The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  She wondered how much Mark knew about the history of his house. All old houses had some pain or tragedy attached to them in this part of the world, she thought. The Highlands had endured some bloody periods down the centuries. Nowhere around here had been immune. Mark’s house had been home to a witch finder sent from Westminster by order of Parliament in the time of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s imperialist adventures in Ireland were well chronicled. But he had been just as harsh in Scotland. The witch finder had been one more symbol of the brutal oppression England could inflict, on a whim, on its self-styled Commonwealth. He had come and he had found his witches. Of course he had. He had probably been given a quota to meet back in London. He had conducted his trials and got his confessions using the iron heated in the forge and the drowning bucket and the thumbscrews. And he had inflicted his burnings on his poor innocent culprits. And he had been cursed savagely for it all. And he had lived in that very house until felled by the stroke that killed him. It was said that the smell of singed flesh clung to the hills for decades after. But Elizabeth believed only the factual part of the story. And she did not think Judge Josiah Jerusalem Smith, or the curse under which he laboured, responsible for the dreams afflicting Adam Hunter now. Puritans frowned even at Latin. Men like Cromwell’s witch finders did not generally inspire anyone to speak Russian.

  Her journey to the Hunters’ house was slow and difficult the following night. Fog was common in the Highlands in the autumn. But it clung most tenaciously to the gullies and vales and stream banks, and to the forested land. Generally it thinned as you ascended in altitude. But it did not do so on this night. Darkness came very early, conjured prematurely by the mist. Elizabeth was not that familiar with the road. Mist wrapped the car in pale tendrils, an opaque blanket of grey smothering her windscreen as her headlights failed to pick out landmarks and she was filled with the weird impression that the car was no longer anchored beneath her to the earth. She crawled in a kind of limbo along the road for a while, aware of the steep banks descending sharply to either side only when the car canted and the tyres juddered and she corrected her steering. She had hoped to arrive at 7.30. But it was past 8 p.m. when she finally made out the light above her, climbing the hill towards it.

  Hunter met her by the door, where he must have been listening out for the approaching noise of her engine.

  ‘There’s been a development,’ he said, ushering her in, before she could apologise for her lateness. He looked worried. He looked tormented.

  She unbuttoned her coat and he took it from her and hung it on a peg beside the door.

  ‘What kind of development?’

  ‘Things have escalated. It has got worse. He’s talking now in his sleep. I tried to keep him awake for you. We were playing chess. But he fell asleep over the board, poor little fellow. He’s exhausted. I’d carried him up and was tucking him in when the muttering started. I don’t know whether to rouse him or leave him. It’s gone beyond the conventions of nightmare. He’s living the dreams. He’s whispering in languages that were dead a thousand years ago.’

  Elizabeth put a hand on Hunter’s arm. She squeezed. He was close to tears, almost unmanned by what was happening upstairs to his son.

  ‘Have you anything strong to drink?’

  ‘I’ve whisky.’

  ‘Pour two inches into a glass and swallow it down.’

  He tried to smile. ‘That’s your prescription?’

  ‘Do it. I’ll go up,’ she said.

  Adam was lying peacefully on his back. His breathing seemed regular but slow. His mouth was slightly open and there was a bluish tinge to his complexion that Elizabeth did not like very much. Once again it felt bitterly cold in the room despite a radiator too hot for her to touch for more than a couple of seconds. He was talking. But it wasn’t in his own clear, piping tone. There were separate voices. It was like some skilled act of ventriloquism. The voices emanated from his chest and their words were articulated without the boy moving his lips even a fraction. It was uncanny, like a radio broadcast of stories recounted in biblical times, and the very remoteness of the tongues made her shiver in the chill of the room.

  Elizabeth had an involuntary memory then, recalling with perfect clarity seeing a ventriloquist perform in a variety show broadcast on television when she had been a little girl of about four or five. The dummy sitting on its master’s lap had sung a song while the ventriloquist himself had very deliberately drunk a tall glass of milk empty. She remembered the song. It was, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’. She had been puzzled, wondering how it was done. Now, more than a quarter of a century on, she puzzled again, wondering how this squall of dead voices was emerging from the mouth of the sleeping boy.

