Chambers shook his head. “Makes no difference with that type. Shaking them off can be more difficult than . . .” he tried to think of something that wasn’t related to the otherworldly monstrosities he had been fighting for the last five years, but it was no good. He had been doing the job for too long “. . . lots of things. Tell your journalist that I’m not going to talk to her for more than a minute.”
“Two minutes?”
“All right, two.”
“In that case,” Turner swallowed the rest of his pint in one gulp then reached out to shake his friend’s hand, “you’re on. It won’t be that bad—you’ll see.”
Chambers wasn’t so sure. Bones that might exacerbate mental disorders? Found buried beneath the house of a man who had written about time travel and alien invasion?
Oh no, he wasn’t so sure at all.
THREE
Sunday, October 23, 1994. 2:17 P.M.
THE ROOM WAS BLINDING white.
So harsh was the glare that attacked him as he stepped inside that Bob Chambers wished for a moment that he had brought sunglasses. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the three workbenches, arranged to radiate outward from the apex that was his point of entry. The benches were white as well, and each had an overhead fluorescent light for extra illumination. In the wall opposite, heavy-handled doors led to cupboards that presumably contained any equipment he might need to assist his examination.
The things he was intended to examine were on the middle bench.
In his career, Chambers had become used to the stink of death in all its varieties, from those recently deceased of natural causes, to the burn victim dumped in a river and then dragged out weeks later. However, since joining the Cthulhu Investigation Division he had seen more death by more bizarre methods than he had ever dreamed possible.
The bones on the table in front of him, however, had a stink all of their own.
He had noticed it as soon as he came in, a smell not just of earth and of the grave, but something else. An insidious sickly sweetness that caught in the back of his throat and made him cough. It was hard to believe that a few fragments of long-dead bone could cause such an odor, but at least it explained the absence of anyone else in the room.
As well as the skull, the single long bone, and the few other fragments that had been unearthed, the clay pot the boys had found had been left for his inspection as well.
“In case it’s of interest,” Malcolm Turner had said.
“I don’t know anything about pots.” Chambers wasn’t having any of it. “When I next speak to Washington I’ll ask if they want to send someone over to take a look at it.”
“Up to you,” came the reply. “Just leave it with all the bits and pieces when you’ve finished.”
Chambers removed his jacket and hung it on the peg close to the door. On the phone last night Marcia Anderson, the team’s psychiatrist, had reassured him that, despite what Malcolm had said, he was unlikely to be affected by coming into contact with anything that had been retrieved from the pit.
“A susceptible adult and two impressionable children?” She hadn’t sounded impressed. “Even the slightest Cthulhian influence has been known to drive such individuals insane. That’s why we only recruit people with a strongly stable mental state.”
“It’s possible there is some malign influence in the bones, then?”
“It’s possible.” She was still unimpressed. “But in view of what you’ve told me, and the fact that most people who have handled the bones seem to be unaffected, I’d say the chances are less than fifty percent.”
He decided to wear gloves anyway.
He pulled a pair of pale blue latex ones from a cardboard box crammed with the things, and then replaced the box in its holder above a sink, the chrome lining of which was so highly polished it looked as if it had never been used.
He retrieved his Dictaphone from his jacket pocket, and switched it on. In the loud, clear voice he reserved for the purpose, he dictated the date, his name, and a reference number his department could use for the case before switching it off again.
Then he tried to pick up the skull.
It was more difficult than he had expected, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why. The dull brown bone, its eye sockets packed with earth, the nasal cavity cracked and bearing traces of a dirty green fungus, was just a skull, like many others he had examined. Admittedly it was a lot older, but that shouldn’t have made any difference.
But nevertheless, there was something . . . wrong about it. Something that made his hand tremble as he reached for it, that made his eyes smart and a lump form in his throat. By the time his fingertips were almost in contact with the scoured surface he was close to vomiting.
He withdrew his hand and the feeling subsided.
When he tried again it came back.
Chambers shook his head and blinked. This was ridiculous! It was an old and possibly diseased piece of bone. He’d handled worse in his career. Perhaps some part of the material packed into the eye sockets was causing his reaction?
Let’s try another bone, then, he thought, reaching for what looked like the top half of a femur.
The same thing happened. If anything, this time it was worse.
Ridiculous, he thought. Perhaps someone had foolishly dunked the bones in an excessively powerful preserving fluid, and that was what was making him feel dizzy. If that was the case, he needed to move quickly, or there wouldn’t be any tissues left for him to examine at all.
He gritted his teeth and made another grab at the skull with both hands. This time he succeeded in lifting it from the workbench.
It was difficult to work out what happened next. Even later, after several hours of thinking about it. The sense of nausea returned with a vengeance of course, assaulting his senses like a battering ram to his brain. But something else happened as well, something even more horrible and infinitely more terrifying.
A cloud of insidious darkness descended upon his vision, and a thick deafness clogged his hearing. He felt as if he was falling backward even though he was sure he was not moving. This progressive and methodical ablation of his senses did not abate until he could feel nothing.
