by Emby Press
“I do.” He took a large gulp of brandy. “Some months before my uncle’s death the house was broken into. One of the doors in the rear was forced open, and there were footprints and other traces of entry in the back hallway. But nothing was found missing; something had frightened the thieves away before they could complete the job. Uncle Charles never reported the burglary to the police, but I could tell he was badly shaken.”
“Do you think he was murdered after all?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” Allan said, shivering in spite of the warmth of the room. “My uncle was an old man who enjoyed his solitude. In the thirty years he’d lived at Atworth Manor, he’d never been able to keep a servant longer than a month or so. They would flee the house and no amount of money could entice them to return. Rumors started to go around—strange noises in the night, voices whispering in the woods, other superstitious drivel. You know what backwoods New Englanders are like. I never paid them much heed until I saw the photographs taken during the Coroner’s inquest. The look on his dead face… it was enough to turn a man’s hair white. He had died of sheer terror.”
“Terror—of what?”
“A presence,” he said. “A malefic agency not of this world.”
I had never thought Allan to hold beliefs in the supernatural, and my astonishment must have shown, for he laughed and rose to refill my glass.
“I assure you that my concerns are practical rather than occult. I had hoped to dispose of the property at a good price, but there have been damn few prospective buyers. Atworth Manor already has an evil reputation in the area, and my uncle’s death will only make matters worse.”
“So you wish to exorcise a ghost.” I searched his face for a hint of mockery, found none. “But how do I fit into this plan of yours?”
“Who better than Alastair Singleton, whose aid has been much sought after by the Boston police department in cases of a mysterious and—dare I say—esoteric nature?” From a pile of books he produced a leather-bound ledger full of newspaper clippings. “Your reputation precedes you. If there is anything to be done, you are the man to do it. I have no time to waste on parlor charlatans and babbling priests. You will, of course, be aptly compensated for your time.”
There was a long silence as I allowed his words to sink in. “This is not a matter to be taken lightly,” I said. “If you have read about my methods of work, you’ll know that I’m no believer in the mystical or diabolical. Rather, it is my opinion that our world is filled with forces and phenomena which science is still unable to explain. But the deeper we delve into this forbidden lore, the greater the peril. There will come a day when our thirst for discovery opens up strange and terrifying vistas of knowledge, for better or worse.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Some things are beyond the reckoning of man, not to be trifled with.” I had an evil foreboding that this was one of them. Yet from the set of my friend’s features I could tell his mind was made up and he would not be swayed. Allan Tremaine was accustomed to having his way. “If we are to proceed, we must do so with the utmost caution. There is no knowing what to expect, but of one thing you can be certain: it is no apparition, no ghost haunting your late uncle’s manor. Such things have no existence save in the imagination of idle matrons who hold frivolous seances.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” I gave him a hard stare. “You must promise me one thing, Allan. If I deem it too dangerous to proceed, you’ll leave it alone—the house and whatever it is that inhabits it.”
“You have my word for it,” he said, and foolishly I believed him. “Tomorrow we’ll visit Atworth Manor and see what we can make of this business. But let’s postpone all dark thoughts until the morning. The decanter is still half full, and I have a story to tell you about a curious thing that happened to me one evening in Monte Carlo.”
*
The house was a ponderous old brick affair with a high gabled roof and ivy-covered wings, situated in a stretch of gloomy woodland some ten miles from the city of Hartford. Allan parked his motor-car in the overgrown courtyard, beneath rows of tall, dusty windows. The watchful gaze of a verdigris-stained Cupid followed us from a long-dry fountain full of yellow leaves. The overall impression of the place was one of neglect and disrepair; as far as I could tell, there was nothing to suggest the malevolent presence suspected by my friend.
