The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Once he was in bed Peter dutifully opened the notebook. The handwriting in it was in that fine sloping style, characteristic of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. It took a little getting used to but was far from being illegible.

  The first thirty or so pages consisted of random notes mainly about antiquities interspersed with occasional sketches in pen of coins, cameos and statuettes. There were jottings down of inscriptions in Greek and Arabic and one or two financial calculations. All this seemed only modestly interesting. Then Peter leafed through the book until he found what looked like a continuous narrative. He located the page where this began – it was headed MY TESTAMENT – and started to read in earnest.

  MY TESTAMENT

  I am Gerald William Sampson, though the last of these three is not my true name, but it is as true a name as any. I was born on the 24th of July 1838, the natural son of Martha O’Connor, kitchen maid and Sir Gerald Fitzgerald, baronet, of Cloyne House, County Cork, Ireland. My mother had been in service there but when she was found to be with child she was dismissed. Sir Gerald at that time was married but with no issue and he made some provision for the upkeep of my mother and myself. A couple of years later his wife gave him two sons in quick succession but he continued his payments to my mother, albeit on a reduced scale and took some interest in my education. When he found that I was academically proficient he paid for me to be tutored by a local priest. At the age of sixteen I was sent to Trinity College Dublin and from there, after two years, to St Mark’s College, Oxford. At that time I called myself Fitzgerald.

  It was at the beginning of my third year up at Oxford that the great tragedy befell me. Sir Gerald died suddenly in a hunting accident and I was summoned back to Ireland to attend the funeral. My mother was not present as she was, by that time, enduring the agonising illness that was to end her life some weeks later, and I was accorded no status at the obsequies. I was told to stay at an inn some miles distant from Cloyne.

  On the day after the funeral I was summoned to Cloyne House where a most unpleasant interview took place in the library. Present were Sir Arthur Fitzgerald, the new baronet and Mr William Fitzgerald, his younger brother, together with the family lawyer Mr Broughton.

  I was addressed by all three throughout as Mr O’Connor, my mother’s maiden name with which I was barely familiar. This was galling enough, but there was worse. I was informed that no provision had been made for me in the late Sir Gerald’s will, and that all allowances to me and my mother were to be stopped forthwith. I pleaded with them that my mother was seriously ill and that I should at least be allowed some funds to enable me to complete my degree, but they were adamant. I was too embarrassed to tell them that, in the careless way young people do, I had run up considerable debts with several local tradesmen in Oxford. To admit to my faults in front of these two popinjays was more than I could bear.

  In my pride I knew that between them my half brothers had not a quarter of the intellectual abilities or strength of character that I possessed, and yet they were looking down on me. Worse still, they appeared to be enjoying my humiliation.

  I remember how at the end of the interview I cried out: “But what am I to do?”

  “You may go to the Devil, for all we care,” said Mr William.

  Sir Arthur, leaning carelessly against the library’s great marble chimney-piece, laughed inordinately at this and though Mr Broughton looked decently ashamed by his clients’ conduct he did not rebuke it. I turned on my heel without a word and left the house.

  For a while I wandered the grounds of Cloyne, so distracted by shame and indignation that I barely knew what I was doing. After some hours, however, I remember finding myself towards dusk in a little clearing in the woods behind Cloyne where between four yew trees stood an old well. It was a gloomy place, but it suited my humour and there I found a measure of calm.

  Out of that calm, however, there grew not sweetness and forgiveness but a great resolve. I would avenge myself upon my two siblings if it took me my whole life. The thought of it settled on my heart like a great cold weight but it seemed to give me strength.

  By pawning the few valuables remaining to me I had enough resources to see that my mother was taken care of before I hurried back to Oxford. There I laid bare my situation before the college authorities in the hope that they might take pity on me and allow me to complete my degree, but they were unsympathetic. The Master of St Mark’s was even pleased to be indignant with me for making myself out to be a gentleman when I was not. My reply, that I was at least a gentleman on my mother’s side of the family, was not well received.

