As far as Ray was concerned it was no bad thing, finding that as long as he kept his head down and away from the news, he could justify that point of view and ‘ thankfully ‘ the job at hand gave him plenty of opportunities to ignore the world and everything in it.
According to his ex-wife that was always Ray’s problem.
At first the virus had been isolated in foreign lands and in an older world he may not have ever been aware of it; but the world was smaller than the world had been during the Spanish Flu, or even the Swine Flu epidemic of a few years ago, so as far away as the virus had been Ray had been aware of it.
It had not stayed far away for long, international travel had brought it to everyone’s front door far faster than anyone could have believed; but true to his cynical self, Ray did not care too deeply. He spent much of his time alone, buried in whatever project currently possessed his time.
The building that had become his current obsession was an unloved but sturdy late Victorian with high ceilings and ornate coving that in place had been eaten away by time. Over its three floors, attic and cellar time had written a testament to its passing and it was Ray’s job to do battle with this invisible foe, to fight it back and help the building regain its prior glory.
Ray was good at it and had built a modest fortune in the art.
Most of the heavy work had already been done by the time the lock down had shut down the majority of the city and all the remaining work was of a cosmetic variety, so Ray had ordered a few camping supplies and made an impromptu living quarter in the basement away from the majority of the work.
There was plenty to do, and though the basement too needed repair it seemed prudent to prepare the upstairs for viewing as soon as people were out and about once more.
So, this is how Ray King found himself living in 124 Richmond Close, in an area of town that was all but deserted in the first week of April, and it was why he was curious when the hole he drilled into what should have been a solid wall punched through into a cavity.
The day began with a quick walk-through of the building, checking for leaks, draughts, and anything else that might indicate an issue in need of his attention. Finding nothing of concern he considered his narrowing choice of options for his activities for the day and settled on the boxing in of water pipes that were next to the door that led down into the basement.
He selected his materials, unwound the extension cables, and began to measure and sketch a little diagram. He decided to make the container flush with the corner of the wall that ran at right angles to the kitchen units and level with the door that led down into his makeshift home in the basement.
This was the reason he began to drill two feet to the left of the pipes he was attempting to hide, and it was this reason his drill tore through two inches of plaster only to discover a filthy pit of nothing behind. As the drill bit reached the other side of the plaster Ray’s pressure drive the tool forward with too much force, Ray was expecting brick and he was leaning in hard when it broke through. The plaster crumbled and the front end of the drill ripped a hole large enough for him to fit his fist through.
Ray grumbled a string of expletives of which he was proud then pulled the drill free and inspected the damage; it was then that he realised what had happened and he went in search of his flashlight
Five minutes later he returned and began a detailed examination.
The hole was six inches by four at its surface to about three inches round at its deepest point, inside he could feel hardened plaster between thin horizontal boards.
He inspected the wall with the torch and could see no join where the partition connected to the supporting wall; he stepped back and considered his options.
He could just forget about it, complete his boxing in of the pipes and cover this hole in the process; but he knew this wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he took out his rotary cutting tool and started to widen the hole into a neat square a foot a side, offering him a much better view of what was inside.
After a brief glance through the hole to the darkness beyond Ray found a chair and sat down, not entirely certain his legs would support him otherwise.
Ray King was not a squeamish man; in his time, he had dealt with all manner of unpleasantness while renovating old buildings. There was a time when a sewage main was ruptured and a whole basement was filled with raw sewage; there was another time when a family of rodents had populated, and died, in the drainage pipe to an old bath he was removing; both times he had cleaned up the mess without complaint.
What he had found hidden at 124 Richmond Close was something different, something not as smelly or disgusting but something with which he would have to call authorities. Which might mean that he would not unload this property if what he thought he saw, was what he saw.
He thought about it.
Ray was forty-five and in good condition, years of hefting around building materials and climbing ladders gave him a body that would sometimes attract appreciative looks from the housewives his job brought him in contact with, which in turn was the reason for his divorce.
Let be honest, he thought to himself, you were the reason for your divorce Raymond. You and your need to be the alpha in the room.
He glanced at the corner that hid the newly discovered room from his immediate view then down at the worn jeans and filthy work-boots that had become his uniform. Dirty footprints decorated the bare floorboards and, in the chaos, he could not pick out the fresh ones that led from the demolished wall to where he sat.
