A Place Called Skull (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #27)

By John Lymington

A man comes to find his way into a secret house, but when he finds it he has a feeling that he is already lost. His mission is to save the world from final devastation, but the nearer he comes to that last secret, the greater his feeling of being lost. He meets people in this house, people he seems to know but cannot place. All that he can be sure of is that they are there to stop him going through the last door.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Mar 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215375990

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

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A man comes to find his way into a secret house, but when he finds it he has a feeling that he is already lost. His mission is to save the world from final devastation, but the nearer he comes to that last secret, the greater his feeling of being lost. He meets people in this house, people he seems to know but cannot place. All that he can be sure of is that they are there to stop him going through the last door.

A PLACE CALLED SKULL

By John Lymington

First published by Robert Hale Limited under the name John Newton Chance in 1980

©1980, 2024 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: March 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Chapter One

1

I FIRST SAW the Old Man while I was still wondering how I could get to see him. I was lying on the grass top of the eastern horn of the cliff, looking down across the sands of the cove. The day was still, the sea calm, ebbing with a murmur; whispering, ‘Farewell, I shall return in anger. The Weatherman said so, thus I shall. One day, I shall not come back at all, and they will all die and I shall not give one solemn, bloody damn.’

And then I saw him squatting on his heels on the wet sand ripples, watching something crawling in a tiny pool, engrossed like a small boy.

I thought; I can never kill him. He is after all, just a small boy, pitiful, ignorant, a victim of circumstance.

He had trunks on and looked thin, scraggy, underfed. Perhaps he was ill. Then suddenly he put a bony hand down and picked up the tiny, crawling thing. He pulled it apart with his fingers, then ate a bit, spat it out and threw the remains into the slow water.

Then I knew I had the anger to kill him.

He got up, turned and ran with long, loping strides up the beach to the scattered rocks at the back of the cove, and went out of sight.

So I had seen him at last, but so far off he had been no more than a figure, a matchstick caricature of a wasting man. I felt pity for him, then anger, then a despair that the job would be so hard.

I lay on there, picking grass, sucking it and staring out across the cove to the far horn of the cliffs. The sky was changing and the cliffs began to look black against the coppery horizon. The sky was gathering, like the Weatherman said it should. In the cove the sea was placid but had stopped withdrawing. I watched it stay level with the corner of the far cliff for half an hour. I watched till it began to lap over itself and run slowly up the beach.

‘You will have difficulty with the staff,’ had said the man in the skullcap again. ‘There are six or seven there. Naturally they will try and protect him.’

He had said it all through the night and all that day up to that afternoon on the clifftop. Of course I would have difficulty with the staff; they were there to protect the Old Man and they would try and stop me. Perhaps kill me.

That was the difficulty I was thinking of as I lay on the grass. I was already on the Old Man’s ground. That was why I was alone. These were his private cliffs, and his private cove, his very private sands and for miles around the countryside was his own private countryside.

Of course, it was good for Nature that it was so selfishly preserved. No roads destroyed the fields, the animals and the birds; no developers deposited little plastic bungalows on the fair grass, for nobody could come to live in them. The old man kept them out, and at last the wildlife had a kingdom where pollution did not come.

So it was good that he was rich and selfish, like his father and his father, and his father. It was all good.

But in the place where he lived he kept The End of the World, and that was why he had to be stopped.

At that time on the cliff I did not believe such a thing could be in any one man’s grasp, though the man in the skullcap had spoken for hours, days, weeks, telling me that it was true. Time and again he had returned to this strange theory, and all the time my mind rejected it.

The thing was impossible. It was bloody stupid. The World was there and Man could never destroy it, though he might destroy himself in trying.

That was what the man in the skullcap meant. That the Old Man might destroy the animal kingdom.

But why should he, when his own selfishness had helped to preserve it? Was he mad? I had asked that, and they all said he was not. He was sharp, quick, alert, wideawake, bright, stuffed to the ears with gorm.

But how did they know all that, when they’d never been allowed near enough to see?

The whole thing was strange. As if the world had tripped, paused a moment off balance and then gone off on another course.

Not the sphere, but the world of Man.

‘You must get into the Place. You must get in,’ they kept saying in the air round me. ‘It is a matter of Survival. Survival. You know what that means? Survival. Preserve Being. Live on. Survive. You, we, everybody: Survival.’

I must get into that place. The Place called Skull.

That was a joke of some crazy man hooked on Golgotha. Skull. A house called Skull. Well, the skull’s a home, I supposed, but the man who called a great solitary house Skull must have been out of his.

