Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  I took Archie through it step by step, telling him as much as I could without betraying too many family secrets. It was a relief to share my recent experiences with someone of Archie’s temper and sympathies, even though I could see he found parts of my tale hard to swallow. When I’d finished, he thought for a while and then said, “But what makes you so sure the solution to all these mysteries is embedded in your precious manuscripts?”

  “If it isn’t, three men have been murdered for nothing. This isn’t some little group of crackpot rustics we’re dealing with. Regis indicated that the coven at Creypool is part of an international brotherhood, with a good many wealthy and powerful constituents.”

  “Then surely it’s nothing for us to tangle with. Why can’t you simply go to the police with what you know?”

  “The police will have to be informed, of course, but not until I’ve learned the secret of those manuscripts and kept my promise to the professor’s mother. It may surprise you, Archie, but I’ve learned to care for these people, and I seem to be the only one who can help them.”

  Archie obviously found my expression of commitment in bad taste. “That’s all very well, Fairchild, but how do we keep from getting killed?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Do you still have access to your laboratory?”

  “I’m turning in the key tomorrow.”

  ‘‘Could you cook up something that would give us some fire power—something we could scare them with, perhaps? A lot of smoke and noise should do.”

  “Yes, I could arrange that all right, but don’t think I’ve decided to throw in with you just yet. Finchie would hardly welcome me at his ‘ancestral manor,’ you know.”

  “We can risk his displeasure. When it’s all over, he might be very appreciative of what we’ve done for him—enough to get us both permanent places in the College, don’t you think?”

  Archie grinned. ‘‘By God, do you suppose we could pull it off? You’d have Abbotswold and the professor’s daughter, and I’d still have Cambridge. A coup d’état!”

  I knew he was nearly won over, so I said, “Our first job is to get hold of those manuscripts.”

  Archie cocked an eyebrow. “You have a plan, I suppose?”

  I did, and when I’d described it for him, he said, “I can see you’ve taken my natural propensities into account. Of course I can make a drunken fool of myself, but my performance is bound to be improved by a bit more of the real thing. Bottoms up, lad.”

  We had another drink. It was just after eleven, and the sparsely populated College had already settled down for the night. The gates would close at twelve, so we had less than an hour to wait. Archie looked at me with great amusement.

  “You’re a prodigy, Fairchild, you really are. Here I am risking my neck and a hefty prison term, and I’m damned if I’m not looking forward to it. Eight centuries with a ghost in the family, hey? No wonder Trevor-Finch has always been such a beastly bore! All things considered, it’s a wonder you didn’t take that one hundred thousand pounds. I would have. This whole affair has turned your wits.”

  “I don’t know quite how to explain it myself,” I said, “but I seem to have developed a conscience.”

  “Ah,” Archie said, and rolled his eyes. “It can happen to the best of us.”

  “Try to imagine what it’s like, to realize you’ve actually seen a ghost,” I said. “There’s a moral shock involved, a sudden awakening to the fact that, if Gervaise’s soul is immortal, then mine is too. And if mine is—”

  “Then everyone must possess such a soul? And if we’re not all just molecules scrambling around in this bloody stew of a universe, then there may be more to the ideals people used to live by than we’ve recognized? I’ve thought of that already, and it’s why I’d like to believe in your story. But what if . . .” Archie pulled at his collar and looked flushed from the liquor he’d consumed. “Well, damn it all, lad, what if . . .”

  “I’ve simply been seeing things? That’s a possibility, I know, but there’s a curious logic to the whole affair that I find irresistible. I’m not just out to save poor old Gervaise and the Trevor-Finches, you know. I have a theory to prove.”

  “A scholar to the death,” Archie said, and we drank to it.

  ~§~

  At ten past midnight I was waiting outside the porter’s lodge with a briefcase I’d borrowed from Archie’s room. At a quarter past, Archie (who’d gone out the back way at eleven forty-five) began hammering on the gate. I could hear him singing some bawdy working-class ballad at the top of his voice as the porter’s man unlocked the gate. Archie stumbled across the threshold, then collapsed in the porter’s arms.

