Catacombs of the Damned: Inspiration

This is what my house looks like, or rather feels like, on a dark winter night. When the moon is stroking the rooftops, there is an overhanging sense of something waiting to happen. The house seems to grow and looms over the passerby with a powerful presence which sleeps during daylight.

And when the winter storms strike, the clouds churn under the moon to let loose torrents of rain which cascade off the roofs and sound the drums of massive waterfalls; perhaps releasing a call to the water-spirits of prehistory which it is well known inhabit the Somerset Levels, while the wind howls around the Celtic crosses above the gables which stretch to the sky as if appealing for some pagan recognition.

And inside it is worse. The wind around the eastern end moans and laments as if to mourn the passage of some soul which still lingers - but it can only be heard from one of the rooms. At the other end of the house there is silence, but it is not a sympathetic peace; rather a sense of waiting, and waiting, till the storm moves on. We don’t know what it waits for; perhaps the Grey Woman who still tries to find repose while walking, or rather floating, down the corridor to the room where you can hear the wind. Surely she is a player in a tragedy that must have been re-enacted for countless centuries?

It is this Grey Woman who has inspired my book Catacombs of theDamned. My Grandmother claimed to have seen her on several occasions; always at night and whenever the storms were raging over the village. There was never any menace or threatening feelings, but rather this ephemeral figure floated down the corridors presumably in search of something long lost. And in later years several visitors have complained of a sudden coldness, always at night, while others have seen a grey shape moving randomly in the house, but always in the peripheral vision and, surprisingly, often during the day time. The last time this happened was several months ago when two visitors saw a shadow move sharply across an open door; but on looking twice there was nothing there. It was mid-morning.

Many of the other parts have been inspired by incidents elsewhere. For a really sobering experience, take one of the public tours around the Catacombs of Vienna Cathedral. This is in itself an awe-inspiring adventure with the main Cathedral part on ground level being overwhelmingly dark and menacing; but underneath the chancel where centuries of bodies are stored is like entering a world of real-life horror. Room after room of bones, many of them medieval plague victims, piled on top of each other achieving a macabre intimacy which produces a deluge of historical awe. Almost every large city in Europe has a similar problem of running out of graveyard space, and all have found a similar solution.

And so Catacombs of the Damned was born.

In the press: To read more about the inspiration for Catacombs of the Damned in the article by the Western Gazette, click here.

Catacombs of the Damned is available in paperback and for Kindle:

 

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