“I’ll see us all in hell first,” the professor said, but there was already a whine of futility in his voice which told me his mother would eventually prevail. I went to the door, where Archie and the colonel stood waiting in embarrassment.
“The Mortimors know I’ve got the manuscript, Archie. They’ve gone to look for us at the abbey, but they’ll probably be back before long with the rest of their coven. I don’t know if there’s time to get help, and the professor and I have something to settle which can’t wait. You and the colonel had better guard the house.”
“Did you say a coven?” the colonel asked.
“Archie will explain it to you outside. One of you guard the front. There’s another road that comes in from the back; the other had better watch that. If anyone tries to approach the house, let us know at once.”
“The canisters, Fairchild?”
“I’m afraid I’ve hidden them and there isn’t time to go after them. Get the shotgun from the van. Do you have a weapon, Colonel?”
“A service revolver, but see here—’’
“Archie will explain. Go on now. The professor and I have to talk.”
I turned back to the others. The professor’s mother was giving instructions to Mrs. Archer, who apparently couldn’t drive, but was to set out on foot in search of the nearest phone. Stephany sat pale and frightened on the sofa; she still couldn’t look at me. Trevor-Finch had found an unbroken bottle of whisky in the mess behind the bar and poured himself a glass. I went over, took the bottle from him, and poured one for myself.
“I’ve had about all I can stand from you,” the professor said. “As soon as the police get here, you can pack up and get out.”
“What I have to say won’t take long, Professor, If you remember the contents of your father’s letter, and what you have hidden in your room, you already know most of what I’m going to tell you.”
“By God, you’ve even burgled my room?’’
“I simply returned the visit you paid to my room, back at the College, when you stole my notes to the Westchurch poem. With them, you were able to reconstruct the checkmate which cost Geoffrey Gervaise his soul, and has haunted your family ever since. You know that story, don’t you, Professor?”
“Yes, I know it, but you don’t expect me to take it seriously.”
“The cult at Creypool does. For centuries they’ve been able to conjure up Gervaise’s image—that much at least. Then they make drugged and tortured young women believe that they’ve had intercourse with the ‘Black Monk.’ Sometimes they even make them think they’ve conceived his children, and sometimes—as in the case of Jamie Mortimor—they make the children believe the Monk is their father. For all I know, he may be the Monk’s child.”
The professor snorted contemptuously and drained his glass. Whisky dribbled down his chin and spotted his already soiled shirt. He looked quite crazed, and ready to fly at my throat.
“Gervaise isn’t the only ghost,” I said. ‘‘Don’t you think it’s time you told your daughter about the one here at Abbotswold—and about what really happened to her mother?”
Trevor-Finch had been about to refill his glass. The bottle slipped from his hands. “Stephany—go upstairs! I forbid you to listen to this insanity.”
“No, Kenneth,” his mother said. “Dr. Fairchild is right. We were wrong to keep these things from her. If she saw what I think she saw at the abbey tonight, she must be told the truth.”
I crossed the cluttered room and sat beside Stephany on the sofa. I tried to take her hand, but she shied away from me, sitting very stiff and straight, her eyes on the door. “What happened to you tonight, Stephany—what we think may have happened—was what happened to your mother before you, and to your grandmother. There’s a spirit in this house—not your mother, but a distant ancestor of yours named Annjenette—who is trying to use you—’’
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Stephany said, with that toss of her head I’d found so charming when we first met. Tonight, however, I saw a darker meaning in the gesture—a marionette’s feeble attempt to free herself from an unseen power intent upon manipulating her life.
“Stephany,” I said, “Annjenette had a lover. It’s a tragic story. His death was arranged by her jealous husband and she killed herself in order to be with him. But the only way she can reach him is through the possession of someone in this house—’’
Stephany swung around to glare at me with eyes I scarcely recognized. “You’re making this up,” she said fiercely. “You’re angry with me and you’re trying to frighten me!”
