The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “I can feel it too,” Brunel said. “What do you feel, Mr Carlyle?”

  “A certain oppression, from the close atmosphere.”

  “But nothing else?”

  “It is curious. This is a very ancient place, and yet—”

  William Dowling, who had been leaning out at the bow, sinking his pick here and there in the water, suddenly reared back with a cry. “I saw a face,” he said. “Looking up at me out of the water.”

  “You saw a reflection of this lantern light,” his brother said. “Don’t mind him, Mr Brunel. He had a little more than a nip of your fine brandy.”

  “It was a man pale as snow,” William Dowling said. “Very handsome and very horrible at the same time.”

  “Not your own reflection then,” his brother said, “unless you were mistaken about the handsome part.”

  I insisted on looking, but saw only rippling lines of lantern light moving to and fro like yellow water snakes over the black surface of the thick current. Thomas Dowling retrieved his brother’s pick, the handle of which stood up from the surface like the hilt of Excalibur, and reported that there was a good three feet of draught.

  “We’ll push on, boys,” Brunel said, and opened the throttle of the gaz engine. The boat glided through the channel into the arch of the low tunnel beyond. The dripping bricks of the ceiling were only five or six feet above the water, and we had to crouch low. Once, a pipe on top of the gaz engine snagged on something, but the boat shuddered and scraped free. Then the echo of the beat of its driveshaft dropped away, and cooler, slightly fresher air blew in our faces. Thomas Dowling raised his lantern above his head, and Withers held up another; by their double light I saw that we had entered a wide lake under a high ceiling of fan vaulting – the flooded cellar of some ancient building long buried by the accretion of centuries. A rushing stream dropped in a fall of white foam from a narrow channel at the far end, and there was a bank of tumbled stones and clay along the left-hand side. A rowing boat was tied up at the foot of a rough wooden staircase that dropped down to this narrow shore from a ragged opening in the ceiling.

  As Brunel steered toward this, the fingerbones beat so strongly in their tin that it jumped from my grasp and fell into the puddle of water at my feet. As I bent to retrieve it, a breeze got up out of the darkness, and the boat began to rock. Little waves ran across the width of the lake and broke in white water on the stones of the banked shore. Spray flew up and dissolved into a thickening mist that rolled over the unrestful water. Brunel looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and I told him that as in the tunnel it was a phenomenon with no cause that I could discern.

  The bow of the boat bumped against the shore, and the two labourers sprang out, thigh-deep in swirling mist, and made us fast. I drew the blade from my cane and clambered out after Brunel, who told Withers to stay with the boat and keep the engine pressured before leading the Dowling brothers and me up the rickety stair.

  The bones tick-tick-ticked in the tin, matching the pulse in the base of my throat. We climbed out into a clammy, stone-floored basement, and something toadlike stirred above the door on the far side. I dismissed it in a moment, but before I could raise my own warning the door burst open and half a dozen men crowded through, all of them with shrunken, misshapen heads, all of them armed with pistols.

  Dr Pretorius stepped into the room behind them, his smile triumphant, and bade us welcome.

  * * *

  My cane was taken from me, William and Thomas Dowling were relieved of their pick and crowbar, and Brunel of his pistol and pocket knife. Dr Pretorius thrust a pale hand toward me, and I gave him the tin containing the fingerbones. He held it to his ear for a moment, and said, “Is this what led you to the remains of Ulpius Silvanus?”

  “Where are his bones?” I said. “And for that matter, who is he, and what do you want with him?”

  “All will become clear soon,” Dr Pretorius said, tapping the side of his nose.

  The Dowling brothers were tied up and left in the care of two of the shrunken-headed men; Brunel and I were herded back down the stair. Withers was waiting for us at the bottom, sitting on the ground with his hands clasped on his head, the giant savage in his Arabian Nights finery standing watch over him, a pistol in each fist.

  “Bring him along,” Dr Pretorius said. “We may be in need of fresh blood.” As we picked our way along a narrow path beaten through the rubble, he told me, “It has all worked out very nicely. You saved me the trouble of bringing up the bones, and then you delivered yourself into my hands. There is still time to recant, by the way. Come in with me now, and your reward will be of this world, and not the next. We will do such things as men have only dreamed of.”

