Death in Devon (The County Guides)

by Ian Sansom

  Morley and the headmaster went quickly and silently along the rows, taking a head-count.

  Everyone was there. Everything was in order.

  Once the headmaster was satisfied, we went across to the other dormitory. It was the same thing. All present and correct. A chubby boy in the regulation blue and white striped pyjamas half woke at the sound of our footsteps and sat bolt upright in his bed, muttering, his eyes open, his cheeks damp with tears.

  ‘No, sir! I didn’t, sir! Sorry, sir. Yes.’

  ‘It’s all right, William. Just doing the evening rounds,’ said the headmaster, patting him gently on the shoulder.

  And the boy lay back down, turned over, and retreated again into his own private world of terrors.

  Back out in the corridor we tried to gather our thoughts, whispering between ourselves.

  ‘Well, thank goodness,’ said the headmaster. ‘We seem to have been mistaken, Morley.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Morley.

  ‘The boys are all safe.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. They are.’

  ‘So?’ said the headmaster.

  ‘It’s not about the boys,’ I said.

  ‘Not about the boys?’ repeated the headmaster.

  ‘Yes!’ said Morley. ‘That’s it, Sefton! There were no photographs of boys, were there?’

  ‘I didn’t see any, no.’

  ‘We just assumed, that … Headmaster, where are all the teachers?’

  ‘Where are they all?’

  ‘Where do they all live?’

  ‘A few live in lodgings, and some of them in Sidmouth, but most of them live here on site, in this building, or in the houses: Alex and his wife have a house, and some of the other married staff. And—’

  Morley had already started for the stairs.

  We followed passageway after dark passageway to the back of the building and to the teachers’ quarters: oak-panelled walls and heavy oak doors. We knocked on one. No answer. And then another – and again no answer came.

  ‘Perhaps they’ve all gone into Sidmouth?’ said the headmaster. ‘They sometimes organise outings.’

  ‘It’s nearly midnight,’ said Morley.

  ‘It is a little late, I—’

  ‘Take us to the houses.’

  Alex’s house was part of the terraced row that led down towards the farmhouse where I had been staying. These were the grander kind of workers’ cottages: roses growing round the door, mullioned windows. A picture-perfect picture of rural domestic England. We knocked on Alex’s door. There was no answer. We peered through the mullioned windows and there seemed to be a light on somewhere at the back of the house. So we knocked again. We tried the door: it was locked. Morley checked the dial on his luminous watch. It was almost twenty to midnight.

  ‘We could go round the back?’ said the headmaster. ‘We just have to go round by the school and then up past—’

  ‘Kick it in, Sefton,’ said Morley.

  ‘I say, Morley!’ objected the headmaster. ‘Hardly necessary, is it? If we just go round the back and—’

  ‘Too late, too late, shall be the cry,’ said Morley. ‘Kick it in, Sefton. Aim just below the door knob. Weakest point. Here.’ He pointed exactly at the spot where he wanted me to kick. ‘Come on, man. Hit with the sole. And push up from the heel of the other foot.’

  He nodded, the headmaster shook his head and gave a kind of low moan, and I kicked. The sound of a blunt instrument – me – hitting an inanimate object echoed in the still dark night. It hurt.

  ‘Any give at all?’

  ‘A little,’ I said.

  ‘Again,’ said Morley. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Morley!’ said the headmaster. ‘I really must object, I think this is—’

  Morley nodded at me to go ahead.

  I kicked again. And then again. And again, like a smithy at his forge. And then again – and it gave.

  Morley raced through the front room of the house and out towards the back. Which was where we found her, sitting in the kitchen: Alex’s wife. The kitchen was lit by a single lamp that cast a thin, wavering languid light. A low-beamed ceiling, bits and pieces of cheap crockery on an old dresser, a range that hadn’t been blackened in some time, and the smell. That smell. The delicious disorientating smell either of something very wrong, or something very right. It was a smell I knew only too well. The smell I’d detected in the staff common room. There was absolutely no mystery about it: the table was filled with bottles, like those in a dispensary in a hospital, each containing different chemicals. Morley glanced at me.

