Read The Magdalena Curse Online
Authors: F.G. Cottam
The Magdalena Curse (30 page)
‘Call me Margaret,’ she said. And then more quietly to her daughter, ‘He’s as bright as a button.’
They let Adam light the bonfire. It was his creation to ignite, after all. When it was burning so fiercely the heat bathed their faces in its furious glow, Margaret Bancroft slipped away to the stable, fishing the key to the padlock that secured its door from the pocket of her cardigan. Adam stood before Elizabeth and leaned against her. She linked her arms across his chest and he grasped her hands for a full minute before realising she had even done it. They stared into the cracking red-white furnace of the bonfire’s seat. And then they saw a large flat object cartwheel into the centre of the fire, sending ashes sparking and hissing into the cold
air with the impact. The panel caught immediately. The cloth in which it was wrapped shrivelled and seemed to evaporate. Shapes appeared to shift in turmoil on the surface of the object as the flames licked at and the heat devoured it in a sudden audible roar. It rippled, the wood buckling and blistering like something alive. And then the animation left it and it was engulfed and turned to ash, betrayed by its age and the dryness of the centuries-old wood from which it had once been mischievously carved.
air with the impact. The panel caught immediately. The cloth in which it was wrapped shrivelled and seemed to evaporate. Shapes appeared to shift in turmoil on the surface of the object as the flames licked at and the heat devoured it in a sudden audible roar. It rippled, the wood buckling and blistering like something alive. And then the animation left it and it was engulfed and turned to ash, betrayed by its age and the dryness of the centuries-old wood from which it had once been mischievously carved.
Margaret Bancroft dusted her hands together with a sound not unlike applause. Elizabeth turned to her mother. She had recently hefted that object herself and would have put its weight at upwards of forty pounds. Her mother had hurled it into the flames as someone might toss a pillow. She did not wonder from where the strength had come, though. She knew that she herself had provided it, earlier in the kitchen, as Adam constructed the meticulous pyre warming the three of them now.
Elizabeth had been a practical sort of a child. She had enjoyed building things. After the bonfire and lunch, her mother located a boxed hoard of her old Meccano in the loft and brought it down to an intrigued and, after a short while, gleeful Adam. They cleared a space on the sitting-room floor and he settled down to build something while the women talked in the kitchen.
Elizabeth thought her mother would be honest with her now. ‘Have you ever seen a wolf, Mum?’
‘No. But I think I know what it is that you’re talking about. They’re not really wolves and they’re not really men either, are they? They’re the creatures depicted in that carved panel I burned. They’re like some evolutionary step that might have been taken had the world taken a darker turn than it has. I dreamed of them. I thought it was a Freudian thing. But there was nothing wrong with my sex life and my
marriage to your dad was truly happy. I used the strength to stop them.’
marriage to your dad was truly happy. I used the strength to stop them.’
‘You used the magic to stop the dreams?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were they like?’
‘They were so disturbing and frightening that I had to put a stop to them. The creatures in them walked on two legs. They affected the conceit of human dress. And they possessed the mannerisms of people and the power of speech. And they tried to communicate with me.’
‘What did they say?’
‘I don’t know, Lizzie. They didn’t speak English. I don’t speak any language other than a smattering of Gaelic and a bit of French. But I recognise other tongues. They spoke Russian and German, and on the most terrifying occasion I dreamed that one spoke Latin to me. It seemed quite blasphemous, somehow.’
‘It sounds grotesque.’
‘You haven’t heard it?’
‘I’ve been spared it, thank God,’ Elizabeth said.
The gift for Adam was never bought in the village because his mood was so successfully lifted by the building of the bonfire and the discovery of the Meccano. He took the giant box of it away with him when they left. He was halfway through some complex construction and delighted with the discovery of this old-tech model building kit. He played with it intently when they got back to the house. Then just before dusk they went for a walk in the snow and then Elizabeth made dinner and they ate popcorn together and watched the first and second movies in the
Back to the Future
trilogy and speculated afterwards on the practicalities of time travel. Then it was time for Adam to go to bed.
Back to the Future
trilogy and speculated afterwards on the practicalities of time travel. Then it was time for Adam to go to bed.
He showed no trepidation climbing up the stairs. Elizabeth
supposed he had inherited his father’s courage as well as his physical endurance. But perhaps that was actually doing the boy an injustice. His demons might not be his own, but the fortitude he had shown in dealing with them surely was. She tucked him in and kissed him on the cheek. He turned his head and closed his eyes and she looked above where he lay at the shelf of books there.
supposed he had inherited his father’s courage as well as his physical endurance. But perhaps that was actually doing the boy an injustice. His demons might not be his own, but the fortitude he had shown in dealing with them surely was. She tucked him in and kissed him on the cheek. He turned his head and closed his eyes and she looked above where he lay at the shelf of books there.
