The Berkeley Story
The house wasn't significantly older than any of the other buildings on the street, but the decay of No. 50 Berkeley Square made it appear that way. From the crazily tilting 'To Let' sign in the front yard to the broken, rag decorated windows, it immolated the sense of foreboding deterioration. Even children, well known for their love of 'haunted' houses, stayed far away from No.50 Berkeley Square.
So, it would have struck one odd that anyone should be striding through the lower rooms of the building. Even odder still for someone in evening clothes...
"All irregularities will be handled by the forces
controlling each dimension; TransUranics heavy
elements may not be used where there is Life.
Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead,
Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver,
and Steel.
"Sapphire and Steel have been assigned."
The man stepped out of the shadows, cold grey eyes studying the immediate surroundings, scrutinizing the darkest corners. When he appeared satisfied with that, he moved on, paused and looked around again, hard, and long. He repeated the act several times until he nodded slightly, knocking away a cobweb with an absent gesture.
"It's all right," he spoke to no one, and then sighed. "What a God forsaken place." He brushed off a sleeve of his silver-gray evening coat.
"Perhaps you'd rather have this haunting Buckingham Palace?" A tall woman, clad entirely in blue, walked up to his side, a contrast in every way to the man. Her blue eyes, large with interest, studied her immediate surroundings. "After all, guardians aren't known for their preference for elegancy, Steel."
Steel scowled at her. "I didn't mean that."
She turned to him, a smile dazzling her face. "I know."
Steel walked to a window, pushing the aged curtain, now more a limp rag, to scan the grounds.
"Tell me about this place, Sapphire."
"It's old, built in the late 1880's." She placed a hand on a faded, oak veneered wall. "This was the drawing room."
"What do you sense?"
"Here?" She stared, blue eyes glowing with an eerie light. "Fear...hopelessness and something else."
"What?"
"Guilt, but it's gone now, almost before I sensed it."
"Does it know we're here?"
"It does now." Sapphire smiled again. I'd like to go upstairs. From our briefing, that seems to be the spot it prefers. She abandoned the need for actually talking to her companion.
Very well. Steel gestured onward, and then froze. Did you hear that?
What?
We're not alone here. I heard something, from there. He pointed to a half opened door. He roughly pushed it aside, his strength knocking it the rest of the way from its hinges the way a normal person would brush aside a curtain.
Sapphire shook her head. "So much for stealth." The responding glare moved her nearly to laughter, meaning nothing more to her than having struck Steel's ego with a resounding blow. She'd worked too long with him to not be aware of his sense of humor.
Had I wanted to be quieter, I would have, Steel protested, walking into the room. What was this?
Sapphire brushed a piece of blonde hair from her face and followed him in, pausing long enough to give his shoulder a brief caress with a long fingered hand.
The kitchen. Hasn't been used recently. At least not in this century.
What do you sense here? Fear? The guilt?
Just the opposite, more of a sense of well being, of peace.
One room, we have fear, resentment, all the usual responses and now this. So close? Is it possible?
If the fear has never violated this room, yes, I'd say it was.
A faint rustle stopped her and she frowned, walking to the door of the servants' quarters and pushed it open.
"Would you please come out? We'd like to talk with you," she spoke evenly, not a line of concern wrinkling her smooth brow.
A shape detached itself from the shadows, coming forward until it caught the light streaming in from a cracked window pane, revealing it to be a man, small, lean, hardly the sort one could expect in this sort of atmosphere.
"Who are you?" he spoke carefully, as if unsure of their actual existence. "What are you doing here?"
"We are supposed to be here," Steel answered harshly. "What reason do you have?"
"I'm a psychic investigator."
"Not another one. Get out." Steel came forward and reached for him.
"Now, see here!" The man stepped back, indignation clouding his features. "I have just as much right to be here as you. I was hired by the owner to help him get rid of the Horror. Just who do you think you are?"
"You still haven't told us your name." Sapphire swept forward, hand out. "I'm Sapphire and that is Steel."
"Steel? Steel what?" The man pushed at his glasses, remaining wary.
"Just Steel." His tone was cold. Sapphire, you're the diplomat, get rid of him. I don't want another Tully.
I know," she replied, an answer to an unvoiced question. "But there's nothing much we can do right now, is there?"
