The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos (9 page)

Setting our fingers around the edges of the stone we pulled with all of our strength, but for long moments the heavy stone refused to budge. Then, with a leaden swinging motion, it moved around a central pivot. The rush of fetid air brought a rising nausea into my stomach. But it was a sensation I instantly forced down in the faint excitement of what lay before me, dimly lit by the pale yellow glow of the lantern I thrust forward.

As I stood there hesitating, I felt I was on the brink of frightful and terrible revelations. The sense of malignancy in that blast of air from those unknown regions had touched me more deeply than I had imagined. The servants, seeing my hesitation, were all for going back, declaring that whatever lay down there, deep in the bowels of the solid rock beneath the manor, it was not good to know. There were many things, they maintained, it was better to remain in utter ignorance of, rather than bring them to light. But as always, in my belief that there had to be a logical and scientific explanation for any of the seemingly abnormal and paranormal phenomena, I insisted that we should go on; ordering them to follow, I stepped forward, the man at the rear carrying the other lantern.

Slowly I began the descent into that passage composed of small steps carved from hard rock, steps of such a weirdly impossible shape and design that the mind baulked at any idea of what sort of feet they had been made for in the past. The pale yellow glow revealed, too, that the stone walls were not perfectly smooth but were covered with time-effaced designs, a few of them discernible. Here were the remaining traces of the pictorial art of this long-forgotten age. I paused to look at only a few of them before hurrying on, gagging at the rush of fear in my mind, the muscles of my throat constricted, warning my men not to look at them, knowing that once they did no power on Earth would keep them with me.

Diabolical-like images drawn from some drug-delirium, they were so oddly reminiscent of my dream of the previous night that I could not put them out of my mind. Deeper and deeper went that passage, as if we were slipping down some hellish well, through haunted tunnels that rang with the muffling echoes of our feet and oozed a thick, viscid moisture from their walls. I saw, too, that after a while there were other passages leading off from the main one along which we were working our way forward, and the lantern light failed to penetrate these black corridors for more than a few feet. Once, I fancied I heard a slithering, rustling sound far off down one of these narrow passages, but as I stopped, my heart thumping madly in my chest, the sound was gone, and there was nothing but the gale of our breathing in the stillness.

The tunnel led us down deep within the foundations of the manor, and we were soon undoubtedly far inside the rock of the cliff itself. The air here was not wholesome, but possessed a horribly fishy odour, and it came to me that we must soon be approaching the level of the sea if the tunnel continued to descend in this manner.

The further we proceeded, the more carvings and crude images were in evidence on the walls, and there appeared to be some strange pressure effect down there, for my ears began to ring painfully. Then, abruptly, without any warning whatsoever, the yellow light from the probing lanterns, which had been reflected from the graven stone walls, vanished, and we seemed to be standing in the midst of an inky blackness, unrelieved on all sides, the light failing utterly to pierce the gloom.

The tunnel had opened out into our wide vault; how vast it was, we could not guess. My mind was filled with wild, chaotic thoughts as I stepped haltingly forward, holding the heavy lantern as far above my head as possible, but even then it could not illuminate the unknown depths into which we were advancing, for the floor of the great chamber still dipped downward. For several yards, the utter blackness remained impenetrable and then, in a moment of indescribable fear and apprehension, I did see something. At first only a pale glimmering as the faint gleam from the very rim of the circle of lantern-glow touched it, and then seen more clearly, it solidified out of the confining, nightmare gloom. There is no way of conveying any idea of the graven monstrosity stood on top of that hideous altar. Half-reptilian, half-amphibian, it reposed in a semi-crouch, and so ready to leap from the stone onto some unsuspecting victim below. Pengarden, immediately behind me, screamed involuntarily as he caught his first glimpse of the thing.

His face was utterly white and flabby, eyes staring from his head. He started back, almost knocking the lantern from Carfax’s grasp. Standing there, in the middle of this strange, subterranean world, the image held an air of timeless mystery and horrible suggestion which was not lost on any of others. In the light of the lamps, we were able to make out the vague inscriptions carved around the base, making the odd observation that the language used was not ancient English, even of the most archaic kind, but some extremely old form of Celtic. Bending forward, we tried to make out something of the letters, to interpret them, but the only fragments that made any kind of sense and sent an indefinable shiver of pure horror through me were vague references to Karyptes. In my early days I had read some of the forbidden writings of the monk, Terrilus, works that had been condemned by the venerable Bede, classed as the impious utterings of a familiar of the Devil.

Karyptes, an obvious Celtic corruption of the Greek Charybdis, made it impossible for me to entirely suppress a thrill at the knowledge that this great chamber, hewn out of the rock, had been fashioned by hands long dead before the Romans visited the shores of Britain. The well-known line concerning this sea-creature, occurring in the
Alexandreis
of Gautier de Lille, a twelfth-century poet:
Incidis in Scyllam cupiend vitare Charybdim
, was known to be at least as old as St. Augustine, and according to the condemned treatise of Terrilus, far older.

I made no mention of this to the two men with me, not wishing to alarm them any further, at least until we had explored the great cavern to its furthest extent. Skirting the vast altar, we moved on into the enveloping darkness, crossing occasionally from side to side, to feel along the walls and make sure that they still stretched on. Gradually, they began to move inward again as the subterranean chamber narrowed once more, and twenty feet further on we came upon a huge door of thick wood, crossed and studded with some kind of metal. But it was not the door itself that brought the ultimate horror to the three of us. There had, for some time, been a vague and curious exhalation of a strongly putrid odour from in front of us, and now, as the glow from the lanterns gleamed dully on the door, it had become offensive and more emphatic, sweeping about us in noxious vapours that choked and clogged our throats and lungs. The cause of this unbearable stench could conceivably have been the pile of bones which lay in front of the door, but a moment’s glance was sufficient to convince me that these were immeasurably old, some crumbling into dust; and it was borne upon me that the source of the stench was something which lay just
beyond
the door.

