by F. G. Cottam
‘At the location of my choosing,’ Elizabeth said. ‘For the length of time I dictate.’
‘You are close to your mother, are you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘If I win, her life is forfeit.’
‘Done.’
‘Do you wish to know the manner of her death?’
‘No.’
‘I have decided she will burn. Start grieving for her now. You have not much time left to you.’
‘You have not yet won.’
Mrs Mallory was silent. The only audible sound in the room was Hunter’s ponderous breathing. He was spellbound. She did not need to maintain eye contact with him to keep him so, as she had at Magdalena. She was stronger than she had been then, enfeebled by Miss Hall’s craft and cunning. Elizabeth wondered how strong she was now. She thought that Hunter was probably in shock too, the refuge enforced by his brain from the pain inflicted on his body. A refuge too from thinking about the obscene crime he was in the middle of being compelled to commit.
Adam dreamed. And someone familiar appeared in the dream. He was in a house with a ticking clock and a polished sideboard and there were butter-smelling crumpets in front of him and Mrs Bancroft handed him a mug of hot chocolate but he did not know if he would be able to drink it because his throat stung, and then she smiled and leaned forward and whispered to him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Adam, you will never be obliged to call me by my first name. You are right and I am far too old for that.’
Mrs Mallory uncoiled out of her chair and shook off her coat, shrugging the sable wrap from her shoulders. She dropped and scooped the dice into the leather cup and, on her haunches on the flags before the fireplace, she rattled it. Her hair was loose and it shook blackly in the snowy paleness against the line of her jaw and tumbled glossily down her shoulders and back. Elizabeth saw that her torn clothing had repaired itself. She slid from her own chair and kneeled beside her, close enough to smell her scent, urgent with sex, sweet with the heavy perfume worn over it. Her dress was tight and satiny against the length of her thighs and her taut belly and the blossoming push of her breasts. She was a powerful and immensely seductive presence this close to, and the effect on Elizabeth was defeating as she listened to the hollow rattle of the cup, thinking that she could not possibly succeed against such an adversary.
‘You take the first throw,’ Mrs Mallory said.
Elizabeth took the cup. Their fingers brushed. She had expected her opponent’s touch to be cold. But just now, it seemed there was much more fire in her than ice. She rattled the dice.
‘They are old,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘But I sense that you are new to this. Some players think it lucky to blow on the dice.’
‘You?’
‘I’ve no great faith in luck.’
‘You were very lucky at Magdalena.’
‘That was fate.’
‘Then why play, if you don’t believe in luck?’
‘Chance and luck are not the same.’
Elizabeth threw. The dice bounced and settled. Face up, they showed two sixes. There could have been no more emphatic result in her opponent’s favour. But Elizabeth sensed that the cast dice had settled free of interference. She had lost the throw fairly. On the other side of the room, Hunter was shivering over his sleeping son, the flat steel of the sword blade matt in the ghostly light cast by the snow under a cruel November moon outside.
Mrs Mallory plucked the cup from her hand and scooped the dice into it. She smiled at Elizabeth with a glittery narrowing of eyes and the dice were flung with a snap of her wrist on to the floor. They danced and jittered, as though their facets flirted with destiny. Then they stopped. And Elizabeth saw that a two and a four were studded on their face sides in black against the white.
‘Down to the final throw,’ Mrs Mallory said, then louder, ‘Not long now, Colonel Hunter. I’ll be back to attend to you and Adam presently.’ She gathered the dice and handed Elizabeth the cup containing them. Elizabeth saw that the grey eyes had widened. Her opponent was appraising her.
‘Will you try to determine the outcome?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then what is the point of playing? If the result is predetermined, chance cannot prevail. It does not exist.’
‘I used to look like you do,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘I rather enjoyed the way I looked then. I was pretty, as you are, shared those feline features all of us who share the gift enjoy. But it seemed pragmatic to change, over time. And I have turned out rather well, I think.’ She nodded at the leather cup in Elizabeth’s fingers. ‘I will try to determine the outcome. And so will you. That is the point of playing. It amuses me to gamble. And I have not gambled, really, since my win at Magdalena. Are you ready, Miss Bancroft?’
Elizabeth rattled the cup and blew on the dice.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Mrs Mallory said. She laughed.
Elizabeth threw.
