The Magdalena Curse (20 page)
Read The Magdalena Curse Online
Authors: F.G. Cottam
My curse makes the world, to me, a more interesting place
, she had said. He thought he was gaining an insight into what Mrs Mallory thought made the world an interesting place. And there was no comfort in the suspicion that her curse
and its repercussions and ambitions went far beyond its implications for his son.
, she had said. He thought he was gaining an insight into what Mrs Mallory thought made the world an interesting place. And there was no comfort in the suspicion that her curse
and its repercussions and ambitions went far beyond its implications for his son.
Adam, who was no longer Adam now, was sitting at the table with his computer when she opened his bedroom door.
‘It’s courtesy to knock,’ the voice emanating from his small frame said. The voice was gruff, adult, the accent Canadian. Elizabeth thought she knew whose it was. She was more or less certain when she saw the watercolour Adam was completing with deft brushstrokes and his tongue curling in childish concentration over his upper lip. It was a representation of the sea breaking in great waves against the granite cone of a lighthouse in a storm. And it was better than merely good. The venting fury of the storm wrought in a child’s palate of paint was a small work of elemental wonder.
‘What a marvellous painter you were,’ Elizabeth said.
The thing that was no longer Adam looked up at her and frowned. ‘I was. There’s little point in false modesty any more. I was gifted, right enough. I could paint damn near anything that meant damn all to me.’
‘You’ve gone back to the sea.’
The painting was almost finished. Adam’s childish hand hovered with the brush over it. He looked up slyly with an expression that was not his. ‘I might as well, Elizabeth. A man can’t die twice over, after all. May I call you Elizabeth?’
‘Can you not leave the child alone?’
‘Not presently. Had I not died by my own hand, things would be different. But I did and they are not.’
‘Why? Why did you?’
‘I defied the curse. I couldn’t paint, you see. The impulse to do so seemed to have deserted me. So I defied the curse. I went back to Melville for inspiration.’
‘
Billy Budd
,’ Elizabeth said.
Billy Budd
,’ Elizabeth said.
Adam looked at her through Daniel Peterson’s squinting expression. ‘He’s told you everything.’
‘I think he may have held some things back.’
‘I was homosexual. Queer. Gay. That was my orientaton and choice. And of course I kept it secret. I was deep into the Melville story late one evening. The phone rang. And Mrs Mallory laughed over the line and derided me as a faggot and said she was going to tell.’
‘Mark Hunter wouldn’t have cared.’
The thing occupying Adam seemed to muse on this. ‘Maybe he wouldn’t. He was an easy-going kind of a guy, for a Brit. He was cultured and intelligent. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared. But it wouldn’t have stopped with him. It would have been the end of my military career. It wouldn’t have sat well in my trade, with my comrades. It would have been the end of who I was. It would have been the end for me altogether.’
‘She offered you the rope. And you took it?’
The Peterson thing occupying Adam cocked its head. ‘You’ve got the hots for Colonel Hunter, haven’t you, Elizabeth?’
‘Who is that really in there? Is that you, Mrs Mallory?’
‘He finds you repellent, you know. The very touch of you repulses him. You remind him far too much of his dead wife. Lillian was always an enigma to poor, dull Mark. But she was a very similar type to you, physically. He tolerates your presence because of the good he mistakenly believes you might be able to do his son. But the sight of you makes him morbid and sorrowful and he detests it.’
‘You are not welcome in this house, Mrs Mallory,’ Elizabeth said. She could hear the shudder in her own voice. She was frightened and she was hurt. She believed the truth of what had just been said to her. She believed Adam was in danger at this moment from the thing possessing him. Miss Hall was dead and their protection had gone and the guardian of the house was absent from it and far away.
The voice was velvety now when it emerged from Adam’s throat. She had been right. It was not the dead Canadian occupying the boy. It was the living sorceress who had persuaded Colonel Peterson to so abruptly take his life. ‘We’ll meet, Elizabeth. Trust me on that. I am nothing if not a woman of my word. We’ll meet in time. But it’s an encounter only one of us will relish.’
Adam slumped on to the desk top. When she lifted his head there was a smear of sea green on his cheek from the painting, not yet quite dry. Elizabeth felt that she had to take from what had just occurred anything that was positive. If she did not do this, she thought she might be overcome by misery for Adam and terror for both of them. She had suspected the sorceress of the gift of mimicry and she had been right. She had suspected something of the character of Mrs Mallory and seen that suspicion proven. It was not much. But it was something, she thought, as she hauled Adam’s slumbering body from his chair and lifted him into bed. It was something. It was enough to slow her heart and stifle the scream in her throat she thought might waken and frighten the child she carried to his rest. She wet a flannel under the running hot tap in the bathroom and, when it had cooled enough, wiped the paint stain from Adam’s cheek as his head lay on the pillow and he slept.
