The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 5

  “Hearsay,” said Tom, “but rather suspicious hearsay.”

  “There was a man called Matthews who lived in the woods nearby who was known as the Dulwich Hermit. He was killed by a gang of gypsies, never officially identified. The Whatleys were high on the list of suspects.”

  She turned another page, scanning down her notes.

  “Oh yes. The parish records indicate the Whatleys are even more inbred than you might think. There’s a steady stream of cousin-to-cousin marriages in that house. And several birth records with unnamed fathers. Oh, and they seem to have had hereditary deformities. Club feet, or no feet at all. As a matter of interest, all the famous fortune-tellers at Gipsy Hill also seem to have had deformities…it’s as though they were trying to breed themselves into a particular strain. Household eugenics.”

  “So,” said Sophie, “does that mean that William’s intruder under the bed was some mad, deformed cousin who’d been locked in the attic for the last twenty years?”

  “On another tack,” said Jessica, continuing down her notes. “Oddly enough, the land for the church was actually donated by Isaac Whatley, who was keen to have a church built on that spot. But there’s no indication as to why. He wasn’t religious, since he didn’t have much to do with the church before then, or even after it was built.”

  She closed the notebook and looked to me to continue.

  In my turn I described my conversation with the vicar, and my own thoughts on marsh gas and its possible effects. I was surprised at how much I had gleaned about decay products, anoxia, and the density of methane when it came to discuss it. I did not like to give the vicar too much credibility, but somehow a struggle with the forces of darkness seemed to fit much better with my subjective impressions. But that would be abominably unscientific.

  “As for his idea that the Whatleys had summoned a fiend from Hell—well, I certainly saw something abnormal, and Tom and George will vouch for me,” I said. “But it was more of an animal than a demon, to my mind. And I do wonder that my brain was most affected when I was kneeling on the floor, where gas might be most concentrated, with that hole in the floor.”

  “I’ve been making a few enquiries,” said George. “But it’s hopeless. Can’t tell you a damned thing.”

  He glowered as though the whole thing were a personal affront to him. George knew everyone, from beef barons in Argentina to diamond merchants in Hong Kong to gangsters (he claimed) in Chicago. He was on first-name terms with earls and plutocrats, but all enquiries had failed.

  “As far as I can tell,” he said, “the Whatleys might have dug a cave for a diabolic altar anytime in the last five hundred years. But we know it can’t be more than fifty years old because of the church. I took a chipping to a stonemason. He says the stone’s not local; in fact, he doesn’t know where the hell it came from. A geology professor just raised his eyebrows at me as though we’re having him on. And why isn’t that chamber full of water, like Whatley’s cellar? The place is a marsh. Sophie, did you find anything?”

  “I can’t say I’ve felt very inclined,” she said. “It’s all rather ghastly if you ask me.”

  George glared at her.

  “If it’s witchcraft or diabolism, it’s very unorthodox,” she said with an elaborate shrug. “I dipped into a few texts, but this is a long way from Montague Summers or The Golden Bough.”

  “Don’t you have some local knowledge?” asked George. “Didn’t you have family around here?”

  Sophie rolled her eyes theatrically and waved her cigarette holder.

  “George darling, if you believe local stories, the Whatleys were thick as thieves with the devil and had him round for tea and crumpets and roast babies every Wednesday,” she said. “But they say that about everyone they don’t like.”

  Daniel was still engrossed in the photographs, and had even taken out a fountain pen and started to write on them. Tom started to protest but gave up. There was no point in telling Daniel to do anything when his brain was at work on something.

  That appeared to be all, but Daisy spoke up unexpectedly.

  “I have something,” she said. From her handbag she took some sheets of writing paper. None of us was expecting this. Daisy’s role was to be an audience for the rest of us; we did not expect her to contribute.

  “I did some automatic writing,” she said.

  I repressed a smirk and saw George doing the same. We were long past the stage of belief in this sort of hocus-pocus connection with the spirit world.

  “I don’t know why,” said Daisy. “It’s as though there’s something there. You know, the way there are radio waves in this room right now, with dance music, and the music is always there but we can’t hear it? I can sort of hear it.…It’s a horrible music. And when I shut my eyes this is what I did.”

  She opened the sheets of paper on the table and slid them towards Tom.

  “It’s an interesting sort of approach,” he said politely, then stopped and stared.

  I leaned closer to see. The sheets were covered in dense, untidy script very different from Daisy’s normal, beautiful handwriting.

  “It’s the same alphabet as the chalk writing,” said Tom.

  “Not all of it,” said Daisy. “If you look, it changes all the way through and sort of gets clearer. The bit at the bottom of the second page is in normal writing, but I don’t know what it means. I thought one of you might be able to read it.”

  “‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’” Tom read slowly.

  “Not any language I recognise,” said George.

  “Code?” I suggested. “Substitution cipher of some sort?”

  “That doodle at the bottom,” said Jessica, “could be a horned man, like the figure in the Greenwich cave.”

