by F. G. Cottam
Adam sipped his beer. Delilah smoked. Her nails wore vermilion polish and they sparkled. He said, ‘I don’t understand that remark.’
‘Your father is dying, Adam. He does not have more than a few weeks. He owes you an explanation for what happened between you and he has been hoping to live long enough to provide it.’
‘There was no need to wait. He could have given me what he owed me on the day of his departure.’
She smiled. The smile was sympathetic but the expression in her eyes was complex. ‘If he could have done that, then he would have. Hear him out, before you judge him.’
‘I’ve judged him already and found him wanting.’
‘Please hear him out.’
‘I’ll listen to what he has to say. It’s what I’m here for. Where do I find him?’
‘I’ll take you to him.’
‘What about your customers?’
‘Regulars, drinking on a tab. They’re not the brightest, but they’ve the wit to serve themselves for half an hour. I’m not expecting anyone else. We don’t do coach parties.’
The bird on her arm was etched in vivid greens and yellows and the one eye portrayed in its cruel profile glimmered brightly. The flesh around it was smooth and firm and almost luminous in the gloomy light. As she unhooked her coat from behind her he was struck by the feeling that someone so exquisite looking could only be a prisoner in so miserable a place. He wondered again where her accent came from.
She had put on a black leather coat cinched at the waist by a belt tied rather than buckled and when they left the bar she linked her arm in his. Her breath was smoky and a loose strand of her hair slipped on to his shoulder, and he was aware of her hip touching his as she huddled against the night and the rain at his side.
He felt the strong erotic thrill of her and wondered at the nature of her relationship with his father. She had said she knew him as well as anyone alive. But his father was dying, she had said. And to Adam, Delilah did not seem especially lovelorn at that moment.
SIX
Martin had taken the ascending steps in the forest, increasingly confused about the sensation he felt in doing so. His feet were climbing. There was no question about that. But he felt in his ears and brain and on his prickling skin as though he travelled downwards. The fog did not lift. If anything, it intensified, blank and blind. He should have felt endangered, he thought, unable to see anything to right or left, to gauge altitude or direction or to sense the closeness of his eventual destination.
His mind kept filling with vivid pictures that distracted him. His progress was steady enough, but his thoughts were everywhere. A nautical image kept intruding. He was on the bridge of an old warship, a dreadnought hauling its vast and bristling tonnage through a North Sea swell, a following wind shrieking through the webbing over the gun turrets and pushing the smoke belching from the vessel’s funnels before them in a filthy trail. The crew members were clumsy and doll-like, marionettes with their strings cut, faces bland as porcelain, gazes glassy and dead.
He saw a seaside pier, fat women waddling in polyester between one-armed bandits spewing copper coins, the tide beneath slopping against the stanchions pink as candyfloss in the light of a descending sun.
A turban-wearing women waved a finger like a warning at him through the awning of a fortune teller’s tent. A lad about his own age grinned, fingering a lock-knife behind the counter of a canvas stall lurid with cheap souvenirs. A Wurlitzer pumped out music to accompany all this, but when he listened to the melody it made for an anachronistic soundtrack, Martin thought. Of all things it was the old Coldplay anthem, ‘Yellow’.
There was nothing wrong with his balance physically. His progress was sure. But he did not any longer own the direction of his mind. There he travelled now to streets full of jostling people somewhere hot, shouting in a language he didn’t understand, surrounding an old-fashioned open carriage replete with gold flourishes and upholstery spattered in gore. Its unharnessed team reared among the uniformed men trying to calm the horses, snorting and kicking in wide-eyed terror.
He had reached a door. He almost walked into it. He had been travelling for a long time. He must be very high up, he thought, though he felt a long way down, the way he felt if he swam deep, snorkelling on holiday.
He looked at his watch. The fog wreathed so thickly around the outside of the door that he could only read the face because it was a Rolex Sea Dweller and, as a divers’ watch, brightly luminous. It was just after midnight. The watch had been an eighteenth birthday present from his dad. The information it provided was superfluous to his journey. He did not remember what time it had been when he embarked upon this strange adventure.
