House of Malice

EIGHTEEN

Mandy felt the chill drape over her like a cold, wet blanket as she stepped inside the hallway. She hardly dared to raise her voice to call Buster’s name. From somewhere up the passage she could hear his demented growling and the scratch of his little claws on the stone floor. She tried the lights. The inky darkness remained.

Buster’s distant growling suddenly became a furious barking. Then an agonised squealing that quickly dropped away to flat silence.

‘Buster!’ Mandy wailed. She ran through the blackness of the hall and down the passage, depending almost completely on feel and her knowledge of the place. The dark was all-enveloping, no longer like empty space but somehow imbued with its own material substance that seemed to caress her, lick her, as she forced her way blindly deeper into the house.

But now a glowing light, just a hint at first, enough photons to register the faintest impression on the human eye, seemed to drift and dance up ahead. And now it was growing brighter, a greenish-yellow haze that cast shadows through the twisting angles of the passage. It was the light from her nightmares. The light that Ellen Grace had described through the pen of her pseudonym Lucinda Darke.

And Mandy was stumbling towards it, drawn to its source as if mesmerised. The passage led her on, and on.

And now Mandy found herself approaching the door. It opened for her as she stepped closer. The luminous green mist swirling and curling itself around her, luring her down steps leading steeply beneath the house. She followed them downwards, one by one. Behind her, the door closed with an echo that filled the narrow arched stone tunnel in which she now found herself.

Down and down she went. She lost count of the number of steps she descended, until it seemed as if the steep arched shaft had taken her miles inside the earth. Was she dreaming? Hallucinating, or in some trance? The greenish-yellow light flickered like cold fire up ahead, more intense than ever, outlining the craggy arch of the tunnel. A few steps later she felt a cold breeze through her hair and realised numbly that she’d reached the end of the tunnel.

In front of her, the narrow space opened up into a greenly illuminated cavern whose vastness was too incredible for her brain to take in. Beyond the reaches of the light it stretched out into ethereal darkness that might have been infinite.

Mandy staggered on through the misty light. Strange voices seemed to echo through the cavern, snickerings and chortlings that made her whirl round this way and then that. The voices seemed to tease her, enjoying her terror. The air was pungent with the marshlike stench of the slimy things that emerged from the ground around her as she walked. The patter and squeal of rats was everywhere; other unseen creatures seemed to scuttle and slither away from her approach. She could feel the many eyes watching her from the darkness.

She was beyond terror now, beyond rational thought, into a realm that had stretched her mind past the point of ever returning. Tears ran down her face, dripped off her chin, tasted salty on her lips. The ground squelched under her feet, making it hard to walk.

She stumbled and fell with a cry, landing on outstretched hands, the weight of her body making her fingers sink into the softness that had broken her fall. Too late, the rank stench reached her nostrils and she recoiled, scrabbling backwards in the filth with a cry of disgust. Looking at her hands, the rotted flesh and blood dripping from her fingers. Gaping down at the half-eaten, ripped and mutilated corpse at her feet. Todd’s eyes stared up into hers but saw nothing.

Mandy’s scream reverberated around the cavern. And from the darkness came the laughter of unseen things too terrible even for nightmares.

She staggered away, weeping, gibbering, on the brink of madness, until her legs buckled under her and she collapsed on her face.

And from between her hands plunged deep into the ooze, a half-buried skull grinned at her. A few wisps of platinum blond hair still hung limp from the cracked bone. Tatters of blackened skin were all the rats had left attached to the rest of the skeleton.

Mandy moaned and tried to struggle upright, but there was nothing solid underfoot and nothing she could do to stop herself slipping back down into the rotting slime. Her fingers closed on some small, hard object. With a wet sucking sound she drew it from the putrescence and held it up in the light.

The little chain dangled from her fingers, dripping filth. The part of Mandy’s mind that was still capable of sane thought recognised the thing in her hand. It was the cameo pendant that had once belonged to Ellen Grace.

The blond-haired skull leered up at her. Cackles of knowing laughter echoed around the cavern.

Because they knew that Mandy Freeman wouldn’t leave this place. She was trapped down here. Face to face with her favourite writer.