Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  That night Stephany came to me in my room. She wore a long white nightgown, her hair scented and shining, a candle in her hand—the shyly amorous heroine of a schoolgirl’s Gothic romance.

  “Stephany, it is you, isn’t it?” I asked, as I admitted her to my bed.

  “Of course, darling. Who did you expect? Mrs. Mortimor?”

  Hardly, but there was a female on the premises whose presence I could not quite forget, though Stephany and I made sweet, sensual, insatiable love while just down the hall the professor lay snoring and dreaming his dreams of social justice.

  Toward dawn I woke to hear her sobbing softly beside me.

  “Stephany, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, sweet. Just a dream. It always upsets me.”

  “What sort of dream?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it . . . it gets all mixed up when I try to remember. I’m locked in a room somewhere in the house—in the tower, perhaps. I hear my mother calling and I want to go to her but I can’t get out. Then sometimes it seems as if it’s my mother locked in the room and she wants me to free her, but I can’t unlock the door. And then all of a sudden it’s me again who’s locked in, but I’m no longer myself. I don’t know who I am—and I wake up crying.”

  I put my arm around her chilled shoulders and before long found ways to make her forget her unhappy dream.

  The next morning, when Trevor-Finch went off to consult with the stars once more, Stephany took me on a complete tour of the house—up to the twelfth-century tower and down to the murky, moldy cellar, into rooms which had been locked up for generations, through secret passageways and abandoned pantries—showing me all the haunts and hiding places of her curious childhood. There was always a cat or two to peer insolently at us from some regal perch, always gloom and mildew and the dust of centuries—and always, to my mind at least, a sense of someone or something watching over us as we pondered the secrets of the past.

  We were just leaving the garret room where some nineteenth-century Trevor-Finch was said to have made a mess of the place by applying a fowling piece to his already addled brains, when Stephany turned suddenly and put herself into my arms, clinging to me with such ferocity that I glanced uneasily down the shadowy staircase.

  “Oh, David—don’t you feel the evil that infests this house? The way it’s preyed upon everyone who’s ever lived here? My God, I’ve never realized until just this moment how much I despise this place!”

  I said, ‘‘Stephany, if it’s the house which has been the cause of everybody’s problems, there’s a simple solution. One can always leave a house behind.”

  “Or a country?” she asked me. “Is that why you left America, David—because you’re in the habit of running away from things you don’t like?”

  I didn’t attempt to answer her until we were strolling the sunny veranda of the Georgian wing, the sea glinting at the end of a green sweep of lawn on which, since morning, the daffodils had bloomed.

  ‘‘When I came to England, Stephany, I was running away—from the utter inconsequence of my life back in the States. Now that I’ve found something that really matters to me, I don’t think I’ll run away again.”

  “And what is it you’ve found?”

  I was going to say the Westchurch manuscripts, of course, but something in her quick smile made me hesitate. A gentle breeze touched her hair; her eyes were the color not of that bland April sky but of the darker, more sinister blue that looked down at us from the upper windows of the ancient house.

  “Come with me,” she said, before I’d found an answer to her question. “There’s another place I want to show you.”

  And tugging on my arm, she led me out across the lawn, through the daffodils, into the grove of budding trees and up the muddy slope where wild flowers peeped through last year’s soggy leaves, over the crest of the hill to a secluded glen where a tiny stream trickled among the rocks and the ground was carpeted with new green moss.

  “This is the place I love,” she said, drawing me down beside her on the moss. “Here, where everything is fresh and clean, where we can breathe.”

  I glimpsed a small stone building back among the trees. The building had no windows, and there were slabs of stone protruding from the mossy ground all around it. Good God, I thought. It’s the family crypt and burial ground!

  “I used to come here all the time as a child,” Stephany said. ‘‘I came to hide from Grandmama, and to look for my mother. I could always feel her near me here—and over there, among the stones. And her voice would sing to me in the music of the brook. But—but what was I thinking of? My mother isn’t dead. She didn’t die, David. She ran off to America . . .”

  I took Stephany in my arms and let the moment pass. We didn’t make love that afternoon, though perhaps what we did make was closer to it than anything I’d known for many years. It was a peaceful spot, and as long as the sun penetrated the higher branches of the surrounding trees we talked comfortably, Stephany’s head on my lap or mine on hers. There were many things I had to tell her about myself; only a few, it seemed, that she had yet to tell me. Finally, when the shadows made us shiver, she turned over my wrist to look at my watch. ‘‘I suppose we ought to be getting back, darling. We have guests coming for dinner.”

  We came down from the hill along an old and deeply rutted road. The woods were dense on either side and we heard footsteps coming toward us before we caught sight of the Mortimors, father and son, laboring up the slope with their heads down. Stephany pulled me off the roadway and into a thicket.

  “I’d rather not meet up with those two,’’ she whispered. “Jamie curdles my blood, and the old man is almost as bad.”

  We hid in the thicket until the lumbering oaf and his wheezing, muttering father had gone by and turned off into the woods. Through the trees I saw another building—a small stone cottage with an earthen roof.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” I asked.

