The sense of claustrophobia was immediate. A locked room, guarded from outside. Where the hell had she gone? He sat on the futon, idly kicking at the rug, and listened to the muffled litany of the congregation. A draught was coming into the room, but not through the door. He lowered his hand down into darkness, and felt chill air prickle his fingers. At first he failed to see the corner of the hatch, but as he focused the beam of the torch more tightly he realized what he was looking at: a section of flooring, about three feet by two, that had been sawn into the wooden deck beside the bed. The flooring was plywood, easy to lift. The hatch covered the spiral stairwell to the crypt. A black-painted Victorian iron banister curved away beneath his feet. Outside, Matthew was leading a catechism that sounded more like a rallying call.
Edward dipped the light and stepped onto the fretwork wedges. Clearly Gill had been kept in the wooden room against her will, but how had she discovered the staircase to the chamber beneath her prison? Perhaps its existence was common knowledge, but it had not occurred to anyone that she might be able to gain access to it. The temperature of the air was dropping fast now; could this have been its appeal, the thought that germs would not be able to survive in such a chill environment?
He reached the bottom of the steps. His torch beam reflected a fracturing moon of light; the flagstones were hand-deep in icy water. A series of low stone arches led through the tunnelled crypt ahead of him. He waded forward and found himself beneath the ribbed vault of the main chamber. The splash of water boomed in the silent crypt.
With freezing legs and visible breath, Edward stood motionless, waiting for the ripples to subside. Something was wrong. Gillian might have lost her reason, but she would surely not have ventured down here alone. She knew that rats were good swimmers. It didn’t make sense. Something was wrong.
Above his head in the church, the steeple bell began to ring, cracked and flat. The change in the congregation was extraordinary. They dropped to their knees unmindful of injury, staring toward the tattered crimson reredos that shielded the choir stall. Damon and Matthew had reappeared in sharp white surplices, pushing back the choir screen as their flock began to murmur in anticipation. The dais they revealed had been swathed in shining gold brocade, discovered in bolts at a Brick Lane saree shop. Atop stood the enshrined figure, a mockery of Catholicism, its naked flesh dulled down with talcum powder until it resembled worn alabaster, its legs overgrown with plastic vines.
The wheels of the wooden dais creaked as Damon and Matthew pushed the wobbling tableau toward the altar. The voices of the crowd rose in adulation. The figure on the dais was transfixed in hysterical ecstasy, posed against a painted tree with her knees together and her palms turned out, a single rose stem lying across the right hand, a crown of dead roses placed far back on her shaved head, her eyes rolled to a glorious invisible heaven. Gillian no longer heard the desperate exultation of her worshippers; she existed in a higher place, a vessel for her brothers’ piety, floating far above the filthy, blighted Earth, in a holy place of such grace and purity that nothing dirty or harmful would ever touch her again.
Edward looked up. Somewhere above him the bell was still ringing, the single dull note repeated over and over. He cocked his head at the ribs of the vault and listened. First the trees, then the church bell, and now this, as though the forgotten order of nature was reasserting itself. He heard it again, the sound he had come to know and dread, growing steadily all around him. Raising the torch, he saw them scurrying over the fine green nylon webbing that had been stretched across the vault ceiling, thousands of them, far more than he had ever seen in one place before: black rats, quite small, their bodies shifting transversely, almost comically, as they weighed and judged distances.
They had been summoned to dinner.
They gathered in the roof of the main chamber, directly beneath the ringing bell, until they were piling on top of each other, some slipping and swinging by a single pink paw, and then they fell, twisting expertly so that they landed on Edward and not in the water, their needle claws digging into the flesh of his shoulders to gain purchase, to hang on at all costs. Edward hunched himself instinctively, but this exposed a broader area for the rats to drop onto, and now they were releasing themselves from the mesh and falling in ever greater numbers, more and more, until the sheer weight of their solid, sleek bodies pushed him down into the filthy water. This was their cue to attack, their indication that the prey was defeatable, and they bit down hard, pushing their heads between each other to bury thin yellow teeth into his soft skin. He felt himself bleeding from a hundred different places at once, the wriggling mass of rat bodies first warm, then hot, now searing on his back until they made their way through his hair, heading for the tender prize of his eyes.
Edward was determined not to scream, not to open his mouth and admit their poisonous furred bodies. He did the only thing he could, and pushed his head deep under the water, drawing great draughts into his throat and down into his lungs, defeating them in the only way left to him, cheating them of live prey.
Gill, I love you, was his final prayer. / only ever loved you, and wherever you are I hope you are happy. Death etched the thought into his bones and preserved it for ever.
In the little East End church, a mood of satiated harmony fell upon the congregation, and Matthew smiled at Damon as they covered the tableau once more, content that their revered sister was at peace. For now the enemy was assuaged, the commitment had been made, the congregation appeased.
Science had held sway for long enough. Now it was time for the harsh old gods to smile down once more.
Susan Davis
The Centipede
Susan Davis’s short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in anthologies and magazines. These include Panurge, Metropolitan, Mslexia and Staple. Three ghost stories have also appeared in All Hallows.
The author’s comic-horror trilogy for Young Adults comprises The Henry Game, Delilah and the Dark Stuff and Mad, Bad and Totally Dangerous, published by Random House/Corgi Books.
“‘The Centipede’ grew out of a holiday in remote rural Spain,” recalls Davis. “The insect was disturbed during a track maintenance procedure and smartly chopped in half by the workman’s spade. The subsequent tales I heard about the creature, also the oppressive atmosphere of the place, combined to haunt me, and this was the result.”
She wished Elsa hadn’t told them about the poisonous centipede. Annie kept her head down, negotiating the track like a minefield. The centipede could be right here, coiled in the long grasses with purple vetch and lilies fluttering. It could be tunnelled beneath those stones, or down where the old garden gave way to scrub, the silly Mickey Mouse ears of the prickly pears.
“You go on inside,” she called out to her husband and sister-in-law who stood below, on the terrace of Peep’s old cottage.
“Okay. We’ll go and do the recce.” Elsa’s voice boomed up at her. Elsa was swinging Pepe’s great key from her hand. She looked as if she were doing the pendulum test over the belly of a pregnant woman. “We’ll have to holler to frighten the rats,” she added cheerfully.
Left, alone, Annie paused to sneeze. The drifts of flowers released a hot peppery tang, which irritated her nose. The air was so dry. She might shrivel up out here: defenceless, her skin would slough off. The centipede knew this. The centipede was waiting just for her.