by John Glasby
The further we proceeded, the more carvings and crude images were in evidence on the walls, and there appeared to be some strange pressure effect down there, for my ears began to ring painfully. Then, abruptly, without any warning whatsoever, the yellow light from the probing lanterns, which had been reflected from the graven stone walls, vanished, and we seemed to be standing in the midst of an inky blackness, unrelieved on all sides, the light failing utterly to pierce the gloom.
The tunnel had opened out into our wide vault; how vast it was, we could not guess. My mind was filled with wild, chaotic thoughts as I stepped haltingly forward, holding the heavy lantern as far above my head as possible, but even then it could not illuminate the unknown depths into which we were advancing, for the floor of the great chamber still dipped downward. For several yards, the utter blackness remained impenetrable and then, in a moment of indescribable fear and apprehension, I did see something. At first only a pale glimmering as the faint gleam from the very rim of the circle of lantern-glow touched it, and then seen more clearly, it solidified out of the confining, nightmare gloom. There is no way of conveying any idea of the graven monstrosity stood on top of that hideous altar. Half-reptilian, half-amphibian, it reposed in a semi-crouch, and so ready to leap from the stone onto some unsuspecting victim below. Pengarden, immediately behind me, screamed involuntarily as he caught his first glimpse of the thing.
His face was utterly white and flabby, eyes staring from his head. He started back, almost knocking the lantern from Carfax’s grasp. Standing there, in the middle of this strange, subterranean world, the image held an air of timeless mystery and horrible suggestion which was not lost on any of others. In the light of the lamps, we were able to make out the vague inscriptions carved around the base, making the odd observation that the language used was not ancient English, even of the most archaic kind, but some extremely old form of Celtic. Bending forward, we tried to make out something of the letters, to interpret them, but the only fragments that made any kind of sense and sent an indefinable shiver of pure horror through me were vague references to Karyptes. In my early days I had read some of the forbidden writings of the monk, Terrilus, works that had been condemned by the venerable Bede, classed as the impious utterings of a familiar of the Devil.
Karyptes, an obvious Celtic corruption of the Greek Charybdis, made it impossible for me to entirely suppress a thrill at the knowledge that this great chamber, hewn out of the rock, had been fashioned by hands long dead before the Romans visited the shores of Britain. The well-known line concerning this sea-creature, occurring in the Alexandreis of Gautier de Lille, a twelfth-century poet: Incidis in Scyllam cupiend vitare Charybdim, was known to be at least as old as St. Augustine, and according to the condemned treatise of Terrilus, far older.
I made no mention of this to the two men with me, not wishing to alarm them any further, at least until we had explored the great cavern to its furthest extent. Skirting the vast altar, we moved on into the enveloping darkness, crossing occasionally from side to side, to feel along the walls and make sure that they still stretched on. Gradually, they began to move inward again as the subterranean chamber narrowed once more, and twenty feet further on we came upon a huge door of thick wood, crossed and studded with some kind of metal. But it was not the door itself that brought the ultimate horror to the three of us. There had, for some time, been a vague and curious exhalation of a strongly putrid odour from in front of us, and now, as the glow from the lanterns gleamed dully on the door, it had become offensive and more emphatic, sweeping about us in noxious vapours that choked and clogged our throats and lungs. The cause of this unbearable stench could conceivably have been the pile of bones which lay in front of the door, but a moment’s glance was sufficient to convince me that these were immeasurably old, some crumbling into dust; and it was borne upon me that the source of the stench was something which lay just beyond the door.
How long we stood there with the lanterns lifted high over our heads so that as much of the light as possible fell upon the scene in front of our startled gaze, we were never afterwards able to tell. But as we stood there, the air seemed to shudder and vibrate and the sudden wind that blew around the edges of the door, through the narrow cracks between it and the stone wall, became more violent. For a moment I tried to tell myself that it was a natural phenomenon connected with the sea that must have lain somewhere nearby, on almost the same level as ourselves, and not far beyond the door.
