Nocturnes (2004) Read online

  Strange the things that one recalls. There were so many horrors experienced amid the flesh and dirt that to choose one above another seemed almost absurd, as if an ascending graph might somehow be created in which offenses against humanity were graded according to their impact on the individual psyche. Yet again and again I came back to a group of soldiers standing against a flat, muddy landscape broken only by the trunk of a single, blasted tree. Some still had blood around their mouths, although so mired in filth were they that it was hard to tell where men ended and mud began. They were found in a shell crater by advancing troops, after a furious battle led to a minute shift in our lines: four British soldiers crouched over the body of a fifth man, their hands working upon him, tearing strips of warm meat from his bones and feeding them greedily into their mouths. The dead soldier was a German, but that hardly mattered. Somehow this quartet of deserters had contrived to survive for weeks in the no-man’s-land between the two lines by feeding upon the bodies of slain soldiers.

  There was no trial, and no record was kept of their execution. Their papers were long gone, and they declined to offer their names before the sentence was carried out. Their leader, or at least the one to whose authority the others most clearly deferred, was in his thirties, the youngest still in his teens. I was permitted to say a few words on their behalf, to beg forgiveness for what they had done. I was standing to one side of them, praying as they were blindfolded, when the eldest one spoke to me.

  “I have tasted it,” he said. “I have eaten the Word made flesh. Now God is in me, and I am God. He tasted good. He tasted of blood.”

  Then he turned to face the guns, and they spoke his name.

  I am God. I taste of blood.

  This too I decided not to share with the bishop. I was uncertain of the bishop’s views on God. Sometimes I suspected that he considered the concept of the Lord as merely a convenient way of keeping the masses in check while securing his own authority. I doubted if his beliefs had ever been tested beyond the occasional intellectual joust over sherry. How he would have fared in the mud of the trenches, I do not know. I think, perhaps, that he would have survived, but only at the expense of others.

  “And how are you finding your time at the hospital?”

  As with all of the bishop’s utterances, it was important to understand the subtext before one answered. Thus, in reply to the bishop’s earlier question, I was tolerably well, even though I was not. Now he was inquiring about the army hospital at Brayton, to which I had been assigned upon my return from the war. I ministered to those who had been deprived of limbs or senses, attempting to ease their pain and to make them understand that God was still with them. And while I was, nominally, a member of the hospital staff, I felt that I was as much a patient there as they were, for I too required pills to help me sleep, and had occasional recourse to the more enlightened of the “head doctors” in an effort to shore up my fractured sanity.

  I had been back in England for six months. All I wanted was some quiet place where I could minister to the needs of my flock, preferably a flock that was not intent upon blowing out the brains of someone else’s flock. The bishop had the power to grant me my wish, if he chose to do so. I had no doubt that he was astute enough to sense my dislike, although I imagined that my feelings were of little concern to him. If nothing else could be said for the bishop, at least he was not in the habit of allowing his emotions, or the emotions of others, to influence his decisions.

  His question still dangled in the air between us. If I told him that I was happy at the hospital, he would transfer me to a more arduous posting. If I told him that I was unhappy at the hospital, I would be there until my dying day.

  “I was hoping that you might have found a living for me,” I replied, opting to answer a different question entirely. “I am anxious to resume parochial work.”

  The bishop waved those arachnoid fingers in response.

  “In time, Mr. Pettinger, in time. We must walk before we can run. First, I require you to comfort an afflicted member of our own flock. You know Chetwyn-Dark, I assume?”

  I knew it. Chetwyn-Dark was a small parish, perhaps a mile or two from the southwest coast. One minister, hardly any parishioners, and not the most rewarding of livings, but there had been a church there for a long time.

  A very long time.

  “Mr. Fell currently has responsibility for the parish,” said the bishop. “Despite possessing many admirable qualities, he has endured his difficulties in the past. Chetwyn-Dark was adjudged to be a suitable place for him to…recuperate.”

