He doesn't, and after chatting for a minute more he says a polite goodbye and sets off back to the village with a fine bit of gossip.
New people in residence, one an American! Pretty, too! And the Marlows vanished like the Warburton girl! the mailman thinks.
As he rides down the drive, he glances over his shoulder at the house, and notices that the light in the old tower has gone out. He's among the trees, now, and he speeds up a little to get back onto the road as soon as possible. He tells himself this is because he needs to warm up after standing around in the cold.
A few stray flakes of snow are falling.
Chapter 7: A Strange Inheritance
“Got some mail for you, my lord!” says Rachel, putting two letters on the table. She notices Bill give a slightly odd smile at her feeble joke.
Perhaps the whole lordship thing is getting old.
“Anything interesting?” asks Charlotte, as Tony opens the smaller envelope.
“No.” He scans the letter, frowning. “Just more legal stuff. I need to tell them, in writing, that I'm here and in residence, for some obscure reason.”
“Lawyers,” grunts Bill. “They love their paperwork.”
“There's something else about the layout of the grounds,” Tony says. “It seems I'm not allowed to move any of the statues or modify the gardens in any significant way.”
“Why?” asks Rachel. “And who gets to tell you what to do with your own house?”
Again, she notices Bill give an odd smile, as if amused by a private joke. Rachel's tempted to ask him to share it with the class. Tony finishes reading, clearly no wiser.
“Far as I can make out,” Tony says, “the garden is under some kind of special lawful covenant dating back to the first Lord Furniss. It can't legally be changed without me forfeiting the whole shebang.”
“That's aristocrats for you,” says Charlotte. “Demented control freaks. I blame all the inbreeding. But perhaps a dose of New York blood will save the Beaumonts from going totally bonkers.”
Rachel punches her best friend on the arm.
“None of that breeding talk, now!”
Charlotte gives a cheeky grin, pushes her chair back. “Okay, I don't know about you lot, but I didn't sleep very well on the train, so I think I'll have a little lie down upstairs.”
Just after she leaves, the kitchen's single light bulb flickers for a moment.
“That reminds me, Tony,” says Bill, “we should check the generator. This place has its own water supply, too. Might be best to familiarize ourselves with it all while it's still light?”
“Good idea,” agrees Tony, and the men get up and put their overcoats on.
“Well, you guys enjoy your little walk,” says Rachel, nodding at the window. It's starting to snow.
“I guess I'll catch up on some lost sleep, too. But I think I'll make up a fire in the library rather than brave that freezing cold bedroom.”
Tony hasn't opened the other letter. It's from someone at the Defense Ministry and has been redirected from London. He picks it up and puts it in his coat pocket.
Well, it's probably just work, Rachel thinks. Can't blame him for not wanting to open it.
***
Madam Castanos sits in the VIP lounge of the Royal Station Hotel, sipping British wartime coffee. She can hear the staff whispering about her. She can also hear the ghosts of this old hotel, whispering about the staff, among others. Since she was a girl in Spain, she has been a speaker to and for the dead. Now, she finds herself pursuing something even stranger, something she still finds hard to define to herself.
Something monstrous.
She shudders at the thought of the vile presence she encountered at her séance with the Beaumonts.
“Poor thing, it must be cold for her,” says an onlooker, unaware that medium's hearing is very sharp.
A waiter approaches with a sandwich, places it on the small table by her chair. She looks past him at an elderly woman with a despairing expression. For a moment, she toys with the idea of ignoring this spirit. Certainly, this man could not pay her as much as her London clientele. But the voice echoing in the medium's head is insistent, and she senses a terrible need born of love.
“Wait!” she says to the man as he turns away.
“Yes, ma'am? Can I get you anything else?”
“Yes, give me your hand.”
The waiter hesitates, so she reaches out and takes his hand in hers.
“Someone is near you. She wishes to speak. Do you wish to hear her message?”
