Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  “This is like a blasted relay race,” Richard said. “Do we pick up the baton?”

  “We have to do something with it.”

  “Take it upstairs,” Catriona said. “She’ll know what must be done.”

  “She?” Richard and Maureen both asked.

  “Mrs. Rochester. Geneviève, her name is. She’ll be waiting. I’ll be up myself, when I’ve composed myself. I’d like to be alone now, anyway. Alone with …”

  She indicated the last shadowman. This one would stay put.

  “Together,” Maureen said.

  They lifted the jewel between their right hands. Richard felt Maureen’s cheek against his, and the side of her body as they slipped arms about each other. She had a few inches on him. Between their palms, the Seven Stars glowed.

  They made their way to the far staircase.

  *

  Mrs. Rochester—Jennifer God-Given—Geneviève Dieudonné lay on a narrow, coffin-shaped pallet. A tie-dyed blanket was gathered over her legs. She looked a thousand years old, and was plugged into a standing drip-feed. A bandage was fixed to her side, stained with greenish seepage.

  Her million wrinkles arranged themselves into a smile.

  “I apologise for my appearance. Your uncle shot me, dear. With silver. If he’d had better aim, I’d not be here.”

  “You know who I am?” Maureen asked.

  “Madame Sosostris knows all,” Geneviève intoned.

  Another name? No, a joke.

  They set the jewel down at the old woman’s feet. It nestled in the folds of her blanket, like a hot-water bottle.

  “Edwin’s gone,” Richard said.

  “I know. He stepped into the shadows. Against my advice, but it’s too late to bother with all that. He was, at heart, a good man. Despite everything.”

  Maureen was clinging closer to Richard. For the first time, he had a sense that she too was afraid. Her obvious courage was in need of the occasional injection of bravado.

  “Will you die?” Maureen asked the ancient woman.

  “No, no, no,” Geneviève chuckled. “At least, not just yet. You might not think it to look at me, but I’m getting better. The tide of years caught up with me, but it’s drawing away from the shore now.”

  “Do you need our blood?”

  Richard noticed only now the sharp little teeth in the old woman’s shrunken mouth.

  “Not yet,” Geneviève said. “You mustn’t think of me until you’ve bound the jewel. We’ve a chance to damp down the ill effects of its use, just briefly. There’s a ritual which will truly end yesterday’s War, which will pack back into the stone all the nastiness that has trickled out since we opened it up back in ’44.”

  “Will everything be … better?” Richard asked.

  “Not really,” Geneviève admitted. “Nuclear reactions will still be part of physics, and you all have to live with the consequences. All the rest of it, you must take responsibility for. The Jewel of Seven Stars didn’t make men stupid or venal or mad. It just fed on those things and spewed them out a thousandfold. But with the stone wrapped, the old world will have a chance.”

  “Why didn’t Edwin perform this ritual?” Maureen asked.

  “He’d spoiled himself for it. Something sad about a cat. And Catriona couldn’t stand in for you. The participants have to be from both factions. You’re a Mountmain, dear. And Richard is the creature of the Diogenes Club. Adversaries whose allegiances run counter to the official history. Churchill and Hitler were equally opposed to Diogenes and aligned with your uncles. There were great villains on Edwin’s side and saints tied up with the Mountmains. It’s too late to blame anyone. You just have to end the cycle, to make way for that Aquarian nonsense.”

  As Geneviève spoke, Maureen took his hand in a tigerish grip.

  “This ritual,” he began, “what exactly …?”

  “What do you think?” Geneviève laughed.

  Richard looked up into Maureen’s eyes, and saw understanding in them.

  *

  Magical sex always struck Richard as somehow contrived, requiring the consideration of mathematics in a process that worked best when run on sheer instinct. You had to keep your head full of angles of the compass and meaningless rituals, locked up within your own skull when your body wanted to flow mindlessly into another. And magick rituals tended to be performed on cold stone floors hardly suited to comfort or arousal.

  This was not like that at all.

