I wiped sweat away from my face with my handkerchief. Even though the living-room was cold, I felt as if I were burning up. Almost malarial.
‘I’m taking you down to the hospital,’ I said. ‘Whatever I happen to feel about you, I don’t want you stolen or damaged.’
‘Wait, listen––’
I grasped the chair’s arms. They rolled and slithered in my hands, but I kept hold of them.
‘I don’t want to listen,’ I said. ‘I’m not even sure if you’re really talking or not. More likely, I’m going out of my mind.’
‘The agreement interests me,’ insisted the chair. ‘It interests me enough to let you survive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I am usually passed from hand to hand by means of a ritual sacrifice. One of my owner’s loved ones has to die. That is part of my destiny…part of the conditions which were laid down when I was first created…but I do not necessarily have to insist on a sacrifice if another arrangement can be reached.’
I straightened up. ‘What are you trying to tell me? That you won’t harm any of us? Not me, nor Sara, nor Jonathan? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
‘The agreement envisaged by the man called Jessop would bring me more than a hundred souls in one day. A ritual sacrifice in your family would bring me only one.’
I was trembling now, partly with fear and partly with excitement. For the first time since Sunday, I actually saw a way of getting off the hook – of getting rid of the chair without any more pain or death or horror. At least, not in my house… and not in my family.
‘I will suggest a bargain with you…’ whispered the chair. ‘If you take me now and give me to the man called Sears, I will release you from your ritual obligations, and awaken your son from his sleep.’
‘Is that a promise?’
‘That is more than a promise. It is a solemn guarantee. We will draw up the papers in the ways of old, in magic runes, and we shall sign them with living memory.’
Sara appeared at the top of the stairs. She said, ‘Are you talking to someone?’ but I raised my hand to show her that I wanted her to be quiet for a moment. She stood and watched me in fascination and, horror.
‘You’ll have to give me time,’ I asked the chair.
‘I will give you no time at all. You will have to decide now. Your decision will not be any the less drastic for being postponed.’
‘What if I don’t agree to give you to Sears?’
‘Then I shall demand your son’s life. Even now, he dreams in the cold vestibules of hell… he is close to me already… it would be a matter of snuffing out a candle that is already burning low…that is all.’
‘You can’t take Jonathan. He’s only six years old. He hasn’t even lived yet.’
‘I have made my decision. I shall take your son.’
‘I won’t allow it. Take me instead.’
‘Your life is a grey remnant compared with that of your son.’
‘You can’t take him!’ I shouted. ‘You can take me now if you want to – right now, right this second! But you’re not going to take Jonathan!’
‘How much do you want me to take your life? asked the chair.
I was terrified now. My whole system was bursting with adrenalin, and I knew that within a matter of seconds I could actually be killed. It was like sitting in the passenger seat of a car that has gone wildly out of control, watching a concrete rampart come blurring and sliding towards you. You think: Jesus, I’m going to die.
‘I don’t want you to take Jonathan, that’s all.’
‘How much do you want me to take your life?
‘Totally, if you have to take it.’
‘Do you beg me to take it?
‘I beg you.’
‘Get down on your knees and beg me.’
Shaking, I bent my knees and knelt in front of the chair. ‘I beg you to take my life,’ I said, with a throat crammed with fur.
‘You fool,’ gloated the chair. ‘Why should I take your life when I could have a choice young life like that of your son?’
‘Take my life!’ I shouted desperately. ‘Kill me! Just get it over with and leave my family alone!’
I bent double, my forehead pressed against the floor. My fists were clenched and my teeth were gritted and all I was trying to do inside of my mind was blank out anything and everything – fear, love, happiness, pain, humiliation – so that when the chair took me I would be nothing but a human cipher. Mindless, thoughtless, gone.
I heard Sara running down the stairs. She grabbed hold of me and tried to raise my head up.
‘Take me!’ I yelled to the chair.
