by Jack Mann
“Service, sir,” he said, in a pleasant, easy way.
Gees smiled. “You don’t often hear that said, nowadays,” he remarked.
“Why, no, sir, I suppose you don’t,” the other man agreed.
“Times change, and manners too. But us old ’uns—well!”
“Come and sit down, Bird,” Gees invited, “and have a spot of beer. You’re not in a hurry to get home, I hope?”
Phil Bird advanced to the armchair that Gees indicated, and stood beside it. “I live alone,” he stated, “and never count on gettin’ to bed much afore one in the mornin’. I—I read a lot.” There was almost an apology in the concluding sentence, as if he ought not to read a lot.
“Excellent idea.” Gees filled the two big glasses from the jug, and handed one over. “Now sit down and try that. You’re not native to this part of the world are you?”
“Bred an’ born here, sir.” He seated himself in the chair as Gees took another like it, facing him. “What made you think that?”
“I suppose there is a local dialect?” Gees queried in reply.
Phil Bird shook his head. “I dunno, sir,” he said. “What with the motor buses takin’ ’em to the cinemas, and the youngsters buyin’
secondhand motor bikes to go off to the towns—why, only the other day I heard a young feller say he’d put a rival on the spot sooner’n see him get fresh with his bird, an’ that ain’t Shropshire. It’s pure cinema stuff from Hollywood. But me, I made off to sea when I was about nineteen, and it was all of thirty year before I come back.”
“With enough to settle on, here,” Gees suggested.
“Well, not quite, sir. I take on odd jobs of all sorts to eke out my little, but I always reckon I brought back wealth. You see a lot in thirty years, places an’ people, an’ I wouldn’t change my store o’ memories for a tidy fortune. Here’s health, sir.” He drank deeply, and put the glass down on the table.
“Thanks, Bird, and long life to you;” Gees said, imitating him.
“Good stuff,” Bird observed. “Nick’s got good brewers,
an’—But what was it you wanted to see me about, sir?”
“I was told that you’re the best work of reference to consult on Denlandham—or Denlum, if you like—and the people in it,” Gees said.
“Well, I know a bit,” the little man admitted. “Some folks think I know a lot. It’s—well, not missin’ things when you see an’ hear ’em, an’ a pretty good memory. Anyone particular you wanted to know about?”
“A place—Knightsmere Farm,” Gees answered.
“Nightmare, they all call it around here,” Bird amended for him.
“A natural sort of version, easier to say. It’s what they would call it.”
“Any other reason for the change?” Gees inquired, and refilled the glasses from the jug, since Bird had already emptied his.
“I see-e.” The little man looked at his glass, but did not touch it.
“I knew this would happen, sooner or later.”
“You did, eh?” Gees asked easily. “But what has happened?”
The deeply set grey eyes which looked full into his own were grave, now, and, instead of relaxing to his chair, Bird sat stiffly.
“When I went away from here, sir, nigh on fifty year ago, I had a sister,” he said. “Our parents were proud of her, and so was I. She went to a big house near Shrewsbury as lady’s maid after I’d gone, and kept at that for years—till the lady died. Then she went on to London, and it happened one day she went to a spiritualist meeting. She had an idea—or else they gave her the idea—that she’d make a medium if she tried, and she did try. From their point of view she was a big success. Used to go into trances, I heard after, and become a sort of channel for spirit communications, not herself at all while she was in the trances. Got so much money out of it that she gave up her job and took to medium work only—and then broke down. She came home to her mother, who was still alive, then, about a month before I got back to settle here. And before I’d been back a week I could see—it wasn’t ordinary nervous breakdown she’d got, but possession.”
“Meaning?” Gees asked.
“It got worse—she got worse, I mean,” Bird pursued. “More irrational, sometimes entirely wicked, according to which of the things she used to be channel for had got possession of her at the time—and when I left her as a girl, she’d had as sweet a nature as you could find. In the end she got dangerous, and died raving mad in a mental institution. The shock of it killed her mother, who might have lived another ten years, I believe, if it hadn’t been for this.”
“Meaning?” Gees asked again.
“Meaning this,” Bird answered, tensely. “All that—that lifting the veil, as they call it, and getting communications from beyond, and talk from them who have passed over—all of it!—is delusion, devilish and dangerous delusion. A good bit of it is hocus, played for cash, but some is genuine—my sister’s case concerns the genuine. But you don’t get any communications with the spirits of people you knew who have passed over, as they put it. All you get is what I might call low grade spirits, anxious to get in touch with humans for their own ends, whatever they may be. And they’ve got power, these low grade spirits, if you let ’em get hold of you as they did of her. They destroy your soul as surely as a murderer destroys your body, enter in and take possession of you, and turn you to less than human, as they are themselves.”