  They were together on cushions spread over the camera obscura table, the jewel between them. In their own anomaly, they ebbed and flowed like the tides, bloodstreams and bodies pushed and pulled by primal forces. Daybreak brought fields and woods and buildings into the room, patterning their bodies. At the centre of a harmonious universe, energies poured in through their open minds, bound up and redirected by their coupling. Mirrors shone warm sunlight down on them.

  Tantric sex, the most common form of sex magic, was all about building up spiritual energy by making love at length but never reaching the dissipation of climax.

  This was not like that at all.

  They peaked three times apiece.

  “The seventh,” she whispered.

  They passed the jewel between them, running it over their bodies. Richard looked through the stone, past the stars, seeing Maureen’s face rubied with joy. They kissed the Jewel of Seven Stars, and Maureen took it, pressing it to her yoni.

  He entered her again, pushing the weirdstone into her womb.

  Joined by the jewel, they came again, finally, together, completing the pattern of seven stars.

  Then, they slept.

  *

  Richard awoke, all sense of time lost. His coat had been arranged around him.

  Maureen was gone.

  He still felt her, tasted her, scented her.

  The Jewel of Seven Stars was gone too.

  *

  Dressed, clothes abrading the tender spots of his body, he explored the house.

  The Hiroshima Shadow marked Edwin’s passing.

  Catriona was in Mrs. Rochester’s room. Geneviève was sitting up, hidden behind a veil of mosquito netting.

  “She took the stone,” he said, weakly.

  “Her family have been after it for years,” said a voice from behind the netting.

  “She visited,” Catriona said, “after she left you, she came here. She was glowing, Richard.”

  “Like a ripe orange,” the voice—so unlike Mrs. Rochester’s frail whisper—said, “so full of life that she had some to share. Edwin made up for what he did with the stone, and she made up for what her uncle did to me.”

  The veil fell.

  The woman on the bed was not Mrs. Rochester. She was lithe, red-lipped and unhurt. But it was Geneviève, young again.

  “Now,” she said, “the old War is over.”

  The anomaly was gone. The War was finished. A great purpose of his life, undefined in his mind until last night, was concluded. But he still had his darkness, the shadowed part of his mind and memory. Because a part of his life was gone, he clung tenaciously to what he could remember, fixing memories like butterflies pinned to a card. Edwin Winthrop was a memory now, and Mrs. Rochester. And Maureen.

  Their coming together ended something, cleared the stage for many beginnings. But that was it. Her taste would fade. But the memory would stay.

  Geneviève got out of bed for the first time in thirty years. Her old woman’s nightgown hung strangely on a body barely grown. Underneath her years, she was impossibly young. She hugged Catriona, and Richard. She danced on the points of her toes. The jewel-light shone in eyes reddened by Maureen’s blood.

  Catriona was bereft, Geneviève reborn.

  A fresh cycle would begin.

  Francis St. Clare and Frederica Masters

  SOMEONE IS DEAD

  by R. CHETWYND-HAYES

  Francis St. Clare is a wealthy young man and an authority on the occult who describes himself as “the world’s only practising psyc
hic detective”. When he first met Frederica Masters, an extremely attractive and gifted materialistic medium, he at once realised the enormous psychic power she possessed and convinced her that by becoming his assistant she could fulfil her potential. Despite their friendly bickering with each other, Fred and Francis are consulted by clients who need their unique knowledge and gifts to investigate cases involving the supernatural.

  ‘Someone is Dead’ (The Elemental, 1974) was their first adventure from author Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes (1919–2001), and it set the tone for all the subsequent stories in the series with the authors’ trademark blend of horror and humour. This is best exemplified by such titles as ‘The Wailing Waif of Battersea’ (1975), ‘The Headless Footman of Hadleigh’ (1977), ‘The Gibbering Ghoul of Gomershal’ (1980), ‘The Astral Invasion’ (1984), ‘The Phantom Axeman of Carleton Grange’ (1986) and ‘The Cringing Couple of Clavering’ (1988).

  Published in 1993, the novel The Psychic Detective revealed how Fred and Francis first met and, for a while, was destined to be a Hammer Film Production. A final short story featuring the duo, ‘The Fundamental Elemental’, appeared in The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes (aka Looking for Something to Suck and Other Vampire Stories, 1997).

