David Riley: Out of Corruption

So this, I thought on that fine September day less than one year ago, as I drove my car round a bend in the lane and drew up before a pair of wrought-iron gates, is where he lives. Despite the brilliance of the sunshine I could not help feeling somewhat disappointed. For the drab grey building visible beyond seemed to personify for me all that had struck me as wrong about the town I had left only two miles away, before passing through the tree-lined meadows and farms along the lane. The uncurtained windows of the house, however, the leaf-strewn pathway rank with mould and long, bare streaks of clay, all these gave off such an air of desolation that I felt instantly depressed. It was certainly not a place which I would have chosen to visit at any time of the day of my own free will, and certainly not at dusk, when the shadows lengthening all about the estate seemed to intensify its ugliness. Why Poole had decided to buy such a place I could not imagine, and I roundly cursed myself for having so readily agreed to come down here to visit him over the week-end. I only hoped, as I stepped out of my car, that the inside of the house would prove to be of a more hospitable appearance than its. facade.

Its blank, almost senile-looking windows stared down at me as I neared the door and rapped upon it. Soon, though, I found myself ushered deep inside the old house in Poole's redecorated study - a book lined room full of polished wood, paintings and leather armchairs, with a coal fire roaring in an elaborately carved hearth full of ebony cupids and flowers. Poole - tall, thin, with the concealed strength of a mountaineer - was in the best of spirits. My own, in contrast, though relieved to a degree by the signs of redecoration, were overcome by a newer and less easily explainable feeling of abhorrence. There was a certain, indefinable quality about the house which I strongly disliked, and I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that, however much Poole might enthuse about it, this initial feeling of mine would not be changed. The more I saw of the house, in fact, as Poole showed me around it, the stronger this abhorrence grew.

Upstairs it was almost derelict, with large, grey, vacuous rooms that echoed their emptiness through fibrous veils of cobwebs and dust. Looking at them I could well imagine this place as:

A house without a living room For dead it was, and called a tomb!

"I don't intend using them much," Poole explained, interrupting my thoughts, "except, perhaps, as store rooms, though I might have two or three done up for guests."

Presently we returned downstairs to the hallway where, at Poole's insistence, we turned off into an arched alcove, within which stood a sturdy wooden door that led to the cellar steps. Lighting a paraffin lamp from a shelf beside it, he unlocked the door and led me down the damp-slicked steps beyond into a tactile darkness that took us into its frigid depths like the waters of a Stygian well.

"Once, before neglect did its worst," Poole said, as he raised the lamp up above his head so that its light could filter across the cellar floor a few moments later, "this was used for storing wine in." The decaying ribs of sundered barrels, furred with mould, could still be seen across the wet flagstones, amidst the remnants of broken bottles and racks. "Some good vintages there were here too," he remarked, stooping to pick up one of the bottles. Its label slid from it like pulp. A curled spider rolled across the floor, spilled from the bottle like a withered grape.

Faint in the distance between heavy pillars I could make out extensions, like passageways. When I asked him about them Poole replied that most had been bricked up long ago. "Or were filled in with rubble when their ceilings gave way."

"Have you been down here often?" I asked, amused at his interest in the dismal place.

Surprising as an affirmative answer would have been - even from Poole, who I had long known had a somewhat morbid temperament - the way he said, "No," came in an unexpected tone of voice. Shaking his head in consternation, he went on: "Before I decided that it was a pointless task, I had some workmen in clearing it out. What they found should have been enough to keep me returning here again and again. But I rarely do."

Turning, he led me across the cellar floor, saying: "I'll show you so that you can judge it for yourself."

As we walked, the air seemed to congeal about us into diseased vapours, smothering us with the sealed-in stench of decay. Our footsteps echoed from the dim expanses of the cellar as we passed beneath the stone built archway into one of the extensions. Though I had only expected it to be a glorified alcove, it went on for nearly thirty yards before ending in a square shaped chamber of ancient, crumbling bricks from which the burnt-out stumps of old torches poked like bony fingers blackened with age. Hanging the lamp from one of them, Poole pointed at the floor. There, deeply cut into the unworn slabs of stone, was the intricate design of a five pointed star, set within two circles, around and in which various signs and arabesques had been carved.

"Devil worship?" I asked, as I felt at the grooves. They were about two inches deep, almost the whole of which was filled with a foul slime.

Poole shrugged. "Probably, but I don't know for certain. I don't even know how old the thing is, nor who must have made it."

"It's old," I confirmed, standing up to look down at the design as a whole. "And authentic, I think. I recognize a few of those signs."

"So do I," Poole said sombrely. "That's the reason, I suppose, why I don't come down here often. It's the one place in this house where I actually feel afraid. Perhaps it's something to do with vibrations from the past, lingering here - I don't know. What I do know is that whatever went on here when this chamber was originally made and used could hardly have been of the more innocent nature such as our modern "fireside" witches get up to. Why else but to conceal the reverberations of a scream should it have been placed so far underground? Maybe blood smeared this devilish creation. Maybe that slime inside those grooves is made of blood itself."

Feeling a certain revulsion at Poole's unsavoury fascination in the-thing, I diverted my attention to the walls. At various points about them there were iron bolt heads riddled with rust. Though there was little of interest in them, one caught my eyes more than the others. The bricks around it appeared to be loose. Inspecting them, as Poole stepped over to join me, we began to pull one of them away to see if there was anything interesting hidden behind it. Within a few minutes five of the bricks were laid on the floor and a sizeable hole uncovered in the wall. Though at first sight it had looked as though we had only come upon a narrow crevice, further dislodgement of the bricks showed that an earth-lined burrow or tunnel large enough for a man to crawl along extended outwards at about chest height for several yards before inclining upwards out of sight. The lamplight illuminated the straggling roots hanging like lengths of matted grey hair inside it.

While Poole stared in rapt and muttering fascination along the burrow, I turned away from it to inspect the bricks we had piled on the floor. Looking one over in my hand, I noticed that it had been heavily scratched on one side as if by claws. Evidently, losing interest in the thing, some rats had tried to force a way through the wall over the years - and failed, I supposed, though their efforts had weakened the mortar enough for us to finish their work with ease.

Noticing that Poole was still staring into the tunnel, I began to feel annoyed.

Taking him by one arm, I said: "Come on. It's about time we were leaving this dismal hole. It's damp and raw down here, and though you might not mind risking rheumatics, I do…"

Stones and lumps of dislodged earth began to tumble down the hole, to scatter like mice across the floor at our feet. And with them, like the gases of decay, a noxious stench far worse than any we had encountered thus far emerged to blanch Poole's face in an instant - and no doubt my own as well. Barely able to restrain our nausea, we fell back from the hole.

"The sewers?" I asked. My words sounded sick in the echoing emptiness of the chamber, and slightly unreal. The air was rapidly becoming discoloured, whilst the lamp grew dim, guttering long black tails of soot. In some incomprehensible way sensing danger, I reached for the lamp, grabbing Poole's arm once again.

"Let's get out of here," I muttered coarsely, ignorant of all other impulses but to flee.

The scraping of grit tumbling down the hole filled me with alarm. A moment later we were hurrying self-consciously across the cellar towards the steps. Climbing them in an instant, we paused only at the door into the hallway. Turning, I peered back into the impenetrable dark of the cellar once more, with its mouldering barrels and decay. There was nothing to see or hear save the distant dripping of water somewhere, yet it seemed to me that someone or something stood, concealed in the all-encompassing darkness, glowering into my eyes. My scalp prickled and I felt a sick bout of fear overwhelm me. The next moment I was out of that hideous chamber, with the reassuringly solid weight of the door slamming shut beneath my hands.

