Jon and George race to a fatal confrontation with Lord Clonlaw, deep underground. Elizabeth discovers the dark secret that her father unearthed in Kilphaun Hall...
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
Jon and George race to a fatal confrontation with Lord Clonlaw, deep underground. Elizabeth discovers the dark secret that her father unearthed in Kilphaun Hall...
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU Season One
A Podcast concerning love, madness, mystery, murder and dead gods in 1920's Ireland and England
THWDY Episode 1.11
'How Gods Die'
Kilphaun Hall
Thursday 10th December
My Dearest Elizabeth,
We have had a bad night of it. People have died, they have died horribly. I do not think I will ever be the same again. Let me tell it from the start that I may order my thoughts of the mayhem we endured last night.
George and I had departed Clonlaw House in haste but the awful torrential rain and the pitch blackness from a lack of moon or stars meant that we slow down or risk never making it to the hall. To have a beast of a car such as George’s and not be able to let it go full throttle! I clenched my teeth in frustration and drove as fast as I dared through the dark countryside. The windscreen wipers were next to useless and I had to keep using my forearm to wipe the fog from the inside of the glass. Outside, we had the weak cone of light thrown out by the headlamps, which caught the rain as falling sheets of glittering diamonds and confounded our view of the road.
We went past the entrance to Kilphaun and took the twisting road up the northern slope of the valley through the woods. With a roar we came out onto the wide lower slopes of the mountains, not that they could be seen. They were black shapes against the blackness of night.
We nearly drove past Clonlaw’s car, only catching the shape of it at the last minute and pulling over in front of it. I got out, glad of my heavy coat and checked the other car. No sign of anybody. George appeared beside me with two heavy battery torches. He gave me one and shone his on the margin by a gate.
“Look here,” he said to me, “Footprints in the mud. It looks like they went that way.”
He shone the torch beam out across the field but all it caught was the falling rain. Of course that direction was straight to the hidden valley and the mound. Where else would they have gone? Thunder rumbled from the direction of the Blackwater valley. How I wished I was in front of a warm fire! Hunched against the rain we followed.
I was glad to reach the comparative shelter of the valley and the temporary boardwalk that the workmen had put down. I was wearing shoes more suited to city pavement than to this place, and had slipped several times already.
It was my first time moving at night through those thin sickly trees that crowded the floor of the valley.
“Dammit Jon, snap out of it. We’re here.”
George had to shake me to get my attention.
I startled out of a trance. I didn’t remember getting here. I had found myself once more moving across the broken fields of France while artillery ordinance exploded all around me. I persuaded myself I was just tired and suggestible to the light and noise of the overhead thunder and lightning.
In front of us was the clearing and the ancient mound.
The narrow entrance slit was cut like a disfiguring knife wound into its side. There was still no sign of anyone but with the trees swinging wildly in our torch beams. Someone could have been standing in plain sight and we might have missed them in the clashing tree limbs and shadows. I don’t know how it was for George but I had to force myself to cross the clearing and enter the mound. Every fibre of my being was screaming at me to run. Just run.
The slit angled gently down and soon became a square sided tunnel made of dry earth and propped up at intervals with stout logs. The geometry did not make any sense. To be so quickly underground, the cutting should have been a steep slope. I’d have retraced my steps to try and understand this puzzle except we needed to press on and find Lily. We had no idea what harm Clonlaw intended her or whether we were already too late.
We pressed on, and on. How deep and long did this wretched tunnel go? Surely the men from Waterford could not have dug this themselves? It was very cold and I could feel the warmt leeching out of me, through my sodden overcoat, and my breath that condensed in clouds in front of me. I stopped at one point thinking I had heard a noise behind me. My torch played back up the empty passage. I was about to go on again when George said, “Wait, look.”
A shadow was creeping down the floor of the tunnel, getting inexorably closer as we stood frozen to the spot. What new terror was this? I kept my torch beam on it as it swept towards us, then it it was upon us and past. I shined my torch at George, his pale face flaring in the light. He looked okay. I crouched down and touched the darkened soil. It was damp now and as I watched a thin rivulet of water cut through the dirt of the floor.
I shuddered. I’d dug men out of collapsed trenches, their mouths choked with earth or still trying - terribly, futilely - to cough up from their lungs the fetid mud they were drowning in. My notion earlier today that this storm was kin to the one that nearly did for us on the Irish Sea, did not seem so fanciful now. A hard death was following on our heels and unknown danger lay ahead.
“We need to move and now, “ I said.
George was clasping the amulet through his shirt. I feared for a moment he was going to break it off but he said, “ Jon, when we find them, I’ll go for Lily and get this pendant around her neck. She’ll be safe then.”
I leaned into George, suddenly angry, “George, get Lily and get out but keep the bloody amulet on you. You’re no use to her if your misguided chivalry leaves you incapacitated in turn. Okay?”
