Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  One of the yells was made of words. It was a moment before he realized the shout came from one of the living. Hudson was calling, running after him. A baby howled in Gray’s right ear, drowning out Hudson. Gray ignored them both, followed the lure of Pertwee’s pain. Hudson took his arm, tried to make him stop. Gray shook him off. Hudson tried again, still yelling something. Not interested, Gray thought. Things to do. Things to learn. Time for Hudson’s nonsensical worldview to be firebombed. The philosophical duelling was over.

  “Please, Richard,” Hudson yelled. Gray heard that clearly enough. Hudson had wrapped both hands around Gray’s upper arm and was digging his heels in.

  Pertwee’s screams dropped down the staircase, becoming distant. “Let go,” he warned Hudson.

  “No.”

  He didn’t actually punch Hudson. He almost did. The anger was there. The hatred of stupidity. He pulled his arm back, at the last second opened his hand and turned the blow into a slap. Hudson dropped his arm and reeled back.

  The screams stopped dead. Silence, hollow as the interior of a cathedral bell. One sound: Hudson’s shocked breathing. In the corridor behind him, Meacham and Sturghill were still. Meacham looked like she was about to do something. Gray held a warning finger up for all three. He listened. No trace of the cries. They were gone. The certainty that he was being led to epiphany had evaporated. He’d lost his guide. He was cut loose. No, he thought. No. There was only one place the screams could have been leading. Perhaps, if he moved fast enough, he might arrive in time, be forgiven, be given the promised truth.

  He ran.

  Hudson leaned heavily against a wall. It must have felt wrong, because he shifted away again. He weaved, weak at the knees. He hadn’t taken his hand away from his face. His eyes were glittering. Meacham went up to him, took his hand, forced it down. His cheek was a bright red. “He hit me,” Hudson said, as if he weren’t sure the blow had really happened.

  “He isn’t himself,” Meacham said.

  Hudson shook his head, agreeing. “He’s in danger.”

  Meacham wasn’t sure about that. If anyone had a chance of surviving the night, she thought it was Gray. But. “He might be dangerous,” she amended.

  “Will you help me stop him?”

  “From doing what?”

  Hudson didn’t have an answer. He radiated desperation.

  “All right,” Meacham agreed. She had not gone after Gray or Pertwee earlier. The pragmatism still felt like cowardice. This time, she was less worried about Gray, more worried about what he might do. And the bigger issue was that Hudson was asking for help. They were all falling straight to Hell, so there was no more room to walk away.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Sturghill asked.

  “Only one place.” Here we go again, she thought.

  The silence was enormous. It prodded him to run faster. It felt like a pause, a balancing on a very fine point. It threatened to pull the truth away from him if the fall went the wrong way. He was being given one chance. He had the space between breaths. If he did not pass the test before the next exhalation, the truth would be lost to him.

  He clattered down the stairs, raced to the crypt and to the caves. He might be being fooled; he knew he’d been manipulated from the start, but he didn’t care. He didn’t doubt. If he had to be twisted and broken before he could be brought to look the truth in the face, so be it. He ran faster. The air he pulled into his lungs was a lure, each breath yanking him further on. His footing was sure. He didn’t stumble once on the steep stairs, or the uneven surface of the cavern floors. He didn’t notice until he reached the false tomb that he hadn’t brought a flashlight. He almost paused then, hundreds of feet below ground. There was no light source. He could see perfectly well. He was in Crawford’s simulation again, the surroundings bypassing his eyes and presenting themselves directly to his brain. He recognized the danger of what was happening to him. That was why he almost paused. He saw the terrible impossibilities as part of the truth that at last was opening up to him. That was why he didn’t pause.

  He reached the torture chamber. Homecoming. He smiled. The tapestries stirred, breathing. Gray approached the throne. It was hard and real. He sat down on it. Its edges cut through his clothes and sank into his flesh. He felt the warmth of his blood flow down his back, pool around his thighs. He gripped the armrests, was slashed there too. The pain was that of a crocodile’s jaw slowly biting down on him. He took a deep, shuddering breath. The tapestries billowed. Their figures began to move. Gray focused on them, letting the gestures pull his eyes from one panel to the other. He waited for revelation.

