The Greenstone Grail

by Jan Siegel

  The smell worsened.

  She recognized it now. As a child of ten or so she had stood at her grandmother’s bedside while the life gradually oozed out of her, the body failing while the spirit hung on. But all people know that smell, whether they have smelt it or not: it is in our race memory, as old as breathing. The fear of it is part of the formula for living. Annie’s steps slowed, then quickened again. She cupped a hand over her nose and mouth.

  At the top of the stair she emerged into a bedroom decorated entirely in shades of white. Snow-pale carpet, furniture that might have been designed for Barbie, a canopied bed screened with muslin curtains. Through the muslin, she could make out a shape lying in the bed, dark hair spread across the pillow, the coverlet tucked under its arms. Keeping her hand over her nose, she pulled back the curtain.

  I won’t be sick, she told herself. I won’t be sick. She didn’t scream. What was left of Rianna Sardou had evidently been there some time. The hair had outlasted the face, framing a skull sparsely padded with decay. The eyes and cheeks had fallen in. Fingers shrivelled to the bone rested on the duvet. Why does death always come in white? Annie wondered, with some dim recollection of Daniel in the pristine hospital room. Not the colour of weddings and innocence but the colour of ending, of grief and horror. She wanted to turn away but she couldn’t stop looking, gazing and gazing at that dreadful festering thing. Downstairs were the pictures, the pale angular beauty, more striking on stage and screen than in life, the aura of fame and vaunted artistic commitment. And here, this. It was terrible and pitiful.

  At last she moved away. Her pulse was still pounding, but then came a sound that stopped it in mid-beat.

  The stair clanged.

  There was a second when a chaos of thoughts tumbled through her mind, jostling for position. Was it Michael (oh, Michael, poor Michael) or the false Rianna? Where could she hide? But there was no time. She looked round for a weapon, but the only thing she saw was a spiky hairbrush on the dressing table …

  A head appeared at the top of the stair. Michael.

  Annie rushed into his arms, half sobbing, babbling incoherent phrases: ‘Don’t look … Don’t look … Oh Michael, I’m sorry – so sorry … I should’ve told you what she was. I should’ve warned you …’ His hands moved to her shoulders, prising her off his chest. She glanced up, and saw that his face was very still. Not shocked, not stunned, just still. He looked at the bed with its grisly occupant, then down at her.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said.

  Annie backed away a step.

  The crooked smile flickered across his mouth, only now it was no longer a smile, merely crooked. The scruffy, careless good looks seemed to change, in some subtle way, like a mask that shrinks to fit the changing face beneath. With an odd glimmer of detachment she noticed the lines of mockery and cynicism which she had once found so attractive pouching his eyes, dragging at his cheek. Since the kiss the previous night the touch of him had stayed with her, his lips, his arms, warming her thoughts even at the back of nausea and terror; but now it evaporated as if it had never been. She felt clear, and empty, and horribly afraid.

  ‘Dear, dear me. So you’ve found our little secret. You should know better than to unlock Bluebeard’s Chamber; as far as I can remember, it didn’t do his wife any good either, though I may have that wrong. You shouldn’t have been so damn nosy. You’ve been very useful to me up till now; I’ll really regret losing you.’

  ‘You killed her,’ Annie said faintly. Things were falling into place in her mind. Of course he would have known about the impostor; Michael, of all people, could never have been fooled. She must have been blind – blind or besotted – not to see it.

  ‘Oh no,’ Michael said. ‘Not me. I’m actually not much good at killing. Mind you, she was in the way. Our marriage had gone cold long ago. But the killing part – I don’t do that. I don’t have to.’

  She felt a gleam of hope which she knew was a cheat. He was taunting her with that hope, his eyes derisive, hard and shallow as glass.