  Only one person had a kind word for me and that was a fellow of St Mark’s and my tutor in Ancient History, Dr Sampson. He told me that though he could not prevent my “going down”, he could give me assistance in obtaining some means of gainful employment. He wrote for me a warm letter of introduction to Mr Julius Lagrange of Bond Street, London.

  Mr Lagrange was a celebrated dealer in antiquities, his clients including connoisseurs, museums and learned institutions, even royalty. Being somewhat advanced in years and infirm, he needed a young and vigorous assistant to travel for him in Greece and the Levant in search of ancient treasures. A facility for languages and a good knowledge of the classical antique, both of which I possessed, were the essential requisites. I truly believe I was as much a godsend to Mr Lagrange as he was to me, and I began again to relish my prospects. In celebration of my new life (as well as to escape my creditors) I decided to change my name, and, to honour the kindness of my old tutor, I gave myself his: Sampson.

  At some other time, if I live, I will write down all the adventures that I had in the next eight years as I travelled through Greece and the Near East. I found I had a natural ability for what I did, and made a considerable fortune for Mr Lagrange and a small one, if briefly, for myself. Through all that time, however, I did not once forget that my ultimate purpose was revenge upon the house of Fitzgerald of Cloyne.

  Respectable, cultivated people and institutions will pay a great deal for antiquities and part of the price they pay, though they may not admit it, is for the privilege of ignorance. They must be spared the knowledge that these figurines were robbed from a tomb or that this ancient codex was cozened from a greedy abbot who had no right to dispose of it. When the very marbles of the Parthenon that rest in the sanctity of the British Museum enjoy a dubious provenance, you may be sure that their lesser brethren almost invariably have something to hide. It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that in the course of my travels I had intercourse with not a few very doubtful characters, and some outright villains. One of the strangest of these was a man I met in Smyrna who called himself Captain Kinnaird.

  I believe it was Lagrange who first provided me with the introduction to this worthy. Undoubtedly he was of use to me in my business. For a price, naturally, Kinnaird was able to secure for me the services of every tomb robber, sneak thief and corrupt official in the neighbourhood. Everyone seemed to know “the Captain”, as he was invariably called, and the captain knew everyone.

  Occupying a large house in a disreputable quarter of Smyrna, he lived in a bewildering combination of opulence and squalor. He never seemed short of funds but he was always eager to acquire more, usually by the most irregular means. Through his establishment passed a motley selection of rogues, cutthroats, catamites and whores in whom he took a mild, almost paternal interest. To me, however, as a fellow Englishmen, he was especially welcoming and soon I got to know a little of his history.

  One night at his house, after we had caroused into the early hours, I let him know something of my own life.

  “We are brothers, then,” said Kinnaird. “We are both scapegraces who have fallen foul of our families.”

  I was content to let that pass, though I considered myself a superior being in every way to Kinnaird, and presently my forbearance was rewarded when he told me his story. His full name was Talbot DeVere Kinnaird and he belonged to a minor branch of a nobl
e family. After quitting Rugby he had obtained a commission in one of the smart regiments and had indeed reached the rank of captain but was cashiered for appropriating mess funds to pay off gambling debts. His family had guaranteed him a small remittance if he left the country and troubled their consciences no more. Wandering the earth in search of a place where his allowance would stretch furthest he found himself in Smyrna.

  Looking round at the foetid luxury in which he was now ensconced I remarked that he seemed to have done pretty well for himself on such a small income. Kinnaird smiled.

  “I have the means to augment my family pittance and I have created a world that suits me. But you, my dear Sampson, I can see, are still searching.”

  Rashly I admitted to him that I would never rest until I had avenged myself on the Fitzgerald brothers for the terrible wrongs they had done to my mother and to me.

  “Believe me, old friend,” said Kinnaird, puffing at a hookah pipe and squeezing the arm of one of the spangled houris who lolled on the divan beside him, “the old Spanish proverb is right. Living well is the best revenge.”

  “Then the best is not good enough for me.”

