Tanners Dell: Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror (21 page)

His voice was strong and it rose yet further to dominate all the hissing and spitting and cursing coming from Kristy as the demons inside tried ever more aggressive tactics. The power within her was snapping the restraints and one of her legs had kicked free. The bed was slamming harder and harder onto the floor and blood was spraying over the sheets, blood vessels slicing into the leather straps as she fought to escape.

Urgency grew with every prayer, reading, blessing and command; but Harry was relentless, minutes ticking into hours, until finally he commanded, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command that you leave.”

Her body slumped.

He repeated it. Watched her. Repeated it once more. And then she collapsed.

No one moved or spoke.

For a full five minutes all three stood silently.

Then Harry said the final prayer of deliverance; and slowly, in front of their eyes, Kristy looked up, stared around the room, and began to cry.

Harry slumped onto the window ledge.

Kristy was sobbing heartily now, for her mother, her father, her ex-husband, and for everything she’d ever done wrong that could have brought her to this place.

After a while Harry put a blanket around her shoulders and pressed the buzzer for Nora. Turning to face his colleagues for the first time in four hours he said, “Well, I don’t know about you two but I could do with a nice strong cup of…” At the sight of Michael who had fallen on the floor, he rushed forwards, but Michael’s skin was already ice-cold to the touch and he no longer drew breath. He turned to Noel, who was standing statue-still. “I think he’s gone.”

Noel nodded. “Harry, I can’t move.”

***

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Wednesday Night/Thursday morning

Toby lay wide awake. With every creak of the floorboards or thump of the old pipes in the Victorian terrace he shared, his eyes snapped open again. If only he was back at his parents’ place enjoying the comfort of double glazing and new plumbing. These old sash windows rattled in their frames, and since neither of the other two lads were exactly gardeners, overgrown branches now bowed and scratched at the glass. Okay, yes, he got up and put the light on. He was seriously spooked.

The minute he and Becky made it back to the car last night, he’d jumped in and accelerated out of Bridesmoor almost before she’d had time to click her seatbelt on.

They’d got to The Old Coach Road before he spoke. “If we have to go back there on Friday night we’re ’aving back up.”

Becky, still out of breath from the frantic sprint through the woods from Tanners Dell, was gripping onto her seat as the car roared across the moors. “What on earth happened in there, Toby? For God’s sake tell me!”

“Right.” He wiped his brow on a shirt sleeve, holding the steering wheel with one hand. The evening was clear and studded with stars, the ground coated in silvery frost. He put both hands back on the wheel and stared hard at the road ahead. “Give me a minute. Let’s get off this moor – I hate it up here. They say the ghosts of dead miners roam around and cars go off the road because something leaps out or a sudden fog comes down.”

“More likely they go off the road because they’ve just come out of The Highwayman; but I agree it’s not the most comforting of stopping places and I’m way too freaked out to argue.”

For a while they sat silently, neither of them looking at the moors, which stretched darkly on either side.

“I keep thinking of Noel,” said Becky. “And that sedan appearing out of nowhere. He got the bike up to about 140mph and it was still closing in on him even on corners. And when Kristy was coming back from Woodsend she said this old woman suddenly appeared in her passenger seat.”

“Don’t tell me anymore.”

“Sorry.”

Eventually the road began to dip down and the neon glow of town lay ahead. Half a mile after that, they passed a deserted forecourt and then a sign for some dog kennels, after which the road was once again street-lit.

“Now,” said Becky, sighing with relief. “Pull over and tell me what on earth you saw inside the mill. If we’re going back there I need to know.”

Toby parked under a streetlamp next to a twenty-four/seven store. “You’re not going back – no way.”

“What? But—”

He shook his head. “This has got to be sorted professionally.”

She sat quietly. “Tell me what happened.”

“Okay, well I climbed into an old kitchen. It were dark, obviously, and I couldn’t see much but at the back there’s a huge room with a whacking great tree trunk growing up through the ceiling. It’s all deserted. Anyhow, I thought that was it and I were gonna come out but then I noticed a really ornate, heavy-duty door – ancient looking with weird carvings on it – and I guessed that the key Cora gave us would fit the lock.”

“And it did?”

“Aye. It turned easy. Steep cellar steps as you’d expect and not a jot of light - I could curse meself for not ’aving a torch. Stupid to go down on me own, really stupid. Anyway, when I got to the bottom I could just about make out a huge horizontal wheel but it were really black in there, so I used me cigarette lighter and then I could see a series of archways and tunnels. I couldn’t help meself, I just stared and stared at it – there’s a bloody great cathedral under there! And I knew someone used it because I could smell fucking weed a mile off, and other stuff… drugs and smoke. Anyhow, that’s when I thought I saw summat – like a hooded grey monk floating down the corridor towards me.”

“Fuck.”

“I ran like ’ell but it were dead slippy and wet so I kept skidding, but I made it up the steps to the door and locked whatever it was down there. So either they had a key or there’s another exit. I’m just wondering if that’s what Callum found and if he stumbled on that other exit – maybe up at the mine?”

“Like the tunnels lead to a mine shaft?”

“Yes.”

Toby’s mobile bleeped and they both jumped in their seats.

“You get that,” Becky said. “I’ll nip in here and get us something to calm the nerves. Hot chocolate?”

He nodded. “Ta.” The message on his phone was from Jes. Could they talk urgently?

After that the night had got even weirder.

Toby switched on all the lights and went down to the kitchen in a clinical glare of electricity. Normally he relished being on his own but as luck would have it both the other officers were on night duty. Strong, builders’ tea was what he needed, and he flicked the kettle on while his mind retraced events. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep with all this replaying in his head anyway.

