The Heirloom

by Graham Masterton

  ‘The same thing happened to Sam Jessop. He acquired great success and even greater wealth when he bought the Devil’s chair. In only a few years, he managed to build Jessop’s into the third most profitable aerospace corporation in the world. But, he also acquired Bright’s disease. And that’s why he made the arrangement.’

  David got up to pour himself another drink, but I said clearly, ‘No more, David. Not until you’ve finished telling us.’

  David hesitated, looked at his empty glass, and then shrugged and sat down again. ‘Very well. The arrangement that Sam Jessop made was simple. He stipulated that he should live for at least another ten years; and that he should immediately be able to dispose of the chair without it coming back to him. I think he’d tried to sell it once or twice in the past, but it just wouldn’t leave.’

  ‘But what did the chair demand in return? It didn’t let him have all that for nothing.’

  ‘No. It didn’t. It demanded the life of his son.’

  I frowned at David incredulously. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that Sam Jessop asked the chair for ten years of life as a sick cripple, and that in exchange he was prepared to see his son killed? His only son?’

  ‘That’s the way it was.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. No father would possibly –’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ David interrupted me. ‘Some fathers would, and have. Sam Jessop never got on particularly well with Martin. He’s always been a stubborn, unlovable, domineering man, and even before he came across the Devil’s chair he believed he had a divine right to do whatever he damned well liked. The Devil’s chair made him worse. As Martin told me – when Sam Jessop was struggling, he was obnoxious; but when he was rich, he was intolerable. Besides that, you have to realise that Sam made a classic error in his agreement with the chair. He asked for ten years of life, but he forgot to specify healthy life. So what he’s faced with is ten years of suffering from acute Bright’s disease. When he offered his son’s life, he thought he was going to get a very much better bargain than he actually did.’

  Sara shook her head. ‘Whatever kind of bargain he got, good or bad, how on earth could he have sacrificed his own son?’

  David lifted his hands to show that he didn’t really understand Sam Jessop’s sense of morality any more than we did.

  ‘If you know that Sam Jessop has arranged to give his son’s life to the Devil,’ I said, ‘then surely Martin Jessop knows it, too.’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was his mother who told him, actually. She never liked Martin very much, either. But when she found out what Sam had done, she couldn’t keep quiet about it. Martin was in Hamburg at the time, and his mother called him up and told him all about it.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘How would you have reacted, if your father had done it to you? First of all he didn’t believe it. But during his college years he’d seen enough of the Devil’s chair to convince him that it had some kind of influence in the house. And so, gradually, he realised that what his mother had told him was actually true, and that his own father had sold his life in exchange for his own.’

  ‘This couldn’t have happened very long ago,’ said Sara.

  ‘No, it didn’t. Only ten days ago. But as soon as he knew, Martin telephoned me and told me to make every effort to get hold of the chair, so that he could try to reverse the deal, or maybe qualify it in some way. Then he took the risk of flying back to California, and he arrived on Monday.’

  ‘What’s this carrier he talked about on the phone? And what’s going to be ready the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s nothing.’

  ‘David,’ I warned him. ‘I want to know everything – everything – or else I’m going to vandalise this apartment like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Ricky. It’s crucial to Martin’s life. Right now, he’s hiding away in a beach house at La Jolla, making sure that he doesn’t go anywhere near anything dangerous, like knives or electric plugs or automobiles. He’s pretty sure that the chair is going to try to kill him when he’s flying his private Cessna…it’ll look more like a genuine accident that way…but he’s not taking any risks.’

  ‘David,’ I said, with menacing softness, ‘every single detail of what’s going on here is my business. Jonathan makes it my business. And unless you tell me what’s happening, I’m going to crucify this whole deal. I mean, don’t you think old man Jessop would like to hear what you’re trying to pull?’

  ‘You wouldn’t. A sick old man, for the sake of a bright young guy like Martin?’

  ‘You’re talking like a fascist now.’

  ‘The deal includes more than a sick old man, Ricky. I told you earlier that there was something in it for me. Well, there is. Jennifer.’

  ‘Your wife? I thought she was dead.’

  David looked at me with sorrowful eyes. ‘She is. But apparently it’s possible… provided one offers the chair enough in return…to have a loved one restored. Whole and healthy, I might add. Not mutilated, or burned. Whole and healthy.’

  ‘And what, if you don’t mind my asking, is “enough”?’

  David spoke very quickly and abruptly, so British and hurried that I could hardly understand what he was saying. ‘Martin – as you probably know – is senior vice-president in charge of guided weapons at his father’s factory in Phoenix, Arizona. He has the authority to test the new cruise missile however and whenever he decides it’s necessary. He is not, obviously, allowed to test nuclear warheads, not without US Air Force supervision. But he can use a conventional warhead with the force of quite a few hundred pounds of high explosive.’

  He paused, and then he quickly continued, ‘The day after tomorrow, an interdenominational religious conference assembles at the Los Angeles Convention Centre. We believe that if we can get the chair by tomorrow, and make the necessary transactions with it, we can offer it a high bodycount at the Convention Centre in exchange for Martin’s life, and for Jennifer’s revival.’

