I held back and raised the candle higher. At the same instant the figure in white drew even with the corridor’s single window, stopped, and began to turn toward me. A cold draft seemed to leap along the corridor and my candle went out.
There was light enough from the window, however—a blue-white glimmer of moonshine—to show me the woman’s face. If in fact you could call it a face. Her features were blurred and indistinct, a white death mask with neither expression nor fleshly substance, an impression I was able to account for, after a moment’s shock, by the discovery that the light from the window did not glow upon her face—it glowed through it. Her white gown was equally translucent. Indeed, she seemed to possess no physical being whatsoever, only a congealed and intensified essence which throbbed and crackled in the dark hallway like an electrical discharge—a violent displacement of the atmosphere in which she stood.
I gasped for breath; there was a pressure against my chest and another inside my skull. It wasn’t simply terror. There was also that feeling I’d had before—that sense of something ancient and corrupt, putrid and defiled. Instinctively I fought to prevent its evil from rushing out to possess me.
The vision itself could have lasted but a few seconds. Yet even as she began to melt into the moonlight that flowed through the window, I became convinced that the creature—woman, demon, spirit, whatever she was—meant me no harm. Her soundless cry seemed to ring in the air even after her image vanished, and it was a cry, I was sure, for help.
I could not immediately move. I was not sure that I still possessed a body. Finally, I dug in my pocket and found a book of matches. Relighting the candle, I proceeded to my room, having no wish at the present to pursue my designs on the professor’s daughter.
After I had chased out the cats, got into my pajamas and made one last nerve-racking trek down the hall to the bathroom, I was still too wrought up for sleep. I opened my briefcase and sat down on the bed with my notes. Before the Special Collections had been closed, I had translated several passages of the Westchurch poem into modern verse. They gave little indication of the poet’s skill or power, but were fairly true to the content of the poem—and at present, all I had to work with. I sorted through my index cards until I found the one on which I’d rendered several lines from the last long section of the poem. As I suspected, they seemed very much to the purpose of the professor’s astronomy lesson.
Oh damned star, oh fiendish light!
Where yesternight was but a well,
A blackish hole where hope could dwell—
Now the heavens blanch with fright,
And hope and faith have lost to hell.
It was raining again by morning, but the professor, Stephany and I wedged ourselves into the Volkswagen and set out for Creypool, a bucolic hamlet several miles inland and sheltered by a range of low hills. The abbey stood on a bit of high ground between the village and the fens. Only the foundations, a few jagged pieces of wall and several precarious arches were left to claim the protection of the National Trust, but the surrounding gardens were well kept. Within a perfectly symmetrical confluence of grassy plots, graveled paths and freshly turned flower beds, we found an ancient sundial. Its eroded and moss-stained stone spoke eloquently of the passage of centuries.
Trevor-Finch turned up his collar against the drizzle and, pipe clenched between his teeth, looked upon the debris of a rival tradition. “The Puritans, good swine, tore the place down,” he said. “Too bad; it might have done for a hospital or a school. Until the Trust took it over, it was nothing but a sheep pasture—though my father did some excavating and poking about here in his time.”
We roamed the broken stonework with its occasional seams of concrete and patches of brick. I inspected the remnants of the abbey’s chapel, library and dining hall. Farther on, we encountered a maze of individual cells, most no larger than a good-sized broom closet. They were open to the wind and rain, and weeds sprouted among their paving stones, but they would have been dark and secretive once. I reflected that it must have been in one of these tiny cells that Geoffrey Gervaise worked over the lines of his extraordinary poem. Good and evil, faith and despair, being and nothingness—the great cosmic drama, miniaturized and made to perform its ageless pantomime in a cell barely six feet long and four feet wide. It occurred to me that our modern philosophers had not been the first to discover the miracle of relativity.
Trevor-Finch wandered off to look at something and Stephany and I found ourselves alone. She took my hand and drew me back into the shadow of a precarious archway.
“Isn’t this a romantic spot?” she asked. “It’s like something out of Byron or Shelley—so melancholy, yet so serene and ageless.”
We were agonizingly close in a well of cold, wet stones, with massive blocks poised directly above our heads. There were raindrops like tears on Stephany’s lashes, a slight flush on her China-doll cheeks. A lock of hair clung wetly to her slender neck, and there was something touchingly submissive about the way she huddled close to me in the little niche we had found.
“Stephany, is there some mystery connected with Abbotswold? Something your father doesn’t want me to know about?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Last night at dinner, when you mentioned an ‘evil spell,’ your father seemed momentarily upset. And yesterday, when I talked to your grandmother—’’
“Grandmama knows all the family stories,” she said. “You’ll have to ask her. They don’t want me to know.”
“Who doesn’t want you to know what, Stephany?”
“Daddy and Grandmama. They don’t want me to know about the ghost and all that rubbish. They’re afraid it will put ideas into my head. It’s so silly, really. I mean, at my age: What ideas haven’t I already thought of, hmm?”
“So there is a ghost! Do you know anything about her, Stephany?”
“Her? What makes you think it’s a ‘her’? I’m afraid I can’t tell you a thing, David. I’ve always been dreadfully protected. Ever since my mother . . .”
