BONELINES
Phil Smith  & Tony Whitehead 

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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.

In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines​ is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light.  ​It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. 

​(You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.)

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Bonelines
  Instalment ​4   (Chapters 9-10)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith

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Chapter 9
 
The next few of Mandi’s days were taken up with chores and paperwork of a kind that twisted her unhappily tight. She had hoped the caretaker might ferry her about, but he claimed to always be busy, which meant she had to rely on lifts from the folk in the camp. She was conveyed in vehicles of varying eccentricity and only a tangential complicity with Newtonian mechanics; in company that meandered across a continuum of infuriating incoherence. These voyages of madness were punctuated by refrigerated conversations in staid back offices about lilies, coffins, death certificates, death taxes, deeds, tenancy agreements, sewerage systems, maintenance protocols, seating arrangements and per head catering options.
 
On the end of the third day Mandi retired to her adoptive parents’ home with cans of various Polish strong beers (incredibly cheap at the local grocery store), a box set of Fellini films she had improbably found in a charity shop and a box of pizza. Mourning was a physical disaster, but a cultural boon; like jilting for songwriters. Sadly, shortly after gobbling a first slice of Margherita, popping the ring pull and sinking into the opening credits of ‘La Dolce Vita’ , Mandi was fast asleep and missed Christ flying over Rome, suspended from a helicopter, and Anita Ekberg cavorting in the fountain in that dress. By then Mandi was drinking at a darker fountain, her teeth cracking against its stern tap, cold water burning the back of her throat. Reeling from the fountain, it was like every other public drinking facility she ever came across; dry and jammed with marbled cigarette ends.
 
When the miserable light of morning finally penetrated her eyelids, Mandi dragged herself out of the waste of sleep and got to work on herself. She scrubbed the night away. Put on new clothes. For no reason she marched out of the camp, under the Creep and headed for the dunes. She wanted to stand on the waste land at the edge of the estuary; surely there was a purity there that could freeze out this ritual of adaptation and boredom she had been shovelled into? Snap the whole thing.
 
It was a thin day. An apologetic sun dribbled through the haze. Marram grass swung unengaged. The day was off its hinges, there was no way of getting leverage on anything. Each of the slippery grains of sand under Mandi’s feet was in a world of its own; one moment she was slipping backwards, pitching forwards the next. The Sett was out of true; the only thing standing in for its centre was the caretaker.  His figure, all in black again, picked out like an inverted exclamation mark against the horizon. He seemed to be watching for something; somewhere off the end of the sand spit there was a playing in the water. Multiple splashes too far apart to be a single animal. Wasn’t it too cold for a pod of dolphins? 
 
Mandi had asked around about the caretaker. Most of the camp residents assumed he was an ordinary handyman, moving from job to job, but others had talked to him at more length. The details varied slightly, but Mandi had built up a picture of a retired academic who had severed family ties and set off on a pilgrimage of self-discovery only to founder in the first few miles with the discovery of a medical condition; he was a biological time bomb and had chosen to give up the grand voyage and instead spend his last weeks or months doing simple tasks around Lost Horizon. The general impression was that he had got to know Anne and Bryan rather better than anyone else; though, generally, the residents were disturbingly vague about anything to do with her parents. Mandi could not work out the balance between how much her parents had kept themselves apart from the community and how much they were effectively leaders of it. After Cassandra’s sudden visit, she had gone back to the soothsayer’s book-swamped home, but the magic had gone out of her; she did not want to talk and Mimir had hovered threateningly, as though he thought Cassandra had already gone too far. When Mandi broached the issue with other residents, even the older ones, they either feigned incomprehension or deafness, claiming not to have lived here at the time or put it all down to pagan infighting, without specifying what “it all” had been.
 
The caretaker bent his monochrome figure down to the dog-eared sands, the gusty wind blowing up a stinging cloak around his stooping. He seemed fixed again. Moving between frozen stances, as if playing a game of statues. With who? Mandi crept through the grass. The sun tinged the grey clouds a half-hearted yellow. Reaching the brim of the highest dunes, Mandi could see how the caretaker was bent over something in the sands; he shifted slightly as if viewing it from a different angle, an artist in a studio at work on a painting. Mandi had seen this kind of behaviour at private views; piss poor painters disguising their paucity of product behind the smokescreen of performance. The caretaker was clearly satisfied with his efforts, for he clapped his hands and turned abruptly back towards the camp, though not before making an odd bowing motion to the sea.
 
Mandi waited until the caretaker was out of sight and then slithered down to the beach. She followed the caretaker’s footprints; that was hardly necessary. On the strandline was a large circular assemblage of objects: chewed rubber ball, breezeblock covered with barnacles, furniture legs, orange and blue ropes, tree stump, plastic bottle tops and tampon applicator, woven into various rubbery seaweeds. The construction looked similar to the one she had seen previously on the beach; not exactly so but approximately the same materials. The tide had been in and out numerous times since then, it could not have left these same things undisturbed. What were the chances? That the same force that spread them far apart, had brought them all together again? Hardly likely; there was a hand in this and Mandi thought it must be the caretaker’s. But what did he mean by it? The first construction she had seen had ‘spoken to her’, but in the irritatingly and conveniently vague way that mystical things did; suggestive of snake oil and publishing opportunities, coffee table books and crop circle calendars. This latest aureole was far more discreet.
 
Mandi was about to kick the thing apart and chase after the caretaker, when she became aware of two things. Firstly, that whatever it was that was playing out there beyond the spit, white horses on sandbanks or whatever, was having a paroxysm; secondly, and less explainable, that the caretaker was standing directly behind her. Without turning she tried to picture him there; she knew he was. All that would come to her was his black silhouette, faceless, his features hidden inside his hood, his hands gloved, his coat zipped up to the bottom of his invisible chin. Yes, even a slight glint around the eyes, as if he were wearing goggles. The impulse to kick away the assemblage in the sands shrivelled in her thigh. The waves around the spit raved. She clenched her fists and turned.
 
Mandi tried to speak, but when she opened her lips she felt darkness on her tongue and an emptiness in her throat out of which nothing could come. A huge and winged something passed over the waters behind her. Though she knew the wind was seething, she could hear nothing of it. Time was a pocket watch wrapped in cotton wool, space put away in a lead-lined box. Nothing radiated, light stood still. Her mouth aged aeons; cities were raised and fell in the ruins of her gums. It was ridiculous; that she, Mandi, presented with any situation, no matter how trivial or absurd, would have, could have, nothing to say. Opinion was a dried angler fish skin.
 
In place of words, Mandi and the caretaker held each other’s gazes, in the soft hands of professional controversialists. Professors of their own grounds, the theoretical carpets pulled from beneath their feet. The sands making new dunes around their boots. The caretaker was not a pillar of darkness, sat up on the rim of the dunes, his hood was back and the wind mussed his bristling white curls, the watery sunlight bouncing in his sad blue eyes. Pain played around his lips; he seemed more hunched than before, as if the strings that held him together were tightening inside. Mandi wanted to speak words of reproach, but they would not come; then words of sympathy, but she had none of those either. Instead, they both looked, in blinding comprehension, at each other; one at the other’s troubled waiting, the other at an impatient wanting to know.
 
The caretaker was the first to move; turning back towards the camp end of the dunes. Mandi chased after him and caught up. Her stumbling run released words; the angel passed and they came tumbling, embarrassingly, out of her.                     
 
“You, you, you, I thought you, what were you, what is that? It was here before? That can’t be. They told me, the people in the end trailer, you were professor of... why did you leave? Is something going to happen? To you? Why do I care this much, is it because you knew Anne and Bryan better than any of their.... what are they? Why are you here?”
 
