by F. G. Cottam
His attacker emerged in a flailing blur from the hedge at the side of the road and aimed a dagger blow at Grayling’s heart that sent him hurtling, gasping, on to his back on the ground. His hands reached for anything while his grinning enemy closed to take a trophy from his victim. He stooped over Grayling’s body with the weapon held loosely in his right fist, convinced, quite reasonably, that he was dealing with a man already dead.
Grayling’s right hand had gripped a section of fallen tree branch. He prayed briefly that it was as thick and heavy as it felt. Light with rot, and he was dead, he knew. He gripped and swung at the temple of his attacker, who was straddling him now, and he felt through his arm and shoulder the explosive impact of the blow.
The man’s head juddered and he fell as Grayling rolled to his right beneath him, out of the way. He dropped the knife with a thud as he fell. Grayling reached for it and then squatted and put two fingers together on the artery in his neck. There was no pulse. He was dead. That was a relief, Grayling thought, because though he would have used the knife, killing in cold blood was not something he relished.
He flattened himself on the ground as a set of headlights briefly unfurled the road in front of them in a bleached path to the right. He waited for the engine noise to fade into the distance, then rose and quickly dragged the body under the roadside hedge, where he covered it with fallen leaves, thankful it was autumn and the concealment was available.
He did not concern himself with thoughts about forensic evidence and criminal enquiries to follow the discovery of the corpse. There would be no corpse to recover. McGuire had told him that they disappeared in the hours after their deaths, and there was a long time till the morning and the possibility of someone stumbling upon it.
He had to be sure, though. He listened for approaching road traffic, but the night was silent. The killing had stilled the songs of the birds in the trees. He went back to his victim and, using the small torch at the tip of his cellular phone to see by, prised open his jaw. The tongue had been crudely severed at the root. They did it to guarantee their silence if they were captured. It was said that Proctor Maul had carried out this procedure on himself with pincers heated in the forge.
Already, the corpse had started to stink. The decomposition churning through its innards rose foully from its mouth. It was a gruesome piece of sorcery, but Grayling was grateful for it. Better a rank stain on the earth in the morning than a murder hunt.
He turned back for Canterbury. It was the pragmatic thing to do. He was still much less than halfway to Whitstable and there would be no tiresome changing of tickets if he caught the train from his planned departure point. His chest was already starting to bruise from the impact of the knife blow and it felt very tender there. His heartbeat alone was enough to provoke the spot into pain. He was aware that two decisions, one made out of courtesy and the other from generosity, had combined to save his life.
He had worn a tailored suit and college tie and newly polished shoes for his meeting with Sir Rupert Dobb. It was a question of respect and due formality, a nod towards Sir Rupert’s status in the world and the gravity of the subject they were to discuss.
He had been early for their meeting. That too had been out of respect, a precaution against delay on the journey there. And this was where the act of generosity had come into play. He had whiled the time away window shopping, and as he was studying an antique shop display, he had spotted a silver cigarette case with a ticket claiming that it had belonged to Lawrence of Arabia.
Angus McGuire, who had in those far-off days gone under an entirely different guise, had known T.E. Lawrence in the war, and he would occasionally reminisce fondly about him with his few confidants. Grayling had bought the cigarette case as a gift for his venerable mentor and comrade in the secret struggle. He had slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit, then he had pretty much forgotten about it as the eventful day began to take absorbing shape. It had stopped dead a knife blow that would otherwise certainly have killed him.
The thought made him frown. The dagger had been a substantial weapon and the blow had been a very heavy one. Silver was a soft metal, and so surely the cigarette case should have punctured and the blade been driven home?
He slipped a hand inside his coat and took out the case. It was slightly crumpled and there was a nick almost at its centre. He examined the damage closely. It was not silver at all but steel, probably electro-plated and certainly without the provenance claimed for it. He had been had.
He discarded the case as soon as he came to a bin, on Canterbury’s outskirts. On balance, he did not begrudge the money it had cost him. His thoughts were more on the conversation that he would be obliged to have with Jane Dobb, once he got back to Cambridge.
He took out his mobile phone and called McGuire. The only bonus in dealing with someone of the doctor’s great age and relative frailty was that he was almost always at home.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Hello, Stuart.’
‘Things are escalating at some speed, Angus.’
‘They certainly are. There is a young chap skulking around outside.’
‘Is he one of theirs?’
‘If he is he’s better than usually disguised and less physically prepossessing than one would expect. I don’t think he’s one of theirs. He’s wearing designer jeans and a trendy anorak.’
‘Be careful, Angus.’
‘I’m always careful,’ said McGuire.
Adam’s first thought was that his father had shrunk. He was seated in an armchair and his clothing had the drape on him of garments belonging to someone bigger. They gaped at neck and wrist and flapped at his thin ankles. James Parker had never been fat in the past; he had possessed the same strong, sinewy build his son had inherited. But now he looked diminished and wasted. Death had marked him and Adam could not mask his own distress at what had befallen his dad.
