“I’m staying too,” said Karen, stepping behind Chambers for good measure.
“Veronica Quesnel, He has picked you as His messenger as well.”
Ronnie shook her head as Traynor leered at her. “I can’t, I can’t.”
He took a step forward and held out his hand. “Come with us and be spared the pain these fools will have to endure.”
“No. No, I . . . get away from me!”
Traynor’s face was inches from Ronnie’s own now. He turned his palm flat and held it before his mouth. “In that case, you will be the first to receive His gift.” With that, he took a deep breath, and blew.
A handful of tiny red particles leapt from his hand and onto Ronnie’s face. As soon as they landed Chambers could see they were alive—tiny wriggling, biting creatures that jumped across her skin searching for the best place to penetrate her flesh.
Fleas.
As the insects took hold and began to bite and to burrow, Ronnie raised her hands to her face and screamed.
“If you will not come to Him, we bring His message to you,” Traynor said once more.
“Stay away from her!” Chambers shoved Karen sideways as she went to help the kneeling Ronnie, who was now clawing at her cheeks, at her forehead, at her eyes.
“They burn!” She screamed. “Oh God, they burn!”
“We’ve got to help her!” Karen tried again, but Chambers pulled her even farther back.
“Can’t you see they’re infected with something? If you touch her you’re just going to end up the same way!”
Holes were already beginning to appear in Ronnie’s face, punched-out ulcers rimmed with yellowing necrosis. The flesh beneath was already darkening.
“What is it?”
“Some accelerated version of the plague, I should imagine.” Chambers took Karen’s hand and glanced at Dr. Cruttenden. “We have to get away from here.”
Traynor and Chesney had moved now, and were standing by the exit that led to the vestry.
“Your only salvation lies with us,” gargled Chesney in a voice that was sounding more insect-like all the time.
“The undercroft I think,” said Dr. Cruttenden.
Chambers nodded. “Me too.”
They kept away from the two figures at the vestry exit, taking care to circle Ronnie and give her a wide berth. Karen clamped a hand over her own mouth as she saw the state of putrefaction the woman had already reached. Ronnie’s face was now a mass of weeping sores, deep enough to reveal shining white bone. Her cheeks had come apart and her exposed jawline revealed teeth that were already loosening in their sockets. The hands that had clawed at the diseased flesh were now just as discolored, each finger’s joint swollen and purple with disease, the fingernails the color of old tree bark or lost entirely. She still had eyes but they had collapsed within her skull, like rotten puffballs left out in the rain.
They were apparently still good enough for her to see with, though.
“Don’t leave me!” The tangled knot of leathery decay that was her vocal cords was still capable of uttering intelligible words, but when she tried to stand and follow her friends, her right leg gave way with a sickening crunch, the knee collapsing as the ligaments that held bone to bone fell apart. The shearing stress of tibia grinding against femur tore the main artery, and blood the color of old engine oil sprayed across the floor.
“Don’t let that touch you!” Chambers pushed them back toward the wall of the south aisle. “Chances are it’s all infected.”
“How can she still be alive?” Karen hissed as they edged their way to the undercroft door.
“Those injuries must be agony.” Dr. Cruttenden was close behind them, her resolve close to breaking.
The horrific state Ronnie was now in wasn’t preventing her from trying to get to them, however. With rotting fingertips, all now bereft of fingernails, she was pulling herself along the stone floor toward them. Her previously intelligible words had now degenerated into a series of fluid-guttural groans. As she dragged herself toward the undercroft door, a slime of necrotic tissue trailed behind her.
And she was moving quickly.
“Come on!” Chambers ran to the door and held it open for the others. Dr. Cruttenden made it through first. “Be careful on the steps!” Chambers yelled after her.
“We have to do something!” Karen was hesitating in the doorway as what was once Ronnie edged rapidly closer.
“We can’t do anything.” Chambers pushed Karen through. “It’s not even Ronnie anymore.”
The crawling creature was nearly upon them.
“How can you say that? How can you—”
Chambers backed into Karen and pushed the two of them through the entrance to the undercroft steps, slamming the door behind them.
“Thank God there’s a bolt,” he said, drawing it across.
Almost immediately there was a wet pounding from the other side.
“Let . . . me . . . in.” The voice was nothing like Ronnie’s. In fact, it was nothing like Chambers had ever heard. “Let . . . me . . . in . . . or . . . suffer.”
“I think we’ll take our chances, don’t you?” Chambers’s words had little effect on Karen other than to make her even angrier.
“You bastard! How could you leave her out there?”
“Let’s get down the steps.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me how you could leave a living, breathing human being suffering out there like that!”
“Well, for one, she wasn’t breathing, and for another, I’m not even sure she’s human anymore.”
There was more thumping from outside that soon changed to a scraping sound. Chambers imagined the dead flesh of Ronnie’s wrist had worn through and that she was now thumping at the wood with exposed bone.
“Karen, please, let’s get downstairs where we can discuss this—that noise is making me very nervous.”
“Good! I hope it fills you with guilt for the rest of your days! I hope it reminds you what an utter bastard you were to leave an innocent defenseless woman to die in a freezing cold church, all alone and with no one to help her!”
