Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  Bald Hill was a bare patch of sloping land just large enough for the graveyard that had once been an English farmer’s family’s final resting place, and now held what looked like a small stone structure. On closer inspection, in the great sweeping flashes of lightning that burst like bombs along the hills, it was a shining beacon of a mausoleum – shining because it seemed to reflect storm like dark glass. There was something both ornate and simple about the building, and Ethan saw his family name along the carved stone over the doorway.

  Pocket slid in the mud getting to its entrance. He was over-eager, Ethan could tell.

  But something within Ethan himself hesitated. He wished to be elsewhere. He wished he could avoid whatever journey he must now go on.

  And yet, he had that conflicting thought, beyond his duty, beyond even finding Maggie. That this was the most exciting moment of his life. That somehow, all along while he’d grown up, visiting Harrow, living with his parents, married to Madeleine (dear sweet Madeleine who left him so that he’d return to Harrow alone, so that he’d have this adventure at all), it had put something within his soul to sleep – and now, he was waking up. Ethan hated to admit it to himself, but life had seemed a bit dull and gray to him. Suddenly, he felt his own blood surging through him. He felt fear and excitement. He knew that somehow it would all turn out all right. He would find Maggie. The secrets that his grandfather had held dearly would be revealed. The night would pass into dawn.

  He felt less self-assured when he stepped into the entryway of the stone structure, and saw the lights inside.

  “It’s as if someone has been expecting us,” Pocket said, fear on his face as clearly as another might have joy etched there.

  They stood in the chilly entryway, Ethan glancing back into the storm, and then down the steps into the crypt. “Before we go there. Before we seek this out…” Ethan said, haltingly.

  “This haunting,” Pocket interrupted. “It’s funny, sir. I have a revolver. I have my club. But what we’re going to face is immune to this. I saw the séance. I was there, laughing while they held hands. Laughing, while they contacted the dead. The artifacts were laid out. Relics of cathedrals. Ancient graves, robbed. She – the woman named Isis Claviger – claimed that a helmet had belonged to a tortured man, a Knight Templar; that a spike belonged to a child murderer from hundreds of years ago; that perhaps even the Holy Grail itself was there, along with other ritual objects that she and your grandfather had collected over the years that were all magical in some way. All had significance. And they brought her.”

  “Matilde?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pocket said.

  Ethan thought: he’s shivering. His teeth are nearly chattering. “Why? If she had this sickness...”

  “Sir,” Pocket whispered. “She was magical. I saw it with my own eyes. She made things happen. They were contacting the dead, and she was their radio. She brought things out. Some were her, but I saw it. She made those…those…things…come alive. She brought back the dead.”

  2

  Down the stairs of the crypt, words were scrawled along the walls, although all seemed the fevered writing of some insane man. At the floor of the crypt, there were three graves, with torches brightly burning above each. Pocket continued speaking nervously, and Ethan felt as if he were there in the room, years before, experiencing a séance: “It was a night without a storm, sixteen years ago. She was still young—at least, Matilde had not aged a great deal in those years she’d spent in darkness. She was beautiful, but she had that lost look, as if she already lived too much in another world. Things had been taken from her. Her world had gone from the looking-glass to the prison of this house. Time had, in many ways, stopped for her many years before, and she called some name over and over, and was driving your grandfather mad with it. He was mad and desperate, and the years had taken their toll. Your grandfather had kept her life a secret from all but a few. I was one of those. And this circle of his. This group, begun by this woman. But that woman – that Claviger –wanted to use his daughter for this grand experiment in spiritualism. Well, she learned soon enough, didn’t she? There were others – perhaps half a dozen – from all over the world, people who called themselves spiritual, but I was sure they were merely charlatans. One man of seventy-two told me he’d been cataloging demons his entire life, and believed that Isis Claviger could call them up, if anyone could.

  “Yes, sir, I kept laughing even through all of this, and I smiled when Isis Claviger showed me what she called the Egyptian Book of Eternal Darkness, written, so she claimed, on the skin of the priests of a god. Within the book, sacred words. And Matilde. Looking as confused and frightened as she had ever seemed to me, so skittish that they had to restrain her as if she were an animal, calling out some foreign name as if an imaginary lover would come to her rescue. Justin was nearly in tears and worry for his daughter, but that woman had reassured him—in ways that I can only imagine – that this would cure the girl, once and for all. That this would take her mind and close the doors to the world of the infinite. That’s what that woman said.

  “But you know, it did just the opposite. They began their circle, at the table, and still, I smiled and chuckled, and thought that nothing would come of it other than poor Matilde being further pressed into the cage where her father kept her.

  “ Justin sat back and nodded as Claviger began her invocation to the dead, to the dead within the bones and rocks and pieces of history she had laid out upon the table.

  “And then, something was unleashed within Matilde. The voices, yes, the sounds, the cries of tortured children. There were the screams of women and men in agony. We were surrounded. I looked up and saw them, there, like the smoke, and the temperature of the room dropped to near-freezing. Hundreds of them. Faces within the smoke. Hands that came from nowhere. Mouths the opened and closed as if speaking. A smell as I have only smelled in a medical laboratory came up. An awful, vile odor. Matilde, who had been holding the relics in her hands, began shrieking, calling out a word, over and over as if the word would make it stop. I saw the armies of the dead standing around us. I knew the soul of madness, what was both within Matilde, who had something unimaginable in her mind, and outside her body as well. Something brought forth from the rituals that Claviger intoned, brought forth from the artifacts, and then, the bloodshed...”