We spoke no more of the phenomenon that night. Perhaps it was fear or nervousness that sealed our lips, but I think it was more likely shame. After all, it had been no more than a few sods of earth and a smell that sent us scurrying in the headlong flight for safety in the hallway above.

It was, however, close on midnight before we decided to retire.

Strangely - perhaps even perversely - enough, when I reached my room and prepared myself for bed my tiredness left me and insomnia set in. For what seemed like hours I lay tossing in bed, trying to compose my mind for sleep. It was as if now that I was alone, the atmosphere of the house, which I had already found distasteful, had intensified its effect upon me. At the time, depressed by the boredom that my insomnia inflicted upon me, I blamed the unsettling fright we had childishly brought upon ourselves in the cellar. Whatever it was, it was already late when I decided that I had had enough and, though I usually scorned their effectiveness and the sense of my doctor in once having prescribed them for me, I climbed out of bed to go to my suitcase to get a bottle of sleeping pills. There was nothing else for it, I knew, unless I was willing to risk the inevitable tiredness that would beggar me the next day if I did not somehow get to sleep.

As I stepped across the room to my suitcase I chanced to glance out of my window into the moonlit grounds. I can't say that the garden there was a particularly pretty sight in the stark moonlight. The gnarled trees and bushes, not to mention the reed-like grass, were as if a nightmarishly deformed jungle had quite suddenly taken root about the house. The scene was peculiarly depressing, and I was about to turn from it when I saw something move in the shrubberies. I paused and turned back to the window, pressing my face to the panes. I held my breath so that it wouldn't mist the cold glass. I could make out a man, half hidden in the interweaving shadows. It seemed that he was dressed in a dark overcoat that hung flapping in the wind about his heels. His hair, a dry-looking tangle of strands, was scattered about his shoulders as he picked his way through the trees. Despite the strong moonlight it was too dark to make out his face properly, though I could tell that it was distinctively white.

Slowly he continued on his way till he passed beyond the edge of the house and I lost sight of him, whereupon I decided that he must, undoubtedly, have been a passing vagrant - he was certainly too poorly dressed to have been a thief - and I finished off what I had set out to do, a few minutes later settling back into bed where I dry-swallowed two pills and waited for the inevitable sleep that within ten minutes overwhelmed me.

I rose late the next day, finding Poole already breakfasted when I came upon him.

"What will you have?" he asked.

"I'll just make do with some black coffee," I replied, as I settled myself down at the table.

"You look at if you slept badly last night," Poole remarked. "Did you find the air in your room too close? Or was it the bed?"

"I sometimes suffer a little from insomnia," I told him with a shrug. "It's not the room - or, at least, I don't think so. Though there was something that disturbed me." Poole glanced at me sharply - perhaps a shade too sharply, I thought. "There was a man wandering through the garden. I saw him from my window some time after one. Do you often get tramps this way?"

"A tramp?"

Was that a look of relief on Poole's face? "I supposed so at the time," I said. "Though I didn't get a very clear view of him in the gloom. Those damned elms blotted out much of the moonlight down there."

"Yes, I was thinking of having some of them cut down," Poole said, staring down at his cup.

"Have you seen prowlers here before?" I asked, suspicions sharpening the edge of my senses.

"You're more perceptive this morning than I thought you to be. But you're right, of course, I have seen someone once or twice before, though I took him to be a local poacher taking a short cut. There are some well stocked forests just a little way further on from the lane past a narrow stream." He laughed quietly. "I dare say he fancied himself less likely to be seen going through the garden than continuing any further down the lane, especially if he had had a good night and was -laden with game."

When I had finished my coffee I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. The grounds looked more healthy in the strong sunlight of a fine September day than at night, and I even found them faintly attractive, though much in need of the attention of a capable gardener. A few minutes later Poole joined me.

"Have you had a look at the house from the outside yet?" he asked, with more than a touch of pride in his voice.

Looking up at the ungainly edifice I wondered what it was about the place that appealed so strongly to Poole. "It seems to have gone through quite a few transformations in its time," I remarked tactfully, noting its early Tudor origins in the barely discernible beams about the lower floors before extensions and alterations obliterated much of them with Georgian, Queen Anne and Victorian elaborations, with a touch of the Regency Oriental in a cupola on one part of its roof- evidently an elaboration which either lack of further money or a premature death prevented from reaching fulfilment. In fact, as I began to think about this, the various changes gave off in general a half finished impression, as if succeeding owners had never possessed it long enough to complete their differing intentions. Mentioning this to Poole, he laughed indulgently and said that it was in more than one way a remarkable house.

He led me to one of the doors. "As you know," he said, "I had to have a lot of work done on the house before I could move in. The man in charge of the renovation, Mortimer (of Sletheridge, Gilbraith and Mortimer, no less) was exceptionally interested in the place, aside from the purely professional angle, which I must say I found gratifying, to say the least. Did you notice, by any chance, if any of the door or window frames were lop-sided? I'm sure I didn't when I first looked at it. He did. And he even knows why every single one of them is so, and it's not because of faulty craftsmanship, for he says that it is one of the finest houses for its age that he has seen, despite its disrepair. The main part, you see, was built during the early years of james I. Then, far more than now, the influence of superstitions on everyday life was particularly strong, far beyond any bounds we can imagine today. So much so, in fact, that they even took precautions against the supernatural in the building of their homes. And one of these was based upon the odd idea that no evil spirit could enter a house through a misshapen entranceway. Therefore the window frames, the doors, even the chimney shafts themselves, are lopsided - not too much so, but enough to reassure our ancestors that they would not be awakened in the night from their righteous sleep to find a leering succubus astride their beds."

"And did this Mortimer have any other insights into the house?" I asked. "About the cellars, perhaps?"

"He looked in once from the doorway. His only reaction was to shudder and say - rather brusquely, I felt - that it would be best to have it filled in. But I'm not too sure. It seems a waste somehow."

Feeling that "filling it in" was probably the best suggestion he could have made, I said: "You might be able to deceive yourself that what occurred last night in the cellar never happened, but I can't. Have you forgotten about it?"

Reluctantly Poole shook his head. "I went to have a look down there again a short while ago - perhaps to convince myself that we had let ourselves get carried away by our own imaginations, but…"

"Yes?" I prompted, impatiently.

"But, somehow - I can't explain why - I just couldn't raise the guts to take that one first step down into it. It was as if the darkness - or something I felt within it - held me back, repelled me, and I couldn't go on."

Sensing that it would do no good to press too hard on the matter, I let it drop. I said that I would like to have a look in the nearby village. "You said in one of your letters that it was a picturesque place. As long as it's better than that town I had to pass through on my way here, I'm not bothered."

"Chalk and cheese," Poole said, brightening. "I don't think you'll be disappointed. But there are several things that need doing around here this morning, so I'm afraid I won't be able to come with you. But you've got your car, and it is only a ten minute drive. It's straight down the lane; you can't miss it. There's a rather fine twelfth-century church near the green."

When, eventually, I left a short while later it was with no small feeling of relief. Few buildings, I thought as I drove down the lane beneath the overhanging branches of the trees, had such an oppressive atmosphere about them. My nerves, for some reason, seemed perpetually on edge all the time I was indoors, and were only eased a little in the grounds. Now, though, I felt relaxed once more, and at ease, and I completely looked forward to having a look around Fenley.

