CARNACKI: The New Adventures (9 page)

“I had retained enough presence of mind to mark the location of the door before it became too dark to see, and now I lunged in that direction, putting one arm around Kronstein to haul him with me.
He groaned and fired his revolver once, twice. The flashes of gunfire added to the sensory confusion of movement, cold, noxious smell, and elusive touch and grab of sinuous, boneless hands. In the flashes, I fleetingly discerned grey forms that seemed at once close and distant, and then it was dark again.

“A rough, solid surface abruptly presented itself in front of us.
In the force of my desperate forward momentum, I stuck against it painfully and rebounded. It was the door, but where was the knob and which way did it open, towards us or away? In my near-frenzy, I had forgotten. I dropped the useless torch and fumbled for the knob, found it, turned it, pushed the door before remembering that it opened in, and frantically pulled back instead. It hardly budged, as if great pressure were holding it shut.

“Kronstein’s pistol discharged again and he slipped out of my arm.
I made a grab for him with one hand as I applied the other to the doorknob, pulling with all my strength, knowing instinctively that neither of us would make it out of the room alive if I failed to open that door. Something brushed my trouser leg, and I reached down with the thought that the merchant was trying to regain his grip on me.

“But it was no human hand that I touched.
Have you seen an octopus in a public aquarium? I imagine that an octopus would have the clammy, leathery feel of whatever had brushed my leg. The thought that the
thing
would next attempt to seize my hand or my face gave me a burst of strength. I wrenched the door open against the pressure that attempted to keep it shut, fell through, reached back, grasped Kronstein’s coat, and pulled him out with me. The light in the front office had been smothered too, and the only illumination came from the wan glow of the street lamps through the storefront window. I seized a hanger from the coat-rack, snagged the doorknob, and pulled the door shut with a violent jerk.

“Kronstein was breathing strenuously, his face sick and bloodless in the dim light from outside, and I dar
esay I looked much the same.

“I remember little of the next few minutes.
My next conscious memory is of being outside the shop, sitting on the curb. Kronstein was looking at his trouser cuff where something had clasped him as he rose from his chair. The serge was stained with a damp, colourless slime that he started to touch curiously.

“
‘No, for God’s sake, leave it alone and burn those clothes,’ I gasped, grabbing his wrist. He looked dumbly at his leg, and then over at mine, which was fouled with the same mess where a leathery travesty of a hand had gripped.

“The shop door was wide open, the lights on again i
nside, and all was silence. I hoped fervently that nothing had come out with us. We sat where we were for hours, until the pallid sun began to rise above the rooftops.”

5.

Carnacki paused, and Jessop asked, “Is that the end of the story?”

“No,” our host said, “not the end.
I couldn’t let matters rest there. Kronstein’s shop had become the nest of something unearthly and infinitely foul. I sensed that it had not emerged with us, but remained there. Perhaps it had not grown strong enough to extend itself. However, it was certain to do so in due course, judging by how much more potently it had manifested itself since Kronstein’s last encounter.

“I saw Kronstein to his cousin’s flat, where I said that he had been attacked by footpads while out on early business before sunrise, and I had come to his assi
stance. Then I returned home, where I changed clothes and burned the fouled trousers as I had advised Kronstein. Next I began to consult my books of the occult in an attempt to identify the nature of that monstrosity in Bow Street. I found some promising information in Harzam’s Monograph, which I have mentioned to you on other occasions.

“It suggested that the manifestation or manifest
ations may have been intrusions from an outer dimension of darkness that impinges upon our own from time to time. Once in our dimension, these detestable things gain form and substance from association with some material object. I suspected that something in Kronstein’s storeroom provided such a focal point for the things we had encountered.

“Several days later, I visited Kronstein, who had substantially recovered from the rigo
urs of our adventure, at least physically. When I suggested that I must revisit the store, he violently argued that I should stay away: ‘Shortly after you got me settled here, I sent an associate around to close and lock the front door, telling him not to go into the store if he valued his life. He . . . he thought I feared he would steal from me! I haven’t spoken of the store since. Mr. Carnacki, the thought of walking back in there . . .’ His voice died away.

“
‘By reviewing your ledgers, perhaps I can identify the object that enables those fiends to remain in our world,’ I rejoined. ‘We must destroy that object, or else the foulness in your store will continue to suck light and life from our world as a leech drinks blood, until it has grown too powerful to dispel.’

“He came around to my argument, and at high noon we returned to the shop, I first performing some appr
opriate ceremonies and bringing with us a certain electrical apparatus that I have found useful in similar situations. I positioned the apparatus in the office so that the vibrations that it emitted formed an ethereal barrier between Kronstein and me on one side, and the door to the storeroom on the other.