‘No!’ shrieked Sara. ‘No, Ricky, you can’t! Ricky, for the love of God, don’t!’
I knelt up, trembling, and she held me tight in her arms. ‘Ricky, you mustn’t. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘It wants to take Jonathan,’ I told her, croakily.
‘But just now…when I was listening to you from upstairs… you were saying something about it not hurting any of us.’
I stared at her intently. ‘It won’t. It won’t touch a hair on our heads. Just so long as we deliver it to David.’
‘Then we’ll deliver it to David.’
‘If we deliver it to David, then David will let the missile loose. That’s what the chair wants. More bloodshed, more death, more sacrifices. It said that human sacrifices are part of its destiny.’
‘You don’t know any of those people at the convention,’ Sara pleaded with me. ‘They could be anybody. Anybody at all. Why should you give up your life for people you don’t even know? You didn’t ask to have the chair left here, did you? Why should you accept the responsibility for a fate you didn’t choose?’
‘People are always having to accept the responsibility for fates they didn’t choose,’ I said, although with less conviction than I had before. ‘It’s part of what makes people human, instead of animals.’
‘So David Sears and Martin Jessop can behave like animals, and you have to suffer for it? Not just you – Jonathan and me, too. Is that it?’
‘Sara, hundreds of people are going to die unless someone does something to change this situation. And the only person who can do anything about it is me.’
‘Hundreds of people are going to die in road accidents this year. You can’t help it. It’s not your responsibility. Hundreds of people are going to be killed by murderers and muggers. You can’t help it. And even if you could – would you? Would you go in front of a firing squad if it could save the lives of everybody who was going to die in a road accident next year? You wouldn’t, would you? You wouldn’t even consider it.’
‘But, Sara, this is different.’
‘How is it different? Tell me.’
I closed my eyes. I felt as if I’d been through a full course of frontal lobotomy. ‘It’s different because it’s real. It’s different because I can actually save those people’s lives.’
‘Why don’t you tell the police? Have them stopped?’
‘Because if the chair doesn’t get its ration of dead bodies, it’s going to come back here looking for its ritual due.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
I looked at the chair, and I didn’t have to ask it directly whether it would return to Rancho Santa Fe seeking its sacrifice or not. I knew in my bones that it would. And I also knew that it would be as angry as all hell, and that would mean torture, and agony, as well as death.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure.’
Sara stroked the back of my hand, as if my veins were a puzzle which she was trying to decipher.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘You have no time,’ whispered the chair. ‘Decide now, or I will decide for you. Your son is so near to death already.’
I stood up, and walked across the living-room. Whatever I decided, the chair would get what it wanted. Hadn’t it gotten just what it had wanted out of me? It had predicted that I would crawl across
the floor and beg, and I had. It had actually forced me to plead for death, and at that particular moment I had wanted death as much as Williams had wanted money, and Sam Jessop had wanted his business to grow, and as much as David Sears wanted his Jennifer back.
But the chair hadn’t struck me down straight away. Although it was insisting there was no more time, it was still holding off. And the only reason it was holding off was because it thirsted for those hundreds of convention delegates more than it thirsted for me. Maybe, in that grisly preference, I had a lever, a way out. Maybe I was simply making excuses for choosing that my family and I should live. Cowardice and bravery are the most complicated emotions of all. At least they seem that way when you’re scared.
‘Now,’ said the chair. ‘Now, or never.’
I looked down at the rug. There was still a pinkish hue there, where Father Corso’s hip had burst open.
‘All right,’ I agreed, so quietly that Sara could hardly catch what I was saying. ‘I’ll take you down to David Sears as soon as we’ve packed our clothes.’
Three things happened then, immediately. It felt as if the room were suddenly crowded with invisible demons, drawing closer with their rustling wings. Sara, alarmed by the sensation, stood up, and held on to my arm.
