“I—there were particular circumstances, which I can’t explain. I can’t help you—it really would not be advisable,” he said.
“I think you could use a million pounds, Sir Harold,” said Michael.
Financial checks and credit references were part of Michael’s business. Quite a few people started buying a luxury yacht as a way of proving they were not in trouble, and the company’s facilities for credit checking were second to none. Michael knew how badly Sir Harold and his family were doing. There was one son who had been living on a beach in Thailand for the last couple of years, another in the Army, and no means of support for the house. The older one, the Thai beach bum, had been to the same public school at the same time as the entrepreneur. He seemed to be the connection. But he had not been home in over a year, according to his Facebook page.
“I’m not denying that,” said Sir Harold ruefully. “It’s not that I don’t need money, believe me. I would like to help you, Mr. Nichols, but really—I can’t. It would be too dangerous. I don’t know how much you know about the—the—the process, but it wouldn’t be safe.”
There was a second crash. This time Michael could tell it was coming from the cellar, and Sir Harold did not mask his reaction quite so well.
“Well, perhaps if you tell me a little more about it—”
“It’s no good talking,” said Sir Harold, suddenly rising. Michael remained seated. “I truly, honestly cannot discuss the matter and that’s all there is to it.”
“It won’t do any harm to talk,” said Michael. “After all, a million pounds is a very useful amount of money.”
“Harold?” A woman had appeared in the doorway. She was Sir Harold’s age, wearing a cream sweater with a double row of pearls and a tartan skirt. She was worried. That would be Lady Mary, his wife of forty-nine years. She was also from a good family but equally lacking in assets.
“Yes, dear,” he said. “It’s all right, Mr. Nichols is just leaving.”
Michael remained seated for three seconds. It was just long enough to show that he could not be forced out so easily, but that he was cooperating of his own free will.
“Have a think about what I’ve said, Sir Harold,” he said, getting up at last. “I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”
“The answer will be the same,” said Sir Harold, shepherding him towards the door.
“A million pounds,” Michael said again as they passed Lady Mary. Hearing that, she would have asked what it was about, and she might help persuade him.
Michael decided it had not been a bad start. But there was work to do.
Sir Harold’s reaction to the noises from the cellar had been to blank them out completely. Another man might have said something to explain them, or joke about the plumbing. But Sir Harold had taken the traditional English approach of ignoring something to make it invisible; well-bred guests would know to take their cue from him and not ask. It was an approach that had served for centuries and that allowed people like Sir Harold to make things like mad relatives or embarrassing lapses of decorum cease to exist and vanish from existence.
Whatever was happening in the cellar, Sir Harold did not want to discuss it. He did not want Michael even to be aware of anything there, but his approach did not work with a man who refused to play by the time-honoured rules. The noise might have suggested industrial machinery, or vehicles moving, or mine working. None of them made any sense. It was a mystery—no, a secret. And, Michael thought, no family has two secrets.
The investigation into Sir Harold was an old-fashioned affair. The man simply did not exist online. He probably did not have a computer or an email address. All the documentation was on old-school paper.
Michael had paid an agency to carry out checks, and apart from the dismal state of his finances they had not turned up anything unusual about Sir Harold. None of his family or circle of obvious contacts had any medical connection. He had an unremarkable career in the Royal Artillery; when his father died and he inherited the baronetcy, he had devoted himself to managing the estate.
Michael knew everything about the place. He had seen the floor plans, how it had lost its outbuildings and been shorn of its crumbling Georgian wings, leaving the barn-like remnant. He knew that its history went back to Sir Harold’s Norman forebears, and the site was even older. It was built by the River Effra, one of ancient London’s rivers which had been paved over and turned into a sewer in Victorian times. He knew the family coat of arms featured an angel with a sword and a Latin motto (Ense animus major—‘the soul is greater than the sword’). He knew the family’s unremarkable history, how they held a Royal charter granting privileges because of the favour of King John. They were a colourless lot, with little ambition to expand their holdings or get involved in court politics over the centuries. The nearest to excitement was one rakehell in the early seventeenth century, a certain Sir John who was said to ride wildly about the countryside, lashing peasants with his whip, accompanied by a devil who took the form of a “great black dogge.” The man ended up altogether mad, and was supplanted by his brother who kept him chained in the cellar.
