Ramskull, p.1
Ramskull, page 1
RAMSKULL
By William Meikle
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 William Meikle
Blood brushes courtesy of Obsidian Dawn
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOVELS
Berserker
Crustaceans
Eldren: The Book of the Dark
Fungoid
Generations
Hound of Night / Veil Knights #2 (as Rowan Casey)
Island Life
Night of the Wendigo
Ramskull
Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man
Songs of Dreaming Gods
The Boathouse
The Creeping Kelp
The Dunfield Terror
The Exiled
The Green and the Black
The Hole
The Invasion
The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet
The Midnight Eye Files: The Sirens
The Midnight Eye Files: The Skin Game
The Midnight Eye Files: Omnibus
The Ravine
The Valley
The Concordances of the Red Serpent
Watchers: The Battle for the Throne
Watchers: The Coming of the King
Watchers: Culloden
Watchers: Omnibus edition
NOVELLAS
Broken Sigil
Clockwork Dolls
Pentacle
Professor Challenger: The Island of Terror
Sherlock Holmes: Revenant
Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors (3 novella omnibus)
The House on the Moor
The Job
The Midnight Eye Files: Deal or No Deal
The Plasm
Tormentor
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Carnacki: Heaven and Hell
Carnacki: The Edinburgh Townhouse
Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate
Dark Melodies
Myth and Monsters
Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths
Samurai and Other Stories
Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy
The Ghost Club
DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
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We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any problems, please contact us at publisher@crossroadpress.com and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.
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RAMSKULL
Table of Contents
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Other books
—THEN: 1494—
Alexander Seton was not much of a sailor.
But then again, this is not much of a boat.
He pulled his deerskin cloak as tight as he could around his body, and tried to shield his legs with the leather roll-bag that contained everything he hoped he would not need at his destination. It didn’t help much.
“It will only tak wan or twa hours,” the old ferryman had said when Seton had been forced to take to the water for the rest of the journey west to Leita. “I shall have you there afore it gets daurk.”
Now Seton was being tossed like a mouse in a box, at the whim of wind and tide, in a trip that had so far taken three hours and showed no sign of ending. And it was now most definitely dark.
Cold water lapped over the bows in the rough seas and soaked into his boots, his leggings and his kilt, and all he could think about was his warm room back in Stirling. He had hoped to spend this late summer and autumn getting some heat into his bones to store up for the coming winter, but his master was having none of it. Indeed, Alexander Seton’s wellbeing was never to the forefront of His Majesty’s mind, and it had been further away than usual back in the monarch’s draughty chambers in Stirling Castle when Seton answered the latest of many summonses.
“I require you to take a journey over to the new abbey,” the king said with no preamble. “Our master mason has stopped work, and if my queen does not have her abbey risen above the foundations by the summer after next, she will not be happy. You ken her temper as well as I do. An unhappy queen makes for an unhappier court. Do what you do best, Seton. Fix it for me, and I will fill your purse with silver.”
James had not said it, but Seton had heard the word.
Again.
A purse full of silver was all well and good, but he’d had one of those last winter. It was fine while it lasted, but ale and wenches were not as cheap as they used to be, and the pursuit of oblivion was a serious business, worthy of gold at least.
But beggars cannot be choosers. You took this course of your own free will these many years past. Complaining about it now will not get you any closer to freedom.
After being given his orders Seton had left the King’s chambers. Pausing only to collect what he thought he might require on the trip, he had woken the old horse from its slumber in the stable behind the inn and ridden West in the rain for a day and a night, until his arse was raw and his belly was empty. That only got him as far as Tyndrum, where the poor beast almost took a turn under him when a hoof went down a rabbit hole. He walked over the moor, leading the horse for many miles in a dank drizzle that made both of them miserable as sin, and stabled the lame steed in Oban, at a cost that would make the King’s treasurer’s eyes water when time came to settle up.
Now here he was, heading for the small offshore island of Leita, lost in the straits in a howling gale with a mad ferryman who insisted on singing at the top of his voice the whole way. It wasn’t a song that Seton knew, and it was just the same two lines, repeated over and over until they lodged in Seton’s head like a ritual.