In answer, the caretaker stopped and looked out across the flattening sea. She followed his gaze.
 
“What am I supposed to be seeing?”  
 
“My purpose. Did they tell you that I am ill?”
 
“They... implied as much. They dropped their eyes.”
 
“Cowards... you would call them... what?”
 
“Snowflakes.”
 
“You know that’s a racist term? But then that would make me a ‘snowflake’?”
 
“Correct. Or not necessarily. Go on.”
 
He laughed. “Can I be honest with you?”
 
“No, probably not, but you are going to try anyway.”
 
“I want to carry on here. I have something to finish, until it finishes me. I don’t think you’ll find a more conscientious caretaker than me. I never forgot the skills I learned when I was younger; I was an electrician’s apprentice before I got caught in the jaws of the thinking establishment. Fixing dull things has always been my way of staying sane at weekends. That and a good wife; when she died I lost interest in thinking, I just wanted to use my hands, listen to what was inside, under all the chattering ideas. You think that’s laughable?”
 
“How would I know? I’m not you.”
 
“No, you’re not me, but you can ruin my last few... months, by getting rid of me. I need the physical structure this job gives me.”
 
“I don’t see any structure. You seem to be on the dunes most of the time.”
 
“Do you see anything in the camp not up to standard, not working, not fixed or up to speed?”
 
“That pile of flags and crap by the holiday trailers.” 
 
“Ah, that was Bryan. But I can clear it away if you want me to.”
 
“Yeh. Do it.”
 
“Bryan didn’t want anyone going in there...”
 
“Look, Mister Crabbe. Professor Crabbe...”
 
“Ha! Yes, attack the enemy where it thinks it is strongest!”
 
“Was something going on with my Mum and Dad? Something that happened in the past that came back to haunt them? Did anyone tell you anything? Because they sure as hell won’t tell me.”
 
“I’ll tell you what I know. Which is almost nothing. Yes, something happened, twenty years ago, around then. Everyone in Lost Horizon knows about it, but they don’t really know what it was, or what it is. Some of them like to come on as if they know, but if you ask them, they don’t. I’ve tested them; they know nothing.”
 
“Do you?” 
 
“No. I only know how much they don’t know. I feel that gap, Amanda, and it’s big. I’ve got a sense of the shape of what they’re not able to explain and that’s all.”
 
“Which is?”
 
“Something that threatens them all. Something that’s still... live. At least for them. But what it is exactly, I have no idea. I know that they don’t like it, and they don’t like not liking it, and they don’t like... it not liking them.” 
 
“It?”
 
“I can’t tell you that.”
 
“Can’t or won’t.”
 
“Even if I could, maybe I shouldn’t, maybe if there is anything to it you should find it out for yourself, in your own way. Or leave it alone. From the way that the residents react to you, I think you’re the one who could find it out.” 
 
“Are you flattering me into minding my own business?”
 
 “You would have made a difficult student!”
 
He gestured to the mess of objects in the sand.
 
“Those things are not mine. But I would ask you to respect them, and not disturb them. If you find one, let me know.”
 
“Is there someone else on the Sett who is making them?”
 
“Not in the way you mean.”
 
“They’re from the sea?”
 
“That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? If it’s not me, not someone else. It’s from the sea.”
 
The waters had calmed. The froth of a thrashing shoal, or whatever it was, gone. Only the lapping of gentle waves on the shore to suggest how high the winds had been. Though Mandi well knew that not so far away were Channel Islands and then the coast of France, the long unpunctured horizon might just as well have been the edge of the world.     
 
“Not the birds, then?”she chirped brightly.
 
“Not the birds”, he replied darkly.
 
Mandi glanced up. A group of curlews were buffeted back and forward by competing winds, like the scatter of a handful of leaves. When she looked down, the curlews resumed a gird formation; the back and forth of conversation between Mandi and the caretaker echoed in subtle ripples through their holding pattern.    
 
The two unlike companions passed under the Creep. The slides and rides, dodgems and crazy golf were frozen under winter tarps.  Sparks from welding torches jumped, over-bright, across the roofs of the redundant railway carriages, stopped forever in their amputated sidings; holiday homes for the only just connected grandchildren of railway workers and a few train spotters who relished the discomfort. The entrance board at Lost Horizon showed a cloud-wreathed hill with a dark cave halfway up its green slope. That was not how Mandi had seen it on her first night back.
 
“Do you think my Mum and Dad were really pagans?”
 
The caretaker stopped and kicked at the water in a pothole. 
 
“I think most of the folk around here are at playing at it. To them it’s a lifestyle or a business. That’s not how they regard themselves, of course, but that’s how they look to my untutored but professionally analytical eye. If a person were truly a magician, would they make a fuss about it? Or would they keep their secrets secret?”
 
Mandi looked along the line of empty holiday trailers. If their magic were real, where was it hidden?
 
“You are a professor?”
 
“I was.”
 
“Ever heard of Lovecraft?”
 
“On the camp?”
 
“No. Not unless... no, no, someone in history, someone who would have written something. Old writing.”
 
“How old.”
 
“Flowery. Victorian, maybe.”
 
“Only ever heard of one Lovecraft like that... there was a Loveless or Lovelace who was one of the Toldpuddle Martyrs, but the only Lovecraft who was a writer, as far as I know, this is not my specialism, was H. P. Lovecraft.”
 
“Who was?”
 
“Like I said, I’m not a specialist. He was a pulp horror writer, but with a very odd, constipated, rather eerie style...”
 
“Yeh, that’s the one I thought of. But he’s like... he’s famous, isn’t he? I’ve never read him, but I’ve hear people talking about him. Celeb intellectuals, gloomy geophilosophy types, they seem to rate him. Do you know his writing?”
 
“No, it’s just one of those things one knows, without really having any reason to.”
 
“That’s right. But he’s really famous, right? An original manuscript of one of his... whatever...”
 
“Stories?”     
 
“Maybe. That would be worth... maybe a lot?”
 
“Mandi, l don’t know what you’ve found, but if you’re worried about putting money into the camp, stop. If this place is storm insured then you’re going to be fine...”
 
He shrugged and turned away, limping along the uneven track back towards the permanent camp.  Becoming a black silhouette.
 
“What did they tell you?” she shouted after him. 
 
Without turning again, he threw up his arms in a gross gesture of despair; a diamond of crows broke above him and scattered to the trees.
 
 
 
 Chapter 10
 
A lot of things happened in quick succession. Like a bowling strike when one careening skittle takes down the rest one by one. Or those tedious lines of dominoes snaking around some charity event. The caretaker spoke to Cassandra and she was sceptical, so Cassandra passed him over to Mimir and Mimir was credulous and excited and got straight on his mobile to The Old Mortality Club who were presently squatting (they preferred ‘house-sitting’) the Italian Gardens outside one of the small villages in the flatlands close to the Great Hill.
 
“You’re crazy”, Cassandra told Mimir, “hooking up a young girl with that thing?”
 
“She’s not a girl, you’re thinking of her as when... she obviously knows how to take care of herself now.”
 
“She’ll need to. She may need some help.”
 