The man nods dumbly. The medium pulls him closer and speaks in a low, urgent tone.
“Your mother is worried that she never told you how much she loved you, and how little she cares that you never married. You and the one you love have her blessing. She wants you to be happy, to stop tormenting yourself with guilt.”
The man jerks his hand away, looks around in case anyone has overheard.
“Thank you,” he mutters, and returns to the bar and the inevitable questions.
“What did she say to you?”
“Did she tell your future?”
“Nothing, she just said I was going to come into some money. A win on the horses, something like that.”
Noises of disappointment, and the little group breaks up.
The medium smiles to herself. Who cares what they say about me, so long as I tell them the truth? Or as much truth as they can take.
She looks out of the window at the bustling heart of the city, sees the dead pass among the living, unheeded. But she sees something else, and feels it, too. There is a new force at work among the spirits, something agitating them more than normal. They keep looking in one particular direction, northwest of the city.
The dead are being drawn to the Tower of the Sorcerer. To a place of evil. It entrances them in their confusion. Perhaps it will consume them.
Then she sees something far more ominous. A worried-looking man in his fifties stops for a moment, looks in the direction of Furniss Manor, shakes his head in puzzlement and walks on.
Even some of the living, now. The lost, maybe, those most vulnerable.
She finishes her coffee, nibbles at the sandwich, then summons a bellman.
“Please take my baggage to the station.”
Outside, it begins to snow.
***
Making a real fire is a skill Rachel had to learn when she arrived in England, and she's gotten good at it. But this is the first time she uses logs instead of rationed, low-grade coal. After some difficulty, she gets a good blaze going in the library hearth. The effect is soothing.
Maybe this country house lifestyle isn't so bad. It's like being in a Dickens novel. All I need is a good book to relax with.
The book she selects to help send her to sleep is a family history of the Beaumonts, written in mid-Victorian times. Rachel settles down in an armchair and kicks off her shoes to warm her toes. She begins to skim the hefty volume, looking for scandal and bloodshed. Her journalistic instincts are aroused by a mystery in the very first chapter.
The first Lord Furniss (1542-1595) was suspected by many, at court, of holding unorthodox beliefs. But he played the dangerous game of royal politics with consummate skill. From humble origins as a mercenary, Edmund Beaumont was ennobled by Elizabeth the First (1533-1603) and given an estate near the Scottish border. It was here that he gained a reputation as a patron of alchemists and sorcerers, in particular the notorious Isaac Braid (1546-1595?).
Little is known of Braid, who, it is rumored, offered to enrich Furniss further by turning base metal into gold. His experiments absorbed a considerable portion of his patron's fortune yet generated no return on the investment. The tower attached to the east wing of the Manor, housed Braid's laboratory and he also insisted, for some arcane reason, on a drastic redesign of the ornamental gardens. Locals people, always superstitious, soon shunned Furniss Manor and many said that simply to look upon the Sorcerer's Tower would bring ill-luck.
Braid's experiments
coincided with a series of bizarre and horrific incidents that culminated in the unexplained death of Lord Furniss, whose corpse was found near his home. Such was the condition of the body that it could only be identified from its garments and a signet ring. Local magistrates attributed the lord's death to witchcraft and naturally blamed the alchemist. But attempts to find Braid proved unavailing, and he vanished from history as mysteriously as he appeared.
That was the last mention of Isaac Braid, as far as Rachel could make out.
Not surprising, really, in an official family history. A paid historian would want to accentuate the positive, play down the shady stuff. The opposite of good journalism!
She reads on and finds nothing remarkable, just the involvement of the Beaumonts in various complex, boring events in British history. She starts skimming again, but soon something catches her eye.
In 1665, the year the Great Plague struck London, Lord Furniss fled the capital for his country residence. However, he still succumbed to disease along with several family members and household servants, having obviously carried the infection with him from the capital.
