CARNACKI: The New Adventures (10 page)

“‘Is this the room you have prepared for me tonight, Randy
, my old mucker?’ I asked, already suspecting the answer.

“‘Oh
, yes. But its malfeasance is nothing you haven’t sniffed at a thousandfold. And it’s not that room that you need to worry about; it’s the mausoleum.’

“
There was no moon that night. And the darkness of Northumberland is like nothing you could imagine in this Chelsea playground.”

Outside of Carnacki’s drawing room we all felt the flickering glow of a million oil lamps and the hiss of the gaslight droning like an incandescent machine in which we were all coddled. We could feel the static of
the electric light raising the hairs on the backs of our necks. The smog was so alive with light that it was impossible to look up and see stars.

“When I saw the stars above Blackstarr Burn I a
lmost fell over in a cosmic funk, they were so clear and plentiful,” said Carnacki.

“The next day Ridley took me to the mausoleum. I dragged my kit there with the north man’s help, down into the crevasse of the upper burn
, up through the twisted Scots pines where some hardy cattle grazed in muddy clumps, high above the very nearly but not quite spectacular force of the Blackstarr source, hardly gushing in a waterfall but more than trickling down the rock, and finally onto the lip of the hill and over the desolate moor to the humble church of St. Martin’s.

“
The church was nothing to write home about. In fact, I won’t bore you with a description, but the mausoleum was a one-off.

“
It was topped with an open stone lantern, bestriding a dome lifted by jagged and unnecessary buttresses. It looked heavier than the church but was not much larger than a policeman’s telephone box, a quarter of the footprint that the church took up. The five-sided box was surrounded by a rampart and gateway, ornately decorated but lichen-encrusted in gnarly burrs, its finials shaped like frozen torches. The twin catafalques were open to the elements, as the door was wedged open at the bottom of the steps that lead down beneath two eroded statues that guarded the entrance.

“It was an impressive sight, accentuated by the i
ntensely diffused white light of the hanging fog that seemed immobile despite a blustery wind slapping the long cemetery choke grass about like reeds in floodwater.

“As I raked around the graveyard, febrile ether seemed to vibrate around us, as if the patterns that the wind tore in the grass and the ringing of the heather were signals transmitted by some subterranean antenna.

“I found nothing but sheep droppings and the pellets of hardy moor rabbits.

“‘We found his camera here.
’ Ridley pointed to the gateway to the mausoleum. ‘Fallen but undamaged. He’d been here for three days and taken not one more photograph. Only his plate of the Grey Mare’s Tail remained. Everything else was blank. And his notebooks . . . blank. We put them in the church for safekeeping. His theodolite is still stabbed into the earth by the loadstone. We found no other trace, and we know these hills inside and out. The Constable, Sapper Sproats (the shepherd), the Liddle Boys, and the terrier men, none of us found neither hide nor hair of the fellow.

“‘Master Popper paid your train fare because he knows that there have been
. . . others.

“‘Others have vanished from this spot.

“‘You are the only one who could shed light upon it. I told him what I knew about you, and he was sold.’

“‘Well, thank you for the recommendation
,’ I genuinely imparted to my former reprobate.

“
Crossland’s theodolite was just out of sight in the veil of hill fog, so I skulked about the chamber itself, where there were two sepulchres with carved stone figures on the lids, similar to the statues that were so damaged on the outside. It was oddly calm beneath the arch, with Ridley standing behind me in the open, his greatcoat dancing in the eddies.

“
Sheep droppings, pellets, straw, and moss.

“
No trace of Crossland, other than the possibility that he too had squirmed into this tight space, for the lichen was abraded and its drier, bushy procrastinations were lying upside down by the back stone coffin. To my untrained eye, the sepulchres seemed too close together, or rather,
a little bit wrong
.

“One might even say sunken.

“The sound of the wind spiraled in a flanging sibilance inside, almost like a murmured oath or atonal choral music, the dust tinkling in a pitch not unlike the high pitched whistle of our endocrine systems.

“
I spent some time listening, listening and hearing . . . they are two very different things my friends.

“
I let the vibrations speak.

“
I could feel the outer realm pressing against my tympanic membranes like a mystic pressure. I was right to bring the Ediphone with me, ensconced in green baize alongside the electric pentacle. It would be ideal. There was something redundant about vision here. The only clue that eyes could perceive now was carved in the mausoleum plaque beneath the organic carbuncles. The legend read:

“‘Erected by Benton Hickey of Black Hedley, in memory of his wife Vivienne of Avila, Spain, who die
d February 29th, 1752, aged 27.’

“
I had augmented the recording machine with occult paraphernalia. It was now more than anything a
Carnackophone,
and its hearing trumpet was crisscrossed with seven human hairs, each one consecrated in the manner prescribed by the Sigsand Manuscript to be sensitive to the ‘antic frequency.’ It prescribed that ‘man shalle not imbibe the song of the Night Jarred,’ but I knew the surface of the wax could deduce this secret language as it was more intuitive than any of our human senses.

“
I left the pentacle unpacked, as I had already realised that it would not be required to solve this mystery.

“
Having set up the recorder in the niche of the mausoleum chamber amongst the stone coffins and sealed up the entrance with Ridley’s help, I carefully enclosed the kit and protected it from the elements by forcing the grating door shut behind it. We then took my final embellishment: a remote monitor attached to the cabinet by wires in the same way a detonator could be secured to a pile of dynamite.

“
We both retreated to the church, where we made ourselves as comfortable as possible in an austere stone bunker in poor repair. We ate some hard cheese with a stotty cake, a flatbread of the region, and drank some stout which I must say I have grown a taste for.

