by Guy Sheppard
The bear of a man stirred while the primeval mud sighed and sucked at his heels.
‘Doesn’t mean you can escape me by pretending to be cursed already.’
‘My brother blamed everything on his ‘monster’. Now I see how prescient that was.’
‘Doesn’t mean any lord of Coberley Hall is above retribution.’
‘You talk as if someone else has sent you.’
‘You know that very well.’
Lord Hart raised his arm more threateningly. Then he hacked at the air with his cane.
‘You’ll get nothing more from me. I’ll be my own master from now on.’
I clamped my hands to my ears, tried to shut out the penetrating cry of outrage which followed. It was part hurt animal, part caveman.
Its roar was so soulless yet human, so cruel yet vulnerable, that I doubted if any gun could ever silence something that full of love and sorrow.
‘My sister died the moment you blew a man’s brains out all over her face. Thanks to you she was cursed ever afterwards.’
‘Damn it, Viktor, you’re insane.’
‘No, I still love my sister.’
*
The wanderer slavered and for a moment I saw the whites of his eyes as I raised my gun on the point of firing. Instead I turned my head briefly to Sara.
‘You knew he was back, didn’t you? Esti Dryzek’s brother has always been our prowler ever since I arrived in Coberley. Why didn’t you say?’
Sara shook red hair from her face.
‘You heard what he said, Lord Hart paid my father to set a trap for him in the woods. It was unfinished business, he said.’
‘Since then you’ve felt obliged to let him into Coberley Hall? He’s been roaming about ready to steal God knows what?’
‘Please, Mr Walker, I tried to stop him.’
‘Hence your cuts and bruises?’
‘I should never have left the gatehouse unlocked, I know that now.’
‘It explains why James is so keen to check all the rooms in the house every night and morning. I was right. He does want to keep out a real bogy man, after all.’
‘There are no bogy men, Mr Walker, only life.’
*
Too late Viktor saw bright steel. Pain and shock brought him to a stop but did not bring him down. Instead he turned and with his bare hand drew out the bloody point of a rapier from the slashed fold in his coat. Wading straight at Lord Hart, he scooped him up like another beast. Holding him close, he twisted and staggered on the sea of dead horse-tails that carpeted the lake with their miniature and primitive trees. The flowerless, black stems snapped underfoot so low and close together like a carpet that it was impossible to see where land and water merged.
Sara and I ran forward, only we, too, sank into the boggy ground.
I was not trapped exactly. Still I could not move my feet but a sensation of imminent entrapment gripped my ankles.
The swamp began to give off a foul, rank smell of things subterranean. Lord Hart fought to seize the Wild Man by the throat and break his grip while the other crushed him deeper and deeper into black slime. The sword-cane had gone flying. Now both were covered in splashes from the treacherous mire. They looked and smelt putrescent, appeared like two corpses in the process of rotting. Each blow, bite and punch threw up something offensive and rancid in this indecent, virulent and gross place that could suck flesh off bones.
Sara prodded and pushed me forwards.
‘Get between them, Mr Walker. Seize your chance.’
I had my gun ready to shoot but not a clear shot to fire it. The sly eye of the moon cast its livid sheen across the water. From the gleaming pool came a deeply inarticulate sound that was both grief and disbelief all in one groan. If it was a cry of agony, it was also a sobbing mewl. It rose to the tops of the trees in a terrified shriek as Lord Hart swept his fist at his adversary in a savage blow. Such yelling quickly turned to a cry of downright alarm. It was too awfully apparent to me that he was already up to his groin in the bog, which was rising round him even as he was powerless to resist it. He lifted his mud-streaked face and it looked bedraggled and disheartened.
‘For God’s sake, Viktor, give me your hand!’
But Viktor had already waded mud and water at the far end of the lake, he was using his superior height and strength to stride through the slime and mount the slippery edge ready to slide down into the valley beyond.
I fired a shot after him but it did nothing.
Instead I threw down my gun and called to Sara.
‘Shine the lamp over here! Now!’
Pulling off my coat and boots, I risked another few steps forwards. This part of the mere was no surface-silvered mirror but a sheet of smoky grey ice much clouded with rime. In its crazed glass I could just see my mocking shadow. Spiky clumps of sedge protruded from their icy prison, otherwise the shore was all treacherous deception.
This frigid crater was so torpid and chilling that it numbed and dulled my senses, it would defer and annul any possibility of life itself. At the same time, it was a place so old as to hold many secrets.
*
I made some freezing progress and saw Lord Hart’s face emerge from the mud. It oozed treacly liquid that gushed from his nostrils. He called something to me, after which he vomited until his head fell back and gazed wildly at the fireflies of snow that floated from the pylons.
Already considerably vexed by my strenuous exertions, I, too, paused for breath. Within a few seconds I had sunk to my knees until I was held in a vice-like grip by the welter of rotten matter. The ice around me offered a tantalisingly firm grip that was all enticement and lure.
‘Sara, go back to that deer hide we passed and fetch its ladder,’ I shouted. ‘Hurry.’
