“Report that they're in trouble, and try to establish the nature of said trouble and how much there is of it,” Benson's voice responded. “That is all.”
The call ended. The two agents exchanged a look.
“He's a cold-blooded bastard,” said Davenport. “Like a reptile in a two thousand quid suit.”
“And he's the boss,” replied Forster, starting the engine. “Never forget that.”
They did not speak again until they reached the turn-off to Malpas Abbey. As the van climbed the shallow gradient towards the estate, a light mist appeared. It gradually grew denser until it was thick enough to cut visibility to about ten yards.
“Foggy all of a sudden,” remarked Davenport.
“We're in the countryside in autumn,” said Forster. “Not exactly surprising.”
“Doesn't mist tend to lie in the valleys? We're going uphill,” the younger man pointed out.
“Here we are,” said Forster.
The van's headlights showed the stone pillars marking the main gates. The fog inside the gateway was so dense that it formed a silver-gray wall.
“We can always get out and walk up to the house,” Davenport said slowly. “Though of course we might just fall into an ornamental pond in this muck.”
Forster grunted noncommittally, then took out his phone. He tried to call Benson, and failed.
“This is not normal,” insisted Davenport. “We should go back.”
“No,” said Forster, firmly. “I'm in charge. We can't ask for new orders, so I say we go in. Get the gear out.”
“Can't we at least drive up the doorway?” whined Davenport.
“Oh yeah,” said the older man, sarcastically. “Why not hire a brass band to march along behind us, just so everyone knows we're coming? Stealth recon, you nitwit.”
The two men climbed out into the damp night air, walked around the van, and opened the rear doors. Forster took out a double-barreled shotgun, handed it to Davenport, then picked up an identical weapon. Davenport frowned at the gun.
“You'd think the boss could run to something more effective than this,” he grumbled. “The world's awash with assault rifles, and we're equipped to shoot bloody pheasants.”
“Benson draws the line at illegal handguns, apparently,” said Forster. “Here, take a taser and a baton. You never know.”
Forster got himself a First-Aid kit and two sets of night vision goggles.
“Right,” he said. “Now we're suitably equipped, let's go and visit one of the stately homes of England.”
***
“Here's how we do this,” said Denny. “We stick together, look after our wounded, get them to the vehicle. Then Jim drives them into Chester for medical treatment, right?”
Jim and Gould exchanged a glance, then nodded.
“Seems like the right thing,” Jim said.
“Ted,” Denny went on, “will you stay and be my backup?”
Gould hesitated.
“If I stay, there has to be some kind of time limit,” he said finally. “I can't just wait for you to come back. Can it be half an hour?”
“Make it at least an hour,” Denny insisted. “Because that won't be very long on the other side. Just a few minutes, in fact.”
“True,” Gould conceded.
Jim and Gould armed themselves with kitchen knives, while Denny selected a glass rolling pin. Then the three of them ushered Brie and George out to the hallway. The group skirted the Interloper's remains, but George hung back to peer more closely at the mess of rotted tissue and pale bones.
“A dead demon!” he exclaimed. “I never saw a dead one before. Surely such things are invulnerable by divine ordnance?”
“They're not demons,” said Gould. “They're as mortal as you or I.”
George looked puzzled at that, and fell silent as they left the hall. They were confronted by a wall of fog. Taken aback, they paused, then Gould and Jim switched on flashlights that shone dimly and flickered.
“When did that roll in?” asked Brie.
“It was clear enough outside a few minutes ago,” Gould said. “So …”
“It might not be natural,” Denny finished. “Big deal. Let's get to your car, Ted.”
Gould's Ford sedan had just come into view when Brie shrieked and fell. In the weak torchlight, Denny saw the woman scrabbling to get up in what looked like a mud puddle. Then she noticed the dark red stains on Brie's hands, the black patches on her denims. Gould's flashlight picked out a heap of wet, sausage-like objects around Brie's feet. Then the flickering radiance fell onto a pale body. The face was distorted in pain, but still recognizable.
