The Uncanny, page 25
His broad shoulders straightened. His weary features set. Well, if they thought he was going to lie down and take it this time, they had another think coming. Another think entirely.
Richard Storm, is it? Sir Michael thought angrily, sitting there. Richard Storm indeed.
And then, slowly, he began to load the revolver.
IX
SPECTRE
The repeated CLANG-CLANG continues and DR. PRENDERGAST, with the faithful HEDLEY trailing after, rushes in, following the sound.
They stand for a moment at a loss. Then, again: CLANG-CLANG.
DR. PRENDERGAST
This way, Hedley!
HEDLEY
But there’s nothing here …
Ignoring him, PRENDERGAST rushes to a large sarcophagus in the center of the crypt. He seizes the stone lid.
DR. PRENDERGAST
Lend a hand, Hedley!
Baffled, HEDLEY joins the doctor. With a massive effort, the two men manage to push the lid off. It falls to the floor, breaking into pieces.
HEDLEY
By Jove, Prendergast: a stairway!
The CLANG-CLANG sounds again from beneath the crypt, much louder now.
DR. PRENDERGAST
Follow me!
First DR. PRENDERGAST, then HEDLEY, climb into the sarcophagus.
131 INT. HIDDEN STAIRWAY
DR. PRENDERGAST and HEDLEY descend into utter darkness.
Again: CLANG-CLANG.
DR. PRENDERGAST
Quick, Hedley, a torch!
HEDLEY produces a flashlight and the beam plays eerily over the mossy walls, suddenly illuminating …
The flayed body of SERGEANT ANDERSON, hanging in chains.
They examine the corpse grimly.
DR. PRENDERGAST
(continuing)
Poor devil.
CLANG-CLANG.
DR. PRENDERGAST
(continuing)
Come on, Hedley, there’s no time to waste!
DR. PRENDERGAST continues his descent. After another moment confronting the body, HEDLEY follows.
132 INT. UNDERGROUND PASSAGE
DR. PRENDERGAST and HEDLEY reach the bottom of the stairs and enter an underground passage. An ominous RED GLOW is visible at the far end.
DR. PRENDERGAST touches HEDLEY’S arm and nods at the flashlight, HEDLEY turns it off.
They move slowly, cautiously, down the passage as the CLANG-CLANG sounds again.
The RED GLOW grows brighter as they near the end of the passage. Their faces tense, they round the bend into …
133 INT. THE GREAT VAULT
The whole scene lies before them, JACOBUS, in the full evil splendor of his miter and pentagram robe, stands triumphant before an altar on which lies a purple blanket.
ANNIE, her clothes torn, is chained to the wall, writhing in her bonds.
As the CLANG-CLANG sounds again, we see …
The hunchbacked GORGE hammering out the blade of the jeweled SWORD OF THE SEIRIZZIM.
JACOBUS looks up at DR. PRENDERGAST with a calm smile, as if he had been expecting him.
JACOBUS
Why, Dr. Prendergast, I’m so glad you could make it. I left Sergeant Anderson to show you the way.
HEDLEY starts forward angrily, but DR. PRENDERGAST restrains him.
JACOBUS
(continuing)
You’re just in time to bear witness to my final apotheosis.
GORGE, his work finished, now shuttles forward, bearing the SWORD to his master.
ANNIE struggles on the wall, crying out through her gag.
JACOBUS handles the SWORD lovingly, then lifts it into the air.
JACOBUS
(continuing)
Poor Prendergast. That you ever thought to defeat me. Could you not see that I am the agent of an immortal power? In such incarnations as this, I travel through the centuries. I feed on the marrow of time. I was here before the oceans turned black with life, and when the deserts are white with death I will remain. The petty hindrances you have put in my way have only served to amuse me. But that’s all over now.
He raises the SWORD higher. And then …
Then, with bright eyes and an eager grin, GORGE steps to the altar. With a swift movement, he pulls the purple blanket away to reveal …
ANNIE’S BABY, lying naked on the altar!