I looked round for Viktor but he was gone. The abominable man had let out a loud cry before bounding away into the valley in great strides. His high, wild peal of laughter sounded through the frosted trees but, growing ever fainter, soon disappeared into the lost byways of the wood’s prehistoric paths where our forbears had once roamed. And yet it was not altogether so – such a cry was also forever mine, since it revealed to me the very depths of my nature. When Viktor looked back from the brink of the void, that face was my own.
*
Lord Hart gasped and gurgled.
‘Damn it, Colin, I’m done for. The devil I am.’
His voice trailed away but not before he shot me a last look of hope.
‘I’m coming, don’t worry.’
I wriggled, felt myself subside even more. Now I was in the hellish pit up to my shoulders. Inch by inch I trod the clammy, sticky swamp until I could stretch out and touch the other’s head with my fingertips. Sara was taking forever to come back with our lifeline. As a result, I could feel myself sink every time I moved a muscle. She was our last, best bet.
Up to our chins in slime, George and I were powerless to move when, at last, I placed my hands squarely on his scalp and pushed him down. With one last, suppurating bubble, he went alone to the bottom.
*
The dilatory Sara at last arrived back at the bog, dragging the sniper’s ladder. Thanks to the moon’s bloodless witness, I could see well enough to place one fist over the other to elbow myself shoreward along the wooden rails.
Lord Hart’s Panama lay on the surface of the swampy pool, but not necessarily at the place where he had gone down. In any case the blood froze in my veins. For a whole five minutes I had to lie on my side spewing awful mud while Sara covered me as best she could with my coat.
‘Couldn’t save him…,’ I gasped. ‘I did try.’
She scooped black sludge out my hair.
‘What’s the odds? He shouldn’t have gone in there, he made a wrong move.’
‘Without you I would have gone down with him.’
‘In the end you had the advantage.’
‘But he’s dead.’
‘Too bad, he lost.’
*
I huddled inside my
coat while Sara pulled on my boots. I stank of the swamp and its slimy decomposition of mud and vegetation tasted foul in my throat. It left me feeling corrupted. I could have been coughing up my soul.
When one man survived at the expense of another, he could not predict that some kind person would dismiss the dead quite so casually. In actual fact, Sara set my cap on my head and put my gun in my hands most properly.
‘This way, your lordship.’
*
Only the most ungrateful man would have distrusted what had just happened, only a fool would not have thanked God for his deliverance.
Sara shone the way ahead with her spirit lamp. I did not question the deferential look on her face when she called me ‘lord’ because I detected no wry cynicism on her part in her changed attitude towards me. I saw no pretence in her acknowledgement of my rightful title, no attempt at ridicule. Clearly she, too, chose to accept that the ill-timed and perverse chain of events was in itself accidental and not due to the dead hand of fate or some other malignant control?
When one man tried to save another only to nearly die himself, he could be forgiven for not doing things by the book. Because death had no rules one could not always behave within specific boundaries, one had to stake everything on simply staying in the land of the living. Lord Hart was gone forever. I had had to finish him off to give myself a chance, but as Sara so elegantly put it, he had overreached himself and his foul game was up.
Even if I was a bit player in someone else’s sinister gamble, it no longer mattered. I’d won.
Actually, matter it did. It mattered a lot.
It mattered more to me than I could ever have predicted.
Incredibly, wonderfully, I was still alive!
38
My trying experience in Hilcot Wood left me excitable and restless. Ignoring James’s tedious protests, I took the keys to every room in Coberley Hall, responded to the pressing call for immediate action. Because I felt such an importunate and insistent demand take possession of me, I began to search the house from top to bottom as soon as it was morning. There were no feelings to express the frightful emptiness that met me everywhere, it was an atmosphere of meaningless joy – it was like looking for something which was unattainable.
I had the house to myself but could not, by myself, bear to have it.
*
Quickly I proceeded to the gatehouse whose side door, being sealed, presented a challenge. But I went prepared. While the sun struggled to rise over the treetops and shine into the outer courtyard, I unscrewed the metal plate that blocked the entrance to the living quarters above the archway. It was an unlucky owner who had to break into his own property.
My cigarette lighter was out of fuel, so I was obliged to feel my way through the darkness by touch and good luck only. Ascending some narrow, twisting wooden steps, I saw a chink of light show up round a door just above me. Each stab of my heart’s resurgent beats left me breathless. My actions were those of someone who was suffering from a sudden but terrible suspicion. On trying to explain it to myself, I could only say that something about Coberley Hall and its environs had begun to castigate me for my vacillatingly, even perverse behaviour. Sometimes the mistake was the man. I heard walls whisper: Why are you not satisfied? Why have you changed? Why can you not simply let love live on forever?
*
At first the door jammed against some invisible body or object. I had to put my shoulder to it, had to try very hard not to double up with a fit of coughing in all that dust I disturbed in a small room that might have once been a sentry post.
None of the windows had been opened for a very long time and the air tasted unbearably stale. Somewhere that worse for wear did not simply smell musty but reeked of the shelved, dirty and forgotten. I was standing in a guardroom that had not been altered in any substantial way since the seventeenth century. Like a soldier defending Coberley Hall long ago, I could soon imagine myself helping my fellow Cavaliers fight off the enemy. My head was all set to explode with heavy, continuous artillery bangs like drum-fire. The clash of razor-sharp halberds and the blast of hand grenades rang in my ears although in reality the room itself remained absolutely still and quiet. Turning dizzily, I could have been standing on some pivotal spot where past and present still did battle.