And Cassandra began to gather together the instruments; a rattle, rhythm stick and bell. She crumbled flakes of a material she had collected long ago. Put a flame to them. The rising wave of nausea told Cassandra that she was in the fug of effectiveness. Mimir went for a walk. The caretaker had long before made his excuses and gone. The smoky trailer shook to the fury of the stricken sorceress, slamming her reinforced boot into the floor to the beat of a cloud inside her head, for she knew that her husband had sprinkled water at the foot of the vine, that sap would be pulsing through the gardens, buds opening and vines suddenly tugging harder to the mortar of the rockeries, baths and altars. Leafy priests would already be shuffling on their petal-robes and processing from their branches, fountains gushing and sluices releasing hot water across yellowy Cotswold stone, adding to the frothing of the crude plunge pools. Steam would gather and then, as if finding its self-confidence, march out across the vats and terraces of the encroached structure; as though a low budget horror movie were being shot in a cloth-eared neoclassical garden. Eras and sensibilities would wrap themselves around each other and it would be far from clear who was fertiliser and who was perpetrator and who would be present to care.
 
A taxi rolled up at the gates. Mandi paid the fare, stepped out, and the private hire shifted hurriedly away. She felt strangely nervous, and clutched the manila envelope to her belly.
 
She looked about her. Though she had been hemmed in by high Devon hedges, she had sensed the expanse of fields and hills beyond, a single giant button of green rising and predominating. It must still be there, all around her; but the house was different. There was no certainty there, despite its size and refined splendour. An old handpainted sign had been screwed to the front porch: THE OLD MORTALITY CLUB. The sign seemed out of place to Mandi; there was something about its gothy retro-crudeness that clashed with the Italianate elegance of the portico. She rang the bell and nothing sounded. She rang again; again, nothing. She pushed at the door and it resisted. She hammered on the door and no one came. Mimir had been very insistent that they were “the real deal”, but maybe the real deal had moved on to more suitable premises. From what she gathered from Mimir, it was unclear if the Club were squatting crusties or a nomadic version of The Groucho Club. When it came to issues of clarity around space and time, Mimir seemed to move according to the multi-dimensional timetable of a personal Valhalla.                             
 
Mandi began to skirt the high wall that encased the property, looking for a gate or gap. The dull beige wall seemed to pulse very slightly. From beyond the wall came the sounds of many voices raised in chaotic togetherness; not a chant but a cacophony, identifiably individual and yet somehow collectively excited. It sounded less than authentic; more like a tape recording of a 1950s cocktail party than directly from voices and bodies. Something giant splashed in water. No wonder no one could hear her knocking. The jouissant cries, more in extreme pleasure than pain, were accompanied by strange music; as if a trio of penny whistle, washing machine and synthesiser had been booked for the gig by mistake. Something thumped out a bass line; a reedy high-pitched line worked its way around harmonies with a mechanical whirr. Mandi preferred R&B.
 
“Come in! You are expected!”
 
Long silvered blonde locks fell from the cranium of a head and shoulders leaning out of the plane of the wall. Its face was wrinkled in smiles, eyes twinkling with mischief and excitement, its broad nose volcanic with pimples.
 
“Grant Kentish?”
 
“No!” and the figure leaned further out exposing a long wrinkled neck and the generous cups of a cage bra. “I am one of his playthings! Hahahaha!”
 
Mandi was not playing along with this. She knew the signs of an ambush better than anyone.
 
“I have an appointment to meet with Dr. Kentish. He is expecting me. I have come about a manuscript.”
 
“O, my dear, come on in! Of course he is, of course he is.”
 
And she stepped out from the Romanesque-shaped wooden doorframe; a sarong in exploding turquoise knotted above a thin and tightly contoured thigh exposed by the lift of the material. Mandi was trying to fight off images of what this elder got up to keeping in this kind of trim. Her body seemed to amplify the sound as squeals and splashes mixed with the odd accompaniment of mechanical music and surged through the doorway. The woman held out a freckled arm in a gesture of melodramatic welcome.
 
“I’d expected...”
 
“Don’t expect, my dear, allow. You will get the answers you have come for. Everyone does.” And she stepped back to allow Mandi to pass through the wall. Well, Mandi said to herself, you are for sure not in Kansas anymore, Toto; as the steam enveloped her and a fluted glass filled with a sticky-looking greenish liqueur was pressed into her hand. It smelt sweet. The steam was rising from a set of crude pools and plunge baths, their stone pillars draped with tarpaulin roofs, fed with hot water from long, thick plastic tubes; a generator throbbed nearby and in the haze Mandi could make out a small music group on a platform, its caped and long-haired Eno-clones playing, respectively, pan pipes, a laundry dryer, which its operator intermittently turned on and off, and synth keyboards. All around the stone lips of the pools, along low walls and across a stone pavilion, were draped ageing and barely clad bodies, mostly entwined in the limbs and words of others. There was something unnaturally generous in the way that the semi-naked figures, clustered beneath painfully orange heaters, paid attention to each other; as if joined in some ritual of mutual hypnotism. No one looked at another person like that in London, not even a forbidden lover.
 
“I’d expected...”            
 
But the Romanesque door was shut and the woman in the sarong gone. Mandi was tempted to leave immediately. The whole thing was a put up, a test of her determination and interest; Kentish was an operator, clearly. He knew how to deal, how to unsettle a client, how to rattle the pupil before enforcing his scholarship; she wanted something from him, but he wanted a cut from her. She had checked him out online. Other than some jealous grumbling, he was extremely well regarded by academics in the field; a rare fruit, an autodidact who could hold his own with professional academics. The only voice Mandi found raised against him was that of a Tony ‘The Summoner’, a filmmaker and ‘researcher’ who had got it into his head that there was a black flying saucer, back engineered by Nazis, buried beneath the church at West Ogwell, a few miles South-East of the Old Mortality Club’s HQ. Kentish’s scepticism about The Summoner’s theory and The Summoner’s fury back both recommended Kentish to Mandi. A familiar figure at both Mind Body and Spirit fairs and university literature seminars, his specialism – American horror literature – had gathered him an doctorate by publication from a non-Ivy League but respected American university. He had not needed to buy his qualifications. So, why this charade?
 
Mandi found a stone jar, decorated with an impish face, into which to tip her poisonous liqueur. She looked around to check that she had not been noticed; the middle-aged revellers were too absorbed in the examination of each other’s wrinkled tans to be concerned with her embarrassment. However, on a small granite pillar, a tiny wren stood at attention, regarding her in the range of its embracing gaze. Absurdly, Mandi felt strangely surveilled; as if the tiny bird could see into her thoughts. The fluted glass was snatched from her hand by a passing young woman; the wren flew off and Mandi lost sight of bird and woman in the fresh billows of steam, while the plastic piping roared out even thicker streams of hot water.           
 
The woman in the sarong reappeared from the steamy haze and beckoned to Mandi to follow her through the reclining middle-aged horde, toward a set of steps that rose alongside a miniaturised castle structure; there was a feeling of very old faked antiquity about the place. A lingering atmosphere of former figment and pretence that had become historic; and these pensioners were playing out some nostalgic, half-baked Roman version of it. Bargain-basement Pasolini. Mandi felt a little queasy; pleased that she could barely make out what it was that was being served on platters, or what it was of the bodies that entered and what it was that was entered. The pornographic muchness blurred into itself, swallowed in its own pools and miasmas. At the top of the steps, leaning on the yellowing concrete of the diminutive fake fortification, a silhouetted figure was sharpening into focus, colours emerging from the background of bright winter sunlight, a large thick weave coat hung about considerable shoulders, a mane of black hair under a jaunty grey top hat, a tweed waistcoat and high black boots. The figure turned on its heels and walked out of sight.
 
As she climbed the stone staircase, Mandi was aware for the first time of the ruin of the architecture; where there should be a door was a gash, where would once have been vines plunging, now masses of ivy hung shaggily. Every surface was covered with velveteen mosses or promiscuous lichens; orange, yellow and red.
 