What our conversations had taught me, however, and over which I ruminated much on my drive into the village, was that the house was having an unhealthy effect upon my friend. He altogether lacked the spirit that had so characterized him in the long years of our friendship, and corresponded only to the dark months immediately following the death of his wife five years before, when he had nearly suffered a breakdown. But that was over and done with now. And I was certain that whatever was affecting him now had nothing to do with this. Besides, I thought, this was an altogether different type of disturbance.

It was all to do with the house, I was sure. If only for Poole's good, therefore, I decided to see if I could find out anything more about the place. Spotting the local library near the village green, I had a look inside. A small, pinched man with empty cheeks and horn rimmed glasses sat in a corner behind the desk at the entrance, while a young girl stood stamping romantic novels for a gossipy group of old ladies. The man seemed oblivious of their chatter as he read through a catalogue. I waited till the girl had finished and turned to me.

I asked her if she had any reference books on local history.

"Is there anything in particular you're interested in?" she asked. I noticed that the elderly gentleman - who I took to be the librarian - was looking across at me curiously above his glasses.

"I'm staying with a friend who recently bought an old house near here. I was interested in finding out if there is any history attached to it. It's a hobby of mine," I lied as she thought for a moment, scanning the packed bookshelves.

"Would that be Mr Poole you are staying with?" the librarian asked suddenly, rising from his chair and approaching the desk. He laid the catalogue carefully to one side.

I said that it was. "You know him?" I asked.

"In passing. He doesn't spend much time in the village, I'm afraid. Something of a recluse, I believe."

"There's a lot of work to be done on the house," I explained. "From what I can gather, it was in a pretty bad state when he took it over. I don't suppose he's had much time to spare for socializing so far." I wondered just how much of this was true. The librarian, however, whether out of politeness or agreement, accepted my explanation with a motion of his hands. "One would not have thought the house worth all the time, trouble and expense.

But there you are. But you were asking just now about books, I believe, on local history."

"About the house really," I replied. "It just strikes me that there must be something about it of interest. Its past owners must have been people of influence locally at one time or another. Is there anything you can let me have a look at that might help me in this matter?"

He smiled thinly. "There are several books I could recommend: Pitts' The Fenley Wanderer, or Albert Dudley's The Barchester Landscape, parts of which concern this area, but they are rather dry and somewhat pedantic. Not the kind of thing to spend a day like this reading through. Besides, they are neither of them very informative about certain darker aspects of the house your friend has bought."

"Then there is something?" I prompted.

The librarian nodded his greying head. "Something," he echoed. "Though exactly what I have never been able to decide."

"Was it anything to do with witchcraft or Devil worship?" I asked, remembering the pentagram in the cellar.

The librarian looked at me in surprise. "So you have heard something then," he said, "after all."

"I've heard nothing," I told him. "All I know is what I've seen." I described the strange carving we found last night, though I left out any reference to what happened afterwards. When I had finished he glanced at his pocket watch. "Look here," he said, "it's about lunchtime. If you haven't eaten yet and have some time to spare, we could go down the street to the tea shop on the corner. I think there are one or two things I can tell you which you might very well find of interest."

Agreeing to his suggestion, I waited while he told the girl he would be back in an hour, then collected his hat from a rack in the office and stepped out from behind the desk to lead me down the street.

When we reached the tea shop, a quaint, rather old world place with fox hunting scenes on its walls, the librarian introduced himself as Desmond Foster. Although he had only lived in Fenley for the last ten years, a keen interest in local history had helped give him a knowledge of the district which he was sure few locals could match. My friend's house, Elm Tree House as it was known in the area, had long fascinated him. "It has had a very long and disquieting history," he said. "Disquieting enough, in fact, to dissuade most people, even in our enlightened times, from purchasing it. Its age, of course, is apparent from its appearance alone - its peculiarly miscegenous appearance."

I said that I had noticed this about it. "It's almost as if succeeding owners had not possessed it long enough to complete their differing intentions," I re-echoed from my earlier conversation with Poole.

"Quite so. Though of the house itself, not even one stone in its entire structure, from the ground floor upwards, is a remnant from the building which originally stood on that spot. Long before Sir Robert Tolbridge, a great nephew of the third Marquis of Barchester, decided in 1608 to erect a house near Elm Tree Wood, there were the ruins of an ancient and almost forgotten abbey there, whose lichened stones were rooted in the ground. It was, as I understand it, during the thirteenth century that monks came to Fenley to build an abbey. From the start they were made welcome, and received ample help with the building of their abbey. Relations, it would seem, could hardly have been more propitious than they were. But, unfortunately, things were not destined to remain at so harmonious a level for long. It has been chronicled that the monks fell into a bad humour, growing lax in their devotions and more insatiable in their demands upon the local yeomanry. It has been chronicled that men returning home late at night from the fields saw sights at the abbey which struck fear in their hearts and heard sounds which made them think of tortured beasts howling in pain."

"Self-flagellation?" I asked.

"Perhaps," Foster replied without enthusiasm, no doubt, I thought, having opinions of his own. "However, the details are too vague for precise conjecture, except to say that to those who perceived these things there was only one explanation satisfactory to their minds. And this was that the monks had been corrupted into the worship of the Horned One, the Devil. Revealing themselves as heartless, cruel and cynical men, who took a genuine pleasure in exacting every last ounce of servitude from those they could gather in the spreading net of their power and influence, the monks became the focal point of hatred for every man, woman and child in the district, culminating after months of harsh treatment in the complete and utter destruction of the abbey building itself and the murder of every monk. The Abbot himself, however, was secured for a crueller fate. In the village green, the very one we can see from this window," he added, pointing significantly through the panes to where several boys were playing with a ball, "he was executed. It would appear, particularly from a set of woodcuts in Adrian Weeke's Chronicles of Rural Life, published in London in the late eighteenth century, that with a sadistic butchery, incited no doubt by the degradation he had brought upon them, the Abbot was hung by the neck from the gallows rope till almost dead. He was then cut down in time to save his life, only for the executioner to rip out his bowels and burn them before his eyes. Whereupon, as he at last expired, he was sawn into quarters, his remains being locked in an iron gibbet for the rain, decay or the summer's heat to destroy."

"Harsh justice," I remarked, "even for a man like that."

Foster raised his eyebrows in speculation. "Perhaps," he said, "though one wonders. Indeed, reaffirming whatever arguments might be put forward in favouring the justice of his fate, is the very fortitude with which he is reported to have faced it, saying as the rope was being placed about his neck - and with a sneer in his voice - a phrase of damning implications: "Exurgent mortui et ad me veniunt!" Or: "The dead rise and come to me!" Foster paused, watching me with inquisitive eyes above his spectacles. "It is a phrase which I happen to have come across before reading the account of his death, and which made me wonder then if the people of Fenley had not been more than justified in their dire suspicions about the abbey, culled as it is from an old book of magic, often attributed to Pope Honorius, called the Red Dragon."

"The phrase, said in a certain way, I suppose, could be made to sound like a threat," I suggested.

"Indeed it could. A thought which must have stirred itself in many a mind in Fenley when, on the day following his execution, it was discovered that the Abbot's remains were no longer confined in the gibbet, but had gone, utterly and without the slightest, least tangible trace. Perhaps falling back on the superstitions of the Church in hope, some said, that the Devil had come during the night to claim his own and carry him off to Hell. Personally, and not unreasonably, I think, I feel that one or more of the monks must have escaped the holocaust that took the other brothers, returning after the Abbot's death to claim his corpse, no doubt to bury it with the rites, such as they were, of their own corrupted faith. But we shall never know for certain, and the more colourful idea of a horned devil plucking out the Abbot's bones through the bars of the gibbet with his clawed fingers, as one woodcut in Weeke's book depicts, will still be the one to attract more attention from collectors of such tales."