The man came forward to take her hand and shake it gently. "Sapphire, I am Benjamin Fisher."
"Fisher?" Sapphire's smile faded for the briefest of seconds, then returned fully volume. "B.F. Fisher. You saved us an awful lot of work, Mr. Fisher. He's the one who cleared Belasco Estate, Steel." She added for her partner's sake.
"Wonderful." Steel muttered. "I'm going to check out the rest of the rooms on this floor."
"There's nothing down here. It's all up there." Fisher straightened, pulling his lean frame up as much as possible to present a mighty figure. He wilted slightly beneath Steel's glare.
"You'll excuse me if I don't take your word for it." He turned away, pausing by Sapphire. Get rid of him…. now!
Fisher waited until Steel was well out of the room, before taking off his glasses and polishing them on his handkerchief.
"Subtle fellow, isn't he?"
"What do you know about this house, Mr. Fisher? My own briefing leaves some holes that I should very much like filled." Sapphire ignored the question, long accustomed to people's reaction upon colliding with her stern, seemingly unapproachable partner.
Fisher stared at her for a moment, and then sighed. "I assume you mean about the Horror itself. The house isn't the haunting element, not in this case. Otherwise, it would permeate the whole structure. As it stands now, it's just the one room and part of the stairs."
"How do you know?"
"I sense it."
"You said you were a psychic investigator."
"A physical medium actually. You see, I..."
"Tell me about the Horror." She shifted subjects, uninterested in the course of the present conversation.
"Well, the reigning theory is that it's the spirit of an earlier tenant's relatives. A Mr. DúPrè of Wilton Park had a brother given to violent fits of insanity and locked him up in the attic, fed him through a small crack in the door. Another man, none other than Lord Littleton himself, was reputed to actually spend a night in the room and to have seen the Horror. He even went so far as to shoot it. The Horror itself was actually described in two varying ways. One newspaper of the time said it was a large, strange creature with many tentacles and declared it a monster from the sewers of Berkeley Square."
"Then why would it choose to haunt only No. 50?" Sapphire brushed a lock of butter yellow hair from her face.
"Exactly, but another newspaper said it was the ghost of a man with extremely horror features, white and flaccid, pierced by an enormous mouth."
"Certainly sound like one and the same as DúPrè's brother, but hardly enough to make one throw himself out a window." Sapphire placed her hands down on a counter, feeling the house. "You said that was the reigning theory. There are others?"
"Not so much theories as alternatives to the Nameless Horror." Fisher replaced his glasses and glanced about him and hugged himself tightly. "One is that it's the ghost of a youth frightened to death in her nursery and who must now wander the house, sobbing and wringing her hands. Another is that it's a man who went mad in one of the upper rooms, waiting for a message that never came."
"That's close enough to be a variation of DuPre's brother."
"My feelings exactly," Fisher said, smiling at her, making no attempt to ignore her supple figure. "The last one involved a young woman who threw herself from a top window to escape the sexual demands of her guardian uncle. However, she rarely comes into the house, but taps on the windows, trying to regain entrance inside. None of these, by the by, have been authenticated."
"But the...the Horror has?" Sapphire dusted off her hand delicately. Despite her attempts, there was simply nothing to pick up here. "I think I'm ready to try upstairs now."
She walked out, not bothering to see whether Fisher was following or not she knew he would.
Steel was just exiting from one of the barren, lower rooms, still scowling.
"From your smiling countenance, I am to assume you haven't found anything," she spoke lightly to him, knowing her attempt to brighten his mood would fail. No one but Steel could do that.
"Nothing, nothing at all." He glanced up at the dangling light fixture on the wall. "I think I'll shed some light onto the subject." He rubbed his hands together and cocked an eyebrow at his partner.
"Excellent idea. I was going upstairs, but I'll wait until you're ready."
"Is he joking?" Fisher whispered to her. "Those things haven't worked in decades."
"You'll discover that Steel never jokes. He sees no reason for it. He does, however, have quite a knack for fixing things." She took her partner's coat.
Fisher stared at the larger man's back as Steel began to work with a nearby lamp. "You said you were briefed before coming here. Briefed by whom?"
"Our employer," Steel answered absently. "And that's all you need to know."
"Just you two? Against the Horror?" Fisher laughed ruefully. "I think your employer has been lying to you. You can't fight that thing, not alone."
