A Coven of Vampires

by Brian Lumley

  “Bucharest?” I repeated him.

  “Hmm?” he paused in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, yes—gypsyish stuff. Tambourines and chanting—and fiddles. Dancing around campfires. Look, I’d better switch it off or the battery will run down.”

  “I didn’t see a radio,” I told him, following him out through the porch and onto the drive.

  He leaned inside the front of the vehicle, switched on the interior light and searched methodically. Finally he put the light out with an emphatic click. He turned to me and his jaw had a stubborn set to it. I looked back at him and raised my eyebrows. “No radio?”

  He shook his head. “But I heard the music.”

  “Lovers,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Lovers, out walking. A transistor radio. Perhaps they were sitting in the grass. After all, it is a beautiful summer night.”

  Again he shook his head. “No, it was right there in the air. Sweet and clear. I heard it as I approached the house. It came from the house, I thought. And you heard nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.

  “Well then—damn it to hell!” He suddenly grinned. “I’ve started hearing things, that’s all! Skip it…. Come on, let’s have supper….”

  • • •

  Carl stuck to his “studio” bedroom but I slept upstairs in a room adjacent to the study. Even with the windows thrown wide open, the night was very warm and the atmosphere sticky, so that sleep did not come easily. Carl must have found a similar problem for on two or three occasions I awakened from a restless half-sleep to sounds of his moving about downstairs. In the morning over breakfast both of us were a little bleary-eyed, but then he led me through into his room to display the reason for his nocturnal activity.

  There on the makeshift easel, on one of a dozen old canvasses he had brought with him, Carl had started work on a picture…of sorts.

  For the present he had done little more than lightly brush in the background, which was clearly the valley of the house, but the house itself was missing from the picture and I could see that the artist did not intend to include it. The pool was there, however, with its encircling ring of quartz columns complete and finished with lintels of a like material. The columns and lintels glowed luminously.

  In between and around the columns vague figures writhed, at present insubstantial as smoke, and in the foreground the flames of a small fire were driven on a wind that blew from across the pool. Taken as a whole and for all its sketchiness, the scene gave a vivid impression of savagery and pagan excitement—strange indeed consider ing that as yet there seemed to be so little in it to excite any sort of emotion whatever.

  “Well,” said Carl, his voice a trifle edgy, “what do you think?”

  “I’m no artist, Carl,” I answered, which I suppose in the circumstances was saying too much.

  “You don’t like it?” he sounded disappointed.

  “I didn’t say that,” I countered. “Will it be a night scene?”

  He nodded.

  “And the dancers there, those wraiths…I suppose they are dancers?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “and musicians. Tambourines, fid dles….”

  “Ah!” I nodded. “Last night’s music.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Probably…. Anyway, I’m happy with it. At least I’ve started to work. What about you?”

  “You do your thing,” I told him, “and I’ll do mine.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “Before I do anything I’m going to soak up a lot of atmosphere. But I don’t intend staying here very long. A month or so, and then—”

  “And then you’ll burn this beautiful old place to the ground.” He had difficulty keeping the sour note out of his voice.

  “It’s what my uncle wanted,” I said. “I’m not here to write a story. A story may come of it eventually, even a book, but that can wait. Anyway, I won’t burn the house.” I made a mushroom cloud with my hands. “She goes—up!”

  Carl snorted. “You McGilchrists,” he said. “You’re all nuts!” But there was no malice in his statement.

  There was a little in mine, however, when I answered: “Maybe—but I don’t hear music when there isn’t any!”

  But that was before I knew everything….

  6. The Familiar

  During the course of the next week Scotland began to feel the first effects of what is now being termed “a scourge on the British Isles”, the beginning of an intense, ferocious and prolonged period of drought. Sheltered by the Pentlands, a veritable suntrap for a full eight to ten hours a day, Temple House was no exception. Carl and I took to lounging around in shorts and T-shirts, and with his blond hair and fair skin he was particularly vulnerable. If we had been swimmers, then certainly we should have used the pool; as it was we had to content ourselves by sitting at its edge with our feet in the cool mountain water.

  By the end of that first week, however, the drought’s effect upon the small stream which fed the pool could clearly be seen. Where before the water had rushed down from the heights of the defile, now it seeped, and the natural overflow from the sides of the dam was so reduced that the old course of the stream was now completely dry. As for our own needs: the large water tanks in the attic of the house were full and their source of supply seemed independent, possibly some reservoir higher in the hills.

  In the cool of the late afternoon, when the house stood in its own and the Pentlands’ shade, then we worked; Carl at his drawing or painting, I with my uncle’s notebook and veritable library of esoteric books. We also did a little walking in the hills, but in the heat of this incredible summer that was far too exhausting and only served to accentuate a peculiar mood of depression which had taken both of us in its grip. We blamed the weather, of course, when at any other time we would have considered so much sunshine and fresh air a positive blessing.

  By the middle of the second week I was beginning to make real sense of my uncle’s fragmentary record of his research. That is to say, his trail was becoming easier to follow as I grew used to his system and started to detect a pattern.