His father tried to stand to greet him. He struggled to lever himself to his feet with the use of a cane; his grip on the cane was feeble and there wasn’t the strength in his legs properly to rise. Adam closed the distance between them in a stride and helped him up. Then they held one another and Adam closed his eyes with the memory of love and the reality of loss shuddering through him.
He had not anticipated such grief. It was not an emotion he had the strength to contain. He felt the bristle of his father’s beard against his cheek and caught the remembered smell of him, and he wept. He could not help himself. He could feel his father sobbing, through the too-big sweater he wore, holding on to his son with all of the grip he still had.
‘There,’ he heard Delilah say, somewhere behind him. ‘Not before time, I would imagine.’ Her tone sounded sardonic and relieved at the same moment. ‘You two have much to discuss,’ she said. ‘And I have a bar to run.’ He heard her turn and ascend the ladder that had delivered them to the living quarters of the moored barge his father lived aboard.
They sat in opposing chairs in the narrow cabin. The walls were lined by neat rows of closed portholes. They were anchored beside a wooden jetty on a tidal creek. Adam had thought it a sadly isolated spot, approaching it with Delilah. He did not think that daylight would greatly prettify much the surrounding scene. The boat itself, his father’s home, was immaculately neat and clean. It was comfortable and well provisioned and warm. But the desolation outside suggested exile more than it did willing escape.
‘McGuire sent me.’
‘He wasn’t McGuire when I met him. He did not call himself that to me. But I think I know the man you mean.’
‘How old were you then?’
‘About four years older than you were the last time I saw you. I was crewing aboard a mixed cargo and passenger vessel. He was one of the passengers. Is he a slight, smallish man, the owner of a boyish face and a pair of hazel eyes?’
‘That’s him.’
‘He was travelling in the guise of a geologist. We were fogbound and obliged to anchor off th
e Scandinavian coast at a spot littered with small islands. Navigation was impossible in the fog. We would have beached, or we would have holed the hull on rocks.
‘He approached me on the evening of the third day. He was wearing an oilskin and he had a compass in his hand and a heavy stick under his arm. A pair of binoculars was hanging on a leather strap around his neck. They were distinctive, the binoculars. They were the kind issued to German U-boat captains during the Great War. I asked him about them and he said he had taken them as a souvenir. I thought he was joking, of course. That was the moment when I first began to wonder in my own mind as to his true age.
‘He told me he needed an oarsman and that he had cleared what we were going to do with the captain. There was an island with a cave he wished to explore because it contained rare mineral deposits. He asked if I would take him there in one of the lifeboats and said that we’d be back for certain by the following day.’
‘What did you say?’
‘It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. In that fog I knew that he would never find his island. There are hundreds of them there, some of them not much bigger than the boat I’d be rowing. It would require a miracle of seamanship.
‘That’s what I thought. But that’s not what I said, because I was fifteen and the captain gave the orders and my job was to obey them. And truth be told, I was bored. Any sailor becomes bored on a vessel unable to voyage to where it’s bound.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘The whole endeavour struck me as bogus right from the outset. He didn’t even have the pretence of a rock hammer or a sample case to store in the locker. We provisioned some rations and drinking water and the boat was lowered from its davits over the side.’
Everything about the expedition felt wrong to young Jimmy Parker, once they got properly clear of the ship. The texture of the water felt wrong against the blades of his oars. He could not have explained it precisely, but there seemed a weird counter-rhythm in the run of the sea to his strokes.
The fog developed a yellow taint and a low, luminous sparkle. And though he said nothing about it to his passenger and the man’s face remained blandly expressionless, Jimmy kept hearing snatches of music. He heard a flute, tremulous and lonely. He heard the faint pluck of mandolin strings. And unpleasantly, he heard something harsh ground out on a barrel organ out there somewhere on the briny wastes.
The self-styled geologist went by the name of Ericson. Perhaps he was deaf to the melodies Jimmy kept hearing. Periodically he would glance at his compass and correct their course by a point or two; his concentration seemed unwavering. Eventually, he could not have said after how long, Jimmy felt the spine of the boat judder on a sandy shore and the two of them were out, hauling the craft higher up the beach where it could be safely left.
Except that Jimmy was told not to leave it. Together, under Ericson’s instructions, they groped at the tideline for driftwood. Then Ericson used one of the bigger pieces to hammer two others as supports into the sand. They flipped the boat and balanced its starboard gunwale by two rowlocks on the edges of their improvised stilts. Thus the boat was transformed into a serviceable shelter.
‘You’ve done this before,’ Jimmy said.
Ericson merely said, ‘You stay with the boat. You keep the bulk of the rations. You stay out of sight.’
‘There is no seeing, Mr Ericson, sir. Not in this fog there isn’t.’
‘If it rains you’ll be dry and there are blankets stored in the boat’s locker. You’ll be warm enough.’ He had changed, had Ericson. He was no longer the diffident scholar who seemed uncomfortably out of place when he wasn’t studying books by lamplight in his cabin. This was a man transformed.
‘Good luck, sir.’
‘What?’
‘Finding your cave, I mean.’
