Beneath the Moors and Darker Places [SSC] Page 6

  “First,” I said, “there’s something you must tell me. About June. She—her looks—I mean ...”

  “I know what you mean,” his voice contained a tremor, however tightly controlled. “It’s what makes the whole thing real for me. It’s proof positive, as if that were needed now, of all I’ve suspected and discovered of the place. I told you she wouldn’t leave the farm, didn’t I? But did you know it was her idea to buy Kettlethorpe in the first place?”

  “You mean she was... lured?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s exactly what I mean—but by what? By her blood, Bill! She didn’t know, was completely innocent. Not so her forebears. Her great-grandfather came from America—New England. That’s as far as I care to track it down, and no need now to take it any further. But you must see why I personally have to square it all away?”

  I could only nod.

  “And you will help?”

  “I must be mad,” I answered, nodding again, “—or at best an idiot—but it seems I’ve already committed myself. Yes, I’ll come.”

  “Now?”

  “Today? At this hour? That would be madness! Before you know it, it’ll be dark, and—”

  “Dark, yes!” he broke in on me. “But what odds? It’s always dark down there, Bill. We’ll need electric torches, the more the better. I have a couple at the farm. How about you?”

  “I’ve a good heavy-duty torch in the car,” I told him. “Batteries, too.”

  “Good! And your shotguns—we’ll need them, I think. But we’re not after pheasant this time, Bill.”

  “Where will you get the dynamite?” I asked, perhaps hoping that this was something which, in his fervor, he had overlooked.

  He grinned—not his old grin but a twisted, vicious thing and said: “I’ve already got it. Had it ever since I found the slab two weeks ago and first went down there. My gangers use it on big landscaping jobs. Blasting out large boulders and tree stumps saves a lot of time and effort. Saves money, too. There’s enough dynamite at the farm to demolish half of Harden!”

  David had me, and he knew it. “It’s now, Bill, now!” he said. And after a moment’s silence he shrugged. “But if you haven’t the spit for it. . .”

  “I said I’d come,” I told him, “and so I will. You’re not the only one who loves a mystery, even one as terrifying as this. Now that I know such a place exists, of course I want to see it. I’m not easy about it, no, but...”

  He nodded. “Then this is your last chance, for you can be sure it won’t be there for you to see tomorrow!”

  ~ * ~

  IX

  DESCENT INTO MADNESS

  Within the hour we were ready. Torches, shotguns, dynamite, and fuze wire—everything we would need—all was in our hands. And as we made our way from the house at Kettlethorpe along the garden paths to the roofless enclosure, already the mists were rising and beginning to creep. And I admit here and now that if David had offered me the chance again, to back out and leave him to go it alone, I believe I might well have done so.

  As it was, we entered under the lintel with the plate, found the slab as David had described it, and commenced to lever it up from its seatings.

  As we worked my friend nodded his head towards a very old and massive millstone lying nearby. “That’s what Jason Carpenter used to seal it. And do you believe June could have shifted that on her own? Never! She was helped—must have been helped from below!”

  At that moment the slab moved, lifted, was awkward for a moment, but at our insistence slid gratingly aside. I don’t know what I expected, but the blast of foul, damp air that rushed up from below took me completely by surprise. It blew full into my face, jetting up like some noxious, invisible geyser, a pressured stench of time and ocean, darkness and damp, and alien things. And I knew it at once: that tainted odour I had first detected in the summer, which David had naively termed “a miasma.”

  Was this the source, then, of that misty phantom seen on dark nights, that bloating spectre formed of fog and the rushing reek of inner earth? Patently it was, but that hardly explained the shape the thing had assumed ...

  ~ * ~

  In a little while the expansion and egress of pent-up gases subsided and became more a flow of cold, salty air. Other odours were there, certainly, but however alien and disgusting they no longer seemed quite so unbearable.

  Slung over our shoulders we carried partly filled knapsacks which threw us a little off balance. “Careful,” David warned, descending ahead of me, “it’s steep and slippery as hell!” Which was no exaggeration.

  The way was narrow, spiralling, almost perpendicular—a stairwell through solid rock which might have been cut by some huge and eccentric drill. Its steps were narrow in the tread, deep in the rise, and slimy with nitre and a film of moisture clammy as sweat. And our powerful torches cutting the way through darkness deep as night, and the walls winding down, down, ever down.

  I do not know the depth to which we descended; there was an interminable sameness about that corkscrew of stone which seemed to defy measurement. But I recall something of the characters carved almost ceremoniously into its walls. Undeniably Roman, some of them, but I was equally sure that these were the most recent! The rest, having a weird, almost glyphic angularity and coarseness—a barbaric simplicity of style—must surely have predated any Roman incursion into Britain.

