Gethsemane Hall (14 page)

Corderman had his breathing under control. “Sorry,” he said. “That scared the hell out of me.”

“Me too,” Pertwee admitted.

He looked at her. He wanted to be held. So did she. The impulse was natural, the need genuine. The problem was implications and consequences. She didn’t know if Corderman would read anything into the act. It was the chance he might that made her hesitate. They weren’t a couple. They couldn’t be. The integrity of their research, she felt, wouldn’t permit it. Not when credibility was such an elusive and rare fish. She didn’t
want
to be a couple. But she thought that Corderman might. She caught the way he looked at her sometimes. At those moments, she usually found an excuse to take off on her own or send him on an errand. He didn’t turn her crank.

(Who would, Anna? Maybe Jim Crawford, bullet-muscle body and heat-seeking logic? The god of credibility? Wouldn’t you just love to suck some of that academic capital right off him?)

But right now, she and Corderman were together in a room that had screamed. Right now, daylight was a long way off. Right now, old instincts and fears were calling the shots. So she held out her arms, and they leaned back on the bed, and they held each other. Just for now. Just for right now.

Gray hadn’t heard the screams. He didn’t wake from his dream. It was a dream of sound and motion, but no images. He was in a darkness of muscle. It shifted with a slow giant’s rhythm. He was caught in leviathan waves, and they ground him against an invisible shale of bones. They threw him down, dragged him out to sea, then smashed him again. His skin was being scoured off. So was his self. The undertow was an enormous force. It wasn’t temptation, because there was no question of resistance, but it had its own dark attraction. He might have swum towards it, if he’d had a choice. He didn’t. It pulled him, scraped him raw, and dragged him down, filling his lungs with the choking sweet taste of revenge.

Old man, you should be in bed,
Roger Bellingham thought.
What do you think you’re doing here? This is no place for an old man. Asleep is what you should be.
At this time of the dawn, even old men, with their broken, reduced sleep, were resting. They were not standing in front of troubled gates. It was still full dark, the last moments of total despair before the horizon greyed with hope. He’d been standing at the gate of Gethsemane Hall for the last half-hour, since his too-old corpse had been dragged from bed and hauled down here by the tug. He heard footsteps behind him. He turned, saw John Porter. “And what brings you here?” he asked.

“Have to prepare the pub for the day ahead.”

This early? “A likely story.”

Porter shrugged an acknowledgement. “Do you have a better one?”

“Only the truth.” He didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t the sort of truth either liked to speak.

“Is it locked?” Porter asked.

“Yes.” He’d given the gate a good shake when he’d first arrived.

“Thank Christ.”

“You could ring.” Bellingham pointed to the call button. “He might let you in.”

Porter shuddered. “Don’t say things like that. For pity’s sake.” He stared at the button with horrified longing. “That wasn’t funny.” Bellingham could hear the cold sweat in his voice.

“No, it surely wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
That was a vicious bastard thing to do, old man, just because you went through the same struggle
. “Anyone else up and about?” he asked.

Porter nodded. “I saw plenty of lights on. Faces at the window. I think we’re the only ones out on the street.”

“We’ve had more to do with it. You were just there.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve been fighting it longest. Been on my mind a lot lately.”

After a minute, Porter said, “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

“It is.” This wouldn’t be their last vigil at the gate. They wouldn’t be lonely much longer, either. The good people of Roseminster might be able to bar their doors to themselves for the moment. If the tug grew much stronger, the current would catch them up.

“Different, too,” Porter said, and he sounded sick.

“Yes.” The tug had nothing to do with desire anymore. It had shed its disguises of curiosity and affection. It was pure rip tide, now. It was strong enough that it didn’t need to use their own impulses to draw them.

“Why?” Porter wondered. “Do you think it’s something they’re doing?”

The thought had occurred to Bellingham. The risk of making things worse was what had made him try to warn Pertwee off. But when he looked back, he realized that the strength had been growing before the ghost hunter had won her access to the Hall. “I doubt it.”

Porter sighed. “I’ve been sleeping worse since he moved back.”

“So have I.” Gray’s return was when Bellingham had felt the tug really pick up strength. But it had been building for a long time. Something about Gray might have sped things up, but they would be reaching this point sooner or later, whether the lord of the manor was present or not. The strength had been scary enough the night Pete Adams had died. High tide was coming.