This introspection, or at least what passed for it in Ray’s mind, was unlike him and for the moment he did not recognise himself.
It was strange, he thought, how a person could sometimes do that; a part of your mind would sometimes show its face and you would momentarily be surprised at your own thoughts.
Ray usually reacted and rarely thought about those reactions.
He rose from the chair, a paint splattered kitchen chair that followed him from build to build and made his way back to the newly excavated room.
The hole in the wall seemed larger than he had left it and without looking inside Ray picked up his circular saw and started to cut. From floor to ceiling in two-foot-wide, one-foot-high sections, each side level with the bare brick inside. When he kicked the bottom section aside, he saw the floor inside was not wood, but stone that had been worn as smooth as marble. Ray reached for his torch and switched it on.
The far wall was no more than five feet from where he stood, deep enough from the light that the thing on it was obscured.
It was a child, and the thought made his chest feel tight.
The figure was wrapped in discoloured cloth, mummified, and placed in what could only be thought of as a sarcophagus. Its head was a little too big for its body, about the same size as an adult, and the body was no more than three feet tall.
Ray supposed that over time it had shrivelled and shrank a little but even so the body inside was obviously no adult.
The sarcophagus was made of black marble, the surface picked up the flashlight beam and glistened as if moist. When Ray looked at its side, he saw what might have been etched letters or drawings, but without getting closer he could not tell which.
He didn’t want to get closer.
He returned to the kitchen chair and sat.
At first, he had thought someone had hidden a body in the wall, a regular body resulting from an ‘ unfortunately ‘ regular act of murder, and the thought had scared him. Not because of any implication on his part but because it would affect resale value of the property; but this was a very different situation.
What lay against the hidden wall was not just someone’s hidden sin.
Ray again rose and moved back to the top of the basement stairs.
The mummy’s sarcophagus had been lifted onto a shelf cut from the stone, the grooves either side of its base cut precisely. Ray moved the beam of light over the alcove in which the artefact sat. This was not just a convenient place to store the sarcophagus, it had been created for it. The space was cut into a cross just tall enough for the thing to fit, and wide enough for something to sit halfway up its height either side. He played the torch over these small platforms and saw circles of molten wax.
Black wax.
Ray was not a fanciful man, his only brushes with romance were his attempts to convince a woman to spend the night and his only dealings with things he could not touch, or smell were the transfer of funds when he sold a property. Ray believed in what filled his belly or served his desires; nothing more, but still; he knew what he was looking at.
It was something ancient, something dark. It was the remnants of ceremony; it was hidden beliefs.
Ray King was not a fanciful man, and he didn’t believe in spectres or gods, but on that evening of that first week in April he could not shake the certainty that a body buried by a killer would have been far preferable to what he had found.
There was something so’ unwholesome about what he had found.
Something even worse than a victim of crime.
Something worse than a subject of abuse.
Something worse than the remnants of torture.
Ray understood, deep down in some primordial part of himself, that abuse and torture was where this all began, but it was not the end.
He played his torch over the inside of the hidden room from left to right. From bare brick, narrow, rough-hewn, over the atrocity exhibition and its missing black candles and to the wall on the other side, the wall that ‘ on the other side of the wall that hid it all ‘ also contained the door that led down to his own basement home.
A door made of the same slick black material as the sarcophagus, etched in the same letter-pictures that, when opened, he knew would lead to a stairway leading down.
He glanced through the open doorway that led down into his own basement, past the pipes that started it all to the wall on the left of the basement stairs. On the other side of that wall was another set of stairs that led from that other door, connecting to a shadow of the room in which he spent his sleeping hours.
He raised his left foot and stepped onto the smooth stone, feeling the cold through the sole of his boot. Inside the hidden room the ceiling was higher than in the main building, high and perfectly rendered in a material that was as smooth and flat as resting liquid. Any warmth he had felt in the rest of the building disappeared and the sound around him changed as if suddenly he was underground.
Closer now he checked the mummy, playing his light over the slender arms, high chest, and painfully slim waist. It was the same size and shape as a three-year-old girl that had a naturally slim build, but the head was wrong. It was the same size as an adult and Rays wasn’t sure, but he thought its shape was still wrong even for that.
It looked deformed, or broken.
