The Demons of Frog End
The villagers of Frog End ascribed the strange occurrences in the village to demons. The true explanation was perhaps even more sinister.
Father Joel O’Shea presided over one of the quietest churches in all of Ireland. Perhaps this was why Bishop Nealey gave him the task of surveying all the Catholic churches in the British Isles.
The task wasn’t arduous. For the majority of the five thousand or so Catholic churches found in the British Isles, up-to-date information was readily available.
As for the remainder, for the most part he had only to make a few phone calls or send a few emails to obtain the information that the Vatican required. He estimated he could complete the work, alongside his other duties, in perhaps three years.
And then, one day, while browsing an old guide to British cathedrals, he chanced upon something rather startling.
The Catholic cathedral of Frog End, located in England’s Lake District, was said to have been constructed in 1805 and was still in use at the time the guide book was published. Were it still in use at the present, that would make it the oldest cathedral in the British Isles to remain in Catholic hands. And yet, all his enquiries as to its current status drew a blank.
A grainy photograph of the cathedral displayed a quite magnificent building, rivalling St. Mary’s in Limerick.
After some discussion, the Bishop instructed O’Shea to go to Frog End and elucidate the current situation in person. And so it was that Father O’Shea found himself on an economy-class flight, crossing the Irish Sea, bound for Newcastle.
When he landed, he made for the smoking area outside the airport with all possible haste and smoked two cigarettes, one after the other.
“This addiction is getting out of hand.” he muttered to himself.
Suitably fortified, he made his way to a car hire desk and hired the smallest car available, which was a little French thing quite obviously marketed to women. Bishop Nealey wouldn’t be seen dead in such a thing, he thought.
The drive ahead of him was a distance of 120 miles, which on a motorway might have been completed in two hours, but on the winding roads ahead might easily take four.
Frog End itself was something of a mystery, and the existence of a cathedral in it even more so. The village was nestled in the shadow of a mountain known as Brindle Pike, and was accessible only via a bridge across a tributary of the River Eden.
According to the guide, a wealthy philanthropist had paid for construction of the cathedral, with a view to serving local farmers and agricultural labourers.
The sun was already setting when O’Shea reached the bridge, after getting lost several times—the satnav appeared wildly inaccurate—only to find it barricaded. While he was sitting there, wondering what to do, the satnav announced, “You have reached your destination.”
“Sure, an’ thanks for nothing.” said Father O’Shea.
He sighed and pulled the car to the side of the road, then proceeded on foot.
He had at least had the foresight to pack his minimal quantity of luggage for the trip into a backpack.
He jumped nimbly over the rusty iron barricade. He was starting to doubt that Frog End even existed. If it did exist, perhaps it was somewhere else. There was no sign of it.
On the other side of the bridge, the track led up over a hill and then sharply downwards, and after winding around a corner, he saw it: a village whose houses were barely distinguishable from the enormous rocks that towered around them. However, among was no sign of a cathedral.
“That’s got to be it., so it has.” O’Shea muttered, staring at a map in the rapidly-descending gloom.
No cathedral was marked on the map either, but that was precisely why he was there. Other than the guide book, he had found no trace of the cathedral’s existence at all, and he was beginning to suspect the book’s authors had invented it for a joke.
As he approached the village the gravelly track evened out into a properly-tarmaced road. He had passed six or seven houses when he happened to spot a man out walking with his dog.
“Hello there.” said Father O’Shea. “I was wondering if you could tell me where I can find somewhere to stay round here?”
The man was thickset and irritable-looking.
“You can try Mrs. Bentham.” he said, waving vaguely towards the mountain. “She’s on Yarrow Lane. You’ll see it. There’s a conservatory at the side.”
“Appreciate the help. Thanks a lot.”
“What’s your business here?”
“I’m looking for information about a cathedral. St Jude’s.”
The man’s demeanour changed abruptly, and in the wrong direction.
“Do yourself a favour a go back the way you came.” he said.
“Why so?” said Father O’Shea, taken aback.
“Why don’t you ask your sky fairy about it?” said the man, and he hurried away.
“These atheists are getting out of hand.” said Father O’Shea to himself.
