Seton laughed.
“I doubt it would help. I snorkeled around this area for a whole summer in the ‘70s without finding anything resembling cave or tunnel anywhere close by. No, by entrance I mean we need to find Crowley’s entrance to the cavern.”
“What makes you think he had one?” Banks asked.
“He talks in his journals about finding a literal gateway to Hell in this place. He was a great one for playing with words, but I’d take him at face value on this. I think he found a way down, to a place that he considered magical, a place where he conducted his experiments and rituals. And I doubt he traveled far to reach it. I think it must be under the house somewhere.”
“And that’s what you were looking for when we found you?”
“Exactly. I’d been inside for an hour or so, and I’d covered maybe half the floor area before you stopped me. I found nothing but rubble and ruined carpets. The search of the remainder of the house will go faster in daylight with more of us looking, and without the need for stealth.”
“And at least we’ll see any shite before we stand in it,” Wiggins said as they left the SUV by the roadside and walked up the slope of the driveway toward the burnt-out ruins.
When they reached the main doorway, Seton pointed to the left to what looked to have been the main living areas in the past.
“I went through all of that side of the house,” he said. “As I said, nothing but rubble and rotted carpets. There’s an old library, but the books were obviously mostly lost in the fire, which is a damned shame. So we go right. If I remember the floor plans correctly, there’s a kitchen through the back, and the rest is servant’s quarters in the main, with a laundry room and a couple of small bedrooms for the staff. It shouldn’t take us too long.”
“And it will go even faster if we move in pairs,” Hynd said as they moved through a long hallway. He saw what must be the kitchen at the far end.
“Sarge, you and Wiggo check all the rooms along this hall here, and Sandy and I will take the kitchen and whatever else might be though there. We’ll meet at the far end in five; shout if you find anything before then.”
He walked down the hall, then turned when he realized Seton was lagging behind. The older man looked gray around the face and wore deep black shadows under both eyes, but he waved away Banks’ concern.
“I’ve been after this thing for 50 years, Captain,” he said. “I can manage a couple of hours of pain now that we’re closing in.”
“Are we? Closing in, I mean? It feels like it’s the one that’s been dictating tactics so far. All we’ve been doing is reacting.”
“I know it seems like that to you, Captain,” Seton replied. “But trust me, I can feel it in my bones.”
“That might just be your broken ribs giving you gip,” Banks said with a smile, and pushed fully aside a heavy oak door that partially blocked the entrance to the room at the end of the hallway. He held Seton back with his free hand as he leaned inside, weapon raised, but the room was quiet and empty. He’d been right, it was a large country kitchen, or rather it had been at one time; the ravages of fire had removed any charm it might have had. There was no roof left, although the remnants of burned timber and slates lay scattered everywhere across the floor. There were marks on the tiled floor where a large range had once sat, and another that had probably been the spot for a fridge, but somebody had salvaged the appliances, possibly for scrap, some years past. Now there was only ruin and bare, tumbledown walls.
Seton kicked rubble aside with his feet in an effort to check the flooring below for a cellar hatchway, while Banks made a circle of the room, checking inside the old walk-in larders for any partially hidden traps or doors.
“It’s a hundred years since your man Crowley was here,” Banks said after five minutes of fruitless searching, tapping on walls and stamping on the floor. “We might as well be looking for one of Jimmy Page’s guitar picks… in fact, I’m pretty sure we’d have more luck in that department.”
“Nil desperandum, Captain. There’s an entrance here on the grounds somewhere, there has to be. The journals were most clear on that point.”
Banks didn’t point out that many people were known to exaggerate in their memoirs or that although he knew little of The Great Beast, what he had read of rituals and magick and Thelema had not convinced him of its veracity. He stopped looking around while Seton banged on walls he’d already banged on several minutes earlier.
Hynd and Wiggins came in a minute or so later, and a shake of the sarge’s head told Banks all he needed to know.
“Light them if you’ve got them, lads,” Banks said. “It looks like we’re up a blind alley.”
“At least it’s not shite creek,” Wiggins said as the private passed out cigarettes.
“Shite, that’s what I’ve forgotten,” Seton said after he’d had his first puff.
“You need a shite, wee man?” Wiggins said laughing. “I’ve heard that tobacco can do that to auld plumbing.”
“No, I forgot about the house’s sewage. There was an outhouse here once upon a time before modern indoor plumbing came to the Highlands. Crowley used some of the foundations and built his shed over the same spot, at least that’s what his journals say.”
“The shed where he did his experiments?”
“Exactly, and where there was an outhouse, there would have been at least a hole in the ground, maybe even a drain or a sewer. It might be a way down in any case.”
“So, we’re looking for a shithouse now, are we?” Wiggins said. “This day keeps getting better and better.”
Banks allowed Seton to take the lead as they went out through a hole in the rear wall of the house to what had obviously once been an extensive garden.
“I’ll ask again,” Wiggins said. “What are we looking for?”
“Shite, and plenty of it,” Hynd said. He pointed out over what had once been lawn. “And look, we’ve found it.”
“Bloody hell, Sarge,” Wiggins said. “When I called you the shite whisperer, I didn’t mean you to take it literally”
The 20 or so mounds of dung in the garden looked superficially like molehills but, like the pile they’d found previously at their night stop in the cottage, these were basketball sized and bigger. Banks wondered if bits of Corporal McCally might not be strewn around on the grass inside the piles, and pushed the thought away, angry just for thinking it.
Seton had gone quiet studying the area.
“There’s more over to the left here than anywhere else,” he said, and marched quickly away from them, picking his way among the piles.
“I never thought I’d see a grown man so excited about shite,” Wiggins said.
If Seton heard him, he didn’t show it, and the older man now stood amid a concentrated area of dung, looking down at his feet and kicking grass and dirt, and dung, aside.
“Found something,” he shouted a minute later. “It looks like foundations. Get over here. This might be what we’re looking for.”
They walked to where Seton stood in the longer grass, having to step carefully to avoid more tumbled timber. The wood was older and much more rotted than that in the kitchen and it lay surrounded by old dry brickwork at ground level that had been laid in a rough rectangle some 15 feet by 10 feet in shape.
“It’s the shed, it’s Crowley’s shed. It has to be,” Seton said, and the auld man looked 10 years younger, his excitement masking any pain he was still feeling. “If the entrance is anywhere, it’s right here, right under our feet.”
It only took them 10 minutes to find the entrance but they were tough minutes of shifting rock, wood, and matted grass aside to try to find the old floor. Hynd finally found a palm-sized iron ring in what remained of the flooring. A strong tug brought up a hatch, and also sent a hefty portion of rotted wood down into the hole below with a tumbling rustle and thud that told them they were above an entrance to some greater depths below.