Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1 - Chapter 2: Chapter 2

"I thought...you said....this would be fun," Jordan gasped, staggering to a halt on the cliff path to catch his breath. Far – too far - below him, the sea was creeping up the beach. It wouldn't be long before it was licking at the bottom of the cliff and they would be stranded here until it rolled out again. Out on the water, their ferry had vanished from sight.
"It will be." Grace looked equally winded. Her short blonde hair was plastered to her face with sea spray and sweat. "When we get to the top."
"It better," Jordan grunted. "Or I swear to God..."
His sister grinned and began to walk again. The path was narrow with loose stones underfoot, and while she picked her way delicately along, Jordan lumbered with caution behind her, occasionally slipping and cursing into the wind. His hands were scraped raw and dirty from grabbing onto boulders and crags for balance, and in the cold air they smarted something fierce. Between swearing, wiping his hands on his trousers and stumbling about, he tried to remember when he had relinquished his free will and allowed Grace to drag him here. It probably had something to do with the three pints she'd plied him with the previous night.
The path grew steeper, and Jordan ended up on hands and knees in an effort to stay on it. By the time he pulled himself over the lip of the cliff, his palms and the knees of his trousers were bloody and his neck hurt from craning upwards. Grace was already on her feet with her camera out, but he stopped for long while on the ledge, sweaty and breathless.
He got up, wiping his hands on a tissue, and looked around. The island's surface was much smaller than its base, and longer than it was wide. Giant monoliths littered one end, some still standing but worn to stumps by the wind, others lying on their sides. At the other end stood the ruin of a tiny oddly-shaped church with a missing wall and empty windows. Chunks of fallen pillars lay everywhere.
There were no people here, just him and Grace and a cloud of noisy seagulls.
"Grace," he said, casually. She turned, smiling, as she lowered the camera from her face.
"Huh?"
"What's your definition of fun, exactly?"
She at least had the decency to look sheepish. "I really wanted someone to come with me," she said, plaintive. "I'll buy the drinks at the pub later if you promise not to hold a grudge."
Jordan scowled. "Buy two rounds and we have a deal."
She grinned. "Deal."
He forced his expression to be neutral, though it was an effort. It wasn't that he thought the place was a complete waste of time; he was more annoyed that this was the result of an hour's steep climb, and that somehow he was expected to occupy himself until the tide went out and the ferry came back. That was in five hours, if the ferryman chose to be exact about it.
"So," he said, "What's the big deal, then? You haven't told me."
"It was a monastery," Grace said. She swept her arms wide. "This whole island was an abbey once."
"Then what's with the church?"
"That's not a church, that's the remains of the chapel." She scanned the whole island through the viewfinder of her camera. "Those stumps over there are the arches of the doors. Though some of them might have been statues." She gestured at the pillars – or what was left of them. "This must have been the nave. They held up the entire thing, see the rows?"
"Just about." Jordan frowned. They were a bit too haphazard and tumbledown to call 'rows'. "And why here? Plenty of abbeys in driving distance back home."
Grace scowled at him. "I've seen all of those."
"Of course you have." He resisted rolling his eyes. He wasn't even entirely convinced it was all for the coursework she was claiming to burdened with. There was a sort of feverish delight on her face whenever she came to a place like this – he was staring at it now – that seemed completely out of place considering it was an assignment. Not that he knew. He'd dropped out a couple of years ago, had never even made it to university, and there was very little feverish delight to be had in pushing things through a checkout.
"Hey, there's plenty of stuff to draw out here," she said half-heartedly. He looked at the near-barren landscape, and then looked at her. She smiled sheepishly back, before her face brightened. "Tell you what. I've been asking around back on the mainland," she gestured behind them as if he'd forgotten where it was, "and I've heard rumours that the crypt is still intact under here."
"Okay."
Her shoulders slumped and she rolled her eyes far harder than necessary. "Okay? That's all you've got?"
"What else did you want? I can't draw in the dark, Grace." He sniffed, wincing as a harsh wind buffeted them. "And also, forgive me if I'm wrong, but rumours aren't the same thing as facts. What if it's collapsed? What if it collapses on us?"
