The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 4

  Jessica shrugged. “The pattern is ancient, I suppose. But it’s not British ancient.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s closest to some of the Inca ruins in South America,” Jessica said. “It doesn’t belong here. It’s been reconstructed, or re-created. Goodness knows why.”

  The evening wore on and the others left one by one. Jessica seemed reluctant to go, but George, Tom, and I wanted to have a word together. We were the three witnesses, the ones who had seen the thing, and I could tell none of us wanted to discuss it in front of the others.

  “I know what I saw,” said George when we three were alone at last. “But I don’t know what you saw. Why don’t we each say what we saw? Like the blind men describing the elephant to each other.”

  I described it as best I could, giving perhaps a less coherent account than the one above. But it was fresh in my mind, and the vividness must have helped convey the sense of it. The others did not contest any of the details.

  “I just caught the last moment,” said George. “It disappeared into that hole, dropped into the water. I saw the size of it and the—the movement, and nothing else, but the way it fell was queer. I’ve seen otters and water rats jump into the water. They disturb the surface more than that. It went in without a sound, like a knife into the water. Barely a ripple. Bloody strange thing it was too. I could hardly see it—I saw it and it was gone, like a stage effect. Quite uncanny.”

  “What about you?” I asked Tom.

  Tom was silent for a long time, looking down at the surface of the table.

  “What did I see? What did I see?” Tom seemed to be interrogating himself. “Well, what you saw doesn’t make sense; what I saw makes less sense. I’d have to say it was something, something the texture of running quicksilver, a cable woven of writhing worms. That’s what I saw.”

  He continued to look at the table, sifting through images in his mind, then looked up.

  “It was a solid bar reaching across the room, between the bed and the hole, a bar made of…dark flowing milk, or seething maggots, or boiling pale moonlight. It moved, but there was no actual movement. It was there, and then it was gone without moving. Does that make sense? No,” he concluded. “That does not make sense. And that’s what I saw.”

  He looked down again and shook his head so rapidly that he seemed to shudder. George put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

  “I was afraid you were going to tell me it was just a cat or something,” I said.

  “No,” said George. “Unfortunately not, old man. But it’s gone now, and we’re out of there with no harm done. We’ve had a bit of a shock and that’s all. I think after what we’ve all been through I’d better stand us a round of brandies—and tomorrow perhaps this will all seem like a bad dream, and we can stop troubling ourselves about it.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Already the image of the thing under the bed was slipping away from me, as though my memory could not catch hold of it. Just like those dreams that you remember so clearly when you wake up, but which have completely dissolved a few hours later. It was as though my mind were rejecting the whole experience, refusing to take its imprint. Sometimes it is much easier to ignore horrors, even ones right in front of you.

  IV

  The next day it all seemed far more remote. More importantly to me then, my thoughts on a topic for my doctorate had coalesced overnight, and I was full of ideas that I had to write down. I was going to carry out an act of synthesis that would fuse scientific and artistic thought in a way that had not been attempted since Leonardo. It was ambitious, and I did not know where I would be able to find the missing pieces, but I could see how I could go about it. Principia Mathematica had united mathematics and logic: now I would carry the torch forward to light up every sphere of human activity into a rational whole.

  I did not forget about the thing under the bed. I even jotted down some notes on the case when thoughts occurred to me. My speculations focussed on what could be proved. I toyed with some idea of marsh gas, whose presence was revealed by that peculiar smell. The Whatleys had been living with it for years: Could it cause madness and hallucinations? Was it strongest in that chamber? I thought of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and how the priestess was supposed to inhale fumes from an abyss to bring on prophetic visions. Was it now seeping into the church as well? Had it conjured up that thing under the bed?

  But these thoughts were just interludes. For the most part I was working on the plan for my thesis. I just had to tease out my thoughts to full length, to unravel the mysteries that I could glimpse. And when I started writing I had my first flash of inspiration. It was as though the shock encounter had cleared some blockage in my thinking and allowed my ideas to flow freely for the first time. Instead of writing halting paragraphs and crumpling up the page, I found my thoughts running out in a steady stream.

  I was interrupted by Mrs Hall inviting me, or rather instructing me, to come down and take tea with the vicar. I sighed at the distraction, but perhaps a break would be no bad thing. I sipped tea and nibbled cakes for twenty minutes while Mrs Hall chatted with the vicar about people I did not know and local events I had not heard of. It seemed rather petty compared to the grand sweep of history. I thought nothing of it, but just as I thought he was about to go, he turned to my landlady.

  “I do hope you’ll excuse me, Mrs Hall,” he said. “But I have to advise Mr. Blake on a spiritual matter.”

  “Of course, Vicar.” She stood up, taking the tea tray. “I’ll just be in the kitchen.”

  He seemed like the usual mild-mannered clerical sort, but I knew already that there was something steelier underneath. And underneath the steel, a seriously worried cleric.

  “I can tell you’re a very intelligent young man,” said the vicar. “And very well educated too.”