  3

  Ethan had already begun investigating the corners of the room, and his grandfather and grandmother’s grave as Pocket spoke.

  He tried to lift the heavy table of the stone sepulcher, but it would not budge.

  He glanced back at Pocket. “Matilde killed them all.”

  “No,” Pocket said. “I don’t really know. It seemed logical that she did, at least in terms of what I could not then believe. The candles went out, and then, all was silence. By the time your grandfather had lit a lamp, it was over. They were gone, all of them, all but your grandfather and myself. We didn’t find them for several days. Horrible deaths, sir. Horrible. Beyond description. She had taken them to her rooms, somehow. Between the apparitions we witnessed and the ritual, unspeakable things had been done to them.”

  “Nothing,” Ethan said, “is unspeakable.”

  “Sir, some things truly are. I will say this about them: none of them died without agony. None of them died without seeing something terrible. They witnessed something so frightening that they must have been paralyzed with fear, sir. They showed no signs of struggle. No fight. Given what was done to them, any human being would’ve fought back, and probably could’ve. No, they saw something terrible that night, and they allowed themselves to be used as some kind of toy for whatever had been let out from the power that Matilde had. The power of the your aunt, and of those items. She had blood all over her body, sir. She was soaked in it. Their blood. And she was drawing strange markings along the walls of her rooms within the house.

  “Perhaps the house itself was evil, for your grandfather told me something the next dawn.

  “We sat toget
her. No, we huddled together, and he confessed that he had gotten mixed up in a society of some sort when he was younger, and that he had done terrible things, but never knew that his own child would be infested from it. He had constructed the house based on some principles he had learned, and some rituals he had performed, when he was young and ignorant of the future he had created for himself. He rambled that morning, and I shivered just as I am doing now, sir. Just as this feels like that night again. Just as I know your grandfather built this house and its rooms to reach the other side. And now, after all these years, sir, I do not believe that Matilde was anything more than one who was tortured by her father’s own guilt, driven mad by his own twisted desires to use her to reach some unfathomable goal, known only to him. Or perhaps, he owed some debt to this society he had once belonged to. But he sacrificed his daughter’s happiness to it, I knew this for sure. Still, I pitied him, but more than that, I pitied myself.”

  More quietly, he added. “I pressed this back in my mind. I refused to acknowledge it. After awhile, it became like a dream. Like something that I had merely imagined but that had never happened.”

  “Why were you there at all?” Ethan asked, the question suddenly springing to his mind as if he’d meant to ask this all along. He looked at the constable, and suddenly saw it there – what he had mistaken for fear. It was some kind of relief in the man’s face. He had finally unburdened himself of this awful memory.

  “I suppose I was the only human being your grandfather felt he could trust through this,” Pocket said. “It seems monstrous now. All bad things do, after they’re done.”

  “Monsters,” Ethan shook his head, wanting to grin, but feeling too grim to smile. “You all were monsters, weren’t you? And there are still monsters here.”

  Ethan had just slipped his finger around the lid of the sepulcher which was meant to contain the remains of his aunt, and something gave.

  There was a small trigger, which he pressed down upon, and the stone floor beneath him seemed to shift slightly. “Help me with this,” he said. “I think I’ve found the way in.”

  4

  The two men managed, after much huffing and puffing, to pull the stone table back. Pressing down on the trigger Ethan had found—a spring-mechanism to one side of the stones—the floor beneath their feet moved, drawing back a flat wooden door that had previously rested beneath the grave – and it felt less like a sepulcher than some kind of altar now.

  Ethan took a deep breath. “I guess we need to go down there,” he said.

  Pocket went and took one of the torches down from the wall and passed it to him.

  Ethan stepped down into what he thought would be absolute darkness, but with the torchlight, saw several feet ahead of him as he crouched low, ducking his head as he moved through a narrow tunnel built of stone.

  He held the torch ahead of him as he moved, crab-like along the path. He brought the torch to the walls around him, and saw that they were loosely built against a cavern wall, which must have been a natural formation beneath the property. Thin streams of water flowed down the sides.

  Soon, however, the tunnel opened up into what seemed at first like a room, but was a hallways of sorts. The first things he thought of when he saw it were photos he’d looked at in the magazine of the National Geographic Society recently about the ancient cities of Egypt that were being discovered beneath the sand.

  It was like walking into a tomb of the Pharaohs.

  Pocket, slowly moving behind him, called out, “Have you found anything yet?”

  Ethan turned, torch in hand, and saw the man push himself from the narrow, low tunnel, into the light of this corridor.

  “It’s not a mirror of the house,” Ethan said. “It’s a world. It’s a complete world beneath the house.”

  The first thing Pocket said (after taking a few breaths) when he saw the columns and the hieroglyphs on the yellow stone walls: “It’s waiting for us. She’s here.”