“I pored for hours through the ledgers, where the merchant had recorded the suppliers from whom he had purchased the merchandise in his store.
For each item, he had meticulously listed the name of the supplier and whence in turn the supplier had come into possession of the item. At last I gave a cry of recognition.

“
‘Here,‘ I said, ‘do you remember this purchase? On May 5 last, 19—, such-and-such price for a ship’s spar, substantially intact, bought from W. Concannon, agent for Marine Trust Insurers. Said spar catalogued among debris recovered as salvage from the sinking of the cargo packet
Mortzestus
on her last voyage from San Francisco, U.S.A.’

“You should remember the name of that ship, Dod
gson. Your colleague wrote an account of it, which he marketed as fiction under the fanciful title
The Ghost Pirates
. Yet there truly was a cursed ship called the
Mortzestus:
it suffered an invasion of hellish beings from Outside on its final voyage and sank in the Pacific Ocean as your friend described—all faithfully transcribed from official records and testimony, and presented as fiction because it would hardly be accepted by the public as fact.

“The rest is quickly summaris
ed. I dared not go into the storeroom unprotected, so Kronstein and I left the establishment, and I returned with a battery of portable vacuum lights and with a box of cotton balls soaked in mint oil. I strung the lights in a protective double row, walking between the rows to the place in the storeroom where the spar from the unfortunate
Mortzestus
lay. As it was, I could sense shadowy movement beyond the purple glow of the lights, the watchful attention of those cursed wraiths of darkness. I stuffed the cotton balls in my nostrils, the mint oil deadening my sense of smell against the onslaught of the awful stench.

“I dragged the sp
ar out of the store and had it carried to a nearby place where I doused it with kerosene and burned it to ashes. I mixed the ashes with salt, bagged the lot, and finding an empty area of the docks where no one would see me, I tossed the bag into the Thames. Sigsand says that fire and salt will cleanse unholy objects and sever the invisible bonds that hold unnatural things to the earth. Devoutly, I hope that is the case with the spar from the
Mortzestus
and the fiends that had attached themselves to it.

“Kronstein sold out his business and retired to the Continent.
Someone else bought the store and took over the enterprise. Nothing remarkable has happened in the building since.”

We were silent.
Taylor said thoughtfully, “If the spar was salvaged, might not other objects from the
Mortzestus
have also been recovered? May other horrors be waiting to manifest themselves in other places and other cities?”

“Yes, that is entirely possible,” Carnacki affirmed.
And we all were grimly silent as we left our host and followed our various paths home.

I
had no reason to doubt the veracity of Carnacki’s stories, but I admit that it was the hearty suppers, unusual tobaccos, and bracing company that drew me to his Cheyne Walk drawing room rather than his sometimes unbelievable repartee.

Besides, my wife was a harridan and any opport
unity to escape her vacuous women’s talk and partake of our manly intellectual roughhousing was a boon for my constitution. We were still waiting, however, for the arm-wrestling competition Dodgson had promised Jessop, Taylor, and me. Dodgson himself had always seemed rather too enthralled by our host’s cogitations than I found healthy, and unlike him I always took them with a whole scuttle of salt, rather than just a pinch.

After all, I am not Dodgson. I am Arkright.

I had long since forsaken John Silence’s raconteurs; he was no match for Carnacki’s direct manner and no-nonsense occultism. Silence always seemed to take so very long to get to the point, stopping and starting his stories along stuttering lines of ponderous circumlocution and—let’s call it without any more prevarication—a kind of anticipatory puppetry of his rapt listeners.

Thomas Carnacki, despite his other flaws, was like a torpedo.

I had no reason to question him this evening, as the
sun sunk into the brass-coloured smog of the Embankment, but this story of the Hickey Mausoleum would even challenge my own reticence to question our modern magus.

Carnacki was mercurial tonight, his warhead was primed
, and he begun. He hadn’t even lit his pipe for fear he might incandesce.

“I despise fox h
unting,” he bellowed quietly. “Or rather, I despise those who fox hunt. The hunt itself has a mythic quality not entirely alien to my esoteric sensibilities.” We all murmured agreement, as we were every one of us, in our own minds, intellectuals with a cosmopolitan outlook befitting any London gentlemen of the new millennium. None of us were opposed to a bit of adventure and blood sport when it came down to it, though, and we would have jumped at the chance given the appropriate invitation.

“I travelled to the b
raes of the Blackstarr Hunt on the request of my former colleague, Randolph Ridley, a minor whipper-in living on the harsh periphery of Northumberland. It is in that land, I believe, that the entrance to the secret places beneath the surface will be discovered, as it is switched with the deepest coal mines on Earth. Their tunnels even spread out like rhizomes under the bed of the North Sea towards sunken Doggerland. But that’s another story.

