A Change of Heir

by Michael Innes

  So far Gadberry’s walk had been through solitude. He hadn’t caught sight of another human being, and even the dumb creatures that had left all those tracks in the snow had retired from the scene for the day. There was nothing in sight except the snow itself, and a few drystone dykes half buried in it, with here and there a thorn tree looking as if it had strayed in from a dismal poem of the Romantic period. For some time, too, there hadn’t been a sound; silent was the flock in woolly fold, and no audible orisons came from the Reverend Mr Grimble as Gadberry rounded the side of the vicarage. But now this chilly stillness was suddenly shattered by first the throb and then the roar of a fast-moving motorcar. In another moment the vehicle – just to be glimpsed as of a rakishly sporting variety, had swung in from the crossroads at the farther end of the village, and then taken another turn which caused it to disappear among the straggling outbuildings of Mr Grimble’s dwelling.

  Gadberry judged this to be odd – only mildly so, indeed, but enough to prompt him to take a good look as he walked past. The car had been driven straight into an empty shed, and its driver had closed the door of this, locked it, and proceeded to vanish round a corner before it was possible to get more than a glimpse of him. Gadberry himself walked on. He had gone another dozen yards before becoming aware that the incident had affected him disagreeably.

  He couldn’t understand why it should be so – except, indeed, that the whole episode gave the impression of having transacted itself with unnatural speed. It was almost possible to believe that the driver of the car had spotted him, and had instantly resolved not to be himself spotted in return. Yes, it was partly that. But it was partly, too, the consequence of a feeling carried over from the previous night. For some quite indefinable reason, the image of the venerable and indeed addle-pated Grimble had become a focus of suspicion in Gadberry’s mind. It was his impression that the old person’s malignity exceeded even his senility, and that this made him a highly dangerous character. Of course danger was what Gadberry had scarcely ceased looking out for on every quarter since his first rash arrival at Bruton, so that he simply wasn’t in a position to view anything or anybody very sanely. Still, the feeling about Grimble was there. What if, quite as much as Miss Bostock, he was a loathsome snake in the grass?

  Even as he asked himself this question, Gadberry was aware that he had unconsciously turned round and was now directing his course towards the vicarage. This seemed surprising. When suspecting a snake in the grass one commonly makes rapidly for the high road. But Gadberry’s strong sense that he had had enough was driving him to a curious rashness. He’d ring Grimble’s front-door bell, and go on ringing it until he was admitted, and so had a chance of identifying Grimble’s mysterious visitor.

  The bell must have been as cracked as its proprietor; it returned a displeasing sound which seemed to traverse empty distances, weave through cobwebs, lose its way in deserted corridors, struggle up or down untrodden staircases. The vicarage was Victorian, dank, gloomy and enormous. Gadberry had no notion under what sort of domestic conditions Grimble inhabited it. But any sort of civilised coping with its brute physical intractability would have required an army of servants that would have put up a tolerable show in the Abbey itself.

  Gadberry rang several times. Halfway through this exercise he had a brief impression of somebody peering at him from an upper window. After that nothing at all happened for a long time. Then after that again there came a sound of approaching footsteps – slippered and shuffling footsteps on what must be a bare flagged floor. The front door opened to a cautious crack. The Reverend Mr Grimble was peering out at him.

  ‘Go away,’ Grimble said. ‘Go away, I say.’

  ‘Good morning, Grimble. It’s–’

  ‘I don’t give at the door, you know, I don’t give at the door.’

  ‘I don’t want you to–’

  ‘Charity begins at home, my good man, at home, I say. And that means your home, not mine. So go away. Should I choose to visit you in the exercise of my pastoral functions, that will be another matter. It will be another matter, I–’

  Wasting no further resource upon idle parley, Gadberry gave the door a long, strong push and walked into the vicarage. With a fine irrationality, Grimble at once shook him cordially by the hand.

  ‘Come in, young man,’ he said. ‘A matter of the banns of marriage, eh? Well, better to marry than burn, I say. Or rather, somebody said – and in a canonical place, if my memory serves. Talking of memory, do you know you remind me of somebody? Young Nicholas Comberford. But you wouldn’t know him, my good fellow. He belonged to the gentry. Wipe your boots.’