He nodded, wild-eyed and we set off again. On and on we went, passing the flood front at one point. I’d a sense that we were spiralling downwards. We started to see a dim light ahead and the sound of voices so we slowed down, turned our torches off and crept forward as quietly as possible.
The tunnel opened out into a low ceilinged chamber made of great slabs of stone. A number of oil storm lanterns had been placed on the ground at intervals. Clonlaw was there of course. The shadows thrown by his long limbed form were that of a predatory spider. Lily was there too and I’d to grab George to stop him rushing in. There was a jumble of broken stone at the far end of the chamber and Lily was kneeling dazed in front of it. Clonlaw had just set a golden statue about a foot high on the stones. I noticed there were chipped and broken grey stone statues of similar size placed at regular intervals around the room’s circumference. Clonlaw coughed harshly into a handkerchief and I’m sure I saw blood on it. Whatever ailed him was coming to collect soon. Alex was lying in the centre of the room spreadeagled. My first instinct was that he was dead but then I realised the muttering we could hear was coming from him. It was something like -
“No, no, no, the thirteen idols are in place, yes, yes, just as they were on the plain. But, but he does not come, why can’t he come to us?”
- and much more in similar vein.
And then cold metal was pushing at the back of my head and I heard a revolver cocking. Padraig, close to my ear said, “Let’s be having you inside with everyone else. Wouldn’t want to miss the show now. And no funny business.”
He ground the barrel of the gun into my skin to emphasise this last point. I didn’t know where he had come from but there was aught else we could do but rise and shuffle into the chamber.
Clonlaw was in a manic mood and was nearly rubbing his hands together in glee when he saw us.
“What took you so long?” he said to George and then grabbed him by the arm and shoved him to the ground beside Lily. I think George cottoned on quicker than I did that Clonlaw thought he had arrived under the influence of his sleeping god. George rose into a kneeling position beside Lily and said nothing, as if he was in thrall to Crom’s whisperings still. I could hear Padhraig’s breathing behind me but at least he’s backed off a bit. I glanced back. The steel of the revolver gleamed dully in the light. Padhraig looked much more uncertain than his voice had suggested but the gun was steady in his hand. I wondered what Clonlaw had told him would happen here this night. Myself, I was remembering the killing of Jame Foley by that old man, or was it Crom?Alex had risen and oblivious to us, was examining the gold statue, a stylised male figure.
Clonlaw came over to me. He looked haggard, even for him.
“Captain Ross, what a nice surprise. You can feel it too can’t you? You’ve been called in some way by Crom, though not for a sacrifice tonight at least, I think.”
I said, “Let them go Clonlaw. They’re innocents.”
He snorted at that, “Innocents! And why should they get to live, who have done nothing of worth with their lives, while I, who has devoted myself to the furtherance of ancient knowledge, laughed at for it and now on the verge of being proven right - why should I accept an early grave? The world will need men like me to guide it, with what is coming. Let me show you.”
He coughed bloody spit into his hand and before I could react dipped a finger in it and smeared it on my forehead.
I fell to my knees but not on the chamber floor but on a wide open, stony, grassy plain, grey in the dull light from an overcast sky, and surrounded all around by low mountains. What was this place? Around us in a circle were the grey statues, their stone fresh with newly carved features. The gold statue gleamed on a simple altar - a slab of familiar looking stone resting on two blocks. Where had I seen it before?
From behind me, Clonlaw said, “Can you feel it?”
I could, a massive presence below us, straining upwards to be free. That malicious, malevolent intelligence I had first encountered on the mound. It was here now in this strange place, asleep for centuries and ready to wake up and remake the world. The words, Magh Slécht, came into my mind. The Plain of Prostrations. I realised then that they were not stones amongst the grass but half hidden bones and skulls.
Clonlaw crouched beside me and whispered, “When Crom was cast down in Connaught centuries ago, his priests fled here and kept his relics safe. I will be his new high priest. My sons have been sacrificed on the altar of men’s ambition, so it is only fair I sacrifice these two now for mine. Crom will rise again to rule and a new order of peace will be established.”
I said, “No god that demands such sacrifice is worth worshiping. He will bring death and madness with him.”
“And this world is sane?” asked Clonlaw, “endless war, that now in this modern age has become mechanised and efficient?”
I said the Great War will have changed that, no one will want to fight again if it means that kind of destruction.
He said, “look deeper Captain Ross and see the future we could change. “
Crom was rising now in my mind, an impossibility of power and anger and hate for its years of forgotten burial. I felt it reach into my mind and show me -
Elizabeth, I have to believe that mankind is worth saving, that we can learn from our mistakes and do better. I realise that history does not bear me out on that so much. Even the Enlightenment was paralleled by war after war. But what it showed me felt true, even if I wish it were not.
