The Mammoth Book of Terror (61 page)

The yellow-green light beneath the pool below the house flickers and grows brighter by degrees.

The dragon’s tail flicks at the suicidal world.

In his attic, Avery screams with the new mouth the gate gave him before it spit the boy, twisted and insane, back into this place, this time.

The oars dipping again and again into the brilliant, glowing water, the creak of the rusted oarlocks, old nails grown loose in decaying wood, and the shafts of light from the pool playing across
the uneven walls of the cavern.

The dragon opens one blistered eye.

And Ellen Dandridge steps out of the boat onto the island, and she doesn’t look back at her husband and daughter.

“Something like a shadow,” Meredith says, taking her right eye from the telescope and looking across the room at her brother, who isn’t sitting in the chair across from
Machen.

“It’s not a shadow,” Avery doesn’t tell her, and goes back to the things he has to write down in his journals before there’s no time left.

On the island, the gate tears itself open, the dragon’s eye, angel eye and the unspeakable face of the titan sleeper in an unnamed, sunken city, tears itself wide to see if she’s the
one it’s called down or some other. The summoned or the trespasser. The invited or the interloper. And Machen knows from the way the air has begun to shimmer and sing that the sleeper
doesn’t like what it sees.

“I stand at the gate and hold the key,” she says. “You know my name and I have come to hold the line. I have come only that you might not pass—”

“Don’t look, Merry. Close your eyes,” and he holds his daughter close to him as the air stops singing, as it begins to sizzle and pop and burn.

The waves against the shore.

The dragon’s tail across the sky.

The empty boat pulled down into the shimmering pool.

Something glimpsed through a telescope.

The ribsy, omnivorous dogs of war.

And Machen woke in his bed, a storm lashing fiercely at the windows, the lightning exploding out there like mortar shells, and the distant
thump thump thump
of his lost son from the
attic. He didn’t close his eyes again, lay very still, sweating and listening to the rain and the thumping, until the sun rose somewhere behind the clouds to turn the black to cheerless,
leaden grey.

August 1889

After his travels, after Baghdad and the ruins of Ninevah and Babylon, after the hidden mosque in Reza’lyah and the peculiar artefacts he’d collected on the
southernmost shore of Lake Urmia, Machen Dandridge went west to California. In the summer of 1889, he married Ellen Douglas-Winslow, black-sheep daughter of a fine old Boston family, and together
they traveled by train, the smoking iron horses and steel rails that his own father had made his fortune from, all the way to the bustling squalor and Nob Hill sanctuaries of San Francisco. For a
time they took up residence in a modest house on Russian Hill, while Machen taught his wife the things that he’d learned in the East – archaeology and astrology, Hebrew and Islamic
mysticism, the Talmud and Quran, the secrets of the terrible black book that had been given to him by a blind and leprous mullah. Ellen had disgraced her family at an early age by claiming the
abilities of a medium and then backing up her claims with extravagant seances and spectacular ectoplasmic displays, and Machen found in her an eager pupil.

“Why would he have given the book to you?” Ellen asked skeptically, the first time Machen had shown it to her, the first time he’d taken it from its iron and leather case in
her presence. “If it’s what you say it is, why would he have given it to anyone?”

“Because, my dear, I had a pistol pressed against his rotten skull,” Machen had replied, unwrapping the book, slowly peeling back the layers of lambskin it was wrapped in.
“That and knowledge he’d been searching for his entire life. It was a fair trade.”

And just as the book had led him back from Asia to America and on to California, the brittle, parchment compass of its pages had shown him the way north along the coast to the high cliffs north
of Anchor Bay. That first trip, he left Ellen behind, traveling with only the company of a Miwok Indian guide who claimed knowledge of “a hole in the world”. But when they finally left
the shelter of the redwood forest and stood at the edge of a vast and undulating sea of pampas grass stretching away towards the Pacific, the Miwok had refused to go any farther. No amount of money
or talk could persuade him to approach the cliffs waiting beyond the grass, and so Machen continued on alone.