  “I believe you have already had my answer,” I said.

  “You’ll help me anyway,” Dr Pretorius said. “But it would be so much more convenient, and I would be far more forgiving of your friends’ trespasses, if you were to give your help freely. Through here, if you please.”

  A low, irregular opening had been hacked into the tightly mortared stones of the wall at the far end of the lake. Menaced by the pistols of Dr Pretorius’s servants, Brunel, Withers and I scrambled through a passage driven through the earth to a low-ceilinged, stone-floored grotto lit by lanterns that hung from a ceiling of overlapping boards propped up by a forest of stout beams. Shovels and picks lay in a heap in a corner; tall jars of black glass each as big as a hogshead barrel stood in a row along one wall; and something square and waist-high was shrouded in a red and gold Persian rug in the centre.

  Withers, his upper arm gripped by the enormous hand of the savage, shivered at my side while Brunel coolly walked around the perimeter, tapping the supports and advising Dr Pretorius to have them wedged more tightly, before the whole enterprise collapsed upon him.

  Dr Pretorius turned his greedy, exultant smile to me. “He doesn’t know anything important, does he? Numbers and angles, cosines and arcs and logarithms, pounds per square inch—” He snapped his long white fingers, dismissing them. “We know, don’t we, Mr Carlyle, that such trivial calculations are of as much use as smoke in manipulating the true nature of the world. It is not matter which is important, but the forms that underlie matter. By mastering those forms, we can master the world, and the world beyond the world too.”

  He strutted across the grotto, his mop of white curls brushing the ceiling, and ran a hand over the top of one of the squat jars, like a proud mother tousling the hair of a favoured child. “This is a new race of the children of men,” he said, “formed by my own artifice and soon to be quickened by the life force that I have discovered. A race able to live in both worlds at once, and mediate them directly. You and I have trained long in the matter of the living and the dead, Mr Carlyle, but my creatures will be able to do all that we can, and much more, as easily as breathing. And I will be their god.”

  “Monsters,” Withers said. His face was as pale as milk under his shock of red hair.

  “Quite so,” Dr Pretorius said. “A new world of gods and monsters!”

  He stepped up to the square form in the centre of the grotto and pulled the rug away, revealing a pediment constructed of heavy blocks of stained limestone and faced with a carving of a man riding a bull, with a familiar tangle of blackened bones draped across its dished top.

  “The altar of the temple of the sun-god, Mithras,” he said. “Roman soldiers brought the cult to London, and sacrificed bulls to drive back the darkness of the forests around their fledgling city. They believed that the spilled blood of the bull killed by Mithras was the life force from which sprang every kind of plant and animal, and so the blood of their sacrifices has charged this altar with a special potency. At least one man was sacrificed too. His head was buried here, and his body was wrapped in a bull’s hide and thrown into the River Fleet. At last, washed to and fro on the tides of many centuries, it came to rest above the path of Mr Brunel’s pitiful little tunnel. You feel its potency, don’t you, Mr Carlyle? Do not deny it – I can
see in your face that you do.”

  The carving on the front of the altar was very similar to the design of the buckle that Brunel and I had found with Ulpius Silvanus’s skeleton. I saw now that the man was not merely riding the bull: watched by two robed and hooded figures, one holding its torch high, the other low, he was pulling back the bull’s head with his left hand while cutting its throat with a long narrow knife held in his right, all this within a ring in which dogs and scorpions and hares and fantastic chimeras chased each other’s tails.

  As I stared at this carving, only half-hearing Dr Pretorius’s gloating speech, I saw a star kindle deep within the stone, and discovered that I could not look away. The star grew brighter and brighter until with a soundless explosion it burst open like a flower, shining beyond the limits of the stone. I cried out and clapped my hands over my eyes, but the light burned through everything. I could see, past the shadows of my own hand bones, the shadows of the bones within the flesh of the men around me; could see the misshapen homunculi stir in their black glass jars; could see at the heart of the light, like a pupa in its case, a ragged unformed figure jerking back and forth, as if trying to free itself. Then it stilled, and turned its terrible dark gaze toward me.

