by F. G. Cottam
The forest seemed denuded of wildlife. She didn’t hear a single rustle in the undergrowth or a solitary note of birdsong. The hush was palpable, the silence so pressing it was almost a sound in itself. The walk seemed interminable. She wondered about her orientation, knowing that right-handed people tended to lead with the dominant foot when walking blind, eventually in large anti-clockwise circles. She adjusted every hundred paces to prevent this, to make her progress a straight line to where she knew her destination lay.
The forest cleared about her all at once. The trees didn’t thin, she just left them behind her as abruptly as the curtain opening on a stage. And in front of her, like some phantom prop, she saw through the fog the ghost of a building; its windows blind, black sockets, its turrets faint clusters and its mass uncertain despite the size of it, rippling slightly through the grey, like some dangerously incomplete illusion.
Earth turned to weedy gravel under her feet and she sensed rather than saw that she was on a broad sweep of drive. She pictured the liveried chauffeurs of Klaus Fischer’s guests; Daimlers and Rolls-Royces and Bugattis; the odd majestic Mercedes Benz. Bentleys, Packards, Delages, their dinner-plate headlamps yellow orbs out here as the dissolution and the darkness reigned within.
The main entrance door was breached, buckled and cleaved as though some rough beast had shattered it, intruding. Ruthie walked up the broad flight of stone steps that led to it and took a deep breath and shuddered once and then entered the Fischer House, feeling like the solitary gatecrasher at some long-forgotten ball.
The vestibule was vast. And the fog had intruded. It roiled to a height of about four feet and concealed the floor, which was hard and slippery and Ruthie assumed to be made of marble. The wood-panelled walls were mildewed in diseased splotches. At a point thirty feet from the front door, and directly opposite it, a central staircase rose to the upper floors. Bits of its balustrades were missing. Its once lush carpet was rotting and slime-covered. Its runners must have gleamed once, chrome now barnacled with rust where they weren’t missing entirely. The steps didn’t look to Ruthie like they could be trusted to take her weight.
There were chandeliers suspended on chains from the ceiling. There were six of them, their intricate crystal dulled by time and neglect. Their chains had rusted, and frayed snakes of cloth-sheathed wiring coiled around their length. Where the chains were anchored to the ceiling, weight had long rendered the plasterwork to spiders’ webs of cracks. Each of the chandeliers looked like it might at any moment come crashing down, exploding into hurtled shards of glass invisible under the fog. It seemed wisest not to walk directly underneath them.
She walked past the staircase to its left and on through a large door, pillared and architraved to either side and above, closed but not locked, high and heavy and stiff on its hinges when she pushed at its once-polished oak surface.
The room beyond was baronial. The fog had not penetrated this far into the building and the floor was intricate parquet, soft and sodden with decades of water penetration, a hardwood bog, mushy under her feet as she progressed further into the Fischer House. The furniture had all long gone, but there were sconces set at intervals high on the walls and the pitch-dipped torches that had once illuminated this great hall’s evenings still resided in them damp now, redundant.
There was an old gramophone player abandoned in one corner, like some material non-sequitur amid the general emptiness, its horn rising and swelling like some silent rebuke. Around it lay shattered records; brittle, shellac 78s that would have sounded scratched and reedy on the primitive machine they were meant for even when brand new and gleaming out of their paper sleeves. Ruthie could imagine the handle of the machine abruptly turning itself, music blossoming out of the horn to breach the silence, a decades-dead operatic tenor summoned for one last, reluctant encore. Unless jazz had been Klaus Fischer’s thing; loud piano, frenzied clarinet. Ruthie shivered. She sensed that across the lost decades, the house was communicating with her. It wasn’t in the least friendly. But it was amused.
Ruthie had crossed the room to another door. She had decided she would explore only the ground floor. She wouldn’t risk the stairs to the upper floors and shuddered afresh at the thought that there might be a lift. Imagine getting into the lift, she thought. Imagine closing yourself inside its musty confinement. Imagine its ancient machinery, clanking through old force of habit into weary life.
