Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  Verse raised an eyebrow. "Reanimation? There are recorded instances of that?"

  "Unfortunately not. Only that one small tidbit I managed to find on the net. And that's the odd thing about this place. Finding reference to any aspect of its history, whether it's walking dead or not, proves almost impossible. There is some regional folklore - cross-generational anecdotal evidence from nearby towns, mostly - even a small amount of internet chatter, but nothing more, and nothing concrete at all. Parish records, coroner reports, court papers, police files, in fact just about everything that could potentially enlighten Boswell's history prior to the winter of 1944 has been systematically destroyed, erased or removed by a body or bodies unknown." Hannah paused. "I think someone wanted this place to vanish off the supernatural radar."

  "1944," Ness said. "When the town burned."

  Hannah nodded. "Another unhelpful snippet. If we believe the official version of events Boswell was the target of an incendiary assault from sea-borne Nazi forces that incinerated its population overnight. Fair enough, there are precedents for sea assaults along this coast. Whitby Abbey was damaged by an artillery bombardment in World War One. But an entire population fried? Hands up who doesn't think so."

  "The last year of the war," Verse said. "They had to come up with something so why not whip up some anti-Nazi bloodlust while doing so?"

  "Exactly. No, we're looking for a deeper truth here, perhaps quite literally."

  "Wha' I don' get," Ness said, "is why the place wasnae left to rot after the war."

  "It was, in a way. Boswell became subject to a compulsory purchase order by the MoD, ostensibly for marine training purposes, but in reality they simply sealed the place off for the next twenty years. Then in 1966 governmental cutbacks forced the sale of the site. The houses were bought job lot by a London-based development company called de Spina Investments. Also in 1966, the monastery, little more than a ruin then, was purchased by a religious sect, the Centre for Celestial Truth, who - and here's the interesting bit - excavated the ruin and rebuilt it to its original design."

  Verse whistled. "Quite some undertaking. More than simple aesthetics involved here? Maybe they wanted to replicate some original purpose?"

  Hannah nodded. "Possibly. We do know they had serious financial backers, and they're impossible to trace. That alone sets my alarm bell ringing. The monastery is therefore considered to be a focus for investigation."

  As Hannah spoke, the Iroquois started to circle the building itself. Below was a structure that bore more resemblance to a stone fort than monks' retreat, built with thick outer walls, solid iron-ribbed doors and a crenellated roof that looked too much like battlements to feasibly be anything else. The only break in the otherwise formidable edifice was an opaque green glass dome on the roof but this was likely an adaption to the old place, made to cover - or conceal - what would once have been its central courtyard.

  Hannah handed the briefing over to Verse.

  "As with the town, we don't have much," the ex-priest began. "The monastery was built in 1173, predating the town by fifty years. The consensus is that its presence here attracted the settlers, as these things tend to do. The founding order, the Brotherhood of the Fallen, were a somewhat mysterious bunch about whom few - and no complete - church records remain. What we do know is that they appear to have travelled to the area with a delegation assigned to rebuild the nearby Whitby Abbey, but thereafter any connections between it and the Brotherhood were swiftly severed."

  "Brotherhood of the Fallen?" Hannah mused. "An outcast order of some kind?"

  "Possibly. But if that were the case why would the Whitby delegation countenance their presence in their party?"

  "Safety in numbers," Ness offered. "There were some nasty bastards runnin' round these parts way back when. They'da needed point, perimeter, back-up."

  "They were bloody monks, not Bravo-Two-Zero."

  "The man might have a point, doll," Verse said. "A piece of local folklore - no more than a footnote, really - in Doreen Greenwood's Weird Whitby mentions the Brotherhood of the Fallen and has it that they carried with their number an object of some value."

  "An object o' some value," Ness echoed, and his face fell. "Och no, no' tha' agin."

  Verse shook his head. "You've been reading too much Dan Brown. No, according to Greenwood, the keeper of a local hostelry where our boys spent a night en route found amongst the monks' things an ornate case crafted of a metal described as 'odd of texture and chill to the skin'. Like touching hoarfrost, he said."