  Brunel told me later that I bellowed like a wounded bull and staggered backward and dropped to my knees, the heels of my hands pressed tight to my eyes. As everyone turned to look at me, he planted his back against the wall and kicked as hard as he could at one of the timbers that supported the roof. It gave with a rending sound and he kicked again and it dropped free, thumping on the stone floor as gravel and stones, and then a cascade of water burst out of the widening hole in the low ceiling. Wherever the water splashed on the stone floor it burst into steam, filling the little grotto with twisting snakes of white vapour, but most of the flood hung in the air as if pouring into an invisible mould: a glassy column that spun faster and faster, with the form of a man becoming dimly visible within it.

  I was jolted from my fugue by cold, filthy water washing over my knees, thighs and waist, and staggered to my feet as the flood continued to rise. For a moment, the glassy figure stared straight at me, and then the spinning column burst, drenching everyone and everything. Half the lanterns hung from the ceiling immediately went out; the rest swung crazily, sending shadows swarming around the flooded grotto. Dr Pretorius was knocked down, his pale hands clawing above swirling water as his servants rushed to his aid, and I grabbed a pick and swung it at the dazzling block of the altar.

  I still do not know if the impulse was mine, or if it sprang from the knowledge that had been rammed into my brain.

  Black bones smashed; metal rang on stone. Drenched, half-blinded by light that only I could see, I swung again and again. I was dimly aware that Withers was beside me, matching me stroke for stroke, and then one of the stones shattered and the burning flower burst like a soap bubble. The flood surged higher and we were all of us knocked down. Hardly aware of where I was, I breathed in a solid gush of water that seared all the way to the bottom of my lungs. Someone grabbed me and hauled me upright, and I saw, beyond a swarm of green and red after-images, that Dr Pretorius and his servants were battling an army of snakes made entirely of water. A glassy python surged around the trunk of the giant savage and bore him under; Dr Pretorius was clinging with one arm to one of the black jars and swiping at darting ropes of water with the other. Then Brunel and Withers dragged me backward, through the half-flooded tunnel.

  The lake had risen too. Waves full of a milky light dashed over the bank, washing over our knees. The Lady Sophia swung back and forth at its mooring, banging against the stairway. At the far end of the lake, only the keystone of the arch showed above the restless water.

  We had climbed to the top of the tottering stairs when Brunel suddenly damned himself for a fool and swung over the rail. Withers tried to pull him back, but Brunel shook off his assistant’s grip, shouted that he would put an end to this and we must save ourselves, and swarmed down the frame of the stairs toward the tossing boat. I was still half-blinded and dizzy; Withers got his shoulder under me and helped me into the basement, where the two brothers were struggling furiously to free themselves of their bonds, and the servants that Dr Pretorius had left to guard them lay in insensible heaps on the stone floor.

  “They fell down like unstrung puppets just a moment ago,” Thomas Dowling said, as Withers sawed at his ropes with a knife he had found on one of the unconscious servants.

  “I think they were intimately connected to Pretorius,” I said. “Perhaps he too is unconscious.”

  Withers said, “Only unconscious? I hope the monster is drowned.”

  He had cut through the rope binding Thomas Dowling’s arms, and had begun to free William, when Brunel appeared at the door, soaked through, wide-eyed, and breathless. “No time for that,” he said. “She’s set to blow!”

  We fled up a flight of stairs and burst through heavy curtains into a big room cluttered with cases and glass jars on stands. Faintly lit by lamplight that filtered through the gold-painted windows, a two-headed baby drowned in oily liquid inside a tall cylindrical jar opened both pairs of eyes and stared at me; at the same moment, the polished wood floor heaved violently and the curtains billowed out and a great gush of black smoke filled the room. Jars tottered and fell and smashed, the windows all fell in, and the floor heaved again and with a great groaning crack split jaggedly down the centre.