Then the visions began.
They were worse than anything he had experienced so far. Shapeless things clutched at him out of the blackness; spider-thin fingers crawled from the right eye socket of the skull he had just laid his fingers on, a thin and shapeless hand following it that was so abnormal in its elasticity that it made him dread to see the individual to whom it belonged.
The image before him changed to a distant church atop a howling hill, the only feature on the powder-dry windswept plain on which he found himself. The sky above was red as an arterial fountain. Then he was looking at a man nailed to a cross. No, not a cross, just the image of it, painted on a stone wall to which the man had been pinned in a hideous travesty of the crucifixion, metal spikes placed through both hands and feet and into the crumbling mortar beneath. Something had wrapped itself around the man’s body—not a toad as such because its pale, diseased body possessed rudimentary, flipper-like legs. Something older, then? Something from a time when evolution was still trying to decide on its final path?
More images—a goat’s head with seven eyes arranged in a cruciform pattern, the emerald iris of each glinting with a terrible and arcane knowledge, made worse by the creature’s body being that of an anatomically perfect young woman. The thing before him raised its hands, palms upward. A dove flew upward from each and fluttered toward him, so he could see the creatures’ bleary compound eyes and the insectoid mandibles that clicked and clacked from their ill-formed mouths.
Then he was falling, leaving the horrors he had been shown behind, tumbling past pictures, walls, rock, past time itself. Everything was being lost to him. Everything he had ever known, everyone he had ever met, had ever loved. None of these mattered anymore. None of them had ever truly mattered.
The only thing of importance was wha
t lay at the bottom of the pit.
He could see it now, coming up to greet him. A plain of gray dust that shone with a pale luminescence. The featureless landscape promised nothing but a purgatory without end, an eternal prison that needed no bars because there was nothing but the prison, and nowhere to run to but the never-ending nothingness of all that surrounded him.
His landing was surprisingly gentle, and as he got to his feet the goat-woman appeared to him again. This time her hands were tapering claws and they held in their chipped and dirt-encrusted grasp the urn he had told Turner he was going to have nothing to do with.
She held it out to him.
He took a step back, only to collide with the same girl behind him, to his left, to his right, in every direction he looked. An infinite number of beautiful young girls, each with the head of a monster, urged him to take the burden each of them was holding.
He closed his eyes and tried to push them away. His senses now fully restored, he could feel the softness of their skin, smell the rot on their breath. As his fingers came into contact with their claws he felt them crumble beneath his flailing hands, the nails coming apart like rotten tree bark.
One urn dropped to the ground, causing the anemic dust to puff around it before settling once more.
Another fell, and then another, stirring up more of the desiccated soil until the resultant cloud was so thick that even when Chambers opened his eyes again he couldn’t see the myriad bodies that thronged around him.
The urns were continuing to fall, landing upon one another and making sounds like dry bones breaking as they discharged their contents into the dirt. The cloud that enveloped him was too thick to see what it was they contained, nor did he want to. It was only when the dust began to clear and the broken shards of pottery were piled high enough, that he began to understand they were intended to contain him. As he watched they smoothed themselves, fusing together to create a chamber he knew would enclose him forever.
Chambers put his hands out again, battering at the newly formed clay walls, beating at them with his fists until, finally, they too began to crack. In the spaces he could now see only darkness beyond, and yet he knew that darkness contained the worst of all. Suddenly something came rushing toward him. It was blood, a frothing ocean of it, containing every dreadful thing he had ever feared, and every terrible thing he had ever done, all in one mighty, overwhelming wave of despair, misery, and horror. As it enveloped him, swamped him, drowned him, Chambers could do nothing but scream, only for his open mouth to be filled by the scarlet wave.
“Are you all right?”
Chambers was on the floor, but at least it was a floor. A nice, solid one with no trace of dust or monsters or anything else that shouldn’t exist in a sane, rational, normal world. He gasped and looked around him. He was back in the British Museum laboratory. Not that he had ever left it, of course.
He got to his feet. It wasn’t as easy as he had expected, and he had to lean on whoever must have found him in this rather embarrassing situation.
“I’m fine,” he said. His voice made him sound anything but. He turned to look at the person on whose arm he was leaning. “And you are . . . ?”
He caught a glimpse of a kind face framed by red hair that swept down to just above the young woman’s shoulders. Her green eyes were filled with concern.
No, not green—emerald . . .
Chambers shook his head and tried to dismiss the image of the goat girl from his mind.
“. . . worried about you right at this moment,” the girl replied. “I was waiting around outside when I heard a crash. I came in and you were flat out on the floor, mumbling all sorts of nonsense.”
“Nonsense?” Chambers eyed her with concern. What might she have heard?
Her expression softened now she could see he was all right, and her face broke into a smile. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you weren’t saying anything I could understand. They weren’t even words, really. To be honest I was worried you were having a fit, and I wouldn’t have had the slightest clue what to do about that.”