  Sara and I looked at each other – each of us searching for some kind of reality. Did David actually believe that his dead wife would be returned to him, just as she was the minute before she was splashed with fiery cooking-oil? Did Martin Jessop actually have the gall to consider that his own life was worth more than hundreds of dead and injured worshippers at the Los Angeles Convention Centre?

  And worst of all, how did they propose to get hold of the chair by tomorrow, when the only possible way was for me or one of my family to die?

  I said, to David, ‘I hope you understand that what you’re contemplating is total madness. And I hope you understand that I can stop you. Occult murders are one thing. The police will never believe that anyone could be hurt by a chair. But if you and Martin Jessop try to launch a cruise missile at Los Angeles, then we’ve got something else altogether. We’ve got conspiracy to commit a mass homicide, and a damned great deadly weapon to prove it; and I can call the police and have you stopped.’

  ‘I did take a small precaution,’ said David.

  ‘A precaution? What precaution?’

  ‘When we carried Father Corso out of the house, I unfastened his crucifix. It’s hidden in your house somewhere, and it’s still stained with Father Corso’s blood. If you try to pressure me, Ricky, then just remember that I’ve got a very effective way of pressuring you back. And, as you say, the police will never believe that anyone could be hurt by a chair.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  David nodded. ‘You should. Because I can always prove it to you in the most inconvenient way.’

  ‘I can implicate you, too.’

  ‘How? It was your house. You don’t have any way of proving I was there. I washed all the drinks glasses, remember?’

  ‘Are you really as cold-blooded as you seem to be?’ I asked him.

  He looked me straight in the eye. ‘Ricky,’ he replied, ‘I want my Jennifer back. I know it seems crazy to you. I know that you think I’m morally wrong.
But as far as Jennifer is concerned, my vision is completely distorted. I admit it. And you could talk to me till dawn, and still not be able to persuade me that the lives of a few Christian worshippers, all of whom will be instantly received in the Bosom of Heaven, can in any way be compared to the life of the most beautiful girl who ever lived, and who was once my wife.’

  I finished my drink. Then I stood up, and offered my hand to Sara to help her up, too.

  ‘All right, David,’ I said. ‘If that’s the way you feel about it. But just remember there’s one small snag. You don’t have the chair yet, and unless you have the chair you can’t make any kind of a deal with it. So, until that religious conference is over, I’m not letting you lay one single finger on it, no matter how much of a bad time it’s giving me.’

  David smiled. ‘It’s all futile, you know, all this bravado. You have all the odds stacked against you. Martin Jessop is wealthy enough to have any one of you dealt with quickly and unobtrusively, and the moment one of you is dead, we can take the chair with impunity. Apart from that, the chair itself may well destroy you, and then we won’t have to bother.’

  ‘I’m not giving up yet,’ I snapped.

  ‘You will,’ grinned David.

  We left him where he was, sitting in his chair with a large glass of whisky in his hand, swinging his leg and smiling at us. It was past four o’clock now, still sunny and hot, but the shadows were beginning to lengthen across the pathways and gardens of Presidio Place. We clattered quickly down the concrete stairs to the underground car park, and drove out into the sunshine again with a squeal of tyres.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Sara. She was looking tired and shocked, and I expect I was looking the same.

  ‘We’re going to go home first, and get that chair.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that if David’s serious, and he and Martin Jessop do want the chair that badly, then I’d rather have it right beside us where he can’t get at it. From now on, we’re all going to stick together like a tight little family. You, and me, and Jonathan, and that goddamned hideous piece of furniture.’

  *

  We drove back to the house. The day was growing cooler now, and the garden was strangely filled with purple-throated humming-birds. We stood watching them fluttering around the bushes for a moment as if they were an omen of misfortune, and then we went inside to collect the chair.

  The chair was waiting for us in the living-room. It seemed taller than before, darker, even more threatening. The man-serpent almost seemed to be welcoming us back with a smile of unholy satisfaction. It may have been my own imagination, playing tricks on me, because now I knew the terrifying price I was going to have to pay to get rid of it. Sara knew too, although she hadn’t said anything during the drive out from San Diego.

  I couldn’t let the chair take Jonathan, and I certainly wasn’t going to let it take Sara. So the only way I was going to be able to rid my family of that horrific chair was to sacrifice myself. Maybe not now, maybe not for years. It would depend what kind of uneasy relationship the chair and I could work out between us. Certainly I would have to start using its evil powers in one way or another, if only to keep it busy and content, and to direct its malevolence away from me and my family.

  We stood staring at the chair for a long time, hand in hand.

  ‘I wonder why Henry Grant chose to leave it with us,’ said Sara.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out. Maybe we were the nearest antique dealers he could find. We’re listed in the California Antique Dealers’ Register, you know – home address and all.’

  ‘He must have been in a terrible panic to get rid of it.’

