‘You’ve rushed in here to say that? I am at a loss to understand why,’ Harcourt replied coldly. ‘Your change of heart is of no interest to me. I suggest you write to Mr Randall.’
‘You don’t understand. I mean I shall never marry.’
His eyes bulged. ‘Are you insane?’ Suddenly, he turned on me. ‘What have you been saying? What sort of mad rubbish, to turn her mind?’
‘Miss Lane had nothing to do with it,’ Flora said swiftly. ‘I have been thinking matters over for the past several days, and only now decided to tell you—’
‘Oh, very likely!’ He had been casting a venomous glare on me, but now stared coldly at Jesperson. ‘I’m afraid I must ask you to take this female person away, immediately.’
I could see that my partner was at a loss: Should he leap to my defence, invent excuses, or pretend to a masculine solidarity that might leave the door open for future visits? Although I didn’t want to leave Flora alone with Harcourt, I didn’t know what we would achieve by trying to stay, so I left the room, just as Flora was demanding, ‘Am I not allowed to have my own friends?’
‘As long as I’m your guardian, Flora, you will do as I say. You’ll have nothing more to do with that female, and you will not break off your engagement. We’ll forget you ever said anything about it. Mr Jesperson, if you please!’
As they emerged, with Flora in the lead, I was surprised to see the hint of a smile on her face. She winked at me before turning on her guardian again.
‘So, I am to be your object and meekly allow your will to prevail in everything, until my twenty-first birthday changes everything?’
‘That will change nothing,’ he said scornfully. ‘You don’t imagine you’ll be anything different than you are now? Than you’ve always been?’
She flinched, but held steady. ‘In the eyes of the law.’
‘The law.’ He snorted. ‘The law is an ass. It has nothing to say about you. It has no idea what you are.’ His gaze on her was horrible.
‘I may as well go now,’ she said quietly.
‘Go? What are you talking about?’
‘You are right that a few months will change nothing. You are pleased with the situation; I am not. So I shall leave.’
She looked from me to Jesperson, saying, ‘If it’s not too much trouble . . .’
He was swift to take her meaning. ‘Of course, come with us. Any help we can give—’
I heard the rattle, and saw that the Chinese vase was rocking violently back and forth, until it tilted too far and fell, shattering against the hard floor and spilling its burden of umbrellas and walking sticks.
Only one of the sticks did not come to rest with everything else on the floor, but shot through the air, straight at Jesperson.
If it had struck where it aimed, against his throat, I have no doubt it would have killed him, but he was quick. Almost as if he’d expected the attack, he stepped lightly aside, his arm rising, fluid and graceful, to catch the stick.
Unlike an ordinary thrown object, the stick continued to move after it was caught, writhing and pulling to escape, while he gripped it more firmly, frowning as he looked for a thread or wire and tried to work out the trick of it.
Certain there would be no invisible thread, I looked instead at Harcourt. His expression was nothing like those I’d seen on the faces of mediums or mentalists; he looked utterly astonished, and thrilled. If he had caused the stick’s activity, it was through a power hidden from his conscious mind, something he did not suspect and could not control.
Then another movement, glimpsed from the corner of my eye, caught my attention, and as I turned to look, I heard the terrible grating, grinding noise made by the stone gargoyle as it ponderously rocked itself across the floor. Although no one was near enough to be at risk if it fell over, I nevertheless called out a warning.
Flora took one look and shouted: ‘Stop it! Stop it right now!’
The gargoyle stopped moving, and so did the stick, although Jesperson still kept a tight hold and a wary eye on it.
Harcourt took a hesitant step forward, his eyes still fixed upon the stick. ‘Give— give it to me, if you please, Mr Jesperson,’ he said. ‘That— that is the weapon that killed poor Mr Adcocks, and before that, a young man in Plymouth. If not for your exceptionally quick reflexes, you would have been its third victim.’
After a reluctant pause, Jesperson handed over the stick, saying, ‘You expected this might happen?’
‘Never,’ the man gasped, staring at the stick in his hands with an unhealthy mixture of lust and fear. ‘Who would imagine that the instinct to kill would be inherent?’
‘You imagined it inherent in me,’ said Flora. ‘A mindless, killing force so powerful that it could use me – a living, intelligent being – without regard for my own free will?’
‘No, no, certainly not,’ he said, without conviction. ‘You were a mere infant, with no ability to think or act for yourself, when fate used you to terminate the lives of three innocent souls. It is quite different now.’ He had been looking at her, but the lure of the object in his hands proved too much, and he soon returned to staring at it like a besotted lover.
‘You’ve always thought of me as another piece in your collection,’ Flora said bitterly. ‘A mindless, soulless thing, and not even your favourite.’
‘Dear Flora, don’t be absurd. I know you are no “thing”. You have been like a daughter to me. Have I not always cared for you as best I could? Bought you whatever your heart desired? My only concern has ever been to see you safely and happily married to the man of your choice, when the time came.’
While my sympathies were entirely with Flora, I recognised that to an outside observer, she would seem hysterical, and Harcourt sane.
