Beneath the Moors and Darker Places [SSC] Read online

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “That’s all very interesting. And thank you very much for your time.”

  “And is that it? There’s no other way in which I can assist?”

  “No, that’s it. Thank you again.”

  And indeed that seemed to be that....

  ~ * ~

  I went to see them a fortnight later. Old Jason Carpenter had not had a telephone, and David was still in the process of having one installed, which meant that I must literally drop in on them.

  Kettlethorpe lies to the north of Harden, between the modern coast road and the sea, and the view of the dene as the track dipped down from the road and wound toward the old farm was breathtaking. Under a blue sky, with seagulls wheeling and crying over a distant, fresh-ploughed field, and the hedgerows thick with honeysuckle and the droning of bees, and sweet smells of decay from the streams and hazelnut-shaded pools, the scene was very nearly idyllic. A far cry from midnight tales of ghouls and ghosties!

  Then to the farm’s stone outer wall—almost a fortification, reminiscent of some forbidding feudal structure—which encompassed all of the buildings including the main house. Iron gates were open, bearing the legend “Kettlethorpe” in stark letters of iron. Inside ... things already were changing.

  The wall surrounded something like three and a half to four acres of ground, being the actual core of the property. I had seen several rotting “Private Property” and “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” notices along the road, defining Kettlethorpe’s exterior boundaries, but the area bordered by the wall was the very heart of the place.

  In layout, there was a sort of geometrical regularity to the spacing and positioning of the buildings. They formed a horseshoe, with the main house at its apex; the open mouth of the horseshoe faced the sea, unseen, something like a mile away beyond a rise which boasted a dense-grown stand of oaks. All of the buildings were of local stone, easily recognizable through its tough, flinty-grey texture. I am no geologist and so could not give that stone a name, but I knew that in years past it had been blasted from local quarries or cut from outcrops. To my knowledge, however, the closest of these sources was a good many miles away; the actual building of Kettlethorpe must therefore have been a Herculean task.

  As this thought crossed my mind, and remembering the words of the curator of Sunderland’s museum, I had to smile. Perhaps not Herculean but something later than the Greeks. Except that I couldn’t recall a specific Roman strongman!

  And approaching the house, where I pulled up before the stone columns of its portico, I believed I could see where David had got his idea of the age of the place. Under the heat of the sun the house was redolent of the centuries; its walls massive, structurally Romanesque. The roof, especially, low-peaked and broad, giving an impression of strength and endurance.

  What with its outer wall and horseshoe design, the place might well be some strange old Roman temple. A temple, yes, but wavery for all its massiveness, shimmering as smoke and heat from a small bonfire in what had been a garden drifted lazily across my field of vision. A temple—ah!—but to what strange old god?

  And no need to ponder the source of that thought, for certainly the business of David’s antiquarian research was still in my head; and while I had no intention of bringing that subject up, still I wondered how far he had progressed. Or perhaps by now he had discovered sufficient of Kettlethorpe to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps, but I doubted it. No, he would follow the very devil to hell, that one, in pursuit of knowledge.

  “Hello, there!” He slapped me on the back, causing me to start as I got out of my old Morris and closed its door. I started... reeled...

  He had come out of the shadows of the porch so quickly ... I had not seen him... My eyes ... the heat and the glaring sun and the drone of bees ...

  “Bill!” David’s voice came to me from a million miles away, full of concern. “What on earth ... ?”

  “I’ve come over queer,” I heard myself say, leaning on my car as the world rocked about me.

  “Queer? Man, you’re pale as death! It’s the bloody sun! Too hot by far. And the smoke from the fire. And I’ll bet you’ve been driving with your windows up. Here, let’s get you into the house.”

  Hanging onto his broad shoulder, I was happy to let him lead me staggering indoors. “The hot sun,” he mumbled again, half to me, half to himself. “And the honeysuckle. Almost a miasma. Nauseating, until you get used to it. June has suffered in exactly the same way.”

  ~ * ~

  V

  THE ENCLOSURE

  “Miasma?” I let myself fall into a cool, shady window seat.

  He nodded, swimming into focus as I quickly recovered from my attack of—of whatever it had been. “Yes, a mist of pollen, invisible, borne on thermals in the air, sweet and cloying. Enough to choke a horse!”

  “Is that what it was? God!—I thought I was going to faint.”

  “I know what you mean. June has been like it for a week. Conks out completely at high noon. Even inside it’s too close for her liking. She gets listless. She’s upstairs now, stretched out flat!”

  As if the very mention of her name were a summons, June’s voice came down to us: “David, is that Bill? I’ll be down at once.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” I called out, my voice still a little shaky. “And certainly not if you don’t feel too well.”

  “I’m fine!” her voice insisted. “I was just a little tired, that’s all.”

  I was myself again, gratefully accepting a scotch and soda, swilling a parched dryness from my mouth and throat.

  “There,” said David, seeming to read my thoughts. “You look more your old self now.”