By the time he found the house on Yarrow Lane it was completely dark; so dark that he could barely see where he was going. He had come very close to taking the man’s advice and returning to his car.
Once he saw the conservatory, he leaned back against a stone wall outside and lit a cigarette.
He was halfway through it when a woman opened the door and shouted, “What are you up to, there?”
“Oh I’m sorry, are you Mrs. Bentham?”
“I am, that.” she said. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m looking for somewhere to stay for the night.”
“You should have phoned in advance.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve literally just heard about you from a man walking his dog. I thought there’d be an inn or something here.”
The woman sighed loudly and pointedly.
“You’d best come in then.” she said. “I ‘ope you don’t mind dogs.”
The woman owned two strongly-built mongrels that snarled at him unpleasantly when he entered, but kept their distance.
That night, as he was lying on a bed in a tiny attic room, listening to a mouse scampering about somewhere under the floorboards, he resolved firmly not to spend another night in the village. Clearly it possessed no cathedral, and any information to the contrary would have to be chalked up to English humour.
In the morning, Mrs. Bentham served him a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and tea for an additional £15.
“Mrs. Bentham,” he asked, as she poured him more tea, “tell me, is there a cathedral round here?”
She seemed to stiffen.
“You’ll be wanting to go to Newcastle.” she said. “That’s the closest as far as I know.”
He persisted.
“There wasn’t ever a cathedral round here then?”
“Let me give you a piece of advice, Father O’Shea.” she said, suddenly angry. “Don’t go raking things up that are best left in the past.”
And she stormed off back to the kitchen.
After breakfast he packed his few belongings back into his backpack and went outside, opening the guide book to the page that described the cathedral. There was a map showing its location, but very sparse in detail and really little more than a sketch.
He took out a modern Ordnance Survey map, spread it against the stone wall opposite Mrs. Bentham’s house and tried to compare it with the drawing in the book. The shape of the river was in same in both, and he managed to find Yarrow Lane on both maps. The most notable difference between the two was that the cathedral was not marked on the Ordnance Survey map.
He put the guide book away, folded the Ordnance Survey map so that the part of it containing the village was uppermost, and began to walk towards the alleged site of the cathedral.
When he got there he found nothing but an empty field. A handful of scraggy sheep roamed about, eating weeds and grass. A little patch of land in the middle of the field seemed somewhat bare; he let himself in through a gate and strode towards it. When he got there he found himself looking down at a stone engraved with a few words.
In memory of those who died, it said.
There was no date, nor any mention of who had died or why.
He was staring at it thoughtfully when a voice shouted to him.
“Looking for something?”
He looked up to see a woman in her seventies. She was holding a dog leash and a border collie was tearing up and down the road, stopping to sniff at things.
“Was there ever a cathedral here?” he shouted.
A curious expression seemed to flit across her face.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Father Joel O’Shea.” he replied. “I’m doing a survey for the church. My guide book says there’s a cathedral here but I can’t find it.”
“I might be able to help you.” she said.
The woman’s name was June and she lived alone with her dog on the edge of the village. She looked and sounded unusually intelligent, and had a nasty scar on her forehead above her right eye. She invited him to to her house, where she proudly showed him photographs of her son and daughter, who she said worked as a doctor and a biologist respectively, and visited her regularly.
There were also photographs of her late husband around the house; more recent photographs showed him smiling, often with his arm around his son or daughter, or playing with their dog, but in earlier photographs he seemed serious and thoughtful; perhaps even a little sad.
“The cathedral was demolished in 1963.” she explained, while they sat drinking tea in June’s living room.
“Demolished?” said O’Shea, shocked.
“I know, it’s a crime to destroy such a beautiful building, but it was for the best. They concreted it over and put soil over the concrete. It was a big job.”
“But why would they do such a thing?”
“What does your guide book say?”
He took the book out of his backpack, opened it to the right page and handed it to her.
She read it, shaking her head and laughing occasionally in disbelief.
“It says John Stevenson paid for the cathedral’s construction but it doesn’t say why.”
“Do you know why?”
“I do.” she said, smiling. “We all knew.” Then the smile disappeared from her face and was replaced by a frown, tinged with nostalgia.
