by Simon Clark
Sterling Pound sat with his back to the wall of his room. He played the saxophone so quietly that the gentle notes sounded more like a breathy voice. He told himself to stop playing. But he’d drifted into a near-comatose state. He couldn’t stop if he tried. The phrasing of the instrument became the channel for an alien tongue that muttered from the glittering horn. The origin of the sound no longer came from Sterling’s lips and through the reed in the mouthpiece. Instead, it came ghosting from a cavity beneath the earth where a monstrous hatred for all things human remorselessly increased in pressure until it would erupt in a fury of hatred and destruction. And when the blind clock in The Good Heart struck twice something of that toxic passion sank into the body of the metallic note. It deformed its tone. The vibration reached such an intensity of pitch that everyone who heard it in the house covered their ears. They grimaced as the sound jagged at their nerves with the same kind of pain a dentist’s drill causes when it rips into the nerve of the root canal. Then the chime’s echo rolled through the stale air toward The Tower’s medieval core. The echo that had all the harsh finality of the slamming shut of a tomb door refused to fade. It rushed through the dark hollows of the house in a thickening pulse of sound. No walls blocked it. The furnishings did nothing to dampen its guttural resonance.
The black dog sitting upright on his bed snapped his teeth at the sound as it passed by. If only Jak could talk. He knew the signs of approaching danger …
CHAPTER 29
‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’
He spoke without turning from his file of oh-so precious song lyrics – those lyrics – that were going to earn Fabian a fortune.
Josanne sighed. ‘Haven’t been listening to what?’
‘I told you to keep out of the cellar.’
‘The cellar?’ Frowning, she shook her head. ‘Fabian. I’ve been nowhere near the cellar.’
‘No?’ He stroked the song sheets, like they were some bloody pet. ‘Are you sure?’
Irritated, she glared out of the window. ‘Of course, I’m sure.’ The setting sun channelled blood reds over the marsh. Its trees were all twisted man shapes with clutching hands.
‘Oh, Josanne, Josanne, Josanne …’ Fabian spoke in such a gloating way she shivered. ‘What are we going to do with a girl like you?’
‘Fabian. What the hell’s wrong with you? I’ve been nowhere near the bloody cellar.’
‘No?’
‘No!’
‘So where do you think you are right now?’
Josanne turned away from the window ready to chew Fabian out. But instead of seeing Fabian fondling his beloved songs she saw the festering brickwork of ancient vaults. The place was dimly lit by four naked light bulbs hanging by cords from the roof. For a century this grim, damp cellar full of shadows had been a dumping ground for unwanted property. On stone shelves were mouldering airmen’s uniforms. Ones that Josanne somehow knew had never been collected because the crews hadn’t made it back from their bombing missions alive. Old upright vacuum cleaners stood against one wall beneath white spun shrouds of spider web. There was something pitiful and shrunken about the abandoned Hoovers. And now in the uncertain light of the cellar they looked less like electrical appliances than dwarfish creatures standing mummified there in the gloom.
Get out of here, Josanne, get out … The voice in her head was as insistent as the one that asked how she’d got down here. She’d been talking to Fabian in the bedroom when all of a sudden she’d been—
What? Transported here?
How? By magic? Give me a break … Or sleep walking? That must be it. After what happened today is it surprising I’m sleep walking? And I’m wearing pyjamas, so that explains how I got down here.
But the cellar? Why sleepwalk down into the cellar?
OK, so get out. That thought had come sharply enough. She started to move back along through the tunnel-like vault, her heart thumping. God, it was so cold down here she could see her breath spurting in white clouds from her mouth. And that smell … it made her think of meat that was long past its best. She breathed through her mouth to divert the air from her nostrils … hell, that’s worse. She could taste the decay now. Moving faster, she headed for the cellar steps. Josanne needed company right now. Being down here was scaring the wits out of her. Nearly there. She saw the end of the cellar. Ahead, was the mould-covered wall. So that’s where the stairs would have to be … where they should be. She stopped dead. Her heart beating painfully and her frightened breathing surging in her ears.
