He managed three pages before he put the book down again. Was it his imagination, or had it suddenly gotten much colder? The glare from the lamp next to his cot seemed to be duller as well. He rubbed his eyes and looked up. Dr. Chesney was still over there in the corner, fiddling away, but now his previously well-defined outline had changed to a murky blur.
It’s because you’re not used to reading, Paul told himself. Pick the book back up and keep going—it’s not as if there’s anything else for you to do.
He tried again, getting as far as page five before he stopped again, and this time it wasn’t because he was bored. It was because the page he had just turned had been blown back over by a draft of freezing air. Paul shivered and put the book down. If that kept up he wasn’t going to spend the next five minutes here, never mind the next three days and nights. He would either have to find the source of the chill breeze and stop it up, or move his cot elsewhere.
As soon as he was on his feet he found himself face to face with Dr. Chesney. Paul jumped and did his best to stifle a gasp of shock. It wasn’t entirely successful.
“Startled you, did I?” The parapsychologist’s voice sounded odd, but Paul put the tinny vibration at the end of every word that was uttered down to the acoustics here.
“A bit.” Paul shivered again. “That’s because it’s cold, though, so I’m a bit jumpy anyway.”
“Cold. Yes.” Chesney didn’t sound as if he understood at all, even though he was nodding his head. “That will probably be because of what they’ve found in the vestry.”
“Who? Professor Chambers and Karen?”
Again that sense of a lack of understanding, despite the almost mechanical nod. “That’s right. They wanted you to come and see. They’ve finally managed to locate Father Traynor, but he’s stuck and they were thinking maybe you could help them get him out.”
“Stuck?” Paul’s brow furrowed. “You mean in the trapdoor?”
Dr. Chesney took some time considering this before he eventually replied. “No. Underground.”
“They’ve gone under the church to find him?”
“Yes. You must come. You must help.”
Of course Paul would. In fact he was secretly delighted to be of some use for a change. He followed Chesney around the corner and into the north aisle. The vestry door was open, but beyond it lay darkness.
“The lights are a bit dim here,” he said, looking around him.
“Problem with the power,” came the reply. “Should be fixed soon.”
Paul leaned in through the vestry doorway. “I can’t see a thing in there,” he said. “We’d probably better go back for a—”
He never finished the sentence because the blow to the back of his skull sent him tumbling into the room. He heard footsteps follow him in, and then the creak and slam of the vestry door. Then all was darkness.
No, not quite darkness.
It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the greenish gloom, and once they had it was possible to make out, in the center of the stone floor, the gaping hole of the open trapdoor.
Paul rubbed his head and turned to see Chesney’s outline behind him.
“What did you do that for?”
Chesney remained silent.
“I’m serious.” Paul pulled himself to his feet. “What did you do that for?”
Chesney knocked him down again.
Paul wasn’t sure what shocked him more—the fact that the parapsychologist had hit him or the power of the blow. Either way, he decided to stay down, the cold stone damp beneath his fingers.
Now Chesney was pointing to the trapdoor entrance.
“Down there.”
“Yes, I know he’s down there, you’ve already told me.” Paul tried to crawl in the opposite direction, but Chesney’s raised foot warned him otherwise.
“You go down there.”
There was no way he was doing that.
Chesney emphasized his insistence with a well-aimed kick to the base of Paul’s spine. “You go down there. Down . . . below.”
“No.” The word came out as a strangled gasp. Paul would never have thought a blow to his back could cause so much pain.
“Don’t make him . . . come up here.”
“Who?”
No answer.
“Do you mean Father Traynor?”
Nothing.
“And where are Karen and Dr. Chambers? Are they down there too?”
Dr. Chesney remained silent, guarding the door and only changing his position if Paul made a move in the wrong direction. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, he spoke again.
“He . . . is . . . coming.”
There was nothing at first. Then, from deep down below, Paul could hear the faintest noise of scraping. Something heavy was moving beneath the church, coming inexorably closer.
Paul tried to back away from the trapdoor, but every movement was met by another blow to his spine. The noise was getting louder—a lurching, scraping sound, as if something with too many legs was dragging itself across stone. It got as far as being directly beneath Paul, and then stopped.
A new sound replaced it. That of footsteps on iron rungs. One after the other, the rhythmic clanging of leather against metal rang out, getting louder and louder until, in the filthy gloom of the vestry, something appeared through the opening in the floor and turned to look at Paul.
Father Traynor.
Paul’s sigh of relief was short-lived as the priest levered himself up out of the hole. Paul hadn’t had much chance to study the man’s face, but he knew it was not as he remembered it. Even in the near-darkness of the room in which he had suddenly become a prisoner, he could tell that there was something wrong with Father Traynor.
The priest approached until his bile-stained boots were inches from Paul’s head. A pale, emotionless face regarded the prostrate man on the floor, and the voice that emerged from between maggoty lips was a cold monotone.
“He is the one?”
The words were meant for Chesney, who nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Flesh for the Body.”