  HE WAS A tall, lean young man with a pale face and the smile of one who is hiding his natural shyness under a mask of easy self-confidence. The girl by his side was extremely pretty: ash blonde hair, white skin, and wearing an expression of cynical amusement as though her blue eyes had seen more than her years warranted. In contrast to her companion’s neat black suit, she wore a colourful costume that bordered on the bizarre. The mauve blouse had a dangerous split down the centre that revealed the valley between her breasts; there was a corresponding parting at the rear which offered the masculine eye a tantalizing glimpse of a white, smooth back. The black miniskirt was the stunted offspring of a broad belt and her splendid, nylon-clad legs riveted every man’s attention and raised a storm of feminine envy.

  “I,” announced the young man, “am Francis St. Clare, the world’s only practising psychic detective.”

  He paused, as though to allow time for applause, then nodded in the girl’s direction. “This is my assistant, Frederica Masters. She answers to Fred.”

  The silence suggested embarrassment. Six people looked, first questioningly at each other, then back at the ill-matched couple standing just within the open doorway. At last a plump young man with receding hair came forward and held out a soft, moist hand.

  “I’m Reggie Smith.”

  Francis St. Clare briefly touched the offered hand and said: “Pleased to meet you,” while the girl nodded.

  “We are delighted you could come.” Reggie Smith poured out the statement. “Delighted and relieved. When we read your advertisement in The Ghost Hunter’s Weekly, I said to my wife …”

  “That’s me,” an equally plump young woman stated. “I’m Betty.”

  Francis murmured that he was charmed and the girl nodded again.

  “I said to Betty,” Reggie went on, “this is the man for us. Didn’t I, Betty?”

  “You sure did,” his wife nodded violently. “Your very words.”

  “Can we sit down?” Fred spoke for the first time and there was a fusillade of “Sorry,” “Of course,” until soon they were seated in a circle, eight voices searching for something to say.

  “I expect you’ll want to hear all about the—er—phenomenon,” Reggie suggested at length.

  “No.” Francis produced a gold cigarette case, fitted a cigarette into a grotesquely long holder and lit it with a lighter that was shaped like a miniature coffin. “No. Eyewitness accounts are never accurate. They embellish, over-dramatise. If there is a psychic phenomenon here, I prefer to see and hear it with an unbiased mind. Tell me about the setup.”

  “Setup?” Reggie raised his eyebrows and looked questioningly round the circle with an amused smile. “We all live here.”

  “I didn’t imagine you were visiting.” Francis watched a smoke ring drift up to the ceiling. “But are you all related, or what? This is a large house and, frankly, none of you are my idea of county.”

  A large man near the fireplace grunted and a petite little brunette next to him said “Indeed” in tone of voice which suggested a knife being drawn across ice.

  “We are three separate couples that share,” Reggie Smith explained. “The housing problem is pretty acute nearer town, so we all got together and bought this place. It is divided into three reasonably large apartments and altogether it works very well.”

  “Do you swap?” Fred asked.

  “I beg your pardon!” The big man all but exploded and Francis smiled.

  “You mustn’t mind Fred. She’s naturally depraved. Now, I think it might help if I knew all your names.”

  “Surely.” Reggie motioned to the large man. “This is Roland Taylor and next to him is his wife, Nina. Roland is chief clerk at Hackett’s Designs.”

  “How’s the designing business?” Francis enquired.

  “Fair,” Roland grunted and Nina smiled sweetly.

  “And this,” Reggie said, indicating a red-haired young man who sat beside a cool, serene young creature with the face of a Madonna, “is Jennifer and Leslie Halliday.”

  “Your occupation?” Francis asked.

  “Chartered accountant,” Leslie Halliday replied, “and I don’t believe in the supernatural.”

  “Indeed.” Francis flicked ash onto the carpet and Betty Smith hastened to put an ashtray on the arm of his chair. “Suppose you were to meet a headless man in the back garden, what would be your reaction?”

  “I’d look for an explanation,” Leslie said shortly.