‘Oh no …’ The words fell from her lips. This was the first time she’d been down into this grim subterranean vault. What she thought was the route to the stairs and back into the house was in reality the path deeper into the cellar. There were no stairs here; no welcoming doorway to the kitchen. She’d have to turn round and walk back the other way. Instantly her skin goosefleshed beneath her night clothes. A cold, wet tongue of air licked around her bare ankles.
I’m not going to make it back, she told herself as a sense of dread oozed into her. I’m not going to get out of here. For a moment she stood as still as stone. Her heart pounded against her ribs … a doom-laden rhythm that went throbbing down through her stomach to continue down into the rock slabs beneath her feet. She imagined the huge beat of terror spreading out through the floor that seemed to feed on the electric light, draining their radiance away into the roots of the house. Light bulbs flickered as if struggling to make up for the loss of illumination – but this damp, shadow-haunted vault was winning the fight. Josanne shivered to the pit of her bones.
Josanne thought: The house knows I’m down here. It can hear my heartbeat. She reached out to touch a wall that wept moisture from the nearby swamp. For a moment she believed she felt the heartbeat of the house flutter beneath the brickwork. The Tower is alive. It knows where I am. Just like a viper knows when a child is close … Get out of here, get out, get out … In her head the words flashed like lightning. She had to escape. Now! But as she ran through the vaulted passageways back to where she hoped the stairs would be, she realized she was too late.
One by one, the electric light bulbs dimmed, and then slowly died.
She didn’t stop. She blundered forward through the dark, her crabbed hands feeling along the cold, wet brick. God willing, in a few moments her fingers would close around the stair rail. Her toes might slam against the bottom step. But who cares … who gives a damn! She’d climb the stairs in five seconds flat, then she’d be free of this suffocating grave of a place. And why stop at the kitchen? She’d grab her car keys and drive home. Once she was a hundred miles from The Tower she’d feel safe again.
With the darkness as deep as that of any grave pressing against her eyes, she lurched through the iced wash of air. The only sound was the thud of her heart and the hiss of her own breathing. Nearly there, surely she must be nearly there, please God. This cellar couldn’t run underground forever, could it? Any second now she must—
There! Her hand struck something hard. The spindle of the banister. She must have found the staircase. Running her fingertips up the spindle she found the stair rail. That’s when she began to climb.
CHAPTER 30
The mood Adam was in he’d drink what was left of the red wine when he woke up in the morning. With the time nudging toward three, she decided to return it to the kitchen. Belle was mindful that Adam shouldn’t coarsen his voice by downing too much liquor. What’s more, there’s the old problem of wine staining his teeth. Teeth and hair were Adam’s assets as much as a strong singing voice. Belle knew the combination was enough to make them rich, and catapult them into the media spotlight – something they both craved. She was pragmatic to recognize that need; he thought he worked for the integrity of the music, but he loved the attention of fans as much as anyone. Maybe it ran in the family, she thought with a flash of cynicism. After all, Adam’s father was an Anglican bishop.
Adam would be annoyed if she simply tipped the bottle down the sink,
so that short trip to the kitchen was a necessity after all. She donned her red silk robe – it was cold as chilled water against her skin – then trotted barefoot out of the room to the kitchen. It lay just twenty paces down the corridor to the right. Cool air washed around her bare calves. The lights burned dimly tonight. Then it was a bloody miracle that electricity made it through the power lines to this Godforsaken backwater anyway. A yawn overtook her. She was three-quarters asleep. Way down at the end of the corridor the entrance hall was a clump of shadows that hid the staircase to the tower.
I wonder what it’s like up there? she asked herself as she opened the kitchen door. Just picture it. A big gloomy, ghostly tower. Morbid stairs. Dolorous windows. A balustrade of stone ribs. No doubt a human skull over every bedroom door. Perfect scare territory. But not tonight, my dear. Time for your beauty sleep.
When she hit the light switch the fluorescents flickered on with a brilliance that made her narrow her eyes. She crossed the kitchen floor to open the refrigerator. There, she pushed the bottle to the back of the shelf then piled blocks of cheese in front of it to conceal it from Adam. OK, so he wasn’t a lush, but boys will be boys.