There would be a cellar, too. She could imagine a dim catacomb down there, harbouring obscure and silent secrets. But she had a suspicion, a sort of presentiment, that if she discovered and descended the cellar steps, she might find herself in a dark stone labyrinth she might never be able to grope her way back out of.
She walked into another room. This one was smaller, possibly a smoking room, and there was a bathroom off it and from the bathroom, Ruthie was aware of two things. One of these was almost expected and the other an unpleasant surprise. A tap dripped persistently, percussively, she thought, against tarnished porcelain. And she could smell tobacco, so strong she thought it probably a pre-war blend and almost certainly Turkish.
Ruthie held her breath aware that the moment had the still expectancy of dawning horror, a sort of slow-motion dread that made her motionless as her skin pinpricked into gooseflesh. Then, unmistakably, she heard someone speak. The sound came from inside the bathroom’s yawning open door.
‘Marvellous,’ a male voice said, fruity and lisping. And absolutely clear and undeniable. And Ruthie shrank, recoiling at the sound, fear thrilling through her like some rude invasive force.
TWENTY-THREE
There was a Fred Astaire patter of shoe-leather on linoleum; an antic, joyful sound that signalled excitement and filled Ruthie Gillespie with terror. Her own feet felt leaden, immovable, literally petrified. A stiff black shape skittered through the bathroom door and wheeled across the floor in front of her. It became still and was a top hat, the black silk lining coarse with ancient grease she saw, the sheen long absent from its black, moth-eaten exterior.
‘Tine to make whoopee,’ the voice from inside the bathroom said, and Ruthie knew that the voice, with its tone of antique pastiche, belonged to someone from the distant past, from the time when the Fischer House revelled and thrilled, from a decade of debauchery and from someone long dead, reluctant to be forgotten despite that.
‘Who’d have thought it, after all this time,’ the voice said. ‘Happy days are here again.’
Strong hands gripped Ruthie’s shoulders and she was wheeled about, gasping. And she was staring into the face of Paula Tort, wide-eyed, turning her head slowly from side to side in a way that firmly signalled for her not to speak. Ruthie saw that Paula had a large crucifix on a leather thong looped around her neck, Christ writhing on her chest. She took her hands from Ruthie’s shoulders and one of them held something and Ruthie saw it was the rosary she’d seen among Martin Mear’s assembled possessions in the storage facility in Wimbledon to which Carter Melville had taken her. She slipped this over Ruthie’s head.
‘Bother,’ said the voice from the bathroom. ‘Neither of you is any fun at all.’ Petulant, amused, menacing.
Paula put her right hand in the small of Ruthie’s back and pushed her firmly in the direction she’d come. She didn’t hurry, as though hurrying would be a mistake, a tactic that might encourage pursuit. She just strode purposefully through the door, over the baronial mush of the rotten parquet, past the spoiled and reeking carpet of the great staircase, out of the main entrance and onto the sweep of weedy gravel, where Ruthie saw that the fog was reluctantly lifting. She remembered then it was only the morning. Inside the Fischer House she realized it had felt like some dark and eternal night.
They walked through the forest in silence. Ruthie came slowly back to herself. Dread and shock receded. She began to notice small details; how purposeful Paula looked in her jeans and leather jacket with her hair unbrushed and her face devoid of make-up. How the forest seemed to awaken, stirring with sound and movem
ent now as they progressed through it. How it transmuted from the lustreless, fog-bound monochrome of earlier into a riot of autumnal colour now under pale sunshine.
Paula’s black Porsche was parked beside Ruthie’s black Pashley bicycle and Ruthie thought how symbolic that juxtaposition was of two lives lived in absurd contrast.
‘Get in,’ Paula said.
Ruthie did.
Paula started the engine.
‘You saved my life.’
‘Maybe not your life,’ Paula said, ‘certainly your sanity.’
‘How did—’
Paula lifted a vertical forefinger to her lips. She said, ‘Full disclosure, honey. But not until we’re well away from here.’