  “Very sensible. Now, you er—Reggie, how do you earn the necessary crust?”

  “I’m a car salesman.”

  “I see.” Francis sat back and stared thoughtfully at the fireplace.

  “We have a chief clerk, a chartered accountant and a car salesman all living in a haunted house. One might say the mundane married to the outrageous. What time does the phenomenon occur?”

  “Anywhere from nine o’clock to midnight,” Reggie replied in a low voice.

  “Good.” Francis consulted a gold wristwatch. “That gives us time to bath, shave and eat dinner. Tell me, do you eat separately, or en masse?”

  “All together in the original dining-room,” Reggie stated. “It’s more economical and labour saving.”

  “Right, if you will kindly show us to our room, we’ll prepare for the worst.”

  “I’ve prepared two rooms,” Betty Smith said coyly.

  “Fine,” Francis nodded. “We don’t sleep together.”

  “Only on alternate Sundays,” Fred added.

  *

  The dining-room was oak-panelled and rather gloomy. The long table wore two white starched table-clothes; a collection of neatly placed plates and stainless-steel cutlery reminded Francis of a well-dressed hardware shop, and two tall wax candles assisted the overhead chandelier in keeping the shadows at bay. Everyone had “dressed”. That is to say, the men wore mass-produced dinner jackets and the women long evening gowns. Francis was attired in faultless evening dress, while Fred appeared in a glittering silver creation that approached the frontiers of near nudity by having a strip of material at the front, leaving the back and ribs bare. The other three women greeted this apparition with unmistakable signs of disapproval, which was wasted on the recipient who seated herself at the table and examined the empty plates with greedy expectancy.

  “What’s all this, then? Fast day at the monastery?”

  “Really, Fred,” Francis sighed. “One can’t take you anywhere.” He apologised to the assembly. “Sorry about this, but she is a genius, and is only trying to let you know. Shall we get on? I’d like to be well fortified before whatever happens—happens.”

  There was a slight easing of the tension and Betty Smith rang a small brass cowbell, which was a signal for the door to open and a large raw-boned girl to
enter, pushing a loaded food trolley.

  “This is someone I haven’t met,” Francis said.

  “Gertrude,” Reggie announced. “She does for us.”

  “How-dew,” Gertrude announced, placing a plate of soup in front of Fred. “I does for them.”

  “Has Gertrude experienced the phenomenon?” Francis enquired, wagging an admonishing finger at Fred who had already laid eager hand to spoon.

  “She leaves before nine,” Reggie stated.

  “Nutting,” Gertrude said, apparently anxious to stress her non-observation, “nutting would make me stay in this ’orrible ’ouse after dark.”

  “Why?” Francis asked.

  “It’s bleeding ’aunted.” Gertrude presented Reggie with the final plate of soup and departed.

  “Not very bright,” Betty informed Francis. “She’s never seen anything, but imagines a lot.”

  “But she’s rather sweet.” Nina Taylor smiled at Francis and thereby earned herself a glare from Fred.

  “What do you know about your house?” The world’s only practising psychic detective addressed the entire table. “For example, how old is it?”

  “Pretty old.” Roland sipped his soup with an expression of distaste. “Too much salt again. Elizabethan, I’d say.”

  “Balls,” said Fred, scraping her plate with fast-moving spoon.

  The shocked silence was broken by Francis saying softly: “Fred does the research. Never go on a job until we’ve looked into the background.”

  “Pseudo-Elizabethan,” Fred went on, examining with a critical eye the plate of roast beef which Gertrude deposited before her. “Built in 1880.”

  “Oh.” Reggie Smith looked depressed, then he brightened. “I could have sworn the estate agent chap said it was genuine Elizabethan, but he must have meant the original house.”

  “Prison,” said Fred, attacking the roast beef.

  “Pardon!”

  “This house was built on the site of a 17th-century prison. It was knocked down in 1830. Your place was shoved up fifty years later.”

  “That’s what made me decide to take the case,” Francis explained. “You get a lot of interesting phenomena on the sites of old prisons. Do you remember the case of the headless strangler of Marshalsea, Fred?”