“Matt!” Brie screamed, hurling herself away from the horrific scene and colliding with Denny.
Matt's entrails had been torn out and flung across the pathway. His undershorts were still on the body but his shirt, jacket and pants were gone.
It took his clothes, Denny thought, numb with horror, and trying to fight down her rising gorge. Like they did with Lucy Gould, to make a more convincing fake.
She turned away from the unbearable sight. Denny felt herself start to grow faint with shock, and staggered across to the car.
“You okay?” asked Jim.
She could only shake her head at first, then managed to say, “Give me a minute.”
“Sorry, but time's pressing – do you still want to stay behind?” asked Gould.
Denny looked up at his anxious face, and guessed that he was conflicted, hoping to draw courage from her.
“Nobody's going to judge you for leaving,” Jim added. “None of us signed up for this.”
Matt's dead, she thought. I can't help him. Frankie might still be alive. I have to believe that.
“Ted, I'm still willing to try if you'll back me up,” she said.
“Right, I'll get the tow rope,” said Gould, unlocking the car and then throwing the keys to Jim. “We'll keep two of the flashlights, you take everything else.”
While Jim and Brie tried to persuade the confused George to get into the Ford, Gould and Denny got the rope out of the trunk. As an afterthought, Denny tossed her rolling pin and picked up a heavy wrench.
“This still strikes me as bonkers,” grumbled Jim. “You've no idea how to open the way through and even if–”
They all stared around them to see a figure had appeared in the fog, back towards the house. It was barely visible, but Denny could see it was dressed in Matt's clothes.
“A demon!” cried George, scrambling into the car and curling up on the back seat.
The Interloper raised its hand in an ironic salute, then turned and vanished. A couple of seconds later, they heard the sound of the house's great front door opening, then slamming shut.
“It's going back!” breathed Denny. “Come on, Ted!”
Chapter 8: The Phantom Dimension
“Should we have left them?” asked Brie.
“No choice,” Jim replied, peering ahead into the fog.
The Ford's headlights seemed to have little impact on the gray murk. Jim nosed ahead in low gear, but still almost collided with the SUV, which suddenly loomed into view. The big Mercedes was blocking the driveway. Rather than get out, Jim nudged it out of the way.
“That'll piss of Gould,” he remarked, with forced jollity. “Still, it's a company car.”
“Horseless carriages,” said George, from the back seat. “An age of wonders. Are they powered by steam?”
“He's perking up,” observed Jim, with a wry smile at Brie. “Want to give him a lecture on internal combustion engines? Maybe move to aviation, the internet?”
Brie managed a weak smile at that, and they set off again.
“Soon, we'll be at the gates,” said Jim confidently. “Then it's a clear road to Chester, a nice clean hospital, and for me, a hotel, and a hot shower.”
But as they progressed slowly down the fog-bound driveway, the familiar gateposts failed to appear.
“Could we be on the wrong road somehow?” asked Brie, tentatively.
“The house had only one driveway, and we are still on it. If we'd somehow passed the gates without seeing them we'd be on tarmac, not gravel, so I can only assume–”
Suddenly Jim hit the brakes, and the Ford slewed to one side.
“What the hell?”
“Oh my God,” cried Brie.
The SUV was in front of them again, its bulky shape unmistakable despite the fog.
“How did we come around in a circle?” Brie asked.
Jim looked at her, then back at the Mercedes he had shoved out of the way three minutes earlier.
“I'm sure we did not circle round,” he said in a monotone. “We were going in a straight line, I'd swear it on a stack of Bibles.”
From the back seat, George spoke quietly.
“They will not let us go unless their purpose is served.”
***
“Sorry,” said Gould breathlessly, catching up with Denny at the entrance to the temple. “I've never been very athletic.”
“All the more reason for me to go through while you hold the fort,” she replied. “Let's see if our little friend has gone through.”