Beneath the hot summer sun, the low, rolling hills seemed to go on forever, and the gulls and a pair of redtailed hawks screamed at him like harpies warning him away, screeching threats or
alarum from the endless cornflower sky. But he found it, finally, the “hole in the world”, right where the Miwok guide had said that he would, maybe fifty yards from the cliffs.

From what he’d taught himself of geology, Machen guessed it to be the collapsed roof of a cavern, an opening no more than five or six feet across, granting access to an almost vertical
chimney eroded through tilted beds of limestone and shale and probably connecting to the sea somewhere in the darkness below. He dropped a large pebble into the hole and listened and counted as it
fell, ticking off the seconds until it splashed faintly, confirming his belief that the cavern must be connected to the sea. A musty, briny smell wafted up from the hole, uninviting, sickly, and
though there was climbing equipment in his pack, and he was competent with ropes and knots and had, more than once, descended treacherous, crumbling shafts into ancient tombs and wells, Machen
Dandridge only stood there at the entrance, dropping stones and listening to the eventual splashes. He stared into the hole and, after a while, could discern a faint but unmistakable light, not the
fading sunlight getting in from some cleft in the cliff face, but light like a glass of absinthe, the sort of light he’d imagined abyssal creatures that never saw the sun might make to shine
their way through the murk.

It wasn’t what he’d expected, from what was written in the black book, no towering gate of horn and ivory, no arch of gold and silver guarded by angels or demons or beings men had
never fashioned names for, just this unassuming hole in the ground. He sat in the grass, watching the sunset burning day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest
had been a fool’s errand from the very start and he’d wasted so many years of his life and so much of his inheritance chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished
to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like some unearthly torch, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.

“What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find
you
?”

Not a question he could answer then and not one he could answer sitting there with the roar of the surf in his ears and the stars speckling the sky overhead. The question that Ellen had asked
him again and again and always he’d found some way to deflect her asking. But he
knew the
answer, sewn up somewhere deep within his soul, even if he’d never been able to find the
words. Proof that the world did not end at his fingertips, or with the unreliable data of his eyes and ears, or the lies and half-truths men had written down in science and history books, that
everything he’d ever seen was merely a tattered curtain waiting to be drawn back so that some more indisputable light might, at last, shine through.

“Is that what you were seeking, Mr Dandridge?” and Machen had turned quickly, his heart pounding as he reached for the pistol at his hip, only to find the old Indian watching him
from the tall, rustling grass a few feet away. “Is
that
the end of your journey?” and the guide pointed at the hole.

“I thought you were afraid to come here?” Machen asked, annoyed at the interruption, sitting back down beside the hole, looking again into the unsteady yellow-green light spilling
out of the earth.

“I was,” the Miwok replied. “But the ghost of my grandfather came to me and told me he was ashamed of me, that I was a coward for allowing you to come to this evil place alone.
He has promised to protect me from the demons.”

“The ghost of your grandfather?” Machen laughed and shook his head, then dropped another pebble into the hole.

“Yes. He is watching us both now, but he also wishes we would leave soon. I can show you the way back to the trail.”

The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.

“You’re a brave man,” Machen said. “Or another lunatic.”

“All brave men are lunatics,” the Indian said and glanced nervously at the hole, the starry indigo sky, the cliff and the invisible ocean, each in its turn. “Sane men do not go
looking for their deaths.”

“Is that all I’ve found here? My death?”

A long moment of anxious silence from the guide, broken only by the ceaseless interwoven roar of the waves and the wind, and then he took a step back away from the hole, deeper into the
sheltering pampas grass.

“I cannot not say what you have found in this place, Mr Dandridge. My grandfather says I should not speak its name.”

“Is that so? Well, then,” and he stood, rubbing his aching eyes, and brushed the dust from his pants. “You show me the way back and forget you ever brought me out here. Tell
your grandfather’s poor ghost that I will not hold you responsible for whatever it is I’m meant to find at the bottom of that pit.”