  “First time that ever happened to me,” I told him. “I suppose your ‘miasma’ theory must be correct. Anyway, I’ll be up on my feet again in a minute.” As I spoke I let my eyes wander about the interior of what would be the house’s main living room.

  The room was large, for the most part oak-panelled, almost stripped of its old furniture and looking extremely austere. I recalled the bonfire, its pale flames licking at the upthrusting, worm-eaten leg of a chair....

  One wall was of the original hard stone, polished by the years, creating an effect normally thought desirable in modern homes but perfectly natural here and in no way contrived. All in all a charming room. Ages-blackened beams bowed almost imperceptibly toward the centre, where they crossed the low ceiling wall to wall.

  “Built to last,” said David. “Three hundred years old at least, those beams, but the basic structure is—” he shrugged “—I’m not sure, not yet. This is one of five lower rooms, all about the same size. I’ve cleared most of them out now, burnt up most of the old furniture, but there were one or two pieces worth renovation. Most of the stuff I’ve saved is in what used to be old man Carpenter’s study. And the place is—will be—beautiful. When I’m through with it. Gloomy at the moment, yes, but that’s because of the windows. I’m afraid most of these old small-panes will have to go. The place needs opening up.”

  “Opening up, yes,” I repeated him, sensing a vague irritation or tension in him, a sort of urgency.

  “Here,” he said, “are you feeling all right now? I’d like you to see the plate I took that rubbing from.”

  “The Dagon plate,” I said at once, biting my tongue a moment too late.

  He looked at me, stared at me, and slowly smiled. “So you looked it up, did you? Dagon, yes—or Neptune, as the Romans called him. Come on, I’ll show you.” And as we left the house he yelled back over his shoulder: “June, we’re just going over to the enclosure. Back soon.”

  “Enclosure?” I followed him toward the mouth of the horseshoe of buildings. “I thought you said the brass was on a lintel?”

  “So it is, over a doorway, but the building has no roof and so I call it an enclosure. See?” and he pointed. The mouth of the horseshoe was formed by a pair of small, rough stone buildings set perhaps twenty-five yards apart, which were
identical in design but for the one main discrepancy David had mentioned, namely that the one on the left had no roof.

  “Perhaps it fell in?” I suggested as we approached the structure.

  David shook his head. “No,” he said, “there never was a roof. Look at the tops of the walls. They’re flush. No gaps to show where roof support beams might have been positioned. If you make a comparison with the other building you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, whatever its original purpose, old man Carpenter filled it with junk: bags of rusty old nails, worn-out tools, that sort of thing. Oh, yes and he kept his firewood here, under a tarpaulin.”

  I glanced inside the place, leaning against the wall and poking my head in through the vacant doorway. The wall stood in its own shadow and was cold to my touch. Beams of sunlight, glancing in over the top of the west wall, filled the place with dust motes that drifted like swarms of aimless microbes in the strangely musty air. There was a mixed smell of rust and rot, of some small dead thing, and of... the sea? The last could only be a passing fancy, no sooner imagined than forgotten.

  I shaded my eyes against the dusty sunbeams. Rotted sacks spilled nails and bolts upon a stone-flagged floor; farming implements red with rust were heaped like metal skeletons against one wall; at the back, heavy blocks of wood stuck out from beneath a mold-spotted tarpaulin. A dead rat or squirrel close to my feet seethed with maggots.

  I blinked in the hazy light, shuddered—not so much at the sight of the small corpse as at a sudden chill of the psyche—and hastily withdrew my head.

  “There you are,” said David, his matter-of-fact tone bringing me back down to earth. “The brass.”

  Above our heads, central in the stone lintel, a square plate bore the original of David’s rubbing. I gave it a glance, an almost involuntary reaction to David’s invitation that I look, and at once looked away. He frowned, seemed disappointed. “You don’t find it interesting?”

  “I find it... disturbing,” I answered at length. “Can we go back to the house? I’m sure June will be up and about by now.”

  He shrugged, leading the way as we retraced our steps along sun-splashed, weed-grown paths between scrubby fruit trees and dusty, cobwebbed shrubbery. “I thought you’d be taken by it,” he said. And, “How do you mean, ‘disturbing?’ “

  I shook my head, had no answer for him. “Maybe it’s just me,” I finally said. “I don’t feel at my best today. I’m not up to it, that’s all.”

  “Not up to what?” he asked sharply, then shrugged again before I could answer. “Suit yourself.” But after that he quickly became distant and a little surly. He wasn’t normally a moody man, but I knew him well enough to realize that I had touched upon some previously unsuspected, exposed nerve, and so I determined not to prolong my visit.

  I did stay long enough to talk to June, however, though what I saw of her was hardly reassuring. She looked pinched, her face lined and pale, showing none of the rosiness one might expect in a newlywed, or in any healthy young woman in summertime. Her eyes were red-rimmed, their natural blue seeming very much watered-down; her skin looked dry, deprived of moisture; even her hair, glossy black and bouncy on those previous occasions when we had met, seemed lacklustre now and disinterested.