“Quite so,” Gees said. “Now will you tell me—where does my saying that I want to know about Knightsmere Farm come in?”
“This way,” Bird said almost fiercely. “If you’ve got anything to do with the spiritualism that uses mediums and trances and talks about astral bodies and calling back spirits that have passed over, then I’ll pay Nick Churchill for this pint of beer and tell him to take it off your bill and have no more to say to you, except maybe tell you to go to hell out of here and leave Nightmare Farm alone. I’ll say no word that might set you trying to get communications from spirits there or anywhere, and”—he stood up—“I reckon that’s all.”
“No, it isn’t,” Gees demurred. “Sit down again, Bird. Do I look or talk like one of that type—the spiritualist type?”
“There is no type,” Bird said, and kept on his feet. “Off that subject, they’re as practical and common-sense as ordinary people—till they’ve gone too far to draw back, got themselves possessed.”
“All right, then, there is no special type,” Gees agreed, “but I’ll tell you in confidence, Bird, that I’m here by request of Squire Hunter—I suppose you call him squire, since he owns the parish, pretty much—here by his request to destroy whatever it is that appears to centre on this Nightmare Farm, if it can be done. Not get in communication with it or try to make capital out of it for any cult or creed.”
“Well, that sounds different,” Bird admitted doubtfully.
“In fact, it’s the reverse of what you feared,” Gees told him. “I have my own ideas about this—but do sit down and have some more beer.”
Slowly, Bird resumed his seat. He took up the full glass and looked at Gees over it, and his eyes twinkled again as at first.
“Good beer, sir,” he said. “Luck to you.”
And, when he put the glass down again, that pint had followed the first. Gees refilled the glass, and took up the two-gallon jar to uncork it and refill the jug, while his guest wiped his lips.
“What do you specially want to know about Nightmare, sir?”
Bird asked, as Gees returned the jar to the floor beside his chair.
“History—anything,” Gees answered. “The more I know, the better prepared I shall be for what I have to do—mean to do.”
“Why, yes, that’s true, sir,” Bird agreed thoughtfully. “History, now. I’ve read pretty much all there is about these parts, an’ remember a good deal of it. There’s a big pool back of the house, very deep—they say it’s bottomless in the middle, but that can’t be true, of course�
��and back in the old days of armour and crusades and things, a knight was murdered by being drowned there. That’s the legend, and the place took its name from it. And the murderer was named Dyne or Dane or something like that, so it was Dyneland or Daneland with the ‘ham’ for home, and so you get the name of the parish. But to get pardon for murdering the knight, he made over all his lands to the Church at his death, and the big chimney at Nightmare is all there is left of the monastery. There was a convent, too, somewhere, but the first of the Hunters—the family goes right back to Henry the Eighth under the same name—the first of them simply wiped out everything except that one chimney, or else the Roundheads made such a mess of what he kept standing for his own use that nothing but the chimney and the rooms round it was worth keeping. There appears to have been a considerable family mansion there up to their time, but all there is left now is the chimney with four ground floor and four first floor rooms built round it—and the attics, of course. That’s Nightmare.”
“The Hunter family, I understand, lived there till the present Denlandham House was built by one of them?” Gees
half-questioned.
“That is so, sir. It was a Robert Hunter built the House.”
“Any idea why he didn’t rebuild on the original site?” Gees asked.
“I might have ideas, sir,” Bird answered, “but no grounds for ’em.”
“Quite so. Know anything about this Robert—don’t let that beer get flat while you talk, for we’ve only just begun on the jar.”
The best part of another pint vanished, and Gees took a liberal drink himself. Bird put his glass down and looked at it thoughtfully.
“Robert Hunter,” he said, “made a fortune, mainly in the slave trade, but other things as well—it’s so long ago that it’s safe to say rank piratin’ was one of ’em—an’ came back to find his brother dead without children, so Denlum fell to him. Married, had three children, and built the House and moved from Nightmare into it not long before he died. Must have been not long before, because the birth of two of the children was entered as at Nightmare, and the youngest was only a year old when he did die. I’ve looked it all up.”