  “Horns or antennae,” I said. “It looks more like he has tentacles coming out of his head.”

  “Can I have this?” George asked, reaching for the paper. “I might be able to find someone who can make sense of it.”

  “I don’t want it,” said Daisy with a shudder, passing him the two sheets. “I think it’s to do with that church, though. That’s why all those people are so disturbed. I can pick up the signals clearly sometimes; they’re just getting them sort of dull and distorted all the time. It bores into your brain.”

  “If you look at this, it’s actually quite interesting,” said Daniel to me, still looking at the photographs. I was disappointed he had not reacted to the lure of a code to be broken. Daniel was a genius at codes. “I’ve marked six of the stones here with the letters A through F in each of these pictures.”

  I stared at them, not able to see what he was getting at. Then something struck me.

  “No, you’ve done that wrong,” I said, without thinking. Daniel never got things wrong. Tom agreed with me, however.

  “The one you’ve marked as B is much bigger than A in this picture,” said Tom, “but in this picture B is smaller. It’s not the same stone.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Daniel. “Ignore the sizes. Concentrate on the topology of it. A is a triangle, B is rhomboid, C is hexagonal; they’re always the same shape and configuration, fitting together the same way. And you can see the chalk marks stay the same.”

  “But the stones are different sizes in different pictures,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Tom. “That’s not just perspective or parallax. The stones can’t just change sizes like balloons. It’s impossible…isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” said Daniel. “In fact, it’s rather a good illustration of what I keep telling you about trying to transfer a three-dimensional object to a two dimensional surface. It’s just that in this instance you have an N-dimensional object superimposed on three-dimensional space. Or at least a two-dimensional stone surface.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Tom.

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “N-dimensional space? More likely the pattern of stonework repeats with size variations.”

>   Daniel shook his head emphatically.

  “You went down into the chamber yourself,” he said. “Didn’t you say the walls seemed to change as you moved? That’s exactly what you’d expect.”

  “Daniel, I inhabit a three-dimensional space, as far as I know,” I said. “Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I always have. I view additional dimensions as an abstract mathematical tool. Even if I did encounter an N-dimensional object, it would appear normal to me. Like a square man encountering a cube—to him it looks like another square.”

  “Look at the pictures,” said Daniel. “Tom, you moved the camera about a foot between this photo and this one, and these others are taken from about three feet away, from different angles, yes? Now, you could do some really interesting geometry on the walls down there, if the walls were properly flat.”

  “Can someone tell me what he’s talking about?” asked George.

  “It’s just a different set of rules,” said Daniel. “Non-Euclidian geometry, squeezed into a small space.”

  “Daniel thinks the chamber is a mathematical concept come to life,” I said. “Like a singular point, or a perfect sphere. It’s a place where normal rules don’t apply, parallel lines meet, and God knows what else.”

  “A place that violates God’s laws,” said George, with surprising force. “A blasphemous place.”

  I was reminded of Abbot’s book Flatland, in which the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world reject the notion of a third dimension as absurd and fiercely reject all possible evidence that it might exist. It might be good for George to read it, though he might take the depiction of the conservative, ignorant flatlanders who refuse to believe in a third dimension as an insult.

  “Nonsense,” said Daniel. Nobody could trespass on his intellectual territory and expect to get away with imprecise language. “It’s like navigation. If you have a map, it’s a flat surface. But the world is a sphere, so actual navigation is different—the angles of a triangle don’t add up to a hundred and eighty degrees and so on, because the supposedly flat surface is actually curved through another dimension. Here we’re just seeing local distortion through another set of higher dimensions.”

  “Everything is warped around the church,” I said.

  “Time too,” said Daniel. “Time is simply another dimension, and the intersection with three-dimensional space varies over time. So from our perspective that chamber grows and shrinks or vanishes or reappears over time.”

  “The barrows marked where it was before,” said Jessica. “That’s what he meant about the stars being right.”

  “What?” George was having trouble following this.

  “Standing stones, mounds, and barrows are a sort of astronomical calendar,” said Jessica. “They’re the only way ancient people had of measuring long periods of time, by the movement of the stars. They must have known the chamber appeared in that particular spot at some set interval of hundreds or thousands of years.”

  “Not necessarily a fixed interval,” said Daniel. “It would be a more complex pattern than that.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute.

  “And that’s what Whatley was looking for all that time,” I said. “He knew the chamber would appear one day—in fact, he seems to have known roughly when. He said the time had come, and a few weeks or months later he found it there.”

  “In any case it’s some sort of satanic creation,” said George. “We knew it was unnatural. You could feel it.”

  “Not exactly unnatural…” Daniel protested.

  “Let’s be plain about this,” said George. “The vicar is absolutely right. This isn’t some amusing curiosity. I don’t know what sort of proof you need, but the whole thing has evil running right through it. You might say that thing was from Hell, or you might call it another dimension if you want to be scientific, but I mean to find that thing and destroy it. And damn anyone who gets in my way.”

  “That’s a bit strong, old man,” said Tom.

