dad? If it’s magnetic we just need to cut the power to it, right?’
‘Or short it out.’ His dad turned and looked around the room. Then spotted the bottle of wine in his wife’s hand. ‘Mary, give me that a moment, won’t you?’
He reached for the bottle, but she snatched it out of his reach. ‘Get your own. This’uns mine.’
Muttering, his dad walked to the table where he found a jug of water instead. ‘Water will work better anyway.’
More of the crowd from the fireplace had moved down to see what we were doing. I could hear the wizard and another man trying to get everyone to come back. ‘There will be a switch or a lever somewhere, we just need to search for it,’ said Caratacus, trying to encourage everyone to help out.
Lord Hale’s voice also echoed out of the dark. ‘This is a very old house. Priest holes, secret passages and the like were not uncommon when it was built. I should not be surprised to find an exit behind the fireplace.’ His voice sounded hopeful to me, like he was hoping we would abandon what we were doing and try the wizard’s daft idea.
‘Or it might be a secret incantation,’ Dr Parrish suggested, joining in. ‘I bet there are clues in the room somewhere. I would put in clues to open a secret door if I was building one.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Lord Hale. ‘Well done, that man. Now we are thinking.’
Tempest’s dad stepped up to the door with the jug of water. ‘We need to get it flowing over the switch and down to earth in order to create a short. That might be difficult, or even impossible from this side as we need to convince the water to flow over the top of the door and down the other side and we need to guess where the magnetic lock is.’
