Dark Coven

by Nick Brown

  “I want to help you, DI Campbell. I pity you because you’re in the same position I was on Samos; you still think there’s a logic that governs our existence. But…”

  He paused and refilled her glass with a deep coloured red wine.

  “Drink this, it’s a Nemea, a good one, I know the estate, my father nearly bought it on impulse some years back. A good wine, it will help you.”

  He watched her drink then began, trying to explain how to see things differently.

  “I can’t explain in a way that will suit the logical part of your mind. The closest I get is that the perpetrators we are chasing have a different perception to ours because they don’t inhabit the same world and pursue different objectives… no, don’t, please don’t stop me.”

  They were interrupted by the waiter bringing a dish of lemon potatoes and two plates of briam. Theodrakis used the natural break.

  “Eat, it’s good, and while you eat, listen.”

  He refilled her glass then resumed.

  “I experienced this on Samos. There was a place there: palatial, impossible, like something out of The Arabian Nights. Its owner enticed me there. I saw it, experienced it but I don’t think it really existed.”

  He looked across at her expecting some protest, but she was listening.

  “What I saw wasn’t a one-off, there’s a history of these places although they go by different names: Lyonesse, Mu, Atlantis, Camelot, Shangri La. They inhabit our consciousness while they achieve some purpose then fade, leaving only myth and memory. But all they really were was a glamour cast over our senses, an illusion, a confidence trick.”

  Theodrakis forked some of the vegetable stew and lemon potatoes on to his plate, took a sip of the wine and wiped his mouth on the napkin fastidiously.

  “You will not solve the case until you understand that the murders are an insignificant consequence of what is happening, and that we play only a fleeting walk on part in the crucial events.”

  Now Viv lost patience.

  “And you’ll explain that to the Chief, will you?”

  “I won’t have to; it will end like it did on Samos - they won’t want any more meddling from us. So the evidence from the crime scenes and a couple of convenient deaths will be given to you on a plate.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Yes, I think so; however, believe me, the evidence will suggest the murders are solved and the murderers are dead. You’ll be the heroine.”

  Viv would have laughed at this a few weeks ago, but experience had destabilised her and she doubted her own sanity. Theodrakis continued.

  “These things appear like this to enable us to play the part they need us to. On Samos, I began to wonder if the real action wasn’t happening somewhere we can’t even conceive of.”

  He picked up his wine and finished the glass. Viv knew it had taken a great deal out of him to expose himself this way to her, but she asked:

  “So, if that’s how it’s going to happen why make the effort to tell me all this insane stuff? You didn’t need to; if you’re right then the case is closed.”

  “But it isn’t really, is it? It never can be and that’s not what you were brought here for.”

  For a second he saw a look of panic transform Viv’s features. He felt he was seeing her as she must have looked as a frightened little girl. He only had one even slightly reassuring card. He decided to play it now.

  “There are some slight compensations thrown in during this process, things that give us the strength to play our parts. On Samos I found love, at least I think it was love. Also, and I’m embarrassed to tell you this, I discovered I wasn’t impotent.”

  It seemed he was more than embarrassed, either that or what he had just said dredged up powerful emotions, for he stumbled to a halt. Viv poured him more wine.

  “Go on, you can’t stop there. What compensation will there be for me?”

  The latter part of her interjection, the question, rang with bitterness.

  “I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t always work like this. But if it does it will be personal. Speak to Giles.”

  A look of incredulity crossed her eyes and he hurried on.

  “I don’t know where that last bit came from, forgive me, but don’t rule it out.”

  Outside the snow was coming down hard, so hard that the dark shape of the town hall was barely visible. The waiter emerged out of the shadows with two small glasses of clear liquid. He exchanged a few staccato sentences in Greek with Theodrakis then took away the empty plates.

  “It’s raki, very strong and on the house, as it appears is the whole meal. The waiter said they don’t want us to pay but they don’t want us to come back either. Apparently they consider us unsettling and bad for business. We drink this then we leave.”

  She stared at him blankly before asking:

  “So, you’re not going to tell me what you think I was brought here for?”

  “I can only tell you what I know, and it’s not much. Like mine, your real role here is unclear, all I can say is that there is a part for you so I wouldn’t make any plans that involve a return to London. I think you’ll find that once they think you’ve closed the case your secondment here will be extended. The rest you will discover for yourself.”

  “And you, what will you do?”

  Theodrakis sat back in his seat, his face as pale as the snow being driven against the window. Then he picked up the raki and swallowed it in one, before saying:

  “I’m going to visit Mrs Carver.”

  Chapter 36: Excavations

  Olga was late; she’d drunk too much last night and forgotten to set the alarm in her lonely bedroom. She had a quick shower, threw on some clothes and made a mad rush down the stairs for the front door. She had to be in Frodsham to see a client by nine thirty and it was already eight fifty-nine - no chance. Grabbing her coat from the cloakroom by the front, door she noticed the door to the cellar was open. This was strange, none of them liked to venture into the ancient bowels of the house. For a second she contemplated investigating but couldn’t afford to lose a client, particularly in light of her unravelling relationship with Margaret, so she headed for her car.