  "Don't suppose he had a peek inside?"

  Verse smiled at Hannah. "He did, indeed. What he found were two orbs. No more information than that but interesting enough, wouldn't you say?"

  "Two orbs," Hannah repeated. "The Eyes?"

  "Or bollocks, for all we know," Ness said. "Ah dinnae suppose these things are still around so's we can check?"

  "What do you think? The case and its contents disappeared along with the monks."

  "The monks disappeared?" Ness queried.

  Verse sighed. "Not literally, no. But as soon as the construction of the monastery was complete the Brotherhood of the Fallen did lock themselves away from the world. Completely self-sufficient, they lived lives of total deprivation, taking amongst others, vows of abstinence, silence, and chastity, of course."

  Hannah pulled a face. "Bummer."

  "Och, withou' a doubt!" Ness roared. The Scot made thrusting moves with his pelvis and grunted obscenely.

  "Keep it to yourself, you bloody animal."

  Ness loomed right into Hannah's face, sucked in her scent deeply through his nostrils and sighed. "Ah, do ah havetae? Christ, t'is a cryin' shame you're a dyke."

  Hannah snarled and glanced sideways at a moving Verse to shake her head: he wasn't worth it. The priest glowered at the Scotsman, then returned to the subject at hand.

  "The question that needs to be asked is why is the monastery built like a fortress? In order to protect the orbs? But why bring them somewhere so remote when they could still have been better protected in London? So, if not the orbs, what? Tell me, why in hell would the Brotherhood of the Fallen need fortifications like these?"

  "They never revealed a purpose?" Hannah asked.

  "Not in a hundred and seventy years, no. Maybe they would have done eventually but the whole lot of them perished from the Black Death in 1349."

  "A wee bit careless, that. Ah guess they musta opened their doors to somebody."

  Verse nodded. "There's the thing. Towards the end rumours emerged of abuse involving the people of the town - men, women and children, I ought to add - but these rumours were, of course, quashed by the Synod of Whitby, the nearest authority."

  "Who watched as the townsfolk themselves popped off with the Black Death?"

  "Boswell became a plague town, yes."

  "So nice and convenient for the church," Hannah said. "No need to tell the world how their halos slipped. Jesus H, they do seem to have had more than their fair share of shit around here."

  "Don't they. The question is, why the late and sudden change of behaviour of the monks? There's got to be a reason. Once more, all we have is an oblique reference in sanitised church records. A mention that following the Black Death, the Synod spent a year in situ removing God knows what from the cloisters, and the monastery was desanctified in 1402."

  "Sounds like they sent in the cleaners," Hannah said. "And the orbs?"

  "If they existed, most likely removed to Whitby Abbey. Problem is, Whitby Abbey itself was shut down by Henry VIII in 1539. And Henry, bless his soul, stripped the place of its valuables. It is there, I'm afraid, that the trail goes cold."

  "That's going on five hundred years ago," Mikey Ness pointed out. "So wha' became o' the Boswell monastery after that?"

  "A chequered history. A brief and unsuccessful attempt to resanctify it in the 1600s, rumours it was occupied for a time by the Knights of Saint Francis-"

  "The Hellfire Club?"

  "An early
incarnation, yes. And finally it was abandoned and left to ruin sometime in the mid to late 1800s. One more thing. The ruins suffered major subsidence damage in 1944, apparently due to a systemic cave collapse beneath Scratch Tor. This, we are told, was yet another side-effect of the so-called incendiary attack."

  "Sounds like the caves are our second focus."

  "Oh, yeah," Hannah said eagerly.

  The Iroquois banked away from the monastery now and flew a small distance around the tor to where a path led up to a dark gash in the hillside: the entrance to a cave. More accurately the one-time mouth of a cave. Only a few feet in, it was blocked by a cave-in as solid as the rock through which it had once granted access.

  "What you're looking at," Hannah explained, "is one of only two known passages to the interior of Scratch Tor. The other is down on the beach, and in a similar state of collapse. They also happen to be at absolute Ground Zero. In other words, wherever the ley pulses are going, these passages lead."