  “Thank you, I’m sure—”

  “But many educated young men are apt to fall into the sin of Pride,” he went on, talking right over me with some force. “You believe you have all the answers and nobody else knows anything. Especially not anybody as old-fashioned as a vicar.”

  I smiled politely.

  “I happen to know that you and your friends are making an entertainment of investigating parish affairs,” he said. “No doubt with the best of intentions. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm; in fact, I’m sure you think you can help. But matters are beyond you.”

  “What matters, Vicar?”

  “I talked a great deal to Isaac Whatley, and to Flora Whatley,” he said. “Their family has been entangled with terrible evil for a very long time.”

  “We wondered if there might be some kind of pagan connection,” I said.

  “Not pagan,” he said darkly. “Now I want you to swear to me on your honour as a gentleman that what I tell you now goes no further than this room.”

  Eager to find out more, I made the declaration at once. I wondered that he had not asked me to swear on a Bible, but perhaps he had a shrewd notion of my religion, or lack of it.

  “I’ve been vicar here for twenty years,” he said. “As spiritual guide and counsellor, I’ve been party to some terrible human suffering. I know my flock as well as any shepherd. I know when something is wrong. And now we are afflicted with something beyond the ordinary. Your set believes that everything can be explained by Doctor Freud; well, I’m sorry, but it can’t.”

  I tried to object—I have always despised Freud—but he stopped me with an upraised hand.

  “Whatley’s family were, to put it bluntly, in league with the Devil for some generations. I’m not so superstitious as to think his deformities were marks of Cain, but…they called me to the house after Flora Whatley died. I took custody of the book; what I found in it and in the house was truly appalling. Worse, the two of them succeeded in summoning something. Something which is still here.”

  “What sort of ‘something’?”

  “A malign influence. Something from Hell,” he said. “Something which does not belong here
and which could only enter through a blasphemous rift made by Whatley. He unbound something which was bound. I don’t pretend to know how, but the Evil one has his powers. This is not something that your science and psychology can understand. This is a spiritual evil, one that can only by overcome with the grace of God. That’s why I must insist that you do not involve yourselves. There is a deadly danger here to all our souls. If people with no understanding meddle in it, the results will be catastrophic.”

  “You have the book?” I asked.

  “Given to me for safekeeping. I assure you it has no scholarly value at all,” he said, anticipating my question. “It is full of the most vile and disgusting filth which no civilised man should see, let alone study.”

  “But—”

  “I have already been offered a lot of money for it by an American woman. She talked about research work and offered me a very large sum indeed—I didn’t like her manner one bit. I had never heard of her organisation; I was rightly suspicious. I refused her and I refuse you,” he said. “Given its obscene contents, I am taking advice on whether I can burn it or if I must keep it for Whatley’s heirs.”

  “What about the underground chamber?”

  “It’s obvious enough that it’s a place of blasphemous worship, whatever Mr. Dunning tells you. Sometimes these people use churches, defiling the altars at midnight…this was more cunning, a way of clandestinely practising their perversions on hallowed ground. It will be cleansed and reconsecrated and then filled in with honest Christian soil. Again, I am waiting for advice on how to proceed.”

  He put down his teacup forcefully.

  “And, I tell you, I will not have it held up as the ‘naïve folk architecture’ that you people are so fond of. I will not have pictures published for others to copy. I will not have their unholy texts made public. We must not preach the gospels of Hell, Mr. Blake, even in the name of spreading knowledge. We must have Faith.”

  “I understand entirely, Vicar.”

  “I doubt it, I very much doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. “But you’re a decent young man, if sadly misguided. Now, let us pray together.”

  I was sufficiently cowed to accept the offer. We bowed our heads while he called for a blessing. Afterwards I felt curiously relieved; if he wanted to take on the whole Whatley business himself, then that was his affair. I had plenty of other things to attend to. But if I could find the key to the mystery, it would have pleased me greatly to do it before that sanctimonious vicar.

  The next few weeks continued the same round of activity, teaching in the day with evenings writing at the dining table, whilst Mrs Hall knitted and Mr. Hall read.

  My thesis proposal rapidly gained a head of steam until it seemed to rush on ahead of me. I realised that I had been stumbling in the dark all my life, finding my way by touch, without understanding that light existed. Now the way ahead was illuminated by flashes of lightning and I could progress with ease, avoiding obstacles that I would have blundered around for weeks, finding doorways and bridges that would have been hidden to me. I hurried to capture on paper each new progression. I found myself sketching graphs and elaborate diagrams.

  Unexpected connections appeared between areas of discourse, so I would skip easily from psychology to archaeology to biology and back. I wrote in English, French, Latin, and Greek; I devised symbols and hieroglyphics to convey meanings too subtle for ordinary language, like Russell’s mathematical logic. Then there were a set of rules to combine the symbols so that they could operate on one another…my work became almost wordless as I covered sheet after sheet, watching the ideas work themselves out in front of me.

  In spite of my self-absorption, I realised that Mrs Hall was showing signs of eccentricity. There were curious lapses in her daily concentration. One morning I found myself confronted by a breakfast of no less than nine soft-boiled eggs, the egg-cups arranged in a perfect triangle. Everything was ironed, but curious triangular and diamond-shaped creases were introduced. Her conversation was superficially sensible, but failed to connect with reality.

