Once (37 page)

Thom was only half-listening, for the sensation spreading through his body was too wonderful for him to concentrate on other things. It wasn’t too dissimilar from the other juices he’d taken, but its effect was far greater and even more immediate if that were possible. His strength returned in a matter of seconds and his spirit lifted in equal amounts. The numbness went from the left side of his body and the exhaustion became barely a memory. What the hell was he sitting here on the stairs for when all that mattered was that he reached the roof room before Nell Quick had a chance to murder Sir Russell? He pushed himself to his feet and turned back to the next flight of stairs.

Wait, Thom.’ Rigwit had caught hold of his leg. He leaned down towards the little man, holding the candle near his face. He saw a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety there now. ‘You must take care,’ the elf told him. What you find at the top of this house might destroy us all. It will be the most terrible thing you have ever had to face.’

‘After what I’ve been through lately? I doubt it.’

The grip tightened.

‘If you’re not dead by the end of this night, you might at least be mad. Use caution, Thom, and listen to your inner voice, because it’s always true.’

The inner voice again. It hadn’t really helped so far.

As if reading his thoughts, Rigwit said, ‘You must believe in the voice. Your only real power is in your conviction. Faith is both your shield and your weapon. There is only so much we can do to help; the malign forces have moved into your realm now.’

Thom considered what he had been told for a moment. Naturally, he did have a choice. He could run down these stairs and out into the stormy night, call the police from a safe distance. But he was feeling good, strong, confident, not quite eager for battle, but not adverse to it. He was still afraid, but the fear was surmountable. Again, he turned to go, but the grip held.

Rigwit’s voice was grave. ‘Remember, you will see and feel things that will make you doubt your own sanity, and I mean it when I say madness, indeed, might soon follow. You think that over the past days and nights you have witnessed the very worst that nightmares may bring, but this I can tell you: they were nothing compared to the abominations that await you in that loathsome room above. They will be insidious and sly, cunning and dangerous. And unless care is taken, they will be fatal. You will be afraid, Thom, so afraid you’ll feel weak again. Even the effects of the potion will not help you.’

Thanks for the pep talk.’

‘You must believe me!’

Thom was taken aback by the sudden anger.

More calmly, although his little body was trembling, Rigwit went on: Take the book with you. Use it as you used it last time. That and your faith is all you have.’

Thom lifted the heavy book, briefly wondering how the elf had managed to carry it through the woods. It must have weighed more than Rigwit himself.

The thought, he knew, was a deliberate distraction, his own mind’s way of deflecting further consideration of what lay ahead for him. Rigwit’s warning had roused his nervousness again, despite the feeling of wellbeing induced by the

potion, and maybe that was the idea, maybe he had begun to feel too bold, too incautious, and the elf knew that could be just as dangerous as fear, in an odd way, maybe even more so.

Once again he looked into the darkness of the next landing, and once again he felt terribly afraid.

He really did not want to go up there.

He took the first step.

THE HORRORS THAT BIDE

THOM STEADIED himself. He stood before the double doors to Sir Russell’s great bedchamber, candle in one hand, the book under his other arm, its base resting against his hip. Sounds came from the other side of the doors, meanings, wailings, the kind of sounds he thought only distressed children could make.

The antechamber was in darkness, but there was a soft glow from beneath the doors. It wavered gently as candlelight would.

He swapped his small flame over to his right hand, awkwardly pressing the book against his body with elbow and wrist, and reached for one of the door-handles. He stayed his hand. It was shivering badly.

The problem was putting Rigwit’s hints about the horrors that lay beyond these doors out of his mind. He grew angry with himself, cursed himself, called himself a wimp, a wuss - and yes, a coward. He was just plain scared.

And who could blame me? he asked himself and that, at

least, gave him some satisfaction. Reality had shifted around him, dimensions had become interlinked. This past week he had witnessed both wondrous and abhorrent things, had made love to an undine, had been scared witless by a monster, had discovered his own birthright. He’d been amazed and abused, overawed and terrorized. Too much had happened, too many new concepts had besieged his fragile mind, to go through the list right now. Yes, he was profoundly afraid, disorientated - even in love, for Christ’s sake! - and what normal man or woman would blame him for bailing out right there and then?

Only himself, came the wordless reply.

A muffled shriek from next door, an old, quavery voice. Sir Russell.

Oh shit. Thom steeled himself. Twisted the doorknob, nudged the door open a little. Then, expecting the worst, stood back and kicked the door wide.

He stopped on the threshold, open-mouthed.

Nothing.

No monsters.

No coven of witches dancing around a bubbling cauldron.

No demons.

Nothing.

Except for the dim figure of Hugo Bleeth cowering in a shadowy corner, knees drawn up, his arms before his face, Nell Quick standing rigid in the centre of a crudely drawn five-pointed star within a circle, a pentagram, a candle burning at each apex. She clutched a piece of paper in one hand and faced the room’s big drapeless four-poster bed on which Sir Russell Bleeth, a frail and sick old man, sat upright, oxygen mask and tubes still in place.