  I had heard stories of Mr. Fell. His disintegration was rumored to have been quite spectacular, involving alcoholism, unexplained absences from services, and obscure rantings from the pulpit during those services that he remembered to attend. It was the last that proved to be his undoing, for in making public his difficulties he embarrassed the bishop, and the bishop was a man who prized dignity and decorum above all else. Mr. Fell’s punishment was to be banished to a living where few would be present to listen to his ravings, although I did not doubt that the bishop retained agents in Chetwyn-Dark who would keep him apprised of the minister’s activities.

  “I was told that he suffered a crisis of faith,” I said.

  The bishop paused before answering. “He sought proof of that which must be understood through faith alone, and when that proof was not forthcoming he began to doubt everything. In Chetwyn-Dark, it was believed that he might find a place in which to heal his doubts, and to rediscover his love of God.”

  The words, I thought, emerged hollowly from the shell of the bishop.

  “But it appears that we were wrong to assume that Mr. Fell was capable of restoring himself in comparative solitude. I am informed that he has begun to behave even more oddly than usual. He has taken to locking the church, I hear. From the inside. He also appears to be engaged in some form of renovation work for which he is temperamentally and vocationally ill-suited. His congregation has heard him digging, and hacking at the stones within, although I am told that there are, as yet, no obvious signs of damage to the chapel itself.”

  “What would you have me do?” I asked.

  “You are practiced in the art of dealing with broken men. I have heard good reports of your work at Brayton, reports that lead me to believe that you are perhaps ready to return to more conventional duties. Let this be your first step toward the living for which you ask. I want you to talk to your brother cleric. Comfort him. Try to understand his needs. If necessary, have him committed, but I want this to stop. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Pettinger? I want no more trouble from Mr. Fell.”

  And with that, I was dismissed.

  The next day, my replacement arrived at Brayton: a young man named Mr. Dean, with the instructions of his tutors still ringing in his ears. After an hour in the wards he retreated to the bathroom. When he eventually emerged his face was considerably paler, and he was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “You’ll get used to it,” I assured him, although I knew he would not. After all, I never did.

  I wondered how long it would be before the bishop was forced to replace Mr. Dean as well.

  The train brought me to Evanstowe. From there, a car arranged by the bishop collected me and brought me ten miles west to Chetwyn-Dark, depositing me, after a cursory farewell from the driver, at the entrance to Mr. Fell’s garden. It was raining and I could smell salt on the air as I walked up the path to the minister’s house, the sound of the departing car gradually fading as it returned to Evanstowe. Beyond, accessible by another paved pathway, was the church itself, silhouetted against the evening sky. It stood not at the center of the village, but about half a mile beyond it, and there were no other dwellings within sight of it. It had once been a Catholic church, but it was sacked during the reign of Henry and then later claimed for the new faith. Small and almost primitive in construction, it still retained something of Rome about it.

  A light burned in the depths of the house,
but when I knocked no one came. I tried the door and it opened easily, revealing a wooden hallway leading to a kitchen straight ahead, with a flight of stairs to the right and a doorway to the left into a living room.

  “Mr. Fell?” I called, but there was no reply. In the kitchen, some bread lay on a plate covered by a napkin, a jug of buttermilk beside it. Upstairs, both bedrooms were empty. One was tidy, with spare blankets laid out carefully at the base of a newly made bed, but the other bedroom was strewn with clothes and half-eaten food. The sheets upon the bed did not appear to have been laundered in some time, and there was a smell from them, as of an old man’s unwashed body. There were cobwebs on the windows, and mouse droppings upon the floor.

  Yet it was the writing desk that drew my attention, for it, and what lay upon it, had obviously been the focus of Mr. Fell’s interest for some time. I cleared some stained shirts from the chair and sat down to examine his labors. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not have intruded upon another man’s privacy in such a way, but my duty here was to the bishop, not to Mr. Fell. His cause was already lost. I did not want mine to join it.

