The Ghosts of Sleath by James Herbert
The fog was not quite as dense further up the hill and the Lodge House soon came into view. There was something wrong and they both sensed it.
Grace gave Ash a swift, anxious look and quickened her pace, almost running the last few yards to the front gate. It was open, just as the door to the house itself was open.
‘Grace, wait!’ Ash shouted as she ran to the front door, her hair loose and flowing, and disappeared inside. Slightly out of breath from the climb up the hill, gentle though it was, he raced after her.
The dusky gloom closed around him as he entered the hallway and he heard footsteps on the landing above. He listened as Grace called for her father, her steps suddenly coming to a halt. She called again and Ash realized the vicar was not in his bedroom. Without waiting for her, he opened the door to the nearby drawing room and peered in. No one there. Grace’s voice came to him again as she searched other rooms upstairs. He walked along the hallway, looking ahead through the open kitchen door; as far as he could tell, it was empty also. He paused outside the study.
Grace’s footsteps were on the stairs as Ash opened the study door. He stood there transfixed.
‘David, he’s not -’
Grace had joined him in the doorway, but her words faltered when she looked past his shoulder into the room. He felt her draw in a sharp breath as her eyes set on the picture over the empty fireplace.
The painted canvas was turning a deep brown in parts as if exposed to a naked flame, and its oils softened and blistered. The paintwork began to crack as small black curls of smoke rose into the air.
They watched in horror as the picture of Lockwood Hall was consumed by a fire they could neither see, hear, nor smell.
35
KATE MCCARRICK CHECKED the signpost through the window of her Renault.
My God, she thought, it’s as if whoever puts up those bloody things doesn’t really want you to find the place you’re looking for.
She consulted the map book on her lap. Yep, Sleath had to be somewhere in this direction. Must be to the right, had to be.
Engaging D, she steered the car through the junction and took the right-hand turn.
The drive from London had not been pleasant, all thorough-fares north, west, east and south congested as hell. Friday evening was a bad time to be heading out of town. When she eventually reached it even the motorway had been chock-a-block, making the journey to the Chilerns not only longer, but extremely frustrating. Dusk was falling and Kate, having taken time only to pick up some things and an overnight bag from her flat, was feeling both tired and peckish. How on earth could all the phones be out in Sleath? She had tried calling the Black Boar Inn several times during the late afternoon, and then the vicar’s residence, to no avail. The operator had informed her that there were problems with the lines for the moment, but service would be back to normal as soon as possible. Okay. A trip into the hills was fine by Kate, and the information she had concerning this man Seamus Phelan might be useful to her investigator. Besides, as much as she disliked to admit it, she was missing Ash.
Love was no longer involved - probably never had been as far as he was concerned - but she still had strong feelings towards him despite his moodiness and irritating world-weary manner. They’d had some good times together - all right, fraught times mainly, but David Ash was still an intriguing person. His breakdown three years ago had taken some of the edge off his cynicism, made him less sure of himself, and if anything, that new vulnerability had somehow increased his appeal. Theirs was always a casual relationship at best, even if intense in passion at times, but Kate had been prepared to commit herself more deeply during his illness; Ash hadn’t allowed that closeness, drawing even further into himself. It had taken at least five months - and then some - for him to overcome his inner demons, and the change in him, oddly enough, was an improvement. He still fought just as hard to expose the charlatans of the psychic world and remained wickedly contemptuous of certain spiritualists and healers; yet there was a new tolerance in him, he was less inclined to dismiss all paranormal and supernatural phenomena out of hand.
By now the sun was no more than a fiery red crescent peeping over the dark, distant hills and Kate hoped she would reach Sleath soon. She needed a good stiff drink, followed by dinner and then - well, she’d play it by ear. Perhaps she’d stay the whole weekend and maybe, just maybe, she and Ash would recapture some of that old magic - or at least, some of that old lust.
She smiled to herself. Oh yes, she missed that. For an enigmatic, self-contained man, David Ash was surprisingly demonstrative where passion was concerned. Until three years ago, that is. The events at Edbrook, the Mariell house, had changed him completely - and no wonder.
The road had inclined steadily for a mile or so and suddenly a stunning scene was offered her through a break in the trees. She pulled over onto the grass verge, not to absorb the panoramic view, but because something else had caught her eye.
Only the very tip of the sun now peeped over the faraway hills, and darkening clouds had begun to gather as if they had been waiting for its demise. The atmosphere was humid, close, the threat of thunder in the air. But it was the valley between the nearest hills that had attracted her interest, for it was filled with a thick yellowish cloud. At least, it looked like a cloud, but it had to be a heat mist or fog. She could just make out a hazy church tower poking from it on the far side, but that was all.
Was the village of Sleath beneath that lot? According to the map it was somewhere close by. How very peculiar. There was no other fog in the region as far as she could see, so why this small pocket of it? No doubt there was some geological reason for it being trapped there. She stood watching it for several minutes, entranced by the weird beauty of the scene.