And the ivory cubes tumbled downwards as though weightless on a slow-motion descent to the cold, chisel-scarred flags of her cottage floor. The sound was like slow motion too as they collided with the floor and then rebounded and bounced again with smudged, dissonant clacks, mocking time and gravity. One of them settled and Elizabeth’s heart thudded with dread in her chest as she saw that it showed a five. She heard a peal of laughter, the sharpness of it blunted by the thickening air that seemed to suspend the second dice a few inches above the flags. It was hard to breathe. And the shape of the unsettled dice seemed unsettled itself, subtly corrupt, its simple geometry deformed and palely repulsive, so that looking at it she winced and felt vomit sour at the back of her throat.
Elizabeth closed her eyes. She hoped that Mrs Mallory had spent too much of herself. A great deal of her must have been lavished just on sustaining the affront to nature her long life represented. But it was Mark Hunter’s resistance that might have depleted her now. She had surely not expected the obdurate stubbornness of his love for his precious son. It must have cost her something. By contrast, she herself was young and entirely unspent. She was inexperienced at this, a novice only, but her mother had said she was strong. She summoned the strength that lay in her, almost untapped and, she saw now with a blossoming sense of wonder, quite immense.
‘No,’ she heard her opponent say.
‘I think you might have underestimated me.’
‘No,’ Mrs Mallory said. Age withered through her voice like a reedy sigh. ‘You can’t!’
‘I can,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And I have.’
She opened her eyes. The second dice lay, innocently shaped again, a few inches from the first. As she had willed it to, it had fallen showing the one. She had won. Mrs Mallory stood next to where she knelt. She had put on her coat and her sable wrap. She was nothing, if not a woman of her word. She was ready for departure, dressed for exile. And she would need the comfort of the fur across her shoulders. Where she was going, it was very cold indeed. Elizabeth got off her knees. She had no need to play the supplicant in victory.
‘Where do you insist I go?’
Elizabeth told her.
‘For what length of time do you insist I stay?’
Elizabeth told her.
Mrs Mallory smiled. She was pulling on a pair of leather gloves. ‘A merciless exile,’ she said.
‘You are a creature with no right to speak of mercy.’
Without a glance at Mark Hunter or his son, Mrs Mallory strode towards the cottage door. It closed on her with a cold soughing of breeze through falling snow. Elizabeth had for a moment to hold on to the back of her chair. She felt giddy with her gift, almost exultant in the thrill of her victory. Mrs Mallory had been right. Only one of them had enjoyed their encounter. In the end, and to her own astonishment, Elizabeth had enjoyed it very much. She would heal Hunter now. He was suffering greatly and it would only take a moment.
‘Don’t,’ he said. His voice was thick and sludgy with shock and pain. He had a tender hand on Adam’s throat. But the wound there was superficial, little more than a break in the ski
n. She would mend that in a moment too.
‘I could hear your game. I was praying for you. She’s gone?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘You beat her.’
‘And now I will make you better.’
‘There’ll be no more magic,’ Hunter said.
‘What?’
‘No more magic. Ever.’
‘Then how will you heal?’
He laughed. ‘Laboriously. That’s my penance for Magdalena, for what I did, for what I’ve put Adam through.’ He looked up at her. ‘There can be no more magic. Not if we’re to be together, Elizabeth. I very much want us to be together. But the magic has to cease here. It has to stop now. Do you understand why?’
She did understand. Of course she did. Her mother’s caution lived with and within her too. But she also believed there was magic in the world beyond the scope of sorcery. She knelt and smiled and gently held the wounded man she loved.
Epilogue
It was a warm evening in late July and Elizabeth could feel the heat of the pebbles under their picnic blanket as she watched Mark and Adam skim stones at the edge of the sea. The sea was tranquil and the sun was descending and Mark’s arm was strong and true and moved smoothly in the execution of the hard, flat throw he used.
The remedial work had been done in Edinburgh. Most of the procedures had been carried out by two eminent surgeons of her mother’s acquaintance. Mark was naturally strong and had healed quickly and his high pain threshold had helped with the recovery because he had never shirked what the physiotherapist had asked him to undergo. He pushed and pushed himself and she was looking now at the result. And if her mother thought it an unnecessarily complicated way of returning him to health, she did not say so. In fact, Elizabeth suspected she was relieved and approving. The time for confounding nature, in both of their lives, was gone.
The sun had set by the time they stopped their game and Adam walked back to where they had earlier had their beach barbecue. His father stayed at the water’s edge, at the brink of the vast Atlantic, as gentle as a pond under the summer night. Adam sat down on the blanket next to her.
