The Heirloom
Page 24
‘You will regret this,’ said the voice inside of my head.
I didn’t answer.
‘You will regret this day until the end of eternity.’
I heard a skin-crawling sound like living flesh being tom away from living bones, and then the Devil disappeared. Jonathan, his face triumphant, looked down at me from the Devil’s chair, and he wasn’t Jonathan at all.
‘Does it not say in the sacred book, “Who ever perished, being innocent?”’ he said, in a voice as clear as a trumpet. ‘And does it not also say, in the same chapter of the sacred book, “They that plough iniquity, and sow wickedness, shall reap the same”?’
He pointed towards the horizon, over the treetops north of Escondido. For a moment, there was silence, but then I heard a rumble, and the rumble grew louder until it sounded like approaching thunder. And Jonathan lifted up both of his arms, and out of the distance came the cruise missile, gleaming white, as fast as a bird, faster, with translucent fire burning from its tail.
My son, my six-year-old son, pointed towards the missile and the missile was totally in his control. The two engineers were staring up at it, their hands shielding their eyes, and one of them was speaking frantically on his radio transmitter. But there was nothing they could do. Jonathan kept pointing at the missile, and sweeping his little arm in a circle, and the missile thundered around the grounds of the Jessop house as if it were a toy kite on the end of a string.
Jonathan smiled. Then he laughed. And he made that missile circle and circle and circle again, his finger directing every move it made, every deflection, every twist and turn through the trees.
‘Jonathan!’ I shouted, but he didn’t hear me, or wouldn’t hear me, and I didn’t dare to take him down from the chair in case he lost control of the missile and sent it plummeting down into the road, or into somebody’s homestead.
An incredible voice in my mind said, ‘“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure; think on these things, and the God of peace shall be with you.”’
And then Jonathan raised his arm upwards, and the cruise missile began to climb. It climbed and climbed and climbed on its tail of fire, and the morning sky was so bright that I could hardly see it. More than anything else, I was conscious of the noise. It blotted out all thought, all sensibility, everything except the overwhelming idea that this, at last, was the moment of judgement.
Jonathan stood for one endless second on the Devil’s chair, his finger directed at the sky right above him. Then he turned and pointed at the Jessops’ Gothic mansion, and up above us the cruise missile tumbled and turned, and dropped earthwards.
As the missile fell, it momentarily broke the sound barrier. There was a weird echoing report, and I felt an expanding pressure on my ears. But that was nothing compared to the explosion that followed. A huge charge of devastatingly high explosive burst the Jessops’ house apart, sending the cliff-like walls thundering into the garden, and whole towers and balconies collapsing into the main hall. Broken chimneys hurtled into the air, hundreds of feet up, and a blizzard of broken glass showered the lawns until they were sparkling and white.
For a few seconds, the framework of the house held together. But then there was another tearing crash, as joist after joist ripped away from its supports, like the ribs of a dying dinosaur, and brought the main roof sliding into the wreckage. The echoes of the explosion came back from the surrounding hills, and then came back again, until they finally died.
A huge pall of grey dust hung over the house, and then slowly began to stir in the mid-morning breeze. I heard a crackling noise as wood and furniture began to burn.
I walked over to the chair and lifted Jonathan down. He looked like my son again. He was my son.
‘It’s finished,’ I said. ‘It’s all over.’
He looked at me for a moment and then he went over to Sara, and hugged her tight. There are times when a boy needs his mommy, and this was one of them. Down at the end of the garden, I heard the cough of the Kenworth Transorient truck. It sounded as if the engineers had decided they were better off someplace else. I didn’t know whether they were planning on telling anybody what they’d seen today, but I didn’t much care.
I took hold of the Devil’s chair, tilted it on to its side, and dragged it over to the ruins of the house. There was a fire blazing quite close to me, part of a collapsed staircase, and I picked up the chair and threw it on.
It burned slowly, the chair, because it was solid mahogany. But it burned. I stood watching the flames lick up at the face of the man-serpent, and I thought to myself, there you go, he who burns first burns hottest. The face was expressionless, and the disappointing part about it was that I knew that it was nothing but wood.
I waited for nearly ten minutes, until the chair was reduced to a blackened frame of charred timber. I kicked it, and it fell to pieces.