  Mrs Standish sat staring straight ahead. She was dressed entirely in black, as usual, her dark hair swept back, her cheeks flushed, as though having recently emerged from the cockpit of a plane. Around her neck hung a string of black pearls. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. She looked like a ruined rag doll. She was absent-mindedly stroking a lizard in her lap, her pale fingers and white nails pulling back and forth against the scaly green skin.

  ‘Good God!’ said the headmaster.

  She looked straight at him then, her dark bright eyes jangling around, and she laughed. It was not the laugh of someone who was happy.

  The headmaster seemed nonplussed.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked. He had no idea what he was witnessing.

  I picked up a phial of liquid and sniffed it.

  ‘What is it, Sefton?’

  I suddenly felt a sympathetic longing for something – not having touched anything for … days.

  ‘Sefton?’ repeated Morley. ‘What is it?’

  It was laudanum.

  ‘Drugs,’ I said, simplifying rather for the sake of the headmaster.

  ‘What?’ Morley repeated.

  ‘Drugs?’ said the headmaster. ‘Well, what sort of drugs? Here? In the school?’

  ‘Lotos-dust,’ said Morley to himself.

  ‘What?’ said the headmaster.

  ‘She lies beside her nectar,’ continued Morley.

  ‘What is this?’ insisted the headmaster.

  I knew exactly what it was.

  ‘It is a door to an artificial paradise,’ I said.

  ‘Michael Taylor – the boy who fell to his death from the clifftops?’ said Morley. He was addressing Alex’s wife now, kneeling down before her, his face up close to hers. ‘Had he found out what was happening?’

  ‘A school at the top of a cliff!’ She laughed. ‘A school at the top of a cliff!’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘Where are they? Where are your husband and the other teachers?’

  But Morley was wasting his time. Alex’s wife had entered a place from where I knew it was impossible to return. She had passed the stage of speech: she had reached the stage of inner speech: she had taken so much of what she was making that she had become quite incapable.

  The headmaster sat down on a low chair beside the range, incapable of comprehending what was happening. He looked tiny, like a boy waiting to meet some terrible punishment.

  ‘Drugs?’ he said. ‘And … those pictures. And the occult? In the school?’

  ‘Headmaster,’ said Morley. ‘You need to think. Is there somewhere they’re likely to have gathered? Somewhere nearby? A big empty space? Somewhere they could meet and not be seen by others? Somewhere private?’

  ‘Somewhere—’ began the headmaster.

  ‘Somewhere – hidden!’ cried Morley. He began clicking his fingers, attempting to summon forth some idea, or to forge some connection. ‘Hidden, hidden. That’s it! What is it, Sefton?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, Mr Morley.’

  ‘And here … And here the sea-fogs lap and cling / And here, each warning each, / The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring / Along the hidden … beach!’ He bolted for the door, calling behind him. ‘Headmaster. You stay here and notify the police. Do you understand?’

  The headmaster sat as insensate as Mrs Standish.

  ‘Headmaster?’

  He nodded.

  And Morley looked at me, and we
began to run.

  The steep path down to the beach was rutted and rocky and the trees had cast the way in darkness. As we tumbled and tore our way along, Morley barked out instructions to me – not to do this, not to do that – and eventually we reached the place down by the water-pumping station where the steps were cut into the cliff. There was a light shining from behind the door of the water-pumping station.

  ‘Odd?’ said Morley. ‘I wonder …’ He glanced at his watch and then quickly entered the building. There was nothing odd about the place at all. It was an office – there were charts on the wall, a pile of ledgers. It was entirely innocuous. And then we went through a door that led into a corridor that led to another door. On the lintel above the door someone had scratched a word I couldn’t quite make out. The first two letters seemed to be ‘E’ and ‘D’.

  ‘Eden?’ I said.

  ‘Edom,’ said Morley.

  ‘Edom?’

  ‘Dogs and wildcats, screech owls and crows and other creatures hold a demonic Sabbath there: Isaiah 34. Prepare yourself, Sefton.’