“So what now?”

“We fight it as best we can for as long as we can.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know, John. I’d be happy to hear any suggestions.” His grip on his stick was growing slippery.

Dread moved through Roseminster. It had been present before, but as a background nag in the chest. It had been something to be ignored, something to be dealt with later. Dread had been put off, forced to content itself as low-grade anxiety. Now it snickered, cocky in its approaching triumph. It travelled in shadows, broke in through dreams, and entered homes on reptile feet. It was a movement in the corner of the eye. It was a sound that became inaudible when the ear strained for it. Most of all, it was the tug. The people of Roseminster felt it, knew it for what it was, feared it. They were on the edge of the maelstrom, and the spin was just picking up. They were still far from the centre, where the ships of their lives would be smashed on the rocks, but they were still too close, and it was too late to escape. Denial had failed them. Things would not take care of themselves. There was nothing to do but wait, while dread walked in on reptile feet and tightened its grip.

They gathered in the Great Hall, breakfast ignored, eager as Christmas morning. Crawford and Pertwee rushed to their laptops, and they both looked as if they’d found coal in their stockings. “What is it?” Meacham asked Crawford.

“Nothing,” he said, disgusted.

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither did the sensors. That’s the problem.” He and Pertwee raced each other to the crypt. Meacham and the others followed. Crawford picked up a sensor in the middle of the floor. He started to shake it, but kept his temper and pushed a button instead. A green light came on.

Sturghill and Corderman came down the stairs from the Old Chapel. They looked just as pissed and confused. “It’s all screwed up,” Sturghill said. “The sensor —”

“I know,” Crawford interrupted. “Did you check the batteries?”

“They’re fine.”

“So are ours,” Corderman said.

“Mind filling the rest of us in?” Meacham asked.

“Total waste of time,” Crawford answered, disgusted. “Something must have gone wrong with the sensors. That or ...” He stopped himself.

“Or what?” Gray asked.

“I don’t know.” But he did know, Meacham realized. One sensor failing could happen. Two, that was odd. All of them? Sabotage. Could Gray be that obvious about it?

She decided not to push the issue yet. Give Sturghill a chance to dig around. She nudged Crawford onto a slightly different path. “The sensors didn’t pick up anything at all? Did you forget to turn them on?”

“Oh, they were on, all right. But the readings are lunatic.”

“Exaggerated magnetic field fluctuation?” Gray asked.

Crawford shook his head. “According to my equipment, there is no magnetic field here
at all
. Which is ridiculous. Also impossible.”

“Same thing here,” Pertwee said.

“Have you encountered something like that before?” Hudson asked her.

“Never.”

“So you don’t see a spiritual influence at work.”

She hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “I’ve never heard of any such thing. I agree with Dr. Crawford. This makes no sense.” Meacham mentally saluted her for her rigour and honesty. The girl had some principles, after all. More than she could say for herself.

“Well, never mind magnetic fields for the moment,” Hudson said. “What about all your other equipment?”

“It’ll take me a few hours to review the video,” Pertwee answered. “The audio should be faster.” She had brought her laptop with her and plugged in the digital recorder. Meacham watched over her shoulder. Pertwee called up an audio editor and loaded the file. There were eight hours of sound, but she zoomed out until the entire track fit on the screen. There was a single big spike interrupting an otherwise flat line. Pertwee zoomed in on that segment, placed the cursor at a point just before the spike, and clicked on “play”. There were a few seconds of ambient static and hissing. Then it came. At first, Meacham thought she was hearing a rumble of distant thunder, had time to wonder if she’d missed a storm last night before the quality of the rumble changed. It became a roar. It stormed out of the laptop’s speaker like a runaway freight. The blow rocked Meacham back. Pertwee recoiled and tried to lower the volume. She was too late. The sound was out. It built even as she fumbled with the controls. The freight train derailed and smashed the room to flames with its anger. Meacham’s breath was sucked away from her by the fury. Her knees buckled, and she grabbed at the table for support. She was buffeted by the wreckage of anger. She thought she might bleed. The throat that howled couldn’t be human. It was too big, too powerful. But it held the memory of humanity in its teeth, and it bit down hard through the sinews of dreams and flesh of hopes, crunching bone and hammering the soul to dust. When the roar finally faded, its echoes covered the stones of the Hall like an oil slick, ready and waiting for the spark to burn again.

