The Heirloom

by Graham Masterton

  We both tried to make a grab for Father Corso’s arms, but they windmilled around as if they were on stiff frenetic hinges, and we were knocked away.

  ‘Oh, God!’ screeched Father Corso. ‘Oh, Holy Mother, save me!’

  I took a couple of steps back, and then charged at the priest in a flying football-tackle. But as my shoulder collided with his hip-bone, I felt him being plucked out of my grasp with all the speed and all the violence of a subway train hurtling out of a station. He was tossed clear across the room, and slammed up against the opposite wall with a thunderous crack that must have broken most of his ribs.

  ‘Save me!’ he gibbered. ‘Save me!’

  He was hurtled back across the room, and collided with the side of the chimney-breast. Blood sprayed up the wall, and I saw a broken arm-bone thrust itself right through the skin of his elbow.

  ‘Save – me – save-me-save-!’ he shrieked. But the Devil had him now, and the Devil was determined to destroy him.

  Helplessly, David and I watched as Father Corso was smashed from wall to wall. He tumbled and flew as if he were being thrown in a hideous and sadistic wrestling-match. It rained blood, and there was nothing we could do but stand there in that grisly shower and witness Father Corso’s brutal death like spectators at a macabre prize-fight. I looked at David and there were splashes of blood all over his shirt, and across his forehead, and he was staring in horrified fascination at the priest’s flying body, as numb and as disbelieving as I was.

  Father Corso was still whimpering and begging and screaming for help when he was dragged by forces that we couldn’t see towards the fire. The embers had all crumbled away now, but the white ashes were still hot enough to sear meat on, or char a fresh-cut log. His eyes were swollen and bruised from their violent battering, but he was able to see where the Devil was pulling him, and he let out a moan of despair that, months later, still gave me nightmares.

  I rushed towards him, and tried to tug him away from the fire, but I was knocked back by an invisible blow that felt like a fierce gust of wind.

  For one moment, Father Corso knelt up straight in front of the fire, his broken hands clasped together in a mockery of prayer. He couldn’t have been holding his hands up there himself, because both his arms were broken in several places, and the pain that ‘prayer’ must have cost him was unimaginable. But the Devil was reminding him of the price of trusting in God.

  David, behind me, whispered, ‘He can’t…’

  Gradually, impossibly, Father Corso bent forward over the ashes of the fire. Soon, his bare face was only six or seven inches away from it, and I could see the skin on his cheeks puckering and twisting in the heat. He was trying to cry out, trying to breathe, but the heat above the ashes was so fierce that he couldn’t manage anything except a high, terrified panting.

  Then, with ugly finality, his face was pushed right into the hottest part of the hearth. He fought for a few seconds, and I couldn’t even begin to think what agony he was having to endure. But then he keeled over sideways, his face mercifully hidden by the side of my armchair, and it was clear that he was dead.

  David stood up. He reached for a cigarette, lit it, and let out a long expressive breath.

  ‘Now we know,’ he said, with bitter conviction.

  ‘Now we know what?’

  ‘Now we know why the trilobite attacked you. The chair wanted you to call for Father Corso, with the specific intention of killing him in front of your eyes.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say, exactly. I’m not a mystic. But my guess is that the chair wanted to demonstrate that it can’t be defeated or dismissed, even by the ritual of exorcism.’

  ‘And what good could that possibly do?’ I asked him.

  David puffed at his cigarette. ‘The chair wants you to do something for it. In order to manoeuvre you into a position where you’re willing to help it out, it has to show you that there are no possible alternatives. Exorcism was going to be your last resort, wasn’t it? Well, now the chair has made quite certain that you don’t have any resorts at all.’

  I walked around the sofa and stared at the chair with utter hostility and loathing. It took all of my self-discipline not to pick it up and smash it to pieces. But, for all I knew, I would have been smashing Jonathan to pieces at the same time, or Sara, and I wasn’t going to give old man Jessop’s demonic chair the pleasure of doing that.

