The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos (5 page)

The branches of the trees, twisted and gnarled, swept down against their faces and there was too much silence in them for Calder’s liking. Over everything, there lay a curious sense of restlessness and unease, a haze of the grotesque and the unreal, as if something had been changed here, something which was not obvious at first glance, but which became more and more noticeable as they skirted the grounds and moved round towards the low hill at the rear of the house.

“This place is more than enough to give me the shivers,” muttered the doctor. His deep voice rumbled from the depths of his chest and he pulled the collar of his coat up higher around his neck.

“And yet young Belstead chose to stay here rather than go away and enjoy himself with all that money he inherited,” said Calder tightly. “I wish I knew why he did that. I’m certain that if we had the answer to that we might know what’s behind all this.”

They moved out of the trees into the open. There was more of the yellow moonlight here but before them, where a narrow, muddy path led up the side of the hill, lay the dark vault where the Belstead family and their servants rested.

Instantly, they were more than ever aware of the silence. It seemed to shriek at their ears far more loudly and insistently than any sound. An almost tangible thing that was oppressive and heavy. Calder felt the sudden, almost physical impact of it the moment he stepped out of the trees and stood in the cold, musty air staring about him, rising tension in his mind.

His arms and legs felt numb and strange as if they were no longer a part of him.

The narrow pathway, muddy and running with moisture even though there had been no rain that day, led them up the side of the hill to the stone vault at the top. In daylight, it would have looked a morbid and dreadful place, but with that eerie moonlight falling upon it and faint muttering of the thunder in the distance, it brought a knot of fear to Calder’s stomach as he stood a few feet away, unable to move any closer, while Woodbridge edged his way forward, his feet sliding on the smooth stone that surrounded the place. It had a look of age about it. There was a slimy kind of moss growing thickly on the walls, but it seemed significant that no other type of vegetation grew to within several feet of the low building. Almost, he thought inwardly, as if the other plants were deliberately shunning it.

He tried to pull himself together. There he went again, letting his imagination run away with him. There was nothing here they had to be afraid of, he told himself half-angrily. Those who rested inside this stone vault had been dead for many years and any idea that the dead could come back and harm the living was ludicrous. All the same, he began to wish that he had not been so keen on coming with the other; and that he had accepted the chance back there at the gate and stayed behind, leaving the doctor to come out here on his own if he wanted to. After all, it had been Woodbridge’s own idea to come to this godforsaken place and hunt around. What he expected to find here, Calder did not know. Certainly, it seemed unlikely that he would find the answers to any of the things that had been troubling him.

For a moment, outlined against the moonlight, Woodbridge stood in front of the iron gate which led into the vault. Calder heard his sudden exclamation and in spite of himself, went forward.

“What is it?” His voice seemed to rattled eerily from the rising stone walls.

“The gate—it’s open.”

“Probably Belstead comes here sometimes.” Calder suggested. There was a strange dryness in his throat. “Knowing him, it’s hard to say what he gets up to at times.”

“No, it isn’t that.” The doctor’s cold voice was muffled as he lowered his head. For a moment, there was a flash of light in the dimness as he flicked on the torch and flashed the beam in front of him. “It’s been broken open—and from the inside! See—the lock is still on the end of the chain.”

“But that’s impossible.” He forced the words out through lips that were trembling a little. “I mean—” He wanted to enlarge on what he had said, but Woodbridge had flashed the beam of the powerful torch on to the ground and they both saw, quite clearly, the imprint of feet on the damp ground.

Calder’s mind was a shrieking confusion of divided impulses, with the overriding one a dominant rush of fear. He wanted to turn and run, run back along that slippery winding path into the trees and then through the tangled undergrowth back to the gate and out onto the road where everything would be sane and normal again. But something held him rooted to the spot. His legs seemed paralysed, unable to move. Only his breath, rasping in his throat made any sound in the awful stillness. He felt like a man in a daydream, who knew that he was dreaming and yet could not awaken; repelled and at the same time oddly fascinated by what he saw. Then Woodbridge moved. He thrust himself forward with a muttered sound, whether oath or prayer it was impossible for Calder to determine, and disappeared inside the dark opening. The lawyer stood quite still outside, listening to the other moving around inside the dark tomb of the vault, saw the flashes of the torch as the other flicked the beam around the dripping, putrescent walls.