Chambers let the fury boil off her for a moment. Then, doing his best to ignore the horrible scraping noises that were still coming from behind him, he looked her in the eyes and said, “We are going to get out of here, you know.”
Karen lowered the fist she’d raised to strike him.
“We will. But we have to stick together, and we have to be on our guard for danger. Otherwise we’re going to end up like . . .” He suddenly found it difficult to say her name “. . . Ronnie.” He had no idea there were tears on his cheeks until Karen wiped them away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“So am I.” He considered putting his arms around her, but there would be time for that later—he hoped. The pounding on the door stopped for a moment, then resumed with greater ferocity and strength. Either the Ronnie-creature had gained some energy, or there were more things out there now. He decided not to mention either possibility to Karen.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get down into the undercroft and plan our next move. We should at least be safe down there for a while.”
As he followed her down the stone steps, he hoped and prayed that he was right.
TWENTY-TWO
Thursday, December 22, 1994. 8:05 P.M.
THEY BARRICADED THE LOWER door to the undercroft as best they could in case Ronnie, or whatever Ronnie had now become, managed to break through and get down the steps. Then they sat down and tried to pretend they couldn’t hear the noises she was making.
“It was a good idea, coming here.” Dr. Cruttenden was looking around her. “Plenty of food, a water supply. Whatever’s going on up there—and I’m still having trouble accepting any of it—we could survive in here for days if we needed to.”
“We could.” Karen didn’t look so sure. “Providing Ronnie doesn’t manage to get in here, and providing Chesney and that prie
st don’t have some secret passage they can slip in through.”
Dr. Cruttenden seemed unperturbed. “I’m sure they came up through the vestry trapdoor,” she said. “It’s the most logical explanation.”
“But from where?” Karen hissed.
“Why, from that ‘down below’ we keep hearing about, of course. I can’t say exactly what that is, mind you, and I have absolutely no desire to find out, but I don’t doubt that’s where they’ve come from. Where all the evil here has come from.” She was rubbing her chin as she looked at Chambers. “I very much suspect that Anarch thing is down there too.”
Chambers nodded. “With Paul. In fact, I got the impression that Paul had somehow become it.”
“Did you?” Dr. Cruttenden didn’t seem so sure. “I got the distinct impression that it—whatever ‘it’ is—needs all of us to . . . I don’t know—return to life? Have its power restored?”
“Rule the world for all we know.” Chambers had his ear against the door. The banging upstairs seemed to have subsided a little.
“I think rule the world is the least of it.” Karen was hugging herself against the damp chill. “It wants to consume, whatever it is, to consume and change every living thing so that it becomes one of those tiny dots on the wall painting—mindless, hungry, and utterly driven by the instinct that thing has put there.”
“It certainly could be one of the Elder Gods.” Chambers was looking at Dr. Cruttenden, who shrugged.
“If it is, I’m surprised we haven’t heard of it before, except in a few obscure and forgotten tomes like the Liber de Nigra. But that might just be because it’s been sleeping for a very long time.”
“But there must have been priests? Followers? This thing can’t have just been asleep for thousands of years and suddenly woken up?”
Karen wanted Chambers to give her answers, but he couldn’t. Whatever was happening here, neither he nor anyone else in the Human Protection League had ever encountered anything like it, so far as he knew.
“Surely you need followers to keep things on track?”
“Who’s to say that hasn’t happened?” Dr. Cruttenden was rubbing her chin again. “We know for a fact that the architect of this church, Thomas Moreby, had a mysterious past, and a mysterious end.”
“Perhaps he was the priest?” Chambers checked the barricade once more. “Or one of them?”
“Like I said, it was rumored he consorted with at least one strange creature—said by some to be an insect as large as a wolfhound—and kept it alive by feeding it the blood of young children. There was some discussion at the time as to who was the master and who the servant. Up until an hour ago I would have said with all confidence that we would never know the answer, but now I’m not so sure.”
“You mean Moreby might be down here too?”
“I mean he is down here . . . somewhere.” Dr. Cruttenden pointed to the pile of packing crates stacked against the west wall. “This is only a very small part of the undercroft, you know. No one really knows how far it goes on for, but Moreby could have had himself interred here in a secret chamber after his death.” She gazed into the darkness, her breath steaming as she spoke. “He’s in there, somewhere, I’m sure of it, and who’s to say this isn’t all part of some occult plan to bring him back too?”
“But we’re okay, aren’t we?” Karen looked from Chambers to Dr. Cruttenden and back. “I mean, all we have to do is stay here and nothing will happen—no Moreby, no flea god, nothing.”
Dr. Cruttenden nodded. “If we can stay here for three days and three nights, with no further attempts by the other four members of our group to try and get in here, then the doors to the west entrance will be opened . . .”
“. . . and we’ll be saved? Right?” Karen was looking to the others for agreement, but wasn’t getting any. “Right?”
“I think what Dr. Cruttenden is getting at,” Chambers had to force himself to continue, so horrific was the implication of what he was about to say, “is that rather than the outside world coming in to save us . . .”