  ‘I’ve never hated anything in my life before,’ I told David. ‘But, by God, I hate this chair.’

  ‘I think it wants you to,’ David replied. ‘So that when you have to grovel for its help on your hands and knees, it will be able to remind you, and make you eat your hatred, word by word.’

  I turned around, although I could still feel the man-serpent’s eyes on me. ‘Get me another drink,’ I said. ‘Then we’d better work out what we’re going to tell the police about Father Corso.’

  *

  Three hours later, just as the sky was beginning to pale, we drove out along the winding road that leads from Rancho Santa Fe to the Pacific Ocean, David a few feet in front of my Impala in Father Corso’s Volkswagen Rabbit, and both of us driving without lights.

  We reached a sharp left-hand curve in the road. On one side, there was a rough brake of bamboo. On the other, a forty-foot drop down reddish, eroded banks, and then a tangle of chokeberries. I flashed David once with my headlights, and he drew in to the side. I drew the Impala up behind him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked him, leaving my wagon and walking along the edge of the road to join him. The morning air was sharp and crisp, and I shivered in my short-sleeved shirt.

  David was tugging Father Corso’s body into the driver’s seat, and trying to jam his stiffened feet on to the pedals. As I came up, I tried not to look at Father Corso’s face.

  ‘That’s one drive I won’t forget in a hurry,’ said David. He stood straight, and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his shirtsleeve.

  ‘You’re sure this is going to work?’ I asked him.

  ‘My dear boy, you can never be sure of anything,’ he said. ‘But the engine’s hot, and I shall cut the fuel line, and I shall be very surprised if the car doesn’t catch fire. Now, why don’t you turn your wagon around, and reverse into it, so you won’t get any incriminating dents on your front bumper.’

  ‘You’re so expert at this, anybody would swear you’d done it before,’ I remarked.

  He wiped his hands distastefully on the sides of his pants. ‘I’m simply using my head. That’s why my parents mortgaged themselves up to the neck to send me to Lancing.’

  I went back to the Impala, and three-point-turned it on bouncing springs so that it was facing back towards Rancho Santa Fe. Then I waited with the engine running while David reached into Father Corso’s black Rabbit and turned the key. He also took the precaution of shifting the manual gearbox into top, so that it would look as if Father Corso had been driving along the road at a high speed. He wedged the clutch down with the priest’s death-rigid left leg, and then slammed the door.

  ‘Right,’ he said, climbing into the wagon. ‘Back it up and let’s see what happens.’

  Carefully, I backed the wagon up until my rear bumper was touching the rear bumper of the Rabbit. Then I bipped the gas pedal, and pushed the little Volkswagen inexorably through the bushes at the edge of the road, and over the rough stones that bordered the steep crumbling canyon.

  ‘It’s going,’ David told me. ‘It’s going.’

  I gave the gas pedal one more nudge, and then the Rabbit tilted, swayed, and disappeared. We heard a creaking, tearing, crashing sound, and the noise of a whole barrage of branches breaking. Then, there was silence, and darkness.

  ‘It’s not going to blow,’ I said, anxiously.

  We both opened our doors, ready to step out and take a look. But then we heard a deep, rumbling whoompb, and a ball of garish orange fire rolled up into the air, and the Rabbit started to burn furiously.


  ‘Let’s go,’ said David, quietly. I shifted the wagon into second, and drove slowly back on to the highway. Then I engaged Drive, and we sped off towards Rancho Santa Fe as fast as the twisting road would allow.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Do you think the police will take it on its face value?’

  ‘Probably. He was a priest, wasn’t he, with no personal enemies? The very worst they’ll think is that he was accidentally pushed over by a hit-and-run driver. And if they think that, they’ll be looking for cars with damage to the front, or the fenders. Personally, I believe they’ll put it down to accidental death. Priests and menopausal women are notoriously poor insurance risks.’

  I steered the Impala round a tight hairpin, and the tyres complained in unison, like a Sunday-meeting choir. ‘You don’t think we should have simply told the truth?’