  Not paying much heed to this rubbish, Gadberry glanced curiously around him. So far as he had hitherto thought about Grimble at all, he had imagined him as cared for by some ancient housekeeper as dotty as himself. He saw at once that this couldn’t be so. Not the most decrepit rustic crone would suffer such conditions around her. The hall couldn’t have been swept through in a twelve-month. The humble lives of rats and mice were much in evidence. There was a bird’s nest – a very old one – in the antlers of a stag’s head over the bogus Gothic chimney piece. And in the thick dust on the inner surface of a large window a shaky and seemingly impassioned finger had traced:

  MARANTHA!

  And this – apparently more recently – had been amplified to:

  ANATHEMA MARANTHA!

  It was painfully clear that the Reverend Mr Grimble, as soon as he stepped within the sanctuary of his vicarage, turned even crazier than he was when on the other side of his doorstep.

  ‘I feel very remiss about never having called on you before,’ Gadberry said cheerfully. ‘So I thought I’d just look in on passing.’ He paused expectantly, but nothing happened. Grimble did, indeed, appear to be listening. But it wasn’t to Gadberry. It might have been apprehensively, for some sound he didn’t, at the moment, want to be heard. Or it might have been for sign or token audible only to an inner ear. In the gloomy solitude of this hideous house Grimble perhaps beguiled the hours in ghostly conversation – whether with spirits of health or goblins damned. He had obviously been a clergyman for a very long time. Conceivably he had got tired of religion and turned to magic – black magic – instead. Very conceivably that was it. This bizarre notion wasn’t a comfortable one, and Gadberry tried to resume his cheery note. ‘It’s nice,’ he said, recalling a frequent conversational resource of Mrs Lapin’s, ‘to see a little bit of sunshine.’

  This, too, wasn’t a success. It scarcely deserved to be, since the heavens without remained heavy with unbroken cloud presaging further tremendous snows. And on even a flawless summer day, for that matter, Bruton Vicarage would clearly continue obstinately crepuscular.

  ‘But perhaps I’ve called at an inconvenient time?’ It had come to Gadberry that he had better make a bold plunge. ‘I think another visitor has just arrived on you?’

  ‘Another visitor?’ The Reverend Mr Grimble was startled. He glanced about him as if in sudden alarm, indeed – and particularly in the direction of an open door on Gadberry’s right. Gadberry glanced that way too. What he saw was part of a large and apparently unfurnished room – a dining-room, perhaps, in the blissful nineteenth-century heyday of the Church of England as by law established. It was his first impression that it was now used for the game of badminton, or at least for some pastime involving the laying down of sundry white-painted lines on a bare floor. Perhaps Grimble gathered together the lads and lasses of the village for this blameless diversion as part of what he called his pastoral function. But this didn’t seem at all in character with the impression of the old creature that he had now formed. Grimble had every appearance of one who drove his parishioners ferociously from the door.

  Gadberry stole another glance. It certainly wasn’t badminton. There were circles inscribed within triangles, and triangles within circles. Perhaps Grimble went in for geometry – and literally in a big way. Gadberry had got no further than this speculation – which wasn’t a very bri
ght one – when something happened that was very disturbing indeed. From a point close at hand, and certainly from the interior of the house, a cock crew loudly. The next moment the creature appeared, stalked through the hall, and vanished into the farther room. It was a handsome cock. And it was jet black.

  Gadberry turned and stared in horror at the Reverend Mr Grimble. His idle speculation of a few minutes before had been bang in the target area. Magic it was – and black magic at that. This ancient clerk in holy orders was a necromancer!