Jes was adamant they met immediately, so after he’d dropped Becky off at the DRI, he drove to the address he’d been given - a house on the outskirts of Leeds. The street was in the Harehills area and the row of terraces a quiet one. Toby parked outside a tandoori on the main road and walked the remaining few yards, unbolted the side gate as instructed and went round to the back door.

The second he arrived, Jes ushered him into a small kitchen, where four men were sitting around a table. “Take a seat.” He handed him a glass and one of the blokes passed along an opened bottle of scotch.

Toby hesitated, then thought better of it.
What the hell. After tonight he needed it
.

“You can kip over if you need to,” Jes said, pouring him another. “You’ve been to Tanners Dell so you’ll need more than one of these.”

Toby knocked it back, feeling the burn of it chase down his throat, igniting his stomach. It took his breath and he gasped. “Strong stuff!”

A couple of the other men smiled.

“Have you ever been down there – underneath the mill?” he asked Jes.

Jes nodded. “So how about we pool information? I’ve waited years for a chance like this, and they’ll be meeting on New Year for sure.”

Toby looked at the other four, one by one. “Perhaps we should introduce ourselves?”

They were Nicu, Tomas, Stefan and Alex: all mid-forties to fifties by the look of them, tattooed, muscular, olive-skinned and hard bitten. “I would trust these guys with my life,” said Jes. “And to be brutally honest, we might have to.”

It crossed his mind that perhaps he’d fallen down a well into some kind of twilight world. He almost laughed. Toby in Wonderland. Well, there was no coming back from this now, was there? This road had no U-turns. An urgent call was waiting from his sergeant that he’d not yet returned, and here he was in a back kitchen somewhere in Leeds discussing an illicit mission to ambush a bunch of Satanists.

He nodded at each of the surly looking men in turn, and introduced himself while Jes poured out more whisky and a bottle of something with a Russian label on it appeared from one of the holdalls on the floor.

“Drink,” said Tomas. “Is good.”

The drink flowed, so did the stories. “I’ve tailed this lot for fucking years,” said Jes. “Taken pictures on my cell phone, had videos and given information to various blokes in that village who were more than happy to work with me – hard-assed miners more than ready to rip Lucas Dean’s balls off. But every single time I got those pictures back they were grainy and grey. One time all there was on each one was a faceless monk with cavernous holes where the eyes should be. The blokes from the village who helped me…something bad happened to every single one of them. I lost my sight temporarily and worse…”

Toby downed another glass of the clear Russian brew that tasted and smelled like meths.

“It’s like that fucking witch is watching you in your dreams. Like she crawls into your mind. And then you get ill, man, like you’re paralysed in your sleep and can’t lift your head off the pillow. It’s called a night crusher. Or you get dreams like you wouldn’t believe – you think you’re going mad with weights on your chest and black slithering creatures sliding out of the walls, rushing into your face. You can’t breathe and you can’t call out. I had to get a long way from here more than once. If she knows I’m close it’ll all start up again. She smells you out. That’s why we have to grab this chance now. Right now.”

The other guys nodded. The stories were boundless and included sudden, agonising deaths from cancer; blindness and alcoholism; and they wanted revenge.

Toby shook his head and poured another glass of toxic brew. “No, not revenge. Justice.”

Five pairs of black eyes glittered dangerously.

“Jes, you said you’d been to see Ruby. How did that go?”

“Yeah, well she got upset because we talked about her daughter – as you know it was news to me – but another of her personalities stepped in and told me a lot of stuff that stacks up. She remembers watching Ida bottle up her tricks: she takes stuff like hair, nails, blood or even a used condom and maybe whatever that person’s guilty secret is, like alcohol or cigarettes…then she’ll add a little cocktail of razors and wolfsbane, hemlock, arsenic, belladonna, all nice things…and invoke a curse. The group will then work on their chosen target from a distance and call up demons. It sounds like a load of bollocks but when you realise just how many of our people or people in that village died or had a hideous accident, it’s pretty fucking real. And when you’ve got a local doctor who signs off the deaths as perfectly reasonable and a vicar who endorses it, you get the picture. The witch herself goes after pregnant women or the new-born, which probably explains all those unmarked graves there used to be in the cemetery. Did you know about those?”

Toby nodded. “It’s in the diary I told you about – the one the social worker kept during the nineties – she collapsed and died of a brain haemorrhage shortly after finding them. The police didn’t have any of this on their records at all.”

Jes stared at him for a moment. “You do surprise me! There aren’t any unmarked graves there now, though - they moved the bodies.”

“Where to?”

Some of the body parts were put in boxes and kept in the caravans but mostly they were transferred, we think to underneath Tanners Dell – there’s a whole labyrinth under there. Ruby, or Marie I should say, saw them digging inside the abbey ruins so we think there will be the skeletons of dozens if not hundreds of children, babies and premature births underneath the grounds of the abbey.”

Toby stared at him for a full minute while the impact of this sunk in. “We can get them on this. You lot up for a New Year raid?”

***

Several hours later he hailed a taxi on the high street and left the car where it was. No matter how many sheets to the wind he was, there was no way was he spending the night on a sofa sandwiched between a couple of hairy-arsed, rough neck blokes snoring and stinking of home-brew.

His mobile woke him with a jolt just as the taxi driver was asking for cash. For a good few seconds he had no idea where he was, then he felt around in his pockets and paid the guy, stumbling into the icy midnight air and falling into the hallway a few seconds later.

There were eight messages from Sid Hall all marked as urgent.

Superintendent Ernest Scutts wanted to see him first thing tomorrow morning. That fact alone would keep him awake for the rest of the night.

***