“Yes, what happened to your mother?” I asked, when she paused. But she seemed confused and her large blue eyes pleaded with me not to ask any more questions. I still held her small, warm hand in mine, and I thought I could probably kiss her if I tried, but as I lowered my lips to hers I heard footsteps crunching gravel behind us. Stephany slipped away with a teasing smile, and then Trevor-Finch rounded the corner.
“What have you two been up to? There’s a rather interesting bit of business I want to show you.”
We followed the professor across a courtyard lined with the stumps of thick pillars, then through the glistening rubble of the roofless chapel. Beyond the abbey’s rear wall—an uneven row of impacted, rotting molars—we reached the verge of the slope that led down to the fens. As far as I could see to the south and west, the land was flat, green, wet and empty, but just to our left there was a small, brushy hillock.
“Over here,” Trevor-Finch said, and led the way into the brush and up the muddy incline. We pushed through the branches, to come out on a stone platform. “Now, what do you think this was?” Trevor-Finch asked, with a smugness which indicated he was about to score a point.
I saw that the flat stone floor had once been walled and possibly roofed over. It was octagonal in shape and not more than eight feet across, suggesting one of those miniature temples one sees adorning the classical landscape in old paintings of nymphs and goddesses. “Some sort of a shrine?” I asked.
“Observe the curious markings on the floor,” Trevor-Finch said. “Do you see? The four corners of the compass and, here, the signs of the zodiac along this circular track. It was an observatory, no doubt modeled on the star-gazing facilities of the ancient Persians and introduced into this country through Islamic influence. You see how it works? The observer stands here, in the center of the room, orients himself by the markings on the floor, then looks up through a series of arches and apertures at various portions of the sky. A crude but effective way of keep
ing track of the stars for astrological purposes.”
“It would be interesting to know who used this observatory,” I said, “and what they were looking for.”
“Signs and portents, I suppose,” Trevor-Finch said.
He looked up and so did I, but all we saw were the low, dense clouds of an exceedingly dismal day.
“I should have thought,” Stephany said, putting her arm through her father’s but smiling at me, “that this would have been a charming spot for a tryst.”
The professor frowned. “No doubt it’s served that purpose as well, but nastier things than that go on here from time to time. There was a young woman found murdered in these ruins some years ago—raped, strangled and mutilated, according to the papers. A damned ugly spot of ground, if you ask me!”
The professor’s face had turned so gray, and he released such a shuddering grunt of discomfort, that I thought Mrs. Mortimor’s fried breakfast was causing him some serious distress. He sat down for a moment on a largish stone, got his pipe going and recovered his normal ebullience. “Well, shall we start back? Beastly weather for sightseeing, I must say.”
We ambled back through the ruins, but found no new corpses moldering among the rubble—just a few crushed cigarette packs, beer bottles, wads of tissue and an occasional prophylactic. A large black bird came gliding in through the murky sky and settled, with extended wings, upon one of the higher fragments of the ancient wall. It sat there, glaring down at us like a proprietary ghoul, as we climbed into the car. Stephany and I took the back seat. The professor’s anxious eyes searched for us in the rearview mirror, but I was fairly sure he hadn’t seen me take Stephany’s hand.
We stopped at the gingerbread parsonage in the village, but Parson Tompkins was apparently not at home. Trevor-Finch left a note wedged into the door inviting the parson to dinner on Wednesday.
“I’m not so sure he’ll want to come,” Stephany said. “You always browbeat him so unmercifully about religion.”
“He’ll come,” Trevor-Finch said. “My note mentions that you’ll be there.”
I wondered just how old the parson was. There had been no Mrs. Tompkins to answer our knock.
~§~
That afternoon Stephany paid her visit to Grandmama and the professor and I settled down before the fire in the library. The professor had decided it was time to talk about politics, so I resigned myself to a long afternoon. The rain beat against the windows and the wind whistled down the chimney. Trevor-Finch worked his way through the ideological arsenal of the British liberal: nuclear disarmament, the curtailment of American imperialism, the disbanding of NATO, the socialization of the Western world and the coming of the Marxist millennium—when, it began to appear, the clouds would part and the author of Das Kapital would be seen descending upon the earth amid angelic choirs, attended by an elite guard of Cambridge dons. Trevor-Finch was enraptured by his vision of a mankind redeemed through the application of scientific principles, liberated at long last from ignorance, poverty and superstition. He refused to acknowledge that it is in the nature of the beast to exist in darkness, in a labyrinth of self-deception and false hopes.
I pretended to give the professor’s proposals my earnest attention, but my mind was busy with quite different problems. Abbotswold had a ghost of its own, and I had seen it. Could there be some connection between this apparition and the one which haunted the College? And what of the spirit that was said to dwell at the abbey? Could Gervaise haunt both the College and the abbey—and if so, who was Abbotswold’s lady in white? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Professor Trevor-Finch knew more about Geoffrey Gervaise and his posthumous career than he was willing to admit. He had not brought me to Abbotswold simply to badger me with political clichés. He wanted something else from me, but I was damned if I knew what.