Then, faint but clear, we heard the sound that came from just the other side of the door; a slopping, oozing noise which brought the sweat boiling from every pore in my body, which transfixed me to that accursed spot because I knew, although I could not see, what it was!
That evil-spawned thing which I had witnessed in my dream surging up from that deep black yonder which heaved and swelled beyond the cliffs, that metamorphic creature whose image stood poised above that time-dimmed, century-stained altar somewhere in the shivering darkness behind us, was a reality, was just beyond that door and trying to get in! Something struck hard on the wood from the other side, sending a hollow echo booming into the stillness around the high, rearing walls of the chamber. A few seconds more and our breaths were literally torn from our shaking lips. The metal-studded door quivered and shook visibly under a torrent of blows. Carfax staggered back, almost dropping the lantern in his fright. Pengarden yelled something I could not distinguish. My fear waxed high again, and suddenly there came a fresh burst of terror at the sound that proceeded from the other side of the door.
It was indescribable. A croaking, moaning, monstrous whistling sound that grew rapidly in volume until it shrieked fiendishly in our ears and reverberated from wall to wall. Unlike anything I had experienced before, it came to us, malignant and evil, sweeping past us as we turned and fled back up that hideously sloping cavern floor, past that grotesque statue which had now assumed a more sinister and terrifying aspect, up the steep flight of strangely carved steps the significance of which I now thought I knew. Slipping and falling in our terrified haste to get away while behind us, as if mocking our efforts to escape, the thudding, thunderous blows on the wooden door grew into a maniacal fury, unnatural and colossal.
Only God in heaven, if there is such a merciful God, knows how we escaped from that veritable pit of Hell, back into the small cellar and up into the grey daylight which filtered through the narrow windows of the manor.
I should have known the people of the district had a good reason for shunning Faxted Manor as they did; I ought to have known the family who had lived in this place many years before I had come, had never seen the shores of South Africa. What must have really happened to them will probably never be known, and the guesses I could have made, probably extremely close to the truth, were of the kind that no one in their sane mind would ever believe.
Far better to say they had simply packed their bags and left then to begin speculating on other reasons for the disappearance. And what of those others who had lived in this accursed place? The demon-cursed family of the Warhopes, steeped in the very evil of which the house reeked? When nothing emerged from those abysmal depths beneath the house, I locked myself in the library, going frantically through the incredibly ancient, cobwebbed books on the dusty shelves, knowing that before I finally left Faxted Manor for good, I had to discover the entire truth, even though it might rip the last vestiges of sanity from me.
Pengarden and Carfax had seen and heard enough. Late that morning, in company with Mary Ventnor, they left, preferring to walk to Bude through the storm, which had begun to blow up from the west, rather than remain another hour under that accursed roof. I could not find it in my heart to blame them, nor to try to dissuade them from going. Once or twice in each dark century, perhaps, there are unguessable horrors revealed to men, which can be neither understood nor disregarded. This was undoubtedly one of them and I, too, fully intended to leave before nightfall.
There were passages in the books, which now took on another
meaning. In the light of what I knew, what I had heard and almost seen, I was able to read into the veiled and sometimes deliberately garbled account the plain and unembellished truth.
It was five o’clock when I finally laid down the last of the books and rose to my feet, going over to the high, narrow window and looking out over the barren moorland at the rear of the house, the weed-choked gardens now full of horrible growths as if nature had regressed, gone back to the ultimate in foulness and degeneracy. Around me, the house was exceptionally quiet. There was not a single creak in the ancient woodwork, even though, outside, the wind, which came howling in from the wild Atlantic, blew and raged around the eaves and angled abutments.
The stillness, the utter stillness, was nerve-rending. My uneasiness grew with every passing minute, and it struck me that there was something oppressively furtive about the quietness of the place, and when I paused consciously analyse my thoughts, I found that I was subconsciously waiting for something to happen, something I dreaded but to which I could give no name.