“Just why?” Gees inquired, and glanced at his watch. Half-past ten now, and Bird had owned to going to bed after midnight. Plenty of time.
“Well, I was curious, that’s all,” Bird confessed. “You see, sir, Robert Hunter had sailed an’ maybe plundered away East, and I’ve been East too—” He broke off suddenly. “I don’t know how much you know, sir,” he said, in a questioning way. “Because, you say you’re actin’ for Squire Hunter. Not that I owe him anything.”
“Curious as to what Robert Hunter brought back from the East,”
Gees suggested. “You can talk right out, Bird. It’s quite safe.”
“Well, yes, that was it, sir. Because of the tales—they were no more than tales, till half a year or so ago. I was curious.”
“Kir Asa,” Gees said, half-questioningly.
“Why”—the man before him looked startled—“what d’you know about that, sir? It was Kir Asa you said, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Gees assented. “I know very little about it, and that little out of an old legend of the East which a writer put into a novel of his—and even then only as a side-issue. Just enough to give me the idea that seems to have crossed your mind, in fact.”
“That—that Robert Hunter found ’em, and brought one back?”
Bird asked. “Because that’s how it looked and still looks to me.”
“I am inclined to think so,” Gees assented. “And now—I’m beginning to wonder why a man with your intelligence and knowledge has to do odd jobs in a village like this, Bird, but that’s your business—”
“No. If you’ll forgive me for buttin’ in, it ain’t, sir—that is, I don’t mind your makin’ the remark. Like this. I had my wander years, as I count ’em, east and west and everywhere. Some people store up money, but I was never that sort—I’ve made a good bit in my time, and spent it too. I stored up adventures, people, scenery, stories and legends, odd customs—made a savings bank of my mind, and came back here quite content to end my days on the income of it. I can sit and live back in what I’ve seen and done by the hour together, and if you know any better wealth than that for a man my age, you’re welcome to it.”
“There is no truer wealth,” Gees agreed soberly. “Now do we carry on with Kir Asa and what it means, or take the Hunter family first! I think it would be better to clear them off before we come to—to why Robert Hunter built a new house rather than rebuild Nightmare.”
“As you like, sir,” Bird said. “You’ve told me why you want to know all I can tell, an’ I’m all for helpin’, an’ the night’s young.”
“Therefore,” said Gees, “we will have more beer.”
“It’s a pleasure,” Bird admitted, “to meet a gentleman like you, sir. Knowledgeable about these things, and still level-headed.”
“Rare combination, eh?” Gees suggested. “Well, the Hunters. In succession from Robert, habits and characters—all of ’em.”
“To be quite frank about ’em, sir, although you’re as you might say workin’ for the present one?” Bird asked cautiously.
“Quite frank,” Gees assented. “Like you, I can say I owe the Hunters nothing, and know the family record is none too white. This present one owned to me—never mind, though. I want an unbiased history.”
“An’ because of—of Kir Asa, say—I studied ’em up, sir,” Bird said. “From Robert’s time—I didn’t go back of him, because there didn’t seem to be need. I don’t find much about what he was after he got back here, but it appears that out East he was as black-hearted a devil as ever sunk a ship with its crew aboard or packed a hold with slaves. Some of the men he’d had under him got back, an’ tales got about—there’s a sort of log that a man named Jarnley kept, for one thing, and he served under Robert Hunter. It says they lost half their men on the hunt for Kir Asa, and had to give it up, and it looks as if that was just before Robert made his lucky strike, whatever that was, an’ decided to come home. Then, as I said, he married, and had three children, two boys and a daughter. She died raving mad.”
“Odd,” Gees commented.
“No, sir, quite natural,” Bird dissented quietly. “An’ that, up to her death, which was nearly the same time as her father’s, was what you might call the first appearance. And it looks as if her brother, the one which succeeded to the estate, tried to atone for his father, as you might say. He restored the church and started a charity that still goes on—the Angus Hunter charity, it’s called.”
“One moment,” Gees interrupted. “That name, Angus. Not a usual name in this part of the world, but it persists in this family.”
“Robert Hunter married a Highland lady,” Bird explained.
“Better breed than he was, by all accounts, and they keep it for that connection, I believe. There’s generally one Angus to a generation.”
“Celtic strain, which may mean anything or nothing,” Gees commented. “Carry on—but have some more beer first.” He refilled Bird’s glass and had recourse to the stone jar again. “Angus—yes. Next?”