It might be possible to get someone else to go in and investigate what was in the house, but that would add complications. How do you find a reliable burglar? Michael needed to find something to use against Sir Harold, and it would be dangerous for the information to be in the hands of a third party. He could approach a private detective agency, but the chances were they’d tell the police at the suggestion of anything illegal. Worse, what if they took the job on and made a mess of it? Long experience had taught Michael that rolling your sleeves up and doing it yourself was the only way to ensure anything was done properly. Breaking into houses was beyond the maddest thing he’d ever had to do in the boat business. But Michael was determined; he could still remember that scream. He could see the look on her face. He was going to do this.
His wardrobe provided black jeans, a dark sweater, a storm-proof black jacket, and some serviceable gloves. Black deck shoes were quiet and gave plenty of grip if he needed to climb a pipe. He even had a balaclava, a thermal one, essential kit when you’re sailing in a strong wind on a cold day.
Two pen-sized LED torches went in his pockets, along with the iPhone.
Michael needed some tools. From the garage he selected two screwdrivers, a chisel, a file, a flat metal ruler, and some wire cutters. Michael used the cutters to snip a coat hanger into two convenient lengths of stiff wire. He emptied the spanners out of a tool roll and filled it with his improvised burglary kit. It made a compact package he could tuck inside his jacket.
There were a couple of other things to complete his equipment. A foil pack of dog treats from a convenience store near work. And, just in case, a Japanese chef’s knife from the kitchen with an eight-inch carbon steel blade, with its own sheath. If the dog did attack him, then a knife might be his only option, even though it would ruin his chances of any deal with Sir Harold. It would be ironic if he lost a couple of fingers to the wolfhound at this stage.
Michael inspected himself in the full-length bedroom mirror. The man in the balaclava looked tough, menacing. He looked like someone who got what he came for. He nodded approval back at Michael. Right, let’s do this.
At ten o’clock he left Anne contentedly watching a box set of Sex and the City, telling her he would not be back until morning. He hated to do it, but it was necessary. She trusted him, as always. He kissed her, then kissed her again, and left.
He drove the Mercedes a couple of miles and parked up to wait. He turned the light off and listened to Echaskech playing low on the sound system, closing his eyes and not thinking about what lay ahead.
At three a.m. Michael started the engine again. The roads were quiet now; after a short drive he parked a quarter-mile from Effra Hall, in a side street he had picked out earlier in the day. Michael sat with the lights off for fifteen minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the lights and tuning in to the nocturnal sounds. There was a vehicle passing e
very minute or so, but no pedestrians. The street lighting was poor, but the moon was high and almost full: a gibbous moon, sailors called it.
Michael slipped past the gatehouse and walked on to Effra Hall, up the grass verge that skirted the driveway. Everything looked strange in the dark. The trees were black pillars and the garden was littered with unfathomable, hostile shapes. With an effort of memory Michael recalled that the thing in the middle of the lawn must be the sundial, that there was a hedge down one side. Something that might have been a bench crouched by the hedge.
There were windows set below ground level on one side of the house. Michael clambered down carefully and shone a light around the frame, locating the latch. Then he illuminated inside: it looked like an old pantry, and easy enough to get in, if he could open the window.
Michael had not seen any sign of burglar alarms when he was inside. It was not that sort of place.
He unrolled his toolkit and started to experiment methodically with the screwdrivers, the chisel, and the metal ruler, trying to force a gap between the window and the frame. A couple of times a screwdriver clattered to the ground. Each time Michael stopped and listened for a minute, then continued.