“They’re very superstitious round here.” she said. “Stevenson grew up in the village. Where you were standing, there was once a hole in the ground. They called it Devil’s Hole. It was a sinkhole, cause by the collapse of a surface layer of rock. It wasn’t always there. They used to say it appeared in the middle of the 18th century, in the reign of King George II. After the hole appeared, the village was cursed with bad luck.”
“Bad luck?” said O’Shea.
She laughed.
“I’m not saying I believe that. That’s just what they believed.” said June. “The locals believed the hole was a gateway to Hell.” she continued. “There was a local legend that a boy once fell into it and two men went into the hole looking for him. The men were never seen again but the boy was found wandering the hills a week later, completely insane, wailing about demons.
“Stevenson built the cathedral directly over the hole, to prevent evil spirits from leaving the demonic realm beneath.”
“To be sure, we can’t have evil demons roaming about.” said O’Shea with a smile.
“Indeed.” said June.
“And did it work, so? Were the demons contained?”
“For a while, yes.” said June.
The expression on her face seemed to darken again and she fell silent, seemingly considering something.
“Is there some kind of weird secret going on here?” said O’Shea. “Pardon me for asking. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s perfectly fine.”
“There was … an incident.” said June suddenly. “I have an account of it, written by a survivor; a man who passed away two years ago. Would you like to see it?”
“Very much so.” said O’Shea.
“I’ll let you read it, but you will have to promise me something. I assume, as a man of God, Father, I can trust you to keep your word?”
“Absolutely, June. Are you a believer yourself?”
“Not really. But you are.”
“What gave it away?”
“I need you to promise me you won’t breathe a word of what you read until after I’m dead.”
O’Shea stared at her in surprise.
“Of course.” he said. “You have my word.”
“If anyone round here asks, I didn’t tell you a thing.”
“Well now you’re asking me to lie.”
“You can just evade the question, can’t you?”
“True enough. Anyway I’m leaving today.”
“I’ll get it.” she said, and she got up and went upstairs.
When she came down again she was carrying a thin sheaf of papers.
“Read it.” she said, handing it to him.
He flicked through the papers, looked at June curiously, then began to read.
My name is Roger Hartley. From 1958 to 1963 I worked at a covert government laboratory in the village of Frog End, in the Lake District. We were researching smallpox. Specifically, we were attempting to make it more infectious and more deadly.
There wasn’t a single one among us who didn’t have grave reservations about the work. The rationale for it was this: only by making the virus more dangerous could we attempt to find a treatment, cure or vaccine against weaponised smallpox. We assumed the Russians were doing similar work and that, if war were to break out, they might use weaponised smallpox against us.
I don’t know who selected Frog End for the laboratory, but the reason for its selection was obvious. The village can only be accessed via a single bridge which can easily be closed or destroyed if needed. The population of the village did not exceed a hundred and fifty souls, and the nearest other human habitation was a farmhouse five miles away. A number of houses in the village stood empty, due to people leaving to find work elsewhere.
In spite of its remoteness, some madman or other had chosen to build a cathedral there, and underneath the cathedral was an extensive cave network. Quite how extensive, we still don’t know. Directly underneath the cathedral, some of these caves had been fashioned in sizeable crypts and cellars.
The idea was that a team of scientists and their families would move into empty houses in the village and that a laboratory would be constructed in the cellars underneath the cathedral. In this way we could come and go without any observer even realising that we were going to work in the covert lab. We would pose as archivists and architectural specialists.
I moved into a house in the village together with my wife, my son and my daughter, the latter being, respectively, four and six years old at the time.
From the start I found the laboratory unsettling. I didn’t enjoy working there. The moral dubiousness of what we were doing weighed on me, but it wasn’t just that. The lab itself was disturbing.
We reached it via a flight of stone steps in the rear of the cathedral. It felt curiously claustrophobic and smelt perpetually of disinfectant. When one descended the steps, the horrible screeching of the chimps trapped in their cages immediately assaulted the ears. I could not help but feel sorry for them.
Inside the lab’s largest room stood something even more horrifying: three human bodies in upright tanks, submersed in a preservative liquid. Although the human subjects were braindead, having suffered serious accidents or illness, their bodies were kept alive by an intricate life-support system. They were the only way to properly test the results of our efforts.
