The passage sloped quite gently into the earth, further than my light could reach. It was as wide as a burly man, but not as tall as I. Now I realized what my mind had been reluctant to accept as I’d heard Crawley disappear into the church — that his footfalls had seemed to recede to a greater distance than the building could contain. I let the beam stray across the pews in a last desperate search for him, and was unable to avoid glimpsing the images scrawled on the walls, an impious dance of clownish figures with ears and feet so disproportionately large they must surely be false. Then Crawley spoke from the tunnel beyond the curve which my light barely touched. ‘Come down. Come and see.’
A wave of the stench like a huge vegetable breath rose from the tunnel and enveloped me. I staggered and almost dropped the flashlight — and then I lowered myself into the earth and stumbled in a crouch towards the summons. The somnolence audible in Crawley’s voice had overtaken me too, and there seemed no reason why I should not obey, nor anything untoward about my behaviour or my surroundings. Even the vegetable stench was to my taste, because I had inhaled so much of it since venturing back to Warrendown. Indeed, I was beginning to want nothing more than to be led to its source.
I stooped as far as the bend in the tunnel, just in time to see Crawley’s heels vanishing around a curve perhaps fifty yards ahead. I saw now, as I had resisted hearing, that his feet were unshod — bare, at any rate, though the glimpse I had of them seemed hairier than any man’s feet should be. He was muttering to me or to himself, and phrases drifted back: ‘. the revelations of the leaf. the food twice consumed…the paws in the dark.. the womb that eats. ’ I thought only my unsteady light was making the passage gulp narrower, but before I gained the second bend I had to drop to all fours. Far ahead down the increasingly steep tunnel the drumming I’d heard earlier had recommenced, and I imagined that the models for the figures depicted on the church walls were producing the sound, drumming their malformed feet as they danced in some vast subterranean cavern. That prospect gave me cause to falter, but another vegetable exhalation from below coaxed me onwards, to the further bend around which Crawley’s heels had withdrawn. I was crawling now, content as a worm in the earth, the flashlight in my outstretched hands making the tunnel swallow in anticipation of me each time my knees bumped forward. The drumming of feet on earth filled my ears, and I saw Crawley’s furred soles disappear a last time at the limit of the flashlight beam, not around a curve but into an underground darkness too large for my light to begin to define. His muttering had ceased as though silenced by whatever had met him, but I heard at last the answer he had given me when I’d enquired after the child: not ‘absurd’ at all. He’d told me that the child had been absorbed. Even this was no longer enough to break through the influence of whatever awaited me at the end of the tunnel, and I crawled rapidly forward to the subterranean mouth.
The flashlight beam sprawled out ahead of me, doing its best to illuminate a vast space beneath a ceiling too high even to glimpse. At first the dimness, together with shock or the torpor which had overcome my brain, allowed me to avoid seeing too much: only a horde of unclothed figures hopping and leaping and twisting in the air around an idol which towered from the moist earth, an idol not unlike a greenish Easter Island statue overgrown almost to featurelessness, its apex lost in the darkness overhead. Then I saw that one of the worshipping horde was Crawley, and began to make out faces less able to pass for human than his, their great eyes bulging in the dimness, their bestial teeth gleaming in misshapen mouths. The graffiti on the church walls had not exaggerated their shapes, I saw, nor were they in costume. The earth around the idol swarmed with their young, a scuttling mass of countless bodies which nothing human could have acknowledged as offspring. I gazed numbly down on the ancient rite, which no sunlight could have tolerated — and then the idol moved.
It unfurled part of itself towards me, a glimmering green appendage which might have been a gigantic wing emerging from a cocoon, and as it reached for me it whispered seductively with no mouth. Even this failed to appal me in my stupor; but when Crawley pranced towards me, a blasphemous priest offering me the unholy sacrament which would bind me to the buried secrets of Warrendown, some last vestige of wholesomeness and sanity within me revolted, and I backed gibbering along the tunnel, leaving the flashlight to blind anything which might follow.