He had almost the complete set of the Eye Witness series. She saw the one about the
Titanic
, which had photographs of the vessel taken by a submersible, quiet and still and gravely enormous in the fathomless depths to which it had sunk. She saw the one about the Apollo space missions, which had a picture of a cold and pitted moon on its cover. She looked at his other bits and pieces; the toy cars and discarded batteries and the Swiss Army knife and a set of fake joke-shop teeth and a tarnished leather cup with a pair of antique ivory dice he must have bought with his pocket money at a car boot sale. A sudden and intense feeling of anger overcame her then. This boy had been robbed of the right to dream with the happy freedom other children did. A vital part of him had been stolen. She shivered, though it was warm in the Hunter house. And she turned and left as Adam descended into what she hoped would be a deep and untroubled night of sleep.
Titanic
, which had photographs of the vessel taken by a submersible, quiet and still and gravely enormous in the fathomless depths to which it had sunk. She saw the one about the Apollo space missions, which had a picture of a cold and pitted moon on its cover. She looked at his other bits and pieces; the toy cars and discarded batteries and the Swiss Army knife and a set of fake joke-shop teeth and a tarnished leather cup with a pair of antique ivory dice he must have bought with his pocket money at a car boot sale. A sudden and intense feeling of anger overcame her then. This boy had been robbed of the right to dream with the happy freedom other children did. A vital part of him had been stolen. She shivered, though it was warm in the Hunter house. And she turned and left as Adam descended into what she hoped would be a deep and untroubled night of sleep.
She switched on the computer downstairs just to catch up on her email. She was pretty tired and thought she would not be long in following Adam up to bed. She had been sent something by the British Library late the previous afternoon. It was an addendum to the document they had dispatched her already. She opened it. It wasn’t very long. She printed it off and took it into the sitting room to read.
I write this only because I fear my time is short and wish to die with my conscience clear and no secret unrevealed and festering to
trouble my immortal soul. I have said that the witch Ruth Campbell was removed from the scaffold and dealt with according to the protocols laid down by Bullock in his urgent missive from the Fens. And this was eventually so. But I was guilty of perjuring myself in my previous account of the event. I told the truth. But I did not tell the whole truth about what did occur.
trouble my immortal soul. I have said that the witch Ruth Campbell was removed from the scaffold and dealt with according to the protocols laid down by Bullock in his urgent missive from the Fens. And this was eventually so. But I was guilty of perjuring myself in my previous account of the event. I told the truth. But I did not tell the whole truth about what did occur.
The corpse of the Campbell woman had been taken from the gibbet and buried a full week by the time Bullock’s letter came to me. It was plain from the contents that we were obliged to carry out the distasteful ritual of disinterment. It was done on my part with a heavy heart. My instinct was to leave the dead to lie in peace. But Bullock’s instructions were most emphatic and precise and I dared not fail in their execution.
We were compelled to sever the head from the body. An axe had been procured with which to carry out this grisly necessity. A stout veteran by the name of Jones had volunteered to deliver the blow. He had never used so cruel an instrument on flesh. But clearance had been his civil occupation and left him facile with an axe between his hands. She looked like sleep when we removed the winding sheet. Jones touched the blade to the spot to true his aim before raising the axe. The keen edge of the blade pricked the skin of her neck and her eyes opened with a start. She snarled as Jones dropped the axe in shock and she sat upright and naked pale. She spoke my name. I drew my own sword and cut off her head with a single clean stroke. And the head did speak then from the floor, cursing me. And only after did the witch perish and with the two parts of her bloody and at peace in their final mutilation.
I believe that in the time of her trial, grief for the creature with which she had cavorted made her indifferent to her own fate. But it would have come to what remained of her mind in time that she had not died on the gallows. She would have crawled from her grave and resumed her mischief. What we did was fully justified by need. But the cost to me has been a heavy one. I am visited by the black visions that precede a seizure of the brain. That was her
curse. I pray only it is fatal when it comes. I would not be left a dribbling fool enduring only as a burden to my wife.
curse. I pray only it is fatal when it comes. I would not be left a dribbling fool enduring only as a burden to my wife.
My affairs are settled and my widow will not want for comfort. My children are grown and fair. I am content I did my duty to the Commonwealth, the Lord Protector and my God. I do not indulge the sin of feeling pity for myself. I have lived through a great and eventful moment. I would have been spared the revelations of these last few weeks, but cannot in truth complain about my lot. Nothing matters more than I face my Maker with my conscience unsullied and the last of the words committed here are written now in the belief I do.
In God and in His truth,
Josiah Jerusalem Smith.