From where he stood, he could see the grossly distorted outlines of other things shadowed upon the walls and although he wanted desperately to close his eyes and yell at the other to come out, he could not do so. There was the inescapable feeling that no matter what had happened already, worse was still to come and the realisation unnerved him. It seemed an eternity before Woodbridge came out into the moonlight again and the expression on his face was one that Calder could not define.

“What is it?” he asked thinly. “Is there something wrong in there?”

“There is.” Woodbridge put up his right hand to his eyes as if to wipe away the image of something he had seen. “It’s worse than I thought. We have to go up to the house right away if we are to stand any chance at all of stopping them.”

“But what is it?” Calder managed to get the words out before the other came forward, seized him by the arm, and pulled him, unresisting, along the path, back in the direction of the house, just visible beyond the tall trees.

“I’ll explain on the way to the house,” went on the other hurriedly. “There isn’t a moment to lose. Perhaps it may be too late already.”

* * * * * * *

It
was almost midnight now. The moon was high in the sky, riding just above the storm clouds sweeping in from the west and although it had lost its lurid red colour, the house seemed to pick something out of the moonlight, to transmute it into something terrible and evil. The broken chimneys stretched up like hands to the heavens and the eyeless sockets of the windows staring intently along the twisting drive towards the road.

This was how it had been for more than forty years, a place of dark and lonely shadows; and if there were lights and noises from the rooms, the villagers, passing on a cold November night, merely crossed themselves and hurried on, praying that the locks was strong on the gates of the vaults atop the hill, caring little of what might be happening to Charles Belstead, alone in that house with whatever horrors that might be beside.

Now, on that particular night, there was a peculiar waiting quality over it. The rooms were not empty and Charles Belstead was not alone. There were shadows in the house, eldritch things, the apotheosis of the unnameable. On the floor of the library at the rear of the house, the strange cabalistic designs glowed with an eerie, devilish light. There was a flickering inside the room as of corpse candles, a cold radiance, a manifestation of the aura of evil that had never left the place, which was crystallised inside its very walls....

* * * * * * *

As they came out of the trees onto the edge of the rambling lawn, the moon was swallowed up by the storm clouds, which had been moving in from the west, covering most of the sky. A few stars still showed to the north, but soon they too, would be engulfed by the blackness. There was a vivid flash of lightning just beyond the trees, followed a few seconds later by the titanic crash of thunder almost overhead.

“There’s a light of some kind in the library,” said Calder tightly, clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering in his head. “Perhaps Charles is still up. At least, nothing seems to have happened here.”

“I only hope to God you’re right,” muttered the other grimly. He took something from the pocket of his overcoat and held it tightly in his right hand. In the faint light, Calder saw that it was a small, golden crucifix. “We mustn’t go rushing in there with our eyes shut, trusting to blind luck to protect ourselves. I know these things and we can, at least, protect ourselves with the few things we have.”

Woodbridge did things that Calder did not understand, and all the time, the house stood brooding less than fifty yards away and the thunder mounted in intensity over their heads like some wild animal. Carefully, they moved along the narrow gravel path, which led around the lawn, at times stepping off it to walk on the grass verge so that their feet made no sound in the stillness. Calder shivered. Although he knew these grounds reasonably well, having visited the house on several occasions, somehow on this particular night, everything seemed altered and the memory of what they had found on the hill gave him the unshakeable impression that dreadful fear and possibly something worse dwelt in the house that night. The most innocuous details of the place seemed to possess a nightmarish appearance as the moon appeared in fitful glimpses through the thickening cloud.