The door was made of oak planks so smoothly joined that he could not have got a fingernail between them. It was studded with nails fashioned from iron, with large triangular heads. It had the character about it of expensive handiwork from the Tudor or even Plantagenet period. The style could not have been more traditional. But the wood was unblemished by weather or time. It had to have been recently crafted.
The door yawed inward on smooth hinges. The chamber within was lit. He walked through, closed the door behind him and looked around. He was in a room so vast he wondered that the fog did not obscure its reach. But he had left the fog outside.
There was a long wooden table with candles burning in pewter holders set at intervals. Most of the interior light, though, came from a fire in the wall furthest from him, over to his left. It occupied a massive fireplace and the logs in it looked like cut sections of mature trees, spitting and flaring as they furiously burned.
A man stared into the flames, illuminated by them, leaning against the wall beside the fire with his back to where Martin stood. He was of a piece with the room, dressed in clothes that could not really have passed without comment or attention in the modern world. He was of a piece with this place. Martin knew that about him, even before he turned to acknowledge his visitor with a short bow and a welcoming smile.
‘You were right, Martin.’
‘Is this a dream?’
‘You were right about history. It is much stranger than people suppose. You were shrewd enough to suspect that’s been the case. But there is a conspiracy and you have been its victim and its perpetrators have used you cynically.’
‘Where am I?’
‘You are in my home. You are my guest. Forgive me, my name is Sebastian Dray. I am an emissary and guide and hope very much you and I can be friends.’
‘Where am I? What year is this?’
‘Please,’ Dray said. He approached and placed an arm around Martin’s shoulder. ‘Let us refresh ourselves with a glass of wine and perhaps a morsel of food. There is someone I want you to meet. He is on his way. He should be here before very long. Matters will be much clearer when you have spoken to Jakob Slee.’
Martin was suddenly ravenous. He thought it must be the arduous climb through the fog. He could smell meat roasting sweetly somewhere, imagined it turning slowly on a spit, succulent juices dribbling from its covering of crisply browning fat. The aroma of freshly baking bread drifted warmly from the same source.
‘Is Mr Slee eating with us?’
For some reason, this assumption seemed to amuse Dray. He stopped and chuckled and then steered Martin to a curtained arch at the far end of the room away from the fire. ‘He will have taken care of his nutritional needs already. We will eat in the kitchen. There is no need for the formality of a banqueting table. I want to get to know you, Martin. I want to know what measure of man is my clever and perceptive guest.’
‘Is Professor Grayling in on this conspiracy?’
‘There. You prove my point about you in a sentence. We call it the Great Lie. Grayling perpetuates it with vigour and cunning. It is an insult to the integrity of every honest and ambitious student.’
Martin was comfortable with being called clever and ambitious. He felt his claims to honesty perhaps less secure. But they had by now reached the kitchen be
yond the curtained arch. And he was not about to labour the point with himself.
A feast was being laid out by a red-faced serving girl. The wine was already uncorked and its bouquet rose from a cluster of dusty bottles, rich and full-blooded. This was an exotic adventure. It might all be an elaborate dream. Or it might be proof of everything he had suspected about the strange and alien nature of the past. Either way, there was no reason why he should not enjoy it.
‘I’ll pour and we’ll raise a toast,’ Dray said. He proffered a deep and heavy crystal glass. He seemed as cheerful to Martin as someone recently released from a jail spell spent in solitary confinement. He sparkled. He positively gleamed. He was a handsome man, dark-eyed and tall with longish hair, strong facial bones and a light-footed agility. Grace, Martin thought, was the quality he possessed. ‘To mysteries solved,’ he said. Did he wink at that? Martin thought that he did. Certainly, and for the second time, Sebastian Dray allowed himself a chuckle.
The mood became more sombre and serious towards the conclusion of their dinner. Martin had drunk fairly sparingly throughout. This was not deliberate self-denial. He had been too busy chatting to consume very much of the wine.