“
I had never cared for Ridley, and always expected him to return to hunting or become a slaughterman again after the expedition he accompanied me on. He was, after all, a horsing north man and only good for out-of-doors husbandry or flesh houses. But I owed him a favour, and on his request I journeyed to that arcane valley in the North Pennines. Ridley had suggested I bring my gear with me without explanation, and for my own amusement I took my most recent technological plaything from the USA, Edison’s version of the office Dictaphone audio recording machine, the Ediphone, which was significantly more portable. It fitted into the case I had made for the electric pentacle.

“
When I arrived in the North Country I was dismayed to find that exactly half of the wax cylinders were broken, leaving only three tubes for any experimentation I may have undertaken, and that my lodgings were in that shop floor of the Blackstarr Hunt, the kennels themselves, where Ridley lived alone with his bald face and curmudgeonly demeanour, not to mention sixty baying foxhounds who loudly announced my arrival to the echoing gullies of the valley.

“Ridley
did not greet me, and I had to find him in the kennel abattoir manhandling fallen stock onto a gantry meat hook. He apologised for his diffidence, saying he had been busy with an escaped dam, proclaiming ‘The Blue Madonna snuck under the flesh house ramp.’ When talking of the hounds his squinting eyes, the size of an owl’s in his sun-burnished face, fired up in a way that was totally absent in his common parlance.

“
A fellow after my own heart in one regard, he began to explain why he had summoned me to what seemed like the very edge of England, if not the world. I had neither unpacked nor been shown where I was to sleep during my stay, and we stood in the flesh house with a pregnant dam circling us.

“
He told me about the disappearance, and how he believed the supernatural was somehow an ebon factor in the uncanny episode.

“
An academic from the university had lodged at the kennels with the intention of photographing the nearby Hickey Mausoleum, a strange folly annexing a one-room church on the moor above the valley. Crossland, the academic, had immediately rubbed Ridley up the wrong way, which wasn’t hard to do. The Master of the Hunt, one Humphrey Popper, had delivered the fellow to the kennels personally and, as a close friend of the college dean, had expressed to Ridley that he look after this fop on his research trip. He was, it seemed, a respected ecclesiastical archaeologist but had been sequestered to this work because of an unnamed indiscretion at the college. Someone had misjudged the effect this wilderness would have on a nervous disposition.

“
A sour note was set upon his very arrival as Crossland had complained about the baying of the hounds, much to Ridley’s annoyance. I made a note not to do so, no matter how disturbing the beasts became.

“‘
I told him the first night they would disturb his sleep, and the second night also. By the third night he would no longer notice their night song, and by the time he returned to Rutherford he would positively miss the sound,’ said Ridley. ‘I also warned him that it was easy to get lost between the braes of the Blackstarr and the plateau of the moor, even though you could plainly see the mausoleum and the church from the window of his lodgings. There is the black gulf of the scar between our steading and the heather banks where the Scots Pines gnarl and thin out.’ While he described it I could define the geography of the upper valley, but the moor was draped in a fog that truly accentuated the
edge-of-the-world
quality of the place. In my mind’s eye I could imagine the desolate church and its lych-house, and the shroud of mist patinating its lonely stone in black spatters gave me a shiver.

“‘As instructed
, I took Crossland up the short but arduous journey to the mausoleum. The church of St. Martin’s was built on the site of an earlier building destroyed by fire in the sixteenth century, and before that in the centre of a forgotten ring of pagan Neolithic markers half hidden beneath the sphagnum and heather weft. The church has long since fallen out of use because of its location and the drain of country folk to the brickworks in Newcastle. And I, as you know, Carnacki, am not a religious man. Not many are out here, not in that sense.’ The dam nuzzled him with her scar-crossed snout. Her aroma was rather piquant. Ridley vigorously petted the fat scruff of her neck and, as a way to disarm my apparent wariness of the huge beast, branched off at a tangent.

“‘
I can see this one’s grandmother in the way she walks, and this blue mottle has come on down at least two hundred years, a blue pelt strain started by a bitch called Glaug and a dog called Nimrod.’

“
The stinking thing did indeed have a bluish cast to her pelt.

“
Ridley continued. ‘The hounds made the fellow nervous. He wasn’t here to record the dimensions of the church, but to scrutinise the mausoleum that stands beside it. I know less about that than the church, so don’t ask.’

“‘But what of Crossland ?
’ I asked. ‘You say he disappeared without trace?’

