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alchemisland · 5 years

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The Antiquarian and the Devil's Dog

April 1928.

I, Martin Bryn-Kolkiln, wish to commit to paper the strange events of Friday last, April 9th 1928. For what seems an age I have been chasing time, little tempting pockets of freedom peppered throughout the week, but the crafty seconds evaded capture. My rest too, like the proverbial snoozing hound, has been disturbed to much chagrin, prolonging the day's drudgery.

I had been away for several weeks prior to the incident, pining for home on the sun-cursed dig sites of the Nile delta. Aerial raids destabilized the region, yielding formerly guarded treasures to the gloved hands of fevered antiquarians, creating a scramble the likes of which beaurocrats had not seen since the African pile-on. At one such site, in the frame of a ruined mosque we found an idol, stark and malignant in its shadow-haunted grotto, providing ample fuel for speculation among my uneducated workforce.

My postprandial scribblings, so long a staple of my working week that no servant dares scurry past my quarters upon seeing the glow neath the door signalling occupancy, go neglected of late, my notepad chastely going without flourish.

I have been much beset by idleness, my usual studious nature replaced by bouts of extended procrastination. I do not fear that you will judge too harshly my slovenliness once I recount my adventure in full.

The journey from London towards Matfield is punctuated with occasional wondrous natural vignettes. A journey I had taken many times before, I spurned heirs for comfort and slid far down on my seat, staring out the window. Wild horses cresting grassy knolls against the backdrop of God's own country.

I had informed colleagues of convalescent intentions, two weeks bedridden to document my trip, so it came as a reluctant surprise when a letter arrived requesting my urgent presence at the Powers Estate. It spoke of a strange discovery as work began on a proposed pleasure garden "to rival Xanadu". The author supposed the discovery would be pertinent to my historical interest, and suddenly I was keen to reevaluate my proposed hermitic fortnight.

I set off that same evening with only a light jacket tossed overshoulder. The note's concluding statement disturbed me most. The scribe, generously an amateur, was firm that they had uninterred the skeleton of an enormous hellhound.

I cycled to match Nike's record laps and barely caught the evening train. Upon alighting, a short preamble along a pleasant pebbled path paired with pastures carried me to the estate, its foreboding walls stark and unmissable against the sweeping hillocks. Overhead, through a bore in the wounded firmament, a lance of otherworldly pearlescence triumphed.

The moon in its wane sat stop the rounded domes of the main compound like a crown's centrepiece, its design an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western classical art, rounded arches twinned with dappled pillars, obsidian grotesques with forked tongues freed of their pursed half mouths. Inside, French tapestries decorated the walls, Greek marbles on every landing, enormous canvas features depicting glorious hunts in gilded frames tacked lavishly on every capable surface. Looted Pictish stones inscribed with mysterious runes decorated the fish pond. This was wealth. Old money.

Casement Power, younger brother of late Lord Richard, inherited no property, instead reviving a modest annual wage to fund his excess. The scurrying fox and the baited badger that presumably made up his cost of arms could not satiate his warrior spirit, so he traveled to Africa where the large game roamed.

It crossed my mind while tracing its mighty girdle that perhaps a secret exotic pet had been disinterred, cyclopean only to an amateur.

I found myself frozen at the gates. Some fuedal conditioning told me my sort still weren't welcome here, and I stood hypnotised by its granduer A fortress fit for a martial family.

A buried phalanx of ghoulish hoplites raised their jagged spears to form the gate rails, fearsome black rods as a ward to the timid, a black bas relief in its centre. Pushed its hinges dragged and howled in dull flight, which I took as a sign of reluctance on the house's part.

Once inside I turned right, veering from the cedar-lined drive down a snaking path of trodden grass towards a distant glow. With my forearm raised to tide the eye-hungry branches, I came to stand in a copse offering a clear vantage of the fiddler's kirkyard, where four beacons crudely jammed into the soil guttered, illuminating a profession of loiterers. One waved my shade closer, evidently the letter's author.

The grass grew sicklier in the albumen of my redoubt, tusks of jagged rock bursting through the topsoil. Little wonder this field alone was designated the plebeian pit, it must have been the only infertile patch inside this splendid garden of bulbed delights.

A terrible scream rang out as I took my first ginger step forward. It crowed shrilly, razorlike against the eardrum. Wretched as banshee's wail. Mighty as the seven trumpets sounding to toll the seventh seal's opening. The Djinn's howl. When the screaming stopped, an orb of light rose and hovered about the hungry mouth of an open grave. Unaccustomed to the light, its radiance blinded me, and when finally those briny trickles tamed enough to pry them back open, I found myself back in the copse where I had stood a moment before, the kirkyard beacons up ahead.

I stared to my hands, unable to discern their shape in the darkness. I needed to be positive I wasn't dreaming. It was bitterly cold. Does one feel true cold in the nightland? I surmised then I was not sleeping and in fact alertly experiencing high strangeness. Sudden nausea stole my legs and I keeled over retching.

Prone on the lawn I watched the distant beacons ignite and extinguish in sequence, casting strange shadows, then in unison they doused. Plunged into void, I felt the grass against my cheek mutate into something harder, with many sharp points. I lifted one eyelid and saw the gates. I was outside the compound, as if I had never before entered!

The bas relief's dark contours adopted an ominous aspect, moreso than previous observations yielded. Their bulbous forms tricked me with feigned normalcy. Brushing the stones set in my palm like jewels, I winced to my feet.

One idle lance shone directly on its centre. Beings that at first seemed grecian effigies altered in the pale moontorch. The icons, lacking perspective, still bulged with taut muscle. Lacking the vocabulary to describe the 'otherness' of its shape, Revelations must serve as an imaginative stimulus. The beings were contorted demons with men's bodies and genitals, coated head to toe with coarse black hair.