An iron key grated in the lock and the entrance door creaked open on rusted hinges. The entryway was dark and musty, dominated by an immense fireplace of antique design. A flight of stairs led upward into darkness, and a long corridor to the left terminated in the arched doorway of the library. The heavy doors leading into the west wing of the manor had been boarded shut; sections of the west wing roof had collapsed from neglect, but Charles Atworth had never bothered to repair them. The more I learned about Allan’s reclusive uncle, the more I understood that the house had come to reflect the old man’s peculiar mood and mind: dark and brooding, steeped in isolation, its once luxurious interior slowly crumbling beneath the weight of years.
Local lore held that the house was built on unhallowed ground—the remains of a colonial prison according to some, the ancient burial site of an Algonquian tribe according to others—but Allan’s research had proven this to be false. From what he could gather, the fanciful stories told by former servants and the queer and reclusive manner of its owner were alone responsible for the air of superstition and credulity that had settled around the place. I was uncertain that our search would yield anything, but decided to indulge my friend’s newfound interest in what he called the supernatural—an interest that was beginning to take on all the characteristics of an obsession.
Soon the gas-lamps were turned on and the great hallway swam out into the dim glow. A gray layer of dust lay over everything, and the corners of the peeling walls were draped with cobwebs. We made our way into the library; here too the dust lay thick, a large black stain spread across the cracked ceiling, and plaster had crumbled on a pile of old books heaped atop the great mahogany desk that occupied the center of the room. The carpets had been rolled back to the walls and the floorboards were bare, inscribed with strange diagrams and symbols in bright scarlet paint.
“This is where he was found,” Allan said, patting the headrest of a scuffed leather armchair. “A storm had blown some telephone wires down. Two repairmen from Newington came to the house to ask if they could drive onto the property and saw him through the library window. He’d been dead for days, that horrific grimace frozen on his face.”
“Your uncle lived here thirty or so years.” I laid the contents of my satchel out on a lacquered coffee table: a heavy revolver, an electric torch, a notepad, a sketching pad and several pencils. The symbols on the floor intrigued me: three years ago I’d seen similar marks at the site of a ritualistic murder in an insalubrious neighborhood in East Boston. “Did he ever mention any peculiar events, or occurrences that defied logical explanation?”
“Never. But Uncle Charles rarely noticed anything.” Allan laughed. “We used to joke that the house could burn down around him without him noticing—so absorbed was he in his work.”
“But he discovered the burglary.” I made a few hasty sketches of the marks on the floor. “Can you show me how the thieves broke in?”
At the back of the entryway was a smaller chamber that connected the kitchen to the empty servants’ quarters. A massive old door of stained oak opened on the back lawn and a row of long-abandoned stables; the lock was new and shiny. I examined the doorway and the clutter of cardboard boxes and jars in the room, but found nothing save another odd symbol painted above the lintel.
“We found muddy footprints here,” said Allan, pointing along the floor into a dark, narrow passage. “At least two men, judging from the sizes.”
“Where does this passage lead to?”
“Past the old scullery and back into the entryway,” he replied. “Uncle Charles forbad
e me from going there; he was so agitated that I didn’t even try to object. We didn’t find a trace of the prints in the front of the house. They must have fled through the same door they had come in by.”
I shone my torch into the corridor and took a cautious step forward. Streaked yellowed wallpaper had peeled off in blotches, revealing rotten masonry; a dark stain like the one on the library ceiling ran along the walls at about shoulder height. Several doors down, the beam of light revealed a charred mark on the wallpaper: soot from a gas lantern where the burglars had halted to ply their trade. I tapped the wall and found a section that gave back a hollow sound. I ran my fingers across the wallpaper and felt the edges of a hidden door, and a switch concealed beneath an unused light fixture.
There was a rusty click and the door swung open: a rickety wooden staircase descended into the blackness beneath, and a faint smell of corruption reached my nose. Allan joined me and stared with growing horror down the stairs.
“What’s in the cellar?” The unspeakable implications of that charnel-house stench chilled my blood. The weight of the pistol in my pocket was suddenly reassuring.
“I don’t know.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “I’ve never been in this part of the house. You—you don’t suppose Uncle Charles…” He could not bring himself to finish.