Meacham had her eyes closed, so she didn’t know who was sobbing.

waiting stone

Hudson combed the Hall, looking for Gray. He had drifted away after they had taken Pertwee to her room, and an unspoken consensus had called a moratorium on the research for a little while. Hudson finally found him emerging from the former stables. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with sledgehammer and pickaxe. “What are you planning to do with those?” Hudson asked.

“Confirm a suspicion,” Gray answered. He began to move forward again.

Hudson blocked his way. “I thought we were taking a break.”

“Go ahead. Take one. By the way, Patrick, tell me again what your role is in the investigation?”

“Very funny. But since you ask, to be a voice of sanity and reason.”

“I thought that was Crawford and Sturghill’s territory.”

Hudson shook his head. “They have their own dogma. I think it might be just as dangerous as Pertwee’s. Let’s say I’m here for spiritual sanity.”

“That would make you the lone voice in the wilderness, wouldn’t it?” Gray was smiling, but it was still that sour smile. He no longer seemed capable of any other kind.

“I’m not kidding.”

The smile vanished. “No,” Gray said quietly. “I don’t suppose you are.”

“Don’t you think this has gone far enough? Don’t you think you should stop?” If Gray was working a hoax, it had crossed the line. They had all been upset, but Pertwee might have suffered some real psychological harm. If Sturghill was wrong, if Gray hadn’t embedded speakers in the walls, if the manifestations were real, then all the more reason to pull out now, while the screams were still disembodied.

“Why?” Gray asked.

“
Why?
Didn’t you hear that recording this morning?”
Or did you make it? And if you did, how? Whose voice was that?

“I take it you don’t want to know what’s behind that sound.”

“
No
.” He hadn’t meant to put so much force into the word. He hadn’t realized how desperately he wanted Gray to be a hoaxer and how little he believed in that possibility. Most of all, he hadn’t realized how much he feared the answers Gray was seeking. Calling a halt was necessary for his own spiritual survival, too.

The emotions that flickered over Gray’s face were hard to read. Hudson saw pain, gratitude, tenderness, anger. “I’m not being much of a friend to you,” he said. “You really should go. For your own sake.”

Gray was wrong about that. “I have to stay,” Hudson told him, “for your sake and for mine.”
Don’t just listen to me
, he prayed.
Hear me
.

Gray didn’t hear. Or perhaps, which was worse, he did. “You’ve had your warning, then.”

“You say that as if you’re making a threat.”

“I don’t mean to.” He looked Hudson in the eye. His expression was a tug of war of concern and barely contained vengeance. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”

“Then you do think what’s happening is dangerous.”

“I know it is.”

“Then why go on?”

Gray didn’t answer for a moment. He seemed to be struggling to keep rage in check. “Because I’m on the verge of a big, hard, truth, and I want to know what it is.” Some of the rage slipped out when he said
truth
. The word sounded like an awful thing. This truth would not set you free. It would stamp your face into the ground and break your spine. “Since you ask, no, I don’t think the investigation has gone far enough. Not nearly far enough.”

Gray had the crypt to himself. There was still some equipment lying around, and he moved it out of the way of the wheelbarrow. He approached the recess of the crypt. He ran his hands over the brickwork of the rear wall. He half expected it to crumble at his touch and reveal the hole that he had seen while wearing Crawford’s helmet. It stayed firm, abrasive and faintly slick under his fingers. He took a step back and shone a flashlight over the recess. The difference was subtle, but he could see it now. The bricks of the rear wall were a shade lighter than those of the rest of the crypt. They were younger. He put the flashlight down and hefted the pickaxe. He paused, giving himself time to reconsider. He thought about the pulsing grey light of his vision, of the night screams and the harm and hostility he had already experienced. He let himself be afraid. He let himself be afraid, too, for the people in his home, and for his friend. Then he thought about God’s laughter and let himself be angry. He waited, turning on the fulcrum. Once he brought the wall down, there might be no turning back. He let the battle run its course. Rage won. He felt the tug and answered it. He raised the pickaxe.