  And so down to the floor of that place, where David paused to deposit several sticks of dynamite in a dark niche. Quickly he fitted a fuze, and while he worked so he spoke to me in a whisper which echoed sibilantly away and came rustling back in decreasing sussurations. “A long fuze for this one. We’ll light it on our way out. And at least five more like this before we’re done. I hope it’s enough. God, I don’t even know the extent of the place! I’ve been this far before and farther, but you can imagine what it’s like to be down here on your own ...”

  Indeed I could imagine it, and shuddered at the thought.

  While David worked I stood guard, shotgun under my arm, cocked, pointing it down a black tunnel that wound away to God-knows-where. The walls of this horizontal shaft were curved inward at the top to form its ceiling, which was so low that when we commenced to follow it we were obliged to stoop. Quite obviously the tunnel was no mere work of nature; no, for it was far too regular for that, and everywhere could be seen the marks of sharp tools used to chip out the stone. One other fact which registered was this: that the walls were of the same stone from which Kettlethorpe Farm—in what original form?—must in some dim uncertain time predating all memory, myth, and legend have been constructed.

  And as I followed my friend, so in some dim recess of my mind I made note of these things, none of which lessened in the slightest degree the terrific weight of apprehension resting almost tangibly upon me. But follow him I did, and in a little while he was showing me fresh marks on the walls, scratches he had made on previous visits to enable him to retrace his steps.

  “Necessary,” he whispered, “for just along here the tunnels begin to branch, become a maze. Really, a maze! Be a terrible thing to get lost down here ...”

  My imagination needed no urging, and after that I followed more closely still upon his heels, scratching marks of my own as we went. And sure enough, within a distance of perhaps fifty paces more, it began to become apparent that David had in no way exaggerated with regard to the labyrinthine nature of the place. There were side tunnels, few at first but rapidly increasing in number, which entered into our shaft from both sides and all manner of angles, and shortly after this we came to a sort of gallery wherein many of these lesser passages met.

  The gallery was in fact a cavern of large dimensions with a domed ceiling perhaps thirty feet high. Its walls were literally honeycombed with tunnels entering from all directions, some of which descended steeply to regions deeper and darker still. Here, too, I heard for the first time the sluggish gurgle of unseen waters, of which David informed: “That’s a stream. You’ll see it shortly.”

  He
laid another explosive charge out of sight in a crevice, then indicated that I should once more follow him. We took the tunnel with the highest ceiling, which after another seventy-five to one hundred yards opened out again onto a ledge that ran above a slow-moving, blackly gleaming rivulet. The water gurgled against our direction of travel, and its surface was some twenty feet lower than the ledge; this despite the fact that the trough through which it coursed was green and black with slime and incrustations almost fully up to the ledge itself. David explained the apparent ambiguity.

  “Tidal,” he said. “The tide’s just turned. It’s coming in now. I’ve seen it fifteen feet deeper than this, but that won’t be for several hours yet.” He gripped my arm, causing me to start. “And look! Look at the kelp ...”

  Carried on the surface of the as yet sluggish stream, great ropes of weed writhed and churned, bladders glistening in the light from our torches. “David,” my voice wavered, “I think...”

  “Come on,” he said, leading off once more. “I know what you think, but we’re not going back. Not yet.” Then he paused and turned to me, his eyes burning in the darkness. “Or you can go back on your own, if you wish ... ?”

  “David,” I hissed, “that’s a rotten thing to—”

  “My God, man!” he stopped me. “D’you think you’re the only one who’s afraid?”

  However paradoxically, his words buoyed me up a little, following which we moved quickly on and soon came to a second gallery. Just before reaching it the stream turned away, so that only its stench and distant gurgle stayed with us. And once more David laid charges, his actions hurried now, nervous, as if in addition to his admitted fear he had picked up something of my own barely subdued panic.

  “This is as far as I’ve been,” he told me, his words coming in a sort of rapid gasping or panting. “Beyond here is fresh territory. By my reckoning we’re now well over a quarter-mile from the entrance.” He flashed the beam of his torch around the walls, causing the shadows of centuries-formed stalactites to flicker and jump. “There, the big tunnel. We’ll take that one.”

  And now, every three or four paces, or wherever a side tunnel opened into ours, we were both scoring the walls to mark a fresh and foolproof trail. Now, too, my nerves really began to get the better of me. I found myself starting at every move my friend made; I kept pausing to listen, my heartbeat shuddering in the utter stillness of that nighted place. Or was it still? Did I hear something just then? The echo of a splash and the soft flop, flop of furtive footsteps in the dark?

  It must be pictured: we were in a vast subterranian warren. A place hollowed out centuries ago by... by whom? By what? And what revenants lurked here still, down here in these terrible caverns of putrid rock and festering, sewagelike streams?

  Slap, slap, slap ...

  And that time I definitely had heard something. “David—” my voice was thin as a reedy wind. “For God’s sake—”

  “Shh!” he warned, his cautionary hiss barely audible. “I heard it, too, and they might have heard us! Let me just get the rest of this dynamite planted—one final big batch, it’ll have to be—and then we’ll get out of here.” He used his torch to search the walls but could find no secret place to house the explosives. “Round this next bend,” he said. “I’ll find a niche there. Don’t want the stuff to be found before it’s done its job.”