All the way to the tunnel entrance I was terrified of being seized from behind. Every inhabitant of Warrendown must have been at the bestial rite, however, because I had encountered no hindrance except for the passage itself when I scrambled out beneath the altar and reeled through the lightless church to my car. The lowered heads of the cottages twitched their scalps at me as I sped recklessly out of Warrendown, the hedges beside the road clawed the air as though they were determined to close their thorns about me, but somehow in my stupor I managed to arrive at the main road, from where instincts which must have been wholly automatic enabled me to drive to the motorway, and so home, where I collapsed into bed.
I slept for a night and a day, such was my torpor. Even nightmares failed to waken me, and when eventually I struggled out of bed I half believed that the horror under Warrendown had been one of them. I avoided Crawley and the pub, however, and so it was more than a week later I learned that he had disappeared — that his landlord had entered his room and found no bed in there, only a mound of overgrown earth hollowed out to accommodate a body — at which point my mind came close to giving way beneath an onslaught of more truth than any human mind should be required to suffer.
Is that why nobody will hear me out? How can they not understand that there may be other places like Warrendown, where monstrous gods older than humanity still hold sway? For a time I thought some children’s books might be trying to hint at these secrets, until I came to wonder whether instead they are traps laid to lure children to such places, and I could no longer bear to do my job. Now I watch and wait, and stay close to lights that will blind the great eyes of the inhabitants of Warrendown, and avoid anywhere that sells vegetables, which I can smell at a hundred yards. Suppose there are others like Crawley, the hybrid spawn of some unspeakable congress, at large in our streets? Suppose they are feeding the unsuspecting mass of humanity some part of the horror I saw at the last under Warrendown?
What sane words can describe it? Partly virescent, partly glaucous — pullulating — internodally stunted — otiose — angiospermous — multifoliate— Nothing can convey the dreadfulness of that final revelation, when I saw how it had overcome the last traces of humanity in its worshippers, who in some lost generation must have descended from imitating the denizens of the underworld to mating with them. For as the living idol unfurled a sluggish portion of itself towards me, Crawley tore off that living member of his brainless god, sinking his teeth into it to gnaw a mouthful before he proffered it, glistening and writhing with hideous life, to me.
Ramsey Campbell has recently completed a new suspense novel, The Last Voice They Hear. His other novels include The House on Nazareth Hill, The One Safe Place and The Long Lost. On the non-fiction side his latest contribution is a major piece on British film history in Stefan Jaworzyn’s Shock. His published short stories run into the hundreds, and his collections include Waking Nightmares, Strange Things Stranger Places and Alone With the Horrors. Campbell’s short fiction has been included in both previous editions of Dark Terrors and about his contribution to this volume, he recalls: ‘Before learning from Leiber and Nabokov and Graham Greene, I acquired skills by imitating Lovecraft, and I’ve often felt there are a few more Lovecraftian tales in me. (In one of my early stories, “The Insects from Shaggai”, I made such a hash of Lovecraft’s unused idea about alien insects that guilt keeps prompting me to have another go at it.) A couple of years ago I was Guest of Honour at Necronomicon in Massachusetts, and Chaosium, the American publisher of Lovecraftian role-playing games — some of whose players, I hear it rumoured, have to be let out of their attics by their families to play, and then only by a light too dim for a sane eye to discern their outlines — undertook to publish a book in tribute. This was Scott David Aniolowski’s anthology Made in Goatswood, composed of stories set in the Cotswold area I’d made peculiarly my own — and I do mean peculiarly. Scott asked if I would provide an Introduction, but it occurred to me that here was the perfect excuse for me to develop one of the Lovecraftian ideas lurking in the pit I call my brain. I wrote it in time for the book to be launched at the convention, and read it aloud there, to the unstoppable accompaniment of a New Orleans jazz band in the nearby restaurant. Despite that, it was gravely received. When I performed it later for the Preston SF Group, however, some Lovecraftian tittering was audible from Bryan Talbot, most recently famous — deservedly so — as the creator of The Tale of One Bad Rat. Can he have glimpsed some dark secret of my tale?’