  It could be, of course, simply the fact that I had caught her at a bad time. Her father had died recently, as I later discovered, and of course that must still be affecting her. Also, she must have been working very hard, alongside David, trying to get the old place put to rights. Or again it could be David’s summer “miasma”—an allergy, perhaps.

  Perhaps...

  But why any of these things—David’s preoccupation, his near-obsession (or mine?) with occurrences and relics of the distant past; the old myths and legends of the region, of hauntings and misty phantoms and such; and June’s queer malaise—why any of these things should concern me beyond the bounds of common friendship I did not know, could not say. I only knew that I felt as if somewhere a great wheel had started to roll, and that my friend and his wife lay directly in its path, not even knowing that it bore down upon them ...

  ~ * ~

  VI

  DAGON’S BELL

  Summer rolled by in warm lazy waves; autumn saw the trees shamelessly, mindlessly stripping themselves naked (one would think they’d keep their leaves to warm them through the winter). My businesses presented periodic problems enough to keep my nose to the grindstone, and so there was little spare time in which to ponder the strangeness of the last twelve months. I saw David in the village now and then, usually at a distance; saw June, too, but much less frequently. More often than not he seemed haggard—or if not haggard, hagridden, nervous, agitated, hurried—and she was... well, spectral. Pale and willow-slim, and red-eyed (I suspected) behind dark spectacles. Married life? Or perhaps some other problem? None of my business.

  Then came the time of the deep kelp once more, which was when David made it my business.

  And here I must ask the reader to bear with me. The following part of the story will seem hastily written, too thoughtlessly prepared and put together. But this is how I remember it: blurred and unreal, and patterned with mismatched dialogue. It happened quickly; I see no reason to spin it out...

  David’s knock was urgent on a night when the sky was black with falling rain and the wind whipped the trees to a frenzy, and yet he stood there in shirt sleeves, shivering, gaunt in aspect and almost vacant in expression. It took several brandies and a thorough rubdown with a warm towel to bring him to a semblance of his old self, by which time he seemed more ashamed of his behaviour than eager to explain it. But I was not letting him off that lightly. The time had come, I decided, to have the thing out with him; get it out in the open, whatever it was, and see what could be done about it while there was yet time.

  “Time?” he finally turned his gaze upon me from beneath his mop of tousled hair, a towel over his shoulders while his shirt steamed before my open fire. “Is there yet time? Damned if I know ...” He shook his head.

  “Well then, tell me,” I said, exasperated. “Or at least try. Start somewhere. You must have come to me for something. Is it you and June? Was your getting married a mistake? Or is it just the place, the old farm?”

  “Oh, come on, Bill!” he snorted. “You know well enough what it is. Something of it, anyway. You experienced it yourself. Just the place?” The corners of his mouth turned down, his expression souring. “Oh, yes, it’s the place, all right. What the place was, what it might be even now...”

  “Go on,” I prompted him, and he launched into the following:

  “I came to ask you to come back with me. I don’t want to spend another night alone there.”

  “Alone? But isn’t June there?”

  He looked at me for a moment and finally managed a ghastly grin. “She is and she isn’t,” he said. “Oh, yes, yes, she’s there—but still I’m alone. Not her fault, poor love. It’s that bloody awful place!”

  “Tell me about it,” I urged.

  He sighed, bit his lip, and after a moment: “I think,” he began, “—I think it was a temple. And I don’t think the Romans had it first. You know, of course, that they’ve found Phoenician symbols on some of the stones at Stonehenge? Well, and what else did the ancients bring with them to old England, eh? What did we worship in those prehistoric times? The earth-mother, the sun, the rain— the sea? We’re an island, Bill. The sea was everywhere around us! And it was bountiful. It still is, but not like it was in those days. What more natural than to worship the sea—and what the sea brought?”

  “Its bounty?” I said.

  “That, yes, and something else. Cthulhu, Pischa, the Kraken, Dagon, Oannes, Neptune. Call him—it—what you will. But it was worshipped at Kettlethorpe, and it still remembers. Yes, and I think it comes, in certain seasons, to seek the worship it once knew and perhaps still... still...”

  “Yes?”

  He looked quickly away. “I’ve made ... discoveries.”

  I waited.

&nb
sp; “I’ve found things out, yes, yes—and—” His eyes flared up for a moment in the firelight, then dulled.

  “And?”

  “Damn it!” He turned on me and the towel fell from his shoulders. Quickly he snatched it up and covered himself—but not before I had seen how thin mere months had made him. “Damn it!” he mumbled again, less vehemently now. “Must you repeat everything I say? God, I do enough of that myself! I go over everything—over and over and over ...”

  I sat in silence, waiting. He would tell it in his own time.

  And eventually he continued. “I’ve made discoveries, and I’ve heard ... things.” He looked from the fire to me, peered at me, ran trembling fingers through his hair. And did I detect streaks of grey in that once jet mop? “I’ve heard the bell!”