The woman in the sarong abruptly, but gently took Mandi by the elbow and steered her through an archway, pierced by the trunk, thick as a fist, of a silvery-barked sapling, skeletal for winter, the masonry pieces gaping. Beyond the leaning arch the grounds flattened out and in the distance, framed by giant beeches, was the main house, stood upon its arches, its design hung somewhere between mansion and working mill. Its bow windows and elegant Georgian gables could not disguise the industrial crudeness of its massing. Mandi knew nothing about architecture or history, but she could smell nouveau-riche a mile off, even in fossil form. The flat plain of the lawn ran out and a path beneath a pergola, some trailing shrivelled plant cringing to it in the wind, was overshadowed by the beeches that stood protectively about the main building. A door at the back of the house was open and the woman in the sarong, shivering now, her arms visibly raised in goosebumps, left Mandi and ran wildly back to the party. Mandi was surprised to see the little muscles at the bottom of the hairs on the backs of both her own hands were standing up; she did not feel cold, and yet something ran through her, a chill inside rather than outside. The wrongness of the house, the unfriendly welcome, the sensual aggression of the party; Mandi did not like admitting it to herself, but she was a little scared and that pissed her off. In London this sort of crap was two a penny.
 
“If someone doesn’t come and get me, I am going home!” she shouted through the open back door.
 
A broad, worried face, swathed in the black mane Mandi had seen on the steps, appeared at a window on the first floor and mouthed some words which might have been “stay there” or “go away”. The face disappeared and Mandi stood, shifting from one foot to other, uncertain where she stood in relation to fear and fury.
 
“I am so sorry, you must be... what are you doing down there? Did Saraswati leave you there? I do apologise! Come around to the front of the house and I will let you in!”
 
The head withdrew and the sash window lowered. Mandi, reluctantly, followed his instructions. The house was a Janus. There was none of the industrial crudeness evident in the splendour of the main facade, its parts in symmetrical proportion with each other, its ornaments restrained; the pretence was wildly effective. Mandi felt as though she had arrived somewhere deeply perverse; the balance and adherence to rules out of place between the saturnalian gardens and the darkness of the sentinel trees. The scarlet door, beneath the curve of a Romanesque ornament, fell back and Grant Kentish stepped out, his left hand jutted forward in greeting, his right swathed in bandages.
 
“Pardon the acid burns of dissolution; the artist must suffer for his craft!”
 
He waved his bandages.
 
“Come in.”
 
The house was a shell. As they climbed the staircase, Mandi’s and Kentish’s footsteps echoed down empty corridors, peeped around the corners of doors into bare rooms and echoed again there. The wallpaper had been stripped, ready for redecoration; flecks of sixties orange sat proud of dull welfare state designs and the arsenic greens of what might have been William Morris. Paint hung down in sheets from the high ceiling. Two flights up, Kentish veered off along an equally tattered corridor and waved Mandi into a small room; it was from here, she assumed, that Kentish had shouted to her. It was a stage set; like one of those ever-so-fashionable immersive theatre experiences she had been to, where they made your wear a mask, where no one knows what is going on nor where to go, and every now and then you fall upon an insanely detailed room filled with junk shop bric-a-brac gathered by underpaid designers and interns. Such was Kentish’s study, or the stage set of Kentish’s study. It felt to Mandi as though she were in a recreation of a study that Kentish had once had somewhere else. She was impressed, as she ran her eyes over the spines of a shelf of volumes, that they were all alien to her. She had expected something similar to the products on display at Mimir and Cassandra’s ‘publishing house’, but these were something else; leather bound, smelling of vellum and rosin, their arcane titles, silvery or golden at the tops of their spines, and the exotic names that the authors, she presumed, had mostly chosen for themselves, signified the occupants and creeds of a monstrous fake city, a spectral cyclopean metropolis of half-baked fears and ignorances, poetic stupidities and endless liturgies, where no one lived, but millions had lost their senses at some time or another. Here was a pathological culture as empty as the house. Sat before her, in a generously upholstered armchair, a Bakelite operation equipped with whisky glass, note pad and pencil, strapped to one of its arms, was this fake city’s expert. Tour guide to its mind.
 
Mandi ran her palms along the arms of her chair; trying to stop herself sinking too deeply into its soft interior.
 
“I hope you were not offended by our little party? We have been studying hard these past weeks; every now and then the workers of the soul deserve to lose their minds and give their bodies a party?”
 
“What is the nature of your Club, then?”     
 
“Ah, the Club! Yes. I’m glad you asked. One has a bad habit of assuming everyone knows. No reason why you should, my dear, no reason at all!”
 
And he levered himself up from the armchair and, dapper and lizard like, skipped to a small flower-shaped table crowded with decanters.
 
“Brandy, whisky, whatever you like?” 
 
“I’m fine.”
 
“Fine is not enough here, Amanda. I know who you are and to know you better, it will help if you could show me a little more. I like a whisky at this time in the afternoon. I’d be flattered, but you would be educated, if you joined me?”
 
He patted his right knee in a gesture that Mandi did not recognise; though it might have been done in pain.
 
“Very well. But just a little water, just enough to taste.”
 
“To taste. Good.” He poured two fingers of Black Label into a tumbler and added a quarter inch of water from a goat-shaped glass jug. “Moderation in all things.” He laughed as he handed her the glass.
 
“But YOU...” he almost yelled as he lowered himself back into the armchair, his whisky glass now filled as high as Mandi’s – when did he do that? Stupid tricks, she thought – “are not moderate; you have ambitions and that manuscript that is burning in your hands, you imagine is what? A passport for you? A cash cow?”
 
“I have an obligation to my parents’ estate...”
 
“O, yes, your parents. Interesting people, Bryan and Anne. I wish I had known them better. Everybody does... wish that. What a mystery they were; of course, miserable people like to say that they kept themselves that way to make it appear as though they were interesting. But what if they really were? What if they were playing a game of double bluff? Why would they do that?”
 
It took Mandi a moment to realise that his question was not rhetorical; that Kentish was fishing for an answer.
 
“I’d like you to understand, Mister Kentish...”
 
“Grant, please.”
 
“Grant... that my parents were important to me, but not close. I was adopted.”
 
Kentish did not react; Mandi could not tell if he already knew or not.
 
“Nevertheless, I want to do as they would have wished me to. I don’t understand why, but they...”
 
“Bequeathed?”
 
“I suppose so... they must have had a reason to leave this particular manuscript with all their other papers, somewhere they had told me specifically to look if they ever died.”
 
“They told you that? Where to look if they ever died?”
 
“Yes.”
 
Kentish raised his tumbler in a toasting gesture and then swilled down the contents. As he did so his long black locks fell back and Mandi thought she saw hints of grey at the roots. His top hat hung on a tall stand behind his chair, as though there were two Kentishes in the room; the one overseeing the behaviour of the other. The bareheaded one tapped at the Bakelite tray with his glass.
 
“And you think you have something written by H. P. Lovecraft? The American weird fiction writer, right? Don’t you think that’s a little unlikely? Here in Devon?”
 
“Mimir told me you were less surprised than he expected; that you were anxious to meet with me. He said “anxious”; I’m sure that was the word he used.”
 
“Simple explanation, Amanda,” and a young expression lit up his weathered face. His knotted hands unwound themselves and he straightened. “This is Lovecraft country. Prior to their emigration to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, HPL’s great grandparents, and their ancestors before them, lived in a few villages within ten miles of this spot. Rarely moved beyond them, I imagine. But that was a long time before HPL was publishing; his Devon family died out long before he wrote a word, there’s no evidence that he ever came to England, so whatever you have would have travelled if it’s a genuine Lovecraft story. Have you read it? What do you make of it?”
 