But nothing else.

Except for black candles placed around the room, all of them lit, each a separate island of brightness in singular struggle with the surrounding darkness, their waxy smell mingling with a smell that was so rank, so foul, that death -or its corruption - seemed to occupy the room.

Nothing more than that, though.

Except…

Except for the other shadows that now began to emerge from the overall shadows, coming from the corners, the ceiling, from beneath the bed …

Emerging as if they had hidden when the door had burst open or as Thom’s own mind and eyes began to perceive the insubstantial entities that filled the room, a crowd, a host, of vaporous beings that loomed and shifted, that were part of the darkness as night itself, forms without real form, amorphous configurations that depended on the intellect for definition. Already Thom was imagining cowled hunched figures, enormously tall as if they were mere shadows cast against the walls by the candle-glows. Only they were not confined to the walls; they roamed the room itself.

Then they bunched together and became something else. No longer shadows, they became countless serpents, intertwined and weaving, fanged heads rearing over the four-poster bed and the man in it, darting down as if to strike, but never touching, although Sir Russell flinched each time one came near.

Still at the door, Thom realized almost at once that this was their true horror: they could be whatever abomination the individual’s mind could conceive. And because their attention was on the sick man, it was Sir Russell’s mind that created their being. He further reasoned, all in the space of seconds, that if they were figments of the imagination, then they had no substance and could do no physical damage. Unless you believed implicitly, that is, as he had discovered with the spiders.

Dropping the candle because it was of no further use, he rushed into the room shouting, ‘Get away, get away from him. You’re nothing, you’re phantoms, you’re not real!’

And then three of the serpents’ heads lunged at him, sending him crashing back against the side of the double doors that was still closed. It rattled in its frame and he slid to the floor, stunned by the impact.

Impossible. He didn’t believe in them, they were creations of Sir Russell’s mind. Yet they had hurt him. Fuck it, they had hurt him!

But at least they were leaving him be. The three trailed away to regroup with the mass. Then they squirmed as a whole across the room, towards the crouching man there in the corner, Hugo, who had peeked from behind his raised arms to see their advance. He let out a piercing shriek, a child’s high-pitched cry, and ducked back behind his hands, his body seeming visibly to shrink as he bunched up, tried to make himself as small as possible, foolishly imagining he might go unnoticed there in the shadows. It was pointless though. The snakes struck out at him, taking it in turns, sometimes one flicking a long forked tongue at him, other times two or three together, a chorus of reptiles.

Jesus, thought Thom, Hugo, who had always abhorred snakes, now to be tormented like this! It then occurred to him that this vision - vision? He had been physically struck by the creature’s snouts - had not just manifested when he had opened the door to the room. No, they were already present, but it had taken his own mind time to adjust, time to bring them into focus. And if that were so, then they truly were figments of the imagination, a vision that leapt from mind to mind, like a disease might leap from body to body, the force so great that even he had believed they could touch him; with the belief came the physical response. But whose vision was it? He guessed he had been wrong in thinking it was Sir Russell’s, for Hugo was the one who had the phobia of snakes.

‘Hugo!’ he called across the room. “They can’t harm you, not if you don’t let them! Get rid of them, get them out of your mind!’

He might just as well have been advising a terrified passenger on a crashing jetliner to whistle a happy tune and think of nice things. Hugo continued to shriek, flinching each time a serpent stabbed at his head or shoulder.

Thom knew he had to get to Hugo, pull him from the room if necessary, slap some sense into him, bring him back to reality. But would it really be that simple? Somewhere in his mind - perhaps his inner self, that canny but elusive voice? - he was being told there was so much more to all this.

And when lightning outside washed the room with its stammering radiance, there were a new set of shadows occupying the room. They wavered as they grew, taking time to form, but when the glare died and the thunder settled to a rumble, they began to emerge, their forms lit by candlelight. They were huge cowled figures, the silhouettes of giant monks, it seemed to Thom, although each one was bowed, hunched, and their extraordinarily long fingers were curled. It was impossible to tell how many of them there were, for like the serpents that continued to torment Hugo they merged, were as one body, gradually filling half the room, their malodour a poison in the air. They were made of blackness, only their outlines giving sense of form and movement.

In the gloom, Thom caught sight of Sir Russell again. He was a diminished man, a frail husk, his withered body trembling as if gripped by ague, the face behind the plastic oxygen mask gaunt, hollow-cheeked, the eyes both deep-set yet shiny and bulging in their dark caverns like the haunting eyes of a famine victim. And it seemed that this new manifestation was concentrating on him alone for, as one, the amalgamation of cowled hunchbacked figures moved towards the drapeless four-poster bed, floating around, or

moving through, Nell Quick, who maintained her stance near the centre of the room. They advanced on the sick man like some dense drifting fog.

Sir Russell saw the movement, saw their coming, and his skeletal hands clutched the’ bedsheets, holding them to his chest like a maiden aunt disturbed by a prowler in the night, the thin material her only protection. Curling and lurching, the sinister clan came closer and Sir Russell backed away, squashing the pillows behind him against the oak headboard.