‘Yes. Quite.’ Ericson bent and picked his heavy stick up from the beach where he had left it to work on the shelter. He tucked it under his elbow and the mist enveloped him.
Jimmy thought he was dreaming. Then he knew what had woken him and feared he was being approached by a large animal, moving with the lithe grace of a predator. But he was tricked by the fact that the woman capering towards him was on all-fours, and what he had thought was a mane was only her wild and abundant hair.
He had never been with a woman, was a virgin with so little experience even of kissing that he associated the thrill of that coy and recent pleasure with Christmas and sprigs of mistletoe. She teased and aroused and wordlessly straddled him. And then she rolled him on top of her. And when he came, with the bucking frenzy of youth, he did so with her thighs clamped tight around his waist and her back arched and straining on the sand under him.
‘She was as wanton a woman as a boy could have dreamed of, Adam. And I was flattered, God help me. And it never occurred to me that I was the victim of a trap.’
‘You were there. You were in the shadow world. And you fathered a child there.’
‘God help me I did.’
‘When did you tell Ericson?’
‘I never told Ericson. He was McGuire by the time I told him. And I only told him because he confronted me. Something must have happened in the intervening years that made him suspect. I told him when you were eleven years old.’
‘And he told you that you had to leave.’
James Parker nodded. ‘Because my shadow world son would find me and kill you. An earth father enables him to come here more or less at will. He would not tolerate a half-brother. He would not tolerate the competition or the taint. I had to hide from him and by doing so, hide you.’
‘Except that there’s more to it,’ Adam said. ‘There is more to it, isn’t there, Dad?’
His father coughed, then gestured at the whisky bottle on the Dutch cabinet. Adam rose and poured them both a generous drink. His father sipped and swallowed and doing so provoked another bout of coughing. There was something loose sounding in his chest. It was the thing killing him, Adam knew with gloomy certainty. He thought of the man who had frightened Jane in the forest, an enemy bound to him by shared blood. He looked forward now to punishing him for the forced absence of his father from his life.
‘There’s a dynastic element to it all,’ his father said. ‘There’s some biological imperative. The man you call McGuire took me there deliberately.’
‘So my half-brother could be born and come here and kill people?’
‘No. The conception of Rabanus Bloor was not a part of his plans. That was some scheme of theirs, unless it was just opportunism. He took me there so that you would one day be born, able to join the fray. Look at you, Adam. There’s more of destiny to how you’ve turned out than chance. I’ll bet you’re quite something in a fight.’
‘Bloor. Is that Delilah’s surname?’
Adam’s father stared at him. And then he wheezed laughter so hard that Adam thought he might choke on his whisky. ‘What did McGuire tell you? Did he tell you anything?’
‘He told me that the shadow world is sometimes referred to as, the land we dare not name. But it does have a name. Everywhere real is distinguished by a name. It is called Endrimor.’
‘It’s unlucky to give voice to that word.’
‘You’re a sailor, Dad, so you would say that, just as you wouldn’t whistle aboard a ship.’
‘’Course I bloody wouldn’t.’
‘Or name the Scottish play.’
‘Which is only common sense.’
‘Or put your left shoe on before your right.’
‘And openly court disaster?’
‘I can’t believe how good it is to see you, Dad.’
‘Likewise, son.’ He blinked. ‘There is more joy in my heart tonight than I’d dared think possible.’
They were silent for a moment, each contemplating his own thoughts. It was Adam who broke the reverie they shared.
‘McGuire said it’s feudal, deliberately so, a place of great refinement in some ways, and sophistication. But it’s also endlessly cru
el. He said it’s a bleak world sustained only by the will to usurp ours.’
‘Delilah was born there,’ his father said quietly. ‘She lives here in exile. She knew we were fleeing the same thing the moment I laid eyes on her. Not many can pass. They give themselves away. But she can. She has educated herself.
‘She says there’s a Luddite aspect to their ideology that makes them abhor technologies beyond the primitive. They do not much differentiate between science and sorcery. And she says it is more fascistic there than feudal in terms of their hierarchy. Not that fine distinctions really matter very much. It’s angels on the heads of pins stuff. According to McGuire they seek our destruction. That’s the only really relevant point, Adam, about the shadow world; that, and the fact that it exists at all.’
‘What would you say is the relevant point about McGuire?’
‘That he’s on the side of right.’
‘He was in Serbia in 1914 on a desperate mission that failed. He was young, but still a grown man then. He’s not aged naturally. He’s worked some magic.’
‘Or been its victim?’
‘Either way,’ Adam said, ‘there’ll surely be a price to pay. Every story I’ve ever read about sorcery insists you defy nature at your peril.’ He sipped his whisky. ‘I can barely believe I’m having this conversation.’
‘Because of the subject matter?’
‘That too, Dad. But more because I’m having it with you.’
‘Age is not the same there,’ his father said. ‘Nothing is.’
‘Jesus. You went back.’
‘I’m a seafaring man, have been all my life. I’m a traveller. I had to go back. But it’s a tale for another time. I’m tired. You’ve worn me out.’