  There were in fact two trails, both historic, one dealing with the McGilchrist line itself, the other more concerned with the family seat, with the House of the Temple. Because I seemed close to a definite discovery. I worked harder and became more absorbed with the work. And as if my own industry was contagious, Carl too began to put in longer hours at his easel or drawing board.

  • • •

  It was a Wednesday evening, I remember, the shadows lengthening and the atmosphere heavy when I began to see just how my uncle’s mind had been working. He had apparently decided that if there really was a curse on the McGilchrists, then that it had come about during the construction of Temple House. To discover why this was so, he had delved back into the years prior to its construction in this cleft in the hills, and his findings had been strange indeed.

  It had seemed to start in England in 1594 with the advent of foreign refugees. These had been the members of a monkish order originating in the mountains of Romania, whose ranks had nevertheless been filled with many diverse creeds, colours and races. There were Chinamen amongst them, Hungarians, Arabs and Africans, but their leader had been a Romanian priest named Chorazos. As to why they had been hounded out of their own countries, that remained a mystery.

  Chorazos and certain of his followers became regular visitors at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I—who had ever held an interest in astrology, alchemy and all similar magics and mysteries—and with her help they founded a temple “somewhere near Finchley”. Soon, however, couriers from foreign parts began to bring in accounts of the previous doings of this darkling sect, and so the Queen took advice.

  Of all persons, she consulted with Dr John Dee, that more than dubious character whose own dabbling with the occult had brought him so close to disaster in 1555 during the reign of Queen Mary. Dee, at first enamoured of Chorazos and his followers, now turned against t
hem. They were pagans, he said; their women were whores and their ceremonies orgiastic. They had brought with them a “familiar”, which would have “needs” of its own, and eventually the public would rise up against them and the “outrage” they must soon bring about in the country. The Queen should therefore sever all connections with the sect—and immediately!

  Acting under Dee’s guidance, she at once issued orders for the arrest, detention and investigation of Chorazos and his members…but too late, for they had already flown. Their “temple” in Finchley—a “columned pavilion about a central lake”—was destroyed and the pool filled in. That was in late 1595.

  In 1596 they turned up in Scotland, this time under the guise of travelling faith-healers and herbalists working out of Edinburgh. As a reward for their work among the poorer folk in the district, they were given a land grant and took up an austere residence in the Pentlands. There, following a pattern established abroad and carried on in England, Chorazos and his followers built their temple; except that this time they had to dam a stream in order to create a pool. The work took them several years; their ground was private property; they kept for the main well out of the limelight, and all was well…for a while.

  Then came rumours of orgiastic rites in the hills, of children wander-

  ing away from home under the influence of strange, hypnotic music, of a monstrous being conjured up from hell to preside over ceremonial murder and receive its grisly tribute, and at last the truth was out. However covertly Chorazos had organized his perversions, there now existed the gravest suspicions as to what he and the others of his sect were about. And this in the Scotland of James IV, who five years earlier had charged an Edinburgh jury with “an Assize of Error” when they dismissed an action for witchcraft against one of the “notorious” North Berwick Witches.

  In this present matter, however, any decision of the authorities was pre-empted by persons unknown—possibly the inhabitants of nearby Penicuik, from which town several children had disappeared—and Chorazos’s order had been wiped out en masse one night and the temple reduced to ruins and shattered quartz stumps.

  Quite obviously, the site of the temple had been here, and the place had been remembered by locals down the centuries, so that when the McGilchrist house was built in the mid-eighteenth century, it automatically acquired the name of Temple House. The name had been retained…but what else had lingered over from those earlier times, and what exactly was the nature of the McGilchrist Curse?

  I yawned and stretched. It was after eight and the sinking sun had turned the crests of the hills to bronze. A movement, seen in the corner of my eye through the window, attracted my attention. Carl was making his way to the rim of the pool. He paused with his hands on his hips to stand between two of the broken columns, staring out over the silent water. Then he laid back his head and breathed deeply. There was a tired but self-satisfied air about him that set me wondering.

  I threw the window wide and leaned out, calling down through air which was still warm and cloying: “Hey, Carl—you look like the cat who got the cream!”

  He turned and waved. “Maybe I am. It’s that painting of mine. I think I’ve got it beat. Not finished yet…but coming along.”

  “Is it good?” I asked.

  He shrugged, but it was a shrug of affirmation, not indifference. “Are you busy? Come down and see for yourself. I only came out to clear my head, so that I can view it in fresh perspective. Yours will be a second opinion.”

  I went downstairs to find him back in his studio. Since the light was poor now, he switched on all of the electric lights and led the way to his easel. I had last looked at the painting some three or four days previously, at a time when it had still been very insubstantial. Now—

  Nothing insubstantial about it now. The grass was green, long and wild, rising to nighted hills of grey and purple, silvered a little by a gibbous moon. The temple was almost luminous, its columns shining with an eerie light. Gone the wraithlike dancers; they capered in cassocks now, solid, wild and weird with leering faces. I started as I stared at those faces—yellow, black and white faces, a half-dozen different races—but I started worse at the sight of the thing rising over the pool within the circle of glowing columns. Still vague, that horror—that leprous-grey, tentacled, mushroom-domed monstrosity—and as yet mainly amorphous; but formed enough to show that it was nothing of this good, sane Earth.