The rooks kept up their mournful chorus in the tall trees and the day grew progressively darker. Old Giles came in to refill the wood box and Mrs. Mortimor served tea. Stephany’s description of me as a knight came to mind, and I imagined that this was some trial by tedium which I had to undergo in order to obtain my holy grail. It was not so different, really, from the game I had been playing all my life—that solipsistic pastime of the academic mercenary who knows all the questions yet lacks the faith to come up with any of the answers, so that ultimately his life becomes a grandiose but trivial game. Our pieces are the stars and planets, our board the great black emptiness in which we live. We gamble recklessly with galaxies, wager worlds on the roll of cosmic dice, rake in our winnings when we can and shrug off our losses when we must, for there is really nothing to win, and nothing to lose, except time.
~§~
It was going on five when the professor finally bored even himself with his secondhand opinions. “Well, Fairchild, I expect you’ve had about enough for one day. Care for a nap or a bath before dinner?”
I noticed that the rain had abated. “Actually, I’d like a little fresh air. I think I’ll take a stroll.”
“Good idea; I’ve given you plenty of things to mull over. Dinner at seven, as usual.”
It was good to get out of the house. Leery of venturing too far with darkness and another storm coming on, I sought the rear gardens, where, passing the Mortimors’ cottage, I saw the three of them seated around the kitchen table. Mrs. Mortimor was peeling potatoes with a brisk, experienced knife. Old Giles was puffing on his pipe and sipping a pint of beer. Jamie sat sullenly across from them, stroking a cat, his idiot’s eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
I veered wide of the window and continued on toward the garage. Its doors were open and I made out the professor’s Volkswagen, Stephany’s sports car, and another small vehicle, which I hadn’t seen before. I stepped into the garage for a closer look. Green cat eyes peered at me from the darkness. Outside, the wind was picking up and the old structure creaked and rattled. I struck a match and confirmed my impression that the car was gray, but layered with grime and rust. The cat watched me from the hood as I came to the front to search for the manufacturer’s insignia. It was an Anglia—a battered, dirty, rust-spotted gray Anglia.
I heard footsteps approaching the stable and crouched by the Anglia’s front bumper. It was Jamie’s heavy, shuffling stomp, and soon his great bulk filled the rectangle of gray light at the front of the garage. He stood there for a moment, then, in a surprisingly soft and high-pitched voice, said, “Here, kitty—here, kitty-kitty-kitty.’’
The cat gave a properly suspicious and reluctant mew from the hood.
“Nice kitty,” Jamie said. He was coming toward me between the vehicles. I tensed and got ready to run for it around the other side of the Anglia. It would have been a tight squeeze, but I couldn’t stay where I was. Jamie was within three feet of me when the cat cried out and tried to leap from the Anglia to the adjacent sports car. Jamie caught it in midflight. The cat hissed and clawed at him; he grunted in pain and anger. Then I heard a sickening snap of bone and cartilage. The cat gave a last gasp.
“Nice kitty,” Jamie said, and left the stable with a limp hunk of fur in his arms.
I waited until he was well away, then hurried back to the house. The wind was blowing hard again and the night seemed filled with demons.
~§~
“Are you a music fancier, Fairchild?” the professor asked at dinner. “I seem to remember you at our last musical evening at Bromley House. My daughter is quite an accomplished pianist—and I’ve brought along my violin.”
‘‘We’re not going to make David suffer through one of our duets,” Stephany said. “There are limits, you know.”
“I’d love to hear you play something,” I said, much to Trevor-Finch’s satisfaction, so after dinner we went upstairs to what the professor called the music room, though in size and splendor it rivaled the Cambridge dance hall. There were sheets and layers of dust on everything, the chandelier encased in a bag like a giant cocoon. We uncovered the piano and the professor and Stephany debated their firs
t number, finally settling on something by Mozart.
I sat back with my port and cigar and closed my eyes. Stephany played very nicely, and the professor sawed with passion, if without great virtuosity. Before long Mozart began to have his way with me, for I’ve always found his music relaxing and slightly erotic, and my recent association with things Viennese only enriched the effect. Augustan nymphs with overflowing décolletages wafted across a refurbished ballroom. Some of them looked like my lost Yvetta, some like Stephany, and one, with long golden braids . . .
Even before I opened my eyes I had heard the discordant element in the room, strident and shrill, as if a third instrument had entered the serenade and was contending with piano and violin for the lead. I looked around for the source of that jarring note, but there was nothing in the shadows, nothing in the filmy mirrors or at the rain-streaked windows. Yet I could feel her presence in the room—a violent intrusion which set the very molecules to scampering about us like frightened mice.
And then I noticed something else. The professor’s brow was gleaming with sweat. His eyes had become fixed and desperate. He hit a sour note, then another. He lost the beat and struggled to regain it as Stephany, apparently having heard nothing untoward but sensing her father’s distress, tried to adjust to a new rhythm. But Trevor-Finch was by now utterly distraught. His violin uttered one last screech and slipped from beneath his chin. His bow dropped to the floor, and those nervous, shifty eyes of his were revealed to me at last as the terrified and half-mad eyes of a haunted man.
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