"My thoughts were beginning to run away with me"

The Boke of the Divill (2017) by Reggie Oliver

[In 1938 Dr. Charles Nightfall, lecturer in Medieval History at the new University of Wessex, investigates an ancient well on the grounds of Morchester cathedral. The well is believed to be the one in which St. Anselm spent a week battling ans defeating an entity called Dagonus.]

Before I began my descent, I was suddenly seized with apprehension. I checked everything was secure and told the Clerk of Works that at least two of his men should be on hand at the wellhead while I was conducting my investigations. A look was exchanged between the Clerk and his men that I did not understand, but he agreed.

The first part of the descent was made easily. I climbed down the rope ladder to the spiral steps, which were rather rough-hewn but not, as I had feared, very slippery. There the workmen let down some tools and the rope. I managed to drive a metal staple into the wall and secure a rope to it. Then, taking my electric torch, I began my descent.

I flashed my torch into the depths but could see no bottom, only the spiral staircase endlessly revolving into the depths. The masonry that clad the walls was smooth, and its composition was what is called “Cyclopean”: that is, huge irregular slabs of stone had been dressed and fitted together, making the wall look like a gigantic piece of crazy paving on the vertical.

The whole, including the spiral steps, was an astonishing feat of construction and certainly not, in my view, Medieval. Anglo-Saxon, then? Even less likely. Roman? I had never seen Roman work that remotely resembled this.

Soon the top of the well had become a little white disc, no bigger than the moon. I trudged downwards, taking care not to touch the walls if I could avoid it. They were covered with a thin layer of something dark and glistening, sticky to the touch, that left a dark brown stain on the hands, like half-dried blood. My dear old tweed jacket was already ruined.

I had entered a world of silence, and if silence can be said to echo, then it did. I suppose what I am saying is that the slightest scrape of my feet on the stone steps came back to me in echoes a thousandfold. Once, I coughed, and it was like a fusillade of rifle shots. The scent of something decaying and fishlike was getting stronger.

Then I heard a faint pattering sound behind and above me. I look round and saw a light flickering and flashing, then further pattering, then what sounded like a stifled oath. I shone my torch upwards. Something was coming down the stairway towards me.

It was that infernal ass Bertie Winship! He was carrying a tiny little toy electric torch that was about as much use down there as a paper bag in a thunderstorm.

I gave the blighter a good piece of my mind and told him in no uncertain terms to go back up at once, but he was unrepentant.

“Sorry, old fellow,” he said, “I simply couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I thought you could do with the company.”

I was barely able to admit it to myself, but he was right. The ancient solitude was beginning to oppress me. I told him sharply to put away his stupid little flashlight and take the other of my two torches. I also told him to remain silent as we made our way down.

I don’t know how long we had been going, but the entrance to the well was only a pinpoint of light above us—no more than a distant star on a dark night—when we came across the carvings.

The first of them was a frieze carved into the stone, about a foot and a half in depth, that ran the whole of the way round the well, broken only by the run of the staircase. It was a continuous key pattern, or, if you like, a set of interlinked swastikas. Apart from anything else, it was astonishing to find workmanship like this at such a depth. What possible purpose could it serve?

I could only conjecture that its presence suggested that an early civilisation, probably of Aryan origin, had been at work here and created the descent for ritual purposes. I began to speculate that it might have been used to commune with spirits of the dead, or some chthonic deity of the underworld. This structure could be an early monument to a mystery religion, perhaps the earliest in these islands, predating Mithraism by hundreds, even thousands of years.

My thoughts were beginning to run away with me, when Bertie gave an odd little yelp. His torch had strayed onto a panel carved in low relief, just opposite him. The artist was skilled and the execution showed no signs of imprecision or crudity. The manner was vaguely reminiscent of those to be found on Babylonian and Assyrian monuments: precise, but stylised.

It showed a group of figures huddled together, one of which was wearing a kind of crown or diadem and seemed to be dominating the others. The figures were not human, nor recognisably animal. They looked like some strange miscegenation between a sea creature, of an octopoid kind, and a human or ape. One of them reminded me rather unpleasantly of the figure engraved on Felix Cutbirth’s card.