  Forty or fifty feet below us, the gaz engine of the Lady Sophia had exploded like a bomb.

  Everything in the museum slid toward the crack, gaining speed, smashing together, and dropping into the smoking abyss. Thomas Dowling hauled his brother up the tilted floor by the scruff of his shirt; I clung to Withers as he helped Brunel knock shards of glass from a window frame. We piled through, sodden, smoke-begrimed, hatless and breathless. Roof tiles and broken glass smashed on the pavement all around. We picked ourselves up and ran, pursued by a great wave of smoke and plaster dust as the building dropped in on itself floor by floor, plummeting into the great cavity beneath.

  June, 1954

  No story is ever finished.

  I decided to write this account of my adventure with the brilliant young engineer after I read in The Times that an excavation under the direction of Professor W.F. Grimes of the Museum of London had uncovered the remains of a small Roman temple. It had been built in the early part of the third century, and sculptures and a silver incense box buried under the stone floor suggested that it had been dedicated to the worship of the Persian god Mithras.

  I paid a visit that afternoon. The site was not on Farringdon Street, but within the old walls of the City, near the buried course of the Walbrook River. Raw new buildings of red brick or steel and concrete were springing up everywhere, but the considerable scars left by the war were still much in evidence. New office buildings and brief rows of surviving Victorian buildings stood amidst the rubble fields of bomb-sites. Only a few months after the firestorms of the Blitz, these ruins had become fields of wild flowers as seeds buried for centuries woke in the ashes: lupins, poppies, pansies, violets and, most notably, the yellow flowers of London Rocket.

  The site of the temple had been discovered while the foundations for an office block were being dug. The archaeologists worked in plain view, in an oblong terraced pit set at an oblique angle to the street. I confess to being gripped by considerable apprehension as I approached, but if there had ever been ghosts or other revenants at that place, they had long since departed. It was pleasant to lean on my cane in the warm sunlight and watch the crew of young men and women at work amongst a narrow maze of low stone walls set at different levels, uncovering the past inch by inch with trowels and paintbrushes, sifting spoil through wire-mesh pans, washing finds in rocking trays of water.

  I knew, as they did not, that this temple was not the first in London to be dedicated to Mithras. Dr Pretorius had hunted out the original, and uncovered not only a source of power but the site of an ancient tragedy.
The temple founded by Ulpius Silvanus had stood just outside the boundary of the new city, beyond the western bank of the Fleet river. As the city grew and became more settled and civilized, and more and more soldiers retired from duty at the borders of the Empire to become merchants and traders, the Mithraic cult had become more concerned with fostering the business concerns of its members than with sacrifice, and a sizeable faction had argued that the temple should be resited inside the city, within the safety of the newly built city wall. Ulpius Silvanus had refused to listen to them, and they had murdered him on the altar of the temple that he had built.

  I had learned all this in the instant when I had confronted his ghost, and I had told the story to Brunel and the others as we warmed ourselves with brandy in the long shed at the site of the Thames Tunnel.

  “The ghost was bound to the skull buried beneath the altar, mingling with the puissance of the accumulated charge of the sacrifices. But it retained a connection to the rest of the bones, too. It was able to follow the ways of water like a spider at the centre of its web. That is why, I think, I felt no presence in the tunnel.”

  Brunel favoured me with his sharp, inquisitive gaze. “Did any of Pretorius’s boasts have substance, or was he a raving lunatic? I favour the latter explanation, of course.”

  “Amen,” Withers said.

  “You did not see what was inside the altar,” I said.

  “I saw you fall to your knees and cry out,” Brunel said. “I saw the flood water behaving strangely, as if vibrating to some harmonic, and all the rest was smash and flood and every man for himself.”

  “You freed something,” Withers said. He had a blanket draped over his shoulders, and although he was no longer shivering he was hunched into himself, clutching his glass of brandy in both hands. He said, “I felt it pass through me, like a wind.”

  I said, “The ghost of Ulpius Silvanus has become something more than the ghost of a man, and something less than the ghost of a god.”