by F. G. Cottam
Elizabeth heard Adam’s feet on the stairs and assumed the boy would join them for their council of war. They had got by on popcorn and hope for the time of Mark Hunter’s absence and then on a potent opiate when those other things had proved to be insufficient. He would be refreshed, she thought. He would tell them both about what he had overheard concerning Mrs Mallory’s ambitions in his dreams. Except that it did not happen like that at all. He came down and saw his father sitting at the kitchen table and his father saw him. Adam shrieked with pure joy and they closed the distance to embrace one another. And Elizabeth remembered that since the tragedy of the death of the women in their family, these two had never before been apart.
It was most certainly a special occasion. Adam was allowed to chug down a Diet Coke with his breakfast. Elizabeth thought the narcotic she had administered the day before would have made him dehydrated and felt a stab of guilt at the raw strength of his thirst. But he definitely looked better for the rest. And of course, he looked infinitely better for the presence of his dad. He had come down in his pyjamas and was sent back up to dress warmly in layers of clothes before putting on gloves and a scarf and a hat and waterproof boots. They were going outside to play in the snow. The snow was still a novelty to them of course, she remembered. They were newcomers, not long settled here from the south of England.
They went outside. She watched them through the kitchen window as they pelted one another with snowballs. Elizabeth glanced at her watch. On a normal day she would have been on her way to work by now, but she had managed to find a well-qualified locum at shorter notice than she had expected. He had filled in for her before, was good and knew the territory. Watching Mark Hunter in the snow, in his agility and exuberance, she had a moment when she felt crestfallen. He had limped home from Austria gravely injured. Her own healing skills had been scrupulously acquired. It took a long time and a lot of single-minded dedication and financial cost to train and qualify for a degree in medicine. But her abilities were scant and impoverished, nothing to the miracles her aged mother was able to work in a moment in restoring a damaged man to health and strength.
They came back in for Adam’s sled. They dragged her outside with them. In the house, in their absence from it, the telephone rang, but of course none of them heard it. They played and skidded and frolicked in the snow. They helped Adam build a snowman. In the proximity of the mouthpiece of the telephone’s receiver on the table in the Hunter sitting room, the faint scent of the Comte’s cologne went undetected, unappreciated too. It rose and dissipated as the line rang and rang, ignored. Finally, the ringing stopped. The scent faded, reluctantly. And with the dissipating fragrance, faint notes of music faded, unheard. It was not on this occasion Gustav Mahler. It was not symphonic, or sedate. It was the Duke Ellington recording of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the “A” Train’. It was jazz that Mrs Mallory was listening to. As Miss Hall had observed, she liked to party.
Eventually, they came back inside. They were red-nosed and frozen-fingered and they sought the warmth of the stove. Hunter kindled the sitting-room fire. Elizabeth made hot chocolate. Despite everything, life seemed very normal. Love and joy might be human failings, Elizabeth thought, but they were strong and persistent and wonderful failings. She served up the hot chocolate on a tray. Adam was on Mark’s lap in the sitting room, being warmed and cherished in the strength and affection of his father. She sat with them and felt very much a part of things.
When they had drunk their drinks Adam stood and looked at them both. ‘I have to tell you about Mrs Mallory,’ he said. ‘You need to know about what she intends to try to do. She’s very confident of putting her tilt on the world. She’s tried and failed in the past. She’s only very narrowly failed. On occasion, the world has survived by fluke, by the skin of its teeth. But this time, she’s confident. She’s very certain, she says, of the ground.’