I tried to take up the issues of the condition of the chimp’s cages and the immorality of using human subjects with the lab director, David Asquith, but he refused to hear me out.
“Are you a scientist or aren’t you?” he said to me. “A scientist cannot afford delicate sensibilities.”
It doesn’t embarrass me to admit that I came to hate that man. As a junior scientist scarcely at the start of my career, I was easily intimidated by him, and I did not persist in voicing my concerns.
The incident that ultimately resulted in the lab’s permanent closure occurred at 5.36 a.m on the 17th June, 1963.
I awoke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of screaming. A chandelier-style light fitting above our bed had fallen from the ceiling and blood was pouring from a wound on my wife’s forehead, above her eye. The entire house was shaking and there was a low rumbling sound in the air, but both stopped quickly.
I removed the chandelier from my wife’s head and began to pick bits off glass off her face. She told me there had been an earthquake and urged me to go and check on the children. Of course, earthquakes in England are extremely rare but there seemed to be no other explanation to hand.
I ran to the children’s rooms, fearful of what I might find, but they were both still soundly sleeping, and unharmed.
My wife had sustained a nasty cut. I thought it needed stitches but she had an aversion to doctors and she assured me it would be fine once bandaged up. This attitude I found to be quite common in those parts, and my wife was a native of the Lake District. In the end we agreed that we would look at the wound again at the end of the day, and she would see a doctor if it showed any any sign of infection.
I then walked around the house checking for damage. A cup had fallen off a shelf in the kitchen and had smashed on the floor. A couple of pictures had fallen from the walls. More disturbing was a substantial crack that had appeared in the wall of the living room, but that turned out not to be the worst of it.
The worst damage by far was in the cellar. A small part of the floor had collapsed, leaving a gaping black hole.
I could only assume the problem had been caused by subsidence. This thought immediately made me fear for the integrity of the laboratory. At that point I didn’t know whether the entire village had been affected or just our house, but of course the prospect of damage to the lab sent a chill down my spine, in view of what was stored there.
I tried to persuade my wife to leave the house with the children until we could get an expert to pronounce on its safety, but she was having none of it. In her view the house was obviously stable, the danger had passed, and my pressing priority should be the laboratory. She didn’t know what we were working on in there, but she knew it was something dangerous; something that, if loosed, would pose a grave danger to the whole village.
Once I had bandaged the wound on my wife’s head I went immediately to the lab, fervently hoping to find it intact.
In the cathedral, I stood for some moments, surveying the walls and the ceiling, looking for signs of damage. I could see none. Archie Spencer entered while I was standing there, and he informed me that an overhanging section of Brindle Pike had collapsed.
“They’re saying the collapse has probably stoved in a cave system under the town.” he told me. “Something to do with stress following a geological fault. No idea how that works though.”
“What about the lab?” I asked him.
“I’m told s surveyor is down there now with Asquith.”
It was fortunate, in a way, that we had been in the process of extending the lab. A geological surveyor was on hand in the village to supervise the proceedings and he was very familiar with the lab from a structural and architectural point of view.
In a room at the back of the cathedral, where the steps leading down the lab were located, we found several other of our colleagues, awaiting the report of Asquith and the surveyor.
The mood among us was tense, to say the least. No-one said much. We stood around, brooding, waiting for the news.
After about half an hour, Asquith came up the stairs with the surveyor.
“Panic’s over, everyone.” he said. “Everything’s intact. There’s a crack in the new section but that’s not going to affect us.”
We breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Crack in the new section?” Archie said to me as we were descending the stairs. “Don’t much like the sound of that.”
“As long as Lab 3 is intact I’m fine with it.” I told him.
Lab 3 was where we kept the really dangerous stuff. You couldn’t go in there without passing through two airlocks, fully suited up.
Inside, the animals were in a foul mood, screaming and trying to throw things at us. I felt desperately sorry for them. At the time I thought the minor earthquake had just riled them up. Now I think they were trying to tell us something.
Archie and I resumed our usual tasks. As a junior researcher I was often stuck with unglamorous tasks like filtering and autoclaving the beef broth we used for bacterial cultures, and I remember that on that particular day, I was working on that.