"And you can? The way you fought Hell House?" Steel snapped. "You forget that a dozen people had to die before you found the answer to that mystery. We plan on being more frugal with our causalities." The light in his hand sputtered to life, casting an eerie glow throughout the empty room. As if on cue, the other lights in the rooms, flickered, wavered and then surged to life.
A monstrous shadow appeared briefly on a wall as something scrabbled from view. Steel spun in the direction of the noise, cold grey eyes staring. Fisher, too, winced at the sheer size of the object casting the shadow. Only Sapphire paid no mind to it.
"It's only a rat," she commented as she approached the staircase.
Steel immediately abandoned the lights, walking up to her and taking his coat. He looked up at the yellow lit second floor.
Are you sure you're ready, Sapphire?' He thought to her, tending to the adjustment his cuffs. "We're not really sure what we're heading in for."
"Yes." She straightened a lapel for him and smiled at the serious face.
She climbed slowly, pausing at every step, waiting for something, anything to make itself known or felt. It came suddenly, an onrush of emotions sheer terror, overwhelming misgivings. Involuntarily, she shrank back against Steel, letting his strength calmed her as the emotions buffeted around her.
"Then it's here?" He asked his voice incredulous. Sapphire, is it here?
"No, just the emotions left behind it. The fears of its victims before meeting their fates."
"The lone survivor of the Horror's attack said they could hear it coming up the stairs. Curious padded
footsteps are how they described it." Fisher stared off into the shadows.
Wordless, Steel pushed past him and strove upstairs.
"Is he always that abrupt?" Fisher dug his hands into his pockets.
"You'll get used to him. Steel doesn't have much polish at times, but he's very useful… and very brave."
I have just as much as the next element, I'll have you know. Steel corrected her.
Sapphire smiled, the blue eyes alight with amusement. "Perhaps. Shall we go, Mr. Fisher? Steel doesn't wait well."
Fisher gestured her onward, pausing to look over his shoulder as the last bit of twilight was swallowed by the encroaching night.
"Which one is it, Mr. Fisher?" Steel demanded from the top of the staircase.
"The locked one, I imagine. Funny, but I've been camped out here for several days and the Horror has yet to put in an appearance. It must run on a time cycle."
They joined Steel at the top just as he reached the described panel. After rattling the doorknob twice, Steel merely shrugged and, with very little effort, lifted the door from its hinges.
"Very subtle," Fisher commented, still pursuing his study of the lengthening shadows.
"I'm not Silver!" Steel snapped sharply. "I do the best that I can." He glared at Fisher and disappeared in the room.
"Sore spot," Sapphire explained. "He was just dressed down for using too much force on occasion." She waited for Steel's comeback, but apparently he wasn't listening, mentally or otherwise. She followed her unsmiling companion inside.
"So, two people met their deaths here." Steel was looking out a broken window to the sidewalk below. "Was it that horrible to make one kill himself?"
You've seen one, Steel; you should be able to answer that. Sapphire came to his side, caressing his shoulder and smiling comfort into the troubled blue gray eyes. Dunwich, remember?
"That wasn't quite the same. That wasn't of our world, it was of theirs."
Fisher looked startled from one to the other, afraid that he's missed something, but neither seemed particularly ready to explain what that might be. Instead, he studied the room that had claimed both the lives and sanity of its victims.
Unlike this rest of the house, this room had remained furnished, although the trappings had long since been claimed by these hands of time and the ravages of the rats. Once elegant tapestries now hung in ruins, the deep plush rug, and a convenient supplier of nest materials. Chairs overturned bed in frantic disarray, everything just as the last victim of the Berkeley Horror had left it.
"Just how do you two propose to fight this thing?" Fisher asked, looking from one to the other. "You do, of course, have a line of defense."
"I'm afraid you don't quite understand, Mr. Fisher." Sapphire smiled at him, her face gently lit by the glow of the gas lamps.
Fisher was about to repeat himself when he heard the first protesting creak from the stairs. His face paled and he barely suppressed a shudder of dread.
"Steel?" Sapphire's own voice was strained with concern, her face showing the first signs of stress since she had entered No. 50.
"Get behind me, Sapphire." He drew a deep breath. "You'd better do the same, Mr. Fisher. If I'm going to fight this thing, I need to have everyone in a safe place. Whatever happens, don't touch me."