  “After firewood, I suppose. That’s an old woodcutter’s cottage, where the axes and things are kept.”

  We heard one of those axes ring through the woods before we reached the house. “Why does your father keep them on?”

  “English gentlemen have always been intimidated by their servants,” Stephany said. “It’s all part of that dreadful class thing Daddy wants to do away with.”

  I could see that it was, but I recalled that Trevor-Finch had never allowed himself to be intimidated by the servants back at the College.

  ~§~

  I came down at six to find the professor’s guests already gathered for sherry in the library. The three scientific gentlemen were about what I’d expected—intense, humorless men who asked a few polite questions about my line of work and then engaged the professor in a ramble through higher mathematics. Parson Tompkins was something else again. A young, robust clergyman with ruddy cheeks, curly blond hair and a look of priestly mischief in his eyes, he gave me a fierce Rotarian handshake and seemed to size me up for some vital parish committee.

  “So you’re the young chap who’s interested in our local legends. I take quite an interest in that sort of thing myself. Read folklore when I was up at Oxford, so naturally I began collecting tales of the region when I was assigned to this parish. Quite a suspicious lot, these Norfolkmen; it took me years to gain their confidence. But now I’ve got some really extraordinary stuff on tape. I daresay it will make my reputation as a folklorist when it’s finally published.”

  “I’d like to hear those tapes,” I said, “or borrow the transcripts for a while.”

  “I can’t let go of the transcripts yet,” the parson said. “There was a bloke up from London not long ago who wanted to buy them, but I wouldn’t sell. I’d be glad to play the tapes for you, though, if you’d care to stop by the parsonage.”

  Giles Mortimor appeared with a new bottle of sherry, and he and the parson exchanged looks—puzzled and wary on the parson’s part, fiercely hostile on the old man’s. I wanted to ask a ques
tion while Giles was still near enough to hear it.

  “That man from London who was after your transcripts—was that by any chance the Reverend Samuel Stemp?”

  “Oh, no. I know Stemp,” the parson said. “He was up here several times a few years ago. I played all my tapes for him—everything I’d collected up to that point. How’s Stemp getting on with his work? Do you know?”

  “Not very well,” I said. “He was killed by a truck on Hampstead Lane just a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh, dear—sorry to hear it. Poor Stemp! Now, that must’ve been just about the time this other chap inquired as to the purchase of my tapes. What was his name again?”

  Giles lingered at the table with his back to us, stretching out some trivial task.

  “A Mr. Simon Regis, perhaps?” I asked the parson.

  “Regis,” the parson said. “That was it. Simon Regis. Said he was a dealer in rare books. Do you know him?”

  “Not as well as I’d like to,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with him about the papers he purchased from Stemp’s widow. They could have a bearing on my own work.”

  “The fellow seems to have an interest in all our fields,” the parson observed. “Not a very likable chap, I must say.”

  I was going to follow that up, but Giles had already started for the door. He was met by Stephany, who made her entrance in one of her own exotic and highly flattering creations. The parson was rendered momentarily speechless by the sight of so much black chiffon, with so much Stephany snugly fitted inside.

  “Good evening, Miss Trevor-Finch,” the parson said with enthusiasm. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  “How nice to see you, Mr. Tompkins,” Stephany said. “You’ve been comparing notes with our visiting medievalist, I see. David’s been anxious to meet you.”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to get the parson’s mind back on the track. “I was just going to ask him about the legend of Creypool Abbey. You have some material on the abbey, I trust?”

  “Indeed,” the parson said. “And on the Black Monk, as he’s called around these parts, who was executed for witchcraft back in the twelfth century. Quite a juicy tale, that one!”

  “I’ve seen a document at the British Museum,” I said, ‘‘which suggests the Black Monk may have been Geoffrey Gervaise, once a clerk in the chancellery of Thomas à Becket.”

  “That’s who Stemp thought he was, too,” the parson said. “I recall there was some connection between Gervaise and this Earl of Westchurch Stemp was studying.”

  “The earl owned one of Gervaise’s manuscripts, which now belongs to Duke’s College. At least, that’s what I’m trying to establish. But can you tell me, Reverend, just exactly what the Black Monk did to get himself burned at the stake?”

  “Oh, dreadful things,” the parson said. “Used to hold regular parlances with the devil at the abbey, so the legends say. The devil gave him all sorts of evil powers over the people of the village—especially the women. He was supposed to have sired a horde of demonic offspring upon poor peasant girls—perhaps even upon a lady or two—and a cult grew up around him in the years following his death. The abbey became a hellish place, the scene of Satanic rituals and orgies. I have evidence on tape which suggests that even after all these centuries, the cult may still exist. In fact, I’ve heard it said that the Black Monk’s ghost returns to the abbey on special occasions to sire new monsters. It’s a terribly cruel and wretched superstition, because when any child in the village is found to be a little different—malformed in some way, or dimwitted—there are those who say the poor creature is one of the Black Monk’s children.”

  “That is dreadful,” Stephany said. “The poor things! What happens to them?”