He didn’t really want to step closer, but he forced himself to so he could look at the markings along the rim of the sarcophagus. He moved the flashlight bean from it to the door and back again; the markings seemed identical.
Okay, he thought, there’s only one place to go now; and turned his attention to the door.
It was taller than an average door, reaching to the ceiling and ‘ to Rays’ trained eye ‘ an easy six inches taller and wider than the standard. The design was like a standard Victorian five panel internal door in a one-two-two configuration. Around the panelling were the arcane etchings and as Ray moved closer, he saw that the panels themselves were made from something translucent like a stained-glass window made of transparent obsidian.
On the far right of the door, close to the demolished wall was a curve of handle resembling the rib-bone of a large animal cast in blackened steel.
Ray grasped it and pushed.
The was no sound as the door opened, no creaking of old hinges and no snapping of the latch that held it closed. Silently it swung inward, swinging to the left to sit snugly within a recess designed specifically for it.
As he had predicted the first step of the stairs that led down into darkness had been constructed perfectly level with the top of the basement stairs creating a small landing where the door had room to rest.
Ray examined the top of the stairs, more stone, and the walls, even more. To the right of the door was a box built onto the wall, a foot a side and sporting six domes, some with switches others with dual round holes that Ray knew were vintage outlets.
Electricity.
Ray could date the build from just that.
He would guess about 1890.
Ray tapped the metal dome and heard a muffled ring, then flicked the toggle switch with no result. He raised the flashlight beam to the cables spewing from the top of the box and saw while most were pinned to the wall and led down into the darkened hidden basement one was coiled into a thick hoop of wire. He reached up and touched it, sending down a mist of fine black dust.
For a moment he considered running a cable to it, then reconsidered. The electrical wiring and hardware connected to it were over a hundred years old; trying to run power through it would be suicidal, so he turned the flashlight beam onto the stairs.
They were reflective, slick in the same way as the door, the same sheen that all the stonework seemed to share. He tested the top step, and it was sturdy under his weight. There was no reason it shouldn’t be, even after all this time it was sturdier than any modern building, he mused.
The darkness was complete, and the bean emitted from his torch barely touched the surfaces. Here and there a glint would draw his attention, the Christmas bulb flicker of feeble light that was no more than a reflection of his flashlight beam. It made the stairs appear wider, even though the walls almost bushed his elbows as he made his way down the steps.
He counted them.
He was ten steps down, to the bottom if he were taking the steps to the basement in the regular world.
Regular world.
The term unnerved him.
He could not see the bottom.
Ray turned and looked up the steps to the square of light above, no more than ten feet away, no more than five running steps, but it seemed so much further. The square of light looked feeble, sick and the light leaned away from him as if cowering from what lay at the bottom of the steps.
He turned from the light and moved carefully down the steps into the oily darkness.
It was sixty-two days before anyone noticed, sixty-two days where the world slowly returned to some semblance of normality. Ray had sequestered himself away at 124 Richmond Close before city centres had been closed and before the mask edict had hit those few who still braved the streets. He had seen very little of how much the world changed, and if he had he would have understood why, for over two months, no one had noticed his disappearance.
It was the beginning of June when the beaten-up Volkswagen Beetle pulled up outside number 124 and it idled there for a few minutes before the engine was turned off and its door was swung open.
The woman who stepped out was one that Ray would not have recognised; even though he had been married to her for almost seven years. In the year or so since he had last seen her, she had lost almost fifty pounds in weight and had returned to a life of art; one she had abandoned when she had married Ray. Her pink nail varnish hid the clay that was always caught under them, and her blonde hair had been bleached to almost white by the sun that streamed through her huge studio windows.
She was doing well, and every day she regretted the seven years he had held her back.
She checked the address next to the note she had scribbled down so many months before, climbed the steps leading to the front door and knocked. She let her eyes move over the building’s facade as she slid the note into the back pocket of her jeans. The pictures he had shown her of the building when he had purchased it had not done it justice.
It was a beautiful building.
She knocked again, this time more forcefully.
The building was still half hers and as much as she had learned to hate the man behind the project, she reminded herself to play nice when she saw him; the potential financial penalty wasn’t worth a few harsh words.
She knocked again, this time far more forcefully, then fished her phone from her pocket. She knew he wouldn’t answer, he hadn’t for over a month, but she didn’t want to start breaking windows until she had made one last attempt.