“
Night fell, or rather
rose
from the shadow swathe of the steep valley of the Blackstarr, the long gnomon of St. Martin’s pointing towards the kennels as the terrier men put the hounds down for the night on Ridley’s behalf.

“
Crossland had told more of his night matters to the whipper-in, making me understand just why he had suspected an occult cause to the mystery. It had reminded him of the creeping atmosphere so common to our own trip to the Near East, a creeping sense of immanence, that the other realm was around us, caught in the corners of our eyes . . . or caught in the whispers half-heard by our ears.

“‘
The second night,’ said Ridley, ‘he told me he was further awakened by a dolorous knocking, like a submarine float knocking against a pier strut. And the low yellow lamp of the full moon again found its way into his room, and at this hour the spotlight fell not upon the far wall as before, but full square upon his bedclothes.

“‘This time the uneven surface of the bedspread draped over his own prone body caused the sharp mooncast to distort in rumpled folds. To his horror, the shadow of the window was wide open, and before his eyes the curtains began to billow like fanned flames. Plainly in the same view he could see that the actual window was closed firmly shut, and that the actual cu
rtains still hung lifeless!

“‘He saw a shadow slither across the square ape
rture of the window, it was the crisp outline of a woman.

“‘Her voluptuous silhouette slid over him, the cu
rtains in tumult like a gale force wind, until they flickered as fast as the wings of a hummingbird. He leapt out of bed and clasped the drapes shut, then slowly opened them, his fists clenching the fabric. He could see the mausoleum on the bright moonlit plain, and he felt as if he were on the surface of our silent, airless satellite. There was a female figure standing before the entrance of the crypt. She could have been made from stone had her gown not whipped around her as if animated by an updrafting whirlwind, almost tearing the translucent gauze off her body. And she was knocking on the door.

“‘
And yet the night was so still!’

“
I was interested in this development in the story but also able to concentrate on firing up the battery of the recorder, giving precisely half of my attention to Ridley’s yarn and half to arranging the ceramic earpieces or headphones so that one sat firmly over my left ear while the other sat just behind the right, allowing me to hear him tell the story.

“
With the dedicated
Carnackophone
ear I had begun to pick up the spectral resonances to which the machine was attuned.

“
I must have missed the end of the story, because Ridley was finishing with an old saying: ‘It’s like what my old mother used to say to my infantile assumptions. I would say, “I thought this, Mother,” or “I thought that, Mother,” and her reply was always: “Well, do you know what ‘Thought’ did?”’

“‘(She had personified Thought as a dunce.)

“‘Thought’ thought that his leg was sticking out of bed, so he got up to put it back in again.’

“
By this point I had pulled the headphones closely over my ears, through the gaseous breath of the ether I could hear a livid, moaning wind.

“
It wasn’t the sound of the hounds, which were silent.

“
It wasn’t the sound of a moaning wind.

“
I felt fear. And I heard a knock . . . knock . . . knock.

“
Knock . . . knock . . . knock.

“
And the moan became a rushing hiss.

“
The recording was high quality, at least as good as listening down a telephone line. I stared at the cable leading along the floor of the darkened church and under the heavy door. It ran across the graveyard to the door of Hickey’s Mausoleum. Inside in abject darkness the wax cylinder was turning and changing, electricity prickling along its wires as ebon horror spreads along the dendrites of a nerve, along my nerves.

“
The knock, knock, knocking and the sibilant hiss of subterranean exhalation crackled along the connection to my ears.

“‘What is it?
’ said Ridley. ‘What can you hear?’

“
I passed him the headphones and we huddled together, each craning over one of the cups.

“
I knew what had happened.

“
We took our lanterns and ran out of the church, following the cable to the mausoleum as if it were a breadcrumb trail. I swung open the door and crouched into the chamber, closely followed by Ridley, our torchlights flashing wildly around the claustrophobic tomb.

“
It was Vivienne’s sepulcher that was out of place, and together we started to heave the vast sandstone block aside, the gravel of the floor squeaking in popping knuckles of stone, draining down into the sinkhole that had opened up beneath the cistern. We moved it quite well, but it would have been impossible for one to lift up from inside.

“
We smashed the recorder over in our haste to gain egress to the interior of the stone coffin, but we were too late. Inside the hole a chasm had formed, no doubt from the millennial groining of the Blackstarr watercourse under the moor. For one moment we saw the lifeless body of Crossland hung knocking back and forth between the closed lid and the rushing flume of the underground stream, hung by his own camera case strap.

“
By shifting the coffin his corpse was released, and it fell before our eyes into the black and bubbling water until it was dragged in the intermittent light of the lanterns into the unfathomable tunnels of the burn.

“
At that point the floor of the chamber began to collapse, and both sepulchers crashed down into the sinkhole and disappeared under the rushing maelstrom. Ridley saved me from following suit by grabbing my arm and lassoing the headphone cable like a cross between a garrote and a sling in order to gain enough purchase to haul me from the collapse.

“
I had realised that Crossland had identified the architectural anomaly with his measuring device and must have attempted to gain access to the foundations for deeper study through the coffin of Vivienne. Not foreseeing the precariousness of the moorland rock above the hidden watercourse, he had fallen into the hole and been sealed in by the closing lid and either died immediately by hanging or slowly perished, unable to escape from his bizarre entombment.

“‘It’s still strange
,’ concluded Ridley. ‘His final description of the window shadow was that he had felt that the only way to keep the spectral twin of the real opening shut was to stand upon the cruciform sills of the shadow all night; but when he had stood upon them, on his unmade bed in the yellow moonlight, the dream window had opened the opposite way and he had fallen through like the trapdoor of a gallows, with the bedclothes going with him into a bottomless plummet. I put his hallucinations down to lack of sleep and the hypnotic song of the hounds.’”