Now that the nine prayer-books were together again for the first time in three centuries, was some strange conclave of shadows reaching its blasphemous apogée in the chapel this very night under the direction of Mr Clark?
In the corner of his eye he caught a brief flash of white against the outer darkness of the lawns and then a crash and tinkle of breaking glass sounded in the shadows at the far end of the room. One of the barn owls must have dashed itself against the glass of the library again, he thought, no doubt attracted by the glimmer of lights inside. He saw that the lower part of the window had been completely smashed by the impact and a glittering spray of shards littered the floor of the room inside. The shattered remains of the windowpane were covered with the same dusty traces as before, but there was nothing to be seen either within or without the library walls.
Leventhorp felt utterly alone in the midnight emptiness of Gaulsford and was seized by a sudden unaccountable chill of anxiety. The National Trust had installed a central fuse-box by the main desk, which controlled all the internal and external lighting in the house, and he ran and grappled with the switches until the entire building was a blaze of light. Outside, the blue-grey nocturnal landscape of the lawns brightened as if at the impending approach of dawn, but the shadows cast by the house lights were deeper, more impenetrable, more concealing.
The lights of the upper landing came on behind him and he turned and gaped at the scene of wanton destruction which had been revealed on the Great Staircase.
The Leventhorp family portraits had been utterly defaced by some unseen hand. Each one had had its face roughly scraped away just as on the medieval rood screen at Brockstone, and to his disgust he saw that his own portrait had not been spared the outrage. He climbed up the stairs past each ruined picture until he came to the remnants of his own self-commissioned likeness. His face had been gouged out in a series of deep scars through the canvas and, as if to heighten the atrocity, a single eye remained visible between the vicious stripes, peering out sorrowfully from the midst of the surrounding carnage.
Clearly a gang of local yobs had found their way inside somehow and had embarked on a vandalism spree. If they came across him in the midst of their mindless rampage he would probably end up with a good kicking, or worse. He needed to raise the alarm with the security guard, and somewhere on the upper floor, he remembered, was a house phone. As he hurried along the corridor he noticed a roll of crumpled linen, about four or five feet in length, lying in front of the door to one of the bedchambers. A dust-sheet, thought Leventhorp in passing, fallen from one the housekeepers’ baskets perhaps, while they were closing up the house. But as he moved closer, the fabric began to stir fitfully as if animated by a network of unseen puppet strings and he paused and watched with incredulous fascination as slowly, and with a snakelike undulation, it began to creep across the floor towards him, leaving a faint spoor of whitish dust in its wake.
At the last instant Leventhorp recognised it not as a piece of forgotten household linen, but as a foul and decaying roll of ancient grave cloth. And at that very moment, the creature within raised itself semi-erect like some hooded serpent to reveal the expressionless and desiccated face of one dead for centuries. Around its withered neck was traced a band of twisted flesh, the eternal imprint of the hangman’s rope. The sightless eye-sockets were crammed full with the festering dirt of the grave, and a forked tongue flickered back and forth from within the crumbling jaws, tasting the air like a ravenous viper seeking out its prey.
Leventhorp staggered back to the main bedchamber, slamming the door shut on the awful vision, but there was no lock or bolt with which to secure it. He looked around in desperation for some means of escape, but the drop from the upper windows was too great to attempt. There was only one place of concealment left to him: the priest hole.
He crammed his body inside the tiny space, and pulled the panel of wainscoting closed behind him. As he cowered in the suffocating darkness, he now realised its true significance. Sir Samuel Leventhorp was no secret Catholic, there were no renegade priests sheltering in his house, and there never had been. The priest hole had been made for himself alone. It was a sanctuary, a castle keep, a refuge of last resort from the tormenting demon sent by Dame Sadleir to plague him and his descendants. Despite his terror, vague recollections of Sunday School scripture lessons came whispering to him, echoes of yet another vengeful incantation: the awful words of Psalm 58, which now bore a stark and literal relevance.
Through the wainscoting Leventhorp heard the door of the bedchamber slowly creak open inch by agonising inch and the dark air around him seemed to thicken with the stench of decay. Then a knock came at the panelling beside him: polite, gentle, a dainty rat-tat-tat of someone requesting an entrance…
The sadly premature death of Sir Jonathan Leventhorp came, paradoxically, as rather a boon to the National Trust, because a codicil in the original deed of bequest meant that the remainder of the estate and trust fund became their prerogative with the extinction of the family title after ten generations.
The priest hole is still featured on the house tour, but thankfully for the long-suffering guide, no visitors have yet had the insensitivity to mention the unfortunate accident that occurred within its confines. Though some, thinking themselves out of earshot, will still mutter amongst themselves as they gaze into its dark airless cavity:
“That’s where they found him, you know. They say he had some sort of nervous breakdown and destroyed all the ancient family portraits that used to hang in the stairway. And he was missing for a full week before anyone even thought of looking for him in the priest hole. The police reckoned he squeezed himself inside somehow, but then couldn’t open the panel to get out again and went stark staring mad from being locked up alone in the darkness.
A pretty sight he was too when they found him. Tore his own face off with his fingernails, so they say, right down to the bone.”
Dennis Etchison
THE WALK
DENNIS ETCHISON is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. His collections include The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts and Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories.
He is also the author of the novels Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic, Double Edge, The Fog, Halloween II & III and Videodrome, and the editor of Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and (with Ramsey Campbell and Jack Dann) Gathering the Bones.