The first floor of Mrs Mallory’s keep, like the ground floor, was occupied by a single enormous room. This was a dining room. A long table divided it and the wood-panelled walls were decorated with carvings furtive with movement when they were not directly looked upon. There was an old-fashioned radiogram against one wall and when Hunter raised its hinged lid there was a record on the spindle waiting to play. He switched on the machine and the record began to turn. He lowered the tone arm and static at the edge of the disc
surrendered after a moment to music familiar from his own contented past. It was Gustav Mahler. It was the Ninth Symphony. It was the recording by von Karajan with the Berliner Philharmoniker. There were banners in this room too. But they were not the blood banners of cobbled riots in Nuremberg and other strongholds in the years before the Nazis swept to power. They were embroidered instead with the anarchic geometric shapes he remembered from the banners under black canvas in Bolivia a decade ago.
surrendered after a moment to music familiar from his own contented past. It was Gustav Mahler. It was the Ninth Symphony. It was the recording by von Karajan with the Berliner Philharmoniker. There were banners in this room too. But they were not the blood banners of cobbled riots in Nuremberg and other strongholds in the years before the Nazis swept to power. They were embroidered instead with the anarchic geometric shapes he remembered from the banners under black canvas in Bolivia a decade ago.
The second floor was occupied by a single room just as spacious but much less stark than those beneath. There were couches here of soft black hide and there were animal skins stretched across the walls. There was, against the far wall from the door, a canopied bed. And there were deep-pile rugs scattered on the floor, he saw, as Hunter approached the bed. The bedspread was ivory but the canopy black gauze and the long bolster covered in black satin. He bowed from the waist and sniffed the bolster in the slight depression where a head had lain. It smelled very faintly of a classic scent. He thought it might be Jicky. It was a Guerlain fragrance, he was pretty sure of that. He knew about perfume because his wife had so loved to wear it. Aimé Guerlain had created Jicky in 1889. It had been a youthful scent when its glamorous wearer in this bed had already been a crone in mortal years.
Other things were more interesting up here. There were carved figures from Africa and the East ranged on stacks of shelves. There were corn dollies and elaborate wreaths of shrivelled mistletoe. There were crude voodoo figures and statuettes Hunter thought might have been fashioned centuries ago by Mayan and Inca priests. There was a door knocker cast from brass depicting the Green Man. He thought it probably English and Georgian. Some items amongst this collection seemed harmless and some merely curious and
arcane, the hoarded bric-a-brac of someone with a taste for myth. But two objects seemed possessed of such uneasy and profound malevolence that he could barely bring himself to look at them. One was a dagger with the silver boss atop the hilt of a grinning wolf’s head. The other was a chalice set with precious stones cut into those queasy geometric shapes the mind could make no sense of. This vessel looked very old, even ancient. He reached out and grasped the chalice in one fist. Dread engulfed him then and he surrendered his grip on the thing with a shudder. It glimmered dully in the beam of his head torch.
arcane, the hoarded bric-a-brac of someone with a taste for myth. But two objects seemed possessed of such uneasy and profound malevolence that he could barely bring himself to look at them. One was a dagger with the silver boss atop the hilt of a grinning wolf’s head. The other was a chalice set with precious stones cut into those queasy geometric shapes the mind could make no sense of. This vessel looked very old, even ancient. He reached out and grasped the chalice in one fist. Dread engulfed him then and he surrendered his grip on the thing with a shudder. It glimmered dully in the beam of his head torch.
He had not thought that things fashioned from metal and jewels could harbour malice and provoke dismay, until that moment. But this one did.
He could put off the part of the visit Miss Hall had insisted upon no longer.
There was a heavy iron latch but no lock on the oak cellar door. It opened outwards on a narrow flight of descending stone steps. If anything, the suspicion of being watched had increased in Mark Hunter’s mind. His instinct was to flee this miserable place, with its sense of impending threat and grisly artefacts. But he could not. Miss Hall had made her instructions plain. He must look and learn if he was to save his son. Besides, he thought smiling grimly to himself, he was surely the ideal candidate for the sort of ordeal he was undergoing now. He had spent his entire professional life overcoming fear to face danger with calmness and sometimes lethal composure. It could almost be destiny, when you considered it seriously.