There was no sign of the Interloper in the cellar. But their flashlight revealed the now familiar shimmering sphere in the air, just to the side of the altar. Gould lit another couple of caving flares and threw them down. Then they descended and started their simple preparations.
“Okay,” said Denny, “I'm going straight through. You give me an hour, right? Then pull my string, see what happens.”
After fastening the rope around her waist, Denny climbed onto the altar and prepared to pitch herself through the gateway. After a moment's thought, she threw her flashlight and the wrench into the portal first. They vanished.
“What if it's a hundred foot drop on the other side?” asked Gould.
“Then get ready to haul me up, big guy,” she replied, and executed a swan dive into what looked like an empty space.
Gould braced himself but the rope did not run out at speed, as he had feared. Instead, it gradually played through his hands in spurts, a few inches at a time, then stopping for several minutes. He checked his watch every few minutes, wondering what would happen if he pulled on the rope and it snapped. Or if, instead of Denny, what came through was an inhuman monster.
Don't imagine the worst, he told himself. That might make it more likely, given the way these things operate.
“Fear is the mind killer,” he said aloud, then wondered where he had dredged up the quotation. He began to obsess over trivia, trying to remember the names of the current England cricket squad, filling his mind with irrelevant data to suppress any memories or feelings the Interlopers might exploit.
Does Denny have no deep, dark fears? he wondered. Is that why all she saw was a mish-mash of commonplace childish fears?
An hour had passed, and he gave a gentle pull on the rope. It yielded an inch or two. He wondered if this meant Denny was standing up, or if he was pulling at her inert – maybe dead – body. Gould gave another tug on the rope and felt it give, then become slack. Anxiety mounted as he began to reel it in, hand over hand, wondering whether the slight resistance he felt was from Denny or the strange portal itself.
The question was settled when the end of the tow-rope appeared and fell to the floor.
“Oh Jesus. What do I do now?”
As in reply, the gateway darkened, swelled, pulsed with strange energy. Gould took a step back as something came through. It was not Denny or an Interloper, but a compact, boxy object. Frankie's camera fell to the floor with a crash, fragments of plastic and glass scattering over the stone slabs.
***
Denny rolled when she landed but the impact still winded her. She felt a stab of pain in her thigh as she landed on something hard. Flashlight or wrench, she thought. Either way I'll have quite a bruise.
She lay curled up and opened her eyes tentatively. At first, she could see nothing but a swirl of garish colors, the buffeting of a strong wind that was burning hot. She remembered standing in front of a huge industrial oven on an assignment. She squeezed her eyelids shut again, took a tentative breath of the scorching air. There was a smell of burning vying with faint tang of decay in the air, something like a match struck in a moldy bathroom
Opening her eyes again, she looked down and saw that she had fallen onto an uneven surface. It felt rubbery, and looked like dimpled reddish clay. By one of her hands, a pale creature like a centipede writhed then made a dart for her fingers. Denny quickly pulled her hand away, scrambled upright. She picked up her flashlight and wrench, holding the latter ready as a club. But nothing else appeared to threaten her.
At least I can breathe the air, she thought. I'd look pretty dumb if I was poisoned or suffocated in the first ten seconds.
In front of Denny, the reddish ground extended away in all directions. It seemed utterly featureless as first. But as her eyes adjusted to the peculiar light, Denny saw that she was at the top of a shallow rise. Ahead of her was a bleak plain, dotted by black blotches that might have been clumps of trees. There were also some more regular shapes, straight lines that might have been walls. It was hard to get a sense of size or distance, however. The light was dim yet also oddly painful, a purplish radiance that made her think of ultraviolet.
Denny looked behind her at the gateway. Instead of a rippling sphere of disturbed air, the gateway on this side was a pitch-black globe, roughly a yard across. It hovered about four feet above the ground. Beneath the sphere, she saw smoke rising from an area of blackened soil, yet she felt no radiant heat on her face and hands. Unable to make sense of the phenomenon, she filed the observation away for future reference. Then she looked up.