Ruthie was aware of the rosary she wore, the weight of its cross between her breasts, the feel of the beads encircling her neck, the talismanic strangeness of it. Organized religion wasn’t her thing at all. She closed her eyes. She felt numb and weary. She shut out the visible world and beside her, Paula drove.
‘I spoke to Carter Melville right after you did. He told me you were going back to the beginning. I figured that meant only one thing, one place, to someone with a mind the way yours works. So I followed you.
‘Then this morning, I missed you. I didn’t figure you for an early riser.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ve got a sort of nocturnal look.’
‘Looks can be deceiving.’
‘And you’ve recently had your heart broken and so probably you’re not sleeping great. I should have factored that in. What time did you set off?’
‘First light.’
‘I missed you by half an hour. But I knew where you were going and I got there just in time.’
‘I think you’re incredibly brave.’
‘Or incredibly dumb.’
‘Because you’ve been there before, haven’t you, Paula?’
They were in the lounge at the Hamborough, where Paula Tort had booked a room the previous night. It was off-season and so they had the lounge to themselves. They had been served coffee, though Ruthie felt like drinking something far stronger. But it was still only half-past ten in the morning and Paula’s hard-rock past was a long way behind her.
‘I went for the same reason you did. Only with me, it was personal. It was where the Martin I knew was born and I wanted to see his birthplace.’
‘What happened this morning?’
‘I can’t explain it, Ruthie,’ Paula said. ‘I think bad things were done there a long time ago using potent magic. It’s a place that sort of revels in its malignant past. The present intrudes there and the place gets provoked.’
‘And that resident?’
Paula shuddered. ‘Not real, I don’t think.’
‘So the Fischer House is haunted?’
‘If there are ghosts anywhere, honey, it’s there.’
Ruthie said, ‘They don’t seem to have bothered Martin.’
Carefully, Paula said, ‘Martin had a kind of protection.’
‘Because he was part of the Jericho Society?’
‘My, what a clever girl you’re turning out to be.’
‘I’ve had a run-in with them in the past.’
Paula sipped coffee. ‘And you’re still around. More lives than a cat.’
Full disclosure, Paula Tort had said. Ruthie took the ribbon-tied pile of Proctor Court postcards from her pocket and put it on the table between them. Paula picked up the bundle and untied the ribbon and read each of the cards. And Ruthie studied her expression, doing it.
‘You faked his death.’
‘I helped engineer his escape,’ Paula said, trying and failing to clear with her fingers the tears now trickling freely down her face.
Ruthie offered her a paper napkin from their table and she took it and dabbed at her eyes.
‘Is he still alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How can you bear that?’
‘We were saving his soul. That was the deal. I knew I’d never see him again. It’s why my grief is real, Ruthie. And still raw.’
‘Does April know?’
‘April can’t know. She’d try to find him.’
‘She’d never forgive you.’
Paula let out a snot-filled bark of laughter. She said, ‘In her position, neither would I.’
Ruthie thought that this was as close as the woman ever came to losing her famous composure. Glacial, was the word most often used describing Paula Tort. Except she hadn’t been that at the Fischer House, or at the wheel of her car. And she wasn’t glacial now.
Paula nodded at the postcards. ‘This your world exclusive?’
‘It’s our secret, if you want it to remain that. I’m a human being and I owe you big time.’
‘Who else knows?’
‘A man I trust.’
‘Not Carter Melville, then.’
‘Never Carter Melville,’ Ruthie said. She had remembered it was Wednesday. She said, ‘What would you be doing now, if you weren’t here with me?’
Paula looked at her wristwatch. It was a Cartier, probably white gold, Ruthie thought. She said, ‘We’d still be in conference. Christmas is still huge in retail and I’ve two collections to create for early January. Maybe a spin class at lunch time or hot yoga or Pilates. Your body starts to cheat unless you take yourself by surprise.’
‘I’ll take your word for that.’
‘So I tend to vary things. I had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon with the architecture firm responsible for the new flagship store scheduled to open in May next year. And after that I was going to brief the photographer shooting the diffusion menswear range for the spring catalogue.’
‘Just an average day, then.’