I fell to wondering what Carrington’s reaction would be if he knew the full story of this accursed place as I now did. For years, he had been merely scratching around on the surface without getting anywhere near the terrible reality of Faxted Manor. I knew that it must all have originated so many centuries ago that without the books and that terrifying experience down among those tunnels with which the entire rock must have been riddled, it would have been impossible for anyone to get the faintest glimmering of the true facts, the full horror.
There must have been some prehistoric temple on the site in which the most abominable rites had been carried out, and later, when the monastery had been built close to the ruins of the carved stone pillars, the old, nameless ceremonies had been carried on until King Edgar in his wisdom, had put to death the perpetrators, razing the monastery to the ground. But the horror was still there, had been wounded but not killed as King Edgar must have fervently hoped, lying dormant in that tunnel-ridden hill with long, slime-bedecked passages leading out to the sea where Charybdis, or some similar heathen monster—for who among us can state that there is only one such foul abomination on this planet—waited, undying, with an insatiable appetite for evil?
Charybdis, or Karyptes, ageless, remembered, and feared by the ancient Greeks, but powerful in the long aeons before that time, when mankind was young, worshipped during those terrible, orgiastic rites, coming at intervals out of the sea with others of its kind. Now the elusive records made sense. Now the terror was seen as cold, dark, naked fact. Those unnatural matings between the Warr Hoppes during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and, if the documents were anything to go by, continuing almost to the present day.
Nylene Poiseder, the wife of Henry Warhope during the early sixteenth century; one of those abominable creatures, an outsider, nonhuman in every respect except perhaps in general outward appearance, theoretically alien, the object of far-spread tales of those days, disturbing stories, which now held for me a more sinister meaning than before. What fearful happenings had occurred then? The hidden heirs of the Warhopes, kept locked away from the light of day and the sight of the peasants, down there in those dripping catacombs under the manor. There would have been some with more man in them than beast; and others so different from man that even the sight of them would have turned men mad. Things like William Warhope, whose body had been discovered on the beach, whose disfigurement had been such that it had been buried with no ceremony and an undue haste in the sand; and as late as 1784, one of the members of the family had been burned on the moors just behind the house, and even to this day nothing would grow there. It was as if the ground contained some evil nourishment, which would allow nothing hallowed to flourish.
With an effort, I pulled my thoughts back to the present. The most merciful thing in this world is the inability of the mind to take in every aspect of any situation and correlate them into a coherent whole. Had mine been able to do so, I would undoubtedly have gone insane at that very instant. But a generous nature had decreed the impossibility of piecing together every little scrap of seemingly disassociated information into the final, sense-obliterating reality.
The events of that morning had faded and become a little blurred in my brain, so that by the time the vaguely-seen watery sun had gone down in a clustering of darkening clouds, I refused to let the hazy qualms overtake me and fought them down as I moved through the house, going from one room to the next. But as I reached the main door, there came a sudden return of that nameless fear which had all but overwhelmed me in those Stygian depths far beneath the foundations.
I thought I was prepared for the worst and I should have been, considering all that had gone before. Yet when that dreadful clang, harsh and metallic, came from that deep below the house, echoing and reverberating along those terrible passages which honeycombed the cliff, my hands trembled so violently on the handle of the door that for long, precious seconds, I tugged vaguely at it before it opened and I rushed out into the twilight.
The wind, howling like a demonical thing, swirled about me. Because of that abnormal stillness inside the manor, I had temporarily forgotten about the storm, which had come sweeping in across the bay over the grey, heaving waters of the Atlantic. Rain slashed at my face. Moisture, dank and foul, ran among the fungoid weeds and overgrown plants underfoot. Walking or running on that treacherous surface was difficult enough; but I did my best and just before I reached the top of the cliff, I threw a quick look behind me, over my shoulder.
The tall, ancient spires and turrets of Faxted Manor rose at my back, clawing spectrally for the storm-torn heavens where the round, leering face of the leprous moon showed for brief intervals, throwing no light on the scene below. But in the faint, murky greyness and the occasional flash of vivid lightning, there was light enough for me to see by; too much light, for behind me, not close to the manor but down there below where the surf pounded on the rocks, something far less tranquil than those dreaming spires arrested my notice and held me immobile, rooted to the spot.