  However, I was too busy to make much of it, and I knew the others were also throwing themselves into their own interests with similar energy. Tom was busy in his makeshift photographic studio and his darkroom. George was speeding about on some sort of political business. Jessica was drafting grand new buildings. We were all going through an extraordinary period of inspiration, yet it did not occur to me to wonder whether there might be a particular reason behind it.

  We saw less of one another than usual. Perhaps I felt I had lost face after the incident in the Whatley house; also, I was reluctant to pursue it too openly after the vicar’s warning, and that would make me look cowardly. I did a little research and jotted down a few notes when they occurred to me, but I did not feel I was making enough progress to be worth mentioning.

  There were a couple of get-togethers; one was a party where there were too many other people for us to talk. The other was a noisy and exceedingly alcoholic soirée, and the first Manhattan knocked me sideways. George and I struck up a conversation, but he wisely if blurrily advised me to continue the discussion later because he wouldn’t remember a thing in the morning. I certainly did not recall much.

  But there was one Saturday afternoon that had been marked in my diary for some weeks: the group of us travelled to the West End to see a matineé of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s new sensation. Sophie sent reminder notes around in the morning, and we all turned up for it.

  Afterwards, when we were gathered around our usual nook in the pub, there was a brisk round of criticism. As I recall, I decried the way the film tried to marry a science fiction storyline with traditional Gothic themes. Also how woefully weak the science was altogether. Jessica was scathing about the supposed architecture of the future and how unlikely it was that skyscrapers would spread to suburbs. George found the political side sentimental and trite.

  But we did not spend long on Metropolis. Everyone wanted to talk about the Whatley case.

  “Now, then,” said George, bringing the assembly to order. “We have the finest set of brains in the country around this table. Let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of this little mystery.”

  I realised then that he took it personally. The mystery was a challenge to him, to the team of crack advisors he had assembled. He intended it as a sort of training exercise for us, and he was not satisfied with our progress after the first round.

  Tom opened the bidding by producing an envelope of photographs. He spread them on the pub table before us.

  “In case anyone’s interested,” he said. “I’m afraid they didn’t come out very well.”

  At first the images seemed bafflingly abstract, but I recognised them as the underground chamber. It was a challenging subject, trying to take pictures in that small, featureless space, and all he could do was point the camera at the walls. The frame was filled with close-packed stones, like peculiar paving.

  “I took several prints of them, tried a few different things in the darkroom,” he said. “That trompe l’oeil effect is there in the actual place—I know because I saw it—but it doesn’t really show up.”

  You can see the pictures yourself. They form the series of photographs known as Sequence III, which appears in several of the collections of Tom’s work. Of course nobody has ever been able to identify where they came from. The rocks have a partly organic quality, fitting together like parts of a living thing. They do have another curious feature. Looking at them you couldn’t tell whether they showed gigantic walls or a tiny section a few inches square. There was nothing to give away the scale. I had never seen a pattern like it, though I learned later that clouds, certain types of vegetation, and minerals have this same property.

  In fact, it was only when I saw the faint traced lines of chalk that I could tell the picture showed a section about three feet across. But I could not make out what was written.

  “Ah yes, the epigraph,” said Tom, when I pointed out the markings. “I�
��ve tried to improve the contrast so it shows up better, but I still can’t make it out. Similar to the scrawl in the bedroom, as you might expect. It’s not Roman script, or Greek, or Hebrew, or hieroglyphics.”

  We passed the pictures around and examined them closely. Daniel seemed most interested of all. He took off his glasses to peer at the detail, then arranged all six of them on the table in front of him, moving them around like parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

  “That’s as far as I got,” said Tom. “But don’t tell me you haven’t been making your own investigations.”

  “The Whatleys have been here for a very long time,” said Jessica, opening a notebook. “As far back as records go, which is about 1450. One was hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century, which was unusual for this part of the world. They’ve always lived in that house, or one on the same site, and they’ve never had any sort of trade as far as I can discover.”

  “So they’re one of the original families of Dulwich?” asked Sophie.

  “Actually they’re not Dulwich at all,” said Jessica. “The house is outside the bounds of the medieval village. Dulwich was tiny then. These people were living in the woods, still in about the same place. The first reference is a man called Watlye living ‘by the barrows.’”

  “The Druids’ Barrows?” I asked.

  “I imagine so, but they weren’t called Druids until the late eighteenth century. Before that they were called the Devil’s Barrows. They were supposed to be Saxon, but they’re probably Neolithic with some intrusive internments from later on. The Whatleys discouraged antiquarians. Oh, and as an architectural note, there’s an underground chamber in Greenwich, which they think was a Neolithic chalk pit, with a picture of a horned deity of some kind.”

  “Underground devil worship everywhere,” said George.

  “Speaking of which, the early Whatleys were colliers, charcoal burners. There was quite a gang of them in the forest of Norwood, and they had a reputation for being pagan if not actual devil-worshippers.”