ANNIE shrieks behind her gag, struggling on the wall.
JACOBUS raises the SWORD above his head, ready to drive it into the infant’s breast.
But DR. PRENDERGAST only smiles with grim calm.
DR. PRENDERGAST
Not so fast, Jacobus …
X
BLACK
ANNIE II:
THIS
TIME,
IT’S
PERSONAL
1
His eyes! His eyes were full of fear. And, though we had seen him in London only two weeks before, he seemed since then to have aged as many decades. A man in his middle sixties, he peered at us through the half open door of Belham Grange with all the tremulous hostility, the white-eyed apprehension, of some ancient anchorite disturbed at his grimmest meditations.
No shit, thought Richard Storm, as the withered, hostile, white-eyed face of Sir Michael peered out at them.
We had already dismissed our cab. We could hear the car’s engine fading behind us on the Grange’s long drive. The winter afternoon was closing around us, the windswept clouds of a lowering sky pressed down on us from above. The house itself, the whole great stone edifice, loomed menacingly before us as with an adsum to our conjuro te.
Well, all right, the house didn’t loom exactly. It was a neat, pretty old mansion, a long stone structure with lots of windows, light and airy. And there were no “horrid ravens peering blackly from the gutters and gables of the place” either. But Storm did feel a “thrill of dread” sure enough at the sight of Sir Michael’s “ravaged features”—his pale, sunken cheeks, his watchful eyes glaring out through the crack in the door. He felt a thrill of dread and a whirling, dreamy, febrile sense of swimming distances and unreality. He had a faint headache too, which had been bothering him all morning.
Sophia stepped from beside him to kiss her father’s sagging cheek.
Storm took a last glance over his shoulder. Back up the empty drive, “where it stretched into the distance overhung by gloomy rows of copper beech.” The clouds barreling in over the hills were thunderheads, great and threatening. The February wind was wet and chill, and the day was darkening to a false twilight.
And through that dark, through the dead, dangling branches intermingling above the drive, he could just make out the ruin of the abbey in the distance: “the broken wedge of a chapel wall, the slanting monuments of its ancient churchyard.”
Storm straightened and took a breath, trying to clear his head. He turned to the house again.
Sophia had crossed the threshold. Sir Michael was holding the door open for him.
Well, he thought, he had come to England to find a ghost story, hadn’t he?
And, forcing a smile, he walked into Belham Grange.
2
Detective Inspector William Pullod stood in the church round and watched the old woman. She was moving slowly among the stone effigies of dead crusaders. Prodding them with that freaky dragon stick of hers as if she half expected them to come to life. Frowning and muttering under her wide-brimmed hat, darting glances here and there from behind her goggly spectacles.
DI Pullod sluiced the air from one cheek to another, rolled his eyes.
He was a small, quick, sinewy man, a balding weight-lifter with shoulders that seemed ready to burst the seams of his raincoat. He hated wasting time and he hated dead ends. And he hated churches too, if it came to that. He found them creepy, lonesome and yet weirdly alive—like a house where all the clocks have suddenly stopped ticking.
This one, the Temple Church, was bright enough with its big doors open to the noonday sunlight. Busy enough with a group of Japanese tourists chattering as they examined the stained-glass windows down at the other end. Here in the round, though, there were disturbing, distorted faces sculpted on the columns of the arches. They stared down from every side at the stone knights lying twisted on the floor. And it was creepy. Like the old darling herself.
Still, Pullod thought, there was definitely something about her. Nutter that she was. With her Saint Iago who never lived, and her Argentinian cult that never existed. Supernatural conspiracy theories. Little gray men and such. She ought to work for ITV, he thought. Still. Her eyes were sharp as a needle, smart. And she looked like she’d been alive forever. Sounded like it too with her gruff, grave voice. Not to mention the fact that she’d identified Lester Benbow from his photofit, and Pullod would’ve given his teeth to catch up with that scar-lipped assassin.