  Down below, Rose and Leonie heard her go.

  “You must have left the door open, that was careless, she could have seen us.”

  Leonie shrugged her shoulders unhappily, the only answer she made. It didn’t satisfy Rose.

  “From the sound of the banging on the stairs it was Olga, you know what Claire told us, no one’s meant to know about this, particularly Olga.”

  Leonie ignored this, saying:

  “Let’s get this finished as quick as we can, Rose, I don’t like it down here.”

  Rose didn’t like it either, it was the first excavating she’d done since the raggedy thing from Hell had bowled her off the top of the mound at Skendleby. They moved through the section of cellar where the mildewed remnants of abandoned belongings from previous tenants lay rotting, to the vault that was situated beneath the eastern wing of the house. The oldest part, which back in the late Middle Ages had been a barn. Rose found herself wondering, not for the first time, what sort of barn had a cellar.

  This space hadn’t been much used since, it seemed. The only light down there came from one bare electric bulb hanging from the centre of the filthy ceiling above. It was powered by a single cable that had been run from the other side. And it was cold, bitterly cold.

  The two women stood shivering on an uneven floor of compacted earth whilst the gentle swing of the cord carrying the electric bulb caused their shadows to shift and flicker. A smell of age and rot filled the space and the silence was sporadically broken by creaking sounds as the old building above them shifted its weight.

  “Feels like no one’s been down here in centuries.”

  Rose agreed with her, but she didn’t want to waste time talking, and anyway, in this part of the cellar sound was distorted, making it feel like Leonie had been speaking from some distance away when in f
act she was standing right by her. But she couldn’t stop herself replying:

  “And the feeling’s not helped by ‘sweet little Jan’ refusing to help.”

  The bitterness of her words was so palpable that Leonie couldn’t think of any response. It didn’t matter, Rose had moved on.

  “You direct the arc light at the centre of the floor then move the beam slowly. If it’s not in the centre we could be here ages.”

  Leonie did as she was told and for a few moments the archaeologists studied the uneven surface of minor undulations that comprised the beaten earth floor. For differing reasons, neither of them wanted to find anything but the evidence of their quest was unmissable. In the centre of the floor, directly below the naked light bulb, there was a patch of earth that bore all the hallmarks of having been disturbed.

  Strange, since the disturbance they were looking for should have been almost as old as the barn itself, over four hundred years, while the feature they found themselves staring at was not only obvious but seemed recent, so recent that little trails of disturbed earth ran down its sides. It was as if the thing beneath the earth was straining to attract their attention. So there was no other option.

  They had no intention of conducting a properly constituted excavation and recording the process, so what they were doing was the equivalent of grave robbing, and they both knew this. Fortunate then that it took so little time and effort. Within minutes they had discovered things with no natural reasons to be in such a location: feathers bizarrely preserved, fetish objects fashioned from materials unavailable in Britain. They recognised these but attempted to push them to the backs of their minds, worried that their mental imbalance would become unhinged.

  Then, cradled in a small wooden container of preserved yew, they found it. Leonie, still an archaeologist at heart, suggested they explore the context but within seconds her trowel blade had scraped against the edge of an unnaturally large severed bird skull and they abandoned the pretence. Leonie lifted the strangely moist and tacky dark wooden box out of its nest and placed it on the floor. From somewhere - could have been anywhere - she heard Rose.

  “Open it, better check it’s what we’re after.”

  “No, you do it, it doesn’t feel right, I don’t like it.”

  Rose didn’t answer and Leonie made no move to check the box. After what could have been any length of time she felt Rose push past her and bend down. Leonie didn’t want to watch so she looked away, and it was then she noticed the shadows.

  Shadows of things shifting and weaving across the floor, shadows of things that didn’t seem to be in the cellar. There was something about the light down there that distorted perspective, making the walls of the cellar seem impossibly distant while the roof seemed to get lower. Leonie felt like she was underground, trapped in some vast crack deep beneath the surface with all the weight of the world above pressing down on her.

  Rose’s shriek of disgust snapped her out of it.

  “Urrghh. It’s wet, it’s alive. Take it away, take it away!”

  Leonie looked over her shoulder at the now open box. Inside it something was flexing, moving. Something less than two inches long and narrow, flexing at some natural break in its length. Staring at this horror it gradually dawned on Leonie what she was looking at: the top two joints of a finger - a living finger. Before she could scream Rose grabbed the box, closed the lid and ran with it towards the steps leading back into the world.

  Following close behind in her slipstream, and disturbed by the unhinged mewing sounds Rose had started to emit, Leonie promised herself this would be her last contact with Skendleby and its restless dead.

