Crybbe

CHAPTER X

The smell happened first.

It happened quite suddenly, as if in the cracking of a rotten egg. The smell and with it the light. Elements of the same change.

The smell was filthy. Sulphur, and something cess-pit putrid.

The light came in oily yellows, the yellow of candles made of animal fat and the yellow of pus from a wound gone bad. The light came from no particular direction but glistened on the stone walls like lard.

Rachel shrank from the walls, but she couldn't get away from the stairs. Where she crouched, it was no longer dry and dusty but wet, warm and slick, like phlegm. She touched a stone step just once, and something unpleasant came off on her fingers. She tried to wipe them on the oak door, but that also was coated with a thick, cheesy grease, gritty here and there with what felt like fly corpses.

Rachel pulled the hand away in disgust, wiped it on her Barbour, knowing she could no longer bring herself to beat on this door. Her fists were sore and peeling, anyway, and if there was anyone out there they weren't going to help her. Perhaps they were waiting for the cool, superior, professional woman to break down, to shriek and sob and plead.

'I can't stand this,' she said aloud. 'I shall be sick.'

Which couldn't make the atmosphere any more foetid.

But if I was a woman with any imagination, she thought, I would be very, very frightened.

For the Court, always so drab and dusty and derelict – gloomy, but no more menacing than an empty warehouse – had swollen into a basic sort of life.

Ludicrous. A grotesque self-delusion. But that was what it felt like. Flickerings of things. Presences in the shadows. The smell itself was like the house's own foul breath.

She began to breathe hard herself. Broke out in a coughing fit. Then tried to breathe slowly and selectively, keeping her mouth closed, because the air was so rancid that when she took it in, there gathered at the back of her throat a richly cloying, raw-meat taste like sweating, sweet salami. Rachel – suffocating, closing her mouth, closing her eyes, trying to close down all her senses; trying, above all, not to hear – thought, I need air. I need light. I need to walk up these few steps.

I need the prospect chamber.

Soft, fresh evening air. Gentle evening light.

The prospect chamber. Eight, ten steps away.

But I can't move from here. I can't move because of…

… those taunting sounds from the darkness above.

Sometimes soft, rustling like satin. Sometimes loud as a foundry overhead. And then stopping for a period of tense, luminous quiet – until it begins again, louder and closer. Then distant again. I am here. I am there, I can be anywhere I choose in an instant because I'm not hu…

Shut up! Shut up!

It's what he wants you to think.

Creaks. Thrustings. What might have been hollow footsteps on wood, flat footsteps on stone. On stone steps.

He's coming down!

Stopping just before the bend, not six feet away from where he crouched, holding her arms around herself, beginning to shiver.

Pull yourself together Someone is trying to terrify you. It's only another person. You can handle people; you always could, you are cool and controlled; you can be remote, haughty, offhand, intimidating. You are flexible. You can be dominant, or compliant, at will.

All you have to do is stride up there and face whoever it is.

Yes, but that's what he wants.

And what if you go up there and there's…

Nothing.

Nothing but the dark.

'Help me!' Rachel was screaming out seconds later, her voice, always so calm and deep, now parched and bitter with anger and despair. 'Hum… ble! Andy! Anybody! Please!'

Then, in a soft and aching whisper, she said, 'J.M.?'

And her eyes filled uncontrollably with tears. When I get out of here, I'm going to get us both away. Tonight. That's a promise.

If I get out of here. If I ever get to breathe the sweet night air.

God help me, Rachel thought, but I'm not going to scream any more. When she'd screamed, the scream had come up from her stomach, like bile.

When she looked down at herself she saw that her Barbour's waxy surface gleamed sickly yellow like the walls. She wanted to take it off, but she didn't like the cold. She'd never liked the cold.

She wanted to remove her shoes, so as to move more quietly up the stairs towards the prospect chamber, but the thought of that ooze between her toes.

She closed her eyes. Closed her eyes and opened them, and rose, picking up the cardboard box containing the dead cat guardian.

'Come on, Tiddles,' Rachel said, wiping the tears away.

She wished the appalling sounds would begin again, if only to muffle her footsteps.

They did not. Silence woven as thick as a tapestry hung over the stairs, which were visible only because of the phosphorescence which seemed to move with her, not so much lighting the way as holding her close, in a thick and stifling miasma.

When she looked back there was merely an oily blackness behind her, in the place near the door where she had crouched.

Rachel couldn't remember a nightmare this bad. She was sweating in the clammy Barbour which seemed to have become part of this place, as if the yellow light steaming from the walls was re-vaporizing on the wax of the coat in clusters of tiny bubbles.

She came to the bend in the stairs.