After several attempts he opened the window far enough to slip the hanger wire through. Michael eventually found the right shape to bend the wire to work the latch. The process seemed to take several hours; it was probably a few minutes. At last he engaged the latch, flipped it out of the way, and swung the window outwards.
Michael quickly wrapped up his tools, stuffed the toolkit in an oversized map pocket, and lowered himself into the pantry. The only light was the moonlight from behind him, and all he could hear was his own breathing and, when he held his breath, the steady thudding of his heart.
“Good,” Michael murmured to himself. He took out his iPhone, clicked a few times, and replaced it. He put his ear to the pantry door, wondering if there was an alert wolfhound waiting on the other side. Dogs usually barked first…but not always.
Outside was a corridor which stretched further than his torch could reach. Michael set off cautiously, taking one step at a time, alert for sounds.
Old pipes gurgled, above him the wooden beams groaned, the old house talking in its sleep, mumbling peaceably to itself in the dark.
The rooms down here were storage rooms, mainly empty, then a disused laundry room, others with indeterminate purpose. One had an opening like a huge shadowy fireplace, or perhaps a coal-hole or chamber for firewood. He looked closer and saw steps leading down.
The end of the corridor opened out into a wine cellar which stretched out in three directions. That was odd. The wine cellar must extend beyond the walls of the house above. The ceiling was crusted with nitrous white mineral growths, and the walls were marked with a series of dark lines from flooding. The water table must be close underfoot here. In fact, he could hear water, running continuously. The walls were irregular; they were covered with indistinct carvings which had been worn away by years of water. That must have taken hundreds of years, at the very least. The house was older than he had guessed.
Michael walked on with feline steps, and his torch shone on endless wooden racks, a few of them loaded with dusty bottles. Then there was another sound: it was exactly like a giant rubber bathmat being peeled off a wet bath. Michael froze.
The sound was repeated. It was a long way away. More stealthy than ever, Michael moved forward, flicking the light over the wine racks, the benches, looking for a place to hide if someone came. After twenty paces he found a stack of packing cases and ducked down beside them, turning off the light. It was utterly dark, deep space with no stars. All he could see were the faint nebulae of after-images dancing in his eyes.
A minute later the sound came again, and again, until it formed a continuous rhythm. Now it was not so much a bathmat as a dozen people walking across a tiled floor in flip-flops. It was impossible to gauge the distance, but it was getting closer.
Now I’m getting somewhere, Michael thought. He tried to focus his hearing on the sound, to feel its shape and substance and identity, but it was hard to make sense of it. There were rustling and slapping noises, and perhaps some gurgling beneath it. Then there was a sound like two millstones grinding together, so loud it echoed, but afterwards it was silent except for his own breathing.
He passed low openings, just under waist-high, like the big fireplace he had seen. They looked like cubbyholes or storage spaces, but the torch showed they extended into the distance before curving off. They had been carved out of smooth rock by some precise tunnelling machine.
For the first time Michael began to feel doubt. The cellars were bigger than he expected. How long could he spend wandering around them? How would he even recognise what he was looking for? And how long before the dog sensed him and came down to investigate or just barked?
Michael flicked the torch on and set off again. Another corridor or tunnel led out of the wine cellar. The place was vast. After twenty paces, and a single opening into a bare cellar, Michael stopped.
He was walking on flagstones. He would have guessed they were old, as old as the house perhaps. But there was no sign of wear. Nor was there any dust. He shone the light at the walls and ceiling and failed to find even the trace of a cobweb. The entire place was clean and dusted. He could hear running water.
Michael felt the faintest vibration through the thin deck shoes. It was like a lorry passing by on the pavement. But there were no lorries down here. The quality of the sound was odd, as though it had reverberated through endless deep chambers underground, underwater. He remembered the worn steps going down from the cellar. Just how big was this place?