  Three old manuscripts, so yellow and worn that the writing had almost faded away, occupied pride of place at the center of a storm of papers. The language was Latin, but the script was in no way ornate. Instead, it was neat, almost businesslike. At the end, beside an illegible signature, was a darker stain. It looked like old, dried blood.

  The documents appeared to be incomplete, with sections missing or unintelligible, but Mr. Fell had made a considerable job of translating what remained. In his neat script he had recorded three extended sections, the first of which related to the foundation of the original church at the end of the last millennium. The second appeared to describe the location of a particular stone formation on the floor, originally marked by a tomb of some kind. Beside it was a rubbing on thin paper, revealing a date—976 A.D.—and a simple cross, behind which was a design of some kind. I could make out an eye at either side of the vertical trunk of the cross, and a great mouth segmented by the lower, as though the cross were resting upon the face beneath. Long hair streamed from its skull, and its eyes were huge with fury, but the features were not human. It reminded me of a gargoyle, but the impishness of such creatures was absent, and a grave malevolence appeared in its place.

  I turned to the third part of Mr. Fell’s ongoing work. He had obviously encountered the greatest difficulty with this section. The translation was littered with gaps, or guessed words indicated by question marks, but he had underlined the terms of which he was certain. They included “entombed” and “malefic.” But there was one that had been repeated again and again throughout the text, and which Mr. Fell had in turn emphasized in his translation.

  That word was daemon.

  I left my bag in the second, uncluttered bedroom and looked out of the window. It faced toward the chapel, and there I saw that a light burned. I watched it flicker for a time, then went downstairs and, remembering Mr. Fell’s reported habit of locking the church, searched until I found a set of dusty keys in a small cabinet. These in hand, I took an umbrella from the stand beside the door and made my way to the house of God.

  The front entrance was locked, and through a gap in the door I could see that a bar had been raised across it from within. I knocked hard and called Mr. Fell’s name, but there was no reply. I was walking to the rear of the church when, close by the east wall, but low, almost as if it came from beneath the ground, I heard a slight noise. It was the sound of someone tunneling slowly, inch by inch. And yet, listen though I might, I could not discern the use of any tool. It was as if all the work were being done by hand. I continued quickly to the back door and tried each key in turn until the lock clicked, and I found myself standing in an alcove of the chapel, with carved heads on the cornices above me. And as I stood, the sound of digging came again to me.

  “Mr. Fell?” I called, and I was surprised to find my voice catching in my throat, so that the words came out as almost a croak. I tried again, louder this time.

  “Mr. Fell?”

  The digging from below stopped. I swallowed hard and moved toward a lamp that burned in a small nook, my feet echoing softly on the stone floor. Rainwater and sweat mingled upon my face. The moisture tasted like blood upon my tongue.

  The first thing I saw was the hole in the floor, beside which stood a second oil lamp, its fuel almost depleted, so that the flame was tiny and flickering. A number of stones had been removed and placed against the wall, leaving a gap big enough for a man to squeeze through. One of the stones, I noticed, was the model for the rubbing on Mr. Fell’s desk. Now, although the stone was worn, the face behind the cross could be more clearly discerned, and what I had taken to be flowing hair now appeared to be flames and smoke issuing from the features of the creature, so that the cross seemed to be branding it.

  The hole itself was dark and dropped gently down, but I thought that I could discern another light deeper within. I was about to call again when the digging resumed, this time with greater urgency, and the sound made me stumble back in fright.

  On the floor, the oil lamp was almost sputtering its last. I took the second lamp from the nook and knelt at the opening. I caught the smell that came from within, faint but definite, the stench of waste matter. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wrapped it around my nose and mouth. Then I sat on the lip of the hole and gently lowered myself down.

