Dark Seed

by Simon West-Bulford

  Ten thousand minds alive

  The archaeological diary of Edward Cephas Hargraven

  20th September 1891

  Our investigation in the chambers of the City of the Innominatum has resumed. We remaining four, having returned to the intimidating central hub and the connecting chamber containing the dark priest’s corpse, have decided it is imperative we all stay together. It seems that my prediction of what Haynes might do was inaccurate. He attempted suicide last night, and so I have insisted he not be left alone until we have left. This drastic move by Haynes has shocked me deeply. I did not think him capable of such awful action. He told us that it was too dangerous for any of us to leave, but that he did not have the courage to stand by his conviction and kill all of us to protect the rest of humanity. He would therefore limit the bloodshed to himself, so that he at least did not have to witness the results if our finds were shared with the academic community.

  His confession was met with awkward silence, and I still do not know how to shake him from these ridiculous fantasies. All I could think to do was to coolly and calmly ask him to explain in more detail why he felt so strongly that the City of the Innominatum should remain secret. He promised to tell us everything at first light.

  21

  At the murky threshold of a near coma, I could hear the desperate sounds of struggle. The shuffling of feet and shattering of glass reached my groggy mind, but I was helpless, lost in darkness and immobilized. Muffled screams for help went unanswered, gradually fading with the soft groaning of defeat. After the skirmish, new sounds came: the gurgling of dying breath and the wet slap of organs hitting stony floor. My subconscious tried to interpret the sounds and assaulted my mind’s eye with distorted images of gouged flesh and splintered bone twisting like vines through rivers of blood. Even when the slow shuffle of weight-laden feet seemed perilously close, I did not wake. Instead the sounds brought more muddled visions of exhumed corpses bearing the lifeless faces of my wife and children.

  The wake of silence that followed brought no peace. Garbled images remained—the memories of horror-filled discoveries and my unwilling companions tortured and consumed by the fire and fog brought by the beasts that hunted us; a colossus looming over Hargraven Manor assuming the sinister form I saw engraved on the door, rippling with heat as the whole estate was dragged howling into an abyss under the weight of huge and writhing metallic tendrils.

  It was not until much later, when a gentle hand rested against the back of my head, that I was recused from these terrible dreams. Slowly, my eyes opened to see two muddy boots a few feet from my face and, as my eyes focused, a bulky figure crouching over me. Thankfully, the pain in my head had diminished somewhat—no doubt the product of forced rest—and I lifted my numbed cheek from the cold flagstone floor. I was in the darkened foyer of the west wing.

  “Can you hear me?” It was Stromany.

  I croaked an acknowledgement, then turned over onto my back to see him reaching down to help me. The stench of nervous body odor enveloped him.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You don’t remember?”

  I struggled to recall my last lucid moments while I propped myself up on one elbow, gingerly reaching for my familiar head wound with my free hand. Memories of the metallic, tumor-like thing in the cellar, followed by our hurried exit, merged with the ugly images and sounds from my nightmare. “I remember running from the cellar . . . and then . . . I don’t know.”

  I saw a flicker of something in Stromany’s eyes: suspicion or devious calculation—it could have been either one.

  “Where are the others?” I said. “I thought Breswick was right behind me.”

  He blinked hard as he shrugged, but it was more like a twitch, and I could see that the effort of containing his fear was tested. “Beatrice will not come near me. I left her in the drawing room.”

  “And Breswick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? How long have I been like this?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes. I didn’t see you here.”

  “And Theo’s been gone all that time?”

  “Yes.” He suppressed a gulp as he blinked hard again. “But finding him will not be difficult.”

  Stromany looked fearfully at the floor farther up the west wing corridor, and I followed his gaze. Spots of red led to a smeared length of fresh blood that curved into the open door of the laboratory. Theo!

  “Can you stand?” Stromany asked me.

  I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’ll be fine. Check the laboratory. See to Theo. There may still be hope. But be quick, we shouldn’t leave Beatrice on her own.”

  “She still doesn’t trust us, Drenn,” he said, hesitantly making his way to the laboratory, following the blood trail. He stopped in front of the open door. He looked immediately to his feet, gritted his teeth, and squeezed his eyes shut. His breathing came in great gusts as he resisted a second look.

  “What?” I called. “What do you see?”

  Stromany stepped back, shaking his head.

  I felt a little stronger as I got to my feet. Reluctant to approach the laboratory to see what had disturbed Stromany so, I moved to him slowly before pausing at the door. I instantly wished I had not looked, for all that remained of Reverend Theodore Breswick was a splayed husk on the floor amidst broken glass and spilled tin trays. He had been gutted, and a scalpel—evidently the bloodied instrument of his death—had been discarded at his side. For a moment my eyes deceived me, telling me that the area between pelvis and torso had somehow sunken or dissolved into the pool of gore that covered the stone tiles, but then I realized that—aside from a few torn strands—the entirety of his bowels and stomach had been removed.