"The pentagram would date back to the time of the abbey, I take it," I said.

"I would suppose so. The cellars were no doubt incorporated into the building erected on its site."

"With all of this I must admit to being surprised that anyone would have chosen to build a house on this spot."

"Sir Robert Tolbridge was a man, even then, I think, who would have built his house on the threshold of Hell itself if that was where he wanted it built. He didn't care a damn what others were frightened of. In fact, I really believe that this may have been one of the reasons why he built it here."

"And was he contented with it?"

"Unfortunately he did not live to enjoy the house for long. Shortly after moving in he was murdered in the grounds one night."

"Which must have brought to light the fear of ghostly revenge on every local's tongue."

"In this case, no. Two men were hanged not long afterwards for his death. It was claimed that they killed him for money. But the house has not had a happy history. Violence has seemed to hang around it. It is said to be a place of ill luck."

"What, no tales of wandering revenants?" I asked. "No screaming skulls or bloodstains on the floor?"

Perhaps taking my remarks as derisive, Foster said, stiffly, that it was not the inside of the house that was considered unlucky.

"The only deaths in there have been from natural causes," he said. "But the grounds…" He paused emphatically. "The grounds are a different matter altogether. Superstitious foolery, some people might say, but it is said that it is an incautious man who will wander at night through the grounds of Elm Tree House."

"Well, there's at least one local man who thinks nothing of the sort," I remarked.

"A local man, you say?" Foster asked, genuinely interested. "You surprise me. There are few men in Fenley - though fewer still who would admit it - who would willingly venture into that ill chosen ground at night. Do you know who it was, by any chance?"

I'm afraid not. It was late last night and the darkness was too dense for me to make out his face. I took him for a tramp, though Poole, who's seen him before, has the opinion that he must be a local poacher taking a short cut to the woods."

"This surprises me indeed," Foster said, "though it just goes to show how poorly one can really know a place even after nearly ten years. It is generally supposed that the only poacher in recent times to venture there was Young Teb back in the late 90s, whose torn body presented the local constabulary with an embarrassing problem for months afterwards. His murderer was never apprehended, and the example the poor fellow presented is said to have dissuaded others from going there ever since. But this was nearly thirty years ago and I suppose the younger men might think nothing of going there now." Glancing significantly at his watch, Foster said that he really had to return to the library now. "It has been a pleasure talking to you," he said in parting, "but there is much to be seen to at the library before we close tonight. However, I hope you will call in to see me some time whenever you are here again. And if ever you want to know anything about Fenley you know where to ask."

Although I had learned a great deal during my stay in Fenley, I decided as I drove back along the lane that it was of little use to me in quelling Poole's rapture for the house. It was, in fact, just the kind of thing to allay his unease about the cellars and awaken in its place an interest in its history. I realized then that my initial idea had not been as promising as I had originally thought, and it was therefore with a feeling of frustration that I eventually pulled up before the house.

When I stepped inside the hallway I was surprised to find that Poole had gone out. Having told me before I left for Fenley that he would not be going out this afternoon, his present absence was inexplicable. It was totally unlike Poole to say one thing and do another. With more urgency, therefore, than the superficial reasons for it might explain, I began to search for him. Perhaps he had had an accident, I thought, remembering the patches of decay in several of the uncarpeted floors upstairs. As the minutes passed, room after room revealing itself empty of the least sign of him, my intangible fears began to intensify into alarm.

"Poole! Where are you?" I shouted as I strode through the hallway, looking up into the grey-brown gloom of the stairs. But my cries were re-echoed without reply through the cacophonous depths of the house.

A cold, insidious feeling of solitude began to oppress me. Enmixed with this was a feeling of foreboding, a strange premonition of doom. I knew that if Poole was in the house he would have answered me by now. I scorned myself without conviction as a panicking fool who would laugh at himself with derision when Poole, unaware of my childish alarm, returned home. But I could not suppress the feeling that something was drastically wrong. What it was, I did not know. It was too enigmatic for explanation in words. And yet, subjective though it may be, and, like hindsight, made stronger in my memory now by what happened afterwards, it was as if the very atmosphere of the house, changed or transmuted in some subtle way, confirmed for me then that something had happened while I was away. Something so awful that its presence, like the last reverberations of a scream, had not completely disappeared. Earnestly though I searched through the house, from the ground floor upwards, even to the attics themselves, there was still one place which I had ignored - perhaps, I thought guiltily, on purpose - and it was, even when all else had proved fruitless, with a feeling of reluctance that I eventually approached the cellar door. One glance, however, at the shelf alongside showed how futile my reluctance had been, for one of the two paraffin lamps stored there had gone.

Grasping the remaining lamp, I ignited it with a match and stepped to the cellar door. It came open at the merest touch. Glancing down, I saw that it was unbolted and must have swung shut - or so I surmised - after Poole had stepped inside. But why had he decided to come here? Pausing nervously at the head of the stairs I stared down into the cloying darkness, whose depths were but tenuously touched by the feeble light from my lamp. The amount of resolution that Poole must have needed to go down into that seemingly sentient darkness alone impressed itself upon me. I was afraid, and I could not deny it. After a momentary hesitation, I called out for Poole. There was one sharp, empty echo to my cry. Then, feeling even more lonely than before, I slowly began to descend the steps. I held the lamp high so that its light would spread over as wide an area as possible. Faint grey speckles of spiders, fleeing across. the floor into the darkness, were the only signs of life as I crossed it; the deep shadows of the pillars gliding like massive bars, merging and mingling together as I passed between them. There was only one part of the cellar I was interested in, for although the very thought appalled me, I knew that Poole must have gone to the chamber we had investigated the day before.

Before I reached the extension leading to it, however, I saw what I at first took to be a large pile of rags lying on the ground a short distance ahead of me. As I approached it, though, I realized suddenly that it was Poole. A thin trickle of blood formed an aimless line along the flagstone beside his head. Kneeling, I felt at his face; it was as cold as the stone it had struck, cold and limp and white. I did not need to hear the harsh gasps of breath that were rasping through his lips to realize that he had been seriously hurt. It was obvious -perhaps too obvious - to me then what had happened. Firm though his resolve must have been when he started out on his way through the cellar, the darkness must have eventually unnerved him, that and the arcane evil that struck one about the chamber and its festering burrow. Panicking, he ran back along the passageway, tripped over an uneven paving stone and struck his head against the floor when he fell.

"John, John," I whispered, "why did you have to come here? Why did you have to try to prove to yourself - or to me - that there was nothing to fear in this place?" As my words were murmurously echoed I suddenly realized that I was not alone with Poole. Though nothing moved, nor any sound could be heard to disturb the profound silence around us, I knew that I was being watched. My mouth dried as I looked up from my friend and glanced along the tunnel to where the light dimmed into darkness. There, submerged in a shadowy hinterland between the two, half seen like something in a fog, I saw a motionless figure regarding me. I raised the lamp; its light spread faintly upwards, seemingly dispersing what I saw into oblivion.

When I stood up I realized that there had been nothing there, only the inhospitable void of the mouldering passageway. And yet, even now, even as I saw that I had been mistaken, I could not shrug from myself the feeling of being watched. Moment by moment the feeling grew in intensity till I felt that I could bear it no longer. Why Poole had panicked no more bewildered me. There was something about the cellar, and especially here in the extension to the chamber we had been in the night before, that could not be ignored. It had the dull persistence and mounting intensity of an aching tooth.