  "So we blow ourselves a hole and kill what's in there," Ness said. "It ain't rocket science."

  Hannah nodded. "The Brigadier has a specialist demolitions team ready to move on our mark." She looked at Ness. "But there's little point going in there half-cocked, is there? We need to recce first."

  "Ask around town," Verse said. "See if anybody knows anything." He too looked at Ness. "That's our job."

  "And mine's the monastery," Hannah said.

  "An' who decided you got tha'?" Ness protested.

  Verse chuckled and smiled at Hannah. "Trust me, you wouldn't fit in."

  Ness stared at Chapter and Verse but neither of them elaborated. "Fine," he said after a second. "So wass this additional data Kostabi downloaded wi' the waveform files?"

  "Saved the best bit 'til last," Hannah said, and span the laptop. A CG version of the surrounding landscape with Scratch Tor prominent was displayed on the screen. "This is a graphic representation of the tor built from the data Siddhi gathered in tracking the ley surges. A composite geophysical scan of the tor constructed with microwave, laser and thermal modifiers. Other than the collapsed caves there isn't really much to see on the first few levels. Go deeper, however, and..." Hannah punched a key and a number of layers of wireframe hillside lifted away like tissues pinched from a box. They represented fifteen or twenty yards of the tor's depth and a labyrinth of lines that clearly were caves became visible. "Here we get a little more detail but still nothing to get those juices flowing. But worthy of note is the fact that it is around this level that the system ceases to be fully blocked." Hannah punched another key. "Go deeper still and... ta-da!"

  The laptop was displaying the very heart of the tor, and in it, as obvious as a tumour picked out on an X-ray, was an unidentifiable dark shape obscuring the normal rock. It could simply have been a denser part of the tor's geological makeup apart from one fact. The image was timecoded and had been logged overnight. And as infinitesimal as it was, something happened in that time.

  The shape appeared to breathe.

  "Ah think," said Mikey Ness, "that it's time to start asking questions."

  "Game on," said Lawrence Verse.

  Hannah nodded. She patted the helicopter pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.

  EIGHT

  The helicopter dropped Chapter, Verse and Ness on the car park, and the three of them descended the steps into town. It was curious, but the further down they went, the less obvious their awareness of ley line energy in the air seemed to become, as if they were entering the eye of the storm. More curious still, their mood seemed to become duller, flatter, until by the bottom step it hung over them like the invisible cloud Verse had sensed as they flew over. The ennui was reflected again by the inhabitants - what few were out in the lanes, anyway - who offered the strangers in their midst indifferent looks with a suggestion of resentment of the intrusion into their misery lurking just under their ambivalent veneer. And it wasn't just the people. Close to, the very buildings of the town radiated a peculiar dankness, as if the stone out of which they were built had in some strange way never been quarried from the local hills and lay buried there still in some black and silent world moistened by a slowly trickling, tainted stream.

  Great God, Lawrence Verse thought, paraphrasing. This is an awful place.

  Ness put it more succinctly. "It's a shithole. Royston Vasey without the laughs."

  Hannah stared at him. The bulky Scot was - as usual when out in public - garbed in an overcoat, hat and shades that made him look like Ben Grimm. Fugitive gear. It was sometimes easy to forget that since absconding from his mental institution he had cold-bloodedly smashed in the skull of the government minister who put him there. "They let you watch that in your padded cell, did they?"

  Ness growled and pointed a finger towards the tor. "Aye. Ronnie Corbett in Sorry!, too. Get thee to a monastery, y'unnatural bitch."

  Verse railed. "So now he's a comedian..."

  "Forget it," Hannah said. "Trust me, it'll be a pleasure." She winked at Verse. "Later, huge guy."

  "Go easy, doll."

  The ex-priest watched Hannah trudge away to the path to the monastery and then he and Ness parted company themselves. They'd decided that the best thing was that he'd have a nosey around the caves while Ness tried at least to chat with the locals in the town.