He heard a noise behind him then, coming from the hallway leading to the front entrance. He froze at the top of the cellar steps with the heel of his right hand on the hilt of the knife he had bought at Innsbruck. It had sounded like the scrape of bone on the marble of the tiles that paved the way to the
entrance. It had sounded like the skitter of a claw. He had not imagined the sound. Alert to anything that might signal threat, he had really heard it. But though he waited for a full minute, it was not repeated. There was a heavy interior silence and beyond that, very faintly from outside, the scream of the wind from the ridge where the mountain peaked above. He descended the steps by the light of his head torch, closing the door behind him.
entrance. It had sounded like the skitter of a claw. He had not imagined the sound. Alert to anything that might signal threat, he had really heard it. But though he waited for a full minute, it was not repeated. There was a heavy interior silence and beyond that, very faintly from outside, the scream of the wind from the ridge where the mountain peaked above. He descended the steps by the light of his head torch, closing the door behind him.
The large chamber hewn from the living rock under Mrs Mallory’s keep was dominated by two machines devised for the killing of men. Hunter did not know much about the guillotine. But the one on which his torchlight shone looked, relatively, like a recently built device. It was not tall and the frame was not a gaunt wooden thing, like those he had seen in engravings describing the Terror that followed the French Revolution. This guillotine did not have eighteenth-century dimensions. Instead its frame was made of riveted steel and the slanted blade was heavy, to give it deadly momentum over the course of a shorter drop. Two thick straps with heavy buckles were screwed to the board on which the condemned man would be bound. There was something sinisterly elegant and even quaint about the French guillotine. This example did not share those characteristics at all. It looked like something built for the cold efficiency of the abattoir. The blade of the machine gleamed in the light from his torch. You could die facing or with your back to it. He pondered for a moment on which would be the worse fate. Closer to it, he saw that there was a manufacturer’s name engraved on the steel of the frame.
Tegel
, it read.
Tegel
, it read.
So it was not strictly a guillotine but a Fallbeil or falling axe, the more recent German version of this deadly construction. Hunter remembered that Hitler had wasted no time in having them manufactured and used. He had ordered the first of them in Munich in the year he came to power. During
the war, more than 16,000 Germans had met their deaths buckled to the boards under the cold honed edges of their blades. The blade was raised on this one. It was poised there, like a threat. He thought it a gruesome sort of souvenir.
the war, more than 16,000 Germans had met their deaths buckled to the boards under the cold honed edges of their blades. The blade was raised on this one. It was poised there, like a threat. He thought it a gruesome sort of souvenir.
The second device on its podium at the centre of the cellar was an electric chair. It lacked the clinical character of the Fallbeil entirely. There were scorch marks on its wooden back and the screws were loose against the wrist manacles on its arms from the dying seizures of its victims. It harnessed electricity but looked almost medieval in its clumsy dimensions and stark crudeness. The cap with its crown of electrodes still stank, as Hunter approached it, with the scent of fear and singed hair. The Fallbeil was a chilling object down here in the gloom and the silence. But he could imagine no more awful keepsake, really, than the chair.
He was studying it, wondering with what possible insights Miss Hall could have intended this tour to provide him, when behind him he heard the whoosh and clang of the descending Fallbeil blade ring loudly home. He turned. There was no hand on the mechanism. There was no torso buckled to the board or head in the waiting basket. But there was blood on the steel in a fresh, dripping crescent. He could smell as well as see it as the coppery odour stung his nostrils. He licked parched lips with a dry tongue and turned and leapt up the steps, having seen more than enough. He closed the cellar door behind him and heard the skittering sound again from the direction of the front entrance. This time it signalled approach. He heard the snarls of a pack of dogs, clumsy with haste over the marble. He looked around him for some means of escape from them.
He remembered the guns then, in the spacious room with the bookcase and the film projector. They were carbines and machine pistols dating from the Second World War but they had gleamed with the lustre of well-maintained and
still-functioning weapons. He had not thought to take one for his own protection earlier because Miss Hall had insisted he would be safe here. He had no time to regret that or to ponder on her broken promise. He had encountered these dogs before and knew that they had the feral power to rip him apart. He ran for the room. He plucked a machine pistol from where a row of them were bracketed and began the frantic search for magazines. He found a box of them and opened it, breaking the protective foil with a fevered hand and slotting home the mag as the dogs erupted snarling and foaming, crimson-eyed through the heavy bronze door.
still-functioning weapons. He had not thought to take one for his own protection earlier because Miss Hall had insisted he would be safe here. He had no time to regret that or to ponder on her broken promise. He had encountered these dogs before and knew that they had the feral power to rip him apart. He ran for the room. He plucked a machine pistol from where a row of them were bracketed and began the frantic search for magazines. He found a box of them and opened it, breaking the protective foil with a fevered hand and slotting home the mag as the dogs erupted snarling and foaming, crimson-eyed through the heavy bronze door.
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