"You worry too much, Joe." Grace turned and started walking towards the ruined chapel. "Come on, we can at least look."
"I dunno," he mumbled at her back, "A collapsing crypt feels like a pretty reasonable thing to worry about."
He trudged after her, scanning the island for somewhere to shelter if the heavens opened on them. The sky was grey but not dark, which was a good sign, but there was next to no cover on the island and the sea was choppy on a calm day. He didn't want to be stranded here during a storm.
The chapel ruins provided some shelter from the wind. It was bigger than it had first appeared; a semi-circular room with the crooked struts of what had once been a domed ceiling poking into the sky. Broken slabs of black stone crunched under their boots as they stepped inside. Grace reached down and picked up a large shard.
"Look," she said, turning it to face him and revealing the worn down carving of some kind of numeral. "This was a ledgerstone."
"The ones with the..."
"Burial vaults," she said brightly, replacing the shard on the ground. Jordan eyed it and then her, and then shuddered in revulsion.
"You mean we're standing on dead people."
"Probably."
Jordan looked at the ground again, and then picked his way over to a window ledge and sat in it, resting his heels on the wall. The whole place gave him shivers; it had given him shivers when he'd thought it was just a pile of stones, let alone a pile of stones with corpses underneath. His fingers strayed to the inside pocket of his coat where his sketchbook sat. He had brought it in the hopes that Grace was going to show him more than a creepy pile of rocks to draw, but she hadn't, so he drew her instead. She caught him and obligingly posed between picking through slabs of stone and taking photos.
The wind picked up again. It howled through the windows and gaps in the walls, and set Jordan's teeth on edge. No matter how long he sat there, he wasn't feeling any more comfortable, and it wasn't just because it was freezing cold, or that they were surrounded by graves, or even that they hadn't brought nearly enough food and he was in dire need of a cup of tea. Something about the place felt off. Abandoned places had never bothered him before. Grace had taken him to too many for him to find the emptiness eerie, and it was the lack of emptiness in this one that was bothering him. The island, despite appearances, seemed alive. Shifting. Fidgety.
He almost said something to Grace, but he was aware of how mad it sounded. On her part she seemed at home, unaware that this wasn't the same as the other places. Heck, maybe it wasn't. The mushrooms on the breakfast buffet at their hotel had looked somewhat suspicious.
"Jordan!"
He looked up with a faint stir of alarm when he realised Grace was no longer in front of him. Her footsteps crunched on the other side of the wall, and when he twisted round to stick his head out through the window, he found her staring into a large hole in the ground. She tore tussocks of grass from the edge, revealing its size.
"Don't you dare fall in," he said quickly, scrambling from the window sill and picking his way out of the chapel as she knelt down and peered into the darkness.
"I won't," she said, and her voice echoed. "I think this is the crypt, Joe."
The hair on his arms stood up. The air felt colder and made his skin crawl. He fought the sudden urge to grab her under the arms and pull her away.
"Please don't go down there, Grace," he said feebly, "That looks so unsafe."
She scraped dirt away from the top of a flight of worn stone steps and swung her legs round until she was sitting with her feet in the hole. She reached up, beckoned. "Gimme the torch."
"Grace..."
"I'm just looking. Come on, hand it over," she said, glancing at him. When he still hung back, her face softened. "It'll be fine, Joe, honestly. I'm not going in."
"It doesn't feel fine."
She squinted, a faint frown furrowing her brows. "What do you mean, it doesn't feel fine? Are you ill or something?"
Feeling a bit stupid now, Jordan shook his head. "It's nothing. It's probably nothing."
He dug the torch out and threw it over, tensing as she flicked it on and crept down a few more stairs. Loose stone rattled with each step. Jordan edged around the gap until he was standing behind her, ready to lunge if she slipped.
"Grace, you're killing me," he muttered, and his words were swept away on another bitter wind. The crackling wrongness grew in intensity, so much so that he checked the sky again for lightning. It was blank and pale grey. Nothing had changed.
Except the crypt; it was growling at them.
"Grace," Jordan said, but his sister as already scrambling back and onto her feet with the torch trained on the hole.
"What was that?" she whispered.
