The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 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.

  He triggered a sweeping, lateral burst that caught the three of them head on. The heavy calibre bullets ripped into them. They shuddered and paused and one of them let out a sort of mewling sound. The big room had filled already with the potent stink of them. They bled from ragged wounds on to the floor in viscous, purplish blotches. The smell of this excretion was unbearable. But they did not die. They barely paused. They growled and gathered themselves for another assault. He had to get past them. He had no chance otherwise. He let them approach him, separating, leaving wider gaps between them as they stalked him across the floor. This was a very risky thing to do, depending only on the beam from his head torch for his light, the dogs to right and left seeking the shadows of the room as they measured their approach. But he did not have a choice if he wanted to live. He slotted home another mag. On the table to his right, where the projector was mounted, he saw an object that had not been there earlier. It was at once strange and strangely familiar. It was a human head, cleanly severed. The dead eyes of the Comte de Flurey stared dully from it. It was a small and symbolic act of spite on Mrs Mallory’s part. It was proof of her vaunting power. And it was proof to Hunter that Miss Hall was dead. She had broken her promise only because she was no longer alive to keep it.

  He emptied his machine pistol into the dog directly in front of him, then dropped the weapon and ran past it through the door. The burst took away most of the dog’s head. But it still managed to snap with the exposed remains of its lower jaw as he skirted by, snagging a long fang on his jacket pocket. The ruined head of the beast seemed to ripple, reconstituting itself, the sockets above the snout deepening and then the
eyes blinking open with a glimmer of crimson loathing. He tore himself free and shut the door behind him, feeling the impact of the other two dogs as they turned and hurled their weight against the bronze. Her magic was more potent here than it had been in the environs of the canvas cathedral at Magdalena. The beasts among her retinue were stronger. Of course they were. There, she had been tricked and curtailed by the craft of a clever adversary. Here, she was free.

  But she was not here. Not in person, she wasn’t. She would have confronted him by now if she was. He thought that she was probably in Geneva, in the house of her dead protagonist, gloating over the corpse of Miss Hall and all the time gaining in strength. He looked around. He could not kill the dogs. He could only elude them. If he tried to go back the way he had come they would pursue and catch and overcome him. He would make it as far as the ice field and be swallowed for ever by the abysmal depths of a crevasse. He had no protection now, no fat and querulous guardian angel to keep death at bay for him. Behind him, the bronze juddered. He bit down on his fear with a resolution that brought blood welling from the roots of his teeth. He spat it on to the floor. It was the only blood of his the owner of this place would have today. He owed Adam the life he had not yet lived. He would not die, not easily. He would not forsake his boy. He would find a way to live through this. He would live to confront and defeat the bitch and he would save his son.

  There were stairs. He took them four at a time until they ran out three floors up against the hoar-frosted obstacle of an iron door he thought must lead to the roof. The door was locked. He could hear the dogs panting as they climbed the steps below. He could hear the soft urging of their handler now, could smell his rising odour, the gagging richness of decomposition remembered from Magdalena. And, more recently, from his hotel room at Lake Geneva. He took the keys he had been given by Miss Hall to enter the place. There was no logic to suggest they would work on the exit too. But they did. He was through the door. He locked it behind him and threw the keys away into the darkness. He would not need them again. There was no going back.

  Iron ladder rungs ascended above him through hoops screwed to the sheer rock. He thought that perhaps they led to an observation platform at the summit. The Nazis had been fond of eyries. A dog would not be able to climb them. At least, a normal dog would not. The snow was falling heavily. The cold was almost palpable, a thick encroachment that pressed sharp barbs against the exposed skin of his face and filled his lungs with frozen weight. It was hard to breathe. It was almost impossible in the blizzard to see. And he could hear nothing other than the roar of the wind from the north as it shrilled over the razor edge of the ridge a hundred feet above him. He had to consume precious seconds putting on his gloves. The cold would weld the flesh of his hands to the rungs of the ladder if he did not. He pulled them on with his teeth and started to climb as he prayed a dog could not.

  Sections of the cage he climbed through were entirely clogged by snow. But it was light and fairly insubstantial, uncompressed in the lee of the wind in the high cold, and he found that he could bull a path through it. He had always been fit and strong. Sometimes fear denuded a man. Sometimes it drained his strength. But he thought if anything the plight of his son made him even stronger than he would have been ordinarily. He looked down, risking the beam of his torch. But he could see nothing through the swirling void beneath him. He raised his head. The journey was upward. There was only the one escape route and he knew he had no option but to take its terrible risk. So he clambered through the cage of iron hoops up the ladder. This old and sturdy construction framed his calm ascent. And then it ended. And it ended in the screaming howl of the ridge a few feet above the snowy concrete platform put there over seventy years ago for preening from on high, above the world created by the Reich.