  “Here, here, sir. You’ve had a heavy night of it,” the porter said, struggling to keep Archie upright.

  “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,” Archie sang, “and the poor what gets the blame . . .”

  I slipped into the lodge and found the keys on the big pegboard behind the porter’s desk. I grabbed the two I needed, ducked out and set off across the New Court for the library, Archie’s song wailing through the night: “It’s the same the whole world over—ain’t it all a bloody shame?”

  A few lights had gone on around the court, but I knew the aroused sleepers would be looking to the commotion at the front gate and not to the library. I unlocked the main door and let myself into air stale with the scent of paper and aged bindings, the dust and mold and stifled aspirations of scholars long since dead and buried. I had brought along a flashlight from Stephany’s car and I kept its beam on the floor, guiding myself down the long aisle toward the Special Collections.

  At the iron gates, I paused to fit the second key in its lock. I could hear none of the ruckus Archie was raising. The silence of centuries lay over the library. I wasn’t frightened—just mildly excited, a little drunk, and very determined to do the job I’d come for. I felt sure that Gervaise was somewhere close by, perhaps even visible in the shadows if I look for him. His encouragement spurred me on.

  I turned the key and the lock slipped back with an echoing clang. My flashlight illuminated the shelves, cabinets and drawers which housed the College’s most prized and precious holdings. The Westchurch manuscripts were kept in a special airtight vault with a combination lock. I knew the combination; old Greggs had given it to me last fall and I’d used it dozens of times, yet I hesitated, suddenly unsure. The wrong combination would set off an alarm.

  I reached out to touch the dial. With the first turn my confidence returned. The numbers were there when I needed them, as if another hand guided my own. Right twice around to 16 . . . left to 32 . . . right to 0 . . . left again all the way around to 2. The latch snapped and the vault swung open. The Westchurch manuscripts, in seven labeled boxes, sat waiting. I needed only the box which contained Gervais’s poem. I put it into Archie’s briefcase and shut the vault. Heading back up the aisle, I paused for a second beneath the concordance to Shakespeare. Steady, big fellow—give my regards to Hamlet’s father.

  A great sense of elation was waiting for me as I stepped out into the chill night air and locked the library behind me. I went back to the porter’s lodge, returned the keys to the pegboard and proceeded to the main gate; its little night door had been shut but not locked. I stepped out into the artificial glare of the Cambridge street. Stephany’s car was parked just around the corner.

  ~§~

  Colin Douglas had gone to Spain for the vac but had left me the key to his flat. By the time Archie called for me at nine the next morning, I was on my twelfth cup of instant coffee and the last few lines of the poem.

  “You look perfectly dreadful,” Archie said as I let him in. “No sleep last night for a guilty conscience?”

  “My conscience never felt better, Archie. I’ve been up all night reading. It’s amazing what sense it all makes now that I know what to look for. And what a magnificent poem it is. There’s not a line that isn’t alive, that doesn’t bristle with genius.’’

  “And has it told
you how its author may be freed?”

  “I think so. But I almost hope I’m wrong. We’ll have a chance to test my theory tonight. The professor has a ghost hunter coming up from London, and there’ll be an expedition to the abbey. What did you get for me at the lab?”

  Archie put a briefcase, nearly identical to the one I’d borrowed for the manuscript, on the desk and opened it up. He took out a metal container the size of an American beer can. “I’ve brought you six of these,” he said. “It’s that new explosive I told you about—similar to nitroglycerin, but much safer and easier to use. If you twist this little tab on the top of the can, the chemicals now held separately inside are allowed to mix. It’s perfectly harmless until you twist the tab, and then, within seconds, you have yourself a veritable hand grenade. Makes a lovely flash and bang when it goes off, too.”

  “How powerful is the explosion?”

  “Hmm. One of these canisters should knock a man down at twenty yards; could give him a nasty burn if he were any closer. Of course, if you set off all six at once you’d augment the explosive force by something like thirty-six times—there’s a complicated formula to account for that.”