"Your guess is as good as mine." He backed up a few steps, pulling her with him. His hair sparked with static.
The crypt still rumbled like there was something stirring down there. Something big, judging by the volume. The noise came from deep within and was getting closer. Grace leaned forward, squinting. Jordan grabbed her arm and she shook him off with a glare, but she didn't try and get nearer.
It took Jordan a minute to recognise the scraping noise that followed as footsteps. Each one dragged along stone and scattered gravel, and over it all was moaning, sighing breath. Jordan's own caught in his throat as Grace's nails dug hard into his hand, her whole body tensed to run. His was paralysed, suddenly aware of the vast presence of the sea around them as it roared in time with each heavy breath. There was no way off the island without a jump that would kill them.
The noises stopped, leaving them in breathless silence for a brief second before resuming. It was on the steps.
"Oh my God," Grace breathed. "Jordan, oh my God."
And when the creature emerged, 'oh my God' proved an astronomical understatement.
Jordan froze. Bulbous, milky eyes stared out from below a pair of wickedly-sharp horns, and above a maw lined with sharp teeth so long that it couldn't close its mouth. It walked on two legs built like pillars and covered in coarse dark fur, but its torso was horrifically humanoid; bony and the sickly mottled colour of a corpse, with thick, hairy arms ending in claws the length of a child's forearm. Jordan had never seen anything like it even in his nightmares.
For a long moment they stood frozen, waiting for it to move. When it remained still, Jordan raised a hand and its eyes didn't follow the movement, continuing to look to the horizon. Its ears, long and curved like a bat's, twisted and turned on the sides of its head and flicked irritably as waves crashed against the cliff below. It was blind, then. As long as they didn't move, it wouldn't know where they were.
He turned to Grace and put a finger to his lips, and then waved a hand in front of his eyes. She nodded, and gasped as the creature's head swivelled in their direction with a snort. It let out another rumbling growl and took a step towards them.
Static erupted over Jordan's skin. His heart, already pounding, skipped two beats in shock. He choked, and within seconds the creature was on him.
He barely had time to register the stinking weight on top of him before his head smacked against the ground. The sky flared violet for a second, rippling with Grace's scream. The monster paused at the noise, and Jordan braced his hands against its chest, trying to push it off. The crackling on his skin intensified to the point of pain, stinging as sweat rolled down his face, but the creature didn't seem to notice in its efforts to snare Grace with its claws.
Please, he murmured, pushing harder. Please.
He cried out and rolled to cover his ears as the monster howled and leapt off him. It left behind the faint smell of charred meat. Jordan pulled in a deep breath, trying to remember how to use his limbs, and looked up at movement in the corner of his eye.
Grace didn't scream as she hit the ground, but the horror on her face was clear as the monster's hand closed around her ankle and tugged.
Jordan scrambled to his feet, lurching after them as it began to drag her towards the crypt. This time she did scream, blood blossoming on her hands and trousers as she tried to stop herself.
"Grace!" Jordan yelled. "Oi!"
He picked up a shard of stone as he ran and launched it at the creature's back. It clipped it on the shoulder, eliciting an irritable whine, but did nothing to slow it or make it turn around. A moment later, Grace disappeared down the crypt stairs, her cries echoing in the cavern below.
The stairs were worn and slippery, and it slowed him to try and keep his balance. Jordan jumped the last few, just as the screams stopped. His froze, heart stopping too.
"Grace!"
No answer. His voice echoed back at him in the pressing darkness. He couldn't hear the creature either.
"Grace?" he whispered. A whining hum set up in his ears, growing louder and louder as panic bloomed in his chest.
He took off at a run, hands out ahead of him. He ran into walls and through webs, yelling through threatening tears, until he reached a bend in the cavern. Beyond the wall, there was light, bright and faintly pulsing. His chest tightened the closer he got.
His toe hit something, and he reached down and took the heavy stone in both hands.
"Grace?" he called. Nothing.
Then, something. A faint call, a growl; he wasn't sure what it was and he didn't care. He ran around the corner, blinded in the sudden light as he called his sister's name, and his feet vanished from under him. Instead of hitting solid ground, however, he fell into air.
And kept falling.