by Sarah Rayne
‘It’s accumulated interest,’ the cashier explained.
‘How lovely.’
On her way back to the car-park Moira went into a large Waitrose supermarket and bought some food on her own account, because she had not really contributed anything to this expedition yet. It was rather fun to choose two fresh lean steaks and weigh out half a pound of mushrooms to go with them, and add a crusty French loaf and butter and cheese and tomatoes. She would cook supper for Kate that evening because Kate had been driving for what felt like half a lifetime. Moira was not very used to cooking, but anyone could grill steak and slice up mushrooms. She hesitated at the wine section, but there was a bewildering array of names and Moira had absolutely no idea what to buy. It might be worse to buy the wrong thing than to buy nothing at all. She would wait to find out what was correct to drink with steak and remember for another time.
Kate lived in a wide street in North London, with a mixture of brick or stucco-fronted houses and unexpected little restaurants and antique shops dotted along it at intervals. Some of the houses had basements with area steps and some had three or four different names against bell-pushes as if they had been divided into flats. Kate’s house was a red-brick Edwardian building behind a tiny paved garden with a black spiked railing. A small patch of wasteland adjoined it.
‘Very useful indeed,’ said Kate, parking with the off-hand efficiency that Moira was coming to recognise. ‘There was a garage at the side as you see, but the last owner turned it into a tiny flat. I’m lucky to have the bit of wasteland, because land in London’s ruinously expensive.’
Moira loved the house. It was light and spacious with pale stripped-oak furniture and deep comfortable sofas and chairs and lots of books and tapes and records. The walls were plain, unpapered cream plaster, with Japanese prints hanging on them and Victorian cartoons, and framed newspaper cuttings of things that had happened in the area in the nineteenth century. Moira thought you could spend a week reading them. The downstairs cloakroom had a framed theatre poster of a sexy dark-haired man called John Martin Harvey who had played Sydney Carton in 1899 at the Lyceum Theatre, and Moira’s tiny bedroom had one of Sir Henry Irving in The Bells. The rooms smelt fresh and aired and not at all like a house that had been empty for a month. There was a faint drift of lavender furniture polish.
‘I have a cleaning lady,’ said Kate a bit absently.
‘Oh, I see.’ Moira went to help Kate bring the box of groceries in. ‘What about the—’
‘The coffin? I think we’d better wait a bit. People in London aren’t wildly curious about their neighbours, but two women lugging a coffin into a house might cause some comment. We’ll wait until it gets dark.’
‘Do you suppose he – it – is still asleep?’ It sounded ridiculous saying it, but Kate took it dead straight.
‘If he wasn’t we’d have heard sounds. I think he wakes to the music, which means that as long as no one plays it we’re all right. In any case, we knocked him out. Let’s have something to eat before we start coffin shifting. What—Oh, fillet steak and mushrooms, how nice of you. Listen, can you manage the cooker, because if you can I’ll fling a few things into the washing machine.’
In Curran Glen the whole of every Monday had been set aside for washing because Father must have a clean shirt every day, and towels and sheets had to be sorted and dealt with separately. If the world had been due to end on Wednesday, Mother would still have had Monday’s washing day and Tuesday’s ironing morning.
Kate simply tipped everything in, pressed a couple of switches and left the machine to it. ‘And if you can manage down here, Moira, I’m going to soak in a hot bath for half an hour with a large drink. I’m a bit stiff from driving. There’s a little shower room just off the bedroom I’ve given you, but if you want a bath you can go after me. All right?’
Moira showered and changed quickly, and went back down to the kitchen. It was astonishing how at home she was feeling. It was even more astonishing how easy it was to be with Kate.