  ‘The truth, dear boy? What is the truth? The truth is that you called up a Roman Catholic priest in the middle of the night and asked him to come to your home. The next thing anybody knows, the poor man has been brutally assaulted and killed. And the only people in the house with him at the time were you and me. That, dear boy, is the truth. And I can’t see any jury in the world giving even a minute’s credence to some story about a malevolent chair, can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. Anyway, what difference does it make? We both know damn well that we didn’t kill him ourselves. All we’ve done is give a dignified cremation to a mutilated body. And there’s no law against that, moral or otherwise.’

  I glanced across at him. His face was sweaty and strained in the reflected green lights from the dashboard. ‘I believe there’s a California statute against do-it-yourself burials,’ I said.

  David smiled grimly. ‘Let’s try to deal with this chair first. Then we can worry about statutes.’

  Later in the morning, we drove back into San Diego. David collected his Rolls-Royce in the hospital parking-lot, and went off to Presidio Place to shower and change, with a promise that he would telephone me after lunch. I went up to the eighth floor to see how Jonathan was getting on.

  He was still lying unconscious on his bed, although the dressings on his face had been changed, and now I could see both of his eyes. Sara was sitting sleepily beside him, a discarded copy of Sunset on the floor beside her, and Dr Gopher was busy in the comer of the room with a series of antibiotic injections.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ I said, kissing Sara on the forehead. ‘How’s it been?’

  ‘No change,’ she said, in a weary voice. ‘It’s just like he’s asleep and he won’t wake up.’

  I leaned over Jonathan’s bed and stared at him for almost a minute. Inside of my head, I was trying to compel him to wake up. Wake up, Jonathan, please. Wake up!

  But he continued to lie still and pale, his hair tousled on the pillow, and all I could do was step away from the bed, sad and frustrated, and leave him to his endless dreaming.

  ‘Dr Gopher,’ I said. The doctor looked up from his bottles of antibiotics, and frowned.

  ‘My name’s Dr Rosen,’ he said. Fortunately, I don’t think he realised that I’d gotten into the habit of talking to Sara about him as Dr Gopher just because he looked like one.

  ‘I’m sorry. I – mixed you up with someone else.’

  ‘You want to know how your son is?’ the doctor asked me.

  ‘Is there any improvement?’

  ‘No, no improvement. But no deterioration, either. His body is functioning perfectly normally in all respects – respiration, heartbeat, digestive functions, everything. If he wasn’t comatose, I’d say that he was an extremely healthy young man.’

  ‘Are you going to try any more stimulus tests?’

  ‘Oh, sure. Your wife will tell you that we tried a new programme of stimulation last night. Stroboscopic lights, music, minor electrical shocks, a whole battery of different stimuli. So far, of course, we haven’t had any response. But I’m sure that we will.’

  I said to Sara, ‘How about coming out for some lunch? We can leave the number of the restaurant with the switchboard here.’

  She stood up. ‘I think I’d like that. I haven’t really eaten properly for two days. Then maybe we could go home for the rest of the afternoon, and come back tonight.’

  I hesitated, thinking about the chair. Then I said, ‘Sure, why not? It’ll give you a break.’

  We were walking down the hospital corridor when a short squat man with fierce black hair and glasses came jogging along after us. ‘Mr Delatolla?’ he puffed. ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  He thumbed through a sheaf of papers he was carrying, and tugged one sheet out for me. ‘I’m the hospital treasurer, sir. John Jarman. I wanted to give you your charges up to date.’

  I took the bill and glanced down it. Private room, $500 a day; auxiliary room for one night, $125; medical supplies, $756; professional charges, $950; nursing charges, $320; commissary charges, $78.50.

  ‘I’ll bring you a cheque when I come back to the hospital tonight,’ I said. ‘That’s unless you charge interest by the hour.’

  ‘Tonight will be fine, Mr Delatolla.’