Where their mouths should have been jutted jaws like that of the snapping Nile crocodiles. One figure above all I was hypnotically drawn to carried by his shoulder a noxious stinger slick with venom poised to strike. Alone was he armed with a pestilent whip, distinguishing him as a leader of sorts, if rank existed within an anarchy of grotesques.

Even as fantasy, this folly was gratuitous, a remnant of the freakshow. The metal itself gleamed as if slick, though no hint of varnish my nostrils scented.

I pushed open the gate as a matter of promptness, again it screeched, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee - like a vixens wail. Events were unfolding like theatre beats, precisely as they had moments ago, only now where I was sure I had steered right, the dig site was to my left.

I thought voicing the skeptic aloud to might steady frayed nerves. Marsh gases were spirits to feudal farmers before wise men dispelled their ignorance, replicating in micrcosm the binding of the primal flame which elevated our kin above the fierce descendants of Echidna. Perhaps what I experienced was a phenomenon as yet unexplained, wholly within the realms of fact.

Seeing the skeptic permitted entry, the coward tried his charms on the doorman, a masculine fellow with traps the size of roset chickens. Without baudy company to mock my yellow belly, I thought of home, there was time enough yet. Sure, the trains wouldn't run until morning, but a man still might still safely walk the tracks in these leafy byways, and at the station Bucephalus waited.

Whether the men disturbed the rest of a hellhound or bones of a dead doe expanded by the ceaseless freeze-thaw action could a question remain, a chilling inkling to ponder on the Samhain.

A faint dust was visible in the air. A golden sporehaze like foundry sparks taken flight, shifting breezeless. Whether it was the unholy residue of occult practices blighting the gloam or a warning of impending spiritual disaster from the universe itself, I don't know, but I knew to follow my gut, instincts hard-honed.

I sped out the open gate, avoiding its siren keen, and kept a blistering pace until the lane melted where gravel gave to slick grass, then further on nearly stumbling were the tracks, a steel corridor of gnarled teeth. Stemming from negligent workers, trackside grasses growing unwieldy cast ominous shadows, obscuring assailants from the side. I slowed briefly, ensuring my stride matched the distance between planks.

After a time ambling I heard from behind the definite sound of paws plodding, four distinct footfalls increasing pace to match my own, causing me to sprint forward with surprising intensity, flapping like a disturbed bird to keep upright.

Paws clacked against the timbers quick as knuckles on a tabletop, dull heavy thuds, then something emitted a low growl that released the auxiliary adrenaline stocks. Without regard for form I reached my maximum possible speed, tissues, coins and paper scraps falling from my pockets all the while.

I was sure no fevre dream had taken hold, that what gave chase was tangible evil, an anamalous malignance out of another world, an oppressive presence. Some distance at last came between I and it, or least the sound of its routing, but still the aroma of fetid meat wrinkled my nostrils. Intense heat flared across my shoulder blades, as the footfalls came closer than ere before it flared to a searing agony.

I imagined an enormous fissure somewhere along the rows of planks behind, a tunnel hewn from riven flesh, from where mangled fingers rose to grasp my tails, bidden aid Cerberus. The beast thundered along now, terrible jaws searching the air. Teeth, dagger sharp and serrated for tearing flesh clean off the bone, came within inches of my ankles. I felt drops of reeking saliva raining down when the beast's tongue whipped at the empty space I occupied a moment earlier.

In truth I cannot recollect much further, gripped by adrenal berserk time held no meaning. New memories ceased forming. All non-critical faculties were off.

After an eternity I emerged into the dirty light of the station and dared to slow, coughing a lung by a signpost, the chase had not been so rabid these last lengths. The spell which coated those bones in living flesh expired as Sol threatened her wakening divinity, bleaching the hills.

The horizon turned red as iron ore. Hours faded like charcoal met by floodwater. Dawn arrived, silent and chorusless. I found no snapping Cerberus or terrible mastiff, only a dizzying corridor of shifting darkness stretching to infinity, for the dawntorch did not pierce the thicket there. In relief I howled, noting aloud to none in particular that this was likely a record time for this journey, surpassing even the no-stop trains that carried resources to the Hebrides overnight.

In spite of everything, I had to question if a creature ferociously pursued me at all, or merely had some friendly dog trotted alongside for a time. As to whether my own footfalls quickening sent me into a panic I was unsure. Should I be terrified, relieved, embarrassed or a combination of all three?

Next came the darkest revelation. I sat, legs dangling over the lip of the platform, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, held it as if the smoke would absorb my woes.

A draft met my back and the sodden shirt plastered thereupon. No, more than a breeze, a pain. I gingerly pawed the raw area, if the phrasing can be pardoned, and found three scrapes stretching hip to hip. At night they vomit pus onto the swanfeathers corset of gauze I have taken since. Another paroxysm sent me spiralling into blackness.

I suppose it was near enough morning when I woke. Some kindly commuter or station man had taken notice and fetched a doctor, I have no memory of this.

The doctors informed say it will be some time before the wounds heal, that I may never recoup my former vigour, and even in miraculous circumstances, there is danger of tetanus.

Tetanus.

The lacerations were proved to have been canine in origin. Doctors, veterinarians and trappers consulted have been completely baffled by their length, stating no native creature is capable of inflicting wounds suchlike to a man grown.

With this nightmare put to page I hope the oily tendrils of it are scraped from my mind. I must retire to steam the wound again. Most, my spirit is shaken. I have not felt anxiety like it since the war.

I cannot complain overmuch, but blast sleeping on my front! How anyone finds solace in this repose is beyond my imagining, I feel like a lizard basking on hot stones.

April 20th, M Bryn-Kolkiln

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