Thom, who was still rising from the floor, shouted a pointless warning and, crouched, made ready to go to the sick man’s aid. But his movement was slow, a bad dream’s motion where limbs were hampered by the thickness of the air and a dull sickness in the gut caused by fear. Somehow, it was as if the stroke of months before had taken charge of his whole body. He struggled against the apathy, his arms moving but only lethargically, his legs pushing but only feebly. He could do no more than watch as the massed shapes drifted over the bed towards Sir Russell.

Muted sounds came from behind the transparent oxygen mask, the old man protesting against this stealthy invasion, his shiny eyes burdened by terror. There were screams, but these came from Hugo, who was going through his own ordeal.

Thom could only look on as the black mass of weaving figures rose over Sir Russell, who had sunk down in the bed, his frail old arms now raised as if to ward off these unworldly predators. The oxygen mask suddenly began to darken as if filling with thick liquid. Its colour gradually filtered through the transparent wall of the mask and it was red. Deep red. The deep red of blood. Oh dear God, thought Thom, the man was about to drown in his own blood.

But that was not Sir Russell’s only problem, for even as Thom managed to find his feet, the shadows were bearing down on the horrified old man, black claws reaching from the mass to sink into his chest, to clutch at his heart. The

swelling drift descended like some heavy crushing load sent to smother Sir Russell with its weighty blackness.

It was too much for Thom. His mutinous body responded as if commanded by some greater force than his own frightened self. Rigwit had told him to listen to his inner voice and now it seemed that voice had become impatient, was screaming at him, propelling him forward despite the reluctance of his limbs and body.

Just as Thom staggered towards the bed, lightning flared again and simultaneously thunder shook the ceiling and rattled the big windows. The roof door that had been open when Thom had entered the room swung shut, its crash barely perceptible over the thunder before it swung wide once more.

Thom cringed as though he thought the ceiling might cave in, but he kept moving, his legs unsteady, his actions still slow. But just before he reached the edge of the bed -he could see the oxygen mask was quite full with blood, red rivers running from its edges down Sir Russell’s hollow cheeks and scrawny neck, and he could see the massive bulk of blackness and reaching claws just inches away from the old man’s prone body, bearing down, the space between gradually shrinking as though the descent were deliberately drawn out to maximize the terror - something appeared in the periphery of his vision, something tall, lumbering forward from a dusky comer of the room.

His head reflexively swung towards this new shadow, for it was he that it approached. He gasped. He almost fell to the floor. Inside his head, he screamed, No, no, it can’t be, not him!

For it was Bones who came at him from the flickering shadows. But somehow, he was taller, much taller, his thin cadaverous face wavering way above Thom’s own. And his shoulders were hunched, his elbows bent, his long, thin-fingered hands reaching…

For a moment or two Thom thought he had been

betrayed by the manservant, his injuries a fake, a ruse to send Thom up to this room alone. Then he realized that this was an exaggerated figure from a nightmare, an apparition whose resolve was to freeze Thom’s heart.

But it was from a nightmare, even though it towered over him, a sickening triumphal grin on its skull-like face, eyes piercing Thom’s own like sharpened needles, sliding through eyeballs, muscles and bone to sink into the brain itself and causing pain beyond belief.

The great bedchamber was a maelstrom of activity and sound, each person - apart from Nell, who still stood as though in a trance - terrorized by their own particular nightmare.

Nightmare … The word, the thought, repeated itself to Thom over and over again as those long, thin fingers grabbed his throat and began to squeeze, their deadly grip unremitting. And Bones was laughing, literally laughing in his face, spittle shooting out between stained teeth to speckle Thom’s cheek and nose, the hands squeezing, squeezing, squeezing the life from him.

Until a voice broke through the uproar. An external voice this time. A calm voice, a gentle voice, that could be heard without it being loud.

Although in ‘Bones’s‘ clutches, Thom was nonetheless able to see the double doorway, both sides of which were now open, two figures standing in the opening, one very small, the other taller.

Jennet, her anxious but sweet face lit by candlelight, called to him again.

‘Thom. Your inner voice. Listen to it. It will tell you what this is and give you power,’ she was saying.

His inner voice. Vision was beginning to haze over, the fingers around his throat ever-tightening, but he remembered Rigwit had told him to listen to his inner voice. And Bethan, his mother, had told him to listen to his inner voice. But it had not worked before, so why should it now?

The room was spinning, he was blacking out; somehow though, he listened, but to Jennet, not to this elusive so-called inner voice, for her call was clear above the hubbub, still insisting that he go into himself, escape this place by retreating - no, by sinking, that was her word - into himself. Difficult, though. So difficult to do when … he … was … being … throttled …

In fact, it was the violence of the assault that allowed him to find the Voice’, for he was losing consciousness, sinking deep. And the inner voice was awaiting him, for it was not far below his conscious level. This is the horror, it seemed to say. This is the nightmare that has haunted you for so long, this is your worst fear…