  She said: ‘It was … that thing?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. My lovely Nenufar. She gets carried away. The Carlow woman called her, and then couldn’t control her, and after a while I understand the old hag outlived her usefulness. Or not, as the case may be. As for Von Humboldt – well, Old Spirits have a very simplistic view of the world. She thought getting rid of him would give us the Grail. I arrived too late to stop her. Still, it muddied the waters – bugger, I do seem to be racking up the bad puns. She got carried away with you, too, but on that occasion I was in time. Murder is pretty much her solution to everything. She’s a primitive.’

  ‘Why do you want the Grail?’ Annie asked, less out of curiosity than the urge to make him talk.

  ‘Everyone wants the Grail. I’ve sought it all my life, dreamed of it, lusted for it. Didn’t Lancelot, Percival, Galahad? Knights and heroes, all of them. I rather fancy myself as a knight and hero. Of course, all that religious stuff was just the usual garbage: the Church trying to appropriate a far older truth. The Sangreal is about power. A power beyond knowledge, beyond science – the power to move between worlds. Think of it, stretch out your imagination. Even your cosy little mind must have some capacity to dream, some concept of aspiration. When Nenufar came to me, I knew that together we could take it. Through her, I can have it all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use her to deal with Dave Bagot,’ Annie inquired at random, ‘instead of getting yourself a nosebleed?’ She was inching backwards as she spoke, more on reflex than plan. He didn’t move. He was between her and the stair, and there was no other way out.

  ‘It was a great chance to look heroic,’ Michael grinned. ‘To act the gallant Galahad. Although you did pretty well yourself. You know, I really am sorry about this. Why you had to come poking your nose in … What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s not important.’ She was fighting to get control over her shaking limbs, her pumping heart. ‘Are you saying you liked me, and it’s such a shame you have to –’

  ‘Good Lord, no. But I was fairly confident I could get the Grail from you, without piling up any more dead bodies. That inspector’s beginning to get suspicious; he could be a nuisance. Besides, I needed you to help me get close to Nat. Nenufar thinks he’s important – I’m not sure why. Of course, once you’re gone, I’ll be around to – er – share his grief. We could become pretty close.’

  ‘No!’ she said, the flash of anger driving back fear, for a few moments. ‘I’ll open the Gate and return to warn him. I swear it.’

  His expression stalled. ‘How do you know about the Gate? You’re not Gifted.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Oh, I always knew I was special. I could control the minds of others, make my own destiny among the feckless, the aimless, the failures. I learned spells from old books – that’s why I studied history, to pick up the clues – and the language of the Stone, the language of power, came to me in dreams. That’s the beauty of the Gift. If you know you have it – if you seek to use it – then it uses you.’ He didn’t seem to understand the full implications of his words.

  ‘It brought you here,’ Annie said. ‘It drove you …’

  ‘For years the image of Thornyhill haunted my sleep. When at last I found it, when I moved here …’ He paused, faintly smiling. Faintly inhuman. ‘Rianna thought the village was quaint. Huh. Nenufar came to me by the river, wearing a face she had found somewhere, the face of a nymph, but her eyes were her own. She was all coldness and hunger.’ He shivered with remembered sensuality. ‘When you’ve touched a spirit, anything else –’ he looked at Annie ‘– is just a woman.’

  She felt her flesh shrink. But the anger revived, warm inside her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m just a woman. But I can open the Gate. Bartlemy told me –’

  ‘Goodman? I should have guessed. I thought there might be a little power hiding under the flab. The Carlow hag said so. But the Gate opens only once, my dear – without the Grail, at any rate. You go
through it and never return. That’s the Ultimate Law. And you’re far too sensible to be a ghost.’

  ‘Even the Ultimate Laws can be broken,’ Annie said. ‘I passed through once before.’ She sensed the chink in his certainty and knew she had to take him off balance, distract him, divert him. ‘Your ally was right about Nathan. He isn’t – ordinary. His father’s from another world. I followed someone through into death, and came back pregnant. I did it once, I can do it again. From death back to life. That is my gift.’

