by Basil Copper
As the two men exchanged a few remarks, Trumble's eyes wandered about the vast study in which they sat; it was one of the most curious places he had ever seen. There was a large globe covered with zodiac signs whose use was obscure to him; tapestries decorated with cabalistic insignia writhed over the far wall while the massed shelves contained thousands of volumes of works in Greek and Latin. So far as he could make out, many of the books were rare and valuable originals. Trumble felt his spirits reviving.
At the far end of the chamber was a large platform enclosed by iron railings; a spiral staircase ascended to it from the main floor of the library. Trumble could see chemical retorts and a Bunsen-burner on one of the benches gave off a bluish-green flame in the dusk. Blue velvet curtains partitioned off part of the other end of the room and the shadowy forms of images of ancient gods ranged round those parts of the walls not given over to books.
"I see that you approve of my surroundings," said Dr. Fabri, shooting him a shrewd glance. "My collection is not so comprehensive as I should wish, but I have begun to make a start. Life is not long enough for the amassing of knowledge, my friend."
Fabri laughed as Trumble stammered out some rejoinder. But then his host rose abruptly.
"Forgive me, but I am forgetting my manners. You must be hungry. Joseph will have a meal prepared shortly."
He led the way out of the study and into an adjoining apartment, conventionally furnished as a dining-room but with panelled walls of some charm and with great glazed doors looking onto the ruin of a once considerable garden. Fabri pulled the curtains over the sombre scene outside the window and led the way over to a cabinet; whisky splashed into long crystal glasses and there came the friendly tinkle of ice. A moment later Dr. Fabri handed him the glass and they toasted one another silently by a fire of logs which spluttered contentedly to itself in a handsome stone fireplace. Trumble sank into a high-backed chair and gazed into the fire as his host excused himself; he felt that he would enjoy his stay at Linnet Ridge.
He was aroused from his thoughts by a sound at his elbow and saw the man Joseph, who had met him in the porch, busying himself at the long teak dining-table. He laid two places silently and with polished efficiency and went out through the far door. Dr. Fabri returned almost at once.
"Excuse my bad manners, my dear Trumble," he said, pressing a thin book into his new secretary's hands, ''but I could not resist the opportunity. I am something of a collector, as you know, and your name was not unknown to me before we met. It would give me great pleasure if you would inscribe the work for me."
Trumble saw with surprise that the book was a rare edition of his own On Goety, produced on hand-woven paper in a limited edition from a private press in Paris. So far as he knew there had been only two hundred copies produced. He felt his hands tremble as he took a pen from his pocket and composed something appropriate on the flyleaf for Dr. Fabri.
"You were surprised, eh?" said the doctor, as he examined Trumble's inscription and thanked him for it.
"There are so few copies and my work is so obscure," said Trumble, his voice quivering slightly. "One works so hard and yet it is so difficult to become known."
Dr. Fabri gazed at him in sympathy. "One is known to those who are of importance and that is what counts," he said simply. "It is a great honour to have you under my roof. But now let us eat. Tomorrow it will give me pleasure to show you round my house. You will not find your duties onerous and I am sure we shall find many mutual interests to share."
He led the way to the table. The meal passed in silence, the courses served impeccably by the man Joseph. There did not appear to be any other staff. Dr. Fabri made no mention of Trumble's duties and for his part the poet was content for the moment to enjoy the good food and wine with which his new employer plied him. Shortly after half-past nine Dr. Fabri excused himself. "Joseph will show you your quarters," he said. "Until tomorrow, then."
The big man led the way up a large oak staircase that opened from the hall and along a luxuriously carpeted corridor lined with oak doors. He flung open the third and switched on the light.
"If you require anything, sir, you have only to ring," he said, indicating a brass push-button set into the wall next to a battery of light switches.