More hurriedly than I had intended, I pulled Poole to his feet and lowered him onto one of my shoulders, before retracing my steps towards the staircase, mounting it in an instant to make my way into the hallway. As I laid Poole out on a couch in his study he began to groan, as if he was starting to wake up. A few moments later I realized that I was mistaken. In between outbursts of unintelligible mutterings, I caught odd words and phrases that disturbed me as I tried to calm him in his delirium.

"… scratches… I hear you! Scratching at the earth… mole, all thin… bleached bones… No! Go away\ Bones!… wgah'nagl… I can see its head… No!… sh'sh'sh' ftharg… gibbering, must stop, got to leave, get away, white skinny hands all claws crawling across flesh peeling left over floor all damp and stinking eyes lit, burning. No! Got to leave… Help! God help me! Help!… I mustn't, can't say those words… mustn't, can't make me… No, no, no!… evil!…sh'sh'sh'… gibbering, must stop… stop…"

At last, after several minutes of such torment, he settled into a more easy sleep, his breathing becoming relaxed and even. But, whatever he had been through or deluded himself into believing he had been through in the cellar, must have been awful, I knew, for it to have affected him as severely as this. For a moment I thought about calling in a doctor, but I decided that Poole seemed to have recovered from the wound, such as it was, and I knew, somehow, that it was not the blow to his head that was troubling.

On an impulse I telephoned the library in Fenley and asked for Foster.

"What is the matter?" he asked a few moments later after I had introduced myself. "You sound disturbed."

I explained to him what had happened since my return to the house. "What his mutterings mean, I don't know," I said finally, "though they must be connected in some way with what happened in the cellar."

"Neurotic hallucinations?"

"No, I don't think so. Not Poole. Though he hasn't been himself this week-end, I must admit. Something happened, I think, something in the cellar. Though what, who knows?"

"But you want to find out. Is that why you phoned me?"

I admitted that it was. "You have a knowledge of the house which I lack."

"A historical knowledge? Then you believe that it is something from the building's past that has affected your friend?"

"I do. There's something about this place, something so strong, so suffocatingly strong that it's hardly even possible to think objectively in this place."

"So that even a man who is a complete, materialistic sceptic could begin to doubt his views and wonder if…?"

The ease with which Foster was assimilating what I was telling him, made me wonder for a moment if all this came as a surprise to him at all. Or did he know more than what he hinted at? Relieved that I had at least found someone with whom I could confide my fears about the place and who, moreover, had a real knowledge of it, I asked him if he would come to the house after the library had closed. "I would appreciate it immensely if you could help me. I'm sure, as well, that you'll find more than enough to interest you."

Foster laughed, admitting that he would have been disappointed if I had not asked him. "I have always wanted to investigate that house," he replied. "I am sure that in many ways it could prove as interesting as any in the country. Psychical research has always been an interest of mine, though one which I have so seldom had a chance of investigating before."

"You believe that is the explanation for all this?" I asked.

"Did you not suspect that already?" Foster responded, his voice indicating that he knew I had. And, despite the scorn I instinctively felt I should express at the idea, I could not deny it. Such things seemed far from fantastic inside Elm Tree House. I admitted that the thought had not been far from my mind.

Evidently amused at my reticence, Foster laughed, saying that in that case all doubt had been cast from his mind and he was certain in his conviction that there was definitely something "abnormal" about the house. Before hanging up, he asked if I could pick him up from his house, since he didn't own a car himself and it was a long walk from where he lived to Elm Tree House. Agreeing to this, I told him I would collect him at seven.

When this had all been settled I returned to Poole to see how he was. The peace that had settled on him after the delirium seemed to have hardly changed. I decided that it would be better to leave him as he was, making do by covering him with a blanket before writing out a note to explain where I had gone in case he woke up before I returned here with Foster. Satisfied that I had done everything I could for the time being, I went out to my car. The sun had only just started to sink lower in the sky, enriching the warm air of the late afternoon with its glow. There were three hours to go before I was due to meet Foster, three hours in which to escape from the depressing atmosphere of the house. I knew that I needed the sight of the invigoratingly healthy countryside with its trees and ferns and hedgerows to lift up my spirits. Driving off down the lane, I headed aimlessly between the rounded hills and valleys that characterize the countryside around Fenley, with its somnolent rivers, forests and glades, the small farmhouses of local stone and the tall church steeples that rise up out of the blue haze of the distance. It is a countryside notable for its subdued beauty and tranquillity. It was, in all, a diversion I had need of and which I savoured to the full. I did not, however, allow myself to forget what had happened, and I thought about it in detail as I drove. It was the sense of freedom, of release from the morbid atmosphere of the house I needed now, not forgetfulness.

At seven I drew up before Foster's house on the outskirts of Fenley, a bay-windowed building set back between rustling rhododendron. Answering the door himself, Foster showed me into his study. As my eyes adjusted to the rich brown twilight inside, I looked about the room; most of it was filled with a pair of armchairs on either side of an elderly gas fire, a rosewood table by one wall, while before the window, a bust of Goethe set on it, stood a round-topped writing desk which I judged, from the carvings about its darkened wood, to have been inherited from an ancestor who saw colonial service in India. My eyes wandered from this monumental relic to the other items in the room as a way of assessing the character of my new associate. In glass-fronted cabinets along the walls were china ornaments, statuettes, busts and various pieces of bric-a-brac. As we shook hands I turned to the neatly lined shelves of books on one wall, glancing with a nod of my head. "I see you're well read on the supernatural," I remarked, noting such volumes as The Survival of Man by Sir Oliver Lodge, Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine and Crompton 's Guide to Demonology, edited by Nicholai Caffre amongst many other books of this ilk. For a moment I had a feeling of misgiving. Though on the one hand they spoke of an erudite knowledge of the occult, on the other they spoke of a crank. The seriousness on his ascetically intelligent face helped to ease my suspicions, though.

"I didn't expect to see you again quite so soon," Foster said, smiling at my interest in his books. "Nor with anything quite so intriguing." He ushered me to one of the chairs.

"You mentioned something about glimpsing a figure in the cellar," he opened, lighting a pipe. "Can you tell me what you thought it looked like?"

"Hardly," I confessed. "If there really was anything there and I didn't just imagine it, there was hardly more than an instant in which I saw it. Barely enough time to register having seen something at all, except that it was about medium height and pale. And thin. Very thin."

Foster nodded. Looking up, he said: "Though I doubt if you have ever heard of it, there is a local legend about a 'twig-shinned' phantom which is supposed to haunt the woods about Elm Tree House. This and the thing you glimpsed could be one and the same. As the school boyish name implies, it is reputedly thin and pale, a wasted creature that creeps with distended fingers through the trees. I believe that Elliott O'Donnell has written about it in one of his books, though I cannot just remember which one."

"And is it known what caused this thing to be there?" I asked.

"I have always thought it must relate back to the abbey and to the Abbot whose remains disappeared so mysteriously all those years ago. 'Exurgent mortui et ad me veniuntl' - 'The dead rise and come to me,' he said. It's possible that he believed that he would return. Perhaps he did. Somehow, through some unholy alchemy of their blasphemous malpractices, perhaps he and his acolytes were able to bring the semblance of life to his body. This is all very fanciful, I know, but there are references to stitches about the creature's body."