With the phone pressed to her ear she walked around the building and selected a window towards the back of the structure; a hefty stone later and the window was open.
She climbed over the widow-ledge into the relative darkness inside, the air drifting in cool eddied as it mingled with the warm air from outside.
She found herself in a narrow corridor leading from the back door around to the kitchen, in front of her was an open doorway to what she thought would be a utility room when the building was furnished; she popped her head in as she passed and imagined a buyers’ reaction to it appreciatively.
She had to admit that he knew what he was doing with all this; it was just unfortunate that this was all he knew.
In the kitchen she could see the remnants of his work, a sawhorse with a handsaw laid across it, a tool-bag, a phone.
She checked the phone, but its battery had been drained dry, then looked up to see the destruction of the wall opposite.
For a moment she was taken back by it, her eyes playing over the rough-hewn opening and the snaking cables that wound their way through the opening into the darkness.
Her eyes refused to focus for a moment, the darkness too complete for them to immediately appreciate. The small alcove was built out of something black and shiny, like black marble, and inside it was another alcove cut into the wall, two small shelves either side of it. Shreds of cloth littered the floor and threads as thin as spider webs clung to the black stone as if fearful.
On the ground cabled tied with zip-ties snaked down the steps.
She had never decided whether her fearlessness was her greatest strength or greatest weakness. It had led her to many woes but provided many adventures along the way and the pragmatist in her could not take the one without the other.
So, it was nothing to her to take the first step into the darkness, then the second. She didn’t think for a moment when it got dark enough for her to use her mobile phone as a flashlight and when the doorway above her retreated into a dot of light she did not even notice.
The bottom step led to a square vestibule, featureless but for the door to her right. It was a heavy door made of the same material as the steps themselves, but it had swung almost closed and perhaps would be closed if it were not for the cables holding it slightly ajar. She pushed it and it swung inward without a sound.
Inside was more of the hungry darkness that effortlessly ate up the feeble light from her Nokia phone. Her footfalls echoed but the noise was as flat as a poor recording, the clatter of her hard heels as muted as a whisper.
But she was not the only thing producing sound, and though it took a while for her to note it the sound was all around her. Was it the trickling of water from a pipe buried in the stone wall? Or was it the scampering of tiny rodent feel on the kitchen floor so far above?
Or was it a whisper of words shielded behind raised hands?
She shuddered as if struck by a sudden chill.
‘Victoria.’
The name, her name, carried in the whispers, the trickle of fluid and the pattering of feet raising the timbre of the word.
Victoria stopped and her heel scraped on the stone, the sound faraway.
‘Victoria.’
This time she was more certain, not entirely certain that someone had called her name, but more certain that she had previously been and now she thought she knew who had uttered it.
‘Ray?’ She asked the darkness.
The darkness didn’t reply.
She took another step, her instincts pulling her closer to the source of the sound and her eyes picking out something in the darkness, a reflection, or movement.
She raised her phone higher and stepped closer. The darkness shifted, retreating as if it were a living thing.
Machinery surrounded her, cloudy vacuum tubes and brass pipes browned with age, ancient cables as thick as her wrist connected one to the other and everything to a panel bristling with levers and small glass domes that she took to be dormant lights.
Beside the machine was the blackboard, much of the scrawling on it erased over time, water drips clearing paths down it in long relentless streaks. New markings wrote over some of the old, and she recognised the hand that wrote it, she could imitate it herself if she wanted to, she knew it so well.
There were notes and diagrams, electrical components illustrated that she half recognised from her time living with him but never learned to understand.
In bright yellow chalk, standing out bold against the worn grey from many a year ago was the drawing of two bodies, one small and one large wire trailing from them to the dormant machine.
But not every light was dormant.
One shone dimly on it, drawing her closer.
This one was not surrounded by brass but by plastic and she recognised it as the transformer her ex-husband sometimes used to power his professional tools. Cables ran from it, secured with huge clips to bared cables that ran into the brass machinery.
She saw the power button, next to it the reset switch had been tripped. Perhaps there had been a power surge, something had blown somewhere in this weird mess of brass and glass.
She reset the tripped switch and, after a moment’s consideration, hit the power.