“I skimmed it.”
 
“You can’t skim Lovecraft; his prose doesn’t allow it. You might as well chug Château Montrose.”
 
“Quite. Why don’t you read it?”
 
She held the envelope towards him, but he stiffened in his chair and his arms fell down by his sides, hidden in the recesses of the upholstery, a flap of bandage trailed over a knee.
 
“Let’s make a bargain. Why don’t you read the story to me and I will give you my opinion? Could you do that?”
 
“Sure, it’s a bit, flowery... but it’s not complicated...”
 
“Then it’s unlikely to be Lovecraft, but we won’t know until we hear it.”
 
“You’ll be able to tell just by listening?”
 
“If it’s an existing story of his then I will know instantly. If you have found an original and previously unknown manuscript of probably the most distinctive horror writer of all time, then it will be hard, let’s say, not to have my suspicions. But let me warn you; over the years HPL has had many imitators and multiple homage-tales have been written in his style. Having said that, there is always something lacking in them, unpossessed of themselves; I think we will know one way or the other. Let’s hear it.”       
 
Satisfied, he leaned back in his chair; his tumbler filled once more. Mandi took a quick sip from hers and opened the manila envelope, carefully revealing the pages inside.
 
“Hold them up!”
 
She held them up, the first page of words turned to Kentish. He did not strain forward, but seemed to cringe.
 
“Typed, hmmm? That’s not any typewriter that was around when HPL was writing. I can tell that immediately. However, proceed; who knows by what route an original story might have reached us?”
 
He seemed relieved when Mandi rested the pages on her knees; a confused smile spreading across his lips as she cleared her throat. She sipped again, and began to read.
 
“‘That traces of an antediluvian civilisation with its attendant flora and fauna can be so readily found in the obscure lanes, fields and woodlands of this part of Devonshire has long been known to the coarse laborers that dwell in this lugubrious place. That this foetid and extinct civilization should, through blasphemous dreams, still cast its influence, however, has been the ruin of my family and the reason we are soon to leave these shores for ever with neither prospect nor hope of return....’”

​“That’s not unlike the voice of HPL. More interestingly, for you perhaps, I can you tell right now, that this is not from any of the existing known writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Proceed.

 “‘I am a master carpenter, worsted spinner and chapman. I was born in 1775. I am married to Mary Full and the good lord has blessed us with six middling and honest children....’”

“HPL writes in other voices, he’s not fond of neutral narration.”

“‘We are currently staying in B--------, a small but adequate hamlet a few miles to the north of A-------. As I write this, there is much unrest in the countryside hereabouts, with pressing talk of riots in Newton Abbot.’”

“Ten miles away? If that?”

 “‘The spirit of progress as represented in the threshing machines which have done much to improve agricultural production and profit is causing much anger amongst the more brute and uneducated of the rustic workers. In their pisky-led idleness they claim hardship, and demand of their honest landlords food, money and beer. However, this is of little import to my current situation and the bankruptcy proceedings of which I now must give honest and truthful account...’”

“How often are money troubles a portal to the supernatural? The same with poetry. Carry on. I won’t interrupt you again. Except to say... no, carry on!”

 “...‘truthful’...” ...er... “‘It is my hope that those that read these words will not judge my failings harshly, for they are the failings of an honest man defeated by circumstance and misfortune, but by those unspeakable things that are neither good nor real. What has befallen myself and my family started two winters ago. I was surveying land near T-------,  (a mile or so from our then residence at P------) for fallen oaks from which I might, for a few shillings, obtain timber for the making of barrels, a hard but satisfying line of work for which I always have customers. A local landowner told me that recent winds had caused two large oaks to fall across a woodland track. These were causing him much nuisance and he said he would gladly donate the timber in return for their removal. He described them as being near "The Old Grotto" and pointed the way along a wooded slope towards the distant church at T-----.’”

Kentish shifted violently in his seat.

“Carry on!”  

“‘I picked my way carefully through the woods, following the track bordered on one side by a crude stone wall and on the other by a low limestone ridge. A cold north wind shook the trees, at times I would swear on any book good enough for a church that I heard a choir singing and some wooden instruments for accompaniment, and I saw rain approaching from the direction of the imposing mound of the Hill feared by the foolish. Above me, a little way up the slope, was a shallow cliff face with a gentle but decent overhang.  This I imagined fondly would provide relief. After picking my way through a few troublesome brambles and over a beam or two some cautious soul had placed there some years before across an entrance, I crouched below the rocks as the rain arrived, safe in the natural bowl that I believed providence had provided.  Somewhat exhausted by both the walk and some recent sleepless nights on account of baby Mary's puzzling restlessness, I closed my eyes, allowing myself, wrapped as I was in warm clothing, the hard-earned extravagance of a little sleep as the rain set in.’”

Kentish whispered something under his breath. To Mandi it sounded like “Don’t, man!”, but whether he was talking to the character in the story or to himself, she could not tell.      

“‘I know not how long I was there, maybe it were half an hour, maybe it were longer, but when I opened my eyes the rain had passed leaving the trees dripping and rivulets of water running down the limestone. Steadying myself on the rock I pulled myself up. As I did, something scuttled along the ground away from me. The speed at which it moved momentarily shocked me, as one might be surprised by the sudden and unnatural acceleration of a wolf spider. What possessed me I do not know, and Lord I now wish I had not, but something pressed on me to follow this obscure thing.  

Its direction took me along the base of the cliff towards a pile of stones leading upwards to a small and nigh-perfectly round hole in the arching limestone through which I could see the trees beyond. The hole was just about large enough to walk through while crouching. On the other side, my eyes were drawn in fascination and honest enquiry to a second rocky outcrop. And, propitiously and appropriately given my days’ task, I drew close to two large fallen oaks lying over a track beneath. Perhaps, I remember thinking in good faith, the scuttling creature was pointing me in the right direction.  

A second movement. This time more distant, but no less distinct than afore. First a rustling on the ground through the leaves then, to my great horror, a shape moving across the sheer face of the outcrop. It was there for no more than a moment, disappearing rapidly into a crevice. Its form, I immediately thought, suggested a firebrat or silverfish, but it was in a scale and of a dimension the like of which I never saw. I shivered and my hair stood up tall from my skin. My curiosity, unsavoury and appetitious, outweighed my growing sense of ingenuous unease and I made my way to the abyss wherein the creature had disappeared.’”

A sharp slap of rain burst upon the window pane. Mandi jumped, but Kentish seemed not to hear it. The room had darkened, but she had not noticed until now; the sounds of the party, squeals and musical entertainment, had all but been replaced by the dull thuds of heavy rain. Mandi hardly dared to glance up from the page, so fiercely did Kentish seemed rapt by the tale, but she chanced a glance and was shocked by the wall of furious purple cumulus that was boiling above the beeches. She jerked back to the page.

 “‘Stepping carefully over the two fallen trees, I made my way along the cliff face wherein the creature had, I imagined, concealed itself. Dropping a little, and rounding a promontory I was greeted by the prospect far below me of a short channel cut into the floor of the forest, some fifteen or so yards long and six yards wide, preamble to the mouth of a cavern. The channel was supported on both sides by a crude stone wall and at its entrance I noted some obscure arrangements of stones laid, I thought deliberately to form a foundation or floor. It was, however, the dark mouth of the cavern that drew most powerfully both my eye and my attention. This was the nest to which the creature was retreating on catching a sight of me.