Trumble thanked him and closed the door behind him. It was a large, comfortable room to which he had been assigned; centrally heated, it was furnished with plain modern furniture and well lit from both ceiling and wall light fixtures. There were three doors opening off it; investigating, Trumble found a sitting-room, bathroom, and toilet. He came back to the bedroom with considerable pleasure: it might pay him to stay with Dr. Fabri for an indefinite period.
His two shabby suitcases were standing in the centre of the room where Joseph had left them; his car keys were on the dressing-table. He smiled to himself; evidently Joseph was as efficient as his master. He unpacked quickly, stowed away his few belongings in the drawers, and put the empty suitcases in the wardrobe. He felt unaccountably tired, but put this down to the long and unpleasant drive. He came back from the bathroom in pyjamas and prepared for bed; the thin cry of an owl came from a thicket somewhere beyond the garden but apart from that there was no sound but the faint gurgling of water in the pipes of the central heating system.
He went idly to the window and looked down into the garden, now silvered by a moon which shone from a clear rainless sky. It was then that he saw the window was covered with bars which followed the pattern of the leaded panes. He frowned. He went back over towards the door. It was, as he had somehow expected, locked. It was curious but it proved nothing, except possibly that to Dr. Fabri he was an unknown quantity; a new employee loose in a household which contained many valuable paintings and objets d'art. He smiled to himself; he did not feel at all insulted. He stood irresolute for a moment, gazing at the door-lock and from there to the brass bell-push which would bring the servant Joseph to him within seconds.
Then he shrugged and turned away. He might take up the matter tomorrow, when he had thought it over further. He got into bed, his mind already embracing sleep, and switched off the light. He slept well, awakening only once as the high, sharp, piercing cry of the owl was repeated; the sound was nearer, almost in the garden. It sounded twice more. He got up then and looked into the grounds but could see nothing. He went to the door before returning to the warmth of his bed; he tried the handle gently in the gloom. It was unlocked. He got back into bed. He was soon asleep and this time slept dreamlessly and uninterruptedly until breakfast time.
He ate his meal alone in a small, pleasant room that opened onto the lawn, with Joseph as the sole attendant to his needs. He was astonished to find that the garden, which had appeared such a ruin from his window the previous night was, at closer acquaintance, obviously well tended, with smooth lawns, well-kept beds, and rose bushes lining trellised pathways. He was annoyed with himself for having made such a stupid error, and after breakfast walked over to the French doors for a closer inspection but was unable to open the fastenings in order to gain access to the terrace.
Just then Dr. Fabri entered with smiling apologies for his nonappearance at breakfast.
"I have much to do, you know," he said jovially. He enquired politely how Trumble had slept; the latter had decided to say nothing about the locked bedroom door and privately meant to see whether it was his employer's intention to keep him segregated from the main house during the nights. In the meantime there was much to engage his attention; while Joseph cleared the table Dr. Fabri and his new employee took a turn round the vast garden, which confirmed Trumble's estimate through the window. He resolved to have a look at his bedroom casement that evening; there might be some distorting quality in the glass.
The two men returned to the house half an hour later, chatting in a desultory way of Trumble's duties; he gathered that he would be expected to keep Dr. Fabri's appointments diary, work out his day for him, answer the telephone, and do the indexing on the doctor's vast collection of books and docum
ents. Apparently there were a great many more papers apart from the main library and it would take him a month or two to find his way around.
Trumble learned, with some pleasure, that he would have most afternoons free but, in return, was expected to put in an hour or two in the evenings, as Dr. Fabri might require from time to time; he would also have to take some dictation and he was glad that he had once learned shorthand in the days when he was contributing to magazines; the facility would obviously come in useful.
At this point in their conversation the two men had returned to the vast study, where the doctor was engaged in pointing out various aspects of his indexing system in the large green filing cabinets which lined one corner of the room.
"There is one other part of the house which will be your special domain," he said with a spark of humour in his eye, as he drew the young man down the shelving. "I think you will find it not the least interesting aspect of your new duties.''