Meacham heard the noise. She knew what it meant even before she recognized it for the
chunnnggg
of metal against stone. It jabbed her nerves, a cold steel spike.
No
, she thought.
Stop
, she thought. Instinct ran fast, outstripped rationality.
Who?
she wondered, but only for a moment. Gray, she knew. She stood up from her chair and began to walk in the direction of the crypt. “Stop.” She said the word aloud and was speaking to herself.
Keep it together. Do your job. Be who you are.
She rallied her skepticism and her cynicism, the pillars that had seen her through wind and gale. She had her breathing under control by the time she left the library. Her heart was less co-operative. It was enslaved by the rhythm of the blows. It jumped with each clash. Gethsemane Hall echoed with the tolling of a stone bell.

She was the first to reach the crypt. She couldn’t see Gray right away. He was hidden in the recess. But the flashlight on the ground magnified his shadow and threw it up the height of the vault. It flailed with expressionist violence. The sound changed as Meacham approached. The ringing of the pickaxe became the deeper blow and sharper cracks of failing masonry. She moved forward until she could see Gray. He was drenched with sweat. His clothes clung to him like sodden rags. He was hammering at the wall with a rhythm as metronomic as it was manic. Chunks of stone flew from his attack. Shrapnel pinged off the walls. The bricks fell. Behind them was darkness. The black seeped into the crypt. The flashlight dimmed. So did the hurricane lamp that lay in the centre of the floor, its power cord an umbilical connection back to the light of the rest of the house, light that seemed now to Meacham to be conditional, an eccentricity allowed only at the sufferance of the Hall’s true owner.

More bricks fell. More darkness crossed the growing threshold. “Lord Gray,” she said, but her throat was dry, and her voice cracked. She tried again, called louder. Gray didn’t respond. Momentum had taken him. He was an automaton constructed for this one motion. Meacham stepped forward, thinking of grabbing his shoulder. But the pickaxe swished the air with each savage backswing, its point inviting her flesh to step on up. She shouted Gray’s name. She might as well have yelled at the Hall itself. More brick shattered. The hole became a maw. Soon it would be big enough for someone to fall through. It was already big enough for something bad to crawl out from. The blows became the pounding of a dark heart. Gray should have been exhausted, but he didn’t slow. Instead, Meacham heard the heartbeat pick up speed. There was excitement to the pulse. Anticipation.

“
Stop
,” she screamed. But the moment had arrived. The remains of the wall collapsed all at once. There was a rumbling crash that was almost swallowed up by another sound. It was a sigh, and Meacham felt herself being pushed back by a giant’s palm. The darkness rushed in, and the lights went out. Black felt coated her eyes. There was no sound from Gray. The rumble faded, replaced by the ticking of pebbles against each other and the restless settling of dust. Then silence. Meacham strained her ears. They felt smothered. Old field training resurfaced, never once used during the length of her career. She was poised for a fight. But she couldn’t see or hear. The enemy would snatch at her from the dark. Her enemy
was
the dark.

And then she realized she wasn’t blind. She was seeing something. From the recess, on the other side of the threshold, there was a light. She could see the faint shape that was Gray’s outline. He was slumping, motionless, his strings cut. There was light. It was grey. It pulsed. It was wrong. Her eyes widened.

Light flashed back on. She blinked. She breathed. She turned her head and saw Crawford stepping into the crypt. Pertwee was close behind him.

“What are you doing?” Crawford asked. “Why did you unplug the light?”

We didn’t
, Meacham thought. The cord was plugged into a socket in the outside corridor.
We didn’t touch the light,
she tried to say, but she wasn’t speaking yet. So she just shook her head.

Pertwee pushed past him, looked into the recess, and saw what Gray had done. “Oh,” she said. There was a world of wonder in her single syllable. There was joy, too.
You should have been here,
Meacham thought.
A new light would have shone down on your optimism, oh you bet.

The pickaxe slid out of Gray’s hands. It clunked on the ground. Safe now, Meacham went up to him. “Are you okay?” she asked.