The lips stretched into a smile. Blood leaked from the cracks that appeared as a result of the flesh being put under such tension.
“Good. More flesh for He Who Waits Beneath.”
Paul tried again to get up, but the other two were too quick for him. Traynor gripped his arms while Chesney held his legs. He screamed, wondering why he hadn’t done so before.
“They cannot hear you,” Chesney said.
“You are not longer of their world,” Traynor added by way of explanation. “You belong to us now.”
Struggling every inch of the way, Paul could do nothing to stop himself being dragged on his belly toward the trapdoor. He felt both knees clatter against a raised slab as they bruised heavily, the joints filling with blood. The harder Chesney gripped his ankles the more he twisted them as well, until the ligaments tore and blood vessels ripped, causing a susurrus of pain that encased Paul’s feet until he lost all sensation in them. He screamed again, not because he thought it would gain attention, but because he couldn’t help himself.
He kept on screaming as his body was bundled through the trapdoor and allowed to fall into the pitch darkness. He hoped that when he landed it would be all over. He was wrong.
His two captors were beside him again, faster than it would have taken for either of them to climb down the ladder. Father Traynor had a lantern now, holding it up so Paul could see it was still them and not some new tormentors. The priest moved to his left and hung the lantern high on a rusty iron hook driven into the stone wall.
Paul tried to twist himself, better to see the room he was in, but every movement sent needles of pain shooting through his knees and ankles. Then he was being lifted roughly onto a broad table with a lead surface. Restraining straps of damp worn leather were applied to his wrists, which were dragged up over his head. Then his swollen ankles were strapped in the same way. When these were tightened he screamed again.
&nbs
p; “The sacrifice is ready.” Chesney spoke first. It was not a question but a statement, and Father Traynor’s response was merely intended as a confirmation.
“The sacrifice is ready.”
Then the priest gripped his left ankle, and Dr. Chesney his right. They remained like that for a moment, long enough for Paul to realize that his surroundings had changed. He was no longer in a dim chamber enclosed by stone. Now a fetid breeze buffeted his body, stirring up the gray dust on the plain that seemed to stretch for miles in every direction. In the far distance, where charcoal sky met pallid dunes in a hazy semblance of a horizon, he could see figures. Hundreds of them. If he turned his head the other way he could see the same—an army of shambling, stumbling things, barely human and yet driven by a hunger, by a need, that scared him even more than the two men who were holding him down. Even though they were miles away he knew they were coming closer, slowly but inexorably, to converge upon his helpless form.
Paul screamed again. This time, rather than echoing off the walls of his prison, his voice mixed with the wind. The sound faded quickly, whisked away over the barrenness, an anguished cry that would live for eternity in this never-ending hell.
He howled more loudly when Traynor and Chesney began to tug at his ankles. They pulled so hard that at first it felt as if they were trying to dislocate his hips. Then, as the skin around his groin began to tear free, he understood it wasn’t what was covering his lower limbs that they wanted.
It was what lay beneath it.
Pain such as Paul had never experienced before wracked his body as both his legs were degloved, the skin coming away from each in sheath-like flaps of tissue. Paul raised his head to see what damage Traynor and Chesney had wrought. He expected to see shining muscle, bloodstained nerves, and glistening fat. What he actually saw was far worse.
His legs were no longer human. From the waist down the skin had been ripped away to reveal, instead of normal tissue, barbed multi-jointed limbs of insectoid chitin. Paul stared in horror at this alien half of his body, at the way the limbs scrabbled for purchase on the shining black surface, at how they bent in places normal limbs never should.
“Oh God, what have you done to me?”
Traynor and Chesney ignored him. They had moved to the head of the table, where now they were gripping his wrists. Paul felt the same wrenching pain close to his shoulder sockets as the skin of both his arms was torn free. He couldn’t see, but he knew his arms were now the same as his legs—dark brown, lined with spiked barbs, and utterly inhuman.
Now the two men were either side of him—Traynor on his left and Chesney on his right. The parapsychologist leaned over him.
“Nearly finished,” he whispered. “Not much more to do now.”
They were tugging at his flanks, grabbing the flesh of his loins and pulling it outward on either side. Paul didn’t move, didn’t resist, all hope of escape gone. He lay there in mute stillness as the flesh was torn from his sides and his ribs were unfolded to form another pair of segmented, scrabbling, multi-jointed limbs.
Father Traynor returned to the head of the table and gripped Paul’s chin. He looked at Chesney.
“For the Anarch,” he said.
The other man nodded. “For the Great God Cthulhu.”
Paul felt the skin slide from his face, felt his ears tear from his head, knew that his eyes were coming away too, even though he could still see, through multi-faceted compound eyes that regarded this land of desolation in a different way than he had before. Where once he had seen hunger and horror, he now saw appetite and promise.
So much promise.
He rose to his full height and nodded to acknowledge his servants’ obeisance, as well as the approach of his armies as they edged ever closer. The chitinous joints of his neck glinted as his bristling antennae tasted the air—so deathly, so sweet, so perverse.