What I saw down there where the white line of foam crashed on to the grey needles of rock—or what I fancied I saw—was a heart-stopping, disturbing suggestion of movement. The distance was perhaps three hundred feet, and for a long second I could discern nothing in detail, but I did not like the look of what I could see.
The things were pale, leprous white, glistening too much in the light of a lightning flash, dripping with water, clawing their way around the tall, black monolith in the small bay, slipping through the water with a horribly, undulant motion. And there was a suggestion of sound, too, audible even above the shrieking voice of the wind—a bestial flopping and a hooting which could have been emitted by no human throat. These were the things which had made those inhuman marks upon the beach, half-dreamed-of monsters from some realm outside of our everyday knowledge and fancies, drawn out of vivid nightmares, whispered of down the long, grey ages, so evil that all reference to their true nature had been deliberately withheld from the eyes of ordinary people. Was it possible that such creatures could have actually been spawned here on Earth, maybe some incredibly old species, probably some strange branch in the tree of evolution? The grain of truth that lay at the very root of the old myths of gods and goddesses? Those mythical beings living during the old times? Those terrible, half-men, half-beast gods of ancient Egypt and, further back in time, of long lost Samaria and Lemuria, of the black stone city of Ib that was old before the first man walked the Earth? From what demonic, blasphemous reality had these ignorant first-people drawn inspiration for the statues and carvings on the walls of the long-dead tombs along the Nile and the Euphrates?
There are those who believe that there is no reality, that these things existed only in the fertile imaginations of the priestly cult seeking power over the mass of the people. And yet I saw them that storm-shrieking night, standing rooted to the spot on that godforsaken, accursed cliff; saw them come leaping, hopping, surging, out of the limitle
ss black deeps of the sea, filing up some half-seen track in an evil, malignant, putrescent stream.
For all of that time I had seen them but dimly, indistinctly, in the heaven-sent darkness. But then, for a long and nightmarish instant, the clouds parted and the flooding yellow moonlight lit the scene almost as bright as day. I saw them clearly then, my mind hovering on the abysmal edge of madness. I think their colour was a greyish-white, and in the moonlight they were mostly smooth-skinned or scaly, with the suggestion of fins along their backs; their arms and legs were webbed, fibrous, their features repellent with wide-bulging eyes that stared unblinkingly into the night. The first had almost reached the top of the cliffs, and still a limitless stream of them was emerging from the sullen swell when something snapped inside my mind. The spell was mercifully broken. I turned and ran headlong into the night. A thin scream rose and fell in my ears, following me, seemed to swell in tune to the rapid thudding of my heart in its frenzied rhythm, and long seconds passed before I recognised the inarticulate yelling as my own.
There came a long, sustained peal of thunder, splitting the heavens asunder and close on its heels, like a cavernous roar out of the gaping mouth of Hell itself; a rumbling, grinding, grating sound as the ground shook and shuddered under my feet. Great fissures opened in the rocks. Chasms appeared behind me, and in one agonised glimpse, twisting my head with a wrenching of my neck muscles, I saw the front wall of the manor buckle and bulge, twist outward, and fall. It seemed the entire rock-face was crumbling into the sea, carrying with it that blasphemous place. There was a vile, graveyard stench that came out of the ground on every side. Choking and gasping, no longer caring what went on my back, knowing only that I had to get away from that place while there was still time, I ran with the howling wind, my lungs bursting with the terrible strain, my legs leading and afire with the tremendous effort. The reality of what I had seen was searing through my mind. I could not rid myself of the thought of that spawn of evil which had risen up from the deep and unknown fathoms within the sea, of what lay down in the tunnels beneath the manor itself, tunnels along which the seawater must have been permeating endlessly with the sweeping tides everyday for countless hundreds, thousands of years, weakening the whole cliff until that night when it had crumbled in upon itself, carrying Faxted Manor with it as it slid into the sea.