Instead of the peace and prosperity I had assumed we soon enjoy, it showed me a world re-arming and preparing for another war, of hateful men rising to power and then a war that dwarfed the conflict I have been through and of things so terrible I do not have the words to describe them. On and on it went, war after war, fuelled by greed, hate and stupidity.
I could see though that which Clonlaw could not or would not see - that Crom wanted this so badly, this endless cycling of generational sacrifice was meat to the grinder. It would not make things better - men would prostrate themselves before their new god and ask their enemies be undone - and Crom would oblige if the sacrifice was sufficient. No, even if this vision was true, Clonlaw would usher in an age even more bloody, scarcely believable though that was.
But why had Crom not appeared? The crooked old man was nowhere to be seen and I could feel Crom’s power coiling and seething endlessly below me but unable to break free. I felt some hope then. Clonlaw had missed something but what? I realised my knees were cold and damp and with that I was back in the chamber. Water was rising up in puddles on the floor and dripping down from the gaps in the rocks in the ceiling.
I heard Clonlaw say, “I don’t understand -“
Then Alex appeared, wild eyed, and grabbed Clonlaw shouting, “The stone, I saw it in the Captain’s mind. We need the altar stone.”
I heard Padhraig shift behind me, presumably torn between protecting Clonlaw and guarding me. That was all I needed. I swung around low and kicked the legs from under him. He fell sideways and there was a flash and deafening bang as his revolver went off. I staggered to my feet and stamped on his gun hand. I’m sure I broke his wrist but he dropped the gun and I picked it up, feeling better for the weight of it in my hand. I kicked him in the stomach to wind him and then turned to check on the others. Alex was staring at his left hand, one of the fingers a bloody stump. He turned to the golden idol as if listening to it and then ran from the room. I let him go. He was not a villain, even if this place had driven him mad. George had dragged a dazed Lily to her feet and was pulling her towards the exit. Clonlaw had drawn his damned ritual dagger and looked to be about to go for them. I stepped sideways between them, splashed actually as water now covered the floor of the chamber.
“Stay back,” I said pointing the gun at him, “We’re leaving and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll wait till we’re gone.”
I caught up with George and Lily and we staggered back up that passage. The walls started to sag wetly and groans and tremors shook dirt from the roof. Water was now flowing freely down the passage, already up to our ankles. I kept an eye back and soon enough I could see another torch but they kept their distance. The air changed and I knew we were nearly out. I cast my torch back one more time and caught Clonlaw in the beam. Callous to the end, he must have abandoned Padhraig in the chamber. I don’t feel sorry for what I did back there but that young man deserved better than drowning alone underground.
The sides of the cutting sloughed in on us and I could feel an unnatural undercurrent trying to pull us back down into that gaping black maw. Lily was in front of me unconscious and George was trying to wrestle her up out of the mud even as he was sinking neck deep and higher in it. I spit mud out of mouth and finally despaired as I found I couldn’t move my arms, trapped as they were in the heavy moving earth. Then bright lights were flashing in our faces and hands were reaching down to grab us. It was Micheal and the local men he’d rounded up! They had a battle of it but eventually all three of us were dirty and prostrate on the grassy mound.
Micheal passed around a flask of whiskey, which did me and George wonders and then we had the long trek back through the woods, two of the men carefully carrying Lily. I thought we would have to walk all the way back to the car but at the edge of the woods was the Gallagher’s Butchers van I’d ridden in before and this time I did not mind at all when they bundled me up into it.
And Clonlaw? When they were pulling me out I felt a strong hand grip my ankle and the men had trouble holding me as they were suddenly pulling double the weight. Did that hand let go, its grasp slipping in the mud? Or did I kick down viciously with my free foot to connect hard with a head? That’ll be my secret for now.
So it’s evening now. You can imagine the state we were in when we got back to Kilphaun. The house had to be roused and the fires restoked to get hot water that we might wash the mud from us. Lily has been resting upstairs in a guest bedroom. She awoke for a little while and talked to George but is asleep again. He is worried for her, but hopefully a good night’s rest will cure her of whatever poison her uncle gave her and the lingering effects of Crom’s influence.
George stayed up until the police had come and gone and then collapsed into a chair by the fire and even now is dozing uneasily. We are working on a story of misadventure, that we went to check on Clonlaw and Padhraig when we realised they were still up there in the bad weather and that they must have been inside the dig when it collapsed. It is a better ending than Clonlaw deserves to have told. What sort of man would decide to sacrifice his own niece?
Who knows Elizabeth, when you finally get here, maybe all will be calm and boring with nothing to do but hunt and party? That would be good wouldn’t it? What I saw in the hill will not leave me soon though, but it makes me determined to do more once I am recovered, to see what I can do to make the future a better one, free of dead gods and bad men.