She was blinded by the light as above her something akin to primitive floodlights bathed the room in a harsh cold glare.
‘Victoria”
‘Ray? Where are you?’
The vacuum tubes glowed, and the brass trembled.
The whispers became shouts, stage whispers loud enough for the cheap seats, incoherent mumbles that rattled her brain and nerves.
‘Victoria”
She turned towards the sound of Rays voice; then wished she hadn’t.
Victoria didn’t immediately understand what her eyes were seeing, the harsh lights gave the scene the surreal quality of a movie set. The machinery’s edges were hard, the brass standing out against the black wall behind it, but the flesh was soft. It pressed inward where the hard metal had pierced it, the blood and oil congealed to a crust sealing the union.
But she did not understand.
‘Victoria”
The man’s face, Ray’s face, was stony and though the words reached her ears they were not uttered by those lips.
Ray was machine now; his eyes were the glittering dull glow of old bulbs and his fingertips sprouted nails made of copper. His body was twisted, nothing more than a marionette with its strings cut, slumped amid the machine’s tubes.
‘Victoria”
The lips had not moved, and she realised that the word was not coming from the man, the man was gone now, and his body was nothing more than an appendage to the machine. From his lips dripped a translucent slime, within it tiny things glittered like shavings of silver in lamplight.
‘Victoria…?’
Now the name took on a mocking tone and automatically her head turned, as if in slow motion, to the sounds source and once again her brain refused to understand what her eyes were seeing.
The creature was tiny, hunched on the top of one of the large vacuum tubes, the light from it illuminating it from below in a parody of a villain from a silent melodrama. It was no larger than a small child, but its hands and feet were over-sized with distended joints and thin bones. Its head was the same, far too large for the spindly neck on which it balanced.
‘Victoria?’ It said, its lips moving around its too large teeth.
The rags clung to the monster as it leapt from the glass vacuum tube with claws extended, its large eyes, black as a shark, seeming to roll in anticipation. Victoria turned to flee but the thing wrapped its arms around her, and its nails rendered her flesh.
Victoria had never cried out in fear, she could not ever remember crying out in pain either, but she did both now and when she saw lights in the darkness, bobbing reflective orbs that could only be similar creatures scampering towards her she spun to rush the other way, straight into the brass machinery.
Sparks flew and darkness, a true black void, descended on her.
The sub-basement was hewn out of deep rock, even the volcanic rock that originally gave the island its beginning back in the days when the Earth was first finding its form. The rock was dark and strong and many a man had died cutting the cavern to shape. Here and there an eagle-eyed observer would see the hard lines made by tools, but they would have to look closer, and hard to pick the markings out of the darkness.
Few visitors to the deep cavern had the time, or the inclination, and fewer still found their way into the deeper caverns that had always been the destination of its excavators.
When they had found the caverns and had sensed the dark power they contained there, there was a rush of activity; not to understand, no, but rather to exploit. It was an age of mysticism, and it did not take long for the purple robed tellers of fortunes to find the place and setup their home here.
Ray was the first visitor in many years to even glimpse it and, progress being as it was, he was not awed by the machinery but amused by it. He did not look on the mighty vacuum tubes with their coils of wire with amazement but curiosity.
This was why he did what he did.
Instead of treating the machine with the respect it deserved, he treated it as a mere plaything.
So, he rigged power using what he knew of history and a visit to the internet as his guide, confident in his arrogance that whatever the machine would produce would be easily contained and controlled.
He had hauled cables and inspected the dormant hardware, then he had considered his options and took steps to overcome the obstacles. It didn’t occur to him the odds against any of his plan working, and it didn’t occur to him the grave danger his actions might produce. It also did not occur to him why he was so certain of success, and that the success of his plan might not be his own success but that of something else; something leading him through the dark, something watching, something waiting.
It was still waiting when Victoria King arrived on the scene, it felt the vibrations of the old vehicle and the thud of her footsteps, it sensed the discontent and the anger that bubbled under the surface of her smile.
Victoria King never used her maiden name after the divorce, she always intended to, she had no love of the name, but the time was always better spent elsewhere; besides there was time enough; she thought.
It heard this from her, it did not entirely understand it, the concept of pair-bonding was completely alien to it, but anger it understood; it was built for anger. So, when she was close enough it reached out to her and brushed her mind in just the right way, the way that came naturally to it, and drew her in.