He beckoned to where the platform sprang from the floor of the main study. The two men ascended the spiral staircase, their steps echoing hollowly on the treads.
The shadowy statues leered darkly from their niches but Trumble had little time to take in their detail or any other particulars of the interesting minutiae strewn about in such profusion in this esoteric corner. Dr. Fabri took him over to the curtains which he drew aside with a silken cord. Facing the two men was a large bronze door, about six feet high, whose golden surface caught the light in dull, undulating reflections.
Trumble then saw that the bas-relief design on the door, magnificently executed, depicted a Sabbat. Nude figures writhed in a circle on some deserted heathland and the artist, with a cunning amounting to genius, had made his horrific vision stand out with startling reality, doubly emphasized, of course, by the medium he had chosen. The figures seemed to move within the frame of the door and Trumble felt a great stir of the heart as he gazed in fascination. There was a rough altar in the centre of the design, he saw, and a goat-form conducting the rites.
A naked girl formed the top of the altar; there was a bowl on her stomach and another girl lay across her knees. Assistants supported the second girl and the goat-figure appeared to be cutting her throat over the bowl. Trumble gazed on with fascinated distaste. Fabri glanced at him with obvious pleasure. "After Callot," he said with great satisfaction. "One of my little fancies."
He pulled back the bronze catch of the great door and led the way into a large chamber; concealed lighting clicked on as he opened the door. It was a curious room, Trumble thought; perhaps the most curious he had ever seen, though it was also strangely commonplace. Walls and floor appeared to be lined with zinc; there were grilles high up in the walls and in the ceiling, evidently to do with the air-conditioning, and racks of books, many with tattered leather bindings and faded gold inscriptions. Trumble noticed many rare works bound in vellum; among them De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn and De Masticatione Mortuorum by Philip Rohr, the Dissertatio de Vampyris Seruinsibus by Zopfius, Harenberg's extremely rare Von Vampyren, together with a contemporary account of the Salem Witch Trials. This section was an incongruous sight, set as it was among modern filing cabinets and a great shelf of ledgers, each numbered and indexed.
On the green-leather-topped desk which stood some yards within the chamber was an open ledger which was inscribed in green ink; and a bundle of newspaper cuttings. A faint humming filled the air.
"This room fulfils two functions," said Dr. Fabri, "and will be the scene of your main duties. My most important and rarest manuscripts are stored here. The air-conditioning keeps them at a constant temperature."
He ran his eyes over the packed shelves with satisfaction. He moved farther down the room and drew Trumble's attention to the ledgers. He chuckled softly.
"These are my records of notabilities, kept through the medium of newspaper cuttings and other material, sent me from all over the world. Obituaries, you understand, of all the celebrities and public persons whose careers interest me."
He waved his hand towards the shelf of ledgers. "I call them the Archives of the Dead.''
He moved back again to the desk. "You will see from this daily ledger the name of the person or persons who are to be added to the scrapbooks. Then, when the material arrives by post, it is cut out and transferred to the appropriate ledger. The information is then cross-indexed in these filing cabinets. The system is simplicity itself."
Trumble moved to the desk, his mind turning over the odd nature of the task; he saw that Fabri's records were incredibly detailed and contained much out-of-the-way information not only from famous newspapers and magazines but obscure journals in German, French, and Russian. He looked down the green-inked entries in the smaller book which stood open on the desk—like the Book of Judgement, he could not help thinking wryly to himself—and noted that the two latest names, in Fabri's impeccable handwriting, were those of a scenic designer and a ballet dancer.
"If you have any queries, Mr. Trumble," said Dr. Fabri, waving his hand to indicate the contents of the room, "now is the time. You will be left much to yourself, I am afraid, as I have my own affairs to pursue. We are all alone here, except for Joseph, and the cleaning women come in during the mornings twice a week."