In the margin, an earlier reader has scribbled just three words in pencil. While badly faded the first word seems to be NONSENSE! The second and third might be BEAUMONT CURSE, but she can't be sure. Rachel shrugs, skims on, but again stops where another note has been scribbled. This one is next to a brief paragraph about the death of a General at Furniss Manor in the reign of King George the Second. The note seems to read NONE SO BLIND.
… as one who will not see, thinks Rachel. What does that mean? Is it something I'm supposed to see?
She starts searching for more notes and finds another, in a chapter about the early nineteenth century. THREESCORE AND TEN, it reads, the words underscored. The page in question is about a scandal involving the disappearance of a governess at the Manor, a woman 'accounted a great beauty in the neighborhood'. That was in 1805. Rachel flips back and sees that the General vanished in 1735. Seventy years earlier. And seventy years before, Lord Furniss and several others died, supposedly from plague.
Three-score years and ten. The lifespan God allotted to man, according to the Bible.
A thought occurs to her and she turns to the title page of the book. The date of publication is 1862.
Damn! Still, if something happened in 1875 it might have been recorded elsewhere.
But checking the extensive library shelves is not tempting, not with her feet nice and warm and the old leather chair so comfy. Rachel grows drowsy, the heavy book sliding from her hands.
***
“Right, it seems to be okay now; I've filled the tank, but we'll need to get some more gas sooner or later. Maybe sooner, if the weather's closing in.”
Tony stands up, wiping oil from his hands with an old rag. He looks round for Bill, who said he was going outside for a smoke after Tony started tinkering with the generator. Shrugging, he goes outside where the snow is now falling heavily.
“Bill? I think ...”
He sees Bill standing by one of the statues and goes over to him. His footsteps are crunching in the snow but Bill doesn't turn round. He seems to be listening, or perhaps meditating. As Tony approaches, he sees that Bill has his eyes closed. Snowflakes falling onto his head, seemingly unnoticed.
“Bill, you all right?”
Tony reaches out, and as he does so, Bill snaps out of it and looks around, eyes wide with alarm. He gives a forced grin.
“Sorry, I was miles away, communing with nature, you know. What were you saying?”
“I just think we ought to stock up on fuel for the generator. That old car we saw earlier should get us to the village,” Tony says.
Bill nods, but still looks distracted.
“Do you really need me along? Like you say, it's not far.”
“True, it isn't, but I'd rather not go alone just in case we need to dig the car out of a snowdrift. These country roads can be pretty treacherous.”
For a moment, Tony thinks Bill will refuse point blank, but the older man nods.
“Fair point, let's get going now so we can be back before dark.”
Bill walks back towards the garage and Tony turns to follow. For a moment, Tony pauses in puzzlement. The snow is falling fast enough for their footprints to be quickly erased, but Tony thinks he sees more snow around the area where Bill was standing.
Well, maybe he was stamping around to keep warm while he had a cigarette.
“I'll get the car out if you pop in and tell the girls,” he calls after Bill.
***
Rachel is in a large, round room. The wall and floor are made of stone, the ceiling lost in shadow. A little light is provided by flickering torches.
A man enters the room and closes a crude wooden door behind him. He is wearing a hooded robe and carries a staff topped by a ball of gleaming crystal. She cannot see his face. The man walks into the center of the room and begins to draw a pattern on the floor in chalk. It is a five-pointed star inside a circle.
The hooded man stands inside the circle and points, apparently, at nothing, with his staff. He turns ninety degrees to repeat the gesture. The third time, and Rachel realizes, he is pointing at the cardinal points of the compass.
After the fourth gesture, the man raises both his arms and starts to chant. The words are in a language unknown to Rachel, but the voice is familiar. With the perversity of dreams, she cannot call the person to mind. Now, the crystal is glowing and the man starts to wave his staff through the air, drawing strange patterns in the darkness.
