Free The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos by John Glasby Page B

manor more than a hundred yards away; and the dull booming in my ears, blending with the tortuous beating of my heart, was the sound of the sea breaking on the rocks.
    I cannot even begin to hint at the thoughts that went through my mind as I stumbled back to the manor. The main door opened creakingly at my touch, and this was evidently the means by which I had earlier left the house. How long had passed since I had left my room and gone wandering forth into the night, I could not tell, but I knew that if I did not get warm at once. I would, in my weakened state, run a distinct risk of catching pneumonia. Throwing a handful of logs on to the fire, which had burned down to mere glowing embers, I sat in front of it until the wood caught and blazed up slowly, very slowly, as the heat permeated into my chilled body. Gradually, the fear in my shocked, numbed mind subsided.
    It had been nothing more than a dream, of course, a highly vivid dream possibly the result of the excitement which had been building up inside me over the past few days, and the general malaise had brought about our recurrence of the sleep-walking which had once afflicted me as a child.
    Further sleep that night was utterly out of the question, so lighting the long candle, I sat in the high-backed chair by the fire, threw a heavy wrap over my legs, and waited for the dawn. As I sat there, I became aware of the noises in the house. It was the first time I had really noticed them. Before, they had been mere background sounds. Now there was an oddly menacing tone to them; a moaning, droning whisper, which built up from some inconceivable depth beneath the structure of the manor, an ululation that sent shivers along my taut-strung nerves. The sound persisted until the first greys and blues of the dawn showed through the windows, then it subsided to a soft, hideous murmur that never quite faded into nothingness.
    That morning, I summoned the two men and asked them to bring lanterns, so that I might examine the vaults and cellars of the house. At the bottom of a score of stone steps which led down into an abysmal darkness was a small cellar, the floor slime-covered to a depth of almost two inches, walls glistening in the lantern light, the cracks in the stone filled with horrible fungoid growths, pale and sickly, which had never seen the light of day. The stench that rose around us was full of rottenness and decay, and here and there, ranged on narrow shelves around the walls, were oddly shaped wooden boxes whose contents I dared not imagine. Was this a part of the old house, built innumerable ages before the manor itself? What I saw there forced me to the inescapable conclusion that it was—and yet, towards the far end of the cellar, we came upon a heavy stone slab set in the wall, around the edges of which a faint stirring of air flickered the lantern flames and gave a hint of something more which lay beyond.
    Setting our fingers around the edges of the stone we pulled with all of our strength, but for long moments the heavy stone refused to budge. Then, with a leaden swinging motion, it moved around a central pivot. The rush of fetid air brought a rising nausea into my stomach. But it was a sensation I instantly forced down in the faint excitement of what lay before me, dimly lit by the pale yellow glow of the lantern I thrust forward.
    As I stood there hesitating, I felt I was on the brink of frightful and terrible revelations. The sense of malignancy in that blast of air from those unknown regions had touched me more deeply than I had imagined. The servants, seeing my hesitation, were all for going back, declaring that whatever lay down there, deep in the bowels of the solid rock beneath the manor, it was not good to know. There were many things, they maintained, it was better to remain in utter ignorance of, rather than bring them to light. But as always, in my belief that there had to be a logical and scientific explanation for any of the seemingly abnormal