  “I’m not sure I want to play with anything that lethal.”

  “It was the best I could come up with on such short notice. And besides, it’s perfectly safe until you twist these tabs. Even then, it would take quite a jolt to set off an explosion. You’d have to give the can a good toss, or hit it with something . . . Well, shall we be on our way?”

  I had one stop to make before we left Cambridge, a small junk shop I’d noticed on my bike rides around the town. The proprietor looked on as I rummaged through his wares in search of the thing I wanted. In a back shed, where he kept those items he no longer hoped to sell, I at last found something close to what I was looking for.

  “What the devil is that?” Archie asked as I held it up to count the squares.

  “An old grate, most likely off someone’s cellar window. Only forty-eight squares, but it will have to do. How much do you want for this?” I asked the proprietor.

  “That’s a rare old piece, guv,” the junkman said. ‘‘That’ll cost you thruppence.”

  “A steal at half the price,” Archie said.

  I paid for the grate and a pair of used binoculars I’d picked up during the search. We put both in the trunk of Stephany’s car, along with the two briefcases, and set out for Abbotswold. Neither Archie nor I attempted to say goodbye to Cambridge and it struck me as a small act of faith on both our parts to assume that we’d ever see the town again.

  There were a few tourists roaming the ruins when we stopped at Grey pool Abbey, but we attracted no attention as we carried the grate and the binoculars to the back wall and left them hidden in a clump of bushes near the remains of the little observatory.

  We pulled up the drive at Abbotswold shortly before one. A large green van, unmarked, with an oddly designed antenna on its roof, was parked near the front door. A portly man of late middle age climbed down from the rear of the van and came to greet us. He was dressed in the tweed cap and jacket, jodhpurs and boots, of the British sportsman.

  “You must be the major’s young Yank from the Col-lege,” he said. “I’m Colonel Lionel Buzby, RAF, retired. Trevor-Finch and I took on the Krauts together. Met in a German prison camp, as a matter of fact. You’re some-thing of an authority on this abbey ghost, I hear.”

  The colonel had a military mustache, jowls and pale, shrewd, sleepy eyes. His handshake was vigorous. “Scarcely an authority,” I said, “but I have an interest in the place. This is my friend Archie Cavendish, also from Duke’s.”

  The colonel sized Archie up with a commanding officer’s interest in a recruit. “We can use an extra hand,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to run into on one of these expeditions, do you?”

  “I’m new to the field,” Archie said. “Have you actually scared up a few ghosts, Colonel?”

  ‘‘I can’t actually say they were ghosts,” the colonel replied. “ ‘Psychic phenomena’ is what we call them these days. Things which defy a purely natural explanation. It’s a hobby of mine, and I’ve rigged up a few gadgets using ideas from my former career in electronic surveillance. Care for a look? I’ve just been testing the instruments.”

  We climbed into the van. It was filled with the sort of equipment a mobile TV unit might use to cover a soccer match—banks of dials, switches, meters, view screens and tape decks.

  “The function of all this portable hardware,” Colonel Buzby said, “is to provide us with some reliable data on these otherwise inexplicable manifestations. Say a chap sees a ghost and it can’t be explained as a mere hallucination. Many such sightings can’t. Well, if there’s something out there which goes against the known laws of nature, it ought to create some sort of disruption in its immediate physical surroundings, right? So we have these various scanners—heat sensors, Geiger counter, x-ray and infrared cameras, radarscope, microphones and so on—enough to give us a rather complete reading on the material consequences of one of these psychic disruptions.