While Trumble put a few questions to Dr. Fabri, his mind continued to debate his astonishing good fortune; for he had soon grasped that his duties for the moment would be merely nominal. He could not really see why Dr. Fabri needed a secretary at all but on the other hand if he were prepared to pay so handsomely in return for such agreeably lightweight tasks, Trumble, for one, was not prepared to argue. The two men parted on the best of terms; Fabri was driving over to see some friends and would not be back until late afternoon. Joseph would prepare Trumble's lunch and he could work on at the indexing undisturbed during the afternoon, in order to get the doctor's records up to date.
If he had the time he was to go through Fabri's correspondence and prepare answers to the routine matters for the doctor's signature and would, naturally, answer the door or telephone and deal with any enquiries. Trumble sat at the desk, quietly jubilant for some minutes after the rumble of the doctor's car had died away down the drive. He glanced round at the massed volumes on the shelves and then down again to the material awaiting his attention; the air-conditioning hummed quietly to itself and the scent of the spring flowers, arranged in big jars round the main library, came to him through the bronze door of the room, which had been propped open with a large stone ornament.
He gazed at the doctor's green-ink entry once again. He picked up his pen and turned to the top of a large, blank page of the current ledger, which had been left open on the desk with the cuttings. In neat block capitals, underlined with a ruler, he wrote: Faenza, Boris b. 1884. Then he set to work.
Three days passed. Three days in which Trumble gradually came to know the ascetic but not unpleasant routine of the Fabri household. In the mornings he took dictation from Dr. Fabri in answer to the incoming mail; the doctor had an astonishing correspondence from all over the world, much of it from such exotic places as Venezuela or the Gulf of Mexico. Many of these were in the languages of the country of origin and Dr. Fabri would peruse them and then rattle out his replies in English with machine-gun precision. More than once Trumble was glad that he had taken the trouble thoroughly to master shorthand during the earlier days of his career.
He thought he was doing quite a good job and Fabri evidently concurred; though he did not say so, Trumble fancied that he occasionally caught a glimpse of approval in his employer's eye, when he imagined that Trumble's head was bowed studiously over the page of his notebook to the exclusion of all other things. The two men would lunch together in a not unpleasant silence, in the room which looked onto the garden and which Trumble remembered so vividly from his first evening in the house; Joseph would wait on them without talking. The food was impeccably cooked and the wines were invariably perfectly chosen and served at the correct temperature.
Occasional
ly there would be time in the mornings for Trumble's work on the Archives of the Dead; he had taken up Dr. Fabri's remark, which he ascribed to his employer's somewhat grim vein of humour, and applied it in a mocking manner to the indexing upon which he was engaged. Dr. Fabri's tastes appeared to be completely catholic and it almost seemed to Trumble that he was obsessed with recording the deaths of everyone of importance who died in the world, without regard to their profession or occupation. Trumble had also taken time to study the earlier ledgers, which went back a good many years, and was astonished to see the meticulous way in which the deaths of bishops, film stars, footballers, philosophers, politicians, and university professors had been noted.
Writers, musicians, and those in the graphic arts were recorded in separate volumes, coded blue, and Trumble, though of course he had never questioned Dr. Fabri on the subject, concluded that the doctor had a special interest in those arts; particularly as many of the writers were also savants who had been authorities on witchcraft and the occult. In this respect the rare volumes in Latin and mediaeval French, which were evidently of immense value, came in useful, and already Trumble had had occasion to check a reference from an original source, when the printed information on his subject's career had been scanty.
His afternoons were mostly free and two days later Trumble motored over to Guildford, posted some letters, had tea in a cafe, and then, because it was cold and raining, visited the cinema for a couple of hours. The film was good and when Trumble regained the street in the early evening the rain had stopped and the sun shone fitfully. He drove back to Linnet Ridge in high spirits and decided to spend the hour before dinner catching up on the indexing. He now worked with the great bronze door closed; there was a handle on his side and the air-conditioning made the room pleasantly fresh and conducive to uninterrupted concentration.