I lowered myself down the slope and stood on the clumsy stone mosaic. The channel, from my new position, suggested the remains now of an ancient building. This must be "The Old Grotto" I thought, remembering the farmer’s words, and played for a moment with an intellectual reconstruction of the building, here a door, above a simple roof and to the back the entrance to the cavern. An old hermitage perhaps, I had heard tales of these eremitic lives and they held some appeal, as befitting any man in a household of six children.’”

The storm outside had turned fierce; whatever music had played around the plunge pools, only the winds howled there now; the tops of the beeches raced and shook rabidly. Mandi glanced up at Kentish, but he was lost in the tale; his eyes shone out of the darkness of his face.  Behind him the hat stand guarded dimly in the murk; the shelves of books, the peculiar collected items, the distended ornaments and rumpled engravings were all fluid now, melding into something that they were not. The room, which had been so distinct and detailed was become marshy, shadowy, enigmatic.   
   
“‘My play with this fancy was cut violently short by the sight of movement in the cave. A shape, that of a person.  I felt the need to shake my head to check my senses. Instinctively, and somewhat nervously, I shouted "Hello". Stepping towards the cavern entrance, I shouted "Hello" a second time. Now just inside the cavern, the vault of which arched some twelve feet above me, I stood, transfixed, my senses straining, trying to glean detail from the Cimmerian shade.

Then I heard it. Indistinct at first, but then more definite. Gentle approaching footsteps; a kind of rapid padding as a goat might cause upon a tiled floor.’”

“A goat?” thought Mandi. “I better end this shit.” But when she looked up to speak Kentish had been completely lost in the darkness, his eyes were as black as his frown, and what she had thought was the room, was now distinctly like a cave. She saw Kentish twitch and she flinched back to the safety of the words, the words were containing the tale; if she could get to the end, they would be spared whatever it was that lurked inside and underneath and around them. 

“‘By now my heart was pounding. I called out again, but where there should be full voice there was little more than a quiet yelp. I thought of turning and running, but I was now held by the force of some unaccountable condition that fixed me to the spot. What emerged from the gloom no mortal man should have need to witness. That through education we can better our positions and have done with the follies of the aberrant supernatural and hobgoblin’s gossip, but this figure, now in front of me, did shake my rationality to its foundations.

The figure, although I hesitate to call it human in any sense we know of the word, was that of a woman; at least let us call her female for want of some more precise equivalent. Visible now fully in the light of a lavish setting sun that had emerged histrionically from the clouds and illuminated the cavern, I saw she was clothed in a long green dress and wore a scarlet cloak around her shoulders. Her hair was a lustful red and fell untidily about her. In her left hand she held what looked like blacksmiths’ tongs, but none of this compared to the horror of that face.’”

Mandi strained against the back of the armchair. With the fingers of her free hand, she dug the nails deep into the palm. 

“‘What intention the good Lord has for such horror I am at a loss to explain. How I am to describe what I saw? As I write my hand shakes and the candle flame that lights this parchment fizzes as if it wishes to extinguish the memory of such a thing, suggesting extinction, annihilation, doom. But I must light another candle and continue this account, for fear that I will give it the power it needs to further its task and gnaw at the souls of other men, until nothing remains.

Her face was not one face. Those features which in our loved ones change only imperceptibly with the passage of time, in this creature changed momentarily and multitudinously. Now the soulful eyes of a young woman in her prime, next the sunken wells of an aged and regretful spinster in her final hours. Now the smooth and conceited skin of a child, next the creased and anxious flesh of a mother worn by childbirth and the labours of the tub.

But it was the mouth that did pierce me. What unutterable blasphemy. Black lips as tight as sloe berries and cold blood. Sanguine fluid poured dark crimson from that hideous hole, staining her neck and chin and the intricately patterned frontispiece of her green vestment, running down to the hem and dripping between her legs to the cave floor.

Slowly, and deliberately, as if a performance, she smiled and as she did she raised the blacksmiths’ tongs. Grabbing her left front tooth, she worked the denture loose and with a grinding tug removed it. I wanted to look away, but was unable. The creature then held out the tooth in the iron tongs and with a simple gesture, a smile, and a fulsome rush of blood, offered me the soiled thing. I felt the walls of the cave close in around me like a furious mob and I had a ringing in my ears. My legs gave way as I swooned, overtaken by emotion and weakness.’”

Mandi dared one glance. She could feel the pages between her fingers; Jesus, she was barely halfway through and Kentish seemed to have folded in two in his seat. No light shone from him, while the walls around him closed in even more, no longer the rounded spines of his library but dull and globular stalactite-like things, masses of something both soft and hard. Worse, much worse, was whatever was beginning to form within the soggy rock of the walls that now stood out from the limits of the room. Mandi remembered the train, and the figure in the cave-like recess of the church porch. And it was coming again. She dare not look up any more, but she must race to the end. The words, spoken, although they were now strangely muffled, as if swallowed by the recesses of the cave, were holding back something within the story, something for which words were a barrier, chains, a cage. She felt as if she were reading for her life.      

“‘W... w...when I awoke I found myself sitting in what I quickly realised was a deeper chamber of the cavern. It was lit by a central fire, the light from which illuminated a damp almost spherical chamber whose walls were hung in a mass of flowstone, petrified rivulets that had formed into long ribbons of varying thickness. Where some of the ribbons merged, the calcite had formed into rounded shapes, simulacra that, in my still dazed state, suggested a hideous fauna of writhing many-armed cuttlefish and Hindoo mermaids that the darkness was kind to somewhat conceal.

I tried to lift myself off the ground. As I placed my hand on the cave floor I felt a sudden stab to my palm. I found myself holding the incisor of some huge beast. And where it had found my hand, I found others. Teeth of varying sizes and categories, and with them, shining bones. The closer I looked, the more apparent it became that the cave floor was composed in generous portion of such osseous matter, perhaps many feet deep, the origins of which at that moment I shuddered to speculate upon, when all speculation was curtailed by the light touch of a hand on my right shoulder.

I screamed instinctively and, in my crouched position, turned awkwardly, falling backwards onto the bone floor. Above me stood what I initially thought to be the creature from the cave entrance, though now the countenance of it had settled into that of a pretty female in its later youthful years. And there was no hint of blood now around her gently smiling lips. In a moment of relief, I realised that she might be my rescuer. The farmer's daughter perhaps, familiar with these caves and perhaps having spied me from a distance entering the caves whilst walking her father's fields.

"Thank the Lord" I said to the girl."Might you be able to help me out of this place?" hoping for some gesture of deliverance.

The girl, this Daughter of Aphony, in silence knelt in front of me. No, she was not my rescuer, and the fullness of her hideous intentions was now to be revealed.’”

Mandi paused. The more she read the worse the tale became; the deeper and deeper it seemed to drag them both into its cavernous labyrinth. How would it unravel; had the writer, whoever it was, bothered to unfold the horror, and free its captive? Mandi wanted to look up, to see if the hallucinations of the story had materialised in the room, to see if Kentish was OK, was an ally against whatever it was that she had spoken into coming close. Or possessed by it? But she dared not; she read on. Almost showing the words, chanting them like spells to keep the imps, hobgoblins and black dogs from the door.     

“‘From her side, as if she made manufacture from thin air, the creature drew a scythe, the type of which I was familiar with in the calloused and insensible hands of the field labourers whose cursing and drinking despoiled the otherwise gentle landscape. Despite her youth and evident beauty I sensed the same crudity and sensuousness here before me as the girl began to loosen her dress at the neck, picking slowly and deliberately at the emerald green buttons. Such wanton-ness I thought an outrage, causing tension between my reason and the loud urgings of that sinful flesh which is a common burden to all men. I imagined M___ at home with our children and in my confusion began to speak the 23rd psalm aloud; but in the confusion of the chamber’s air my words sounded more like the obscene shantees of the labourers than the choir’s canticles.