There was a weird atmosphere in the lab. We all noticed it and none of us could put our finger on the cause of it. People were going about their work with fearful, anxious expressions on their faces, talking little and startling easily.
Archie had a theory that earthquakes tap into some kind of primitive area of the brain, triggering fear centres. Enrico, who we called Rick, laughed and said mild earthquakes were common in the region of Italy he came from, and they didn’t make people behave like we were all behaving. Archie countered that none of them lived in an underground bioweapons lab in Italy.
“Maybe the earthquake unleashed the demons.” I said, attempting to laugh but failing.
“Cosa?” said Rick.
“You know, they believe demons live in the caves round here.”
Instead of laughing, Rick and Archie just looked even more anxious. Rick even got a little testy.
“What-a complete-a nonsense!” I remember him saying.
Archie kept glancing nervously towards the new area that was under construction and was destined to become Lab 6. Work on it had stopped completely, and what with that and the lack of chatter, the lab was eerily silent, except for the jabbering of the animals.
Somewhere in Lab 6 was a crack in the newly-constructed wall, beyond which was a cave system that perhaps no human being, nor any living animal, had ever seen.
Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t imagine I would have found this idea particularly terrifying. It’s a cave, so what? That’s what I would have thought. Yet somehow the idea of all that blackness and those unknown, uncharted depths, really got to me at the time. The fear of them displaced even my concerns about my wife and children. At least they were safely above ground, I found myself thinking. We were stuck working next to those unfathomable monstrous depths.
I could see from the expressions on the faces of my colleagues and their nervous glances towards Lab 6 that they were presumably having similar thoughts.
We were next to a small mountain. Who knows how deep the caves went? A mile? Ten miles? More? How can the human mind even truly comprehend the endless darkness of those subterranean tunnels, untouched by history or progress or evolution, devoid of life and light?
An endless, pitiless labyrinth, silent and uncaring for countless millennia; a godless void beneath the earth, waiting implacably for —
My thoughts were interrupted by the door of Lab 3 opening and Asquith stepping out holding a vial in a pair of tongs.
He had a wild, crazy look on his face and I saw with absolute horror that all the airlock doors were open, all the way to the horrifying interior of Lab 3.
He shouted out at the top of his voice, “It is completed! I’ve created the ultimate weapon! Proof that God is dead!”
Everyone froze. Phil was the first one to break out of the spell. He approached Asquith cautiously, saying “Why don’t you go back into Lab 3 and put that down? There’s a good fellow.”
Asquith looked at him confusedly and, at that moment, the vial dropped from the tongs and smashed on the floor.
All hell broke loose in that instant. Asquith seemed to suddenly come to his senses and he moaned, “What have I done?”
The deputy director, Roland Elling, immediately shouted “Close the exit doors!”
I ran to the exit and there an astonishing sight met my eyes. Lisa Reynolds, our animal technician, was opening the animal cages and setting all the chimps free. I could tell from the light at the end of the coridor that the door to the steps that led up into the cathedral was open.
Some of those chimps were old enough to be extremely dangerous; we needed a certain quantity of chimps with mature immune systems, and they were angry as hell. As I watched, one of them sprang at her and began tearing at her neck. I tried to close the doors but one of them ran at me, knocking me to my feet, and proceeded into the lab, chattering and baring its teeth. Others soon followed.
Asquith ran to the outside line and began shouting into it. He was shouting something like “Emergency Sigma! Execute Protocol 9! Execute Protocol 9!”
When he put the phone down he was shaking badly.
Rick shouted at him: “Che cazzo è Protocol 9?”
Asquith was a perpetual bachelor but many of the rest of us had family in the village. We didn’t like the sound of Protocol 9 at all. We were seeing chimps run into the contaminated lab and out again, and we knew that would warrant a strong response.
“That’s above your pay grade.” said Asquith. “Get that bloody door shut!”
I finally succeeded in sealing the door, but not before three more chimps had enjoyed a good scamper around the lab and then run out again. The few who entered the lab soon saw there was no way out but the way they had arrived, and they left us in peace, streaming toward the steps to the cathedral. This, I saw with my own eyes before I was able to get to the door controls.