  Some of it was in Latin. Some of it was Classical Greek. She thought some of it was from St Luke’s Gospel, recited in Hebrew. She recognised quite a long passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, sonorously intoned in an English dialect she had never heard spoken. The really unnerving thing was when two voices spoke at the same time. One rising babble of voices almost forced her to flee from where she stood. There was anger and mockery there in the chill room and she could equate none of it with Adam. She lifted one of his eyelids and then measured his pulse. His heart rate was regular and his sleep deep, even if it wasn’t restful. The voices subsided for a moment and she crept out in the charged silence. They were no more alive, the voices, she thought, than had been the ventriloquist’s doll. If they had been, they would have addressed her. She did not think she could have endured that. This was bad. But she thought there was some explanation that the science of her calling could accommodate. Had the voices addressed her, had they acknowledged her presence, she would have been staring at the void.

  Hunter was seated in one of two armchairs angled to face the hearth when she descended the stairs. She could smell the peaty aroma of whisky. An open bottle and two glasses occupied a small table placed between the chairs. She would not join him in a drink. The unfamiliar road would require total sobriety even if the fog had lifted. Elizabeth had seen the carnage caused by vodka-fuelled driving in her time in Russia. She had seen the victims thrown through windscreens on arctic nights, pasted by their innards and then welded by them, frozen to the bark of the conifers their cars had collided with. Such sights offered no encouragement to drink and drive. A decade on, the gory images of accidental death still stayed with her.

  ‘I think he is undergoing some kind of nervous trauma,’ she said. She sat down. ‘I think he has downloaded something, some game involving magic or possession or demonology or a stew of those things. It’s overwhelmed him. We should check if any of his schoolmates are similarly afflicted.’

  ‘They’re not. You would know. They would be your patients. And you know it isn’t that.’

  ‘You should have his computer’s hard drive examined and find out what is on it. And find out what he’s deleted from it. It isn’t just download sites. Check your credit and debit card bills. See if he has bought something on eBay, some hardcore Death Metal-inspired thing, some game involving the Apocalypse. Or one of the occult series shown on television in America and available here as a box set of DVDs. Some of those shows are heavy stuff.’

  ‘You think my son was reduced to this by watching episodes of Buffy?’

  ‘Check whether he’s subscribed to an online fraternity. The Goth subculture can be very dark.’

  ‘It isn’t that. You know bloody well it isn’t.’

  It was quiet, now. The murmurs from above had ceased. Adam lay quietly and apparently still in his bed. She heard something large caper by outside. It brushed the wall of the house with a coarse flank. A deer, she thought, befuddled, made clumsy by the mist.

  ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you, Mark.’

  Hunter drained his glass. ‘I’m just going to have a look at him. Make sure he’s okay.’

  He came back down half a minute later. There was relief on his face, which was slightly flushed by the whisky.

  ‘There’s
something I need to tell you,’ she said again.

  ‘And there’s something I need to tell you. But by all means, ladies first.’

  She paused. And then she began. ‘I told you Adam spoke yesterday morning in fluent Russian.’

  ‘In a strong Siberian accent.’

  ‘And in the persona of a man who recited his name. I did not tell you that part. He was speaking in character.’

  ‘He told you who he was?’

  ‘He stated who he was. He did not engage with me at all. It was not a conversation. It was a speech, a recitation. His voice was raised no louder when I turned my back on him to discover whether it would be. It was not communication. It was impersonation.’

  ‘It was possession. What was the name he gave?’

  Again, Elizabeth paused. ‘He stated that his name was Grigori Yefimovich Novy. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yes. Novy was born in Pokrovskoye, in Siberia. The date of his birth was probably 1869. The world knew him better as Grigori Rasputin.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Mark? You can just picture some Californian cyber-geek game designer namechecking Rasputin for level three of his warlocks and wizards conspiracy fest. And it has affected a boy, too young to play the game, in the traumatic way we see upstairs. Adam needs psychiatric help, Mark. He has downloaded and been exposed to something he shouldn’t have and has frightened himself out of his wits. You are right that the condition has worsened. I know a really good man in Edinburgh. He’s expensive, but he will prioritise a case as unusual as this. And he’s a kind man with kids of his own.’