Chilled air from the refrigerator encircled her thighs. The red silk dressing-gown didn’t have the thickness to keep out the cold. A shiver rippled down her spine. For heaven’s sake, girl, get back to bed where it’s warm. The thought prompted her to move faster. After closing the refrigerator door her bare feet carried her back across to the kitchen. When she opened the door she was surprised to see the lights in the corridor were extinguished. Utter darkness engulfed it.
‘Bloody power supply,’ she muttered. ‘No, it can’t be that. The kitchen lights are working.’ She glanced back at the brilliantly illuminated interior. ‘I could just go for it I suppose.’ The light flooding from the kitchen revealed the dark oblong of her door. She reasoned, I could cross to the wall then work my way along by touch alone. First is Marko’s door, then Sterling’s, then ours. The third is the one to open. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ she told herself. ‘Like anyone’d want to go strolling round this heap in complete darkness.’
Belle opened the kitchen door wider so more light fell into the corridor. That’s more like it, she told herself, you only had to find the bloody light switch. The brass switch was set directly in front of her. Turn on the corridor lights, then bed – preferably before that rotten clock strikes three. She hated the sound of those chimes. They had all the charm of monotone notes being played on the ribcage of a skeleton.
‘Uh, that’s my first mistake,’ Belle whispered, as she stepped into the corridor. The kitchen door swung shut behind her. It must be on a spring closer but she’d never noticed before. Now she was plunged into darkness. She couldn’t see a thing. She froze. A stir of icy air crawled up her bare legs beneath the robe. Don’t be such a coward, she scolded. The light switch is just a couple of steps away. Walk forward with your hands straight in front of you. You’ll find it with your fingers. Switch on, then get to the room. Run to the room. That’s what she wanted to do now. Her heart drummed. Her breath came in short gasps. This darkness pressed down on her; its presence suffocating. She wanted light. Wanted it now! She took one decisive step forward. Her arms stretched in front of her, fingers splayed out, sensitive skin at the fingertips feeling the play of cold air currents. Another step forward. Then a third.
That’s when her fingers found the light switch. At least they should have found it. A swelling button of something soft. A protrusion. Not the cold brass switch. She gasped.
A nose. I’m touching a nose. Beneath her fingers she detected skin, then the rounded swelling of what could only be eyes, the bristle of eyebrows …
Belle jerked back with explosive speed. Her back slammed into the kitchen door knocking it open. The light flooded out. In front of her a figure appeared in the splash of radiance. A dishevelled figure. A tangled nest of hair. A scarred forehead. A part open mouth that revealed yellow ruins of teeth. A pair of watery eyes … She held the stark image. It burned itself deep into her brain as the figure lunged forward, dragged her away from the kitchen door, so it closed, plunging her in darkness again. Before she could cry out a solid mass struck the side of her head.
I should be shouting for help … Belle tried as she fell; not even a whisper escaped her lips.
In the cellar just three feet beneath where Belle struck the corridor floor, Josanne fumbled up the flight of steps in total darkness. The iron stair rail she clung to was by turns either covered in cold slime as if gigantic slugs had tracked over it, or it was so corroded that flakes of rust pricked her fingertips.
Get out of here – get out, get out, get out! If I can just reach the top of the steps there’ll be a door … When Josanne found the light switch by touch alone it was like finding a casket of gold. It took a hard pull to flick the old switch downward. Contacts scraped after years of damp; its mechanism must be all but rotted away. But at least the thing worked. Light blossomed in the cellar once more. In this section of the vault three filthy light bulbs hung on mildewed cables. But, to hell with it, it was light. Light’s all that mattered. What it did reveal made Josanne groan. This staircase led nowhere. Years ago it provided a convenient exit. Now she was confronted by a wall of concrete blocks that infilled an archway of ancient brickwork that would have once allowed access to the body of the house.