I ran the beam of the torch across the packed dirt floor, expecting to find corpses, but the only thing I could see was a rack of gardening tools and an old workbench. The staircase creaked beneath my weight as I ventured into the damp chill of the cellar, my heart in my throat. But no grisly sight greeted me at the bottom: nothing but old dusty furniture and junk, and a solid steel door set into the far wall. I turned on the lights and called out to Allan to come down. Together we approached the vault door: the metal surface bore the marks of crowbar and chisel, and a curious stone relief lay in pieces by the wall. The wall around the doorway was stained black, as if something had seeped into the brickwork.
Failing to pick the lock, the burglars had resorted to brute force, but their furious blows had not so much as dented the barrier. Nothing short of a charge of dynamite would get us past the door, and I was no longer certain I wanted to know what lay beyond it. The old scholar had kept a secret vile enough to be locked away behind a foot of iron and steel. Opening the vault would make us privy to this secret, place us on a terrible and unknowable course from which there would be no return.
Allan’s face was as white as a sheet. He rummaged through his pockets and produced a heavy, star-shaped iron key.
“I got this from the police, but could not figure out which lock it opened,” he said. “They found it clutched in his dead hand.”
*
“Drink this.” I thrust a metal flask a Allan. His eyelids were half open and his breathing was labored; he took a cautious sip and groaned, but some of the color returned to his cheeks. I settled into a low chair and tried to control the shaking of my hands. Images swarmed my mind; I buried my face in my hands, feeling the walls edge closer, a whisper of insanity tickle the back of my skull, promising oblivion.
Of our venture into the pit of horrors beneath Atworth Manor, the less is said the better. The stench that rushed out at us was like a thousand open graves; it sent us reeling and retching in great gasping spasms. A vast underground chamber sprawled before our eyes, lit by strong electric arc lights. In the center of the hall, rows of metal vats were sunk into the floor. A sort of hydraulic engine, or pump, was attached to each by an array of pipes and tubes. Some had broken down, while others appeared to have run out of fuel. Oil dripped from motionless cranks and gears and pooled on the stone floor, its sharp smell mixing with the foetorfetor of the room.
Overcoming the reek and the feeling of dread that welled up in my stomach, I pressed on. Behind the vats was a small, tidy area in which stood a sloping autopsy table, and next to it a short tray on which mortician’s instruments gleamed in neat rows. At the back were long, deep shelves filled with beakers and vials and specimen jars in which pale forms floated, casting eerie shadows on the stone walls of the cellar, and beneath them a row of drawers.
I glanced at Allan and opened one of the drawers. Inside was a decaying wooden box with a carved lid, and at its bottom lay an inch or two of gray ash and fragments of bone. We inspected the rest of the drawers and found the same in all of them: human remains, some in coffins or burial urns and some without, centuries old and crumbling to dust.
A shriek made my blood run cold. I turned and saw Allan, eyes wide with terror, shrink away from one of the metal vats, clutching at the pipes for support. Drawing my revolver I approached the riveted lid and peered through the slitted window.
At first I saw nothing, for the inside of the vat floated in shadow and a film of dark green slime covered the other side of the glass. Then the pale, raw shape within moved and the pistol dropped from my palsied hand. My mind picked over the hideous sight, searching for a weakness, a flaw that would reveal it to be false; a rush of madness darkened my thoughts and I tried to scream, but no sound came out. I fell to my knees and crawled away, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes and stopping my ears.
Words are inept to describe what I saw in the sunken vat: a hideous mass of pink and scarlet flesh, with vestigial arms and clawed hands and a raw, glistening head in which rudimentary human features could be vaguely discerned. It writhed and mewled in frenzy or agony, dark veins and malformed organs pulsing beneath the translucent skin, black, depthless eyes staring into mine.