Chapter Nine
Mark Hunter thought there was a profound difference between the magic of Miss Hall and that endowed by the Campbell bloodline. When Margaret Bancroft healed him there was no bit of business with a scarf or show of paperless origami from dextrous hands. She just closed her eyes and it was done. Miss Hall had been begrudging in her healing of his mauled arm. And his emotional state had been fragile, badly affected by what had happened to Major Rodriguez. The arm had quickly become better but there had been no sense of energy or exuberance about the process. ‘I cannot work miracles,’ had been her cantankerous complaint. In medical terms, this was not true. She had worked one on a limb so badly infected he would otherwise have lost it. But it was an unspectacular miracle. At least, it was compared to the one he had experienced earlier that day. Elizabeth’s mother was elderly, even frail. But she had left him feeling years younger and full of strength and vitality. He suspected it was the difference between magic learned and practised scrupulously and magic yours by birthright. Mrs Mallory enjoyed the latter. He was certain of it. After the way Miss Hall had toyed with him in her house above Lake Geneva it made the prospect of confronting Mrs Mallory a daunting one.
He thought the notion of Elizabeth Bancroft as a witch almost amusing. His attitude towards her had entirely changed. He no longer thought of her as some morbid mirror image of his lost wife. Repellent was the last word he would use to describe her now. He thought this might simply be a case of having recently seen her naked. After all, he was a man. With no clothes on, pained and damaged as he’d been, he could not help noticing just how beautifully put together a woman she was. But it wasn’t just that, was it? It was her confidence and lack of self-consciousness as she stood there calmly dressing. It was the way she had taken charge of the situation. It was the way she had made the decisions, carrying Adam down to the Land Rover, putting it firmly into gear in darkness on a freezing road, meeting a dire emergency by cajoling her mother into using skills she’d kept a secret even from herself for forty years. Before she had been almost deferential, someone on to whose wan character it had been tempting to superimpose Lillian because of the resemblance and probably, also, because he missed his wife so painfully. But in the short time since his return, Elizabeth had emerged as so much her own woman he was barely aware of the resemblance any more. She was a stunning individual. She was sexy and clever and strong. The idea that she could be a sorceress like Mrs Mallory seemed almost absurd to him.
And they were communicating. Before his departure for Switzerland, their conversations had held all the emotional nuance of a pair of speak-your-weight machines placed side by side. Circumstances had obliged them to grow closer, become friends. The circumstances were awful. So Hunter was doubly grateful for Elizabeth’s friendship.
This was his thinking as he waited for Adam to thaw himself out under a hot shower before telling them about the substance of his dreams. He was sitting alone in front of the fire in the sitting room. He had built up the fire and the room was encouragingly warm. Elizabeth was in the spare room upstairs, reading the rest of Judge Smith’s account of his Scottish experience. Hunter would read the whole of it when she had finished. She would come down when Adam did, no doubt having first made sure his hair was properly dried so he wouldn’t catch a chill. It was amazing how close the two of them had grown in the short time he had been away. Their body language in the snow had betrayed their closeness. There was no distance between them at all. It was good for Adam and he felt grateful for that as well. He needed answers to occur to him from his time in Mrs Mallory’s keep. Without them, his son’s ordeal would continue and worsen. He needed some clue, some insight. Without that he could do nothing. He had been a man of action all his professional life. Thanks to sorcery, he was healthy and whole again. He was capable. But he had no idea at all about what to do next. He wished Miss Hall had not left it so late to try to help him lift the Magdalena curse. He wished that she had not died quite so soon. It came to him then that five people had been cursed at Magdalena and not the four he had always supposed. There was Rodriguez first of course and poor dead Peterso
n after him. There was him and there was his son. And finally there was Mrs Mallory’s adversary, wasn’t there? Miss Hall had been cursed, or she would not be dead. She had beaten Mrs Mallory and when their blundering mission had voided the victory, an affronted Mrs Mallory had exacted her revenge. It was why Miss Hall had hurt him, despite her wish to help. He had not understood that contradiction. He thought he understood it now.
The phone on the table beside him rang. He picked up the receiver and said hello. Sergeant Kilbride introduced himself and asked would Elizabeth get back to him. She had told Hunter about the harassment campaign and he explained this to Kilbride, who said there had been a significant development in the case. He wanted to discuss it with Dr Bancroft personally. He suggested the Black Boar at four that afternoon and Hunter promised to pass the message on.