  She only believed part of what she was saying, but she saw it was unsettling him. He moved towards her, away from the stair. At her back, the dressing table dug into her thighs. Her hand groped for the hairbrush, because that was all there was.

  ‘You couldn’t do that,’ he said, and the smile crooked into a sneer, but it didn’t work: there was doubt behind it. ‘It would take enormous power – the power of death, the power of the Grail. What power do you have?’

  ‘The power of love,’ Annie said. ‘But you wouldn’t know about that.’ She brought her arm round, hairbrush in hand, and smashed the spiky side into his face, aiming for the eyes. His glasses were knocked off; he gave a yelp of pain. She kicked him on the shins in passing and bolted to the stair.

  She half fell, half slid down the spiral, clutching the rail. Then she was through Rianna’s study and in the main house. Behind her she heard a thump as Michael vaulted the stair. She reached the front door, yanked it open, started down the path –

  ‘You may as well stop running,’ Michael’s voice said, from the doorway. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ He sounded relaxed now, mildly amused.

  It was there on the path in front of her. It had Rianna’s hair, Rianna’s face, but she could see the water moving under the skin. And in its eyes was the ancient darkness of the abyss.

  ‘That hurt,’ Michael said, touching his eye. ‘Wasted effort, I’m afraid. I told you, I don’t do the killing round here.’

  Nathan lay in Halmé’s bed with the Grail in his hands and the coloured lamps turned down low. He had told her about the Mark of Agares and tried to draw it, but the rune was complex and he couldn’t reproduce it accurately. ‘It looks familiar,’ she had said, and on her screen she had flicked through a file of magical symbols in her world, until she found one that was the same, even to the name. ‘Perhaps magic has one language and one set of rules in all worlds,’ she suggested carelessly. She copied the Mark on his arms and forehead in a dark purple ink that had a strange odour, at once herbal and chemical. ‘Now sleep,’ she said. ‘Go into your mind. Find your way home.’ She offered to play what she called sleep music, but he declined. He thought of how he had torn the Mark off his bedroom wall, and pushed the doubts away. He would have to trust to hope. Halmé left him, with a murmur of sim vo-khalir, which he knew meant au revoir, and he lay awake, feeling as if he would never sleep again. He had expected her to kiss him, a loving, probably maternal kiss – had half feared, half desired it – but she hadn’t. And then he thought of the masks, and the contamination, and the Grandir’s restraint with her, and he guessed that maybe they didn’t kiss here, or not often. He had yet to do any serious kissing in his life, but a world without it seemed curiously bleak. He drifted away into a fog of adolescent speculation, trying to imagine Halmé at his own age, smaller, slighter, an exquisite fairy creature with her perfect alien face somehow soft and unformed, and he took her hand and gazed long into the rainbow blackness of her eyes. Then in his thought he kissed her cheek, and she shrank from the strangeness of it, but not far, and he kissed her lips, and thought became dream and spiralled out of control, and he slipped over the borderline into oblivion.

  He woke very suddenly in an unfamiliar place. Not Halmé’s room, nor his own. He started to sit up, felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You’re with me.’

  He was in a bedroom at Thornyhill, and his uncle drew back the curtains on midday sunlight, and when he looked round he saw the Mark of Agares on a sheet of paper taped above his bed. An oil-burner exuded the unmistakable aroma of Bartlemy’s herbal brew. Between his hands was the Grimthorn Grail.

  ‘I see you brought it back,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Well done. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He thought he was all right, at any rate.

  ‘I want to hear all about it,’ Bartlemy continued. ‘But first, I think we should get you home. Your mother’s been worrying.’

  Nathan got up to find he was weak and unsteady on his legs. Obviously his longer sojourn in the other world had drained his strength. Bartlemy produced a quick snack of biscuits and cheese, fruit and coffee, and went to call Annie.

  ‘She’s still out,’ he said. ‘That’s odd. I thought she might be coming here, but she’d have arrived by now. Unless she’s with the police. I think – we should leave immediately. Hoover!’