Feeling that we were wasting time over matters which would, in all probability have nothing whatever to do with what we were up against, I glanced out of the window at the dimming brightness of the sky. "Whatever it is that lies at the bottom of all this," I interrupted, "cannot be worse than what your suggestions conjure up. However useful they might be in preparing our minds for whatever we discover, I think we would be better spending our time now at the house with Poole. I don't like to leave him there alone, not after dusk. In his state there's no saying what he'll do if he wakes up alone."

Foster agreed. Collecting his hat from the hallway on the way out, he said: "I had forgotten about your friend in the excitement of the chase, so to speak."

The last strong rays of the sun were gilding the upper branches of the trees as we set off. These rays had passed by the time we arrived back at Poole's house, a dull grey gloom having settled about its dispiriting grounds. The house itself stood dark and lifeless against the purple haze of the sky.

"I've rarely seen a grimmer place," was Foster's only comment as we stepped out of the car and approached the house, shivering at the chill. A wind had risen with the dusk, swaying the trees as it circled the house.

Although Foster's company did something to alleviate the unease that came upon me as I opened the front door and entered the silent twilight inside, it did not disperse it altogether. Perhaps to attempt at hiding this from myself I called out for Poole, though I knew somehow that he would not have as yet recovered. I felt Foster's hand on my arm; perhaps he sensed the atmosphere as plainly as I did and understood the fear filling me now. In a subdued voice Foster said: "Grotesque rites were practised in the abbey they built here all those centuries ago. The effects of this slaughter did not die with those whose bodies were tortured on this spot. They echo through the air even now, marring the peace that should fill this place."

Switching on the light, I entered Poole's study. Thankfully he was still asleep. "I think it would be better to leave him as he is for the time being," I said. "If anything happens in the next few hours it would be better if he was oblivious of it."

Foster agreed. "He has been tried to the brink already. It is our turn next, not his. I only hope," he added, with a baleful smile that revealed just how nervous he was, "that we fare better."

"As long as we remain inside the house we'll be safe," I said. "The doors and window frames will ensure that."

"I certainly hope so," Foster replied as he shrugged his shoulders dismissively, seating himself in one of the armchairs near the hearth. The embers within it were slowly crumbling into themselves and growing dark. On an impulse I crossed the room and began piling some coal onto them. "We'll need a good fire if we're to stay up all night," I explained. "I take it you intend watching for whatever it is that prowls about the grounds."

"The poacher? Yes. Though I cannot but feel that the root cause of the whole matter lies inside the cellar. However, I don't suppose either of us would relish the prospect of going there tonight. At least the 'poacher' should cast some light on the mystery of what haunts the woods."

Eventually, as the minutes passed, we relapsed into silence, Foster patiently reading through a book he had brought in his pocket, while I spent my time alternately checking on Poole and watching the grounds through the window as dusk passed into night. The only sounds were those of a clock slowly ticking on the hearth, the soft moaning of the wind and the rustling of paper as Foster turned the pages of his book. After a while the moon rose in the sky, a grey radiance silvering the leaves of the elms. Yet nothing appeared as the long hours passed. I yawned and began to doze, the tedium tiring me even more than the events of the day.

It was in such a state, as I drifted between wakefulness and sleep and yearned for nothing more than to be able to slip between the comfortable sheets of my bed, when Foster suddenly spoke. Not catching what it was that he said, I turned from the window and looked towards him. He was staring at Poole, one hand raised into the air for silence.

There was, I realized, the sound of someone murmuring. Vague, at first, it was not for a moment that I realized it was Poole. There was an almost imperceptible twitching of his lips, as his head rolled softly from side to side. Suddenly he called out. His high-pitched, scream like cry split the air as he leapt to his feet, shuddering. In an instant Foster was beside him. Once, twice the flat of his hand cracked hard against Poole's face, then he grabbed him by the arms and pressed him back to his seat.

"What was all that about?" I asked, bewildered.

Foster smiled thinly. There was an incipient trembling in his body which told of the tension coiled inside him. "I wish that I knew," he replied unsteadily. "All that I noticed at first were the words coming from his lips."

"What words were they?"

"Old ones - words which few civilized people speak anymore." A fit of trembling, more fierce than any which had passed through him before, shook his body. "Someone must have walked on my grave," he joked weakly. There was a deep gust of wind, and smoke billowed out of the fire. The ashes inside it were almost dead. In an effort to allay the unease that was stealing over me, I made a fuss of restoring life to the fire. A chill, which seemed to me then to be only partially relieved by the brightening glow from the fire as I poked its grudgingly igniting coals, filled the room. I made no more enquiry of Foster concerning what Poole had said. Somehow I did not want to know.

A further gust of wind suddenly rattled the window panes. Not realizing the cause for their vibration at first, I leapt to my feet in alarm, before an ensuing annoyance at my nervousness overcame it and I made to turn back to the fire. As I did so, however, I heard Poole speak in a low, uncharacteristically sibilant voice. I glanced at Foster, and was surprised to see an expression of terror writhe across his face. Before I could do anything to stop him he grasped a statuette from a cabinet by the wall and shattered it against Poole's head.

"Why the Hell - " I cried out, catching a hold of Poole as he slumped to the floor, blood flowing from an ugly gash across his forehead. "Are you mad? He's been injured once today already… and now, for no reason at all, you…"

But I could see that Foster was taking no notice of what I was saying. In silence, he stepped to the window, where he stared into the grounds outside. "Switch off the light!" he whispered authoratively a moment later. So insistent was his voice that, despite the anger I felt towards him for his attack upon Poole, there was nothing I could do but obey his command, placing my friend on the couch once more before crossing to the switch. As the light went off", the room was plunged into a pale twilight lit only by the greyish rays of the moon. Foster crouched at the window, as if to hide himself from view. Nervously I crept towards him.

"What have you seen?" I asked, but he hushed me to silence. Following his gaze I looked out into the grounds. For a moment or two, until my eyes became adjusted to the gloom, everything seemed as it should have been. The trees were swaying back and forth in the wind, portentous of a coming gale, their actions mimicked nearer the ground by the bushes and shrubs and unkempt tussocks of grass. The woods surrounding the house seemed deep and black and almost impenetrable in the darkness. But then, as the less prominent features became perceptible to me, I realized that something was crawling through the grass. "The poacher?" I whispered for wont of anything more likely to suggest.

"Poacher?" Foster laughed quietly. "And why should a poacher be prowling so secretively on his belly through the grounds? What wildfowl or game are there here for him to take?" Wiping the mist his breath had left on the window away, he pointed further to our left, adding: "Besides…"

Looking, I saw another shape in the grass. There was a pale blur of what I took to be flesh. Was it someone's face, looking this way? Shunning the speculations which its abnormal pallor should have given rise to, I noticed that there was another blur, this time partially concealed behind some bushes. Was I mistaken? Were my eyes deceiving me?

"They must be some children," I said uncertainly a few moments later as I made out still more figures.

"At this time of night?" Foster asked.

"Then what?" I grasped Foster's arm. "In God's name what?"

Foster pulled himself free. He pointed at Poole with a look of contempt. "Ask him."

At this I remembered the way in which Foster had attacked my friend only a few minutes before, and with it the anger I had begun to feel before my attention was diverted to whatever lay hidden outside re-emerged. No doubt discerning the altercations going on inside me as I tried to reconcile Foster's actions with reason, he said: "Can you doubt but that dabblings on his part must be the cause for whatever we can see outside now?"

"A few prowlers," I said dismissively.