He strolled over to the woman now, his hands in his overcoat pockets.
“Everything look in order, love?” he asked her. He kept his voice low. Churches had that effect on him.
“Yes,” murmured Harper Albright after a moment. “Yes.” She went on prodding the dead crusaders with her stick.
Pullod ran his eyes over the gibbering faces on the walls. He could not restrain a weary sigh. “You’re sure this is where you saw him last, this Iago fellow?”
Harper only nodded. “I didn’t expect him to return, but it seemed worth trying. It was something he said about being chosen. I have a sense, you see, that he is not only following this trail of stories, but attempting somehow to inhabit them. As if he thought they were all about him in some way, as if he thought he were their ongoing protagonist. It makes one think he might seek out locations that bore some relation to them. That he might use them as the base for his operations.”
“Aha,” said Pullod. He put his tongue in his cheek to keep from smiling.
Harper Albright looked up at him sharply. “I don’t expect you to believe me, Inspector. All I ask of you and your people is that you let me know the moment you locate Bernard’s car.”
Pullod, caught out, lost the smile and nodded briskly. “Morris Minor. We’re keeping our eyes peeled.”
She studied him through those goggles of hers for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she sniffed.
“Please do,” she said. “Because whether you believe me or not, the truth of the matter is: We haven’t got very much time.”
3
Then a church bell tolled some unknown hour and Bernard began to come around. He had no idea where he’d been, where he was, no notion of what had happened to him. For a long time the only thing he knew for certain was that the business of living had turned dimly dreadful.
Then, after a while, his eyes came open. Slowly. Breaking the dried crust that had held them shut. He looked.
Nothing. Blackness. Darkness more complete, more empty than any he had ever known. He became aware now too that he was deeply uncomfortable. Lying on his back, inert, twisted. Knees to one side, one hand flung up by his face. The reek of the air was foul. There was a stench of vomit that made him want to vomit. He could feel the stuff soaking his shoulder through his shirt, viscid, lumpy. There was the smell of urine as well: his crotch and thighs were stinging with the drying damp.
A steady throb in his forehead was fast becoming intolerable. The taste in his mouth defied description.
Well, he’d woken up in a similar condition any number of times. But no, this wasn’t an ordinary hangover. He was remembering now. The church. The crucifix. That moan; that man. His head lifting. His eyes …
Bernard made a weak, shuddering noise, a sound he’d never heard himself make before. The blackness seemed to be growing heavier, thicker. Closing in around him. Smothering him. Entombing him.
Entombing him. The thought started a stain of panic spreading up towards his chest from his loins. He could feel now the rough stone beneath his shaven pate. He moved his hand—felt a wall of the same rough stone to the right of him, another to his left. Rough stone was at his feet when he tried to extend his legs. And then, slowly, fearfully—prayerfully—he upstretched his fingers.
There was a slab of rough stone right above him, not six inches above his nose.
Buried alive. The panic swarmed up over him like rats. A chill sweat bathed him from head to toe. His breath grew short, shallow, his pulsebeat quick. A whispery voice spoke over and over in his head: buried alive they’ve buried me alive I’m buried alive …
He had to get the hell out of here.
With a choked cry, he thrust both hands up through the blackness. Instantly, the pain in his skull became excruciating, the veins bulging against his temples like spiked balloons. He pushed against the slab that covered him—pushed and pushed—struggling with all his sinewy might against that unyielding weight.
It was still unyielding. The breath stuttered from him in intermittent grunts. Then he gasped out the rest of it, and his arms collapsed on top of him.
“Help!” he shouted wildly. “Help!”
Then he retched, turning onto his side as best he could to keep the acid spittle off him. Then he plumped onto his back again, staring into the blackness.
Then he began to weep.
Buried alive. Christ, Christ, he didn’t want to die like this.
“Christ,” he whispered, sobbing. “Christ.”
He worked his arm around in the cramped space, reached his trembling hand to his cheek to swipe away the hot tears.
And his heart seized in him like a dry engine.