  “That varies,” the parson said. “In the old days—as late as the seventeenth century, in fact—they were burned or hanged as witches. At other times they’ve been simply tolerated or even given a position of honor and privilege. These things go in cycles. It all depends upon how active the cult is at the time, and who’s in it—which is always kept a secret, as you can well imagine.”

  “And at the present time?” I asked.

  “I believe the cult is sleeping quite peacefully at the moment, thank heavens. But these ancient superstitions are extremely difficult to uproot. There was an outburst of devil worship around the turn of the century, another as late as the 1940’s, when most of the village men were off at war. Of course, I find the survival of such ugly superstitions a scandal to the Christian community, and I’ve petitioned the Church for the power to conduct a thorough investigation. The bishop has advised me to let sleeping cults lie; he’s afraid of the adverse publicity if the Church starts witch hunting in this day and age. But it seems clear to me we really must do something to squash this evil before it surfaces again.”

  “The manuscript I’ve been studying,” I said, “was not the work of an evil man—though certainly a troubled and perhaps insane one.”

  “I wonder if we aren’t too quick to rationalize away the power of evil in our century, Dr. Fairchild. I fancy myself an enlightened clergyman. Ghosts, witches, demons—I don’t really believe in all that. But there’s something out at those ruins—something which infests this entire region. A psychic contagion, if you will, which lies dormant for generations and then strikes the entire population like a plague. In my opinion, we need a general inoculation before it strikes again.”

  “Ah, Tompkins,” exclaimed Trevor-Finch, who had joined us during the parson’s speech. “Your scientific metaphor is most encouraging. But if you wish to inoculate the populace, there’s only one serum that will do the job. Plain, honest, scientific truth! The sooner we bury all religion, the sooner we’ll lay all these bloody ghosts and hobgoblins to rest!”

  The parson was starting to protest, when Mrs. Morti-mor opened the door to the dining room and we saw that dinner was about to be served.

  Parson Tompkins was determined to sit next to Stephany. I wound up between the science master at the local school and another amateur astronomer. The dinner progressed smoothly, with a good deal of expert knife-and-fork work and a few bits of easy conversation, until the parson asked the professor if he didn’t find the principle of indeterminacy a most persuasive argument for the existence of God.

  The professor found it hard to believe that the parson would so willingly put his head on the block. “I am not aware of any scientific theory,” he said, exchanging a glance with his colleagues in atheism, “which in any way supports even the most tentative assertion of a Supreme Being.”

  “What I mean,” the parson said, “is that the principle, if I understand it correctly, demonstrates the ultimate incomprehensibility of the universe to the purely rational intellect.”

  “Incomprehensible, my dear parson? Perhaps; but irrational, no. Extremely difficult to predict, but by no means incapable of analysis. You really must allow that your layman s understanding of the term—’’

  “But isn’t incomprehensibility one of the attributes of God—in fact, what the very name of the Deity signifies to philosophers and mystics alike?”

  They were off, and I saw I had to take the parson’s side, not only to stay in character, but to give the poor man a chance to escape with his head. We each made several attempts to justify, or at least retreat gracefully from, his rash position. Our plates were removed by the silent Mortimors. A decanter of port and a box of cigars made the rounds. Stephany rose from the table, returned my questioning gaze with a nod to the terrace, and exited via the French doors. The parson was drifting into waters where no one could save him, and after a few minutes I followed her.

  It was a mild evening, stars twinkling through the haze, a scent of blossoms in the air. Stephany was waiting for me in the shadows. As we kissed, I could hear Trevor-Finch making one of his favorite points: “The riddle of the universe, my dear parson, points not to the mystery of God, who very likely does not exist, but to the mystery of man, who does.”

  ‘‘But
what,” the parson persisted, “if the mystery of man is God?”

  “But what if it’s not? I say, where has Fairchild gone to? He really ought to hear this—it’s right down his alley.”

  But Stephany and I had already left the terrace and were walking across the garden, and the professor’s voice grew fainter, and fainter, and at last faded out.

  Stephany and I were having a late breakfast when Trevor-Finch burst into the dining room with Armageddon in his face. My first thought was that America had just bombed Moscow, or maybe even London; my second was that the professor had guessed where Stephany had spent the better part of the night.

  “Daddy, what’s wrong?” Stephany asked, as the dumb-struck man dropped into his chair and stared at the glossy tabletop.

  “The—the parson,’’ Trevor-Finch managed to say after a minute. “Good Lord, it’s incredible! I admit I badgered the man, but I always said he was a good chap.”

  “What’s happened to the parson?” I asked.

  “I just heard about it from old Giles as I was coming back from my walk,” the professor said. “He’d been into Creypool for groceries and they were talking about it all over the village. Stephany, we must go into Creypool straightaway and see if there’s anything we can do.”

  “But, Daddy—what’s happened?”

  Trevor-Finch took a comfortless puff on his cold pipe, then probed the ashes with a finger. “Last night, on the way home . . . his car lost the road and plummeted down the cliff.”

  “That’s horrible!” Stephany said. “Is he . . . ?”

  Trevor-Finch nodded. “I should have driven him home. I thought he looked a bit flushed as he bade us good night. Too much theology and port, the poor devil, and that is a treacherous road at night.”