  It had been described to him as a wall. It was covered in ice and whatever snow clung to its steepling gradient. It dropped for a near vertical mile. Shackleton had skidded down a glacier in South Georgia on his escape from shipwreck and the Pole, and had survived along with his entire party. It could be done. Men had done it. The wind might buffet and slow him. The snow that clung to the face might impede his speed in forgiving, clogging drifts if he did not trigger its precarious weight into avalanche. He wore gloves and heavy boots and had the protection of the performance clothing he had kitted himself out with at Innsbruck. Hunter was not a betting man. But asked, he would have put his chances of living through his descent of the north face of the mountain at no better than 10 per cent. If he had any final doubts about trying to survive it, they were dispelled by the thrum through his fingers of vibration on the final ladder rung. They had breached the door. They were coming after him. With a gasp he went up the final few feet, over the ridge and into the void.

  Elizabeth opened and printed off the document attached to the email sent by the British Library. With Adam now asleep and apparently restful, she felt like nothing more than succumbing to the refuge of sleep herself. It was a symptom, she knew, of shock. Her conversation with the malevolent character occupying the child had inflicted that on her. It was not so deep as to debilitate her completely but it was genuine enough. She corked the bottle and flushed her untouched glass of wine down the sink. Then she helped herself to a large measure of Mark Hunter’s single malt and drank it down in a gulp. It was not the medically accepted remedy for shock but she felt it working almost straight away. She poked at the sitting-room fire and stacked it with a couple of logs. The warmth would be a comfort and the resinous smell of the wood burning a reminder of what was real and demonstrable.

  She suspected that Adam Hunter was lying about the dreams he endured. She thought that it was likely he remembered them very vividly. He was reluctant to recall them because in a way that meant they were inflicted upon him a second time. And perhaps he was noble like his father was and wanted to spare them the worry the images and portents of the dreams would provoke in them. She had no proof that he was lying of course. But he was an unusually bright child. Curiosity was a principal characteristic among bright children. They were curious about everything. It was what fuelled their precocious gathering of knowledge. Yet Adam showed no curiosity at all about the dreams that afflicted him. They were not a mystery to the boy. Elizabeth suspected they were anything but.

  The logs in the grate caught and flared with brightness and warmth and she adjusted the angle of the lamp on the little table next to her and tried to concentrate on the pages she held in her hand. They had printed in reverse order. She began to sort them sequentially. She blinked and focused on the first words on the title page. Something landed with a wet thump against the front door, startling her. The half-sorted pages slipped from her fingers to the floor. She looked in that direction, but decided against investigating the source of the sound. The door was extremely solid, the house virtually fortified against intrusion. The hazards of his career had apparently made a cautious man of Mark Hunter where his home was concerned. It was approaching midnight now and her curiosity about the source of the noise would wait until the morning and the coming of light to be satisfied. She lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle just to check as a precaution that the line was not dead. Mobile coverage was patchy up here and the phone was a lifeline. She heard the soft burr of the dialling tone and felt grateful for it.

  She replaced the receiver and knelt on the floor to retrieve the scattered pages there. Words on the first sheet she recovered caught her eye immediately. On her knees, by the firelight, she read what was written there:

  The wench was uncommon comely for a woman accused of such vile and pernicious crimes against God. She was less than buxom and had not the fecund quality creatures of lust find irresistible in a maiden. Her figure was slight, but fine rather than frail or wretched thin. There was nothing openly wanton or ripely lustful about her aspect. Instead, about her head, there was a clean firmness of jaw suggestive of strong character. Her nose was short and straight. Her eyes were of an arresting shade of green under finel
y arched brows and somewhat cat-like in shape. They compelled attention without implying insolence. Her gaze was steady and true seeming and not suggestive in the slightest degree of boldness or insolence or other womanly vices. Her mouth was well made. Her lips were full and her teeth even. She was pale of complexion and her skin unsullied by pox or general blemish. Her hair was wheat coloured and clean and straight. She appeared taller than her height. But this was less a trick of sorcery than the impression given forth by her calmness and what seemed the fortitude of her character. Hers was a winning personage to look upon. At least in the first instance, there was no doubt of it.

  ‘Oh, Christ. She looked like me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She looked like Lillian Hunter did.’ She shook her head. She gathered the spilled pages. She could not comprehend what any of it meant. Threads drew together in her mind and formed only a tangled and impenetrable web. The fire warmed the side of her face. And then her skin chilled with the overpowering instinct that she was being watched. She looked up sharply. She rose to her feet.

  Adam was sitting on the floor by the door that led to the stairs. He must have awoken and descended them without her hearing him. He was very pale and thin-looking in the baggy folds of his cotton fleece pyjamas. He looked as though he had shed ten pounds in the period between breakfast and now – between that morning, his classroom recitation in the afternoon and the possession earlier in the evening. His eyes were wide with fatigue and sorrow. His blond curls were plastered against his forehead with perspiration.