She grilled the steaks carefully, brushing them with melted butter, adding the mushrooms and tomatoes, and feeling very daring about sprinkling chopped garlic in the grill pan. Father said garlic was nasty foreign rubbish, but Moira was discovering it to be rather good. It was as well she had not risked buying wine because Kate had a wooden criss-cross rack filled with bottles in a tiny half-room just off the kitchen. Kate came padding downstairs, barefoot, but wearing jeans and a loose shirt like a man’s, and opened a bottle of something called Rioja Reserva which was completely delicious. They washed up without any of the fuss Moira was used to where you had a separate cloth for glassware and put knives to soak with the handles out of the water, and then they sat drinking the remainder of the wine in the sitting room overlooking the garden. Night was falling and Moira remembered about bringing in the coffin, and shivered.
Kate said, ‘I’ll have to go into the office tomorrow, Moira. My partner’s amazingly patient, but I’ve overstayed the leave of absence a bit this time.’ She refilled her wine glass. ‘And now I’ve got Ahasuerus, I’ll set up a meeting with Vogel.’ Her voice was cool and brusque, but Moira had the impression that she was squaring her shoulders as if she was about to assume an immense burden.
‘Will Vogel know you? I mean – is he likely to recognise you?’
‘He might. But I don’t see how he can do any more than recognise me as Richard’s wife or as one half of my own company,’ said Kate. She leaned back, thinking. ‘There’s no reason why he should see anything suspicious about setting up a concert, because I’ve been setting up concerts for nearly eight years.’
‘But this time you’re involving Vogel and Serse’s People,’ said Moira.
‘Yes. And this time I’m going to hype the thing until it squeaks,’ said Kate. ‘I hate hype normally, but it’s meat and drink to my partner, and I’ll get her in on it.’
‘Does she know about all this?’
‘Some of it,’ said Kate. ‘She’s kept the business going through it all which is fortunate for me. And she’ll love the idea of using the legend for publicity.’ She drained the wine in her glass. ‘There’ve been quite a number of versions of the music over the centuries,’ she said. ‘Jude Weissman wasn’t the only one who discovered it. The eighteenth century composer Guiseppe Tartini wrote a violin sonata called the Devil’s Trill that uses the music in the final movement, and there’s a bit in Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre that touches it.’ She paused. ‘And Mozart, of course, has always been credited with knowing more about the Black Chant than was ever revealed.’
Moira stared at her. ‘All those composers knew about it? Mozart knew about it?’
‘Mozart almost certainly knew. There’re one or two odd rumours about the company he kept towards the end of his life – when he was writing The Magic Flute – and he wove some very odd things into that work. It’s supposed to have several Masonic rituals inside it, in fact, and there’re so many other allusions that it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody made out a case for the Chant being in there as well.’ She smiled unexpectedly. ‘And then there’s that story about Paganini being in league with the devil to the extent that when he died in the mid-Eighteen-Hundreds he was refused Christian burial and his coffin was stored in an underground cellar for years.’ She grinned. ‘Grisly, isn’t it? I can’t think why writers of pulp horror need to think up fictional plots; there’re enough real ones littering the world.’
‘But – did the creature in the coffin wake each time the music was discovered or played?’ asked Moira. ‘Surely he couldn’t have—’
‘No, he can’t possibly have done. I think that for one thing the music has to be exact and for another Ahasuerus has to be within reasonable distance. He was safe in that crypt, of course, and the monks were guarding him. The problem was that the music was still out in the world. Still able to cause harm. That’s why it’s got to be exposed.’ She paused again and Moira was aware of the strength of her belief. ‘I’ve been thinking a
bout the format for the concert,’ said Kate, ‘and I think that if we use the legend for publicity, we can have a kind of pastiche of the music: jazz, baroque, heavy rock, symphonic, psalmodic, choral – we can bill it as a satanic day of music or something. That ought to bring the crowds in, people love anything tinged with the supernatural.’
‘But,’ Moria asked, ‘can the music be transposed into all of those?’
‘Yes, according to Richard’s notes it seems to have a chameleon quality,’ said Kate. ‘It’s adapted itself over the centuries – you could almost call it protective camouflage – and it can be played in almost any form—What’s the matter?’
‘I think that’s the most sinister thing you’ve said yet,’ said Moira. ‘You’ll have the coffin at the concert of course?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate softly, and there was a sudden silence.
‘Will it work?’ said Moria, at last.