How long we stood there with the lanterns lifted high over our heads so that as much of the light as possible fell upon the scene in front of our startled gaze, we were never afterwards able to tell. But as we stood there, the air seemed to shudder and vibrate and the sudden wind that blew around the edges of the door, through the narrow cracks between it and the stone wall, became more violent. For a moment I tried to tell myself that it was a natural phenomenon connected with the sea that must have lain somewhere nearby, on almost the same level as ourselves, and not far beyond the door.

Then, faint but clear, we heard the sound that came from just the other side of the door; a slopping,
oozing
noise which brought the sweat boiling from every pore in my body, which transfixed me to that accursed spot because I knew, although I could not see,
what it was!

That evil-spawned thing which I had witnessed in my dream surging up from that deep black yonder which heaved and swelled beyond the cliffs, that metamorphic creature whose image stood poised above that time-dimmed, century-stained altar somewhere in the shivering darkness behind us, was a reality, was just beyond that door and trying to get in! Something struck hard on the wood from the other side, sending a hollow echo booming into the stillness around the high, rearing walls of the chamber. A few seconds more and our breaths were literally torn from our shaking lips. The metal-studded door quivered and shook visibly under a torrent of blows. Carfax staggered back, almost dropping the lantern in his fright. Pengarden yelled something I could not distinguish. My fear waxed high again, and suddenly there came a fresh burst of terror at the sound that proceeded from the other side of the door.

It was indescribable. A croaking, moaning, monstrous whistling sound that grew rapidly in volume until it shrieked fiendishly in our ears and reverberated from wall to wall. Unlike anything I had experienced before, it came to us, malignant and evil, sweeping past us as we turned and fled back up that hideously sloping cavern floor, past that grotesque statue which had now assumed a more sinister and terrifying aspect, up the steep flight of strangely carved steps the significance of which I now thought I knew. Slipping and falling in our terrified haste to get away while behind us, as if mocking our efforts to escape, the thudding, thunderous blows on the wooden door grew into a maniacal fury, unnatural and colossal.

Only God in heaven, if there is such a merciful God, knows how we escaped from that veritable pit of Hell, back into the small cellar and up into the grey daylight which filtered through the narrow windows of the manor.

I should have known the people of the district had a good reason for shunning Faxted Manor as they did; I ought to have known the family who had lived in this place many years before I had come, had never seen the shores of South Africa. What must have really happened to them will probably never be known, and the guesses I could have made, probably extremely close to the truth, were of the kind that no one in their sane mind would ever believe.

Far better to say they had simply packed their bags and left then to begin speculating on other reasons for the disappearance. And what of those others who had lived in this accursed place? The demon-cursed family of the Warhopes, steeped in the very evil of which the house reeked? When nothing emerged from those abysmal depths beneath the house, I locked myself in the library, going frantically through the incredibly ancient, cobwebbed books on the dusty shelves, knowing that before I finally left Faxted Manor for good, I had to discover the entire truth, even though it might rip the last vestiges of sanity from me.

Pengarden and Carfax had seen and heard enough. Late that morning, in company with Mary Ventnor, they left, preferring to walk to Bude through the storm, which had begun to blow up from the west, rather than remain another hour under that accursed roof. I could not find it in my heart to blame them, nor to try to dissuade them from going. Once or twice in each dark century, perhaps, there are unguessable horrors revealed to men, which can be neither understood nor disregarded. This was undoubtedly one of them and I, too, fully intended to leave before nightfall.

There were passages in the books, which now took on another meaning. In the light of what I knew, what I had heard and
almost seen
, I was able to read into the veiled and sometimes deliberately garbled account the plain and unembellished truth.

It was five o’clock when I finally laid down the last of the books and rose to my feet, going over to the high, narrow window and looking out over the barren moorland at the rear of the house, the weed-choked gardens now full of horrible growths as if nature had regressed, gone back to the ultimate in foulness and degeneracy. Around me, the house was exceptionally quiet. There was not a single creak in the ancient woodwork, even though, outside, the wind, which came howling in from the wild Atlantic, blew and raged around the eaves and angled abutments.

The stillness, the utter stillness, was nerve-rending. My uneasiness grew with every passing minute, and it struck me that there was something oppressively furtive about the quietness of the place, and when I paused consciously analyse my thoughts, I found that I was subconsciously waiting for something to happen, something I dreaded but to which I could give no name.

I fell to wondering what Carrington’s reaction would be if he knew the full story of this accursed place as I now did. For years, he had been merely scratching around on the surface without getting anywhere near the terrible reality of Faxted Manor. I knew that it must all have originated so many centuries ago that without the books and that terrifying experience down among those tunnels with which the entire rock must have been riddled, it would have been impossible for anyone to get the faintest glimmering of the true facts, the full horror.

There must have been some prehistoric temple on the site in which the most abominable rites had been carried out, and later, when the monastery had been built close to the ruins of the carved stone pillars, the old, nameless ceremonies had been carried on until King Edgar in his wisdom, had put to death the perpetrators, razing the monastery to the ground. But the horror was still there, had been wounded but not killed as King Edgar must have fervently hoped, lying dormant in that tunnel-ridden hill with long, slime-bedecked passages leading out to the sea where Charybdis, or some similar heathen monster—for who among us can state that there is only one such foul abomination on this planet—waited, undying, with an insatiable appetite for evil?