  “What the hell is it?” I half-gasped, half-whispered.

  “Hmm?” Carl turned to me and smiled with pleased surprise at the look of shock on my blanched face. “I’m damned if I know—but I think it’s pretty good! It will be when it’s finished. I’m going to call it The Familiar….”

  7. The Face

  For a long while I simply stood there taking in the contents of that hideous canvas and feeling the heat of the near-tropical night beating in through the open windows. It was all there: the foreign monks making their weird music, the temple glowing in the darkness, the dam, the pool and the hills as I had always known them; the Thing rising up in bloated loathsomeness from dark water, and a sense of realness I had never seen before and probably never again will see in any artist’s work.

  My first impulse when the shock wore off a little was to turn on Carl in anger. This was too monstrous a joke. But no, his face bore only a look of astonishment now—astonishment at my reaction, which must be quite obvious to him. “Christ!” he said, “is it that good?”

  “That—thing—has nothing to do with Christ!” I finally managed to force the words out of a dry throat. And again I felt myself on the verge of demanding an explanation. Had he been reading my uncle’s notes? Had he been secretly following my own line of research? But how could he, secretly or otherwise? The idea was preposterous.

  “You really do feel it, don’t you?” he said, excitedly taking my arm. “I can see it in your face.”

  “I…I feel it, yes,” I answered. “It’s a very…powerful piece of work.” Then, to fill the gap, I added: “Where did you dream it up?”

  “Right first time,” he answered. “A dream—I think. Something left over from a nightmare. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The heat, I guess.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s too damned hot. Will you be doing any more tonight?”

  He shook his head, his eyes still on the painting. “Not in this light. I don’t want to foul it up. No, I’m for bed. Besides, I have a headache.”

  “What?” I said, glad now that I had made no wild accusation. “You?—a strapping great Viking like you, with a headache?”

  “Viking?” He frowned. “You’ve called me that before. My looks must be deceptive. No, my ancestors came out of Hungary—a place called Stregoicavar. And I can tell you they burned more witches there than you ever did in Scotland!”

  • • •

  There was little sleep for me that night, though toward morning I did finally drop off, slumped across the great desk, drowsing fitfully in the soft glow of my desk light.

  Prior to that, however, in the silence of the night—driven on by a feeling of impending…something—I had delved deeper into the old books and documents amassed by my uncle, slowly but surely fitting together that great jigsaw whose pieces he had spent so many years collecting.

  The work was more difficult now, his notes less coherent, his writing barely legible; but at least the material was or should be more familiar to me. Namely, I was studying the long line of McGilchrists gone before me, whose seat had been Temple House since its construction two hundred and forty years ago. And as I worked so my eyes would return again and again, almost involuntarily, to the dark pool with its ring of broken columns. Those stumps were white in the silver moonlight—as white as the columns in Carl’s picture—and so my thoughts returned to Carl.

  By now he must be well asleep, but this new mystery filled my mind through the small hours. Carl Earlman…. It certainly sounded Hungarian, German at any rate, and I wondered what the old family name had been. E
hrlichman, perhaps? Arlmann? And not Carl but Karl.

  And his family hailed from Stregoicavar. That was a name I remembered from a glance into von Junzt’s Un speakable Cults, I was sure. Stregoicavar: it had stayed in my mind because of its meaning, which is “witch-town”. Certain of Chorazos’s order of pagan priests had been Hungarian. Was it possible that some dim ancestral mem ory lingered over in Carl’s mind, and that the pool with its quartz stumps had awakened that in his blood which harkened back to older times? And what of the gypsy music he had sworn to hearing on our first night in this old house? Young and strong he was certainly, but beneath an often brash exterior he had all the sensitivity of an artist born.

  According to my uncle’s research my own great-grand father, Robert Allan McGilchrist, had been just such a man.

  Sensitive, a dreamer, prone to hearing things in the dead of night which no one else could hear. Indeed, his wife had left him for his peculiar ways. She had taken her two sons with her; and so for many years the old man had lived here alone, writing and studying. He had been well known for his paper on the Lambton Worm legend of Northumberland: of a great worm or dragon that lived in a well and emerged at night to devour “bairns and beasties and foolhardy wan derers in the dark”. He had also published a pamphlet on the naiads of the lochs of Inverness; and his limited edition book, Notes on Nessie—the Secrets of Loch Ness had caused a minor sensation when first it saw print.

  It was Robert Allan McGilchrist, too, who restored the old floodgate in the dam, so that the water level in the pool could be controlled; but that had been his last work. A shepherd had found him one morning slumped across the gate, one hand still grasping the wheel which controlled its elevation, his upper body floating facedown in the water. He must have slipped and fallen, and his heart had given out. But the look on his face had been a fearful thing; and since the embalmers had been unable to do anything with him, they had buried him immediately.