  *******

  A few miles away, crouching down in the freezing black peat, Jan was thinking something similar but was too occupied by the bizarre scene in front of her to follow it up. She and Giles had been on site since the first had tentatively slipped in from the east. Not that the calibre of light had brought cheer in its wake, more an indistinct blanket of greyness. And it wasn’t as if this was Jan’s only worry, she recognised that in opting to be here excavating with Giles, rather than in the cellar with Leonie and Rose, she’d crossed some type of line separating her from her housemates.

  This bothered her less than she’d imagined; in fact, in a strange way it was a relief. There was a distance between her and the other women, they saw things differently. At first she’d rationalised that this was because the others had bonded with each other for longer. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t to do with perception; it was more like they inhabited a world of different realities. Even Leonie, her friend. How had this happened? She didn’t get time to answer herself, Giles’s voice pricked her thought bubble.

  “Ok, let’s just limit ourselves to what’s right in front of us; I don’t think that anything beyond these two metres will be of much interest to the police. Strange how different it looks now, almost as if it’s fading away.”

  The end of the sentence made no sense to Jan and probably not to Giles either, as he followed up with:

  “There seemed to be more stuff when they brought me out here on the morning they found the body. Certainly different stuff.”

  He stuttered to a stop. Jan said:

  “Giles, this stuff can’t be real, I can’t understand it?”

  “Reality doesn’t function in Skendleby, does it?”

  Jan ignored this, pointing instead to the layer of evidence they’d reached in the semi saturated subsoil.

  “Shells, worked flint, animal bone and antler tools. Beads and nutshells, and all of it laid on what seems like a brushwood and timber platform. I didn’t expect something with an age profile like this.”

  “So what’s your archaeological diagnosis?”

  “Text book Mesolithic, Star Carr comes to Skendleby but…”

  “But?”

  “But it shouldn’t be here and even if it was it wouldn’t be laid out like this as if it had been waiting for us.”

  “Yeah, and that’s not even the strange bit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that when I looked at this patch of ground the day they found the body it was a different assemblage. These aren’t the artefacts I saw.”

  “How, how different?”

  “There was evidence from different material cultures for a start, a pottery culture, looked like grooved ware, the sherds I saw, much later than this. It was an artificial assemblage but an entirely different one to this; there were human bones, and bird bones. Pottery, bronze, all types of shit. I wasn’t there long enough to study it closely but long enough to identify elements.”

  “And?”

  “And, where’s it all gone? This is different. How come we’re finding evidence from just one context? A context that shouldn’t exist.”

  He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t wait for one.

  “How’s this happened? It’s like a revolving slide show of archaeology. It’s not possible, is it?”

  Jan had no answers; she was out of her depth. She threw down her trowel and stood up, fumbling for the cigarettes in the pocket of her overalls. She lit two with shaking hands and handed one to Giles. He reached up to take it and remained crouched over the small patch of disinterred human activity.

  “Archaeology was the only safe part of my life; it was always there, consistent, safe, with its own rules. Never let you down like people do, it never ran off with other men; boring at times but faithful, dependable. You knew where you were with physical bits of the past. It was never frightening.”

  Jan stood listening, wondering where this was going.

  “Jan, which bits of this are real? Was what I saw last time real, or is this? What’ll turn up here tomorrow?”

  He got to his feet; she saw he was close to tears.

  “What’s happening here, Jan? What’s happened to time? If the past just shifts when it wants to then what’s real? What can we believe in?

  Chapter 37: Stranger Affairs

  “I’m not a reliable
expert anymore than I’m a reliable witness; no one would believe anything I said.”

  Viv smiled at him but blamed herself, if she’d handled him better he’d talk to her, and now she really needed him to talk to her.

  “Please, Dr Glover, just try to explain what it was at the crime scene that changed.”

  At first she thought he wouldn’t reply and had begun to plead.

  “Giles, this is…”

  He cut across her.

  “What I saw when you dragged me out there to the crime scene wasn’t there today. What we saw today was different in every way, which is, of course, impossible. This is why any report I make will just weaken your case. Get it? Understand?”

  He was red-faced and shouting by the end of the sentence. Then something strange happened. He looked hard at Viv, as if seeing her for the first time, and his face softened, making him look younger and, to her surprise, desirable. He said gently:

  “But you’ve been damaged by this too, haven’t you? You’re hurt. Like me. Like Theodrakis, you’ve been hurt.”

  “Yes, I’ve been hurt.”

  He knew there was more to come so said nothing, giving her space, and, after a few moments of silence, she said:

  “Not so much hurt as damaged.”

  She crawled to a halt. Giles thought she was going to cry, but it seemed she was made of tougher stuff.

  “Not even been damaged, I think some part of me is doing the damage. Either that or…or…”

  He prompted her gently.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’m haunted.”

  Giles laughed.

  “Of course you are. Why should you be any different?”

  For once with her he’d found the right thing to say, she smiled. Then everything changed as Anderson burst into the room.

  “The forensics are back, you’d better come quick, they all tie up, we’ve cracked it. I think the nightmare’s over.”

  *******

  Smiling faces, corks popping, congratulations, even a football chant, and yet Viv couldn’t join in. She knew it was false.