“‘He left a trace al
l right. I helped him hulk his camera and theodolite up there, and he stored them in the church. You will see that they are still there. On the way up he was struck by the waterfall at the head of the valley, which is the source of the Blackstarr Burn as it spouts out of the rock from its subterranean course.

“‘It is by no means a waterfall of any note, and like so many others it is known as
the Grey Mare’s Tail. Crossland thought it was worthwhile photographing it and took the time to set his kit up on the path to the hill, so much so that time was getting on when we got to the church and its spartan cemetery. It was good weather, with a low-tide moon reaching fulness. I let him get on with it. But the pheasants were clucking and preparing to roost.

“‘When he found his way back on the first night
, just on the wrong side of sunset, he was most disturbed. I put it down to the scares of darkness falling in the pines, which can be awfully sinister to a Southerner. Or perhaps it was the baying, which drifts across the gloaming like a settled cloak. The sound would have brought him back here even in the night, for it continues unabated when the moon is up.’”

At this point Carnacki settled back into his chair and lit his pipe. He had been ‘up north’ for some time, and while Dodgson had done his fair share of
Blackburn time, I found the notion of the uncouth place particularly unpalatable. I admit that might have been inherited from my father, who had got out the minute he made his fortune from brickmaking, and my father painted an unsavoury picture that had rather coloured my view.

“My de
ar Arkright,” said Carnacki, “this was not my only investigation in the borders. You must also hear the stories of the Knock Rock Devil and the Warlocks of Spadeadam. I dare say they will put this trifle in the shade! I do not wish to and cannot devalue my current ejaculation, however, for there is a note of dread and mystery that even I cannot decipher . . . all about to be revealed to you now.

“
That evening over a rather pallid two-day-old pot of hamhock stew and a slab of pease pudding (which I have to say was better than it sounds, no doubt because of the oil-black porter Ridley uncharacteristically shared with me), he continued his tale.

“
Crossland spent the next two days to and fro from the kennels to St. Martin’s, barely speaking to my host, always more haunted than he was the night before; he had not stuck Ridley as anything other than the most sensible of prigs. He became unkempt, almost delirious, and when the two did communicate with any coherence, the academic revealed he had been much disturbed by the ‘howling of the dogs’ and the brightness of the full moon.

“
He confessed to Ridley that he had awoken after midnight when the baying had momentarily turned into strangled barks as two dogs mithered in the night. Facing away from the bright square of the window towards the interior wall to help him sleep, he saw the shadow of the window frame and thin curtains clearly projected before him. The full moon hung so low and large on the horizon that the adumbrated mausoleum was cast like a puppet theatre proscenium on the wall.

“
Crossland says he raised his arm from under the covers and watched his own shadow moving in and out of the lunar spotlight. He says he made childish shadow puppets; the universal shape of a swan made by opposing the thumb with the straightened beak of fingers and a crone, made from a fist and a crooked index finger projected, and hooked.

“‘So what
?’ I said to him. Ridley of course had been turning his nose up at the weird anecdote, firstly put out by the description of baying hounds as ‘howling dogs’ and secondly by the personal nature of the description of Crossland’s private bedroom. ‘The strange thing was this, Carnacki . . .’ Ridley uttered with a troubled inflection.

“‘Crossland proceeded to make
his shadow hand
knock upon the
shadow panes
of the window, uttering ‘knock . . . knock . . . knock . . .’ in a stultified monotone, and then to try and grasp the plainly visible shadow of the handle that secured the window closed, which of course was something like attempting mirror writing.

“‘To his disquiet, he succeeded in opening the
shadow window,
and immediately a cold blast of night air flooded the room, making the shadows of the curtains billow and flap like tattered flags in a storm. It was impossible, and he bolted out of the bed to close the culprit window, only to see that it
was
closed, and the curtains were hanging flat in a dead doldrum, glowing in golden innocence of the moons beams.

“‘The chill remained.

“‘What had driven him to distraction was that when his eyes returned to the cast shadow, the curtains continued to blow, but the window
was
shut.

“‘Steeling himself, he got out of bed a
nd went to the window to double-check, all the while the shadow image a-raging while the curtains hung still.

“‘He turned the handle with some difficulty (I had not opened that room’s windows for some time, it being spare) and opened the window ajar.

“‘There was nothing but a light breeze drifting through the gap.

“‘He closed the window, an awful spirit of perturb
ation wringing through his nerves, and he faced the shadow once more. But just at that moment a cloud passed before the moon’s face and all the shadows bolted beneath weak umbrations until the darkness engulfed everything.

“‘When the cloud passed, the shadow only showed the square of the window and the motionless curtains. Crossland’s own shadow filled the frame, his arms braced and head rigid.
’