Eventually, Kate returned to the car, shaking her head wryly. Not what she’d expected for the weekend. Perhaps the fog would have drifted off by tomorrow, or dispersed with the rain clouds, leaving the village open to the sun and all its glory. It was certainly a wonderful location, far removed from the dreariness of the city. She buckled her seatbelt and set off again.
The road soon began to descend, a winding course that kept her alert and her attention away from the brief glimpses of the valley through the trees. The road wasn’t very wide, but thankfully she met no other vehicles travelling in the opposite direction. As she rounded yet another sharp bend near the bottom of the hill she saw the fog bank stretching across the road a few hundred yards up ahead.
Slowing the car, Kate regarded the great opaque barrier with dismay. It looked so impenetrable at that distance. And so … she chided herself for the thought, but it was there anyway … so forbidding.
Two vehicles were parked a short distance away from the wall of fog and Kate pulled in behind them. The drivers were standing by the lead vehicle, a grey Ford van with the red and blue logo of British Telecom emblazoned on its side and rear doors. They stopped talking to look her way.
One of them, the younger of the two, whose hair was pulled back into a lank ponytail, gave her a grin. ‘You won’t be driving through that, love,’ he announced. He leaned an elbow on the roof of his van and rubbed round the back of his neck.
The other man, who, unlike his companion wore a tie with his neat blue-striped shirt, nodded his head in agreement. ‘It’s a freak fog,’ he informed her, adding, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Surely if I use my lights …’ she replied hopefully.
The ponytailed Telecom engineer shook his head. ‘Tried it,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get beyond ten yards using dipped beam. I’ve never seen nothing like it neither.’ He looked back at the slow-swirling mass. ‘They don’t pay me enough to risk driving through that sort of thing,’ he remarked defiantly.
‘I’m going to find another way round it,’ said the other man, who Kate guessed was a businessman or sales rep. ‘No need to go through Sleath anyway.’
‘Then Sleath is up ahead?’ Kate enquired.
‘Coupla miles.’ The telephon
‘Would that upset all the phones?’ Kate asked, realizing now why she had been unable to get through earlier.
‘If the damage is bad enough. Last time this happened was in town when a lorry crashed into one of our green boxes. It knocked out half the town’s lines in one go.’
‘But I have to get to Sleath,’ she insisted.
The engineer shrugged. ‘Can’t help you, lady. If you don’t believe how bad it is, take a walk into it. But don’t go far …’ he winked at the other driver ‘… or we might never find you again.’
Kate decided to do just that. After all, how thick could a fog be? Perhaps it was denser at the edges and this idiot couldn’t be bothered to try too hard. She walked away from the men and they eyed her appreciatively.
‘Be careful now,’ the man with the tie called after her quite sincerely. She was no spring chicken, but he wouldn’t mind.
The engineer gave him a knowing wink.
Kate paused at the edge of the fog, amazed by its opacity and surprised by the odd yellow tint of its particles. There was a rather nasty odour, too. It followed a ragged course to the left and right of her, yet did not appear to be drifting in any direction, although it swirled and moved within itself. She took a step forward and immediately felt the fog’s coolness; a further two steps and it was impossible to see the road ahead. Craning her neck round she could just make out the dim shapes of the vehicles and their drivers behind her. Although anxious, she faced ahead again and advanced a few more steps.
The coolness became a chill and she halted again. This wasn’t right. This bloody fog wasn’t natural. She began to feel disorientated.
Quickly she searched for the grass verge by the side of the road and was relieved to find it, even though it was faint. The coldness seeped into her and with it came a sense of foreboding. She didn’t like this, she didn’t like it one bit. She began to retrace her footsteps, for some reason walking backwards as if afraid to turn her back on whatever lay ahead inside that fog. It was irrational, it was crazy, but she didn’t care. She searched the mist as she retreated, expecting something to loom up before her, something from deep inside those swirling clouds. Nothing came for her, but still she would not turn round. She could hear her own shoes on the roadway and it seemed to be taking longer to leave the fog than it had to enter it. Surely she should have been clear by now? She would run in a moment. She would take a chance and turn and run and not stop until …
The telephone engineer’s sarcastic handclap greeted her reappearance; the businessman gave her a sympathetic smile when she spun round. Kate shivered and kept walking, calming herself mentally so that she would not break into a run.
‘You’d think Brigadoon was in there,’ the businessman said as if a light remark might reassure her.
No, she thought, looking over her shoulder at the inscrutable wall of lazy-moving mist, it was nothing so romantic. In fact, it was downright bloody sinister.
Kate climbed back into her car and sat there catching her breath. The two men got into their own vehicles and executed several-point turns in the narrow road to face back up the hill. The businessman gave her a small wave and the engineer tooted his horn as they drove by, leaving her to sit there alone watching the great blankness through the windscreen.