Archie ran at Asquith and grabbed him by the collar.
“You’re going to tell us what Protocol 9 is.”
“I’m damn well not.” said Asquith.
Archie had begun twitching and hardly seemed saner than Asquith.
Rick strode forwards with a beaker full of something.
“Get ‘im on the floor. I ‘ave a nice-a drink for ‘im.”
I don’t know what was in the beaker but it was certainly something that should not be drunk.
Archie struggled with Asquith for a few moments, almost pulling him to the ground, then Asquith shouted. “All right, what the hell, none of us are getting out of here anyway.
Archie let him stand up and he addressed us in a loud, hoarse voice.
“The village must be considered contaminated now.” he said. “The entire village will be sprayed with E7.”
Archie paled visibly.
“What’s E7?”
“A nerve gas.” said Asquith. “It’s deadly. They’re all going to die, just like us!”
And he began laughing unhingedly, his voice cracking high, mixed up with fits of coughing and wheezing.
I ran to the door and hammered on the open button, but nothing happened. The mechanism had been deactivated remotely, and the door was made of inch-thick steel. There were faint wisps of smoke curling around the edges of it, and I deduced that the coils that pulled back the door’s multiple bolts had been deliberately burned out.
Archie was backing away from Asquith, moving towards me. Rick, on the other hand, began viciously beating Asquith. Asquith no longer even tried to defend himself. Several of the other ran at him and joined in, some of them giggling and laughing derangedly.
When he reached me, Archie laid a hand on my shoulder and said, quietly, “We’re not getting back out through that door, but if there’s damage to Lab 6, maybe there’s a way out there.”
I could feel his hand shaking and twitching.
“We can’t leave.” I said, dazedly. I’m quite sure, looking back, that I also wasn’t in my right mind.
“What about your family?” said Archie, and those words snapped me out of it.
“Let’s go.” I said.
When we reached the door of Lab 6 we looked back to see our colleagues either joining the assault on what was left of Asquith or else staring at the spectacle and laughing. I thought I saw Rick waving Asquith’s severed arm in the air, and at the time it seemed to me completely real. Only afterwards did I understand that something had affected our minds, and we weren’t able to distinguish reality from hallucination.
It’s not an easy business to detach an arm and that inclines me to think the arm must have been hallucinatory. If Rick really did cut Asquith’s arm off, I’m certain he acted only under the influence of the same insanity that affected all of us to varying degrees. I knew Rick to be a sober and thoughtful man, not a limb-tearing maniac.
We quietly opened the door of the lab and sneaked inside, closing it behind us. It was lit by only a solitary light bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. At the far side was a pile of rubble, and we made our way towards it.
Sure enough, there was a substantial gap in the wall above the rubble. We looked around and found a stash of flashlights, the type that you hold by a plastic handle, fitted with six-volt lantern batteries.
We scrambled up the heap of rubble and shone them into the gap. The air was strangely misty and we couldn’t see very far, but we could see that there appeared to be a tunnel leading off somewhere behind the hole in the wall.
The thought of clambering into that inky-black tunnel, filled with a curious mist, was deeply unpleasant. Terrifying, in fact. Only the sure knowledge that our families would die if we didn’t try it, propelled us forward.
I daresay we both entertained the same faint hope: that the cave system might have an exit that emerged somewhere onto the side of the mountain and that we might be able to get to the village and evacuate our wives and our children before they commenced spraying.
There was a risk that we would spread whatever virus Asquith had prepared in that vial, but even so, murdering the entire village seemed to me an overreaction. We could simply quarantine ourselves. Who knows in what direction the chimps even headed, assuming they made it out of the cathedral? My wife and I, if asked, might well have agreed to sacrifice lives for the greater good, but the idea of my children being gassed like vermin was absolutely unsupportable. Under no circumstances would I ever have been prepared to entertain it.
The gap in the wall was only about a foot in height, and we had to scramble on our stomachs through several yards of it before emerging on the other side. Archie went first, making odd subdued noises that he struggled to suppress, like a cross between laughing and crying.
I followed him and soon we both stood on a rocky uneven surface, facing a long tunnel that led who-knows-where.
“Nothing else for it.” said Archie, and he stumbled forwards into the gloom.