There was something lying beside him in the blackness.
He had touched it with his knuckles. He could feel it there, an inch from his face. He could feel the smooth, yielding surface of moldering bone. The empty eye sockets. The image formed in his head as if he could see it: a human skull. Gaping at him, grinning at him. He was in a stone coffin—a sarcophagus—with a rotted corpse.
His body bucking with wild terror, he drove his hands against the coffin lid again. The pain was even worse this time. White pinpoints danced before his eyes. He almost lost consciousness. But he poured his strength into his arms, his soul into his arms, a high screek tearing from his throat as he fought to move the slab even a millimeter, even the width of an eyelash.
It was no good. The stone wouldn’t budge. Bernard lay gasping, sobbing, trembling. Buried alive I’m in the earth in a grave I’m buried alive … He could feel his mind trying to tear free of its tether, trying to careen out of his control. He was about to start shrieking …
No. He set his teeth. No, no. He pressed his fists against his mouth, gnawed at the skin on his knuckles to force the scream down into his throat. Once he started that, there would be no end of it. He had to hold on. Hold on—by main force—there was no other way.
He summoned his will. He shoved the whispery voice of panic down, down. His breath. He focused all his concentration on his abdomen, on his breath.
He lay still. There was the dark, and the inner frenzy of his helplessness, the smell, the damp, the terrible pain. And yet he lay still, focusing on his breath.
He came down from the panic in notches, bit by bit. After a time—he didn’t know how long—he became aware that he was whimpering, and forced himself to stop. His muscles began to relax. His fists sank down from his mouth, sank slowly over the length of him. He kept his hands directly above him, kept his elbows pressed close to his side to avoid touching that horror just next to him, that gaping horror.
“Help! Help me! Help!” Bernard shouted, not wildly this time, but as loudly as he could.
Then he lay very still, trying to control his breath so he could hear. Lay with his eyes wide against the impenetrable blackness. Listening, listening.
“Help!”
Each time his voice ceased, the silence that followed seemed deeper than the silence before. It seemed to flutter down over him like a shroud and swaddle him round. A man could suffocate in such a silence. He could almost hear the worms crawling in it. He could almost hear the skull beside him speaking, whispering, buried alive buried alive buried alive …
“Help! Help!”
A high note of hysteria entered his voice and he clamped his mouth shut, clamped his eyes shut. Clamped his hands together over his belly, clamped his elbows to his sides. Hearing his breath, hearing his heartbeat, hearing the whispering skull beside him: buried alive …
And then—possibly—he heard something else. A noise. Possibly. Outside.
Bernard’s eyes sprang open. His body, taut as it was, went tauter still. He stopped breathing altogether, and there was only the throb of his pulse, the throb of his head.
And, yes, something else. Definitely now. Rattle, crank, creak, thud. The sound of a door, he thought. A heavy door with a metal latch. Opening, then swinging shut again.
“Oh!” he said. Fresh tears surged from his eyes, tears of relief and gratitude. He wasn’t under the earth, not buried, not yet.
“Help me!” he shouted.
Painfully rigid, he listened, yearning upward towards the coffin lid, beyond it.
And there were footsteps. Footsteps on stone. Steady, echoic. Coming nearer.
They stopped.
Bernard, crying, hardly dared to speak again. He stared upward, ached and prayed upward into the darkness. Someone was standing there, just over him, just on the other side of the stone, just on the other side of the blackness. He could feel the presence. Standing there. In the light, in the open air. Looking down at him.
Bernard licked the mucus from his upper lip. Swallowed it. Sniffled. Spoke through his tears in a tremulous whisper.
“Help me. Would you please.”
There was another moment’s silence. And then the presence spoke. A voice distinct and mellifluous. Casual, gentle, even kind. Strange and yet strangely familiar.
At the sound of it, some warm, potent emotion he couldn’t name bubbled out of Bernard like blood from a wound, ran like blood all over him.
“I’m here, son,” the presence said. “I’m here.”