So what to do now? How the hell could she get to David Ash with the information she had? Although not pertinent to the case he was investigating - at least, she didn’t think it was - her discovery might be interesting to him. And suddenly it began to bother her, for it was curious that this man Seamus Phelan seemed to show up only when major disasters occurred. No, not quite correct: he showed up just before the disasters occurred. She had recognized the name when Ash had first mentioned it to her, but it had taken quite a few enquiries to find out about the Irishman, and even then knowledge of him was scant.
His presence had never been recorded officially in any of the subsequent investigations into the catastrophes - obviously he was regarded as nothing more than a crank by the authorities - but there were people who knew of him, the police, a few journalists, and those in her own field of work who had made studies into the metaphysical nature of such horrendous events. It was from the latter sources that she’d learned of Phelan.
His first appearance had been noted about thirty years ago when at Aberfan, a small mining village in Mid Glamorgan, a tip of coal waste had slid and overwhelmed a school and houses, killing a hundred and forty-four people, most of them children. Nothing more was heard of him until the mid-eighties when a fire had engulfed London’s King’s Cross underground station, incinerating thirty-one passengers and staff. Phelan, along with several other unconnected individuals whom the public were never told about, had been taken into custody for suspected arson and later released without charge.
He seemed to have gone to ground again until 1988 when he had resurfaced warning people in a small Scottish borders town called Lockerbie just before an American Boeing 747 from Frankfurt had been blown from the sky by a terrorist bomb to plough into the little housing estate below. More recently - and this was only rumoured, Kate’s sources had emphasized - Phelan had directed police to a house in Gloucester where twelve bodies had been found buried beneath the cellar and garden area as well as in a field nearby, all of them of women and young girls who had been reported missing years before. This was the first time Phelan had turned up after the event - in all the other cases he had managed to be on hand before, apparently warning people of the danger to come. It was hardly surprising that no one had listened.
And now Seamus Phelan was in Sleath.
Kate thumped the steering wheel and cursed the fog that barred her way to the village.
Why was the Irishman here?
And what did he want with David Ash?
36
THE RIVER WAS SLUGGISH, yet it pushed against the millwheel with irresistible force. The blocks that had held the wheel in place for more than half a century began to crumble, slivers breaking off, pieces turning to dust. A high-pitched squealing, as if some creature were in terrible pain, pierced the night as the wheel juddered, then slowly began to turn.
With its first dragging revolution something bloated and white emerged from the river, a putrefied carcass that once might have been human. Rusted chains bound it to the millwheel’s green-slimed slats and from the open pit that should have been a mouth there came a wailing sound, the pitiful lament of a soul in torment.
For once Sam Gunstone did not bother to pull off his dirty boots and leave them on the doorstep. He hurried down the passageway leaving a trail of mud and dust behind him and climbed the stairs, using the banisters to haul himself upwards. Winded though he was, the farmer kept going when he reached the top. Something was wrong. He didn’t know why he was so sure, and never once had doubt dragged his step. The strange-coloured fog enveloping the fields around his farm, a throwback from the filthy smogs of yesteryear, had initiated his alarm, and for the life of him he couldn’t explain why. The great blank wall of rolling mist that had swept across the fields as he returned from a rabbit-shoot had disorientated him at first, for it was difficult to see more than a yard in front. Its smell was nasty too, and the drifting clouds seemed to cling, making his flesh cold and damp even though it was summer. He had almost been afraid to breathe it in.
Out there in the fields his immediate concern had been for Nell. She was too ill to be left alone for long and if he should get lost in this … He tried to remember if he had shut her bedroom window before he’d left the house. This foul stuff wouldn’t do her poor old lungs any good and she might be sleeping, unaware it was creeping in.
He had dropped the sack of warm dead rabbits he was carrying and waved at the vapours in front of him as thou
Fortunately, as he progressed the fog became less dense - it was as if there was a thick outer ring to it - and soon he was able to increase his pace. He plodded on, his shotgun, barrel ‘broken’, over one arm, and it wasn’t long before he could make out the first outbuildings of his farm. Quickly the farmhouse itself came into view but, because he was approaching from the front and Nell’s bedroom was at the rear, he could not tell if her window was open. He was being a silly bloody fool, he knew that, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong and Nellie needed him badly. Discarding the shotgun, he had broken into a trot. Oh Lord, don’t let me be too late, he silently prayed.
Through the front door, up the stairs, and then he was on the landing and rushing to the open bedroom door. He gave a brief exclamation when he saw that the window was closed, the fog outside filling the panes, but the cry caught in his throat when he noticed the empty bed.
The sheets were trailed across the floor as though dragged along as Nellie had made her way over to the window. The window … Gunstone stared hard at it.
An orange glow flickered through the fog.
No, not that, he thought, not again, not that dratted spook fire. How could Nellie know, how could she have seen it from her bed? He moved closer to the window and peered into the mists, watching the ill-defined flames as they swelled and danced, their flicker muted by the drifting veils.
‘Nell?’ His nose was almost touching the glass. ‘Nellie?’ He called her name aloud because he could vaguely make out a dim silhouette standing before the dim blaze. The figure was short, bulky, wearing something shapeless that could only be a nightgown.