Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

“Just keep me posted. Let me know what you find out. I… I can’t stay here. It’s too much for me. I’m not a young man. I need to get out and breathe.”

Marc nodded. “I understand. And I appreciate this, I really do.” He opened his hand and looked at the keys. “I’ll find out what I can and keep in touch.”

Rose didn’t take his eyes off Marc’s face. “Let’s just hope you find out that Harry wasn’t involved.”

“What do we do if… well, if he was involved? How the hell do we tackle that situation?”

Rose set down his cup. He placed his hands, palms down, on either side and made them into fists. “I don’t know. Let’s just see what you dig up first, eh? We’ll face that problem if it is a problem.”

“Okay. We’ll see where the wind blows us on this. I’m pretty sure Harry wasn’t doing anything bad. I think I knew him well enough that I’d be able to recognise something… you know, if he was a bad man.” He paused. “And you were his brother: you’d at least have a slight inkling if he was some kind of child abductor. I doubt we’re going to find any bodies buried under the cellar floor.” He tried to smile but it was a struggle. “Worst case scenario: he knew a lot more than he ever let on, and something scared him enough that he kept quiet for all these years.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

Marc nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

LATER, BACK DOWNSTAIRS, Marc stood at the front window of Harry Rose’s lounge, watching the sky grow dull and leaden. Like time lapse photography, the clouds moved quickly across the heavens, darkening the area, cutting it off from the sun. It was an unusual effect; he had never seen anything quite like it before. When he’d been up in the attic rooms with Rose, he’d glimpsed similar dark clouds out of the attic window, but these were much more expansive. He’d thought of those earlier clouds as harbingers of a storm, and still the idea felt right. But the oncoming storm was not one caused by atmospheric conditions; it was more of a spiritual upheaval.

Marc was not a religious man. Depending on what day he was asked, he would tell people that he was either an atheist or agnostic. He certainly didn’t believe in the God his parents had prayed to. Look what that had achieved for them… nothing; nothing at all. Just a slow, painful, drawn-out death in front of their son.

He watched the darkening sky, his skin prickling as if tiny ghost fingers were pitter-pattering across every inch of his body. He felt cold. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was bristling. It was a sensation he’d only ever read about in books, but now that it was happening to him he realised that the physical experience — like most clichés — was based in reality.

“ Jesus …” He reached out and closed the window blinds, then turned to face the room. He didn’t feel comfortable here. Not on the estate or in this house. Everything seemed vaguely hostile, as if his presence was unwelcome.

When Rose had left, Marc had gone straight back up to the attic. After studying the model of the estate for a little while, he’d crossed the landing to the library. Ignoring the sensation that there was still someone in there, standing in the corner and watching him, he’d browsed again through the volumes. On a shelf near the door, he found another notebook. He’d failed to notice it the first time, but this time it was as if his eyes had come to rest immediately upon it, deliberately seeking it out. He refused to believe that it had not been there the first time, and someone had placed it on the shelf for him to find when Rose wasn’t around.

The two notebooks were now on the coffee table. He crossed the room, sat down, and picked up the second one again. It was old, the cover creased and stained, yet unmarked by any kind of writing.

There wasn’t much content inside this one, but on the first page was stapled a faded copy of an old-fashioned print or woodcut of a plague doctor. The name Terryn Mowbray was written underneath in Harry’s neat, small script.

“Terryn Mowbray is Captain Clickety…” Even as he said the words, he appreciated their inevitability.

He turned the page and read the words over, trying to understand them more fully this time. There were scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page, and Marc could at least see the shape and structure that Harry had been attempting to impose upon the writing.

In 1349, during the Black Death, a plague doctor was summoned to the village of Groven 1in the northeast of England. King Edward III himself was said to have given the man his orders. Groven, it was said, had managed to avoid all signs and marks of the Plague. The Black Death had not crossed its borders; the people who lived there were fit and healthy and oblivious to the darkness that had fallen over the rest of Europe. 2

The plague doctor, Terryn Mowbray, was around thirty years old. There is no record of his existence prior to his mention here, and even this was difficult to piece together from various unreliable sources. He apparently arrived in Groven sometime in May. What he found there (here?) enraged him. The people of the village had embraced ancient rites and rituals and even created new ones of their own — normal pagan beliefs had been supplanted by something stranger, like a mutated, nameless religion. They prayed to unnamed deities and Mowbray claimed that they offered up children — twins were thought to be the most prized — as a sacrifice. The children were stabbed to death at the centre of a grove of oak trees, their blood left to soak into the earth. A path of black leaves is said to have led the way from the village to the grove. 3

Mowbray apparently noted many strange sights: 4visions of a tall, grey structure at the centre of the grove of trees, birds that hummed and flew backwards, a young girl with multicoloured wings, and animals that he could not name — a horse with a single truncated horn, like a mutilated unicorn, dogs with the faces of humans, a large, bloated snake that smelled of offal and was drawn to the site of the bloodshed. He called this giant serpent the Underthing. 5

Mowbray was enraged. He ordered the village cleansed. People were hung, burnt in bonfires, and quartered by his men. After the massacre, 6he and his men slept one more night in the village.

The rest is sketchy 7at best. Some say that a great number of ghostly twins appeared in the village, and others say that it was a pack of ravenous human-faced dogs. I was even told by one drunken old-timer that it was giant hummingbirds.

However it happened, Mowbray’s men were killed, their skinned bodies hung from the branches of the oaks. Only he was left alive. An envoy sent by the King arrived a few days later and found Mowbray, starving and filthy and jabbering, sitting at the centre of the grove of oaks, surrounded by the rotting, flyblown remains of his men’s bodies. He spoke about other worlds, and gateways, and secrets that should never have been disturbed. He whispered the words Croatoan and Loculus. Upon his face and body, beneath the mask and the cloak, were the buboes and postulant sores of the Plague. He had brought it here, to the place that had previously remained untouched. His spirit had polluted the sanctity of Groven, first with the sin of his banal evil, second with the blood of the villagers, and then finally with Black Death itself…

The only whisper I heard about what happened next makes little sense out of context. Apparently Terryn Mowbray stood, bowed, and started turning in a slow circle upon the ground. He disappeared as if he were sinking into the earth, corkscrewing away into infinity, chanting a single word over and over again: Loculus. 8All that was left in his place was a small mound of blackened leaves. 9