  At first, the only movement came from the tortured. They pantomimed their pain. There was nothing new there. The screams started up again. Now, through his vision that seemed to grow clearer all the time until the cave was bright as cold sunlight, he could see which mouth produced which scream. He heard Pertwee’s cry, and his gaze was riveted on the figure of a woman being pulled apart by giant talons. He looked at her face. It was distorted by agony, stylized in the manner of the tapestry’s period, but it was recognizable. It was unmistakable. It was Pertwee. He was surprised he hadn’t spotted the resemblance before. He squeezed the armrests more tightly. His fingers threatened to lose their grip as they became slippery with sweat and blood. He scanned the other tapestries for familiar faces. He found Corderman’s hide stretched over an iron framework, his face recognizable even in its Silly Putty distortion. Crawford was trying to climb out of a boiling cauldron and being dragged back by a serpentine coil. They were here, all the victims of the house and its preaching inhabitant. He looked for his own face, for Meacham’s, for anyone who was still alive. He found no one. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t recognized the other figures before. They had only recently been added to the art. Who, he wondered now, were all the other characters? He didn’t know those faces. Perhaps some were Rose’s victims during her lifetime. Perhaps others were blank slots, holding patterns of medieval anonymity, waiting for new deaths to take on individuality.

  Sharp, jerky movement in the corner of his eye, demanding attention. He looked. At first he thought one of the damned was waving. Her hand was shaking back and forth, but it was only through galvanic pain. The woman was being speared on four sides by enormous claws. She was his wife. She was Lillian. He stopped breathing, sick satisfaction stolen from him by a huge blow to his gut. He didn’t want to look any further. He wasn’t given the choice. His eyes moved just to the left of Lillian and up. He was forced to see his daughter. Jill was cut in half. She was still twitching. She was still screaming. And there was her voice, and there was Lillian’s, and had their cries always been there; had he simply been unable to bring himself to hear them? Had he been, for all his posturing, as resistant as Hudson to that crucial piece of the truth? He jerked his eyes away, gasping. He clutched the chair for support. His grip slipped with his blood, but the spikes caught him again. Pain was clarity’s stiletto, and he continued to reason as he sobbed, his chest wracking hard and vicious. Lillian and Jill had not been killed by the house. They couldn’t have been. They were too far away, they had no blood ties to the place, and he didn’t think Rose’s influence would have been strong enough to reach out that distance. Their deaths weren’t mysterious. All of the deaths connected with Gethsemane Hall were. His family had died because of the uncaring stupidity of the universe. There was no other reason.

  The reasoning moved forward, relentlessly, to the truth in all its scales. Perhaps he was seeing his wife and daughter not to learn about how they died, but about what came next. He had been staring at the floor, watching blood pool around his feet, but now he faced the tapestries again. He resisted the movement, the current that was trying to rush him back to his tragedy. He clung to the rock that was Pertwee’s torment. The epiphany arrived, a slow, nuclear dawn. What was happening to Pertwee and all the others wasn’t the real point. The torture was the iceberg tip of the real truth. What Rose had learned, and what she preached, w
as not that there was agony, but what caused the agony. Gray had been distracted by the damned as they screamed for mercy and called for a help he could not give. He should have paid attention to what was inflicting the torture. He should have looked more closely at the other movement, at the immensity that the tapestries could only hint at. He stared at one of the crucifixion scenes and tried to learn what he should about the being that was ripping Christ apart.

  The pieces coalesced:

  His family and the implacable sadism of the cosmos.

  An afterlife of unending suffering, no exceptions.

  (We are not alone, he thought with horror.)

  The teeth.

  The claws.

  The scales.

  The power.