After what seems like an age, Rachel sees that something is happening, a darkening of the air. A black whirlwind begins to form and swirls around the chalk circle. The dark vapor condenses, slows down, and gradually settles into a cloudy column in front of the hooded man. He points with his staff and utters a command.
The dark cloud starts to form into something huge and vaguely man-shaped. Rachel doesn't want to look at the thing as it comes into focus, but cannot tear her gaze away. She sees bulky limbs, a misshapen head, and a massive torso. Luminous, yellow eyes open in what is now almost a face. At first, the eyes stare blankly, then focus on the hooded man. After a moment, the glowing eyes swivel again, and look straight at Rachel. The thing's mouth is now well-defined enough to smile.
Rachel wakes to a woman's screams. She takes a moment to realize they aren't hers.
***
Charlotte lies fully dressed, apart from her shoes, under a heap of blankets. She wishes there were a fire in her bedroom, but she's not inclined to get up and light one. Instead, she does her best to snooze.
Rather clever of me to remember the secret portrait trick. And maybe there is a way of revealing the picture. Yes, it doesn't need the original cylinder.
There's a soft click, as of a latch being lifted, what might be the creak of hinges. Is someone opening the door? Charlotte emerges from the covers to look. The door is still closed. These old houses are full of odd noises. The place might be falling to bits.
She covers her head and tries to remember what she was thinking of, but it eludes her. Drowsiness starts to overtake her, but suddenly she's fully awake, nostrils twitching. For a moment, she can't remember where she's encountered the foul odor before. She recalls the séance and sits upright.
“Beautiful, so beautiful.”
Despite the words, the deep voice is as vile as the stink that fills the room. A shadow falls over her. A bulky silhouette looms between her and the window. The stench is so disgusting that she's starting to gag. She gets out of bed, stumbles over her own shoes and falls heavily.
“Oh Charlotte, so lovely yet so proud! Why do you flee from me?” the voice says.
A huge hand falls onto her shoulder. She sees gray pulps of flesh and nails like talons. Without thinking, she picks up her shoe and slams it, spiked heel first, into what she hopes is the face of the intruder. There's a squishing sound, a groan of dismay, and the hand loosens its grip. She leaps up and sprints to th
e door. Behind her, a heavy footfall on the worn carpet.
“Don't leave me, Charlotte, my voluptuous goddess! Don't play hard to get!”
She hears another footstep behind her as she flings open the door, rushes outside, slams it shut. There's no key, so rather than try to hold it shut, she decides to run downstairs. All the while shouting for help. She almost falls down the staircase, but manages to keep upright. Suddenly, she's clinging to Bill.
“What's wrong, Charlie?”
“In my room, something attacked me! A foul thing!” Charlotte is now aware that she's shivering.
Rachel rushes out of the library.
“What's going on? What happened?”
“I think we've got an intruder,” says Bill, glancing upstairs
“Looks like she's been punched in the face,” replies Rachel, taking out a handkerchief. Charlotte realizes the warmth sliding down her lips and chin and is blood streaming from her nose. While Rachel tries to stem the bleeding, Bill holds her by the shoulders and asks,
“What happened? Were you taking a nap?”
“Yes, in my room, and there was that foul stink, you remember?”
“What did he look like?” asks Bill intently.
“Not a he, an it! I didn't get a good look, but it was big, misshapen, and hideous!”
“Stay here with her,” says Bill to Rachel, and starts up the stairs.
“No, don't!” says Charlotte.
“I'll be fine, Charlie,” replies Bill. Halfway up the staircase, he pauses and takes an old sword from a display on the wall.
“See?” he says, hefting the weapon. “It's not me you need to worry about.”
Charlotte is still shaking and shouts, “Don't go up there!”
“Honey, come on, you need to sit down,” says Rachel, taking her into the library. “I'm sure Bill can take care of himself.”
The front door bursts open, and Tony enters. After a few words of explanation, he rushes upstairs after Bill.
The Haunter (The Sentinels Series Book 2) Page 8