  16

  As we have seen, George Gadberry regarded with satisfaction his descent, whether actual or imagined, from that John Gadbury who had been among the most eminent of English astrologers in the seventeenth century. It might be expected, therefore, that he would not be particularly upset upon suddenly finding himself to be in the society of another practitioner of occult arts. But it wasn’t so. He was chiefly shocked, no doubt, because of Mr Grimble’s regular profession. Gadberry himself, after all, was a vicar’s son. He knew that the proper spare-time employment for a rural clergyman, while able-bodied, is to dig in his vegetable garden, weed the drive, chop wood, clean windows, carry coal, and perform similar chores appropriate to his economic standing in the community. When old and feeble, like Mr Grimble, he may get down to a little reading, or to antiquarian research on a local and unassuming basis. But at no time ought he to become a sorcerer.

  And it was certainly sorcery to which the black cock pointed. Tonight, or on some night in the near future, the Reverend Mr Grimble, clad in cabbalistic robes and standing within one of those white triangles or circles, would slit the creature’s throat, mumbling dark conjurations the while. No wonder the old gentleman was reluctant to admit visitors into his vicarage. If this deplorable vagary became known he would certainly lose his job. Indeed, bishops and archdeacons and their like would be so quick to clamp down on the scandal that they’d have him securely and permanently dumped in the county loony-bin before he could flog the first instalment of his life-story to a Sunday newspaper. And anybody who knew Grimble’s secret would decidedly have the whip hand on him.

  This last reflection came rather inconsequently into Gadberry’s head, and he didn’t know why he was momentarily inclined to dwell on it. He certainly had no intention of trying a little blackmail himself as a result of what he’d just discovered. But perhaps –

  At this point Gadberry was distracted by a sharp noise from the room into which the cock had strutted. It was the room which he himself had just been able to peer into – the one with the magic formulas, or whatever they were, painted or chalked on the floor. It was a noise suggesting a rash movement on somebody’s part, and some object being bumped into or knocked over in consequence. Gadberry decided to investigate. He had pushed rudely into Grimble’s hall; he might as well persevere in this course of conduct and push farther. Perhaps the noise had been made by the mysterious visitor. And he now owned a quite irrational anxiety to know who this might be.

  Having come to this determination, Gadberry sidestepped Grimble and strode across the hall. Just as he reached the half-open door however, some unseen agency on its other side swung it to. Gadberry grabbed the handle and shoved. The door didn’t give. A key must have been turned in it or a bolt pushed home.

  ‘Vexatious,’ Grimble said. ‘I keep on reporting these matters to the parochial church council. Roof leaks, windows rattle, pipes burst, floors collapse, doors jam. Doors jam, I say. Like this one. You can come into the kitchen.’

  ‘Thank you. I think I’d better be getting back.’ If Gadberry’s curiosity was still strong, a growing distaste for Grimble and his affairs had suddenly revealed itself as stronger still. And, after all, they were Grimble’s affairs. That they could in any sense relate to Gadberry’s own situation was an idea so irrational that it ought to be discouraged at once. The mysterious stranger, who had nipped so quickly out of his car and into the vicarage, wasn’t difficult to explain. Black magic is not commonly an entirely solitary occupation; it is something undertaken by little bands of initiates. No doubt Grimble was joined in his operations by fellow students who had every reason to come and go unremarked. If something was brewing in the near future – eye of newt and toe of frog, for example – there were probably several of these people lurking about the place already. Gadberry decided he didn’t want to meet them.

  ‘Quite right, quite right.’ Grimble had moved to his front door with surprising nimbleness, and was now flinging it open. ‘You mustn’t miss your great-aunt’s lawyer, eh?’ Grimble gave Gadberry a queer look, and suddenly burst into a cackle of shrill laughter. ‘Wonderful times ahead, too. Wonderful times ahead, I say. I think they may surprise you. I think they may surprise you very much. Good day to you, Comberford, good day!’

  A minute later, Gadberry found himself walking down the overgrown vicarage drive again. It would be an understatement to say that his perturbations had returned. To begin with, it was oddly disturbing to find that Grimble had evidently been quite clear about his identity all along. The business of supposing him to be a parishioner who wanted to get married and so on was entirely bogus. Again, whereas Gadberry would have been prepared to swear that on the previous night Grimble had been only vaguely aware of what was going on, it now appeared that he had been quite on the spot in the matter of Mrs Minton’s having announced her testamentary intentions. But that wasn’t all. In the final moments of this bizarre encounter the old man had seemed suddenly to lose control of himself. And what had been released, as a conscience, was an obscure and spine-chilling malice. An impression of something of the sort had peeped out of him more than once before. But this time it had suddenly shot up like a jet of venom.