  It was a vivid, glaring day, with only a single cloud close to the western horizon. I took Sara to a northern Italian restaurant called the Old Trieste, in Clairemont close to San Diego’s Old Town. The Old Trieste is more like a New York restaurant than a California restaurant, with dark leather booths where lovers and veeps can meet in quiet and private. We drank a bottle of fresh dry Corvo, and ate veal Fiorentino. We didn’t talk much.

  ‘Do you really want to go back to the house?’ I asked Sara.

  ‘The chair’s there?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘I can’t go on running away from it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to face up to it some time. Both of us have.’

  ‘If I knew what it wanted, at least I could get it all over with,’ I said, laying down my knife and fork.

  ‘I still think we ought to call in Father Corso,’ said Sara.

  I took a small sip of wine, and lowered my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe we could.’

  I looked up again, and Sara was staring at me curiously.

  ‘Is that it?’ she wanted to know. ‘Just “maybe we could”?’

  ‘What else do you want me to say?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But you sounded funny. Don’t you think that Father Corso could give us some advice? There has to be somebody in the church who knows about things like this. Maybe he could put us in touch with them.’

  I tried to look as non-committal as possible.

  ‘Well, say something,’ Sara demanded. ‘Do you think we ought to talk to Father Corso or not?’

  I glanced at the people eating in the next booth. They were busy arguing about the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park, and I didn’t think they were going to take much notice of anything I was saying. So quietly, I said to Sara, ‘I already talked to Father Corso. Last night.’

  ‘You did? And what did he say?’

  ‘He came over to the house.’

  ‘He believed you?’

  ‘Not at first. But then he saw the chair for himself.’

  ‘So what did he do? Ricky, tell me!’

  I pressed my fingers to my forehead. I felt as if I had a migraine coming on. ‘He tried to exorcise the chair. At least, that’s what it seemed like. He was reciting some kind of stuff about God commanding thee, and thou art dismissed, and quit this place. Stuff like that.’

  Sara reached across the table and held my wrist. ‘So what happened?’

  I couldn’t look at her. I knew that Father Corso’s death wasn’t my fault, but I still felt responsible because I’d called him up to the house when I knew, or at least I should have known, that an attempted exorcism was exactly what the chair had wanted.

  ‘The chair – killed him. Threw him around the room as if he didn’t weigh anything more than Jonathan’s Raggedy Andy. Then it pushed
his face right into the fire.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Sara. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘I didn’t want to upset you more than you’re upset already.’

  ‘But what have you done? Have you told the police that he’s dead?’

  I looked quickly at the next booth to make sure that none of the diners there was half-listening. Then I said, ‘We couldn’t. It looked just like we’d beaten him up ourselves. They would have locked us up on a first-degree homicide charge.’

  ‘So what have you done?’

  ‘We arranged an accident. We pushed Father Corso’s car off the road, and it burned out.’

  ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, it was my idea. David helped me. So, in the eyes of the law, we’re both as guilty as all hell.’

  Sara looked as if she were about to cry, but she remained dry-eyed. She had cried enough tears for Jonathan, and there was nothing left. By the look of her, she was beginning to feel the same numbness that a constant condition of fright and despair had already brought over me. You can’t stay in high key all the time. You just run out of adrenalin, and strength.

  ‘Can you pour me some more wine, please?’ Sara asked. ‘Then I think I’d like to go back to the house.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive. That chair’s already torn my life to pieces. It’s not going to keep me out of my own home.’

  8

  Threatenings

  Before we drove back to Rancho Santa Fe, I decided to call by Presidio Place arid tell David where we were going. I had tried to telephone him from the restaurant, but his line had been constantly busy.

  Presidio Place is one of those expensive private adult communities, set in a landscaped park with artificial lakes and carefully-planted willows and tennis courts. No children, no dogs, no beach-bums, and nobody with a less-than-substantial income. I’m surprised they even allow Democrats.

  I left the San Diego Freeway at the Mission Valley Freeway turn-off, and then turned off left again on to Hotel Circle and Fashion Valley Road. The afternoon was growing dusty and hot, and I had the air-conditioning in the wagon turned down to cold.