‘OK, this isn’t a problem,’ she told herself. ‘You’ve got the light. Just go down the steps, through the cellar, and leave by the other stairs.’ Grimacing, she glanced at her hands. They were streaked a brownish yellow from the slime on the stair rail. This entire place had succumbed to growths of subterranean fungi. Meanwhile, every nerve in her body flashed a sense of urgency – a searing imperative to quit this place as fast as possible. By now she’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Beneath her feet, this section of floor consisted of dark woven brick. The tunnel-like vault ran forward twenty paces before it narrowed to an archway. Beyond that it opened up into the cellar she’d found herself in ten minutes ago. White clouds of vapour gusted from her mouth as she crossed the floor. Running alongside her were shelves fixed to the walls. A fungus spread its sickly yellow rash across them. It had even extended its toxic fingers over bundles of old aircrew uniforms as if claiming them for its own. Halfway along the vault, three massive pipes that were as thick as tree trunks ran from the ceiling, down through a gap in the shelves, then plunged vertically into the floor. That same crust of yellow fungus had begun to invade those, too. She imagined the toxic spores could infiltrate through the iron tubes to contaminate the water. The idea of drinking mains water that flowed through those loathsome conduits was enough to send a wave of nausea through her. Even as she regarded that trio of water pipes she heard a clang. Was that an airlock in one of them? Had someone taken a bath, and now a cistern was refilling itself, drawing clean water through those filth encrusted tubes? The bang came again. The sound of a steel bar striking against a pipe. Oddly, it could have been some mutant progeny of the chimes issued by the blind clock. It possessed that same metallic note. The bang sounded yet again. This time it was massive enough to stop Josanne dead. A moment later, when the echoes had died, the chimes did come. They pulsed through the air. A sound of ancient metal. A monotonous series of notes that invaded the still air around her. Each note subtly altered, sometimes the after-echo deepened to shake the muscles in her belly; sometimes they rose in pitch to gnaw at the sensitive skin deep inside her ears. That’s when she wanted to thrust her nails into her ears to tear out the noise that irritated her beyond belief.
It must be three o’clock. One, two, three … yet the chimes continued. They rose into brittle notes that set her teeth on edge; then deepened into the tolling of a bell to shake the bones of her skull. The sound mutated again. This time the chimes appeared to come from the pipe. She turned to stare at them with an ‘Oh my God’ distorting the shape of her mouth. Before there was any visible sign she knew. The chimes imitated the gro
an of metal being subjected to irresistible force. The house warned me … it showed me what would happen …
The pipes ruptured. Hunks of metal simply peeled away. With it came a blast of water. This wasn’t fresh water from the dams. This stank of pond weed and the silt where dead things lay in darkness to rot. She flinched back as the displaced air gusted at her before the inrush of water. Light bulbs swung. Shadows lunged crazily across the walls. Then she reeled as the wave that was already knee high struck her. When she turned to run, the black tide carrying pale rafts of scum had already covered the cellar floor. Behind her the flood thundered from ruptured pipes. Cold water swirled round her legs. Her pyjamas clung to her as spray soaked them. And underwater, soft things folded around her bare ankles. In her mind’s eyes she saw slick black eels carried in with the cascade of foul-smelling liquid. She imagined sharp teeth would sink into the flesh of her calves. Or the creature’s head set with glittering eyes would strike at her face from the water.
Worse … much worse than that … Josanne remembered the vision of how she drowned. The water smelt the same. Her panic was the same. The chimes sounded the same. She’d die the same.
Fisher woke when he heard the chimes that signed away three o’clock. Outside, hail tapped at the window. Another four hours until daybreak. He now knew that they had to leave this place. Maybe they’d have a better chance in the daylight?
At night the fastest way to reach morning is to sleep. Only Fisher realized he didn’t feel even remotely drowsy. He resisted the temptation to switch on the light that would dispel this oppressive darkness. Even so, he reached out his hands to either side of him, then stretched his arms directly upward. He’d had his Death Dream as Blaxton called it. The walls and ceiling had rolled in to crush him. For the moment his hands swam through the dark; nothing solid struck his fingertips.