Across the clear green waters of the Copley painting, blood began to spread. The shark had tom off the mariner’s shoulder and part of his head, and the mariner’s friends were so far away now that they could scarcely be seen. In the Stuart portrait, the hooded figure was now standing right behind the colonial gentleman, and there was an expression of intense pain on the colonial gentleman’s face. Through his severe black vest, a coiled shape was emerging, like a grey-coloured tube, glistening with abdominal mucus.
Something else happened, too. Out of the crevice at the back of the chair’s black-leather seat, a sheaf of parchmenty-looking paper emerged, with a soft crackling noise, and then floated across the room on an unfelt draught, sheet after tumbling sheet. Sara and I collected it up, and then tried to read what was written on it.
There was line after line of curious characters, seven pages of them in all.
‘What do they mean?’ asked Sara. ‘I don’t understand them at all.’
‘They’re runes,’ I told her. ‘The magic writing of spells, and of agreements with the Devil.’
‘You really believe it’s the Devil? Like, the medieval Devil?’
‘The Devil was never exclusively medieval,’ I said. ‘He takes on whatever shape we humans care to give Him. Sam Jessop thought of him as a kind of moral Black Hole – utterly negative but also totally attractive.’
‘And how do you think of Him?’
I scanned the handful of runic papers. ‘Right now,’ I said, ‘I only have to look in the mirror.’
9
Bargainings
That night, the chair was so light that I could carry it by myself with ease. I loaded it carefully into the back of the wagon, and this time, by some curious distortion of size and space, I didn’t have to tie the tailgate together with cord. The chair had grown taller, and yet it fitted into the wagon much more easily.
I went back into the house, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Sara was combing her hair in front of the dressing-table mirror. On the bed, our airline bag was packed with fresh clothes for her.
‘You may not need those,’ I said. ‘Provided the chair keeps its bargain.’
‘I’m not going to take any chances,’ said Sara. ‘Right now, I don’t know who I can trust.’
I stood behind her as she finished combing her hair, watching our faces in the mirror as if they were the faces of two people with whom we had once been acquainted, but with whom we had now lost touch. The sort of person who sends you a card at Christmas, but never writes or telephones or comes to visit.
‘There has to be some way to stop them, you know,’ I said, quietly.
Sara looked up at my reflection. ‘I hope there is. But you’re not going to stop them by sacrificing yourself, or your family. The Delatollas aren’t going to make a name for themselves by being martyred.’
‘I just hope that we can bear the guilt.’
‘I’d prefer to face up to the guilt with a living, breathing husband – rather than spend the rest of my life as a widow with a clear conscience.’
‘You’re being very hard, you know.’
‘I’m fighting for your life, against the lives of a whole lot of people I never even heard of. And you think that’s hard?’
I shook my head. ‘Not particularly. After my first demonstration of selflessness, I think I’m inclined to agree with you.’
I went to the bed and zippered up the airline bag. It was then that I noticed what had happened to the large unfinished Gustave Moreau painting over the headboard. In the centre of the bare area of canvas, someone or something had sketched an outline in charcoal. It was difficult to make out exactly what it was, but it had the rough appearance of a bull, or perhaps the head of a minotaur.
‘Sara,’ I said. ‘Come take a look at this.’
She came over, still combing the ends of her hair, and stared at the picture closely.
‘That’s new,’ she said. ‘Was that there this morning?’
‘Not that I noticed. Can you work out what it is?’
Sara gently touched the canvas with her fingertips. ‘It looks like the outline of some kind of monster, with horns. The funny thing is, it fits into the composition, like this was what Moreau always intended to paint here. Look at the way the woman’s shying away from it.’
We both regarded the painting for a while, each of us withdrawn in our own thoughts. Then Sara said, ‘You know, it vaguely reminds me of something.’
‘It looks like a bull to me.’
‘Well, yes, you’re right. It does look like a bull, but it reminds me of a picture in one of my college textbooks.’
‘Can you think which one it was?’