  The tunnel was narrow and sloped, and I felt myself sliding on stone and loose earth for a few feet, the lamp held low before me in case it might break upon the roof. For a moment, I feared that I might fall into some great chasm, with only darkness around me as I plummeted, never to be found again. Instead, I landed on stone, and found myself in a low tunnel, perhaps only four feet at its highest point, which curved ahead of me and to the right. Behind me, there was only a blank wall.

  It was intensely cold in the tunnel. The sound of digging was stronger and more noticeable now, but so too was the smell of excrement. Holding my lamp ahead of me, I walked, crouching along the stone flags of the tunnel, following it as it sloped down, ever down. Where old supports had decayed, someone—I guessed that it was Mr. Fell—had made improvements, adding new braces to hold the roof.

  One support in particular caught my eye: it was larger than the others, and covered in carvings of writhing serpents, with the face of a beast at its highest point, tusks sprouting from either side of a snouted mouth, its eyes hidden beneath a thick, wrinkled brow. The face was reminiscent of that on the marker stone in the chapel, although better preserved and far more detailed in its depiction, for I had noticed no tusks before. Two heavy ropes snaked from either side of the brace, with a knot at each end. When I looked closely, I found them connected to a pair of iron rods hammered into a gap in the stone. The ropes were new, the rods old. From the looks of them, if these ropes were pulled then the stones would collapse, taking the brace with them. And I wondered why this tunnel had ever been built, and why someone had taken the precaution of contriving a mechanism to destroy it if the need arose.

  The digging grew closer and closer, the tunnel ever cooler. It was narrower now, and far more difficult to negotiate, but I found myself hurrying, my curiosity briefly overcoming my unease. I was crouched almost double, and the stench was becoming unbearable, when I rounded a corner and my foot touched something soft. I looked down and heard myself moan.

  A man lay at my feet, his mouth contorted and his face deathly white. His eyes were open, and there was blood in the corneas, where tiny vessels had burst under some dreadful pressure. His hands were raised slightly, as if to ward off something before him. The clothes of his ministry were tattered and filthy, but I had no doubt that I was in the presence of the remains of the late Mr. Fell.

  When I looked up, I saw what I thought at first was simply a stone wall, but at the center of the wall was a hole, big enough for a man’s head to fit through. From behind it came that picking sound, and I knew then what
I had been hearing.

  It was not Mr. Fell digging down, but something else digging up.

  I raised the lamp and examined the breach in the wall. At first, I saw nothing: the wall was so thick that my light barely penetrated through the hole. I drew closer, and suddenly there was a gleam from within as the lamp caught a pair of eyes, entirely black, as if the pupils had permanently enlarged themselves over time, desperately seeking light in that dark place. There was a flash of yellow bone as those great tusks were revealed, followed by a hiss, like an exhalation of breath.

  Then the image was gone, and a moment later the presence in the chamber struck the wall from behind. I heard it grunting with effort as it retreated and threw itself once more against the barrier. Dust descended upon me from the roof, and I thought I heard some of the stones in the wall shifting.

  A claw appeared through the hole. Its fingers were long, impossibly so, and appeared to be jointed at least five or six times. Huge curved nails erupted from the ends, clouded with dirt. A gray scaling covered the bones, and thick, dark hairs protruded from cracks in the skin. It reached for me, and I felt its fury, its malevolence, its searing, desperate intelligence, and its absolute loneliness. It had been imprisoned here in the darkness for so long, until Mr. Fell had commenced his translation and begun to explore, moving rock from where it had fallen, clearing debris and restoring braces as he drew closer and closer to the mystery of this place.

  The fingers were withdrawn, and the beast hurled itself again at the wall. A fine tracery of cracks shot out from the hole at its center, like threads on a spider’s web. I retreated, backing farther and farther away from it, until the tunnel grew wide enough that I felt that I could turn. For a moment, I thought that I had trapped myself in doing so, and found that I could go neither backward nor forward. Now the beast was howling, but in between its cries I thought I could discern words, although they were spoken in no language that I had ever heard.