‘Jakob Slee awaits us in the library,’ Dray said, as the cheeseboard was taken away and the brandy poured. The fingers of his right hand drummed a tattoo on the table top when he said the name and Martin had an intuition that Dray, for all his bonhomie, was slightly nervous of the man they were shortly to meet.
‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’
‘It’s a large house,’ Dray said. ‘The library is in the east wing. And it is not his habit to blunder and crash. A less noisome individual than he would be difficult to imagine. Come,’ he stood. ‘And bring the brandy bottle if you wish. You have been miserly with yourself in your cups tonight. Eat, drink and be merry, Martin.’
‘For tomorrow we die?’
‘No, my young friend, we do not. Death is in my plans for neither of us. Come.’
There were doors in each of the four kitchen walls. He had not noticed that until now. Martin grasped the brandy bottle by the neck and followed Dray through the door he now knew faced east. It opened on a lengthy corridor. There were pictures at intervals along the corridor, portraits of men and women he did not recognize. None of the faces looked kind. Some of the men were as handsome as his host and some of the women really quite beautiful, but there was a calculation about their expressions, a certain unappealing quality of watchful coldness.
The corridor did not possess any windows. This gave it the closed-in atmosphere, Martin thought, of a catacomb. The illumination strengthened this impression, candles pooling scant yellow light at intervals between the scowling likenesses. He realized that he was nervous about meeting Jakob Slee, almost to the point of being afraid. Without his noticing, his knuckles whitened as his grip tightened on the bottle held in his hand.
Slee was seated at a reading table, but stood when they entered the library and smiled in Martin’s direction, rolling up the chart he must have been studying as he did so. He slipped a knotted circle of twine around the chart and performed that gesture, somewhere between a bow and a nod, with which Martin had earlier been acknowledged by Dray.
Slee was dressed in a black ankle-length garment that looked like a priest’s cassock. But there was no clerical collar encircling his throat. He was tall and very slender, and so fine-featured Martin thought him almost as pretty as a girl. His hands were small and girlish too and he wore a silver ring on every finger. Only his thumbs were without adornment.
There were three chairs around the table and it was there that they sat. Slee looked at Martin, who put down his brandy bottle and the two glasses he had brought. He frowned, thinking he should have brought three.
‘Feel free to serve Sebastian and yourself,’ Slee said. ‘I’ve already taken my evening’s refreshment. I expect you would like to know where you are.’
There was a slight accent to his speech. It was melodious, hypnotic, a sound so seductive you wanted to hear more of it immediately. ‘When, would be a more likely question than where,’ Martin said. ‘I’ve seen nothing I’d call modern since my arrival here. If it wasn’t for the contractions in your speech, I could believe I’ve been transported back centuries.’
As if to stress the point, he looked around at the library walls. Lamps were suspended from them. The light they cast was perfectly adequate, but they were not powered by electricity. They possessed wicks and burned oil or paraffin, giving off a slight odour, and above each had spread a faint round soot stain on the plaster ceiling.
‘It is discourteous, to criticize someone’s home when you are their guest,’ Slee said. His tone was mild, but the rebuke was a sharp one.
‘I apologize.’
Dray filled both their glasses almost to the brim. He pushed Martin’s towards him. ‘You meant no deliberate offence,’ he said. ‘I possess a fastidious nature and this house is very old. I prefer it to be of a piece. Modernity for its own sake has never appealed to me. I am not a man much impressed by novelty.’
Martin cleared his throat and helped himself to a large gulp of brandy. ‘I do not wish to be rude,’ he said. ‘But certain things strike me as unusual.’
Dray chuckled. Slee stared. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Neither of you wear a wristwatch.’
‘There is more than one way of knowing the hour,’ Slee said. ‘Look at your watch.’
Martin looked. He had to lift his sleeve to do so.
‘It is twenty-seven minutes past two in the morning,’ Slee said. ‘You are four seconds slow, Martin. Not unacceptably tardy. But then the instrument on your wrist was expensive, so you have the right to expect accuracy from it.’