  Ness made his way down to the bay, stepped onto the shingles, boots crunching on stones still wet from a receding tide. The sound took on a slight echoic quality as he made his way under the ledge of the collapsed sea cave. Verse slipped off his shades and examined the rockfall. The merest of breezes was detectable coming from beyond it, and Verse gagged. It was utterly foul.

  "Stinks, doesn't it?"

  Verse turned to greet a man in his mid-sixties dressed in a muddied boiler suit slung with bits of caving equipment.

  "Saw you from the cliff," the man said. "It's not often you get strange faces around here." He stepped forward, indicating the fall. "They say it's the tides stirring up the dead in the deeper chambers."

  "Do they?" Verse said.

  "Scratch Tor's a dangerous system, at least was before it collapsed. Folk have gone missing over the years. Quite a lot of them, if you want the truth. Most of 'em are likely still down there." The man stuck out his hand. "Jonathan Hemlock."

  "Lawrence Verse."

  Hemlock glanced at Verse's crucifix. "You some kind of priest, Lawrence?"

  Verse smiled, a little sadly. "Some kind. But these days perhaps more of an agent of the Lord." He changed the subject. "These caves are tidal?"

  Hemlock nodded. "Two entrances below sea level churning with flashtides, riptides, tidal surges, whirlpools... you name it. Totally inaccessible. Be down there at the wrong time, which is all of the time, mind, and you could be washed about in those caves without ever being flushed out again. If there were owt left to flush after those rocks had ground you down, of course."

  "You sound quite knowledgeable on the subject," Verse said. Morbidly so, in fact.

  Hemlock jangled his equipment. "Whitby Cavers Club. Been spelunking on this coast for years."

  "Then perhaps you could help. Is there another way in?"

  "Oh, you don't want to go in there, lad."

  "No," Verse lied. "I'm just curious."

  Hemlock nodded. "Not any more. What you're in now used to be the biggest - Saknusem's Swallow - and up on the tor there's Leidenbrock's Ledge... But both collapsed during the war, no one's quite sure why. There're rumours o' two more but I'm still looking for one while t'other I've wanted permission to investigate for years. On private land, you see. Right under the monastery."

  "Under the monastery?"

  "That's what they say. O' course, no one round about's old enough to remember when the monastery or its ruins weren't here, so who's to say, eh?"

  "The owners won't give you permission?"

  "Not a cat in 'ell's chance. Keeps themselves to themselves, that lot. Bunch o' funny women to a man."

  Verse smiled. Exactly
why Hannah had been the best choice for that particular recce. And maybe she was already answering the question that had immediately sprung to his mind - namely, why the bloody hell would anyone build a monastery over a hole?

  "It's all to do with the local legend," Hemlock said, as if reading his mind. "Heap o' horseshit if you ask me but summat is supposed to a hit the tor a long, long time ago - summat big, and from the skies. It's said the impact split Scratch in half, and that whatever had come down - a monster - had crawled inside the fissure, then down into the dark. Some say it's why the church came 'ere in't first place. That it were summat evil, and the monastery were built to cap the 'ole."

  "And... this monster," Verse probed. "Do you know what it was meant to be?"

  Hemlock laughed. "Some'ow I didn't take you as a speleologist, Mr Verse. Is that why you're really here? On a monster hunt?"

  "As I said, I'm curious..."

  "Then you've got a lot to be curious about... 'cause that's not the only local legend. Which do you want? That the thing that fell from the sky was a devil? Or a spaceman - ET? That maybe it didn't fall from the sky at all but is, in fact, the ancient Boswell Wyrm? Or how about the great, wounded sea-monster that crawled over this very shingle then into this very cave, its scream o' pain the thing that wrent the rock?"

  "Quite some menagerie," Verse agreed.

  "Oh, there's more. Not the monster as such but sightings o' dead people over the years. Strange troglodyte-like creatures. And back in the days when the caves were briefly mined for tin, tales o' knockers spooking the workers, luring the poor idiots into the unworked passages from where they never returned..."

  "Sound like this place should have had its very own issue of the Fortean Times."