‘Yet you must have wondered,’ Jesperson said, as if idly. ‘Eh, Harcourt? You surely wondered if your ward was intended by Fate for family happiness. Perhaps you saw her first engagement as a scientific experiment. The result was not as you hoped, but perhaps as you feared . . .?’
They exchanged a look, man to man, and although Harcourt shook his head ruefully, I saw the smug satisfaction beneath the solemn look.
‘You’re vile,’ Flora murmured. She cleared her throat and announced, ‘I can never marry. I won’t put another life at risk.’
This time, Harcourt did not protest. He shrugged and sighed, and said, ‘I would never force you to go against your will, no matter how foolish it seems to me.’
‘That’s not all. I’m leaving your collection today, Mr. Harcourt—’
‘Oh, come now. Don’t be childish. You can’t blame me for what you are!’
‘Not for what I am, only for what you’ve tried to make me. The atmosphere in this house is hideous, not because of the objects, but because of your gloating fascination with murder and violent death. I’m going. I won’t set foot in this house again as long as you are alive.’
Having stated her intention, she made straight for the door.
I felt the shudder that ran through the house even before her hand touched the door handle; it was a sensation so subtle yet so profound that I thought at first I might be ill.
Harcourt yelled. His nose was bleeding; the walking stick had come to life again in his hand and seemed determined to beat him to death. He managed to remove it to arm’s length, and struggled to keep it under control. The gargoyle, too, was shuddering back to life, and, from the variety of creaks and groans and fluttering sounds I heard coming from the next room, so were other bits of the collection.
‘Move,’ said Jesperson urgently, propelling me forward. ‘Get out of the house! Is there anyone else?’ Hearing the shouts, the little maid who’d let us in reappeared, and, although looking utterly bewildered, she allowed him to usher her outside as well.
We met Flora at the front gate and turned back to look at the house.
‘W
here’s Harcourt?’ Jesperson demanded. ‘He was right behind me.’
‘He won’t leave his collection,’ said Flora. ‘He’ll have gone back for it. He used to worry aloud about what he should save first, if the house were on fire.’
‘But it’s the collection itself that’s the threat!’
On my own, I might have left Harcourt to his fate, but when my partner ran back inside, I felt it my duty to follow. Mounting the front steps, I was able to see through the window into the study, and what I saw brought me to a standstill.
Pale and portly Mr Harcourt was leaping and whirling like a dervish, holding the silver-headed stick away from his body like a magic staff, as he struggled to avoid a flurry of small objects. Occasionally in his efforts, he unconsciously pulled his arm in closer to his body, allowing the stick to give him a sharp crack on his leg or shoulder, and then he would shriek in pain or anger.
Books and other things continued to tumble from the shelves. Many simply fell, but others hurled themselves with force directly at him, and these struck a variety of glancing blows against his body, head, and limbs. A glass-fronted display case shook fiercely, as if caught in an earthquake, until it burst open, releasing everything inside. A great malignant swarm composed of small bottles, jars, needles, pins, razors, and many more things I could not recognise now enveloped the man, whose cries turned to a constant, terrified howling as they attacked him.
Feeling sick, I turned aside and went indoors to my partner, who was throwing himself bodily against the solid oak door, as if he could force it open. Seeing me, he stopped and rubbed his shoulder, looking a little sheepish.
I gave him one of my hairpins, assuming he would know how to use it.
As he fiddled with the lock, I listened to the horrible sounds that accompanied the violence on the other side: thuds and thumps, shrieks and wails and groans, and then a shocking, liquid hissing, followed by a gurgle, and then the heaviest thud of all, and then silence.
By the time Jesperson managed to get the door open, it was all over. Harcourt was dead. His bloody, battered corpse lay on the carpet, surrounded by the remnants of his murderous collection. Whatever life had possessed them had expired with his. There was a sharp, acrid stench in the room – I guess from the contents of various broken bottles – but nothing so foul as the atmosphere it replaced.
‘Vitriol,’ said Jesperson. ‘Don’t look.’
But I had already seen what was left of the face, and it was no more shocking than the sounds had led me to imagine.
As I went out to give Flora Bellamy the news, and to send the maid to fetch the police, I already knew that this had not turned out to be a case I could write about for publication.
And, as it developed, it got worse.
It was fortunate indeed that Jasper Jesperson had some influential relatives who moved in the circles of power, for otherwise I think the local police would have been pleased to charge him with murder, in the absence of more likely suspects, and if he hadn’t done it, I was their next choice.
Even though we might argue we had saved his life, our client was so far from pleased with the outcome of our investigations that he refused to pay us anything. It was not Harcourt’s death that bothered him so much as Miss Bellamy’s insistence on releasing him from their engagement. She would give him no better reason for her change of heart than to say that she was reconsidering how she might best spend her life, and that she was inclined to seek some form of employment by which to support herself ‘like Miss Lane’.
Flora Bellamy never set foot inside The Pines again. Even though her guardian was dead, she had decided to take no chances, and hired others to empty the house before selling it. In his will, Harcourt left everything to his ward, with only one caveat: Although she could decide whether to keep or dispose of “the collection”, she must do so as a whole, and not break it up.
This stipulation she decided to ignore.