  “Over here we’ve got a new device I’ve just designed and I’m anxious to try out. I call it my portable molecular analyzer—‘the Mole,’ for short. I press this button, and the Mole emits a wave of charged particles. The particles will pass through ordinary matter without a trace, but if they enter the magnetic field of particles with different properties—what we commonly call an ‘antiparticle’—we get a reaction in the form of ultrasonic signals, which the Mole picks up, ‘reads’ and feeds back to the recording devices in the van. With the Mole, I should be able to track a ghost, or whatever phenomenon it is that’s causing the disruption, over terrain the van couldn’t manage. Later, we can run the data through a computer to see if it makes any sense. No matter what my good friend the major says, science is one day going to get around to the whole question of psychic physics, and then my data will prove invaluable—’’

  “Psychic physics, indeed!” said Trevor-Finch, appearing at the open door of the van. “You’re an ingenious technician, Buzby, but an incurable romantic. You’ll find nothing to impress science at the abbey, I can assure you of that . . . Glad you made it back, Fairchild. I was beginning to fear that Stephany and I had been boring you, but this little experiment in nonsense ought to catch your fancy.”

  Archie came up from the front of the van and the professor started at the sight of him. “I say, is that you, Cavendish? What are you doing here?”

  “I brought him along, Professor,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind. He’d like to get in on our ghost hunt.”

  “Nothing better to occupy your time, Cavendish? Well, as long as you’re here, I suppose I can put you up for a night or two. Mrs. Mortimor is serving sandwiches on the terrace. Won’t you all come along?”

  ~§~

  After lunch, Trevor-Finch took Archie and the colonel down to the beach to inspect his tower laboratory. One glance from Stephany and I knew how she wanted to spend the afternoon, but I pleaded lack of sleep and a sick headache (both true), got the briefcases from the car and went up to my room alone. I was too tired even to chase out the cat sunning itself on my window ledge, but collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  I awoke late in the afternoon from a trying dream, my brain still reeling with rhymed couplets and sonorous medieval vowels. A rose “both red and white . . . The boy’s first love, the man’s delight.” In my dream I had seen the rose, not variegated or striped, but a magical rose which changed its color as I gazed upon it—first a throbbing, blazing red, then a pure and dazzling white. People came to me in the dream and pleaded with me not to pluck the rose, but I grasped the stem, whereupon one of its thorns stung me to the quick.

  I lay on the rumpled bedspread in the dusky room and listened to the birds chattering outside the house. Then I heard a footstep in the hall. I lay very still with my back to the door and presently I heard the knob turning. I waited another few seconds, then groa
ned and rolled over like a man just waking up, and caught Giles trying to slip back out through the door.

  “Beg pardon, sir. I just came up to see—that is, the professor wanted me to tell you they’re having sherry in the library.” I could see his eyes flick quickly at the desk, where I’d left one of the briefcases in plain view; the other was behind the bed.

  “Thank you, Giles,” I said. “I’ll be down after I’ve had a wash.”

  “Very good, sir. Sorry to disturb you.”

  The old bastard knows I’ve got the manuscript, I thought. It was possible that Regis had had me followed to Cambridge. If so, he might not wait the entire forty-eight hours to collect his prize.

  I took both briefcases—the one containing Archie’s bombs somewhat lighter than the other—made sure the old man was no longer in the hall, went softly down the stairs and let myself out of the house. The last rays of sunlight departed from the treetops as I cut across the lawn and picked up the path to the beach. I wanted a hiding place well away from the house, yet one I could get to quickly if the need arose. The professor’s tower had seemed the logical spot, but the door was locked. There was no time to scout another locale; I would have to hide my booty on the beach. Looking up at the cliffs, I saw the professor’s dish antenna silhouetted against the purple sky, the evening star already winking through its beams and struts. The cliff was about thirty feet high at that point and slightly overhung. Its side of clay and loose rock was steep but looked climbable just off to the right, along a small gully. I took the briefcases up one at a time and found a place, where the clay had washed away from the concrete footing of the structure, that would accommodate the two of them very nicely. I lowered the heavier briefcase into the hole, then opened the second briefcase and twisted the tabs on each of the six canisters. I gently lowered the armed bomb until it rested firmly atop the other briefcase, an effective booby trap. I concealed the hole with several large rocks, then worked my way back to the path without returning to the beach and came across the lawn in the dark.