‘What do you think he’s thinking about?’
‘Oh, you know Dad. He’ll be reminiscing about jumping out of an aeroplane with a big gun. He’s a sentimental man. He gets nostalgic about wasting enemies of the Crown on secret missions.’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘He’s probably thinking about a name for the baby.’
‘We don’t yet know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl.’
‘So he’s got plenty of names to choose from.’ Adam laughed himself. ‘He’ll likely be there all night.’
‘He’ll need to watch out for the tide if he is.’
‘I’ll bet he goes for Eve. If it’s a girl, I mean.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll threaten to divorce him if he suggests that.’
Adam was quiet for a moment. Elizabeth knew what was coming next. He had never referred to it before, but she felt certain he was going to do so now. He looked up at the ascending moon, out at the glittering sea beyond the distant silhouette of his father.
‘Do you think she will ever come back?’
Elizabeth shivered. Warmth radiated through the blanket under her. It was a balmy evening, but she shivered just the same. ‘They do say never say never, Adam. But I think it extremely unlikely.’
‘Good.’
‘Why do you bring it up now?’
‘Brooke is on the curriculum in English at school. It reminded me.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m okay with it. It seems like a bad dream now, after all this time. Just a bad dream I woke up from and, like a dream, it’s fading.’
‘That’s a good way to think of it.’
He smiled at her and there was mischief in the smile. He glanced again up at the moon and out over the water. ‘Where did you send her?’
‘What makes you think I sent her anywhere?’
‘I just know you did. Where is she?’
‘She is somewhere very dark and very cold and very lonely.’
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’
Elizabeth reached for him and ruffled his hair. ‘A wicked stepmother needs to keep some things secret, Adam. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to call myself wicked at all.’
Also by F. G. Cottam
The House of Lost Souls
Dark Echo
The House of Lost Souls
‘A terrifying encounter with manifest evil … His adrenaline-charged prose is drawn tight with suspense.’
Financial Times
‘A riveting supernatural thriller. Rich in atmosphere, the book builds to a shattering finale.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Old-fashioned suspense combined with modern horror imagery to produce a fine example of the genre.’
The Times
‘Thrilling, addictive, dangerous, hypnotic and deadly … The book is a cross-genre treat. Beautifully written, with frighteningly invasive descriptions, literate, complex, conspiratorial and threatening … pervasively believable.’
The Times, Johannesburg
The Magdalena Curse
F. G. Cottam is also the author of
Dark Echo
‘Beautifully written and highly engaging.’
Daily Mirror
‘F. G. Cottam has crafted a superb and tautly told tale of manifest evil. A perfect ghost story for this or any other season.’
The Times
‘A well-paced horror thriller.’
Canberra Times
‘F. G. Cottam’s complex, tautly atmospheric thriller delivers plenty of chills.’
Daily Mail
The House of Lost Souls
A drowned corpse, a glimpsed apparition and a discordant melody carried on the breeze. The evil is back. The house has been re-opened …
Just weeks after four students cross the threshold of the derelict Fischer House, one of them has committed suicide and the other three are descending into madness.
To save his sister, one of the three, ex-soldier Nick Mason must join ranks with Paul Seaton – who visited the house a decade earlier and survived. But Paul is a troubled man, haunted by visions of an ordeal that even now threaten his own sanity.
Desperate, Nick forces Paul to go back into the past, to the secret journal of beautiful photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare, to a decadent gathering in the 1920s and to Klaus Fischer – master of the debauched proceedings and an unspeakable crime.
The Fischer house is beckoning, and some old friends have gathered to welcome Paul back …
Dark Echo
Dark Echo is an unlucky boat.
Despite this knowledge, Martin Stannard falls under her spell and prepares to sail her across the Atlantic with his father. But his lover Suzanne is uneasy and begins exploring the yacht’s past.
What she finds is terrifying. Dark Echo isn’t just unlucky, it’s evil. It was built for Harry Spalding, a soldier and sorcerer who committed suicide yet still casts his inexplicable spell nearly a century after his death.
Suzanne must uncover his last, terrible secret before Dark Echo destroys the man she loves …
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MAGDALENA CURSE. Copyright © 2009 by F. G. Cottam. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK company
eISBN 9781429990370
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
First U.S. Edition: August 2011
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F.G. Cottam, The Magdalena Curse