  “I am not unsympathetic. In fact I had to strive to reach the state I am in now.”

  I raised my eyebrows. The idea of Kinnaird striving to attain anything struck me as ludicrous.

  “You mock me? I think you should not. Look over there.” He gestured with the mouthpiece of his hookah to a corner of the room behind his left shoulder. “Tell me what you see.”

  I told him that I could see only a mass of shadows and something glinting within them.

  “Wait. Look more closely. No! Don’t get up and go over there. You’ll disturb it. Tell me again what you see.”

  I concentrated my gaze on the corner of the room. Kinnaird was right. Something stirred there. They were not just shadows, but somehow, in an indistinct way, alive, and the more I stared at them the more I felt a kind of revulsion that is hard even now to explain or define.

  “What is that?”

  “You would not believe me if I told you.”

  “Kinnaird, I am drunk enough to believe anything.”

  “It is what in this part of the world is called a djinn or vashnak. The biblical term for it is ‘familiar spirit’. You remember the Witch of Endor?”

  “You are telling me that you have a familiar spirit? In God’s name, why?”

  “Why, to do my bidding, my dear Sampson. To keep me in cash and what you in your censorious way would call ‘vicious enjoyments’. Mind you, I had the devil’s own job, finding and securing it for my use. These things come at a price, you know, but that is why half the rogues and cut-throats of this stinking city come here to pay homage to me, and the other half are in mortal terror of what I might do to them.”

  My mind was too fuddled with drink to know what to make of this and the following day I left for Bodrum further down the coast in search of some Tanagra figurines – then just becoming fashionable with the cognoscenti – which I heard could be had for a reasonable sum. While on my journey South I had time to reflect on what I had been told and what I thought I had seen. At that time, as I have explained, I was possessed by an intense need to gratify my desire for revenge. As with our amorous urges, it is only when it has been sated that one can see how unreasonably this lust has dominated our lives, and what a monster it can make of us.

  By the time I had got back to Smyrna my mind was made up. I went to Kinnaird and told him that I was determined to acquire a “familiar spirit” such as he had. Kinnaird smiled his queer little smile and said that he would see what he could do, but that I might have to wait up to a year before an opportunity arose. I said I was prepared to wait.

  “There is a price you know,” he said.

  I said I was not short of funds and was prepared to pay the going rate for such things.

  “Yes, that price too, but I meant another sort of price.”

  “You mean my immortal soul, or some such nonsense?”

  “My dear Sampson, those are crude and superstitious terms that I would never deign to use in front of you. Nevertheless there is a universal and inviolable law which stipulates that for everything one gives one must receive and for everything received one must also give. In these cases the master can become the servant and the servant the master. Understand this and all may be well.”

  Thinking that I understood, I nodded. I left Smyrna in a few days’ time, bound for Greece in search of Red Figure Attic ware.

  In the two months that followed I almost forgot my conversation with Kinnaird and when I did remember it I wished it had never occurred. My enterprises prospered. Then one day I was on the quay at Patras overseeing the loading of some packing cases full of Ancient Greek vases for Lagrange when a boy came up to me and handed me a letter. It was from Kinnaird and God in Heaven knows how he had found me. The missive stated that if I wished to proceed with the enterprise we had discussed I was to take the next available packet and present myself to him in Smyrna as soon as possible.

  I did not hesitate, though I have since often wondered why I did not, and the following evening saw me in the port of Corinth. The next morning I was sailing across the Ægean Sea, eastward bound for a tryst about whose nature and consequence I had not the least conception.

  I feel I must give some account of what happened when I reached Smyrna. If I am to rid myself of this cursed thing, I will have to in some measure confess, if only to the pages of this book. But how I hate that word “confess”! It sounds so weak and simpering. Let me be as brief and to the point, then, as may be.