  “Dammit, you even saw the wretched thing,” said George. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about. There are good Christians on one side and this—this thing on the other.”

  A disturbance interrupted the conversation. We could hear confused shouting in the street and many running feet. Outside it was a fine late summer evening, but there was alarm in the air. We were carried along in a rush of people down the road and onto a side street where there was a faint pall of dust. Halfway down the road, where there was a gap in the houses, a crowd was gathering quickly.

  “Stand back, everybody—please stand back!” a man in workman’s overalls was shouting. “It ain’t safe! Stand back, I tell you!”

  V

  It took me a minute to realise that a house had collapsed, and that was why there was the haze of dust in the air. It had folded neatly into itself, with the rubble fitting tidily into a hole that had opened underneath it so that the heaped floor tiles were level with the lawn.

  “It’s subsidence,” a man next to me was explaining to his wife. “Like they have in Yorkshire with the coal mines.”

  “What mines?” she asked.

  “It’s an earthquake,” another man was saying. “A bloody earthquake. One minute the ’ouse was there, and then, pouf …”

  Men were clambering over the ruin, trying to get into it. I gathered that a retired banker and his wife lived there and they had both been inside when it collapsed. A constable arrived and then another, and soon the able-bodied men were drafted in to form chains to move rubble away from the ruin as others dug in to it.

  George, Daniel, Tom, and I helped out with the rest, taking off our jackets and passing bricks from hand to hand. It seemed a futile effort, but we had to try. And we were literally handling single bricks. The house seemed to have been shattered, every brick pulled apart from every other by some tremendous sudden force.

  Sometime later, when I saw footage of the Nazi bombing in Guernica, there were similar scenes of destruction. But the damage there was not so concentrated and so intense. The effect on the house was something like an explosion, as though it had been blown apart and the pieces all gathered together.

  “Did you hear anything?” George asked as we worked.

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  “Must have been an earth tremor,” said Tom.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s pushed the whole street out,” he said.

  I paused a moment and looked in the direction he indicated. The line of the street had been changed. Instead of being straight, there was a slight bend to it.

  “Impossible,” said George. “We would have felt something.”

  “My God,” said Tom.

  I followed his gaze but could see nothing extraordinary. He was looking out across the back garden, with its paving next to the house, carp pond, gazebo, and rose beds. George and Daniel were also mystified. Then it hit me.

  “Those stones,” I said. “That stonework. It’s the same.”

  What I had taken for an ordinary section of patio, with some limestone paving, was in fact exactly the same pattern as the underground chamber where Whatley died. That same regular irregularity, the same curious stone. It was an irregular oval perhaps twenty feet across.

  The flowerbeds were all neat rectangles. All, that is, except the one next to the paving, which was a peculiar, bloated crescent. There was no sign of disturbance to the soil, but I knew intuitively that an hour before it had been the same shape as the others, that this distortion was the same sort of monstrous intrusion as the mysterious chamber. Its geometry had somehow inserted itself into this space, warping the rest of the garden and the house around it.

  I knew now what had happened to the house, how it had been ripped apart in the transition that must have run right through it.

  “Interesting,” said Daniel, adjusting his glasses. Tom retrieved a pocket Kodak from his jacket and went over to take photographs, much to the irritation of the next man down in the chain as he looked for someon
e to hand the brick to.

  “It’ll be important evidence,” I said, moving to close up the gap.

  “Who cares?” he asked. “They’re dead by now anyway, aren’t they?”

  He was right of course. I don’t know what they died of, but somehow I wondered if they were dead before the house came down on them.

  While we were moving rubble, there was a knot of women by the side of the house. They were clustered around a female neighbour who had evidently seen something and was sobbing and moaning. Jessica drifted in to the group to listen for a while, and afterwards came towards George and me.

  “She’s not very coherent,” said Jessica in a low voice.

  “Her neighbours were just crushed,” said George. “It’s not very surprising.”

  “It’s not that,” Jessica said. “It was something that happened before. She was in the garden, taking down the washing. She looked up and—something happened.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She’s just babbling really,” said Jessica, looking at me. “But she keeps saying something about being seen through the window of that house. She keeps saying ‘He saw me, he saw me with those yellow eyes.’ I thought you ought to know.”

  “That thing in the Whatley house,” I said. The house, the chamber, that grotesque creature, and now this.

  “It’s all connected,” George said grimly, still handing bricks away from the ruin. I had never seen him so serious. “There’s evil here and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

  We were quiet after that, each of us with our own thoughts. It was more than an hour before they found the bodies and took them away. The summer evening was wearing on towards darkness. George half-heartedly suggested going back to the pub, but there was no enthusiasm.

  “I’ve been thinking and I want to show you something,” said Daniel, and George and Tom and I followed him. I noticed he was holding a tennis ball.

  Daniel stopped by the pond at Alleyn Park Road and tossed the tennis ball in, where it bobbed up and down.

  “There,” he said. “Do you see it now?”

  “A three-dimensional object intersecting a two-dimensional surface,” I said, grasping his meaning at once.