  The truth, when it arrived, was so simple. It boiled down to a single sentence.

  chapter twenty

  a cordial invitation

  The screams had stopped. So had the sense of expectation. It seemed to Meacham as if the air itself had become brittle and snapped. The anticipation of the worst thing was over, now that the worst thing had happened, and the house was relaxing into aftermath. She felt better. She didn’t know why. She distrusted the feeling. She was in the trough between shocks. Gethsemane Hall was simply pausing between dragon breaths.

  She, Hudson, and Sturghill were in the caves. They were moving slowly, shining their beams left and right across the floor, covering the territory. When they had grabbed their flashlights from the table of research equipment that still stood, forgotten, in the crypt, they had noticed that none were missing. Gray had run down without one. They had expected to find his body, bones floppy with fractures, lying on the steps. Now they were wondering how far he had made it in the dark. They closed in on the site of the collapse. They knelt at the lip of the hole and aimed their lights down. Meacham said, “I don’t see anything.”

  Sturghill puffed her cheeks. “No way he could have made it over this in the dark.”

  “Then he’s gone?” Hudson asked. “Like the others?”

  Meacham answered, “Maybe.” She thought, No. There was something being woven around Gray. She didn’t see his being tricked into a quick execution as a part of the whole pattern.

  Then Gray proved her right and spoke. “What are you doing?” he said.

  Meacham jumped. They all did. They all stood and caught him in the light as he walked up the tunnel toward them.

  “Watch my eyes,” he said and held up an arm to shield them. In the light, blood dripped. Meacham saw a grid of puncture wounds running from his hand to his shoulder.

  “Jesus!” Sturghill said. “Are you okay?”

  Gray glanced at his arm, dismissed it. “I’m fine.” He stepped around the gap without even looking at it. As he reached them, Meacham saw the extent of his injuries. The back of his shirt was soaked and shining with blood. Flesh and clothing were torn from neck to ankles. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I sat down.”

  The wounds made sense. “In that chair?”

  He nodded, kept walking, forcing them to keep up.

  “My God, Richard,” Hudson began.

  Gray cut him off with a short bark of a laugh, as if Hudson had said something very funny, but this wasn’t the moment for Gray to indulge in a full guffaw. “I’m fine,” he said, but he began to stagger.

  “No, you’re not,” Meacham informed him. She and Hudson moved up to either side. Gray tried to shrug them off, but each step became more unsteady, as if the force that had held him up were leaking out. He was deflating. Five more steps, and he gave in and let them help him. They each took an arm. His weight became heavy very quickly.

  The stairs were too narrow to go up any way other than single file. Gray went first, Hudson following with his hand on Gray’s back to help keep him upright. The climb started off slow, grew worse. Gray had to pause and gather strength for each step. He leaned heavily against the wall, leaving smears of himself behind. Meacham couldn’t avoid touching the wall. Her face become wet with Gray’s blood.

  When they reached the crypt, Gray turned around and gave them all a tight, knowing smile before he collapsed.

  They carried him upstairs. They laid him face down on his bed and cleaned his wounds as best they could. Shreds of cotton from his clothing had been pushed into the holes in his skin. He was unconscious, but he winced every time they pulled out another blood-soaked strip of cloth.

  “He needs a hospital,” Sturghill said.

  “If either one of you has a good idea about how to get him to one, I’m all ears,” Meacham said.

  Hudson buried his head in his hands. “So what do we do?”

  “We stay together. Carry on as before. Make it through the rest of the night. See if we can’t come up with something better during the day.”

  Sturghill said nothing. Hudson nodded and began to pray again. Meacham had long since given up on the idea that there was any point to his effort, but she admired his commitment. If there were a god, he had abandoned his servant, but the servant hadn’t abandoned his god. Meacham wondered if holding firm to a belief made death any easier when it came. From the pallor of Hudson’s face, she doubted it.

  Gray twitched, drawing her attention. His eyes had snapped open. His head was turned to one side on the pillow, and he was looking at her. His expression was calm, cold. If he were experiencing pain, he didn’t show it. “Please leave me,” he said. “All of you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she told him. “You’re weak. You’d be very vulnerable if —”

  “I’ll be fine.” He sounded absolutely certain.