Cleaver Square was suddenly more salubrious than the streets he had just risked. No one haunted the pavements. He made for the Prince of Wales pub. There was music playing inside. It was Duke Ellington, ‘Take the “A” Train’. The pub was very hot and crowded and it was a jostle to get to the bar. When he did get there and had been served a pint of beer, he looked around. He thought that maybe he had stumbled into a stag party or a themed night. But there were too many women present for a stag do. Most of the men were wearing black tie. The women, for the most part, had on cocktail frocks and more make-up than he could remember having seen slapped on since the early 1980s, when he had been a callow youth. There were pillbox hats and hats with veils and elbow-length gloves. People were smoking in the pub and they were not doing it furtively. The air was bitter with smoke. Almost everyone seemed to be drunk.
‘What’s your story, pilgrim?’ the man next to him at the bar said.
Hunter didn’t like conversations casually struck up in pubs with strangers. He didn’t particularly like being called pilgrim, either. But he decided on the path of least resistance. He could not afford to be conspicuous.
‘Just fancied a pint,’ he said. ‘And I wanted to get out of the rain.’
The man smiled. His teeth were discoloured. Hunter noticed that the collar of his dress shirt was rimed with dirt and the satin lapels of his jacket greasy in the light from the bar. ‘You’re telling me you came in here on the off-chance?’
Hunter took a sip of his beer. It tasted brackish. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
But the fellow seemed momentarily to have forgotten him. Two men over by the entrance to the Gents had begun to fight. They were clumsy and inept and it went straight away to the floor where they bit and gouged in a tangle of limbs. Hunter’s new acquaintance pushed his forefinger and thumb into his mouth and let out a piercing, celebratory whistle. But the combatants were becoming exhausted and feeble, already spent. One of them started to vomit copiously, and the other tried to escape his grip and scramble out of range of the bucketing puke.
The whistler at the bar remembered Hunter. And he remembered what Hunter had just said to him and frowned. ‘No one comes in here on the off-chance, pilgrim,’ he said.
‘Are you telling me this place is a private club?’
The man opened his mouth to reply and then hesitated because a woman behind him was now tapping him on the back. Hunter looked around him at her. She wore thick foundation that failed to conceal acne scars and eye shadow so deep it made the sockets they shaded into blue caverns. And blue was the wrong colour. Her eyes were brown. ‘He says it’s fifty,’ she said.
‘It’s forty,’ the man said back to her.
‘He says it’s fifty now.’
‘Forty’s my limit. Offer him a hand job to make up the difference. A blow job, if he says no.’
She pouted and turned and walked unsteadily away. Hunter had time only to see that the stockings were laddered above her red stilettos before she disappeared in the throng. He put down his glass.
‘Leaving already, pilgrim?’ his new friend said.
‘Out of my league,’ Hunter said. ‘This place is far too sophisticated for me.’
If anything it was raining harder when he got outside. He looked around. Cleaver Square wasn’t square at all. It was a quite narrow rectangle. Most of its houses occupied two long Georgian terraces that faced one another on either side of the strip of gravel between them and the trees surrounding it. The square was dark as well as wet, the gravel puddled, the trees tall and dripping gloomily. But it was not difficult as he walked to identify Mrs Mallory’s address. He had Adam’s detailed description of its façade and Green Man door knocker. When he saw that, he saw also that the houses to either side of hers were both for sale. He was not surprised at this. She had been in London for a while. It must be tough to be a next-door neighbour of the hottest, coolest party hostess in town.
Her house was dark. His instinct told him that she was not at home. He had known she was there at her home a dozen years ago at Magdalena. He felt her absence from this place now as surely as he had felt her presence then. Of course it was possible she could be at one of the darkened windows, receded just far enough into the shadows around her to be invisible. She could be watching him. But he did not think she was. He felt afraid of what he was going to find in the house. But Mrs Mallory tonight was doing her own fearful business somewhere else.
Hunter made his observations without pausing or even appearing to look towards the address he intended to enter. The garrulous loser who had spoken to him in the pub could be outside it now, just as curious as to what he was doing in the neighbourhood as he’d been about his presence in the Prince. There could be alert eyes on the other side of the square. These handsome houses were obvious targets for burglary, given the sink estate poverty that pervaded elsewhere in Kennington. He did not have a convenient set of keys conjured into existence by his erstwhile ally Miss Hall. He would have to scale the wall at the far corner of the terrace and steal through a series of gardens to reach the point where he could get through a back door or window. He was well qualified for this sort of work. But you were only ever successful at it if you were extremely careful. The weather was on his side. The rain meant thick cloud cover and that meant no moon. He had gained the end of the terrace. He looked around once more and prepared to climb.
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