“Oh my God!”
The sky was a shimmering, silvery color. There were a few ragged shreds of reddish cloud. There was no sun or moon, just a general luminosity streaming down onto the wasteland below. Above the clouds were the black stars George had ranted about. They were star-like in that they twinkled, throwing out flashes of green and orange light. But there the resemblance ended. These stars were, she felt sure, living creatures of some sort. They moved relative to one another. They looked like huge black starfish, their arms waving lazily. But at the center of each black star was a gleaming disk.
Eyes. They have eyes, just like George said. These stars really do look down.
Shuddering, she turned her attention back to the landscape of the Phantom Dimension. There was no sign of any thing living other than dozens of the centipede-like bugs. Then she saw something out of place nearby, a dark object with straight edges. It seemed familiar, even in the deceptive light. Denny walked toward it, feeling her feet sink into the ground, hearing a squelching over the howling of the wind.
It was Frankie's camera. Already some strange process had half-buried the bulky piece of equipment in the reddish earth. As she squatted to look closer, Denny saw that the ground itself was heaving and sucking at the camera. She looked down at her feet. What she had taken for a kind of dirt was acting like a living thing, and throwing eager tendrils up and over her shoes.
If I don't keep moving, I'm dead.
Denny wrenched her feet free of the hungry ground and tried to remember how to work the camera. As she tinkered she flicked on the built-in light, and a pool of blue-white radiance revealed the dirt to be bright ocher. A pale, sinuous creature writhed in apparent discomfort, then scuttled for the shadows. She followed the worm-like animal with the beam, watching its intense reaction as it tried to escape. Then, feeling slightly guilty, she turned off the light.
Maybe what we think of as normal light is painful to some of the things that live here.
Denny filed the idea away as potentially useful and started to circle the camera, looking for footprints. Then she told herself not to be so dumb, as it was clear that the nature of this alien dirt would have erased any tracks. She raised the viewfinder to the horizon, hoping to see a structure, some sign of intelligence.
A tall, tapering shape might have been an obelisk of some kind.
But that's way too far to walk, so long as I'm tethered by this rope.
Denny lowered the camera, focused on details that were maybe a hundred yards away. Now she could see that what she had taken for a wall seemed to be the remains of a collapsed building. As she swung the camera around, more apparent ruins appeared peeking out of the ruddy earth. It occurred to Denny that she was standing in the middle of what had been a settlement of some sort. But it had long since been abandoned.
Why? Something to do with the gateway to our world?
Now a dark blur that resembled a clump of trees came into view. It consisted of dark, thick trunks supporting a canopy of oval, fleshy leaves. Then one 'trunk' lifted itself out of the ground, moved toward her, replanted itself. The supposed clump was walking, coming her way. She recalled that George had said something about trees with eyes. Denny lowered the camera, scanned her surroundings with the naked eye. She wondered if the half dozen or so dark blurs were nearer than when she had arrived.
She focused again on the distant, pylon-like object. She could see now that it was in fact one of many, as other more-or-less conical forms were just visible on the horizon. Denny reasoned that she might be looking at a city, the Interloper equivalent of Manhattan. The things might be the skyscrapers of the Phantom Dimension. But it seemed improbable, given the apparent ruins around her. She felt strongly that this was a world in an advanced stage of decay.
This was a dumb, desperate idea. They were right. But I had to try.
“Frankie!” she yelled. “Where are you?”
Her voice sounded oddly flat, and she could not believe it would carry far. The wind increased to a gale and almost knocked her down.
“Help!”
The voice was almost inaudible over the howling gale. She could not make out the direction it had come from. But it sounded like a woman's voice, high-pitched, desperate.
Did I imagine it?
There was a tremendous yank on the rope, so hard that she fell backwards onto her behind and dropped the camera. Cursing, Denny scrambled to her feet, trying to minimize contact between her skin and the strange, living dirt.
Nightmare Abbey Page 12