"Prowlers! You talk as if the word brought order and normality to this house at the mere mention. Can you still not conceive what those things really are?"

There was a noise at the window as of someone scratching at the glass, and I caught sight of a thin, white hand passing down out of sight. Involuntarily I screamed. I had no choice, for it was a hand from which most of the withered flesh still adhering to it seemed to have been eaten by decay. Overcome by nausea and horror at the hideous sight, I turned away from the window. Badly shaken though he must have been as well, despite his knowledge of what we were up against, Foster had the strength of mind even now to fight against his instincts and speak rationally. "It cannot get inside the house. None of them can. The misshapen door and window frames will ensure that."

"Them?" I muttered, aghast at the thought. "What are they? What foul, unearthly abominations are those things out there?"

When he spoke it was with a voice as dry and clinical and matter-of-fact as any man could muster in the situation, dispelling at last what doubts I might have had about him. "The monks who were slaughtered at this spot all those centuries ago," he replied, "servants, even in death, of the man who founded the abysmal abbey they worshipped in, and who was hung, drawn and quartered in the village. It is them or their remnants that prowl about the house."

There was a sound outside as of twigs being snapped, and a stone came crashing through the window, scattering splinters of glass across the room. A gust of wind fluttered the curtains as it wheezed and howled about us.

"Get back!" Foster cried. "Get back as far from the window as you can." Even as he spoke a further stone hurtled through the shards of glass still surrounding the hole, and bounced off the writing desk to strike the wall at the far side of the room with a resounding crash.

"We must get Poole out of here," I insisted. "One of those stones hitting him could be fatal."

Foster nodded his agreement. "We'll carry him to an upstairs room. He'll be safer there."

Hoisting him onto our shoulders, we hurriedly vacated the study. Two more stones, crashing through what remained of the window almost simultaneously, told us just how timely our exit was. As we climbed the stairs the bangs and crashes continued without respite till it seemed, as they increased in number and ferocity, as if a monstrous hailstorm of rocks was bombarding the house.

"They are only trying to scare us into making an untimely attempt to escape," Foster said, as we peered down at the grounds after leaving Poole stretched out in the safety of the passageway. The figures, concealed by the deep shadows under the trees, were in a sense unreal. Their features were unnaturally blurred, and my eyes seemed unable to focus properly upon them. What glimpses I got of them as I strained my eyes against the gloom were of badly misshapen and gaunt bodies wrapped in dull rags, which may at one time have been the habits of monks.

There was a thud against the wall. "They're trying to reach us up here now," Foster said as we stepped out of the room. There was a piercing crash of breaking glass as the windows were shattered behind us.

"Why go to these extremes?" I asked, grasping the stair rail as we started downstairs.

"Perhaps because they are afraid of us."

"Of us?" I could hardly hide my incredulity.

Shaking his head, Foster replied: "Don't be deceived into believing them indestructible just because they appear to have conquered death. It is all a sham, a facade. They have not stopped the gnawing of the worm nor brought breath into their parchment lungs. They cannot even step through the windows they have so easily broken to reach us. Maybe, therefore," he went on, growing more confident with each word, "it is possible that we may be able to sever what thin, frail thread still binds them to the semblance of life."

"And do you have any idea how we can do this?" I asked.

"Perhaps," Foster said. "But we would have to go down to their source." At the quizzical look I cast him, he said: "To the cellar."

I shook my head. "Never! What I've already experienced down there is enough for me. Nothing, nothing on this earth could persuade me to go there again."

"If that is the case," Foster said, "so be it. I can't force you to accompany me."

"You're still seriously thinking of going down there?" I asked.

"I am. I might look like an old fool - a crank - and, God knows, in some ways I may be, at that - but I know where my duty lies. What your friend in his foolhardy residence here has unleashed, I shall do my utmost to put right."

"There was something in this place long before Poole ever ventured here," I insisted. "You admitted so yourself."

"And so there was," Foster replied, unshaken. "There was something here, alone and speechless, unable to summon up anything else. It wasn't till the thing gained access to the cellar and gained control of Poole's voice that it could speak the words needed to bring its hellish brethren back to the similitude of life." Irritably he shook his head. "We are wasting time. If you will not enter the cellar with me, will you at least do me the favour of accompanying me to the cellar door? I may need your help."

"Of course I'll go there with you," I said, "if you still insist on entering the place."

Upon reaching the cellar door, Foster paused, looking along the shelves beside it. At one end there was an untidy heap of tools: hammers, nails, a rusty pair of pliers, a saw and what looked like part of a very old brace and bit. Reaching for one of the heaviest hammers, Foster said: "This should do in case I meet with any trouble." He chuckled drily as he took down the paraffin lamp and lit it. Shaking it lightly he listened to the reassuringly loud lapping of its nearly full tank.

Tucking the hammer in his belt, he reached for the door bolt, drawing it quietly from its socket. As he pulled the door open there was a sudden smell of fetid air, a vile corruption that struck nausea in us both with one, half-gasped breath. Crying out in pure and absolute terror, Foster fell back from the doorway. There was a movement in the gloom, and I was sensible of an odd shuffling sound. With one spasmodic but determined movement, Foster raised the lamp high into the air. Its light spread into the gloom, revealing the stooped and ragged figure glaring at us with its withered and leprous abomination of a face. Its back bent double beneath the remnants of a monk's habit, it shook as if straining to keep itself erect on the topmost step.

There is no way in which I can describe the loathing horror that the creature inspired within me, with its suppurating, claw-like hands, the eye-like slits of the wrinkles in its decaying flesh, or the grotesque stains of dissolution that, in nauseatingly contrasting hues, were spread about its ravaged body. Even as I looked upon the irregular and stained stitches about its body and face, where the severed quarters of what I knew to be the Abbot's remains had been rejoined, I could not force the scream that I felt stifled within me from my lips.

In a cracked whisper I urged Foster to draw back from the doorway in case the crouched abomination should reach out for him with its talons. Perhaps numbed beyond feelings of horror, Foster merely shook his head, saying: "It can no more move its hands through the doorway than mine could penetrate stone." He laughed humourlessly, adding: "Which gives me an advantage I cannot but use to the full." With that he suddenly tugged the hammer from his belt and raised it in the air. The swaying lamp made the sharp shadows about the creature's face exaggerate its hideous decay, as if unseen maggots were writhing in torment beneath its flesh. Then, using the whole of his weight, Foster brought the hammer down onto the creature's head. The thing had barely time in which to look up as the hammer crashed into its skull. There was a dull splintering of bones, old and brittle ones, a black putrescence oozing from the obscene wound. The Abbot stiffened, its hands feebly moving as if to touch Foster, who in the instant backed away, drawing his arm out of reach. The hammer fell, forgotten, to the floor as the lich swayed in the doorway. From the wound in its skull, along with the foul fluids, other substances were being ejected in the pulsating flow: wriggling heaps of pallid worms that gathered on the stained floor. "For it is of old rumour," Foster recited to himself in awful fascination, "that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnal clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws, till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it… and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl!"

Unable to look upon the thing a moment more as it stubbornly fell to its knees in a doomed attempt to fight against the weakness plainly sweeping through its body, I stared at the floor. Horrible though it had been in "life", in its "dying" the creature had achieved new dimensions of revulsion and awfulness. Nor could I bear to see the burning penetration of its sunken eyes as it stared at us and through us into the house. There was something in that look which made panic stir itself within me.