He sleeps in the depths with the fish, far below,
He sleeps in the deep in the dark.
The ferryman brought the boat near to the island just as the wind finally abated and the cloud washed away under a full moon, giving Seton a first clear sight of his destination. He could see why the queen wanted the spot; the hills of Mull looked silver and black and gray and magical across the water on the horizon and the mainland sat like a squat, black wall in the gloom at their back. The abbey itself was going to be raised up at the foot of the island’s long hill in a semi-circular natural harbor, sheltered in the winter and standing proud at a gateway to the fertile farmlands of the hill itself. But to build an abbey in the first place, there must be strong foundations, and this edifice was struggling to raise itself even so much as that first step. That was why Seton was here, to make sure the vital step was taken forward, not back.
He paid the ferryman—silver, as is tradition—and another expense to be tallied against the royal coffers on his return to court. He stepped ashore and had a long look at the moonlit site while he walked firstly along the rickety wooden jetty, then up a short slope from the waterside to the new foundations of the abbey itself. From below it looked like little more than a tumbled mound of rock, and his heart sank. It seemed the first step was going to be a far bigger one than he had anticipated.
Despite the late hour, John Douglas, master mason, was waiting for him at the top of the slope, standing alone amid the pile of worked stone and earth. If he had a team of men, there was no sign of any of them.
“I saw the wee boat coming in and knew who it must be. You will be the king’s man, then?” the bearded man said, then, as he put out a hand to be shook, looked straight into Seton’s eyes. It was obvious something was puzzling him. “Have we met afore?”
Seton resolved to be canny around the old mason, he had a sharp eye. They had indeed met, and had even worked together for several weeks, but Seton could not admit to it. It had been nearly forty years past, at the rebuilding of Arbroath Abbey, at the behest of another king, another court. While the master mason had gained a long beard and a stoop in the intervening years, Seton himself had not aged a day, and explaining that would require more time than could be spared over a handshake.
“I do not think so,” Seton replied cagily. “Although I have been told I take after my grandfather in both face and manner as well as having his name.”
The old man’s gaze never left Seton’s eyes, and Seton made a promise to himself that he would not lie to the mason any more than he had to. The man was obviously astute enough to notice.
“Aye. That must be it,” Douglas said, finally. “He was a queer cove too, if I have the right man. Well, you had better come up and see what has caused the . If I ken the king’s mind, and the queen’s fancy, he will want this sorted fast.”
The old mason led Seton to the main diggings, a large square hole in the ground some fifteen feet deep that they had already started to shore up with perimeter underpinnings.
“We needed to go almost half as deep as we want to go high,” the old man said. “The rock we can quarry here for the bulk of the work is good and strong and the foundations will be sturdy enough, if we get then done. But the ground is damp and heavy and the digging was hard going. And you know what men are like. I have had nothing but moaning and complaints since we got here, even after I offered free whisky. Then, just as I was thinking that we had broken the back of the task and could get some height built up before winter, we found it.”
“Found what?”
“The thing the King has sent you to see,” Douglas replied. “The thing that has stopped us from getting on. It is doon here.”
They went down a sturdy wooden ladder to the bottom of the workings. Seton immediately felt even colder, all too aware of his recent soaking that had not yet had a chance to dry. The moonlight scarcely penetrated down here, and dark shadows flitted and capered, demons among the black. As he descended, Seton’s roll bag swung alarmingly, threatening to topple him backward off the ladder, but he could not leave it up top. Every one of his senses was telling him that the king had been right. Whatever was here, Seton was the only one who might stop it.
But I have to understand it first.
The old mason led them through a mire of sucking mud to where the diggings slumped alarmingly into a deeper hole, pitch black in the dark depths of the foundations. This was the source of the cold. A snell breeze blew up from below, as cold as any winter wind, threatening to freeze Seton’s wet clothes to his body.
“It is doon there,” Douglas said, and spat into the hole. “I dinnae right ken what manner of thing it is, but it’s a dark thing, a bogle right enough, and there is not a man will work here until it is dealt with. So if you are the king’s man, here is what you have been sent for. Good luck.”