‘I think – I can’t remember exactly – I think it was a painting by Vittore Carpaccio. He was a Venetian Renaissance painter… a follower of Gentile Bellini. He used to paint all kinds of ceremonies and processions in Venice. Great big crowd paintings full of boats and people.’
‘And?’
‘And I think I’m right in saying that it was Carpaccio who painted a very mysterious picture which was suppressed at the time. It didn’t fit in with any of his other paintings, and there are lots of scholars today who still say that it wasn’t his. He was supposed to have painted it in about 1496, right after he finished a terrific canvas called The Miracle of the True Cross’.
I looked back at the painting on our bedroom wall. ‘He painted a shape like this in his mysterious picture?’
‘That’s right. I remember a black-and-white reproduction of it. It showed a whole crowd of mourners at a Venetian funeral, some of them stepping into black gondolas, some of them lifting their hands up to heaven in sorrow. But in the background, standing on a balcony, you can see a silhouette of this same shape… the bull-like head, and the man’s shoulders.’
I picked up the airline bag. ‘Well, maybe Moreau used What’s-his-name’s painting for reference. Carpaccio’s.’
‘I wish I could remember where that textbook was,’ said Sara. ‘There was an interesting piece about what the shape was, what it represented, and why the experts think Carpaccio included it.’
‘You can’t remember off-hand?’
Sara shook her head. ‘It was too long ago. I’ve forgotten almost everything about the Renaissance. I don’t even remember who painted Venus, Cupid, Folly, And Time.’
‘Bronzino, as a matter of fact. But what was the book called?’
‘I don’t know. Something like The Italian Renaissance.’
‘That sounds original. Maybe I should go up into the attic and look for it. All your old college books are up there.’
Sara checked her watch. ‘Do you think we have time? It’s getting pretty late.’
‘You checked in
with the hospital, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Okay then,’ I said. ‘Give me five minutes up in the attic, and I’ll see what I can dig up.’
Up in the attic, amongst heaps of boxes, stacks of magazines, broken squash-rackets, and Jonathan’s old crib, it was stiflingly hot. I crouched my way along to the very end of the gable that overlooked the front of the house, and there were Sara’s old college books, as well as a Fisher-Price camper, two sections of a fibre-glass fishing-pole, a copy of Playboy for May 1961, and a descant recorder. Sweating in the humidity, I rifled through the books until I found a dusty yellow volume with brown lettering on it which announced itself as Howlett’s Italian Renaissance. I blew on it to remove the dust, and then I made my way back to the stepladder.
‘Did you find it?’ asked Sara.
I held it up. ‘Don’t you ever again accuse me of being a lousy hoarder.’
As I folded away the stepladder, Sara took the book and started to leaf through it. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘it seems like a century ago that I studied all of this.’
‘It seems like a century since that chair arrived.’
She took the book through into the bedroom and sat down at the dressing-table with it. Eventually, she said, ‘Here it is. Look. The Mysterious Funeral Guest, attributed to Vittore Carpaccio, circa 1496–7.’
I frowned at the painting closely. It was a very small monochromatic reproduction, because the picture was only a curiosity, not an important event in the mainstream of the Venetian Renaissance. Nonetheless, the silhouette of the bull-like creature was quite clear, and there was no question at all that it bore an extraordinary resemblance to the charcoal sketching which had appeared on our unfinished Moreau.
‘“The Mysterious Funeral Guest is an inexplicable departure by Carpaccio from his usual paintings of Venetian public events,”’ read Sara. ‘“Although the authenticity of the painting is considered by the Accademia in Venice to be beyond question, many experts still doubt that it was painted by Carpaccio because of the number of unusual occult symbols in it, most notably the Minotaur which appears on the third-floor balcony of the building on the left-hand side. The Accademia claims that this Minotaur is The Mysterious Funeral Guest of the painting’s title, but at least two other experts from the Museo Nazionale suggest that this beast is only an unusual shadow, and that the guest is the grand-looking gentleman stepping into the third gondola, who may very well be a member of the Medici family.”’
The Heirloom Page 20