  “I know. We’ll find her. Maggie is alive. I can feel it,” Ethan said.

  “It’s Matilde. She’s here,” Pocket said, mostly to himself. “She’s been waiting for me.”

  5

  “I feel it, too. She’s here,” Ethan said.

  He felt overcome with a light-headedness, a burst of uncontrollable laughter within him, trying to get out. I’m going mad, he thought. This is the first sign of my madness. No, perhaps the third or fourth, for I’ve seen more in these past several hours than a man is meant to see in a lifetime.

  Grim thoughts overtook him, images of an insane little girl dancing in a circle in the dark, and the mad giggle that had been within him subsided. The thought of nightmare and the fear of death were too much here. “Matilde is all around us,” he said, an afterthought.

  “Precisely,” Pocket said. “Dear God, look.”

  He brought his torch along a wall, to the curious markings and symbols. There seemed to be a cross within a circle, surrounded by lines – forming a curious letter H – and around this symbol, what Ethan identified as “ankhs” – the Egyptian symbol of eternal life. “It’s them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Chymera Magick. The gathering of spiritualists and mediums. This was their mark.”

  “Just markings on a wall,” Ethan said. “We’ll find Maggie. We’ll get her out of this place, and then…”

  “Then?”

  “We’ll destroy it. This is a place of the dead,” Ethan said. “They should remain buried here.”

  “You can’t even begin to understand!” Pocket called after him, his voice echoing. “You were a child when your grandfather created this place. You were a child when she murdered them. You were a child when your grandfather came to me in tears because he needed help!”

  Ethan turned back to face him. “Your guilt won’t help anything, Pocket. Either keep quiet, or go back to the vault. Maggie may be dead for all we know. Maggie may be hurt. I am not going to leave her to the same fate that befell my aunt. I will not let this house have her.”

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  You see – I interrupt my own tale – I knew that I loved Maggie.

  Oh, not the way that you imagine love comes with time and trouble and knowing someone. I had known when I met her that I felt love for her. I can still see Ethan in that chamber of the ancients, torch in his hand, feeling the courage of those who love and have stout hearts and must seek fate.

  Part of me knew that Maggie and I were to be intertwined, even when I saw her in the Holy Land; even when she chided me and tossed me a wet rag for cleaning; even when I made little jokes with her son; she and I had that indefinable something, perhaps it was chemistry, that was meant by God and Nature to bind man and woman.

  There is so little that human life can accomplish. The only true achievement is the binding of two human hearts in strength and love. I know this now. I did not know it then, but I wanted it. I wanted Maggie alive and with me. I wanted the nightmare to end.

  2

  I led the way in torchlight and silence. Pocket remained many feet back from me, mumbling to himself nearly incoherently. As I went forth – into what I perceived to be an ancient Egyptian tomb – I felt the majesty of what my grandfather had created here.

  This was no mere imitation of history or reassembly of parts as if from a factory. This was the tomb of some pharaoh. Some great kingdom had held this space, thousands of years in the past. Each stone and statue placed in just such an arrangement, each jackal of some pure black rock, carved centuries before, lovingly set here to guard this underground realm.

  I glanced up to the ceiling – it, too, was from some ancient city of Egypt, and covered with designs and hieroglyphs. I remembered hearing from my grandfather of museums in Europe that held entire temples and wonders of the ancient world within them. This is what he himself had done. He had managed to carve out from the earth a place for his manias, a museum within caverns.

  For a moment, I was caught up in the magnificence of it.r />
  The great statues of a pharaoh and his queen dominated a brief staircase into another passage way. A sarcophagus lay at the center of the chamber, a beautiful woman’s face over it – Nefertiti perhaps or Cleopatra – her headdress in the form of an ibis, her arms folded across one another, wrapped in a cloak of gold. I could not resist – I had to touch the image. I had to look at the sapphire eyes and the lips that nearly seemed to shine in my torch’s light.

  I tried to lift the lid, but it would not budge – it was sealed tight. That’s when I heard a noise, and glanced about in the fog of shadows.

  3

  I thought I saw the darkness moving – but it was an animal. A cat.

  Then, I saw another and another – several shadows ran along the passage. The feral cats that were all over the garden above. They ran from the light, and I guessed that I now stood beneath the abbey ruins; and that these cats had means of escape into the upper world. I moved into the passage ahead, which, as I looked about, was built of blocks of stone, put together with the precision of an interlocking puzzle, with more markings carved in and around them.

  A catacombs.

  Human bone and skulls were set within depressions in the stone. Rather than grow afraid, as one might, I began to experience the wonder of all of life. This was like entering a true wonderland, and yes, it was frightening in some ways, and yes, it also gave me comfort. I did not fear bone or skull. I feared what I sought here. My grandfather had been a genius of some sort, albeit a mad one. But his madness had managed to build a world beyond the one of this small Hudson Valley village. He had tamed the earth and its holes and filled them with the beauty of the ancients. I had no doubt that some foreign governments would be fighting for these treasures – had they known about them – for even among the catacombs, there were jewels and diadems and masks of gold and silver as only ancient kings would have in their burial mounds.