‘Pretty much.’
‘One I’ve sabotaged.’
‘I had to come,’ Paula said.
‘You could probably still make the noon ferry.’
‘I’m doing no such thing,’ Paula said. ‘I’ve never needed a drink more in my life. And something tells me you know better than most would where we can get one.’
Ruthie picked up the pile of postcards. She hesitated and then handed them to Paula. ‘Find a safe place for these,’ she said. ‘I’d suggest the bottom of the Solent on your ferry ride back to the mainland.’
‘Thank you. Where are we headed?’
‘The Spyglass Inn is five minutes away,’ Ruthie said. ‘Panoramic sea views. And I’m buying.’
They walked down the hill to the Spyglass. The day had cleared and there was no wind. The sea stretched calmly in subdued, English light.
‘Who’s the guy you showed the postcards?’
‘He was with me when I found them.’
‘I’m guessing you found them at Proctor Court.’
‘He’s a man named Michael Aldridge.’
‘Aldridge the architect?’
Ruthie stopped walking. ‘Are Aldridge Associates doing your flagship store?’
‘No. A few years ago I bought a Jacobean manor house in Sussex.’
‘As you do,’ Ruthie said. They’d resumed walking.
‘Aldridge was recommended as a specialist in restoration,’ Paula said. ‘Kind of cute, in an understated sort of way. You involved with him?’
‘You cut to the chase, don’t you, Paula?’
‘Always have. Too late to stop now.’
‘Anyway, the answer is yes. Tentatively.’
‘Tentative won’t do it, hon,’ Paula said. ‘Tentative will get you nowhere.’
They’d arrived at the pub. They ordered drinks and found a vacant table outside, where Ruthie could sit and smoke in the wan sunshine. ‘A bad habit,’ she said, taking her pink Bic lighter from her pocket.
‘I had a lot worse,’ Paula said.
‘What was it really like?’
‘Utterly crazy,’ Paula said. ‘We were making up a life as we went along that no one had lived before. It’s impossible to describe because it was so insane. Sometimes it was wonderful. It w
asn’t always, but it was most of the time. And I’d have been dead decades ago if it hadn’t stopped when it did.’
Something had happened, Ruthie realized. They were no longer interviewer and subject. They were something more. Ruthie felt indebted to Paula Tort, but there was more to it than that. There was a chasm between them in age and experience and status. But there was suddenly also a closeness. Paula reinforced this notion, saying what she said next.
‘It’s a huge relief to me to be able to share that secret with someone I’m able to trust, Ruthie. And God help me, I do trust you.’
‘I get the impression you and April are close.’
‘As close as we can be.’
‘Sir Terence Maloney was scheduled to talk to me. Then he postponed. Then he cancelled altogether. Have you any idea why he would do that?’
Paula gulped vodka and tonic. There was a tremor Ruthie noticed in her hand, picking up her glass. ‘I can theorize,’ she said.
Martin had been corrupted by his Uncle Max. The Jericho Society was dynastic and Max Askew had no heir. So he had inducted Martin, sharing the rites and beliefs and secrets, seducing him with the promise of what belonging could bring in terms of worldly success and power and prosperity.
And Martin Mear got those things. He attained his rewards. But instead of remaining loyal to what had enabled all that, he faked his death to escape it and then renounced it from beyond his apparent grave. He didn’t merely defy the man who had indoctrinated him as a child, he taunted him. It was more than a betrayal. And they never forgave. And they never forgot. And there was always a price to pay.
‘Bad news for Uncle Max,’ Ruthie said, remembering the passive neutrality on the face of the man at the wheel of the split-screen Morris Minor, with his bland features and his leather-patched tweed.
Bad news for the surviving members of Ghost Legion, Paula said. Not for Jason Ritchie, intent on drinking himself to death. But she believed both Patsy McCoy in ’79 and James Prentice in ’83 had met with intentional rather than accidental ends. They wanted to destroy what remained of Martin’s life-work. They wanted to send him a message. They wanted to silence forever the people in whom Martin might have confided about the cult to which he’d once belonged.