There was still much to do.
TWENTY
Thursday, December 22, 1994. 7:15 P.M.
“I CAN’T FIND PAUL anywhere.”
Ronnie was poking her head through the vestry doorway. It was obvious from the way she was acting that she didn’t want to come in.
“We left him ten minutes ago,” said Chambers. “He told us he was going to try and read and then get some sleep. Is he not on his cot in the north transept?”
Ronnie shook her head. “And that’s not all. Dr. Chesney’s vanished as well.”
“Well, they didn’t come this way,” said Karen, rising from her crouching position near the trapdoor and putting away her tape recorder. “We’ve been here the whole time and we’ve seen no one.”
“So still no sign of Father Traynor, either?”
“No.” Chambers was getting increasingly worried about the priest.
“So that’s three people potentially missing, then.”
“Paul and Chesney must be around somewhere,” said Karen. “Have you checked the undercroft?”
Ronnie had. “I’ve checked everywhere. I don’t want to spoil things for anyone but I was thinking, perhaps you could come and search again with me, and if we still don’t turn anything up maybe we should be thinking about hitting the panic button?”
Chambers had to agree. The thought had occurred to him several times over the past few hours, especially when Chesney had suffered his injury. He gave Karen an apologetic look. “I have to say I agree with Ronnie.
We’re not even twenty-four hours into this and Father Traynor has been gone for too long. We’re only assuming he went below the vestry, and that he’s still there. Anything could have happened to him, and I don’t think it would be safe for us to go after him.”
Karen didn’t look happy. “He could be, though,” she said. “He could have found church records, ancient books, anything. You know what these types are like once they get engrossed in something.”
“Even so, it’s part of his responsibility to the rest of the group to let us know where he is and that he’s okay.” Chambers looked at Ronnie. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s look for Paul and Chesney, and if they really have gone then it’s time to call this a day.”
Karen chased after them. “You’re making a fuss over nothing! Father Traynor is probably buried in documents. Dr. Chesney bumped his shoulder. He told you he was okay afterwards. And nothing’s happened to anyone else.”
Chambers kept walking, out of the vestry and down the north aisle toward the west entrance. “Something’s happened to the building though, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well in case you hadn’t noticed, since we came in here a painting of a ten-foot-high skeleton has appeared on the wall with the words ‘Memento Mori’ daubed across it.”
That was the point at which Ronnie screamed.
The painting had changed. Considerably. Where before the twisted bones and elongated skull had suggested the semblance of the skeleton of a human being, now something else entirely had taken up residence on the wall. Something alien, something insectoid.
Something cruel.
“Jesus Christ.” Karen looked at the thing in horror. “What is that?”
Chambers took a step back so he could get a better look. It wasn’t the toad god Tsathoggua at all. This thing had huge compound eyes, six jointed limbs, a bristled carapace behind which seemed to be concealed the merest hint of wings. And yet it appeared to be standing upright, as a man would, its two foremost limbs raised while the middle two hung at its sides. The weight of its entire body seemed to be supported by the back legs, which looked much stronger and more powerful than their counterparts.
“It’s an insect of some kind,” he said. “If I didn’t know better I’d say it looks like . . . like . . .”
“A flea,” said Rosalie Cruttenden’s voice from behind him. “Carrier of pestilence, vector of death, responsible for more misery and suffering worldwide than anything else until man’s technology caught up with God’s.”
“That . . . thing, is not a creation of God’s,” Ronnie
whispered. “More likely it was made by the Devil.”
“Or indeed it could be the Devil.” Dr. Cruttenden’s academic interest was obviously outweighing any revulsion she might be feeling. “Don’t forget Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Images of insects as representations of evil have existed ever since ancient man dipped his fingers in the blood of a kill and found he could use it to paint on the walls of his cave. But this . . .” she pushed past Chambers “. . . this is worrying.”
“Why?” Karen had her recorder out again. Chambers didn’t know whether to admire her professionalism or tear the thing out of her hand and stamp on it.
Dr. Cruttenden pointed to the bottom of the painting. “Do you see what’s here?”
“Looks like a collection of tiny black dots to me.”
“That’s because you have to come closer, Dr. Chambers. Don’t worry, it’s only a painting. It can’t hurt you. Not yet, anyway.”
Chambers did as he was told, even though every fiber of his instinct was telling him to keep his distance. He had to get right up to the wall in order to see it, and when he did he wanted to run away even faster.
People.
Thousand of tiny people, their numbers densest around the rear legs of the thing.
“Do you think they’re running away from it, or toward it?” he asked.
Dr. Cruttenden peered even more closely at it, narrowing her eyes through her spectacles. “I don’t believe you can tell. Not at the moment, anyway. But I would find either concept equally terrifying, wouldn’t you?”
“The spelling has changed as well,” said Karen from behind them.
Dr. Cruttenden turned to acknowledge her. “I beg your pardon?”
“The words.” Karen pointed. “It used to say ‘Memento Mori,’ but now the second word is different.”
The Lovecraft Squad Page 19