I followed and tried to keep up as best I could. Archie was surprisingly nimble and sure-footed, running over boulders like a mountain goat.
Soon we were mired in a tangle of tunnels and stalactites, and had lost all sense of direction. It wasn’t as though there were even clear alternatives to try; in some directions the roof simply got lower and lower until we gave up; other passages ended in pools of foetid water.
I don’t know how long we journeyed into the depths of the cave. Perhaps only half an hour, or perhaps hours. All the while I was trying to fend off the thought that my entire family may already be dead.
Eventually Archie stopped, standing still, looking at something.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“It’s a way out.” he said excitedly.
I followed his gaze but I could see nothing: only rocks and darkness. The mist we had walked through earlier had mostly dissipated, and survived only in pockets here and there.
He rushed forwards and abruptly vanished.
I shouted his name, moving cautiously forward, and soon located him. He had fallen into a crevasse, perhaps ten yards in depth, and at the bottom I saw his crumpled body. For a moment I thought he was still alive, because I saw him moving spasmodically. Then I saw that his head had hit a rock and split open like a grapefruit, his brain spilling all over it. Any movement, if I didn’t imagine it, was mere reflex.
I sank backwards to the ground, slumping against a rock. Archie was dead, and what was even far worse was that my wife and children were, I thought, at that very moment probably being sprayed with nerve gas, and I could do nothing about it. I would die wandering around that cave. The flashlight would give out soon enough, and eventually I would starve to death, all the while knowing that I had failed to save my children.
I will admit that I fell into helpless sobbing. I had not cried since perhaps the age of seven, and now I found I could no longer control my emotions.
Then the thought came to me that there was a faint chance that I might still have time, if only I could find a way out. With a superhuman effort I pulled myself together and scrambled around the edge of the crevasse.
On the other side of it were only more boulders, stalactites and sudden precipices, but I persisted.
After squeezing through a narrow 45-degree gap I found myself in a sizeable cavern, and there, to my amazement and horror, was my daughter, half of her face covered in a hideous network of bulging veins. She was staring blankly at me, as if she didn’t see me. I shouted her name and she made no response. I ran towards her, my heart beating wildly, and just as I was about to embrace her, she vanished. It was nothing but a hallucination.
I was losing my mind, or perhaps I had already lost it, perhaps even hours ago. I really had no idea how long I had been wandering the cave system. I began to doubt everything; even the accident at the lab. Time seemed to stop. Then I abruptly snapped back to the present and forced my bruised and bleeding limbs to carry me forwards.
After following a winding and increasingly-narrow passageway for perhaps five hundred yards, I arrived at a pile of rubble, blocking my path.
I collapsed, crying helplessly like a small child that’s lost its mother. My life seemed to flash before me. If only I had made different decisions. If only I had not accepted the job at the covert laboratory. If only I had stayed at home and taken care of my wife instead of rushing out to check on the lab. If only.
I was lost in terrible anguish and self-pity when something about the rubble caught my attention. I picked up a small rock and examined it in the light of the torch. The rock wasn’t made of any natural material: it was made of concrete.
I shone the light upwards and saw a jagged hole at the top of the rock pile. I scrabbled up the pile of rocks, twice almost falling back to the bottom, and emerged into what I immediately recognised to be the cellar of my own house.
With an enormous burst of adrenalin I ran up the cellar stairs, scared of what I might find. My wife and my children suffered an enormous surprise when I emerged, bleeding and covered in filth and grime, into the living room. My son was playing with a toy train and my wife and daughter were fiddling with the radio set. From outside came the sound of air-raid sirens.
I ran towards them and I was hugging them deliriously when it occurred to me that I should have quarantined myself. I should have stayed as far away from them as possible, but by the time this thought raised itself in my addled mind, it was too late.
Of course my wife was full of questions, and I could see she was a little scared of me. I must have looked quite a sight.
“There’s no time to explain.” I said. “We have to get out of here. We have to leave immediately.”
“The air-raid siren’s going, Roger. We’re not supposed to go out.”
I almost screamed at her, “We need to leave, I’m telling you. Please listen to me.”
I ran to get the children’s shoes.
Soon I had them all outside, looking frightened and alarmed.