  We rounded the bend, and ahead: a glow of rotten, phosphorescent light, a luminescence almost sufficient to make our torches redundant. We saw, and we began to understand.

  The roofless building up above—the enclosure that was merely the entrance. This place here, far underground, was the actual place of worship, the subterranean temple to Dagon. We knew it as soon as we saw the great nitre-crusted bell hanging from the centre of the ceiling—the bell and the rusted iron chain which served as its rope, hanging down until its last link dangled inches above the surface and centre of a black and sullenly rippling lake of scum and rank weed.

  ~ * ~

  For all the horror that might follow on our very heels, still we found ourselves pulled up short by the sight of that fantastic final gallery. It was easily a hundred feet wall to wall, roughly circular, domed over and shelved around, almost an amphitheatre in the shape of its base, and obviously a natural, geological formation. Stalactites hung down from above, as in the previous gallery, and stalagmitic stumps broke the weed pool’s surface here and there, showing that at some distant time in our planet’s past the cave had stood well above sea level.

  As to the source of the pool itself: this could only be the sea. The deep kelp alone was sufficient evidence of that. And to justify and make conclusive this observation, the pool was fed by a broad expanse of water which disappeared under the ledge beneath the far wall, which my sense of direction told me lay toward the sea. The small ripples or wavelets we had noted disturbing the pool’s surface could only be the product of an influx of water from this source, doubtless the flow of the incoming tide.

  Then there was the light: that same glow of putrescence or organic decomposition seen in certain fungi—an unhealthy illumination which lent the cave an almost submarine aspect. So that even without the clean light of our electric torches, still the great bell in the ceiling would have remained plainly visible.

  But that bell... who could say where it came from? Not I. Not David. Certainly this was that bell whose sepulchral tolling had penetrated even to the surface, but as to its origin ...

  In that peculiar way of his, David, as if reading my thoughts, confirmed: “Well, it’ll not ring again, not after this lot goes off!” And I saw that he had placed his knapsack full of dynamite out of sight beneath a low, shallow ledge in the wall and was even now uncoiling a generous length of fuze wire. Finishing the task, he glanced at me once, struck a match and set sputtering fire to the end of the wire, pushing it, too, out of sight.

  “There,” he grunted, “and now we can get—” But here he paused, and I knew why.

  The echo of a voice—a croak?—had come to us from somewhere not too far distant. And even as our ears strained to detect other than the slow gurgle of weed-choked waters, so there echoed again that damnably soft and furtive slap, slap, slap of nameless feet against slimy stone ...

  ~ * ~

  X

  DEEP ONES!

  At that panic gripped both of us anew, was magnified as the water of the pool gurgled more loudly yet and ripples showed that could not be ascribed solely to an influx from the sea. Perhaps at this very moment something other than brine and weed was moving towards us along that murky and mysterious watercourse.

  My limbs were trembling, and David was in no better condition as, throwing caution to the wind, we commenced scramblingly to retrace our steps, following those fresh marks where we had scratched them upon the walls of the maze. And behind us the hidden fuze slowly sputtering its way to that massive charge of dynamite, and approaching the great pool, some entirely conjectural thing whose every purpose we were sure must be utterly alien and hostile. While ahead ... who could say?

  But one thing was certain: our presence down here had finally stirred something up—maybe many somethings—and now their noises came to us even above our breathless panting, the hammering of our hearts, and the clattering sounds of our flight down those black tunnels of inner earth. Their noises, yes, for no man of the sane upper world of blue skies and clean air could ever have named those echoing, glutinous bursts of sporadic croaking and clotted, inquiring gurgles and grunts as speech, and no one could mistake the slithering, slapping, flopping sounds of their pursuit for anything remotely human. Or perhaps they were remotely human, but so sunken into hybrid degeneracy as to seem totally alien to all human expectations. And all of this without ever having seen these Deep Ones—”Tritons,” as David had named them—or at least, not yet!

  But as we arrived at the central gallery and paused for breath, and as David struck a second match to light the fuze of the charge previously laid there, that so far merciful omission com
menced to resolve itself in a manner I shall never forget to my dying day.

  It started with the senses-shattering gonging of the great bell, whose echoes were deafening in those hellish tunnels, and it ended ... but I go ahead of myself.

  Simultaneous with the ringing of the bell, a renewed chorus of croaking and grunting came to us from somewhere dangerously close at hand, so that David at once grabbed my arm and half-dragged me into a small side tunnel leading off at an angle from the gallery. This move had been occasioned not alone by the fact that the sounds we had heard were coming closer, but also that they issued from the very burrow by which we must make our escape! But as the madly capricious gods of fate would have it, our momentary haven proved no less terrifying in its way than the vulnerable position we had been obliged to quit.