I imagined those times and the imaginings expanded from my mind.
I yelled at those rising obscenities and they hesitated, began to slide away, back down to the slimy depths they'd climbed from. Back to the deepest realms of my own thoughts.
Gradually, another sound grew beneath the tumult, a drumming-fluttering, an underlying rhythm to the howling of the wind.
The chimney breast throbbed with their flight and once again the bats swept from the fireplace opening, screeching and swarming over Mycroft, beating him with their wings. In seconds, he was engulfed and they drove him against the mantel.
They covered almost every inch of him so that his image was akin to the creatures who were slinking back into their underworld.
A brilliance was in my mind, subduing the darkness that had threatened to overwhelm, a dawn defeating the night.
I struggled to my feet, Midge helping me, and Mycroft and I gazed into each other's eyes one last time before his face was enveloped by those feasting monsters. I've no idea what he'd felt for me: I'd only observed a vast emptiness in his eyes.
Blood flowed between the frantic bodies of the smothering bats, soaking them and trickling down to puddle the floor. They drained him while he stood there.
Through the hallway, the back door crashed open and shut, an enticing trap for those people trying to escape. Some made it outside, others were crushed against the frame, their broken bodies spat back into the hall like pips from a chomping mouth.
Cracks in the curved walls were widening and more bats were squeezing through, others entering by the smashed windows. They wheeled around the room, carried by the wind, swooping to attack exposed faces and hands. Bricks began to dislodge themselves, hurtling across the room like missiles.
Midge clutched my arm and pointed upward.
The ceiling was rising in the middle, becoming more warped, more bowed, than before. Floorboards ripped free of the carpet and lifted, blasting up to the ceiling's apex to collect there along with books, cushions and ornaments. The sofa began to rise, spinning in the air, only one corner remaining in contact with the floor. Several of the Synergists had become flattened against the crumbling walls as if in a fairground rotor. I felt gravitational pressure on myself, outward and upward, and had to stand firm and resist. Gramarye was shuddering down to its very roots (and God only knew where they were).
"We must get out!" Midge shouted, her hair whipped around her face. "Something even more terrible is going to happen here, I can feel it!"
Me too. I knew she was right. Forces had been revived, set free, were pounding through like an oil gusher, and I didn't have the know-how to cap the flow. Gripping each other tightly we staggered toward the stairway, leaving behind the carnage, the awful sight of Mycroft being emptied of blood, the pulped faces of those who'd been struck by stone or raked by bats, the gale that tore around the curved and breaking walls. All bathed in that eerie, electric gleam.
We were almost through the doorway when rough hands seized my throat from behind.
I was hauled backward, thrown to the roaring, erupting floor. Then a hefty weight on my chest was pinning me there, the hands at my neck now attacking from the front. Stunned at first, I opened my eyes to find our American Hero snarling at me and he didn't look so clean-cut any more. His nose and cheeks were smeared red, and there was a deep gash in his forehead, right across from corner to corner, blood soaking through in spurts. His blond hair was tangled and dusty; God knows how, but clumps of it had been torn out so that his scalp, pinky-blue in the unnatural light, showed through. The madness in his gaze confirmed he was a true disciple of Mycroft's.
I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands away, but he only enjoyed my struggle, leering down at me and steadily increasing his own pressure.
Then Midge was on him, scoring his face with her fingers, catching the edge of the cut in his forehead and lifting the skin like a flap. The bone beneath was bloodied, hardly any white showing.
Kinsella smacked her aside easily with the back of his hand, ignoring his own pain and the blood flooding down to blind him. But the next bulky shape that lumbered forward wasn't so easy to dismiss.
A thick hand grasped him beneath the chin and jerked his head backward, continuing to pull as another hand chopped hard at his stretched windpipe. Spittle showered my face, but I didn't mind that in the least.
She tossed him away and, before he could raise himself from the floor, one of her heavy brogues crunched into his ring-of-confidence teeth. Val was playing for keeps.
She reached down for Midge and hauled her up, ducking as objects and bats flew over her head, then turned to help me; but I was already lurching to my feet.
The room was exploding around us, the middle section of floor completely gone, many of the remaining floorboards angled upward and waving like stiffened streamers; earth and mud was spewing from the opening, spraying the domed ceiling with their dirt. Brickwork was dropping from the walls in huge chunks too massive to be borne by the wind. Those Synergists who hadn't escaped—those not sprawled on the heaving floor—were clinging to the walls, unable to tear themselves free.
Val propeled Midge and me toward the doorway, as resolute and indomitable as ever, even though she was plainly scared out of her wits.
The back door still flapped wildly, inviting us to chance our luck, to beat the devil—you'd better be nimble, you'd better be quick.
"Through the kitchen!" commanded Val without even contemplating the challenge.
We rushed for the stairs as one, slipping on loose boards and carpet at the bend, the three of us tumbling down in a rolling avalanche of arms and legs. We came to an untidy halt near the bottom, and the walls were throbbing on either side of us.
We unraveled ourselves with much grunting and groaning and got going again, the noise from behind becoming even louder. We ran across the kitchen, Midge in the lead, the ceiling light dimming and brightening in quick succession. The floor tiles were all loose, rattling against each other like broken crockery, and it wasn't easy to keep our feet. Something caught my eye but I kept moving, pushed on from behind by Val. Midge threw open the front door and all three of us cleared the step with a jump, literally bursting from the cottage. We kept moving, racing down the path, flowers and weeds waving in the air on either side as if we were runners in the hundred meters, and we knew something catastrophic was about to happen back there, that the place was going to explode, or collapse, or be swallowed into the earth.
But I skidded to a halt halfway down the path.
Midge and Val were at the gate before they noticed I was missing.
"Mike!" Midge screamed back at me. "Keep going!" I shouted, then turned and ran back to Gramarye.
I could still hear her screaming my name as I plunged inside.
ENDING?
So THERE YOU have it, that's the story.
I warned you at the start that you'd have to suspend belief, and if you found that difficult, imagine how I felt at the time. Even today I sometimes wonder . . .
I wish I could explain more and neatly tie up any loose ends like the psychiatrist at the end of the Psycho movie, when he gave us lot sitting out there in the dark (as well as his fellow actors, who were probably equally puzzled) reasons for Norman Bates's odd behavior; but he was only dealing with human complexities: this is something else. This is Magic. Explanations can't be so pat.
What I have learned, by the way, is that there's no such thing as Good Magic or Bad Magic, White or Black. There's only Magic. It's how it's used, or by whom, that matters. It comes under our direction—if we have the power.