  The sudden giddiness of nausea possessed me and I was forced to steady myself against the doorframe. If there was one person I expected to survive all of this, it was Theodore Breswick. I feared more than ever for the survival of the rest of us, for not until that moment did I realize that Breswick—despite all the conviction of his faith—had been as vulnerable as the rest of us. If there had been even a tiny seed of faith in my heart waiting patiently to sprout again, watered by this man’s words and deeds, it had just been trodden upon, and brutally. I would miss him.

  “Why would someone do this?” Stromany said.

  I turned to face him. He had backed himself against the far wall. I eyed the scalpel, then shot a glance at this huge, dark man standing beside me. “Someone is intent on ensuring that salvation is impossible.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you forgotten the verse from his book?” I said. “Each of us has an attribute crucial to the salvation of all. First Elizabeth’s eyes were taken, and now Theo’s bowels have been removed. It’s only a matter of time before whoever did this will come for the rest of ours.”

  Stromany looked at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers. His face was twisted into a fearful grimace. “I am the strongman. They want to take my strength from me?”

  I said nothing.

  “Who? Who wants to take it from me?” Stromany’s voice was raised a little louder than I would have liked. “And why? What good are these virtues if we do not know how to use them? We have done nothing but wander from room to room getting ourselves killed.”

  I could not answer his question. It made no sense to me that Breswick’s allegorical verse could be taken in so literal a fashion, but the memory of his analysis came to mind. These murderous acts were symbolic. Someone was threatened by the combination of the qualities that each of us possessed and had no qualms about causing our deaths to remove them. But surely, if their combination was the key to our salvation, then the removal of just one should have been enough to secure the murderer’s victory. Breswick’s death was therefore a redundancy, and I could make no further speculation that made sense of our conundrum.

  I walked away from the laboratory. “We should go back to Beatrice. It is absolutely imperative that we stay together fr
om now on.”

  “Wait!” Stromany caught me by the elbow, and his fingers gripped me so tightly it hurt. “You did not answer my question. Who is killing us?”

  I turned to meet the huge man’s gaze and was instantly taken aback by the rising panic I saw there. A huge margin of white surrounded his pupils, giving him the look of a man on the verge of insanity.

  Carefully, I placed my hand over the fingers that were gripping my elbow so tightly, then gently patted them. “I don’t know, George,” I whispered slowly, “but what I do know is that Beatrice is alone.”

  Stromany continued to stare for a few more tense moments, and during that time, I held my breath. It was a considerable relief when he relaxed his grip and looked away, blinking.

  With Stromany at my side, I set off again and made my way to the drawing room, pondering Stromany’s question. Lord Hargraven, Charlie Nubbs, Elizabeth Fortroy, and now Reverend Theodore Breswick—who had killed these people? Was someone else hiding from us? Each victim was alone when they were killed, which implied we were being watched, but I could not silence the thought that the murderer was closer. Perhaps it was simple paranoia, but the presence of the scalpel drew my suspicions back to Stromany. His fear and confusion seemed genuine, but in truth, I knew nothing about this man and how efficient he may be at deception. I also knew nothing about Beatrice, though the thought of her committing such crimes was even more ridiculous to me. But if Breswick’s claims about demons had any merit . . . No, I dared not dwell upon that notion.

  When we reached the drawing room, I was relieved to see Beatrice still there, just as Stromany had said. She was seated in one of the leather chairs, leaning forward, head bowed and hands clasped tightly. She was praying.

  “Beatrice?” I said.

  She looked up, and I saw the same haunted gaze that had afflicted both Breswick and Elizabeth. Her lips trembled and her cheeks twitched as the tip of her tongue reached for her top row of teeth. Breath whispered from her throat as she tried to form a single word, and eventually, with a smile that gave me a chill, it came. “Lucy.”

  I swallowed.

  “Lucy,” she said again. “I can hear you. I’m coming for you. Just tell me where you are.”

  “Beatrice,” I said. “It’s Alexander. Can you . . . ?”

  She blinked twice, then I saw the relief in her face. “Thank God,” she said. “You’re alive. Where is Theo?”

  I glanced at Stromany, but he looked down at his feet. I looked back at Beatrice and shook my head, unable to say the words.

  “No . . . Oh no! Not dead. He can’t be dead.”

  Stromany eased himself down on the chaise longue, staring ahead, no doubt still in shock, and I made my way to the drinks cabinet. I pulled out the bottle of port and picked up one of the glasses. It still had dregs at the bottom, and I paused to stare at the ruby droplets for a long moment. It seemed wrong to drink from a dead man’s glass, and I gently set it aside, my appetite for alcohol suddenly absent.

  Moon Box Segment Translation 21

  To feed the yearning heart

  The archaeological diary of Edward Cephas Hargraven

  21st September 1891

  I woke in the dead of night to the sound of Haynes’s distraught tears. I despair at the man he has become in so short a time, and it pained me to see that, once again, he has attempted suicide. But his tears, he claims, are born of frustration, because he could not go through with it. I gently took the razor from his trembling hands while Joseph made us some hot tea.

  I asked him why he was so set upon ending his life, and he responded with the same rhetoric of the previous day about the terrible fate of everything we held dear if we were to return home with the knowledge we had accumulated. I admit that my sympathy had all but been exhausted by this time, and after insisting in rather harsh terms that he explain his meaning once and for all, he relented.