* * * * * * *

Never before, had the presence of evil oppressed him so much as it did then. Here, he felt, was some blasphemous abnormality from the nethermost reaches of Hell itself, something evil which had been frozen into that house many years before, which defied time, and still lurked there, watching and waiting. And where, in God’s name, did Charles Belstead fit into all this? Why had he never set foot outside the place ever since that day he had come home from his father’s funeral? What kind of hold had this place got over him? The night suddenly grew hideous with things which were beyond all human comprehension and imagination.

They saw the lights in the library more clearly as they reached the corner of the house. Calder sucked in a harsh breath. Was that a darker shadow just inside the large French windows—or was his overwrought imagination playing more tricks with him? He screwed up his eyes in reflexive instinct, then shook his head slowly almost to convince himself. Whatever it had been, it had seemed so intangible that it might never have existed.

They paused outside the windows, looking in. At first, Calder could see nothing. Then he made out the figure of Charles Belstead, seated in the tall, high-backed chair in front of the fire in the wide hearth. The flames had burnt down low, and there seemed to be only a faint spark still kindled there. But there was plenty of light in the room; a bluish glow that seemed to come from every corner of the library. It was an eerie, hellish glow that sent more shivers coursing up and down his spine. His hands were clenched tightly by his side, the nails biting deep into the palms, but he scarcely noticed. An unearthly chill seemed to reach through the glass of the windows and engulf him, numbing his muscles and limbs, swirling and eddying about him like something tangible, as a cold river current suddenly chills a man plunging into the water.

“We have got to go inside and face them.” As if from a great distance, the doctor’s words reached him. A moment later, all sound was drowned by the peal of thunder that rumbled over their heads, crashing away to the horizon.

He saw the shadows in the room now—vague, half-seen things that vanished whenever he tried to look directly at them. A cold sweat of terror broke out on his forehead as he went forward slowly, behind the other. Woodbridge paused for only a moment, then trust the large windows open and stepped through into the room. Swiftly, he raised the golden crucifix in his right hand as he strode forward, intoning something in a language that Calder did not understand.

A faint, low moaning sound began to make itself heard. Slowly, it rose in volume, striving to drown out the words Woodbridge was speaking. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed his companion’s face, drawn and white in that hellish glow. Sharply, he drew in his breath. In front of him, Charles Belstead, his face wrinkled like that of a mummy, suddenly lifted his head, stared at them with a strange expression on his face. For a moment, he seemed almost relieved, the tight lines on his features melting away swiftly. He got stiffly to his feet, made as if to move towards them with one arm outstretched, then stumbled forward like a man hit with a blackjack, spun halfway round on his heels, then went down quickly, arms outflung, fingers just touching the little silver cups, filled with some clear liquid, that rested at the corners of the glowing pentagram.

Without hesitation, Calder went forward, down on one knee beside the other. He forced himself to ignore the savage, exultant cry that rang through the room, something blended of triumph and horror, forced himself to ignore the sudden stab of pain in his body as the sound hammered at his ears. The flickering light in the room dimmed.

He felt for the old man’s pulse, then gently lowered his arm. It did not require Woodbridge to confirm that the old man was dead. He lifted his head to glance up at the other, shivered as an icy blast of air swirled around his kneeling body, chilling him to the bone. The room seemed to flicker and sway in front of his staring eyes. For a long moment, the walls, the pentagram on the floor, the books in their glass-fronted cases, seemed to glow with a weird and hellish light. By it, he could just make out the dim figures standing on the very edge of the designs etched into the floor. One, he recognised instantly as Charles Belstead and even as common sense told him that this could not be possible, that the other was lying dead on the floor in front of him, the body already growing cold under his fingers, he recognised the others. Henry Belstead, the lean saturnine face grinning eerily in the dimness, watching him from out of baleful eyes. Old Peters standing a little to the rear, his form as substantial as it had been in life. The old housekeeper who had died some seven years before. He knew that he had to turn and run, that somewhere Woodbridge was waiting for him, although he did not know where. A shrilling, evil laughter bubbled up from in front of him, joined by other voices that he did not recognise, until the sound shrieked along the endless corridors of the house, blending in the end into one vast peal of thunder that seemed to shake the building to its very foundations.