Ten paces in front of him one of the flagstones moved. It was a metre square and thick as a paving slab, but it opened as though it were on a hinge until it was the height of Michael’s knee. At first he thought he was looking down into the darkness below, but then he realised he was seeing something else. Something black and lumpy poured through the opening, like asphalt being poured on to a road surface. Except that it was pouring upwards.
He watched, fascinated. Was this some sort of mediaeval defence, like boiling oil triggered by the intruder’s footsteps? It was too slow to be threatening. As the flow continued he realised it was not liquid. The black stuff moved unevenly and piled itself up instead of spreading out. The last of it came through and the flagstone ground back into place, exactly like a cat flap closing behind a cat.
Michael squinted at it, his heart pounding like a hammer. Slowly, like a snail’s horns extending, the entity stretched out glistening black pseudopods that felt their way up the walls to the ceiling. Over the course of several seconds the entire thing stretched and flowed until it was upright, forming a living wall that completely filled the corridor from floor to ceiling.
His mind shifted gears and for a moment he thought, “It’s a computer-generated special effect”—then slipped back as he realised this was reality. Then there was a sudden stab of memory: Michael was ten years old, looking into a garden pond and watching in fascination as a tiny blob squirmed and changed from a sphere to a worm.
“What you got there, Mikey?” asked his grandfather, putting down his trowel. “Well now—do you know what that is?”
Michael shook his head. The thing had formed a U-shape, attaching itself to the surface of the water and somehow finding enough purchase to inch its way along.
“That’s a blood-sucking leech. They used to have great ponds full of them here,” said his grandfather. “And that’s one of the survivors. Leeches live forever, you know, and they drink human blood.”
Michael looked up at him with big eyes.
“They farmed the leeches here, to sell them to doctors. When I was a lad there was a story that one day a boy fell into a leech pond. Before they could get him out, the leeches were all over him, hundreds of them, ten times bigger than that. By the time they hauled him out the leeches had sucked him dry!”
Michael took a step back
from the pond.
“Don’t you worry. I expect it was just one of those made-up stories boys tell. Anyway, one little leech can’t harm you. Fascinating creatures,” his grandfather added, as the leech found a crevice and slipped inside, even though the crack was so narrow you could hardly have inserted a knife blade into it. Michael watched for a long time, hoping it would emerge again.
The next day Michael told all his friends at school about his grandfather’s pond full of huge, deadly, blood-sucking leeches. The teacher found him a book which explained how they were used by doctors in the olden days, and how modern doctors were using substances extracted from leeches to help with transplants. There was even a Victorian barometer filled with leeches. The pictures in the book were boring blobs; you had to see them moving to know what they were really like.
Every time he visited he would rush to the pond to look, but he never saw one again.
Without thinking, Michael was holding up his iPhone, hoping there was enough light for a video. He did not know what the thing was or what it meant, but this was surely what he had come for. This was the secret of Effra House. It was huge. Its surface rippled and pulsed; it oozed oily liquid in a way that suggested salivation. It was a lot like a leech, but even more malleable and able to change shape.
It was like an amoeba, but as big as a horse. One that could engulf a man in seconds. A leech big enough to suck the blood from an army.
Then the thing started sliding down the corridor towards him, as swiftly and smoothly as if it were on rails.
Michael dashed back to the wine cellar. When he glanced back it was gaining on him—and in the darkness he could see the thing was faintly phosphorescent, with a pattern that shifted and expanded as it moved.
He raced back past the wine racks and ducked down behind the packing cases. The thing had stopped where the corridor opened out. There were slapping and slopping noises as it adjusted itself to the room, arranging itself into a different shape. He poked the iPhone up to get a periscope view. Now the thing had reshaped itself into a glowing barrel bigger than a bear. Another flashback overtook him: Michael was a teenager, a South London boy looking over the side of a boat in the Med on his first cruise, watching a translucent jellyfish in waving seaweed, frilled sea anemones clinging to rocks. Strange, colourful, gelatinous creatures like nothing he had ever imagined.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 11