  The door opened onto a passageway lit by candles – some kind of service tunnel. Morley glanced behind him, put a finger to his lips and went on ahead into the passageway. It was cut through rock, winding down and down, deeper and deeper, like the steps at Goodge Street Station, except that following the steps down we emerged not to a station platform but an underground cave.

  I stared at the dark stone walls, which were lit by guttering black candles. There was a row of trunks lined up against a wall, and a long hanging rail for clothes. It was like a changing room in a school sports pavilion. It even smelled like the changing room in a school pavilion: linseed oil, sweat, old leather and mould.

  ‘The robing room,’ whispered Morley.

  We entered a narrow passageway into another chamber.

  This room was larger – perhaps twice the size – and there was a large round table in the middle of the room, with chairs set around it and books and papers spread across it.

  ‘The round table, eh?’ said Morley bitterly, shaking his head.

  There were bookshelves against the walls, and a cabinet set with what appeared to be stationery supplies and arts and crafts equipment: quill pens, ink pots, knives and scissors. The place seemed to be designed as some sort of study area. There was even a sign hung below one of the candle sconces that had clearly been borrowed from the school library. It read, in time-honoured tradition: ‘SILENCE, PLEASE’.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Morley quietly, beckoning me over, pointing at the books on the bookshelves. ‘Here we are, Sefton. Dornford Yates. Of course.’

  I raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  SILENCE, PLEASE

  ‘Occult guff. Knorr von Rosenroth. Same. Glanville: absolute total guff. And Bulwer-Lytton. Yes, of course. The Coming Race.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the chap old Mrs Standish was talking about?’

  Morley picked up the book. ‘Hmm. Story of a subterranean master race who have the power to heal and destroy humankind. Great favourite with the Rosicrucians, and all sorts of other crackpots …’

  Morley became momentarily absorbed in flicking through the books. I turned to the table and picked up a card that had been laid out with a set of others; they were like the Tarot cards we had found in the darkroom, except that these were crude, home-made things, featuring weird handdrawn symbols. They were arranged on the table in a pattern resembling a cross.

  ‘Mr Morley,’ I said quietly, holding the card up to him: it showed a dagger.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tattwa cards. I’ve never seen a set myself.’ He studied the cards set out on the table. ‘Wand. Pentacles. Stars. The dagger.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Divining instructions.’

  ‘What sort of instructions?’

  ‘Maybe related to this …’ He picked up what appeared to be a parchment manuscript set beside the Tattwa cards. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘A grimoire?’

  ‘Grimoire?’

  ‘Repository of magical knowledge, Sefton. A sort of store of curious information and quaint ideas, scraps of folklore, old legends and superstitions.’

  ‘Sounds familiar,’ I said. It did not sound dissimilar to our own enterprise.

  He carefully turned the pages of the book – each page covered in dense handwritten notes. ‘A means of arming oneself against evil spirits and witches, though more usually it’s a book that people turn to in order to fulfil their wanton desires.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘How to seduce women, how to gain power over others. How to cause rain. You know the sort of thing, Sefton.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My eye had been caught by a photograph that lay with the Tattwa cards. I picked it up. It showed Miriam.

  ‘It’s like a book of spells,’ continued Morley. ‘Except the other thing about the grimoire’ – he turned the book over and over in his hands, stroking the dark brown cover – ‘is that the book itself is also magic.’

  ‘The book itself?’

  ‘Certain words within it have active properties. But more important is the paper and the ink …’ Again he stroked the pages of the book. ‘I’m afraid I recall reading somewhere that the most valuable grimoires are those made from a parchment made from the skin of the unborn.’

  ‘The skin of the unborn?’

  ‘An aborted animal foetus, for example, such as—’

  ‘A cow?’

  ‘I fear so, Sefton, yes.’

  ‘Mr Morley,’ I said, about to show him the photograph.

  ‘Good God,’ said the headmaster. He had followed us down from the school.