This time it had tools at its disposal, it was no longer a stranger in a strange land, drawn here by some infernal contraption constructed by naked apes, this time it had something it had not possessed before, knowledge.
As its body had withered within its mouldering bandages its consciousness had crept along the secret passageways of the minds around it, invading dreams and unsettling those who could feel its presence. Time meant little to it, but it knew that it had been doing that for a long, long time. It had sniggered at the discovery of television and was breathless with the joys of war, but it hungered for flesh.
Then the man had heard it and broken one wall, then supplied the power to the machine to break the other, and then the creature feasted.
There was a flicker of light, like a missing frame in a strip of movie film, like a tiny error in the editing of reality. A slip, a crack, a momentary hiccup, and Victoria saw behind the curtain, the veil that had been slipped over her mind.
She was not a passive viewer to a cerebral play; she was controlled once before, and she would not be controlled again. She saw through her own eyes once more, the eerie room around her bathed in that awful light and the thing at her feet that was once her husband.
Pain stabbed into her, and her eyes snapped it its source. With her right hand she was driving a bared cable into her wrist, she could feel it as it was driven deeper, the cable pushing up the flesh of her arm like a distended vein.
She felt her gorge rise as her hand reached for another cable, this was inserted into her husbands’ corpse, specifically through his throat and up into his head. It slipped free, lubricated by that transparent slime that filled him now, the glistening shards of silver clinging to it.
She thought she saw them move, upward towards the cables jagged tip, and she knew that whatever they were they were alive, and they knew what was to come.
So did she now.
The gorge spewed from her lips in a cascade of half-digested fast food, the stink of milk made her heave again and another lumpy mass was forced up from her stomach.
It splashed across her husbands’ feet, and she felt a long strand of thick mucus hanging from her lip, her arm twitched as she instinctively tried to wipe it free, and she realised that her control was diminished but not broken.
She felt something press into the soft flesh of her neck, a tiny hand and she knew that the thing was still riding her, controlling her like an animal.
Her arm twitched again, the tip of the cable swung away from her as her hand trembled, then she felt the cold slime slither over her fingers.
She tore at the thing on her back, and it came away loosely, as if no more than a child’s doll, and threw it. Its desiccated remains had no weight and she heard it flop through the air before colliding with something fragile, a vacuum tube, and there was a spark of light and the sound of shattering glass.
She scooted backward, the rock beneath her smooth and slick, until she felt fingers brush her spine and she screamed again. She reached out and slapped them away, but they swung back, dead, and cold, and she realised the hand belonged to Ray and revulsion swept through her.
She pushed back in the opposite direction and from the corner of her eye she saw a light, a twisted diamond of white in the near distance. For a moment she stayed still, fighting to draw shallow quiet breath; but the light did not move, so she decided she must.
Victoria climbed to her feet, each movement a cannon of sound in the silence and when she was close enough a sigh of pure joy escaped her lips when she saw that it was her phone, cracked screen and all, and with its feeble light she found her way to the stairs once more.
With Christmas just around the corner the inter-national lock down the world had suffered at the beginning of the year was still fresh in people’s minds. The shops on the high street were almost silent but those wise enough to have an internet presence had done well.
The people around Victoria had changed because of their experience, bus Victoria herself had changed far more.
Many took her new interest to be nothing more than a symptom of her newfound wealth after her husband had finally been officially declared dead. No body had been found but the trail he had left with the phone they had found clearly indicated he had disappeared long before Victoria had investigated, and no foul play had either been suspected or had any evidence been found to suggest it. Midway through refitting the kitchen he had simply vanished, and the prevailing rumour was that either he had run off with one of his many affairs, or one of their husbands had finally caught him in the act; either way, people suggested, they wouldn’t be seeing him any time soon.
Victoria had finished the work she had started on the house, the work that began with boarding up the wall to the underground chamber and then moved in her things.
She could hear it whisper as she lined one of the bedrooms with shelving and she felt its rage as she installed the desk for her research. Quickly the books begun to line the shelves and Victoria’s knowledge begun to grow along with the collection she was amassing.
She would beat it.
She felt it move in the back of her mind.
Sooner or later, she would figure it out.
It whispered that she wouldn’t.
Sooner or later’
She felt its cruel smile.