George has just snorted himself awake and announced that he will check in on Lily. I’ll wait for him to report back and then leave this letter out for the maid catch the first post as I do not think I’ll be rising early tomorrow. My bed beckons! Tomorrow can look after itself.
I have missed you so much these last few weeks, Elizabeth but now this horror is finally over, I can look forward to seeing you again soon.
All of my love,
Jon.
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'The Prisoner of Kilphaun Hall'
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Clatbury, Wilts.
9th December, 1925,
Dear Jon,
GET OUT, GET OUT now! You know there is something evil about Kilphaun Hall, I have worked out what it is, the house is possessed by the old god Crom and the triskelions are not to protect the house and its occupants but to keep Crom in. It is his prison. I only hope this letter reaches you in time! It was not something I could articulate in a telegram.
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The underlining and frantic doodlings above are to make sure you have got the message to leave Kilphaun Hall immediately! I do not know where you will go in the depths of winter but there must be a room at the inn. Or perhaps the Master of Fox Hounds will have a place to accommodate you? Certainly don’t go to Clonlaw House and please don’t read any further in this letter until you have made it to safety.
But I know you will want to understand how I have come to this conclusion so let me tell you. In the papers returned by Dr. Rookfield he had added a copy of the deathbed confessions of one Finian Dashwood, a founder of the Society of Esoterica, who it seems built Kilphaun Hall about two centuries ago. He had Crom as a hero from old. Heaven knows why!
Well, Dashwood built Kilphaun but in doing so, used some of the stone from the old mound, partly as it was an available source, but also because the mound and its venerable hawthorn were considered a former temple to Crom. Locals would not go near it, and this superstition even affected the wild animals. It seemed rather useless as it was, and so Dashwood decided the altar could be repurposed – believe this if you will, Jon – within Kilphaun Hall, so he could earn Crom’s favour with – I can hardly write this – “sacrifices wanton and provident that any who shalt be gored by the knife or the Hawthorn shalt give their blood and flesh henceforth and eternally to the Old God”.
The only thing that would contain Crom, it seemed, were the triskelions. This isn’t obvious from Dashwood’s letter but he does refer to Crom’s association with the old Greek gods and that the “triskels of local lore may be linked to protective devices favoured in Ancient Greece to protect the humble folk from the enmity of the father of their gods.”
I wonder if Father ever saw this letter? I think he was definitely onto the same idea but I don’t know if he ever encountered the Society and I would hope he wouldn’t have considered buying Kilphaun had he known of all this dark history. For me, I will have none of the place! But I know you are there, Jon, and George too, and you need help, and this brings me to the next part of my letter. By the time you are reading this I hope to have brought about this plan and rescued you from danger.
Tomorrow morning, I will take Dimples from the stables, and ere daybreak, will ride up to the gibbet, there to connect with you along the ley line between it and Kilphaun Hall, with the third point on this line, which I now know to be Morval in France, way behind us. I have traced the orientation on the globe in the study, and although small, I can see a perfect alignment. I hope that in doing so I will not only save you from imminent danger but also exorcise those spirits that have been hanging about you ever since your wartime tribulations in that place.
It must be dawn, for the moon is old, and I will use its waning light to trust Dimples to get me up the hills, where, as the sun rises behind me, I will appeal to all the benevolent psychic forces and etheric cross-currents that control the ley line to release you from the thrall of both Morval and Kilphaun, and for us to be reunited at some point along its path. Following Madame Gregoriou’s advice, I will be “skyclad” which means I will take an old cloak from the dressing-up box to keep me warm for the journey, and then divest. While it might be more sensible to wear riding habit, I’d be tempted to keep it on during the ritual, which would no doubt lessen its effect.
It is of course a secret, only you know. I may have to tell Tom, in case he notices Dimples is missing, though I think I will be back soon enough. I did telephone Celia this afternoon, as I was concerned as to how Rookfield had found my whereabouts, and I wondered if he had pressured her into divulging at all. She said no, and then I found myself telling her about ley lines and how they might help you. Well, her retort about my dabbling in “mix and match” mysticism, from astrology to fortune-telling to geomancy and all parts in between, did sting, so I decided not to make her aware of my plan.
I must confess I am excited. I haven’t ridden Dimples for so long, and the thought of taking her out under the fading moon and getting into the saddle, feeling the rhythm of her movement, hearing the clop of her hooves as they canter across the short springy downland grass, and finally reaching my destination, the old haunted gibbet, with the aim of connecting with you and exorcising those ancient demons, has got me on the edge of my seat and I am sure I will not sleep tonight for the thrill of anticipation.
I can only hope, that, by this time tomorrow, my invocation has worked and you and everyone at Kilphaun will be happy and safe. In the meantime please get out now!
With love and good luck,
Elizabeth