When he replaced the receiver and the phone rang again straight away he assumed it was the sergeant ringing again because there was something important he had omitted to say. But it was not.
‘Colonel Hunter?’
He recognised the voice. He said nothing.
‘This is the Comte de Flurey.’
‘No, it isn’t, Mrs Mallory. The Comte is dead. You killed him.’
There was a pause. ‘And you killed me. Death isn’t everything it’s reputed to be.’ After better than a decade, the velvet purr of her voice was familiar enough to chill his spine. She laughed her throaty laugh. There was music in the background. It was jazz. It was Bix Beiderbecke playing the cornet. His imagination told him he could detect her scent over the line; strong tobacco and pink gin and Jicky perfume. ‘The Comte is alive and well,’ she said. ‘If you don’t believe me, look out of your window.’
Hunter picked up the phone, cradling the receiver in the crook of his neck, and did as she had suggested. The snow was falling in a heavy flurry and the sky was almost as white as the ground in the mid-morning luminescence. A headless figure stood poised in evening wear about forty feet from the house.
‘It’s a good trick,’ Hunter said.
‘Colonel, there are plenty I can better it with.’
The figure in the snow shuffled forward a step. Under the sophistication of its dapper attire, Hunter saw that it was shivering. He heard Adam and Elizabeth talking as they descended the stairs, away across the room from the doorway behind him.
‘If my son is confronted by that abomination you will burn, Mrs Mallory. I swear to Christ I will hunt you down and build the pyre myself. And you will burn and perish screaming.’
She laughed again. In the snow outside, the apparition disappeared. ‘Hunter. You are well named,’ she said. ‘But your bravado is pathetic. Still, I wouldn’t want to frighten the child unduly, Colonel. Not at this stage. Not yet.’ The connection was broken.
Firstly Adam tried to explain the misguided good intentions that had caused him to lie about remembering what he dreamed. Hunter tried to picture his son as he thought Elizabeth would be doing. He was a beautiful and articulate boy wrestling with a dilemma no child should have to confront. The dimensions of the chair he sat in made him look small and even younger than he was. His feet did not reach the floor. His unbroken voice wavered as he steeled himself to recall the detail of the nightmares haunting him. He would bring tears to the eyes of a stranger, Hunter thought. He stole a glance at Elizabeth. She was not a stranger, was she? She was biting her lip and blinking too often, struggling to retain her composure as Hunter was himself.
There are the big dreams and the domestic dreams, Adam said. The domestic dreams were the worst because they were all about Mrs Mallory and he did not think Mrs Mallory knew he was having them and he was scared of what she would do to him if she found out. He eavesdropped in the domestic dreams and he thought that would make her very angry and when she was angry she did cruel things. She got pleasure from cruelty, he said. She was a very bad person. Except that she wasn’t really a person like other, normal people. And she thought that cruelty was a lot of fun.
‘Where do the domestic dreams take place, Adam?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘At her house,’ he said. The look on his face was terrible. Adam was a reluctant visitor to Mrs Mallory’s house.
‘We’ll get to the domestic dreams in a bit,’ his father said, gently. ‘Tell us about the big dreams.’
Often these took place on battlefields, Adam said. They were a bit like movies except for the frozen corpses and the mutilations. They were much scarier and more gruesome than anything in the movies he had been allowed to see. They were sometimes very noisy with the screams of diving aeroplanes and barrages of artillery fire. Sometimes the battles were from a long time ago and had cavalry with swords and bright uniforms. But they weren’t quaint or picturesque. The soldiers were cold and frightened and brutal. You saw more men dead in those dreams than alive.
It wasn’t all battlefields. Sometimes it was marching men with flaming torches in what Adam thought was a football stadium. They listened to speeches by night and roared out responses and the worst thing about those dreams was just the general noise and the hot stink of body odour.