Of course, not the Old Man. His father’s father’s father’s father’s idea of a joke. It was so long ago the Place was called Skull that for generations the oddity had faded and nobody now thought it strange.

I LOOKED ASIDE to the top of the cove where he had gone. There were trees like green sponges crowded together beyond it, lying up a combe, a gully leading away from the beach.

Beyond the trees, beyond the rise of the cove cliffs the ground sank into the wild natural world in which Skull had lain, they said, for a thousand years.

Rubbish, rubbish; it could not be a thousand years.

‘Why not?’ they said. ‘It’s not too long. How many generations is that? Why, not that many. Not a thousand. Only hundreds. And some of the sods lived damned long lives. Yes, damned. That’s why so many lived so long. They were frightened to die.’

It was like a nightmare, lying up there in that ominous place. The sea was changing colour from green to the dull, coppery sheen of the sky.

The sky, doing what the Weatherman said. Obedient, scientist-loving sky, doing what the man said. Storm approaching.

It had to approach. It was to be my natural cover, my excuse to get into Skull. Caught in the storm.

But what of my excuse for being on the land, the secret, private land?

‘You lost your way,’ they said. ‘You know all the excuses. You’ve made enough in your career. It’s your business, isn’t it? Inventing excuses, reasons, lies.’

Lying there toying with fear, re-hearing them talking, reasoning, cajoling and at last, ordering, was biting at my nerves.

They seemed to gather all round me, their heads formed in the gathering cloud tops round the darkening horizon, and I could see them and feel anger and fear at them all over again.

The skullcap with the everlasting cigarette dangling from the lips, and the bent pillar of ash hanging from the end, and the warm comforting smile surrounding it as he said over and over again, ‘You can do it, only you. Survival. That’s the message. Survival.’

And the code man, endlessly walking up and down behind the light on his desk and repeating, ‘Of course, of course it’s a risk but you must take it. Why you? It’s your relative. Years removed. Families removed, but it is yours, and that provides the excuse. The final excuse, should it be needed. But it may not be as difficult as we think now.’

It may not be as difficult. But they don’t know if it’s difficult or not. They don’t know enough.

Planes flew over and photographed the wild woods, the forest, the overgrown fields and the waterfalls running down between the trees, down the wild rocky steps to the combe and the sea.

They saw the vans and trucks that go to the gates far from the house and drop their goods on the platforms for the staff to collect when they would.

They knew that somehow some repairs were done to the vast roofs, so there must be a mason there somewhere on the staff. There were styes, and byres, and animals grazed in the fields, almost bursting with the overgrown riches there, so there must be a farmer of some sort.

Things like that they knew from the air and from common sense, but that was about as far as it went.

And that was about the sum of what was known about Skull when I got upon the clifftop and began to walk down what had once been a path towards the combe behind the distant rocks.

I should have said that it was the sum of what they had told me they knew, for mistrust was growing in my mind and had been since the job had been put to me. ‘Only you can—Only you will—Only you might—’

Might. If anybody can, you might.

Must, they should have said. Must. If I had refused the Skull job they would have got me with another one, more sure in the outcome.

The path crumbled and fell away. I stood there looking down at the sheer drop to the beach and the rocks, the bone-breakers’ teeth showing up at me.

You must. Only you.

I should have died before. All this was borrowed time. Thirty-eight and alone. No one to go back to, no one at all. Those grey years behind me, of creeping, prying, whispering, then running, running, running, and with no breath left, collapsing on their carpet and hearing them say, ‘Well done, well done, now here is something else—’

It was six feet across the break and the far edge was crumbling. I turned back, turned again and ran a few paces. I landed both feet on the other side, feet slipping backwards down the drop as the ground crumbled under my weight.

I let myself fall forward and grabbed a grass tuft. It came out, dripping earth from the rocks. I grabbed again, both hands, as if only then realising what the failure would mean.

That time the grass held. I just hung on, content almost to fall asleep like that, face down while the dry earth gradually crumbled away underneath me.

Scrambling up was difficult as I left it so late, but I got on to the solid ground and lay there looking up at the darkening sky.

Then a change swept through me. Survival. That was the name of the game, otherwise there was nothing.

When I had got up I noticed the sea was a little more vigorous than it had been. On the horizon to the west the sky was purple with a snow range of lighter clouds creeping up.

2

THE NEAR-FALL changed my mind, jerked the view round