Slee had not seen the face of his watch, he was certain. Nor was there a clock to consult on any of the library walls. And the cassock was sewn with no pockets in which to conceal any sort of timepiece. ‘That’s an impressive trick,’ Martin said. His throat felt dry. He drank more brandy and Dray refilled his glass.
Slee shrugged and looked at Dray and then back at Martin. ‘It is no trick at all. You would be able to do it yourself had history been different, had men like your Professor Grayling not tinkered and dabbled and meddled with destiny.’
‘On the subject of time,’ Dray said, ‘the moment has arrived for serious talk. You can help us, Martin. And we can certainly be of service to you.’
Slee lifted a hand to the buttoned collar of his cassock and his fingers disappeared and then emerged again, gripping the links of a thin chain worn around his neck.
He lifted it over his head and held it dangling above the table from one hand. Depending from it was a blood-coloured stone set in a circle of pitted gold. His elbow on the table, his grip on the chain was relaxed. The stone swung back and forth and twirled languidly. ‘Tell me what you most want,’ he said in that mellifluous, mesmeric voice. Facets of light jittered in the twirling stone in a way that claimed the eye and absorbed the attention. ‘What do you most desire? We can deliver it for you if you choose to be our friend.’
‘I want to be successful. I want to achieve great things and I want those achievements to be properly recognized and rewarded. I want respect and admiration.’
‘You certainly have the potential to gain all of those things,’ Dray said.
‘I want a girl. That probably seems a shallow ambition in the judgment of serious men. But there it is. What I really want is for her to want me.’
‘You want Jane Dobb,’ Dray said. ‘No man with blood in his veins could blame you for that. And you shall have her.’
Grayling turned back and walked through the West Gate and took the Whitstable road. He was more than capable of travelling the four miles to the little seaside town on foot. There were trains travelling regularly through Whitstable for London, where he would change for the journey to Cambridge. The route to Whistable was hilly and it was now fully dark. But it was an altogether less hazardous choice than a confrontati
on with the man they had sent after him.
That confrontation would inevitably come. They did not give up. His opponent was young and obviously strong and would have no compunction at all. He would possess the merciless energy and doggedness of a born hunter and it would be combined with a mercenary’s martial skill.
He would not have magic in his armoury; they would not risk that. It would be too conspicuous an asset. But he would be formidable, and it was only sensible to choose the ground and the time for the fight. Grayling was himself skilled at combat. And he did not know anyone remotely as fit as he was for his age. But he was a middle-aged man and had not fancied grappling desperately in the street at dusk with someone youthful enough to be his son.
It could have been much worse. They could have sent Proctor Maul. McGuire had once seen Maul and had described him since to Grayling. The sighting had been many years ago but the moment vivid enough to remain very clear in McGuire’s memory. This time they had not sent their most fearsome and sadistic assassin. If they had, he would probably be dead instead of speculating on the identity of his pursuer. He was not Maul and neither was he the Adam Parker doppelgänger who had so terrified Jane Dobb in the forest. The Adam lookalike was a puzzle. But the moment for solving puzzles would come later. Now was the time simply for eluding danger.
The road ascended towards the hamlet of Blean. It was a clear night and he could make out constellations in the stars above him. The air smelled of smoke from the coal fire of a cottage he could not see. Hedges grew wild and high to either side of the road, only breached by the trunks of occasional trees. Birds sang in their high branches. The earlier autumn sun had warmed the land throughout the day and Grayling could smell that too, cooling now, the grasses and loam sweeter and less sharp on the senses in this gentler climate of the south-east of England than they had been in the Scottish lowlands, 500 miles to the north.
He had not considered a new assault on the world a likely event in his own lifetime. McGuire maintained that the last effort to undermine humanity had finally failed only with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The struggle had endured for the better part of a century and now, less than a quarter century after its failure, they were orchestrating another attack. They must have known how close they had come, he thought. The taste of victory had almost been theirs. It had given them the appetite for another attempt. There was no mistaking the portents. Adam’s clarion call at Cree was a signal no one on earth a party to this ancient, secret conflict could ignore.