  Of course Grimble was crazy. For example, his last words had patently carried some sort of ugly and gloating threat. But Grimble seemed not to have been aware of this; he had plainly been supposing himself to be indulging only in the darkest of ironies, invisible except to himself alone. Reflecting on this as he retraced his steps through the snowy solitude, Gadberry discovered in himself a new emotion. An intermittent apprehensiveness and alarm had, in the nature of the case, been familiar to him ever since his arrival at Bruton. But now he felt frightened. And that, somehow, was quite different. He didn’t like it at all.

  And next he discovered something further. His sense of sheer fright was giving him a fellow feeling for somebody else. He was quite sure of this, and yet he was unable to decide in his own mind who the other person could be. Was it Miss Bostock, whose past history and present intentions appeared alike reprehensible? He didn’t think it was. Miss Bostock wasn’t intimidated. She was intimidating. Was it – But suddenly Gadberry found that he had no further need to speculate. The other frightened character was Grimble himself. That Grimble was frightened was something merely a little obscured by the fact that Grimble was also malevolent.

  Hard upon this discovery, Gadberry found his own fright deepening. For a few moments it might even have been described as terror, so that it became his impulse to run for it – literally to run for it – here and now. He’d take to his heels through the snow until he found a railway-station, a bus, a friendly motorist willing to give him a lift – or, all else failing, just a frozen haystack into which he could burrow and hide.

  He realised that this was panic. In fact it was quite strictly what used to be called panic in ancient Greece: a conviction that some supernatural power was coming after him. Of course this was nonsense, absolute nonsense. It must have been that damned cock that had done it. He recalled that the bird had affected him with a sense of horror he couldn’t account for. Perhaps he’d suffered a traumatic experience with a similar creature in some forgotten woodshed during his childhood.

  Trudging doggedly on towards the Abbey – for he commonly discovered in himself some small emergency stock of resolution in extremity – he brought his mind back to Grimble. A mingling of fear and malevolence, he told himself, is precisely what you might expect in one who has dabbled in black
magic once too often. It must be the typical emotional state, that was to say, of a man who has yielded to diabolical possession. To have passed wholly within the power of the Devil must be very frightening. It must also make one, in all one’s own impulses, very devilish indeed. That was it. The wretched Grimble was a man constrained by an external power to wickednesses that at once scared and attracted him.

  That Gadberry should have come to entertain this highly coloured and Faustian vision of the Vicar of Bruton must appear surprising. Generally speaking, he owned a fairly rational mind. When he departed from the dictates of this – and in the present narrative he has undeniably been discovered as doing so – it was in the direction of behaviour which, if freakish, was yet enterprising and directed to quite reasonable ends: economic security and a recognised place in society. If his course of conduct had been one scarcely to be entered upon by a person of unimpaired moral perception, it had yet not been accompanied by any positive clouding of the intelligence. Yet here he now was, on the verge of believing himself involved in what old magazines would have called a Tale of the Supernatural. Walking towards Mr Grimble’s vicarage, he had known very well that certain tracks in the snow had been made by a running hare, and not a prowling Demon. Now he was not so sure.

  The Abbey was before him. He stopped and stared at it broodingly. The vast and rambling house, half Gothic and half Gothicised; its peripheral ruins, culminating in a broken and ivied tower which was the chief fastnessm of the Bruton owls; the gardens which were mostly cavernous cypress alleys with here and there a marble statue like a petrified corpse; the fishpond, enormous and mysteriously deep, now frozen over but with here and there a hole driven through the ice for the benefit of the enormous and voracious pike lurking in it: all this must be in part at least responsible for the mediaeval turn which his speculations on Grimble had taken. And of course it was superstitious nonsense, he told himself once more. There must be some other explanation of the puzzle that the old creature presented.