This, then, was the secret old Atworth had kept for decades: this basement of horrors, the result of some unspeakable experiment. The vats held dozens of the pale fleshy abominations, but only a few still showed signs of life; the rest had been reduced to liquid putrescence. Whatever they were, it was plain that they depended on the pumps for sustenance and survival, and the failure of the machinery had precipitated their demise. But of this I had no thought at the time: reason had retreated into the deepest recesses of my brain and all that remained was the primitive urge to flee. Allan lay insensate on the flagged floor and I half-dragged, half-carried him out of that mad, reeking pit and up the cellar stairs, into the dank, musty darkness above.
Sitting in the library, dim late afternoon light filtering through the dusty panes, I felt some of my sanity return. My friend was still pale, but he had regained his senses. For a long time neither of us spoke a word; the silence enshrouded us like a living thing, and beneath it something lurked, its poison breath tainting the stale air. Allan was right: there was a presence in the old house, a malevolent, formless essence bleeding through the rotting walls and worm-eaten beams, watching from under the dark vaulted ceilings, biding its time with inhuman patience. Both of us sought to occupy our thoughts with mundane tasks: I copied the symbols on the library floor and Allan set about lighting a fire in the enormous hearth. From the entryway came muttered curses and the clatter of the heavy iron grate: the flue was blocked up and the flames would not take hold.
Feeling restless, I began to pace the room, my gaze roaming from shelf to shelf. The heap of old tomes on the table drew my attention: brushing off the rubble, I leafed through the brittle pages. The writing was Latin, the ink brown and faded with age. To my great surprise, I recognized some of the titles: medieval tracts and treatises on the secret lore of alchemy and necromancy and witchcraft, the black arts of conjuring and transmutation. Many among them had been considered blasphemous and diabolical in less enlightened epochs; the mere suspicion of perusal of such works was sufficient to condemn the unfortunate subject to the stake or the torturer’s rack. My pulse quickened as my finger traced the forbidden incantations. Here they were, these grim, dark, centuries-old tomes, in the library of Charles Atworth, eccentric and erudite, author of two acclaimed books on the long-forgotten tribal cultures of the Polynesian isles, patron of science and benefactor of museums around the world. Only hours ago the notion would have struck me as preposterous; but in the light of the hideous discovery
in the cellar, the presence of these dread volumes furthered my unease.
Allan returned from the hallway, his hands blackened with soot. The unspoken question hung between us. He was shaken by the ordeal, but his mouth was a thin, bloodless line of determination. I saw there was little hope of persuading him to leave.
“What we saw in the cellar.” His voice was cracked and hoarse. “Is it… did it kill him?”
“No,” I replied. “The things in the vats are experiments. Some kind of obscure ritual of communing with the dead—conjuring a prison of living flesh from ashes and dust, then using it to summon the spirit of the deceased and bind it into service.” As I spoke the words, some of the pallor returned to my friend’s face. “The process relies on the machinery: without it the animating essence flees to the nether spheres, and the transmuted flesh decays rapidly.”
“But to what end, Singleton? How did he die?”
“Here is what I think.” I struggled for an explanation he would understand. “Your uncle combined ancient rites with modern science to open a gateway to realms beyond our own and speak to the spirits of the dead who dwell therein. But these hidden dimensions, these nighted planes of existence, are populated by entities whose nature is beyond mortal ken; and when a door is opened there is no knowing what may come through it. Atworth had some understanding of the forces he was dealing with. He took precautions, barred the way out of the cellar with a powerful warding glyph. But the burglars smashed the stone tablet to pieces trying to force their way into the vault. Whatever was inside escaped: Atworth died in the middle of a banishment ritual. Something found its way into our world—something older than time, an evil beyond our comprehension—something that’s still between these walls!”
“This is absurd.” My friend collapsed on the battered sofa. “Rituals, spirits, entities from other dimensions—all this from a dreary old bookworm like Uncle Charles.”
“Curiosity knows no bounds,” I said. “Clearly there is danger in this place. We must decide how to proceed from here.”