  Nathan snatched an apple, gripped Bartlemy’s arm for support, and they went out to the car.

  She didn’t run. There was nowhere to run to. The thing came towards her with a peculiar swaying gait, something on its face that was almost a smile. It shouldn’t be stronger than me, she thought, but it is. Stronger than the real Rianna, strong as the undertow of the tide, as the onrush of the wave. She couldn’t fight it. She was human, weak, powerless. She had no Gift, no resources but herself. Behind her, Michael said: ‘They’ll find you in the river, tomorrow or the next day. Another tragic accident. Oh, the inspector’ll be sceptical, he’ll sniff around for a while, but there’ll be no evidence to find, and he’ll cool off in the end. My DNA won’t feature, and as for Nenufar, no forensic lab could identify her substance. As far as science is concerned, she doesn’t exist. You see, that’s the beauty of magic, that’s its real power. Nobody in the world believes in it.’

  But they believe in science, Annie thought, in genetic fingerprints, and you’re human … She whipped round and ran to Michael, clutching at him yet again, reaching up to drag her short nails down his cheek. A thin redness spread along the cuts. Then the water-spirit caught her and pulled her back, locking her in its clammy grasp, the cold hand sliding across her face to enclose nose and mouth and send its liquid matter gushing into her lungs. ‘Your DNA is on me now!’ she cried. ‘The river won’t wash it off. They can pick up the minutest traces. My mark is on you and yours on me! She may be a spirit but you’re not. They’ll know – Nathan will know –’ The hand shut off her nostrils, sealed her lips. She tried to breathe, and breathed water. The dark was coming, and this time there would be no respite. She saw Michael’s expression change, twitching with fury and fear. Nathan will know … At least she had achieved that.

  ‘Let go! Let go now! Oss-toklar!’

  ‘How dare you! Release her at once!’

  Two voices, one very deep, oddly accented, one a little higher in tone. Both familiar. The spirit halted; for an instant, startled, it lost its grip on solidity. Annie broke free from an arm that was suddenly more fluid than flesh, and reeled, coughing and gasping, against a strong supportive body. Eric. Rowena was striding towards Michael like an avenging angel.

  ‘Knew you were up to something! You said your barbecue in Oxford was rained off, but it only rained here. You’re after the Grail too, aren’t you? You and this psycho bitch were in the woods that afternoon, murdering Von Humboldt. Don’t know how you did it, but you did it all right.’ She rounded on Rianna. ‘Trying to strangle Annie, were you? Never did trust you actress types. You’re going down for the rest of your life …’

  Confused, uncertain, Nenufar wavered. Her form shimmered as if river-gleams showed through the veil of flesh and skin. Then she turned and fled, more gliding than running, her feet barely meeting the ground. As she drew near to the shrubs along the riverbank her shape thinned into a damp coil of mist which wound its way between the leaves and vanished towards the water. Rowena stood staring after her, suddenly silent, panting from the impact of anger cut short. When she found her voice again, it was to swear.

  Michae
l, seizing the moment, ran the other way – round the house to the car. It was parked at the side of his tower, in the shade of a tree. Annie heard the click as the system unlocked and saw the lights blink even as he reached the door. Eric released her to go in pursuit but she grabbed his jacket, holding him back. ‘No. No. Look.’

  Something was crawling out from under the tree, swiftly engulfing the car, distorting the smooth flanks of the Merc into ripples and bulges. The windows were closed but it flowed through them and up the air vents, making the space within quiver as if in a heat wave. Michael had thrust the key in the ignition; the engine stuttered and stalled. Then he seemed to be beating at nothingness, as though attacked by invisible insects. His mouth twisted and gaped; he clutched at his head. The screaming went on for some time. When it was over he slumped sideways, his face slack, drained of all personality. A phantom glimmer of movement crossed his features as Rowena approached and her reflection curved over the windscreen.