Dr. Cruttenden nodded. “Those who have already become slaves to the Anarch will be released into the world. And there are bound to be other suitable subjects out there. It won’t matter if we’ve survived or not.”
“You mean right now the only thing that’s protecting this world is the fact that we’re shut in here?”
“Yes. And rather than having to last three days and be saved, we only have three days to stop whatever has started here and save the world from apocalypse.”
They were silent for a moment, but that just served to emphasize that the hammering against the upper door had recommenced.
“That’s not going to hold forever.” Chambers was already debating unplugging the fridge and adding that to the downstairs barricade.
“And the lower door is a lot flimsier.” Dr. Cruttenden sighed. “Despite our best efforts, if they can break down both of those they’re not going to have much of a problem getting past packing cases, chairs, a table, and a fridge—are you going to add the fridge, Professor Chambers?”
He shook his head. It suddenly seemed rather pointless. “We have to get out of here, don’t we?”
Dr. Cruttenden nodded.
“But there’s nowhere to go!” Karen looked at them in horror and then followed their gaze over to the west wall. In any other situation the disbelief on her face would have been comical. “Oh, you’re not serious? Go farther into the crypt? We could get lost in there and never come out.”
“It’s better than getting killed in here, or . . . worse.” Chambers still felt uncomfortable mentioning Ronnie’s name.
Karen was about to say something else, but she was interrupted by a crash from upstairs.
“And from the sound of it, I’d say we haven’t got long.” Dr. Cruttenden heaved herself to her feet and made her way to the back of the improvised kitchen. “I hope at least one of you is going to help me move these crates?”
They both did, once they realized that they were staring at the door and that the nasty, slapping sounds beyond it were only going to get louder the longer they procrastinated.
It didn’t take long to shift the boxes. Karen had the helpful idea to pile them up against the door as an extra barrier to whatever was trying to get in.
“It might hold them for a few more seconds,” she said.
“And that might make all the difference.” Dr. Cruttenden was wheezing with the effort.
“I hope you’re going to tell me you’ve remembered any inhalers you take.” Chambers didn’t let his concern slow him down, but he knew she would slow them down if she couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t worry.” Dr. Cruttenden produced a mint green inhaler from her jacket pocket and took two puffs. “Plenty in here to last me. It’s the dust, you know, my body never was on friendly terms with it.”
“Keep out of the way, then.” He meant it kindly. “We can shift these, there aren’t many of them left, anyway.”
It only took another couple of minutes, which was just as well as once the final packing crate was moved, there was a heavy thump and a crack appeared in the door to the undercroft.
“Okay.” Karen wiped her hands on a rag. “What now?”
Dr. Cruttenden was examining the far wall. “By all accounts there should be a way through.” It was almost pitch-black and she was feeling her way. Chambers looked around for a portable light source, but there was none.
There was another thump, followed by another crack appearing in the door. And now there were voices as well.
“You . . . have . . . to . . . let . . . us . . . in.”
Was that Ronnie? Or what was left of her? The words sounded like air being squeezed across rapidly rotting vocal cords, lending them a liquid quality that was simultaneously nauseating and terrifying.
“You must, you know.” That was Chesney. “He is waiting for you. For all of us. And the longer He waits, the more He will be displeased.”
“Accept your salva
tion,” said Traynor. “Accept it and revel in the Holy Putrescence that is His Holy Glory. Embrace the Anarch and He Whom He Serves and learn true salvation! True immortality! There is an afterlife! There is life everlasting! No pain, no fear, just inviolable appetite, unending consumption, eternal satiation! Why prolong the agony?”
Because we still want to be ourselves, Chambers resisted crying out to the things now pounding at the rapidly splintering door. He shouted at Dr. Cruttenden instead. “Have you found anything yet?”
Her response was not what he wanted to hear.
“Not really. A few loose bricks, but that’s all they are—there’s solid stone behind them.”
A chunk of the door flew into the room. Behind it was something that would live in Chambers’s nightmares for as long as he lived.
If it was Ronnie, there was very little left of her face to identify it as her. The skin was gone, the muscle had liquefied and her left eye had followed, trickling in a snail trail of postulant necrosis down what was left of her cheek. Loosened teeth rattled in her exposed jaws, and what was left of her tongue had to be pushed against the roof of her rotting mouth to make any kind of intelligible noise at all.
“You can’t escape . . . join us . . . join Him.”
The two dark shapes behind her echoed her words as they, too, reached through and clawed at the air in the undercroft with rotting hands and leaking fingers, nails gone, bone poking through fingertips.
“Embrace . . . His . . . salvation,” gargled the thing that had been Father Traynor.
“Could you hurry up and find the way out?” Chambers kicked at one of the crates. Then he kicked it again. Eventually a shard of splintered wood big enough to wield broke off. He gripped it tightly, even though it was probably the most pathetic weapon in the history of conflict, but he didn’t know what else to do.
“There might be something here!” Karen was crouched next to Dr. Cruttenden. “It’s small, but it feels like a door.”
The way in to the undercroft finally gave way completely. Three unrecognizable figures that only a few hours ago had been their colleagues began to push aside the furniture and crates that had been piled up there.
The Lovecraft Squad Page 21