‘Yes,’ Kate replied. ‘It’ll work because I’ll make it work. It might take more than once concert; it might take three or four. But in the end, I’ll expose Conrad Vogel and I’ll put an end to the Serse cult.’
Moira said tentatively, ‘And Ahasuerus?’
‘We’ll destroy him,’ said Kate.
‘How?’ said Moira. ‘And why do you have to wait for the music to wake him before you destroy him?’
‘Because,’ Kate answered, ‘to expose Vogel and the music, we need the full impact. And that means Ahasuerus emerging from the coffin.’ She paused, and Moira felt a cold breath of fear brush her face. Ahasuerus fumbling blindly out of the tomb in the Abbey . . .
‘Also I don’t think Ahasuerus can be killed in a – a conventional way,’ Kate added. ‘Remember the mask? And the way he cried out – as if his mouth might be ruined. I think he’s been mutilated – disfigured. Probably by people trying to kill him. Only they couldn’t.’ She made a quick gesture. ‘I know it sounds absurd. Horror-film stuff at its most way-out. The Undead, the immortal creature, the amaranthine . . .’
‘Boris Karloff coming up out of the swamp with the mummy-bands unwrapping,’ said Moria without thinking, and Kate grinned.
‘There’ll be a way to destroy Ahasuerus,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is because I don’t know enough about him yet. But I’ll find the way to do it. Only before that happens, I’m going to destroy Conrad Vogel.’ She stood up. ‘And now let’s start coffin-moving,’ she said.
Moira had been expecting to feel fear and repulsion at the sight of the coffin again, but there was a curious sense of familiarity. The brass handles at each end were smooth and cool and easy to use, and she and Kate simply lifted the coffin out of the caravan and carried it through to the back of the house.
‘Down into the cellar,’ said Kate. ‘It’s the traditional place to hide bodies, isn’t it?’
‘Like Paganini.’
‘Yes.’ She grinned. ‘There’s no electricity, but there’s a good lock on the door.’
Kate propped the door open so that the kitchen light shone through into the cellar, and set two electric torches on the floor where they would illuminate the stair. The beams sliced through the darkness, showing up the cobwebs and the household junk: old kitchen chairs with broken backs and mangles and an ancient cabin trunk plastered with faded labels with exotic place names. It was rather cold and sad.
The steps were awkward and narrow and twice they nearly dropped the coffin. The second time Moira felt her heart lurch in panic, because surely there had been a movement from within. Had there? She stopped, listening intently.
‘Nothing,’ said Kate, understanding. ‘I’ve been listening as well. If he was in the least bit aware in there, he’d have been snarling and clawing to get out long since.’
Snarling and clawing . . . I won’t think about it, thought Moira firmly. They set the coffin down on the floor and straightened up. ‘Easy,’ said Kate. ‘Who needs men? Where did I put the hammer?’
‘What—’
‘I think we should nail the lid down,’ said Kate in an expressionless voice, and Moira repressed a shiver and then remembered the figure they had seen emerging from the stone tomb. ‘He isn’t awake, but – well, just, but.’
‘Can I help?’
‘Yes, hand me the nails one at a time, and ignore the Anglo-Saxon curses when I hit my thumb.’
Moira had not expected to be so upset by the hammering down of the coffin lid, but when Kate laid down the hammer she discovered that she was trembling all over.
Kate said, ‘At least we know he’s still unaware. I made enough noise to wake the—No, I won’t say it. Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t look it. Come back upstairs and we’ll have a large brandy each, we’ve earned it.’
‘If I stay with you much longer I’ll turn into a raving alcoholic.’
‘Strong coffee, then.’
Moira hesitated, looking back at the coffin resting in the middle of the cellar floor. It looked rather forlorn and it suddenly seemed dreadful to be leaving it down here like this. How must it feel to be sealed alive into a coffin and abandoned?
But Kate was right, of course: Ahasuerus could not possibly be aware.
Chapter Twenty-One
Moira rather enjoyed being on her own after Kate left for her office.