  ‘I expect he was. Although he must have had some idea of what the chair was all about before he bought it. Remember he left a message with his office before he came down here from Santa Barbara, telling them that they mustn’t accept the chair back from anyone, under any circumstances.’

  ‘And then he died in that road accident,’ said Sara.

  ‘Accident? Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Everything that happens involving this chair seems to be part of some deliberate plan. I just wish I knew what the hell the plan was.’

  Sara looked around the room. There was no trace of the violence that had taken place there in the early hours of the morning, except for a damp patch on the rug where I had painstakingly washed out Father Corso’s blood. The fireplace had been swept and relaid, and the crispy shell of the Devil’s familiar had been buried in the garden. Still – there was a chilly and unpleasant atmosphere – and a curious smell that was alien to both of us. It was bitter, and acrid, and it gave me a taste in my mouth that reminded me of the salted-up plates of old car batteries.

  On the wall, the shark in the Copley painting was only inches away from the silently screaming mariner, and the hooded figure in the Stuart portrait had begun to cross the stretch of open ground between the woods and was now only twenty or thirty feet away from the terrified colonial gentleman in black. The hooded creature’s face was still invisible, but a greyish kind of tube seemed to be dangling out of the darkness of its robes.

  Sara examined both paintings without saying a word. I came up behind her and laid my hands on her shoulders. ‘The gradual approach of inescapable doom,’ I remarked. She turned and looked at me and her eyes were bright with anxiety.

  ‘You’re going to think this all out, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re not going to try any rash heroics?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve never been given to heroics, rash or otherwise.’

  ‘You mean a lot to us, that’s all,’ said Sara. ‘I know it seems as if the only way we’re ever going to get rid of this chair is for one of us to die… but there have to be other ways. Remember David’s friend Williams? He was able to get rid of the chair after his mistress died, David’s wife. So it doesn’t look as if you necessarily have to be related for the sacrifice to count.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked her. ‘Free to sacrifice someone else, so that we can stay alive?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Well, maybe I did mean it. When it comes down to the bottom line, I’m afraid that I’d prefer somebody else to die rather than one of us. Especially rather than you. I love you, and I can’t help it.’

  I wearily pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. ‘Well, I don’t know. Right now I don’t have any ideas of how we’re going to get rid of this chair at all. And right now we’ve got the problem of smuggling it into the hospital so that David can’t lay his hands on it.’

  ‘It would come fight back to us even if he did.’

  ‘Maybe it would, and maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t trust David a centimetre, if you want my feelings in metric. If he’s willing to let loose a guided missile on a crowded convention hall, then he’s willing to try any kind of deal with the Devil to wrest the chair away from us… and that would include bumping one of us off.’

  ‘You really think he’s serious about the missile? It sounds so far-fetched.’

  ‘Darling,’ I told her, ‘he wants his Jennifer back. Fanatically. And Martin Jessop obviously has no intention of dying for the sake of his father, or for anyone else’s sake, either. Okay – it could be nothing but some kind of nutty scenario that David’s created in his head. But Martin Jessop does have access to missiles, and there is going to be a religious convention in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the whole thing could easily be covered up as a tragic mistake. Systems failure, computer breakdown, or something like that. They’re always testing missiles out over the Pacific, or at China Lake. If one went off course, they’d have to hold an enquiry, naturally. But if Martin Jessop knows his missiles, he must have worked out a way to cover the crime up afterwards.

  Sara looked away. ‘It’s like a nightmare,’ she said. ‘I keep feeling that I must be asleep, and that I’m dreaming all of this.’

  I kissed her. ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and pack some more clothes? A couple of shi
rts for me, too. I’ll see if I can load the chair on to the wagon.’

  She glanced up the stairs. ‘You’re sure it’s safe up there? No Devil’s bugs, or anything like that?’

  ‘If there are, scream.’

  ‘Oh, I shall,’ she promised me, fervently. ‘I shall.’

  When she was gone, I took a deep breath and went back across the room to face the chair. It was smiling down at me with bared fangs. Down at me – from almost six-and-a-half feet. It had grown nearly six inches, and the confusion of damned souls who plummeted down the length of its splat now seemed to have been stretched, like characters by El Greco. I was aware of a wavering in the air all around it, like the rippling of heat over a charcoal barbecue.

  ‘Listen,’ it whispered, somewhere in the recesses of my cortex.

  ‘Listen to what? To more lies?’

  ‘I know of the arrangement for the slaying of Christian souls.’

  I looked at it carefully. ‘You know about that? How?’

  ‘The thoughts of the man called Sears are transparent.’

  ‘So? What about it?’

  ‘I have been thinking it over, and the arrangement is an interesting one.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure it is. To someone who likes torturing innocent priests and threatening young children, the idea of blowing up a few hundred religious pilgrims must seem like a regular beanfeast.’

  ‘Your bravado is childish.’

  ‘So people keep telling me.’

  ‘In any event… the priest called Corso was not innocent…I cannot harm the innocent…only those who have sinned. And you would be surprised how gravely your Father Corso had sinned…’