His skin was dust and sweat and pallor. His hair was soaked limp. His eyes were trained in the direction of the breach, and they were unfocused, twitching back and forth. When Meacham touched his shoulder, he jumped and turned his head to face her. After a moment, his eyes saw her again. He grunted. He looked at the collapsed wall, then back at her. He gave her a faint, despairing smile. “Well,” he said and made a sound in his chest. A small, hurt laugh. “Well,” he said again. “Here we are.”

Gray went off to dig up two more flashlights and fresh batteries. The rest of the party gathered at the mouth of the hole, no one yet taking a step down the revealed staircase. Pertwee and Corderman crowded the front, eager as kids at Christmas to explore, only courtesy for their host holding them back. Meacham didn’t appear to feel their hurry. She was sticking to the entrance of the crypt, close to the light of the rest of the house. Crawford peered into the depths. There wasn’t much to see. A half-dozen steps dropping steeply into blackness. Vertigo entered his bloodstream. A dark invitation, it tried to make him topple forward. He backed out of the recess. He tore his eyes away from the void, forced them to look at the details of the breach, tried to analyze what he was seeing. This was rearguard action on behalf of rationality, and he knew it. He made the effort anyway. He wanted to see evidence of a hoax. He knew about as much about dating construction work as he did Swahili, but he still hoped, clutching at straws in the wind, that he would see traces of plaster and Styrofoam rocks. Nothing. He looked up and saw Meacham gesture him over. She had already corralled Sturghill. He joined them.

“Well?” Meacham asked.

“I wish I could say it looked fake.”

“I could have told you it wasn’t.”

“What have I been telling everybody about believing the evidence of their eyes?” Sturghill said. She sounded annoyed. Crawford wondered how genuine her skepticism was. She might be fighting the same losing war as he.

Meacham seemed poised on the edge of unconditional surrender. “He didn’t fake smashing down that wall,” she told Sturghill.

“So it looks good. But consider the evidence. He puts on the helmet, says he sees things that the helmet couldn’t possibly be showing him, claims he has a vision of a staircase behind the wall. He takes down the wall. Lo and behold, there it is. And in his own home, too. Now if
I
had had the vision, I might be a bit more convinced.”

“Have you found any speakers in the walls?” Meacham asked.

“Not yet,” Sturghill admitted.

“Any hard evidence of any kind to support the hoax theory?”

“No.”

“Then how long can you pretend that thesis is viable?”

“Until I see hard evidence to the contrary. Lacking empirical evidence on either side, which is easier to believe: hoax or ghosts?”

“Occam’s Razor,” Meacham muttered.

“I was thinking more of David Hume and what he had to say about miracles. What’s more likely: that the eyewitnesses are wrong, however many there are, and however much they may be in good faith, or that the laws of the universe have been violated? The miracle loses out every time.” She cocked her head at Meacham. “You don’t sound like you’re fighting too hard for your own agenda. You’re the one who wanted us here, remember.”

Meacham nodded. “I also saw what I saw.”

Sturghill smiled. “I don’t think you’d see much of anything with the light unplugged. I can get freaked by sudden blackouts too.”

“That wasn’t the problem. I
did
see something.”

“Well, it wasn’t a ghost.” Sturghill said. She left them to turn the magician’s eye on the rubble.

“You’re being quiet,” Meacham said to Crawford.

He decided to be open with her — and with himself. It helped that she was voicing her own anxieties. “I don’t like where this is heading,” he said. “I’ve never experienced anything like this. And I haven’t had a single reading on any instrument that makes the slightest bit of sense.”

Meacham looked at the ground for a moment, then at him. “When you asked me if I had a dream the night before coming here,” she said, “I lied.”

“I thought maybe you had,” he said.

Then Gray was back with the flashlights.

“Well?” their host asked.

Meacham still had her doubts. She doubted that heading down these stairs was in any way a good idea. She doubted that she was going to come out of this fiasco with anything that would satisfy Jim Korda and salvage her career. And though she suppressed the idea as soon as it rose, she was beginning to have concerns for her personal safety. Gray’s behaviour was becoming erratic. People who wielded pickaxes while in a trance were to be approached with caution. That was the lost-cause rationalization she used to keep the anxiety from growing any worse. She didn’t let herself ask
why
he was in a trance. She would hold off that question and its darkness just as long as she could. But oh, going down the stairs was a bad idea.