  In a village called Bassarlik some ten miles from Smyrna in a mountainous region, there lived a wise man, or Khof, as they are called in those parts. From him Kinnaird had heard of a tragic incident in the village. A young girl of no more than fourteen, having been rejected by her suitor, had thrown herself down a well and killed herself. Now in Turkey, as in most societies I have come across, a suicide is considered to be a most unlucky thing for the neighbourhood in which it occurs. Equally, advantage may accrue if the restless spirit of the dead person can be disposed of. In short, the ghost of a suicide may be sold to the highest bidder as a familiar spirit: being no good for the next world, it may become a slave in this.

  I will not describe the ceremonies by which the creature was invoked by the Khof, ably assisted by some of the village elders who were well paid for their trouble. Those interested in such anthropological curiosities may apply elsewhere. To me the details are too repellent to contemplate. It all took place at the well where the poor girl had drowned herself and in the early hours of the 24th of July 1865, which happened to be the day of my twenty-seventh birthday. I will only say that the sensations I felt when I saw a hideously emaciated arm, dead white and wet, rise above the well’s parapet, were of the most profound horror and revulsion.

  Slowly, by some mysterious process of levitation, the thing rose out of the well and then collapsed upon the earth beyond it. Immediately, as I had been instructed, I ran to it and placed round its neck a gold chain on which I had hung a token of my ownership of the spirit. It was a gold solidus of the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus, with the reverse rubbed smooth and my initials together with the date scratched upon it.

  I then led my creature off to a grove about half-amile distant from the village of Bassarlik where was performed a second and private part of the ceremony. This I will not describe: it is too horrible to me, especially as while the ghastly act was being performed I realised that I was not alone. Halfway through the process I caught a glimpse of something in a dense thicket close to me. It was like a single luminous eye that glowed yellow in the dark, then faded to red, glowed, then faded again. It was Kinnaird’s cigar.

  With the aid of my familiar (as I shall now call her) my business as a trader in antiquities became prodigiously successful. By the year 1870 I was a rich man and was beginning to feel a pressing need to return home and fulfil my destiny.

  My one anxiet
y concerned the familiar. Would it survive the journey to England and then Ireland? I consulted Kinnaird, albeit reluctantly, he being the only person who was in my confidence and might have some expertise in the matter. He told me that if I placed my familiar’s desiccated remains – when inactive the thing returned to its corporeal entity as a corpse – in a box made of cedar and lined with lead, I could transport it overseas. Once landed, the familiar could be revived by the application of fresh standing water, preferably from a well, and the ritual practice which I will not describe.

  In the year 1871 I arrived in Ireland and took a suite of rooms at an inn not far from Cloyne House. My skin was heavily tanned and I had grown a black beard so that I was confident that no one would recognise in G. W. Sampson esq., the insignificant young Mr Fitzgerald or O’Connor who had fled the scene so precipitately all those years ago. I pretended to be a young nabob who was looking to buy a property and settle down in the district.

  Did I still feel the burning desire for revenge that had animated me all those years ago? Probably I did not, but the resolve had become a settled part of my existence and I could no more rid myself of it than I could have cut off my right hand. Everything I had done had been a prelude to this moment. So, one night I strapped the cedar box to the back of a hired nag and made my way to the old well between four yew trees at the back of Cloyne House.

  Uttering the correct invocations I threw the contents of the box down the well and presently, by the light of my dark lantern, I saw the thing emerge, pale, wet, odiously thin. Once I had paid my part of the dreadful bargain I gave my familiar her instructions. It had been my whim to communicate with the creature always in Latin, so that we might keep our intercourse cloaked in the obscurity of a dead language.

  One morning a few days later I was sitting in the parlour of my inn, enjoying a solitary breakfast, when the landlord entered and announced that a terrible tragedy had occurred. Mr William Fitzgerald, younger brother of Sir Arthur Fitzgerald, baronet and squire of Cloyne, had died on the hunting field. Accounts differed, but the general consensus was that Mr William’s horse had taken fright at something and that in the ensuing wild career Mr William had been thrown from his mount and that his head had suffered a violent collision with a tree. Some accounts, admittedly not from the most reliable of sources, stated that someone or some thing had actually torn him from the saddle.