“My grandfather hears you,” the Miwok said. “He says you are a brave man and a lunatic, and that I should kill you now, before you do the things you will do in the days to
come. Before you set the world against itself.”

Machen drew his Colt, cocked the hammer with his thumb and stood staring into the gloom at the Indian.

“I will not kill you,” the Miwok said. “That is
my
choice and I have chosen not to take your life. But I will pray it is not a decision I will regret later. We should go
now.”

“After you,” Machen said, smiling through the quaver in his voice that he hoped the guide couldn’t hear, his heart racing and cold sweat starting to drip from his face despite
the night air. And, without another word, the Indian turned and disappeared into the arms of the whispering grass and the August night.

July 1914

When she was very sure that her father had shut the double doors to his study and that her mother was asleep, when the only sounds were the sea and the wind, the inconstant,
shifting noises that all houses make after dark, the mice in the walls, Meredith slipped out of bed and into her flannel dressing gown. The floor was cool against her bare feet, cool but not cold.
She lit a candle and then eased the heavy bedroom door shut behind her and went as quickly and quietly as she could to the cramped stairwell leading from the second story to the attic door. At the
top, she sat down on the landing and held her breath, listening, praying that no one had heard her, that neither her father nor mother, nor the both of them together, were already trying to find
her.

There were no sounds at all from the other side of the narrow attic door. She set the candlestick down and leaned close to it, pressing her lips against the wood, feeling the rough grain through
the varnish against her flesh.

“Avery?” she whispered. “Avery, can you hear me?”

And at first there was no reply from the attic and she took a deep breath and waited a while, waiting for her parents’ angry or worried footsteps, waiting for one of them to begin shouting
her name from the house below.

But there were no footsteps, and no one called her name.

“
Avery
? Can you hear me? It’s
me
, Merry.”

That time there was a sudden thumping and a heavy, dragging sort of a sound from the other side of the attic door. A body pulling itself roughly, painfully across the pine-board floor towards
her, and she closed her eyes and waited for it. Finally, there was a loud thud against the door and she opened her eyes again. Avery was trying to talk, trying to answer her, but there was nothing
familiar or coherent in his ruined voice.

“Hold on,” she whispered to him. “I brought a writing pad,” and she took it out of a pocket of her gown, the pad and a pencil. “Don’t try to talk anymore.
I’ll pass this beneath the door to you and you can write what you want to say. Knock once if you understand what I’m telling you, Avery.”

Nothing for almost a full minute and then a single knock so violent that the door shivered on its hinges, so loud she was sure it would bring her parents to investigate.

“Not so
loud
, Avery,” she whispered. “They’ll hear us,” and now Meredith had begun to notice the odor on the landing, the odor leaking from the attic. Either
she’d been much too nervous to notice it at first or her brother had brought it with him when he’d crawled over to the door. Dead fish and boiling cabbage, soured milk and
strawberryjam, the time she’d come across the carcass of a grey whale calf, half buried in the sand and rotting beneath the sun. She swallowed, took another deep breath, and tried not to
think about the awful smell.

“I’m going to pass the pencil and a page from the pad to you now. I’m going to slide it under the door to you.”

Avery made a wet, strangling sound and she told him again not to try to talk, just write if he could, write the answers to her questions and anything he needed to say.

“Are you in pain? Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, and in a moment the tip of the pencil began scritching loudly across the sheet of writing paper. “Not so hard,
Avery. If the lead breaks, I’ll have to try to find another.”

He slid the piece of paper back to her, and it was damp and something dark and sticky was smudged across the bottom. She held it close to her face, never mind the smell so strong it made her gag, made her want to vomit, so that she could read what he’d scrawled there. Nothing like Avery’s careful hand,
his tight, precise cursive she’d always admired and had tried to imitate, but sweeping, crooked letters, blocky print, and seeing that made her want to cry so badly that she almost forgot
about the dead-whale-and-cabbages smell.