“By Jove,” said Bertie, “I wouldn’t like to meet one of those on a dark night.”

I told Bertie to stop making idiotic remarks, and we continued our descent. There were several more of these relief sculptures, each one stranger than the last. One depicted a group of human beings kneeling in homage, heads touching the ground like Moslems at prayer, before a strange lopsided creature with a head far too big for its body. In another further down, four man in profile were carrying a rigid human body horizontally. They appeared to be feeding it to one of the strange half-fish creatures; in fact most of the body’s head had already entered the beast’s vast open mouth.

Shortly after that my foot encountered not another stone step but soft, muddy soil. We were at the bottom of the well. I commanded Bertie to stop, and I tried the ground. I was afraid it was a quagmire into which we might sink, never to be recovered, but the soil, though moist and soft, appeared to be solidly founded.

I then noticed a strange thing. The aperture at the wellhead was almost exactly ten feet across, but the chamber at its base was wider. I measured it with the tape I had brought for the purpose and discovered that we were in a circular space slightly over twenty-three feet in diameter.

We must have been walking down a funnel that slowly tapered towards the top, but the widening (or narrowing, depending which way you look at it) had been done so gradually and with such cunning that we had never noticed.

The air at the bottom was not free of the odour of rotten fish, but it was not rank or stuffy, and it was almost as if a breeze was coming from somewhere. I noticed that at opposite ends of the circular wall were two black spaces with pointed arches, just wide and tall enough for a man of average height to walk through them. I shone my torch into one of them and it revealed a long, narrow tunnel leading into more blackness.

By this time Bertie had reached the bottom too, and was talking his usual nonsense. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was connected with King Arthur and Merlin, or some such twaddle. He said that he that the two apertures were bound to lead to “treasure chambers” and that we should explore them at once. I was resolved to do no such thing. We had had quite enough excitement for one day, but just then Bertie let out a cry.

“I say, look at this!” he said.

I prepared myself for yet another inanity, but Bertie had actually found something. He had been idly pushing his foot about in the mud and flashing his torch at it, when he had come across something shiny. He pulled it out of the mud, and we did our best to clean it up with our pocket handkerchiefs.

It shone still because it was made of some incorruptible metal or metals, pale yellow in colour. I suspected an alloy of gold and platinum, but this was highly improbable for such an obviously ancient artefact. The workmanship was very fine, but when I say fine, I do not exactly mean beautiful.

It was circular and in the shape of a coronet or diadem, but if it was a sort of crown, then the head it had enclosed was monstrous, at least twice the size of an ordinary adult human head. The pattern was one of intricately entwined whorls and concentric circles which, when you looked closely at them, resolved themselves into the coiling limbs of strange creatures whose bulging eyes were represented by some sort of milky white semiprecious stone. They were not pearls, but could have been white jade, though this seemed unlikely for England. The lowest band or border was composed of the interconnecting key pattern of swastikas that we had seen on the walls above us.

While Bertie was babbling on about how he had found King Arthur’s crown, I took out the camera from my knapsack and put a flash bulb into the attachment. I only had a few bulbs so I had to choose my subjects carefully. I took one of the area we stood in as a whole to give an impression of the remarkable structure we had found. I took another, at Bertie’s earnest request, of him holding the giant diadem. I then decided that I should point the camera down the two tunnels that projected from our central chamber.

I took one without any effect, but when my camera flashed down the other tunnel I thought I saw through my viewfinder something move at the end of the passageway I was photographing: a pale grey-green something that was smooth and glistening. The next moment I heard a noise, halfway between a groan and a retching cough, but cavernous and hugely magnified. I turned sharply round to see if it was Bertie playing some stupid joke, but he was staring back at me, white and horrified.

The next minute we were storming up those spiral stairs as fast as we could go. Bertie, who was ahead of me, stumbled several times. Each time I picked him up and on we went. By the time we had reached the end of the steps and the rope ladder we were both gasping for breath. It was at least five minutes before we made the final ascent.

As we came out of the well the sun was setting in a clear evening sky, but for a few seconds it seemed impossibly bright to us. I ordered the rope ladder to be drawn up.

The Boke of the Divill by Reggie Oliver (2017, Dark Regions Press).

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