“Look!” I said, and I pointed to a helicopter that was making it way towards us from the south in the distance. It was spraying long plumes of chemical fog into the air below it. I could hear another one approaching from south-east.
I squatted down so I could look the children in the eye and told them, “We need to run, fast as you can. As fast as you can, all right?”
They nodded dumbly, wide-eyed.
We ran into the field to the north-west and up the hill. At the top we saw a local farmer by the name of George. He was standing staring at the helicopters.
I shouted at him, “They’re going to kill us, run!”
He looked after us as we ran off down the other side of the hill, but he didn’t move. He must have thought us insane.
We had reached the top of a second hill, and had resorted to carrying the children on our backs in an effort to make better speed, when I looked back and saw George fall to the ground and remain there, unmoving.
The helicopters hadn’t even flown near him, but the gas must have reached him, blown on the wind.
We ran and walked for an hour before we were finally able to flag down a passing motorist and hitch a lift.
I shouldn’t have done it. I could have infected him, but all I could think about was my children and my wife. My behaviour was certainly unprofessional. Perhaps it was immoral.
It ended up being quite fortunate that my wife had grabbed her purse on the way out, not fully understanding the profound danger we were in. We were able to purchase disinfectant in a nearby town, which I fairly soaked all of us in, including the driver of the car, upon whom I impressed the severity of the grave danger to which I had inadvertently exposed him, while keeping the details rather vague. I insisted he give us his contact details and asked if he could try to keep himself to himself for three weeks. He said he was a farmer and only came into town once in a while, and often passed three weeks without seeing anyone anyway.
I realised we had potentially happened upon an immense stroke of luck, and I prevailed upon him to let us stay with him for a few weeks, assuring him I’d pay him well at the end of it.
In the end we stayed in his house for four weeks, all the while nervous in case symptoms of disease should emerge, or the authorities should track us down and finish what they’d started, but neither eventuality transpired.
When we reached the end of 28 days, we knew all acute danger was passed. We weren’t infected, and there was no longer any good reason for the authorities to kill us.
As far as I know, every other soul in the village of Frog End perished, save for a handful who happened to be away at the time, and arrived back to find the bridge barricaded and guarded by soldiers wearing gas masks.
It is clear to me, looking back, that the cave contained some sort of noxious gas, doubtless fermented over many centuries, which leaked into the lab when the collapse of Brindle Pike ruptured the natural wall at the far end of the new lab section.
Whatever it was, it caused us to lose our sanity.
It took me a full two days to return to my normal state of mind, during which I continued to see odd shadows flickering at the periphery of my vision and endured terrible nightmares. Even so, I think Archie and I must have been unusually resistant to the effects of the gas, and Asquith perhaps unusually sensitive to it.
When I finally gave myself up to the authorities and threw myself on their mercy, the people responsible for the murder of one hundred and twenty-nine people in the village of Frog End had already been thrown out of their posts, disgraced and displaced by saner heads, aghast at what had been done.
Even so, I was sworn to the strictest secrecy, on penalty of death. I am writing this account only to be read after the passing of myself and my wife, so that the world may one day know the truth of the horror that once transpired in a sleepy little village in the Lake District.
O’Shea put the sheaf of papers down.
“Is it all true?” he asked.
“It’s all true.” said June. “Remember, it stays between you and I until I’m worm food.”
“Upon my honour.” said O’Shea.
“Now you know why the cathedral was demolished.” said June, rising to her feet. “For ten years they wouldn’t even let anyone live here.”
“Do other people know about this?”
“Not the details, but they know a lot of people died. The government told them a toxic gas seeped out of the cave. They say the best lies contain a grain of truth. Some of the people who live here now still say it was demons that killed everyone, rather than gas.”
It was only after Father O’Shea had left June’s house and had almost reached the bridge, having arrived at the top of the hill that separated the bridge from the village, that he made the connection between the scar on June’s head and the events described in Hartley’s story.
“You ejit!” he said to himself out loud, smacking his forehead. “She was his wife.”
He almost turned around to go and ask her if she was indeed the wife of Roger Hartley, then thought better of it, and instead lit a cigarette and took one last long look at the village of Frog End.