  Again he shared with us his previous convictions about the dangerous attributes of the messages inscribed upon the walls of the city’s antechamber, claiming that they had the power to sow the seeds of the Innominatum in the reader’s mind without them even knowing. It was why the Kur’hukayians had built their city: to hide the older city that had stumbled upon this dreaded secret, and it was why they had forbidden all forms of communication. The Word must not be made flesh.

  The writings were a code, Haynes told us, a mental and biological cypher, some sort of perverse evolutionary infection of the mind that would ultimately provide rebirth of the predatory intelligence known only as the Innominatum. He has driven himself almost insane with the idea that reading the texts within the antechamber has infected him. He told us that the words must gestate, that they had to be absorbed piecemeal each day so that the host’s brain could be transformed in necessary stages. This was his reason for thinking none of us should survive the expedition. He believes he has become its host.

  I immediately sent him home with Alice.

  She will take care of him while we finish up here. I no longer have the stomach to continue.

  22

  We sat in the semidark drawing room and did not utter a word for the longest time. Occasionally, Beatrice mumbled her daughter’s name with a start, as if Lucy had hissed suddenly into her ear. For much of the time we simply stared into space, desolate, drained, and afraid. The lamps were dwindling and many of the candles had almost burnt out. I knew we would have to find more soon or give ourselves up to a slow but terrifying end in darkness. I was about to get up when Stromany spoke.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  I studied him as he sat there, still staring absently. “What are you sorry for?” I asked eventually.

  “Back at the laboratory. I allowed fear to overcome me.”

  “It’s perfectly understand—”

  “No, you do not understand. Fear is no stranger to me, I am afraid all of the time, but usually I do not allow it to master me.” Stromany looked at me, trying to find the right words, and Beatrice looked up too.

  “Out there,” I said, “when we buried Elizabeth, and when you went with Breswick to get the petrol, you were fearless. You seemed almost pleased to be able to face those creatures, but when we first met you, and when we found Breswick . . .”

  Stromany winced. “Yes.”

  “How can it be that you are so terrified one minute but so courageous the next?”

  Stromany regarded me with an expression of mild surprise. I think he understood that my question was a genuine one, born of a desire to understand rather than to criticize. I had experienced a similar sway of emotions and drive. One moment wallowing in despair, then the next wanting to scream defiance into the face of the enemy, and I was perplexed by the contrast. Stromany seemed all too familiar with this paradox.

  “I am black!” Stromany smiled and huffed. “Do you remember what happened four years ago?”

  Beatrice spoke up, “You mean the race riots.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were involved?” I said.

  “I did not want to be. I am from the Caribbean, but I left my family—three sisters, a younger brother, and my parents—and came to England to fight in the war. I signed up for the Royal Garrison Artillery, and for a time, even when hope for the world was very small, I still believed in a future and hoped to bring my family here one day . . . but it did not happen.”

  “You lost contact with them?”

  “Yes. So I started a new family. I married.” Stromany rubbed the heel of his hand against his nose and sniffed. “We were happy for a time, even living in a shared home with two other families. We had no complaint. I took a job at a soap factory, and my wife, Emily, had two children, beautiful boys. We had no luxuries, but we were content to live life that way. I think of them as good days.”

  He smiled as he reminisced, but then the look faded as time moved on in his mind. “But then the riots came. The local people blamed blacks for stealing their jobs, which were hard to come by. We were prepared to work for less money
and in worse environments, so the whites became hostile toward us. Small things happened at first—fights on the street, threats, nothing more, but then a young black boy in my street was stabbed. The police tried to help, but within weeks everything went very bad, and I was caught in the middle. I am ashamed to say that—in my anger—I beat several men in one fight. One of them was hurt so badly that I feared I had killed him.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

  Stromany shook his head and I could see tears trembling in the corners of his eyes. “No, and I have been afraid ever since. I ran again, joined a traveling theatre company. I have never looked back, and I still . . . still miss my wife and children, but I cannot go back after so long, and since that day, I have always lived in fear of losing control of my anger and hurting someone that badly again.”

  “And the beasts gave you license to loose your rage.”

  Stromany sighed deeply and nodded. “I may be a murderer, and one day, God will judge me for my crime, but here, no matter what you both may think of me, I have killed no one. My threats about Charlie were said in anger. I would not have harmed him, and I did not kill the others.”

  I wanted to tell Stromany I believed him, and in my heart I did, but how could I be sure? This was an enormous confession, but for all his apparent remorse over his past, I could not guarantee that the stress of our predicament, combined with the guilt of his previous acts, had not possessed him to act in ways contrary to his better intentions.

  And then the other equally hideous thought returned to me as I considered that word. Possession. As far removed as the idea was from my rationality, so too was the reality of our situation, and Breswick’s belief about the demonic nature of our plight suddenly seemed more plausible to me than ever. Perhaps one of us had been influenced. It could have been any one of us. Perhaps it was Stromany. Perhaps it was all of us.