  Morley swung around. ‘Headmaster,’ he said. ‘I told you to stay and …’

  But the headmaster – who seemed to be in some kind of daze – ignored us, walked past us towards another narrow passageway that led into yet another deserted chamber.

  ‘Good God,’ he repeated. ‘God forgive us.’

  Morley and I entered this final place together and we all stood together, staring, speechless.

  There were crude, mysterious symbols painted on the stone walls with black paint. And in the centre of the room, a long refectory table that had effectively become an altar. The floor beneath this altar was awash with blood. And upon it was a slaughtered donkey.

  ‘Mithraism,’ said Morley decisively.

  ‘What?’ said the headmaster.

  ‘Sacred cult.’

  ‘Mithraism?’ said the headmaster. ‘But—’

  ‘They worshipped in underground caverns. Brutal initiation rites. This certainly looks like a Mithraist sacrifice.’ Morley approached the donkey on the altar. ‘Should be a bull, of course, strictly speaking, but—’

  ‘But this is … my school,’ said the headmaster.

  ‘Someone seems to have established another kind of school, Headmaster. The cave schools of magic at Toledo and Salamanca?’

  ‘How on earth did they get it down here?’ I said.

  ‘Taurobolium,’ said Morley. ‘That’s it! That’s what it’s called. Bull sacrifice in which the blood of the beast is shed and flows onto the worshipper, which then empowers them to—’

  ‘There must be another entrance,’ I said, glancing around.

  ‘Good God!’ said the headmaster again. ‘In my school?’

  ‘Headmaster,’ said Morley, turning to face the headmaster, his temper suddenly flaring. ‘This is not your school. You have lost control. Do you understand?’

  I had found another wide passageway behind the altar table, hidden behind a heavy damask curtain. The passage-way led down and out.

  ‘Here!’ I cried. ‘Mr Morley! Headmaster! There’s a way out!’

  I was right. There was a way out – and there wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE FULL MOON

  THE PASSAGE LED straight onto the hidden beach below the cliff.

  At the best of times a beach at night can be a shuddersome place – a
ll the colour gone, and with it all charm and beauty. A place of pleasure during the day can seem like the most desolate spot on earth at night. And on this night the beach at Rousdon seemed like hell itself.

  The full moon lit the scene before us like a theatrical set. Alex of course was centre stage. He wore a peculiar headdress and what looked like a lace dressing gown with no buttons down the front, the kind of garment that could only have been made by the lacemakers of Honiton. In the darkness his lips appeared to be tinged with blue and his face – just as it was in the caves – was a burning phosphorescent yellow.

  Above him was the full moon. Behind him, the endless grey sea spitting pebbles up onto the beach. And before him, a crowd of benefactors and teachers – and held aloft between them, bound and gagged and tied to one of Morley’s surfboards, was Miriam. She was dressed in an outfit similar to Alex’s. God only knows what they were planning.

  Morley yelled. I yelled. We ran full pelt towards the gathered ghouls.

  It is difficult to describe what occurred then in the chaos that ensued, but this an account as good as I can recall.

  Most of the teachers and benefactors scattered, running for the cliffs. Morley made it to Miriam and began to untie her from the surfboard – and when he undid the gag around her mouth she sat up and let out a bloodcurdling scream worthy of Fay Wray herself.

  I went straight for Alex and launched myself upon him. He grabbed me with both hands by the throat, but I struck him once, twice and three times with all my might, and then grabbed at his fingers and bent them back until I heard them snap – and he fell down on his knees in agony. In Spain I’d learned from a little Hungarian named Imre some basics of hand-to-hand combat: attack the most vulnerable parts of the body, the groin, the eyes, the neck, the fingers. And use any available object. As Alex lay stunned before me I grabbed a large pebble, a rock really, the size of my fist, and was about to dash it down on his stupid shining head when someone or something flew at me. It was Miriam.

  ‘No!’ she screamed with a demonic rage. ‘Sefton, no!’ She hung on my back and dug her nails into my face, screaming; we fought intensely for a moment, me trying to throw her off, until she began sobbing. ‘You must not kill him! You mustn’t! You mustn’t! Don’t do it!’