The creature, insensible to my confusion, revealed her throat and chest to the level of her heart. Smiling sweetly she bade me look upon her, which in guilty truth I did, and she did slowly raise the tip of the scythe to the base of her throat and without an instant of hesitation drew the blade down her porcelain white skin, its translucence parting to allow pearls of blood to form along the incision. On completion of the mark she ran her ring finger along the wound and in one graceful movement offered me what I took to be its salty taste. I refused.

Undeterred by what I thought a moment’s confusion in her eyes, she placed the blade’s unforgiving edge now on her left index finger. “Please stop" I called, the words lost in the depths of cavern’s tunnels as she drew the scythe quickly and forcibly through skin and bone, cleanly and without a sound or a hint of pain in her still smiling face. The finger fell to the floor. I felt myself go faint and loose in the limbs as blood flowed from the revealed finger stump. Carefully, with her left hand she lifted the finger from amongst the teeth and white dry bones and offered it with an action so appealing that were it not for the horror of the object I would have taken it as from M___ I might receive a slice of lamb from the dinner table.’”

Mandi felt something cold and wet run down one of her wrists. Careful not to raise her eyes, careful to continue reading, she gently eased her fingernails out of the wounds she had made in her palm. 

 “‘...I will not take the demon’s gift, I repeated to myself.

I search privately in vain for reason or meaning to it all. I am at a loss, though throughout my internment in this official cavern of the local authorities, behind the shock and revulsion, there was a feeling, that these creatures meant me no harm at all. And indeed that they might be inviting me to partake in something innocent. That through accepting what I was offered I might become subjected to some necessary gnosis. However, as a rationalist, and a God fearing subject of this kingdom, I could not, and will, with all my strength bear what seems the terrible and unjust consequences of my refusal.

This refusal was sealed and impiously confirmed by the witness of the creature’s third offering. Even now, I hesitate before committing this part to paper; for it exceeded by a different quality of degradation what had gone before. But speak it I must, with the light of The Lord’s Bright Truth, and in all humility these are the simple facts of what I was made to witness.

The creature replaced, with some care, her dismembered finger on the bone strewn floor, arranging three of the doggs teeth around it, one by the nail and two at the base, forming a triangle, the lower longer tip of which, along with the finger, pointed towards me. She closed her eyes for a few moments. Still paralysed by uncertainty, my voice was now lost; I felt as empty as the earth. After her prayer or whatever it was, she opened her eyes and once again smiled kindly. As she did I noticed a slight movement on the walls behind her...’”

Involuntarily, in a spasm electrified by the words, Mandi looked up. Kentish’s folded body had begun to glow, and eerie light that matched none of the colours Mandi could give a name too had begun to leak into the space; Grant Kentish’s eyes, eyes that shone in the darkness, were now the blackest parts of him. And behind, a thing shifted, gave a shimmy that was pretty. Mandi knew what was coming and thrust her face down through the gloom and back to the pages, scrambling to find the next word and finish the thing!

“‘... one of the r... r... ribbon like formations moved. The cord of stone was gently pulsating, as if being filled by some noxious effluvium. Others, similar knobs and trails of limestone rock, began to breath in a similar manner, as if the cliff were come into unnatural life and the cave walls one grey mass of heaving tentacles gesturing and inviting me in the same way as had the demoness in her form of a pretty girl.

I looked back in horror at the maiden, who had now once again picked up her scythe.

“Please God" I cried. And my words rippled through the bowl of wormish, serpentine, intestinal things that shook and trembled from the innards of the cavern, like unfortunate amphibious things turned inside out. 

Holding the scythe at her throat, just below her left ear the girl glanced down at the triangular arrangement of teeth and, as she did, a dozen tendrils slipped down from the cave walls and inched towards her, reverently entwining first her legs and then her waist until it appeared she had herself become half serpent. A swarm of many legged creatures, giant invertebrates, silverfish, centipedes, cockroaches emerged impossibly from fissures between the tentacles; such was the absurdity of this stampede of unlikely beings that I laughed for joy at the likelihood that this was all a dream or vision. I was not comforted; the writhing mass appeared to give the she-devil great joy. She threw her head back in a kind of adoration, and as she did, drew the blade strongly across her throat. The wound gushed blood. How much more of this could I bear as I watched her carefully and deliberately with numerous cuts sever her head completely!

The skull, still smiling, its lips open in its preposterous kind of passion, rolled and was caught by two of the tentacles. The remaining tentacles now flowed all about her, as waters in a gully, some entering the gushing wound at her neck. Drawn with horror to the bloodied head I watched helpless as the tendrils offered me up the terrible thing. The third invitation. Its eyes were still open and still it made that smile; “come in” it seemed to say “come in”. And then a gentle sound, a slight movement of lips; my Good God, it was actually speaking, not in my head, but from its mouth! Whispered, that single word to this day I know not the meaning of, but that I cannot shut it out of my mind.

"Dumno."

And with that single word my world collapsed...’”

But Mandi had not spoken the word. The word had sounded in the room, for Mandi, she was sure, had not moved her lips. She was still taking a breath when it sounded in the space; and the voice that spoke it was not like hers. She did not recognise it as a voice at all; but more like an escape of gas, a fart, or the sound a house might make when going cold at night. It was not a human sound. Mandi shivered. Kentish was still, his eyes risen up inside his skull following the shadows on the walls of his imagination. 

“‘Every rational thing that gave the ground solidity beneath my feet, that caused the sun to rise and set, the seasons to follow each other, the books to balance and the contracts fulfilled, word kept and promises honoured. Every single design the Good Lord had built into his perfect world, lay as waste around me. And as certainty retreated, the floor of the cave gave way and I felt myself falling into darkness.

I do not know what happened next, and in all honesty I am grateful for God's grace to have been spared the details of that fall and any sense of what lay beneath the floor of that hideous cave. Somehow, by what tentacular, visceral or magical means I shudder to think, I had been transported from the cave up into the forest above, and to the shallow cliff face where I had first sought shelter from the rain. The fall through the floor of the cave floor had clearly caused me to lose consciousness and drop into a sleep, the moon was high in the branches above me and the trees resounded to the insistent calls of two owls. It must have been some hours that I was lost.

Grateful for my release but now burdened with images of my captivity I stumbled back to P____. The following days were difficult. I fell first into melancholy, unable to talk to M___ about my encounter, or why I was so troubled. I could not work, the site of the sharp-edged tools of my profession filled me with revulsion. I feared that if I were to pick them up I might do some similar mischief to myself or to the children. And worst of all, in my dreams I kept repeating my time in the cave, struggling from the sight of blood and swarming tentacles, striking out aimlessly in the darkness and swinging the counterpane about the room. The children, hearing my confusion, began to dream their own dreams; G____ now wakes every night crying out against “the many arms!”, “teeth in the arms!”, “the beak, the beak!” What awful inheritance have I passed on?

But what was very worst was a thing that was not a thing that I dare not even dream of, nor confess to anyone since; my hand is still and firm as I write this, but, within, my soul trembles and has no anchor. For I know there was a kind of insubstantial matter beneath the mosaic of teeth...’”