Suddenly there was the sound of someone bounding down the stairs behind us. Surprised as I was at the unexpected sound, I was momentarily unable to react. When I did at last manage to turn round, it was to glimpse Poole as he dashed on past me. I called out to him in warning, but he shouldered me aside as he launched himself in a furious attack against Foster. The small librarian was on the point of turning round when Poole's fist struck him on the jaw. Without even so much as a groan Foster fell back against the cellar door, trying to steady himself against it. But Poole gave him no chance to regain his balance before he hit him again, pounding him in the stomach. As Foster doubled up, Poole grabbed him by one arm and propelled him towards the open doorway. Before I could do anything to stop him, Foster stumbled into the darkness at the top of the cellar steps. As if given new strength at the opportunity to wreak its vengeance upon him, the lich grasped Foster in its arms. Almost without knowing what he was doing, Foster swung the paraffin lamp, still gripped in his fingers, furiously against the creature's body. The putrescence from its skull splattered it, blotting out its light for an instant, before the lamp crashed to the ground at their feet. There was a gust as flames rippled upwards, catching on the creature's flowing robes and spreading through the pools of paraffin that were scattered at its feet. As if fed on something far more volatile than the pint or two of paraffin inside the lamp, the flames roared upwards, consuming both figures in a roaring ferocity of fire.

I cried out in despair as the sudden heat blasted out at me and I had to cover my eyes against it with my hands. I took a step forwards, but the heat was too strong and I had to step back. I looked round at Poole, and I felt a cold, unreasoning anger towards him. An anger which almost made me pound Poole into submission and force him into the growing inferno on the cellar steps. But it was an anger which died as I saw the horror and disbelief on Poole's face. The hatred that had seared his features only moments before had gone. "I… I couldn't stop myself," Poole muttered in his bewilderment. "I couldn't." He looked at me for support, beseechingly. "I couldn't."

I said that I understood, though there was so much that I knew I would never understand about what had happened.

I looked back at the blaze, in which the frenzied writhings of the two clasped figures had ceased. It was as if the destructive forces of those untold centuries had been unleashed upon the Abbot at last, taking their vengeful toll not only on the cleric himself but on Foster as well, till there remained, as the last few flames died down, only charred and unrecognizable fragments of bone and ashes on the floor.

As Poole collapsed, sobbing, I stepped into the study to see if there were any of the monks still lurking in the grounds. My relief could not have been more intense when I saw the faint flush of dawn penetrating the sky above the trees, now plainly etched against it. Of the creatures, not even one could be seen when I stepped to the shattered remains of the window and looked out.

I met Poole's eyes as he stepped towards me. Had my nerves been less taut, I might have felt some pity for his miserable plight, but the rigours of the night had been too much. I could tell that Poole remembered what he had done, though not why he had done it. That he had been possessed he undoubtedly realized, but not that it had been by something other than his own deranged subconscious. "How could I?" he repeated to himself. I wondered if he had seen the thing in the cellar. Or had his eyes been blinded to everything except Foster? "How could I?"

Irritation and fear building up inside me, I told him to stop being a fool. "Can't you see what it was that controlled you?" I asked.

He looked at me in alarm, that served only to intensify my annoyance, so that I grasped him by one arm and dragged him to the cellar door, where I showed him the charred fragments of bone which were all that remained as the fire died down of the Abbot. "He made you do it," I said callously. "Look at him!"

Poole shuddered as memories seemed to awaken inside him at the sight of the thing. He stepped away from it and knelt on the floor, clasping his hands to his face. "What can we do?" he asked.

What could we do? As I looked out at the stubborn darkness of the woods or into the dull twilight of the house, I felt trapped, claustrophobically and eternally trapped, as if caught within a nightmare from which there could be no escape into wakefulness and sanity. Sanity! Even the word itself seemed to verge on the ludicrous now. Sanity! What was it when even reality itself gave way to madness, when the curtains of our existence are rent apart and the grinning mask of chaos is thrust towards our eyes? What words could I utter in comfort when I felt my own mind sliding towards an oblivion of madness?

"We must get out of here," I said at last, my voice grating. "We must never return. Only death and madness lie in this place for us if we remain."

Looking up from his despair, Poole asked: "What of Foster? What can we do about him?"

"Nothing now," I replied. "He is dead and, I hope, at peace. There's nothing we can do for him now."

"But his death?" Poole asked, his voice almost shrill. "I caused his death."

"Not willingly," I reminded him as I looked about the hallway. "When it's light we must bury him and what's left of the Abbot beneath the flagstones in the cellar. I doubt if anyone will ever find them there. We'll do that as soon as we can, then leave… and hope that in the months to come we can forget what happened here last night."

Poole agreed immediately to my plan. He had no choice. He knew as well as I did that, if we were to attempt to explain any of this to the police, we would be damned straight away as liars. There was no satisfactory way in which we could explain Foster's death, even if we had possessed enough strength of will to face an enquiry, which we didn't.

On leaving the house several hours later I drove us away from Fenley to Pire, and from there we went on to Tavestock, where I live. For the next few months Poole took up residence in an hotel in town. I saw him now and again. I did not shun him particularly; it was instead as if we mutually found that each other's company brought back memories we would both of us prefer to forget. Though it seemed, to my relief, that what had happened in Fenley remained our secret, and that what fuss there was about Foster's inexplicable disappearance died down to be more or less forgotten, Poole seemed unable to recover properly from our ordeal. I doubted then that he ever really forgot, even for a moment, what had happened, and I could tell from his red-rimmed eyes and haggard face that his nights were tormented and sleepless.

He complained sometimes about feeling as if he was being watched, insisting that at night he caught glimpses of someone peering into his room from the darkened streets. I told him that it was his overwrought imagination, that it was his fear of someone finding the two charred bodies we had buried in his house and of the police watching him. "And there's no chance of any of this happening so long as you still own that house and no one is allowed inside it," I insisted. "Don't worry," I would end. "We're safe. Forget that it ever happened. It's in the past."

Over the months that followed I only hoped that the mental breakdown that kept threatening to occur would not happen and that Poole would somehow find the strength of will to fight back against his insubstantial fears. In the end he left Tavestock. Probably I reminded him too much of what happened. I was not sad to see him go. In a way it came as a welcomed relief. We still occasionally exchanged letters. These, at least, I could cast to one side if their contents disturbed me, for he continually complained even now about someone monitoring his house. I knew that he was slowly losing control. The whole thing had become an obsession with him, so intense that he would not even set foot out of doors after dark. "They are watching me," he once wrote from the new house he had bought in Pire, "waiting for the first chance they get if I slip up."

It was not till last night, when I read about his death in the Barchester Observer & Times, that I realized for the first time in what awful terror he must have been living for the past ten months, for his dismembered, mutilated body had been found in an alley not far from his house. No one was specifically suspected. The only clues as to who might have carried out his foul murder were the traces of mould on his scattered remains and the splintered fragments of human nails found embedded in his flesh. But the latter, as I was to learn on enquiry today, were of a puzzling nature - at least to the police investigating his death. - For they were far too old to have been broken from the fingers of living men and were supposed, by the police inspector I spoke to about it, to have been stolen by someone with a perverted sense of humour from a rifled grave and purposely implanted in Poole's dead body.

Only I know the truth of what must have happened, for I have already seen them watching my house from the darkened streets at night. That is why I no longer set foot beyond my door after dusk and have fixed a crucifix at every possible entrance to my home.

They are only waiting for me to make that one small slip such as Poole must have eventually made in order to wreak their vengeance upon me as well. You will know, by the very fact that this narrative is in your hands, that this slip must have already been made. God have mercy on my soul when this occurs!