  Hunter poured himself an inch of whisky. It was the single malt, Oban, she saw from the label, paler than any blend Elizabeth was familiar with, even in the firelight in front of which they sat. She was not a whisky drinker herself. But she had once been very close to someone who was. He raised the glass. The liquor had an oily sheen and moved with an almost viscous laziness as he swirled it in front of his face. She could smell the whisky and she could smell the resin from the pine logs burning in the grate. And there was something else, some rather more esoteric scent she could not place. Perhaps Mark Hunter wore cologne. Military men could be as vain as peacocks. It would not require premeditation to dab on a bit of scent. Quite the opposite, if it was his general habit.

  ‘A psychiatrist.’

  ‘A brilliant man. A compassionate man, also.’

  Hunter nodded. He downed his drink. He stood and went across to an oak chest positioned against the far wall and took some items from a drawer there. They chinked when he put them on the top of the chest. Then he scooped them up and brought them back and they fell from his hands on to their little shared table. She saw his Military Cross and his George Cross on their crisp coloured ribbons. So it was true. He was a hero. There was a medal with the citation scored in French. There was another with an American eagle impressed on the polished bronze. He sat heavily back in his chair and gestured at the decorations.

  ‘Baubles,’ he said.

  She wondered, was it the whisky talking? She did not think it was. A man with his background would have a good head for the stuff. Discretion had been the basic prerequisite of his entire military career. Drink might have made him more open to her, less inhibited. But the margin would be slight.

  ‘I have lost my wife and daughter. If I lose my son, my life amounts to the trinkets on that table. Do you know the line from Eliot, Elizabeth?’

  She believed she did. It came from The Waste Land. It was the famous line about shoring fragments against one’s ruins in a bleak attempt at some sort of consolation. She quoted it. Hunter listened as she did so and then sighed.

  ‘Well. These fragments are not enough. I want my boy to have his chance at life. He is my legacy and my gift to the world and my gift to him is his chance at living. I will not willingly have him denied it. Do you understand?’

  He was crying. He was doing so silently. But the tears tracked glistening down his face in the orange cast of the firelight.

  ‘You said you had something to tell me.’

  He sniffed. ‘Adam is possessed. He is the victim of a curse. I incurred it twelve years ago in Bolivia. It was pledged that my progeny would commune with the dead. The hag who cursed me was doubly right, in the event. But I don’t think she was thinking of my wife and daughter. I think she was referring to this. And of course it has come to pass.’

  Whatever large beast capered outside, it had not left the vicinity of the house. Elizabeth heard the rough smear of its hide on stone again, the scrape of horn on the leaded window glass. There was a snort, or whinny. There was the drag and clatter of heavy hooves.

  ‘Do you think there is anything you can do?’

  ‘There was white as well as black magic in that place. A kind of conflict was being waged there.’

  ‘You actually believe this?’

  ‘I saw it. There was a white witch. She was old and very powerful. She could help me. She could help Adam, if I could find her.’

  ‘Twelve years, Mark. She was old then. She could be dead.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘If she was dead, this wouldn’t be happening. This is her ordeal, her test. That was how it was always meant to be played out. I see that now. And if I’m to save my son I have to find her.’

  Elizabeth looked at the medals on the little table between them. They shared space with the bottle of Oban and the two glasses, one used, one still free of whisky’s happy contamination. The medals looked like nothing in the dull light of the fire. But she had seen combat and its aftermath. She knew something of the courage and selflessness they must have taken to earn. Fuck it, she said to herself. She poured an inch and drank it down in a gulp. ‘Would you not consider the psychiatrist, Mark? At my sincere request? Would you not have someone qualified examine the boy’s computer files?’