From this dreadful place the terribly wounded Captain Digby had been dragged off to prison.
*
I tried to quell all the rhythm and racket and clear my head by focusing on my physical surroundings. That peace of mind should still elude me was too grotesque to contemplate. Why should anything prevent the absolute pleasure of being master in my own house, which in every other respect seemed so peaceful and perfect?
Yet dazed though I was, most definitely did I not beat a hasty retreat.
Part shrine and part museum, boys’ home-made swords, cuirasses, pikes and axes lay beside an orange, rust-encrusted carbine left behind from a real battle.
I advanced to a very old table on whose green baize lay pens, rulers and papers. I recognised maps of the Coberley Estate next to a great number of diagrammatic figures and sketches. At hand was a book on tracking and hunting, I noted. Where most sketches degenerated into mindless doodles, one animal trap struck me as more than work in progress. Whoever had sat here had reworked the plane of the weapon, both horizontally and vertically. They had established the exact killing range of its spears.
It was all strangely precursive of everything I had seen or done since coming to Coberley, as begun years ago but for my own imminent arrival. Struck dumb with dread and in fear for my soul – I had no other word for it – I felt caught in the deadly aftermath of an ongoing conflict.
I could reject my sudden shiver of revulsion, but not its relevance. New shotgun cartridges, ropes and knives rested in boxes on the floor at my feet. I was not simply standing in a shrine to a dead sibling, I was in a current centre of command. In a footnote to the drawing of the trap big enough to spear a bear was an amendment made in biro: KILL WALKER. George never intended that I should take his place in Coberley Hall, he never even wanted me to be alive.
*
I stopped dead at a photograph on the wall, next to a cabinet of preserved butterflies. The print showed two boys dressed in the brand new blazers and black and white ties of the local grammar- school. Neither child looked any older than eleven. In the background of the photograph stood the entrance to Coberley Hall with its bullet-riddled door and its inscription to TP and LP 1638.
The twins looked very stiff and unsmiling. Thanks to their mother’s marriage to Joseph Jones, Philip and George had been brought up in a world of someone else’s making. Nor had I yet learnt their real surnames, only that their stepfather had tried, then refused, to make them his own. In their black frames they were as trapped as the Cavaliers in their portraits. Surely they had never wished to be called Jones.
A moment later, my gaze came to rest on the high-backed Jacobean chair that had been placed at one side of the window. The nauseating smell of recently burnt wax emanated from the candle placed on the stone sill, though with it came a much older, earthier odour that immediately I resented.
But not much longer was I left wondering. Trailing from one side of the oak chair was a human arm. I let out a cry. In taking a step back, I saw seated upright before me a woman draped in a long green and white dress. Her bones were less like human remains than pieces of glossy ivory. Her skeletal head, shoulders and fingers had a shine worthy of something elemental and precious, much the same way that impurities were scarified like dross thrown off from metal in melting. Such an assemblage could have walked through all the fires of hell itself and emerged unscathed.
The polishing of the skull in particular helped mellow the slender black and irregular cracks that ran across the cranium both vertically and laterally. Clearly such defects had been acquired during the long time spent lying underground. The edges of each disconcerting eye socket were peppered with hundreds of tiny holes where bone had turned v
ery slightly porous but had not actually disintegrated, I noticed. Slightly irregular teeth were still firmly in place, even if one jaw did no longer align with another.
Technically.
That’s to say, the bottom row of teeth hinged low on the movable joint of the jaw where the skull would forever utter its agonising cry of anguish. The eyes were the same. Of course, no aqueous or vitreous humours lent transparent fluidity to either bony socket and yet so highly buffed were both black holes that a living glint did appear to linger. Likewise, there was no tongue to taste or ears to hear, yet it was noticeable how the breast bone ran robustly from neck to stomach and the ribs articulated with it so freely that some sensation or movement was not to be entirely discounted. The nose was an ugly, rat-gnawed cavity, but it did not take much imagination to see how once it had been able to smell wild flowers.
With rash intent I knelt before her and caressed her hand. She dipped her chin and stared straight at me. There was no way to express the awful compulsion that passed through my lips, it was a feeling of loathsome desire – I had thought myself in love with the dead! But that was the other Colin Walker.
‘Damn you,’ I cried and, raising myself up, went to kick the skeleton to smithereens.
Instead I vomited. Jumbled bones could be swept away like so much rubbish. No one could ever find her again, or know she was here. To remember of this woman that she had existed at all was sufficient torment.
*
But strike her I did not, nor could I. Rather, a din of battle, this time swelling and grinding round me with its dreadful auricular percussions, began to thunder in my ears fit to burst their drums. Here, a gallant colonel was shot in the throat while over there a soldier’s skull was beaten to a pulp by a musket-stock. Horse flesh smoked and sizzled on the end of fire-pikes and cannon blew off men’s faces with iron-slugs and pike-shot.
