Deadlight Hall (Nell West/Michael Flint #5)(36)

Porringer’s lower body was twitching spasmodically, and he was groaning. Sch?nbrunn and I grasped the edges of the door, and threw all our weight into pulling it open. In the cold torchlight we could both see that blood had spattered the iron – blood, with tiny splinters of bone in it. I began to feel sick. As you know I am apt to be annoyingly squeamish.

But I said, with as much force as I could, ‘Porringer, tell us. We’re trying to get you free, but tell us about the twins, and we’ll do our best to help you.’

But either Porringer would not or could not speak by now, and I said, ‘We must get him out. There’s blood and brain matter spilling out. We can’t leave him like this—’

‘If there was something we could use as a series of wedges to force the lid open,’ said Sch?nbrunn, looking round the room, ‘we could get him out and to an infirmary.’

‘Should one of us try to find a doctor? There’d be one in the village – Mrs Battersby would know, I could ask her. Or if her husband’s still prowling around upstairs …’

‘I think Battersby must have gone,’ said Sch?nbrunn. ‘If he was still here he’d have heard us and come down to investigate. As for going in search of a doctor – by the time we managed to get one here …’ He looked at the trapped man and gave an expressive shrug.

‘Also,’ I said, very softly, ‘to do any of that would blow our cover.’

‘Quite. Dammit, there must be something we can do.’

That was when we heard the other sounds. A kind of rhythmic ticking, like the heartbeat of some invisible creature. We both looked towards the door leading out to the dark passage, but nothing moved. Then came a dull roar. At first I had no idea what it was, then Sch?nbrunn said in a voice of extreme horror, ‘Dear God, it’s the furnace.’

‘What—?’

‘It’s firing,’ he said.

‘It can’t be.’

‘But it is. Can’t you smell the hot iron? The door mechanism must have released something – set something working. If we don’t get him out in the next few minutes he’ll burn alive. His face—’

The thick pipes feeding the furnace were already scorchingly hot, and the smell of hot iron was increasing.

The torch spluttered and the battery died. We were in the pitch dark.

Porringer’s screams will, I believe, echo through my nightmares until I die. It is a terrible thing to hear the screams of a man whose brain has been partly crushed, and whose face is about to be burned off by the roaring heat of an ancient furnace.

After the first few nightmare minutes the darkness was not quite so absolute, because a flickering light began to glow from the furnace. That meant we could at least see what we were doing, but it would not have mattered if a hundred suns had shone down on us, or if a thousand bright lights had poured into the room, because there was nothing we could do to save Porringer.

If we had known how to disable the furnace that might have saved him, but we did not know, and we did not dare waste time trying to find out. Instead, we tore our hands to shreds trying to get the door open. To no avail. The door resisted our efforts as firmly as if something was leaning heavily against it, or as if – and this really will convince you I went temporarily mad in that hellish place – as if something on the inside was pulling hard on it to prevent it being opened. In the end, the heat became so unbearable that eventually we were forced to stop. Even so, we both had badly blistered hands for some days.

I cannot tell you how long it took Porringer to die, because time ceased to exist in that hellish place. The glow from the furnace turned the room into something from one of the ancient visions of hell. Our shadows, distorted and grotesque, moved across the old stone walls, and more than once I thought other shadows moved with them. Smaller, more fragile silhouettes, their arms outstretched. The old deadlight set into the room’s iron door was bathed in the sullen light; it watched us unblinkingly.

Porringer was screaming, and there was a stench of burning flesh – I cannot find words to describe that, nor is it something that should be described. But at one stage the nausea overwhelmed me, and I was sick, helplessly and messily, spattering on the floor. I think Porringer was dead by that time, for the sounds from the furnace had ceased.

One of the most bizarre, most sinister aspects of the entire incident was that once Porringer was dead, the furnace began to cool. The angry glow faded and the sound of the pipes clanking and growling ceased. There was a ticking as the metal cooled.

We left him – what remained of him – in that room, closing the iron-bound door, and groping our way back through the dark passages. I could not stop thinking about that smeared, blinded deadlight, and how it had seemed to watch everything that happened. That is something else that is in my nightmares.

I suppose Porringer’s body will be found sometime, but I am not sure if it will be possible for it to be identified. I don’t know if there will be enough of it left.

Sch?nbrunn and I walked rather shakily from the furnace room. Neither of us spoke. Both of us wanted, I believe, to simply reach the good fresh air and the normal world, and to get away from Deadlight Hall as fast as we could.

Neither of us can explain what happened to Porringer. There was no one else with us in the furnace room. It can only be that when Porringer fell against the furnace, the cover was dislodged by his fall and the hinges broke, so that when it swung closed, it somehow locked into place. That, we have agreed, is the likeliest explanation.