Chambers leaned against the bench and did his best to return her smile. “You’re not a doctor, then?”
“Oh Christ, no.” She held out a well-manicured hand which was nothing like the crumbling claws the girl in his vision had possessed. “Karen Shepworth. I’m covering the story about the bones being found under H. G. Wells’s house for the News of Britain.”
Chambers flinched without meaning to before gently shaking her hand. “You’re a reporter?”
“I prefer ‘investigative journalist.’” She was rummaging in the brown leather tote bag that was slung over her left shoulder. “I’ve got a card in here somewhere . . .”
Chambers held up a hand. “Don’t worry about that,” he said.
“Oh, but you’re going to need it,” she said, finally locating one and handing it over. “How else are you going to get in touch to give me your final report?”
Realization dawned.
“You’re the one doing the story—”
“—about the bones found on the building site, yes.” She finished his sentence for him with a smile he did not share. “Why else would I be hanging around the arse-end of the British Museum on a Sunday?”
“Why indeed?” He was beginning to feel better. “Well I’m sorry to have to inform you Miss Shepworth, but I haven’t had a chance to get started yet.”
She insisted he call her Karen. “But you have made a start on the pot those boys dug up along with the bones, I see.”
Chambers had no idea what she was talking about, nor why she had such a mischievous smile on her face. Then he followed her gaze to the bench where the skull lay, along with half a thigh, and the other fragments of bones.
But no clay urn.
Because it was on the floor.
In pieces.
“Shit.” His first reaction was guilt. He must have knocked the thing over during his faint. He was already dismissing that as a result of the preserving fluid, the bright lights, and the jet lag. It still wouldn’t be a good enough excuse to give Malcolm, though.
“I’m guessing you didn’t mean to do that then?”
Chambers was already down on his knees and picking up the pieces. I don’t even remember doing it he was about to reply, and then he thought better of it. Anything he came out with in this girl’s presence could be in the papers tomorrow morning.
“More fragile than it looked,” he said, as he placed the broken fragments back on the bench.
The contents were still on the floor.
It was the first time he’d noticed them, and now he wondered if perhaps they were too delicate to be picked up by his untrained hands. There were three rolls of what looked like parchment, each tied with a fine piece of maroon thread, flecked with gold. They also seemed to be in far too good a condition to have spent much time in the ground.
“Aren’t you going to pick those up too?”
He wasn’t, but there was no way now he could get out of it. “I’m guessing these are something more suited to Malcolm and his team.” He picked each one up individually, and laid it gently on the work surface.
“We could have a look.” Already she had a pair of nail scissors out and was advancing on the one closest to her.
“I think we should leave it to the experts,” he said, but it was no good.
“Oops,” she said as she snipped through the thread. “It must have come off in the fall.”
Almost as if the parchment approved of her actions, it unfurled before them, revealing a document of such beauty that they both took in a breath.
“It looks like a page from a medieval Bible,” said Chambers, peering at the ornate, beautifully lettered script, complete with an intricately illustrated drop capital that began the text. The colors used could not have been any more vivid if they had been applied yesterday.
“It’s like a work of art,” said Karen, reaching out to pick it up.
Chambers pushed her han
ds away. “You’d better not touch it,” he said. “Apart from the fact that these old paints and inks can contain toxic compounds, there’s always the possibility that we’ve got something priceless here.”
That took a moment to sink in. “Priceless? How can you tell?”
Chambers gestured to the rest of the specimens. “They were buried with this poor chap, whoever he may be, and even a rudimentary examination suggests the bones have been in the earth for a very long time, possibly hundreds of years.”
Karen looked intrigued. She also took out her own Dictaphone and switched it on before continuing. “How can you tell that?”
Distracted by her presence, Chambers picked up the skull without thinking. This time he felt no ill effects. No dizziness, nothing. He coughed to conceal his relief and continued. “Some of the signs are obvious, others are more subtle. The bone itself has a density that you only get when the minerals of the bone matrix—mainly calcium and phosphate—have been leached out into the soil by rainwater. As a result the bone ends up porous. The older it is the lighter and more porous is the tissue. And this skull is very light indeed.”
He held it up to the light. “If you look carefully you can see a lot of tiny lines over the surface.” Karen came close. “The best place to look is the calvarium—the top of the skull. Can you see?” She nodded. “Well, those are formed by creatures that live in the earth—worms, beetles, and suchlike, moving against it. The thing is, the wearing away of the bone like that takes time.”
Karen held the recorder close. “How much time?”
Chambers shrugged. “Difficult to say, but again we’re looking at hundreds of years rather than decades.” He picked up the femur. “You can see the lines on here as well, which helps confirm this is probably part of the same body the skull belongs to.”
“Anything else you’d like to add?”
Chambers put the femur down. “Not at this time,” he said.
“Okay.” She smiled and switched off the recorder. “One last question, the answer to which I promise you will be off the record.”
The Lovecraft Squad Page 3