The room was brightening. The storm was passing. The shelves of books, the antique furniture, the cases of fossilised molluscs and posed taxidermies acting out scenes of predation and hometown humour. But none of that was any comfort to Mandi, as she garbled chains of prose, rushing the words together into streams of stringy gloop, the story distending like a single tentacle, covered in rough hooks and phrases, bioluminescent with metaphors from unreal zoologies.  

“‘... do not ask me how I know this, but I do. There was a kind of being without existence, a kind of shadow without a primary object, a darkness that was never lit, a many-armed Nothing that is real and unreal and defies human thinking; for though I KNOW this thing, I cannot KNOW it! I feel and believe in it, I have faith in it every bit as much as I have faith in God, I could not withstand the lure and accusation of this blackness, blankness, toothless maw feeding on my hope, night cast upon my day, hood of absence tied around my mind, falling down inside; like a house built on a cliff falling slowly into an abyss.’”

The sun burst through the fleeing clouds; Kentish’s frozen face glowed like an antique bronze unearthed by greedy tomb robbers.    
 
“‘I sought solace in the drink, to quieten the riot and decline of my mind.  Those callous sons of the earth I had previously reviled became my confidents as we shared flagons of cider. The beer house became my church. In my stupefaction I would tell my story to eager ears, and by return was told ridiculous myths of particular hobgoblins in this or that part of the lane, of giant worms coiled beneath the chapels and hills full of fairy folk, malignant influences, the upturned hull of Noah’s Ark beneath a field, unseen things and fancies that would trap and mesmerise the unwary traveller. "Ah, they loves your teeth them little winged demons, always turn your pockets out when walking these lanes at night. Ha ha ha!"

Of course, it was all nonsense, yet when it came to walking home back down the lane or across the fields, I saw them, looking oft and again over their shoulders, eyes bright with fear, but my logic like theirs had so abandoned me that I became obsessed by seeking out these tales. One aged farmer, well-schooled and erudite, but ravaged by gout, after gladly accepting a few pennies for more Bordeux liberally poured from the pub’s dusty bottles, told me that my story was "the story of the ancients" from the "bible days before the flood". That there was a kind of theology to the chaos in this land, an opposite gospel in these fields and deep lanes, that had been brought here by a fallen star and its crew, a race from the darkness of the skies, a race of fallen and unspeakable beings. Reaching for his battered copy of the good book he read me this passage from the Book of Revelation:

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

He said that in the days before the word of God arrived, the people were rotten and worshiped strange idols and the hills ran wild with huge dogs. But God judged them and banished them beneath the earth where they became all white and thin and withered away and a different people came to live in these parts; hard working builders of churches and farms.

In my growing desperation I took my story and these tales to the Reverend J____ at T_____. Sitting in the church nave he was quick to remind me that my return to the flock would be most welcome and the weekly collection had been much denuded by my contributions to the beer house...’”

Mandi could feel a single page now between her fingers. The ordeal was almost at an end. The hat stand had resumed its post; the darkness was entirely gone. The lines of the engravings stood sharply in their frames. Mandi heard the page rustle between her fingertips, things felt real again. Birds outside were singing in protest at the storm. The roar of the leaves had wholly gone. All was held, all was safe. Kentish was reviving, movement returning to replace the mask his face had become.

“‘With some nervousness I started my tale. To spare the tender ears of the good Reverend, I was charitably economical with some details, and interspersed the story with the legends I had been told.

However, I could not finish my tale for a sudden and unexpected sight of something so ghastly that I had to beg my pardon and flee that place. For behind the Reverend, in the tracery glass above the altar, high up towards the vaulted ceiling I noticed, a collection of brightly coloured images of the hosts of saints. There, in all plainness on the left was the scythe-bearing demoness of the cave. And on the right a woman holding a tooth bearing a striking resemblance to one of the juicy faces I had endured in that terrible place. I fled the church and its startled priest, and ran, dodging hobgoblins, down the path. 

I wandered for days in the lanes and fields, alone and without company, feasting on blackberries and centipedes. My world was empty; my stomach felt cavernous and distraught. When I finally returned to my workshop and my customers brought me plans for new furniture, fittings or machinery, I could make no sense of the straight lines in the drawings. And M___’s spinning of wool was impossible for me to bear; each strand brought to mind those heinous tendrils that bore the head of a temptress. And all the while, that word...’”

Mandi could not speak it. But she must. Or it would be spoken. Kentish, as if fully recovered of his faculties, stirred and looked anxiously at Mandi, as if he understood the extent of the challenge and the value of the stake. She ground out the words between clenched teeth:

"Dumno. Dumno. Dumno."

And the moment she had, she knew she had let them out, she knew she had made a terrible mistake, she had fallen for the trap, fell into the pit, though quite what it was she had done, she had no clear idea, except that some very bad things were celebrating deep in the darkness to which they had nearly been taken. But now, Mandi had left the door ajar. Left the key in the lock, left the lock on the latch. And that thing down in the deep darkness, it knew now, it knew how to get back to them, how to find its way. 

“‘By now my business was failing. Debts accrued and my wife pleaded with me to find a way back to my former self. How I wished I had never strayed into that terrible place; nor ever felt the Presence, greater and lesser than God Himself, that sat in its lair beneath the enamel floor.

And so it is that as I write this we are now packed to flee this place and start afresh in the New World, for I feel that only distance will rid us of this curse and bring us back to sanity; the doctors have granted me freedom on condition I write this missive to them, but I insist they are not to read it until we sail. We shall depart before the bankruptcy hearing at C___, slipping away quietly and leaving this madness behind. Taking nothing of this with us in our luggage. This place has been abandoned by God and I beseech anyone who should read this account to seek refuge away from here and leave these folded hills to the thorny briars on Satan's cloak and whatever else it is that languishes beneath the county.’”

Mandi put down the pages.

She looked up at Kentish and he was grinning manically; as if the thing had fixed his teeth in a grimace. She stared into his blazing eyes for a glimmer of creepy malevolence; anything human.  The tape had stuck in the machine, the programme was loading, the screen had frozen. Then the cosmos hiccupped and Grant Kentish was already halfway into a sarcastic rant that took in failure to restore power to the house, the sinuous dishonesty of book dealers and a deep exegesis of the metaphorical taxonomy of the ‘LOVECRAFT ORIGINAL’. Finally, his verdict, brightly: a compelling tale, no doubt, but not HPL, more like an early draft of, no... some rough notes... and then he paused, unable to explain himself.

“... if someone who came before a writer could write a bad copy... a pastiche of their style, but before they came to write anything, a primitive model, a crude and primal ur-text, as Geoffrey of Monmouth stood for Shakespeare or Ovid before Arthur Golding transfigured him... as Homer for Chapman if Keats is right, I’ve never read either... this might be the raw material for an HPL tale, but nothing is realised and everything is too explicit, too obvious, it doesn’t conjure anything except its description of itself.”

“So, it’s worthless?”

“I didn’t say that, my dear, but what you need is an antiquarian, not a literary critic.” 

He glanced down at his belly and from its folds withdrew a large timepiece.

“Hell’s bells. We’re going to miss the fire wheels and we haven’t had dinner. You can’t go to the fire wheels on an empty stomach, Amanda!”

Mandi wasn’t aware that she was going anywhere on any kind of stomach.   
      
“Yes, you’re coming! Where better to meet an antiquarian than a wholly fabricated re-enactment of a non-existent history! They can’t keep themselves away! Where’s the gong?”

He held up his finger. From deep in the bowels of the house, a tinny dinner gong was clanging repeatedly.

“Alright, alright, we’re coming”, and he swept Mandi from the room, as though she were a flock of angry geese. At the threshold, Mandi paused and looked back; she knew that Kentish would know too, but she had to. She had to know.
 
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