And sometimes it was conference rooms. Men in single-breasted suits and thin ties sat around a large table with a big chart on the wall like something from a really dated low-budget science fiction film. There were outlines of countries and dots of red light in strings and clusters on the chart. The men around the table wore old-fashioned headphones and spoke in whispers to one another and seemed to be waiting for something. They drank coffee from a machine out of disposable cups and all smoked cigarettes. The conference room dreams were creepy but boring, Adam thought. But the men in them were not bored. To him, they seemed pale and terrified.
He thought the worst of the big dreams were the executions. These were shootings or hangings and they weren’t like the movies at all. It was almost always cold and very early, the victims dragged from a cot in a freezing cell and still stiff from sleep when they were blindfolded and taken to an icy courtyard and killed. He could not believe the speed with which human life vacated the body when it was shot in the head. It happened all at once. It was like watching the strings severed on a puppet, he said. Except of course, the blood told you it wasn’t a puppet at all. And he could not believe how slowly life left the body when it was raised on the end of the rope. The hangings were worse than the shootings. The kicking of the corpse just went on and on.
Adam got off his chair and said he needed to pee. He was sorry, but the Diet Coke was to blame. It had gone right through him. He had to use the loo before he got to the domestic dreams.
Hunter and Elizabeth sat in silence for a moment after his departure from the room. Then Elizabeth said, ‘I’m no great student of history. But if Mrs Mallory succeeds in putting her tilt on the world, I think we’re in for a grim period.’
‘That’s the prophesy.’ Hunter thought about the apparition he’d witnessed earlier through the window. ‘Do you think my son can ever recover from what he’s been forced to witness?’
‘If it stops now, yes, I’m confident he will. He’s very aware that these are dreams, however graphic and awful. He’s very clear on that. Children are extremely resilient. But if it goes on much longer, it is bound to damage him.’
‘I wonder if your mother might not be able to protect him. I mean, just for a while.’
‘You want me to abandon my patient?’
He turned to her. ‘I want you to help me find and destroy the monster doing this.’
Adam came back into the room. ‘I’d better tell you about the domestic dreams,’ he said, ‘the dreams where I’m in her house. They’re worse.’
Mrs Mallory lived in a large house in a spacious tree-lined square. The square was covered by gravel rather than grass. The house had four big rectangular windows and a pillared entrance at the centre framing a huge black painted front door. The stonework was painted cream. A set of steps led up to the door. It had an ornamental knocker. It was a bearded man’s head and the bit you knocked with was h
eld between the teeth in his grinning mouth. The curtains at the windows were always closed and Adam never used the knocker to try to enter the house. He could barely have reached it. But he did not need to. These were dreams, after all. They followed a dream’s weird logic.
She lived alone in the house. There was someone in there with her but it was not human and Adam did not think that it was any longer alive. It sat in a book-lined room he thought might be her study or library. There were books on the walls in glass-fronted cases, with a globe and astronomical charts and a telescope on a stand and a polished desk. And there was the thing she lived with. It sat on a sort of throne. It was dressed as a man but it was bigger than a man and very frightening to look at. Mrs Mallory spoke to it as though it was alive but it never moved or replied to what she said. Adam did not think he could have endured it if it had. The library was gloomy and so was the rest of her house. She had electricity but the lights were always turned down very low. He thought that she held parties because sometimes some of the rooms were messy and smelled very strongly of tobacco smoke and drink spilled on the soft furnishings or the carpets. But he never dreamed of those. He just saw their aftermath, the overflowing ashtrays and half-empty champagne bottles and discarded items of jewellery and clothing and the litter of sequins and feathers and the bits of foil and smears on tabletops and the syringes left about.
She liked to play cards. Her opponents were always women. If she entertained men, he never saw them. The thing on the throne in the library was male, though. It wore a man’s uniform and black, polished boots over its enormous feet. The boots looked deformed on the feet. He did not like to look at them but they were fascinating in their size and ugliness and he thought they must have been specially made.