All she had to do was follow the spiral.

To her left would be the alcove concealing the door to the prospect chamber. Above her – how far above her she couldn't tell because there was no light and she could not remember – would be the attic.

Better not to think about the attic. Shut it out.

I don't go into the attics. I'm not superstitious, I just don't go into the attics…

Two steps.

Two steps to the alcove and the prospect chamber and light and air. She could stand in the opening and shout and scream and somebody would have to hear her.

Oh, please. Please don't let the door be locked.

Rachel made it to the second step and was about to fall into the alcove, throw herself at the door to the prospect chamber…

This is the only part of the house I like.

… when – to a shattering chorus of harsh clangs and grinding, strangled creaks, a malfunctioning clock-mechanism amplified a thousand times – the greasy darkness shredded before her like a rotting curtain, revealing the attic all lit up in bilious yellow, except for the quivering shadow of the rope hanging from the apex of the roof, turning slowly, stretched taut.

By something palely shining, the source of all the light, noosed and squirming.

It was not far off 10 p.m., the night sidling in, when Powys drove the Mini between the gateposts of the Court and became instantly aware of the Tump behind the house.

He could not see the Tump, but he saw for the first time that the trees towering over the Court from behind were the trees growing out of its summit.

Once you knew this you could almost see the shadow of the great mound outlined in the Elizabethan stonework of the Court itself; the Tump and house fused into a single…

… entity.

Even as he had that thought, something flared in the house and then went out, like a light-bulb which explodes the second it's switched on. He saw a momentary afterglow in one of the small windows immediately below the eaves.

Maybe Andy's in there. Maybe I can wait behind the door until he comes out. And then I'll start hitting him.

Powys accelerated, drove around the house to the courtyard, parked in front of the stable-block, next to the Range Rover – felt a pang of gratitude when he spotted that, longing to see Rachel again.

The stable door was unlocked; he went in.

'Rachel?'

The place was dim; although it probably faced west, there was little light left in the sky. From here, at the top of the long room, now sectionalized, you looked down towards the big picture-window and the grey and smoky Tump.

'Rachel, luv, you in there?'

Maybe the light, way up in the house, had been her, with a torch. I don't like that. It may not frighten her up there, but it scares the crap out of me.

And why had the torch gone out?

'Rachel!'

He looked around for light switches, found a panel of them behind the door, pressed everything. Concealed lighting came on everywhere without a blink.

On the kitchen table was a scattering of magazines. New Age stuff. And a black leather bag, open. Rachel's bag.

He went outside again, anxiety setting in with the dusk. He looked across at the Court. Soon the sky and the stone would meld and the house would be an amorphous thing balanced on the edge of the night.

Powys moved to the rear entrance, trying not to crunch gravel. He pushed the door, but it didn't give. Locked.

He didn't waste time with it, but followed the walls of the house around to the front and almost cried out when something big and black reared up in his path.

It didn't move. It was a massive rubbish pile, except many of the items on it didn't look like rubbish to Powys, even in his light. Near the top of the heap was an enormous double wardrobe, Victorian Gothic, its top corner projecting sharply out of the pile, as if in protest.

This time Powys tried the front door, and found that it too was locked.

He looked back along the dead straight drive into the wood, straining to the silence. No birds left to sing.

Directly above him, he knew, would be the prospect chamber, set into the highest eaves, the house's only orifice when the doors were locked and barred.

Powys stepped back from the door and shouted as loud as he could up in the direction of the chamber's hidden maw.

'Rachel!'

A moment in a void.

Then he saw a glowing filament of sporadic pale-yellow zig-zagging the length of the eaves, like very feeble lightning.

He heard a scream so high and wild it might have been an animal on the brink of violent death in the woods.

And then a chasm opened under all his senses.

You land with a breathtaking thump on the fairy mound, not hearing the laughter, only aware of the pit beneath you, an endless lift shaft. You're falling, down and down and down, faster and faster, a tiny point of white light far below you… a point of light, which gets no larger the further you fall because what it is… is the light reflecting from a spearhead, dirty and speckled with rust, as you can see quite clearly in the long moments before you feel the tearing agony, watching the spear's shaft disappearing into your stomach in in explosion of blood.

Noooooooooo!'

He staggered frantically but uselessly about, trying to position himself below her, as she plummeted from the prospect chamber like a shot bird, the Barbour billowing out, waxy wings against the leaden sky.

But she crashed down in the only place he could not hope to throw himself in her path, and he actually heard her neck break as it connected with the projecting corner of a Victorian Gothic wardrobe of old, dark wood.

Something came after her – a small, grey-brown wisp of a thing.