‘Perhaps I’m wrong,’ she said to me, the last time I saw her, ‘but I believe it could be dangerous. Individual objects are only things, but when gathered together, they became something more – first in Mr Harcourt’s imagination, and then in reality. The concept in law of the deodand was that something that had once done evil could be remade into something useful, even holy, by good works. That was not allowed to anything in Mr Harcourt’s collection – his use of those things was opposed to good; it venerated the evil deed.’
Her way of redemption was to donate everything that remained in the house to a good cause. Being extra cautious, she chose one so far away that she would not have to fear an accidental encounter with her former possessions, and had everything sent to a leper colony on the other side of the world.
I took it as a positive sign that she did not feel obliged to sacrifice herself in a similar way.
She decided to share a flat with her school friend, and embarked on a course of training in bookkeeping and office management.
Jesperson and I, naturally, discussed the details of this case – which began with one unsolved murder, and concluded with two – at great length when we were alone together, and also with Mrs Jesperson, but we were never able to agree upon how to assign the blame for the killings. We all agreed that both Adcocks and Harcourt were murdered, yet we also agreed that if there was no murderer, murder could not have been done.
I hope our next case will be less of a curiosity.
Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in Texas, but moved to Britain in the 1980s. She now lives with her writer husband and their daughter on the side of a Scottish loch. She has written more than a dozen fantasy, science fiction and horror novels. Her entire backlist has been re-released in ebook format by Jo Fletcher Books. Her most recent novel The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief, featuring Jesperson and Lane, is also available.
The Discord of Being • Alison Littlewood
The Discord of Being
Alison Littlewood
Emma hadn’t been to Morocco, the place her mother was buried and her father still lived, since she was little more than a child. All the same, as she stepped off the aeroplane it seemed familiar, despite the strangeness of the low, decorated terminal, the palm trees waving flag-like branches in the breeze. It was the sky, she decided. A grey covering of clouds rolled away into the distance; it was an English sky. Even so, her skin prickled with sweat as she walked towards immigration with the other passengers – holidaymakers, their children, and people going home.
In the terminal, where families waited, one man stood among the others, holding a sign that bore her name. Her father had sent a colleague to meet her, a tall, neatly dressed man named Ibrahim. She shook hands with the stranger, remembering her father’s words on the telephone: You don’t need to come. She felt he had been offering an escape route for them both.
The call had come late one night, the ringtone sounding just like any other. That was what seemed strange afterwards, that the sound had carried no warning; that she hadn’t known.
Disturbed, her father had said, and all Emma could think of was being pressed close to her mother’s body, safe, warm. Her grave has been disturbed. I just – I thought you should know. And then that eternal mantra, You don’t need to come.
The thought of it angered her. How could he have done this? For it was her father she blamed, at once and entirely. He had brought her mother here, leaving Emma to stay with an aunt, just for a little while. And then her mother had died and he decided to stay, just like that, not seeing Emma save for when she came for her mother’s funeral. How could he let her mother die like that? How could he let her die here? And how could he live among people who would do this to her grave?
Emma opened her mouth to say something to Ibrahim, then closed it again. It was as if he read her thoughts. He turned to her with sympathy in his eyes. ‘The Moroccan people would not do this.’
She scowled. ‘Then who?’
<
br /> It was his turn to subside. He shook his head, led her to the car.
It wasn’t long before they reached the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Emma watched the colours flash by. She had imagined somewhere sepia and bleak, without growth and life. Instead there was this red land, with grasses and straw and brilliant yellow flowers, everything dotted with dark green argan trees.
The engine protested as the road grew steeper, heading up towards the grey sky.
‘It will rain,’ Ibrahim said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘I think you brought it from England,’ and she smiled back at him as he was proved right; droplets speckled the windscreen. The wipers scraped and Emma wound down the window to see a river rattling down a narrow gully, palm trees darkening in the rain.
They wound upwards until they reached a narrow track. To one side great boulders were piled atop one another, their ochre streaked with red and grey and orange. To the other side was a sheer drop. Emma glimpsed the road they had travelled far below, a village nestled into the hillside beyond, the mosque’s minaret towering over everything else.
In front of them, an inlet was cut into the rocks. Buildings slotted into it, filling every inch, their wooden doorways painted bright colours. One opened and a man stepped out. He wore a point-hooded djellaba and had yellow babouches on his feet. He had a grey beard and was turning something in his hand: a piece of stone. With a tremor, Emma realised it was her father.
When she turned to Ibrahim, he gave a sympathetic smile. Her father did not hold out his arms or say anything at all. Instead he raised his watery eyes, nodded, and led the way inside.
The room was dark, its concrete floor strewn with threadbare rugs. There was a simple wooden table, shelves holding rocks and grit and tools: hammers, chisels, brushes. A mobile phone lay among them, dust-covered like the rest. The room smelled of damp stone and something sweeter: honey, perhaps.
Emma felt a twinge of anger. As far as she’d known, her father had left England for a good job, a prestigious job, working with the fossil mining concerns that dotted the mountains. But this – was this why he had left? Her desk at work was just one grey cubicle among many, but the walls were smooth, the floor clean. She had a computer and a telephone, air conditioning.
The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology Page 19