  Hudson said, “You can’t know that.”

  Gray’s eyes narrowed, glinting hostility. “Yes, I can. Now go.”

  Meacham stepped away from the bed. “The man says he wants to be alone, he wants to be alone.”

  Hudson caught up with her as she reached the doorway. “You can’t be serious.”

  She jerked her head Gray’s way. “His decision.” To Gray, she said, “No more chasing after you, though. Clear?”

  His smile was tight and showed no teeth. “I didn’t ask you to the first time.”

  “You’re welcome,” she spat and turned away.

  Hudson grabbed her arm. “He’s not in his right mind.”

  “Sounds lucid enough to me.”

  “For God’s sake, Louise.”

  She freed her elbow from his grip. “He says he’ll be fine. You know what? I believe him.” She didn’t know what sort of understanding Gray had come to with the force in the house, but she sensed he had. Gray had no fear of harm, and though he was injured and bleeding, his conviction had the ring of truth. Nothing was going to touch him for now. She looked past Hudson’s shoulder at Sturghill. “You had a good idea earlier,” she said.

  Sturghill frowned. “I did?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go talk about it. You too,” she told Hudson. She took him by the collar and tugged him out of the room. “Don’t make me pinch your ear,” she said.

  “Richard,” he pleaded as she hauled him, stumbling, from the room.

  Gray had closed his eyes again.

  Back in the bedroom where they had begun the night, Sturghill asked, “What was my great idea?”

  Meacham replied, “Later. Wait for daylight.”

  So they did. There were no more screams. Meacham found herself beginning to relax. There was no building tension in the atmosphere. Nothing was stretching taut. Rose was resting, or she was waiting, but she wasn’t active. Towards dawn, Meacham slept.

  She wasn’t asleep long. Daylight entering the room was a call to flight. Meacham was up first, but the other two were right behind her. She ran downstairs, though the Great Hall, across the courtyard and out into the gardens. The sky was cloudless. The sun was squint-bright. Meacham inhaled air that tasted tantalizingly of freedom. It was the clean, living air of an English morning, fresh with evaporating dew. It was the breath of the lush green. In the daylight, the fore
st looked soothing, not hostile. At first glance. Looking again, Meacham saw that the woods were inviting only if one had never seen them before. “Kristine,” she said. “Take a look at the trees. Notice anything?”

  Sturghill caught it right off. “They’re closer.”

  The advance guard of yews had constricted the perimeter of the lawn. The space was much less open than it had been when they had first arrived at the Hall. Meacham didn’t think there were more yews than before, but they had tightened their ranks. Beneath their branches, the shadows still looked like night. Meacham asked, “Think we’d have any better luck?”

  “Doubt it.”

  She nodded. She had hoped daylight would transform the woods, thinning them, pruning back the tentacles, chasing away the biggest shadows in which large, surreptitious movements could occur. Her hope was going the way of the dew, but she started walking towards the woods anyway. Perhaps the sense of darkness would be less absolute from closer.

  “What was Kristine’s idea?” Hudson wanted to know.

  “I’d love to know that, too,” Sturghill said.

  “Tell you in a minute.” Meacham was wary about speaking what she had in mind aloud. She didn’t know what might be listening. She walked up the drive towards the woods. The other two kept pace. She stopped just shy of the trees. “Check it out,” she said, amused, bitter, scared. The two nearest yews now had half the girth of their trunks on the left and right of the drive. Their roots joined in the centre. There was no longer any room for a vehicle to pass. A person could step over the roots, though. Go on, said the trees. We dare you. Meacham declined. Instead, she took another few steps forward, closing with the yew on the right. She stretched her hand out slowly, nervous. She touched the trunk. The tree did nothing. She felt the moist bark and moss under her hand. She reached up and rubbed the long, narrow leaves between her fingers. They were luxuriant. She folded one. It didn’t break, sprang back to its shape when she let go. Not promising. “Right,” she muttered and led the way back down the drive. She headed for the middle of the lawn, as far from both Hall and woods as she could be.