  He smiled, but not at her. The thing outside blundered against the door. Hinges strained and the mortise clacked loudly, but Mark ignored it. Elizabeth decided that she would too. She suspected that Mark Hunter had a large gun somewhere for use against threats like the one perhaps posed by whatever was lurking in his grounds. The metal hoard on the table told her he would use his gun coolly and well. Whatever the thing outside was, it posed no threat to Hunter and his son. Whatever slouched out there was too big and too solid a target.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Do you not wonder what that smell is, Elizabeth?’

  The scent she had detected earlier had grown much stronger and more prevalent. It drowned the odour of the whisky and the fire. It was not the vain colonel’s cologne, unless he had spilled a bottle of the stuff.

  ‘It’s frankincense,’ Hunter said. ‘It smells of fresh pine and lemons, does it not?’

  Elizabeth nodded. It did. Richly and intensely so.

  ‘It comes from the country in Africa we now call Somalia. It was popular in the Eastern world at the time of the birth of Christ. It was brought back to Europe by the Templars, after the First Crusade. Western Christians waited a thousand years to smell the stuff brought as a gift to the Nazareth stable by one of the three attendant kings. I believe its source in my house tonight is the room occupied by my son. And I can promise you, its presence here has nothing to do with the hard drive of his computer.’

  She stayed the night. The mist did not dissipate and she was too unnerved to risk the road. The spare bedroom was warm and comfortable and the rest of the night passed without incident. The smell of incense was weakening even as she brushed her teeth and in the morning was entirely gone. So was the fog. She enjoyed a stroke of luck when she saw the message light on her phone flashing and discovered her first appointment of the day, a meeting with a pharmaceuticals company rep, had been cancelled. It gave her the opportunity to have a chat with her patient before she was obliged to leave the house.

  She found him at the table in the sitting room, still in his pyjamas. He had his elbows on the table and his head rested in his hands. He was frowning, staring at th
e pieces on the chessboard left from the unfinished game of the previous night. His father was in the kitchen preparing breakfast. He was humming something tunelessly. It occurred to her that once upon a time, Mark Hunter had probably been a happy sort of man. She pulled out a chair and sat beside Adam.

  ‘Do you ever beat him?’

  ‘Occasionally. When he lets me.’

  ‘When he’s in a good mood?’

  ‘When he thinks I need the encouragement of a win to keep on playing. But I can tell he’s losing on purpose, even when he pretends he’s struggling. My dad’s a really crappy actor.’

  She laughed.

  He smiled at her. ‘Sorry. I’m not supposed to say crappy. I meant to say Dad’s a really lousy actor.’

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ Hunter shouted from the kitchen.

  ‘Coffee, please.’

  ‘A Coke for me, Dad.’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  Adam turned to her. ‘What is wrong with me, doctor? My dad doesn’t seem to know and he usually knows everything.’

  She paused before replying. ‘Did you dream last night? Do you remember your dream?’

  He frowned. ‘I dreamed something was trying to get into our house in the darkness. It was a wild animal. It was a wolf, I think. But it was massive, the size of a horse.’

  ‘That was the only dream?’

  ‘It was the only one I remember.’

  ‘If I say the word “sleep” to you, what does that make you think of?’

  The frown had not lifted from his face. ‘Dust,’ he said. ‘Darkness.’

  ‘I will do everything I can to make you well, Adam. I promise you that.’

  The frown lifted. He nodded and smiled at her. But she was aware that she had not answered the question he had asked her. And she could see that he was too.

  As soon as she got into the surgery, she emailed the Edinburgh man. She outlined the principal details of the case. He called her back within half an hour. It was Wednesday. He agreed to come and see Adam the following Tuesday. She called Mark Hunter to tell him. He did not seem thrilled by the development. She thought that was natural. In resorting to a succession of strangers to tend to his son, it must seem to him as though Adam and his problems were becoming remote from him. In a loving father, that would not be a pleasant notion. But he was intelligent and had been disciplined all his professional life. He needed to be objective if his son was to be helped. As their short conversation drew to its conclusion, a thought occurred to her.