She peeped into Kate’s books, which ranged from Agatha Christie to Stephen King and Jane Austen, and back again via Rider Haggard and Susan Howatch, and which included a great many about music. There was a shelf of musical biographies, not just on people like Mozart and Beethoven, but more modern composers as well: Aaron Copland and Janácek and Gershwin. There were several about conductors: Henry Wood whom Moira knew about because of the Proms in London, and Arthur Nikisch whom she had never heard of but who had apparently been called the last of the romantic conductors. And there was one titled ‘A Traitor of Genius’, with a black and white photograph of a young man on the cover, dressed in the sharp formality of evening clothes of the Thirties. Jude Weissman. Moira reached the book down, intrigued. He was much younger than she had imagined and he was much better-looking as well if the photograph could be believed. Would Kate mind if she curled up with this for an hour or so? She thought she would not. She poured a cup of coffee from the pot made at breakfast and took it into the little sitting room at the back of the house.
The house was quiet, but in the not-completely-silent way of most houses. There were little creaks and clicks. The ticking of the central heating clock in the kitchen. The whir of the fridge switching itself on and off. Houses always had a secret life of their own. Kate’s house was not quite silent in the way that houses never were quite silent but the small sounds were friendly. It was a friendly house. Moira thought Kate and her husband would have been happy here; having friends call, Kate cooking her lovely meals for them.
Father had not liked visitors: he always said, What do they want to come calling for, poking and prying? Or: I’m not spending my money on feeding a lot of strangers. Mother’s two sisters came to stay sometimes, and Mother Bernadette occasionally looked in to enlist help for church events. Father could not say much about Mother Bernadette, who seldom even accepted a cup of tea, but he always grumbled about Mother’s sisters, saying it was a waste of good money, and: I suppose this means extra food to be bought. Moira thought they had not been wildly rich, but they had been what a good many people would call comfortable. You had reluctantly to conclude that Father had been rather mean. This was rather a dreadful thing to discover, although it was not as dreadful as what he had done that last night, of course – well, almost done. Didn’t it say somewhere that meanness of mind indicated meanness of spirit? Father was a mean-spirited man and being free of him was as heady as – well, as heady as the wine that Kate drank. Moira thought that in time she would manage to forget the sight of him standing over her bed and the feel of his hands on her, but she would not forget the meanness and the stifling atmosphere he had built up around her.
Tumbling
straight into this strange quest – the Devil’s Piper and Serse’s People and the music – had made running away easier; you could not be anguishing over leaving home when you had been plunged into a desperate adventure, or when you had fallen in with someone like Kate. Kate was so different from anyone Moira had ever known that she might almost be from another planet. She was certainly from another world, but that was good, because it was a world that Moira had yearned after for years. I suppose I do believe her, thought Moira suddenly, I suppose this isn’t all a wild plot? But she could see no motive behind it; nobody appeared to be out for gain, in fact most of the players sounded more like victims.
She made a sandwich and a cup of tea at one o’clock. Kate had said to help herself to whatever she wanted to eat and drink. She took the sandwich and the tea back to the sitting room and the book about Jude Weissman, which was proving rather interesting. A whole chapter was devoted to his last major public performance which had been in a medieval part of Eastern Germany, near to Weimar on the outskirts of the ancient Forest of Thuringia. It seemed to be one of those lovely fairytale jumbles of dynasties and petty dukedoms, with any number of vaguely sinister legends woven into its history. After the War it had become part of the Russian zone of occupation, which Moira thought added to its remoteness. Hadn’t Russian states been like another world then? Beyond the Iron Curtain.
The performance had been at Eisenach Castle which was on Thuringia’s outskirts. There had been photographs of castellated battlements and a jagged-toothed yett at the centre, and circular towers and turrets. All the standard things, thought Moira. The book listed the titled and famous people who had attended the concert, most of whom Moira had never heard of, and there was a description of the evening by someone called Angelika von Drumm, who sounded racy and rather fun, and who apparently had some kind of proprietorial rights in the Castle because she referred to the concert as the most glittering night in all the history of her family’s home.