The heavy plodding footsteps came closer, floorboards groaning under the weight of the oncoming presence. Steel took a deep breath, preparing himself for his body's plunge to near absolute zero.
A figure appeared in the doorframe, filling its capacity and then some. It looked solid, mighty, nothing like the wispy spirit of some insane dead. It stood there for a moment and then Sapphire laughed, rushing past Steel and a horrified Fisher.
"Lead!"
The huge black man scooped her up in a bear hug, lifting her easily off the floor with only one muscled arm.
"When are you going to learn to let us know when you're coming?" Steel, too, relaxed and chastised the man who towered over him.
"Little Steel, when are you going to learn I'm never going to learn?" Lead shambled forward, ready to scoop the blond man up as well, but stopped at the warning glare. True he may be bigger and stronger than Steel, but he was never as determined.
"Do you have it?" Steel fell back a step, putting more space between him and the towering shape.
"Right here, all save and sound. Funny place, that New York City. I just walked up to their truck and took this off. A dozen people saw me and yet no one tried to stop me."
"Who in their right mind would try and stop you, Lead?" Steel took the shoe box sized container from him and eyed it critically. "How does this work?"
"As far as I can tell, it's on some sort of electromagnetic field." Lead eased himself down on the corner of the bed while springs groaned out their objections. "That ghost firm really has the place hopping. I suppose it was easier for us that the guardians headed there instead of Nome, Alaska."
"I wonder why they all went there." Sapphire joined Steel, regarding the box with a professional curiosity.
"Don't know. Maybe something big is coming down. That's Diamond and Gold's territory and you know how they are about crossing boundaries. I was surprised that they even let me in for the guardian."
"Somehow, I don't think they had much choice." Steel placed the box down and continued his study. "You know, for humans, this is rather ingenious and creative. We may have to keep them in mind for later use."
"I thought you might say that." Lead rose to his feet, heedless of the dust that covered him. "Here's one of their cards."
Steel tucked away the card and sighed. "Well, I suppose we'd better see to him. I imagine he's cramped in there."
"Now wait a minute!" Fisher, who'd been quietly listening to the byplay, came to life. "Are you saying that the Horror is trapped in that box?"
"Yes, that's right, Mr. Fisher," Sapphire obliged.
"And you're going to let it loose again to terrorize this house?"
"Also correct." Steel picked up the box and took it to the door.
"But you can't...It's not right," he protested violently. "It's captured, it's safe in there. You've fulfilled your job."
"Not yet, not until we turn it loose again."
"Why?" Fisher's question was close to a plaintive wail.
"You see, there is a corridor called Time and everything, everyone must move through it. Yet there are some events, people, even Time itself, on occasion that try to escape through weak spots in the Corridor. Guardians, like this one here, keep them from doing so and thereby insuring that things will progress on their preselected course." Sapphire took on her most persuasive tone, one used to placate children, to gain trust in old men, to soothe, to calm. "If we don't restore this Guardian to its rightful place, dire consequences will follow."
"Who...what are you people?" Fisher glanced from her to Steel to the grinning Lead.
Lead leaned back, his laugh booming and full. "You decide, Fisher. Are we animal, vegetable or...mineral?"
Fisher took a step back, shaking his head. Lead, Steel, Sapphire, it made more sense than he wanted it to, than it should. Horrified, he watched as Steel knelt down and began to operate the switches.
"You can't!" He rushed the man, but Lead caught him, his great strength holding the man easily.
"Ah, but we can and must." Lead assured him.
After flipping one last switch, Steel stepped back, away from the immediate vicinity of the container. With a sudden rush of air, an inhuman roar, a stirring of dust, the Guardian escaped, casting a baleful look over at the party.
"Go on," Steel urged. "You know where you belong."
Another roar and the air quieted. Fisher sunk back in Lead's arm and suddenly caught himself.
He caught himself; he was standing in the pantry, taking a physical reading of the immediate area. He stopped, convinced he'd been elsewhere. He blinked, thought, but nothing made sense, nothing was tangibly real to him.
Then, he heard a noise, a curious creaking of steps. The name, Lead, flashed through his mind for a brief second and then he knew it was the Berkeley Horror come to prowl another night at No. 50 Berkeley Square.