With a look that spoke of relief to be away from the spot, the mason left Seton there in the dark. Seton heard him climb the ladder, setting the old wood creaking, then all went silent.
He was left alone, with the dark, the hole, and whatever it was that sat in the bottom of it.
Seton felt cold, wet, hungry and tired, but there was a new thing to see here, he could feel it. And that simple fact was more than enough to ensure his attention. There was indeed a power in this spot, and it spoke to the part of Seton that came from the same place, the dark speaking to the dark, a conversation he barely understood, but was all too aware of its happening.
It is why the king sent me, rather than any other, after all.
He unrolled the long leather bag on the ground at his feet and fetched out a candle lantern and his tinderbox. It took him three tries to get a spark but finally he had it lit and could survey the scene properly.
At first glance the depression in the center of the workings looked like no more than a deep muddy hole. But as he approached the edge he saw that the bottommost part had collapsed inward, a darker hole no wider than a shoulders-width across, opening out into some kind of cavern below. He rolled up his bag and took it with him as he went down the muddy sides, more sliding than climbing, finishing up somewhat precariously above the small entry that went down into complete blackness. The darkness that spoke in his mind came from below, whispering and entreating him to come closer, come deeper.
“There is no need for you to shout so loudly,” Seton whispered back. “I am coming.”
He lowered himself down gingerly until he sat on the edge of the hole. It was bitterly cold now, the breeze stiffening into more of a wind, whistling up from the deep. If he stayed here, he’d be frozen and dead within a matter of minutes. The light of the lantern showed him a floor some four feet below so, trusting to luck, he let himself drop down, and had a bad moment when his left foot slipped under him on landing, nearly sending him tumbling and forcing him down onto one knee. The sound he made on trying to recover his footing caused an echo to ring around him, one that immediately rose in tenor and timbre, as if a great bell had just been rung to announce his arrival.
It began with a reverberating vibration that shook the ground beneath him, as if a giant might be attempting an awakening from a buried sleep. Seton again tried to stand but the shaking was so violent that he immediately fell back on his hind-end to lie on the ground. The vibrations soon shook him to his core, threatening to loosen flesh from bones. Darkness seeped in at the edge of his sight.
In less time than it took to draw a breath everything went black, leaving him groping in the darkness. The ground rose and fell around him as if something huge attempted to rise up from below.
But that was not the worst of it. He was blinded, in blackness, but he was not alone. A drum beat somewhere in the depth of the cavern and he felt it just as much in the pit of his stomach as he heard it in his ears, a giant drum, distantly far, but getting closer every second, beating as fast as his terrorized heart. Something moved in the dark, something huge. He was lost in a world of fear, like a child in a dark room when he senses movement under his bed. The blackness surged, washing over him in waves. Seton wished he were dead so that he might be free of this. He was utterly lost, utterly alone.
And just as he thought he could take no more, something in the blackness reached for him.
His own darkness, the thing inside that he’d invited in those long years past, answered back, and it was only then that the great drum faltered, and finally failed, the interloper drawing away as it met something it recognized.
Seton’s eyesight returned. Slowly, the dim glow of his lantern led him back to what passed for normality. The chamber fell deadly quiet once again. He sensed that he was being watched, tested, but put that away, trusting to his strength as he stood and managed for the first time to have a look around. Any inconvenience was immediately forgotten when he saw where he had ended up.
He had dropped down into an ancient burial chamber, a longbarrow. The mason had the great, and surely not completely accidental, misfortune to be building atop an earlier, much earlier, structure. The walls were built of large blocks of sandstone, beautifully engineered and dovetailed together so tight that a layer of silk could not have been slid between them. During the long years of his own hunt for the Great Mystery, Seton had visited several of these old tombs, in Carnac in France, on Orkney, Malta and on the rolling moors in the South of England. This one gave the same sense of age as any other he had visited, a remnant of a time long past and a reminder of the impermanence of all things.
What was completely different here though, was the overwhelming sense that this place was still in use. The dead may be here, but they were not resting in peace. He felt it, in every rustle, in every breath of wind, in every shift of shadow.