Sara and Jonathan stood watching me. In the distance, we could hear the sound of fire-trucks, their sirens whooping as they sped along the road towards us from Escondido.
I put my arm around Sara’s shoulders, and said, ‘Come on. I think it’s time we went home.’
*
It took six weeks for a special USAF Tactical Air Command enquiry to decide that the Jessop cruise missile had suffered ‘a guidance complication’ and that its devastating attack on the Jessop mansion had been an ironic but entirely accidental tragedy.
Escondido paramedics discovered in the wreckage of the Jessop mansion the bodies of Mr Sam Jessop, his wife, and his son Mr Martin Jessop. Their Mexican manservant had gone down to the basement at the moment of impact to look for a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and had miraculously been spared. Also discovered in the ruins, with their arms around each other, were Mr David Sears, a British antique dealer, and an unidentified woman. The coroner noted with surprise that the woman’s body was badly burned, while Mr Sears’s body was completely untouched by fire, or even by direct blast.
Three Jessop flight engineers were questioned about their part in the disaster, but apart from voicing suspicions that the ground-to-sea test wasn’t being carried out ‘for any discernible aeronautical purpose’, they all testified that they had noticed ‘nothing unusual’ during the launch.
Sara and Jonathan and I returned to our quiet and occasionally dozy life in Rancho Santa Fe, among the lemon groves. The leaves began to bud on our eucalyptus trees again, and our bushes began to flower, and the paintings in our living-room were as normal and as pleasant as Copley and Stuart could ever be. Only the charcoal outline on the Moreau painting refused to disappear, so I took it down from the bedroom wall and stored it in the attic. I didn’t need any reminders of that week we’d spent in the company of the Devil’s chair.
And one thing more – the grass never grew on the patch where I’d buried the Devil’s trilobite, no matter how much seed and fertiliser I tried.
All this happened more than a year ago now, and most people around Rancho Santa Fe and Escondido have forgotten about the spectacular missile accident that destroyed the biggest and wealthiest house in the county. But, until last month, one tiny unanswered question always used to irritate me, and I would often sit for an hour or more by the side of the pool wondering what the hell the answer was, and why it had happened that way.
Then, when I picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Sunday Times, I was given half of a clue. On an inside page, buried in the Travel section, there was a photograph of a curiosity store in Bali, or someplace like that. And there, smiling at me from behind the counter of this junk-filled emporium, was the face of Henry Grant. Either him, or his identical twin brother.
I’ve never discussed it with Sara, but I’ve formed a kind of a theory that Henry Grant was somebody very special, somebody who brought us the Devil’s chair because he knew it was part of our destiny to fight it and destroy it. That’s why he left his office with strict instructions that we weren’t to give it back.
And m
aybe some day, in some antique market somewhere, you too will come across a dealer like Henry Grant – a dealer who will offer you a bargain price on a chair or a table or a corner-cupboard. All I can advise you to do is to touch it, feel it, and maybe sniff it, too. Because, from my experience, some of these old pieces of furniture can give you a Devil of a lot of trouble.
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GRAHAM MASTERTON was a bestselling horror writer for many years before he turned his talent to crime. He lived in Cork for five years, an experience that inspired the Katie Maguire series.
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Katie Maguire was one of seven sisters born to a police Inspector in Cork, but the only sister who decided to follow her father into An Garda Siochana.
With her bright green eyes and short redhair, she looks like an Irish pixie, but she is no soft touch. To the dismay of some of her male subordinates, she rose quickly through the ranks, gaining a reputation for catching Cork’s killers, often at great personal cost.
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London, 1750
Beatrice Scarlet is the apothecary’s daughter. She can mix medicines and herbs to save the lives of her neighbours - but, try as she might, she can’t save the lives of her parents. An orphan at just sixteen, Beatrice marries a preacher and emigrates to America.
New Hampshire, 1756
In the farming community where Beatrice now lives, six pigs are found viciously slaughtered; slices of looking-glass embedded in their mouths. According to scripture, this is the work of Satan - but Beatrice Scarlet suspects the hands of men. As she closes in on the killer, she must act quickly to unmask him - or become the next victim herself…
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First published in the Great Britain in 1981 by Sphere Books
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1981
The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781786695598
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