“No, child,” the old woman said. “Dr. Fairchild knows these things because I told him—because I too, in my time, had dealings with Annjenette.”
“Oh!” the professor burst out in exasperation. “This madness has persisted in our family for much too long.’’
“You’re right,” I said, “to call it madness, but I don’t think it’s one your psychiatrist can cure.”
Trevor-Finch did a double take. “My personal difficulties have no connection with—’’
“I’m afraid they do, Professor. Your psychiatrist is either a member of the cult or a paid informer. How else would the Mortimors have gotten the information they used to blackmail you, after you discovered their connection with the cult? They forced you to keep them on and to overlook their little business enterprise at the woodcutter’s cottage. They even forced you to conspire with them, didn’t they, Professor? There was too much in your family, and in your own private life, which you couldn’t bear to have known. Didn’t you wonder where they got all that information?”
Trevor-Finch couldn’t answer. He went to the windows and looked out at the darkness and his own pale image.
“You gave the Mortimors a key to the College library—though you probably didn’t know they intended to kill Dr. Greggs. You also passed along information about my work—information you could have picked up easily enough in the senior common room or from Greggs himself. They’ve been using you, Professor, rubbing your nose in the very horrors you were afraid to face, and all because of your damned pride.”
Trevor-Finch collapsed into a leather armchair and stared at the carpet. “No doubt you think me a great hypocrite. But it wasn’t just pride—nor even shame at the things I’ve sometimes been driven to. I’ve never known how to deal with the irrational. It frightens me—quite paralyzes me. It’s so utterly dehumanizing! And then there was Stephany. I wanted her to have a chance at a life free from the past and all its madness. If we dredge up all these old scandals and horrors now—’’
“We don’t have to dredge them up; what we have to do is lay them to rest, once and for all, before the cult shows up and demands the manuscript.”
“Manuscript?” he said, looking up.
“Last night Archie and I stole one of the Westchurch manuscripts from the College library. I had to have it, in order to learn how Gervaise might at last be freed—and now I need your permission in order to—”
I stopped, aware that I was going too fast and that to obtain the professor’s consent I would have to build my case. I checked my watch and went to the windows. The Mortimors had been gone not quite an hour. It shouldn’t take them long to round up the members of their coven, yet the grounds were still silent, Archie and the colonel on guard.
“This is outrageous,” Trevor-Finch was saying. “That manuscript belongs in the College.”
“You may feel differently when I’m through,” I said. “You’ve got to understand that the Westchurch poem is a record of Geoffrey Gervaise’s obsession with evil and his struggle with his personal demons. He was a master at the game of chess; it represented the one element of sanity in his twisted, tormented life. I won’t go into the events which led up to it, but somehow, whether drugged, dreaming or hallucinating, Gervaise arranged to meet Satan across a chessboard. There were three games. Gervaise won the first two, but became in the process so addicted to the risk, the excitement of the game, that he grant
ed Satan’s request for a third match—winner take all, Gervaise’s soul against the devil’s dominion over the human heart—and this time Satan devised the rules. They’re described in the poem, but only if one knows how to interpret certain cryptic lines.”
“Do you expect me to believe that all this actually happened, just as it’s described in the poem?” Trevor-Finch asked.
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said, “just how it happened. We know what Gervaise himself believed, and we know the consequences of his belief. If you’ll be honest with yourself, Professor, you’ll see those consequences in your own life.”
“Please, Kenneth,” said the professor’s mother, “try not to interrupt, and don’t look so pained. We know you’re an eminent physicist and can’t take things seriously. You will please believe them nevertheless.”
“This time,” I said, “what Satan proposed was a game of celestial chess—a contest waged among the stars, played out night by night against the panorama of the heavens. Such a game must have had an overwhelming appeal to Gervaise’s imagination—even though he knew the rules had been designed to ensure his defeat. The way I reconstruct it, Satan must have given Gervaise a list of fifteen stars—his sixteen pieces, less one—each identified according to its chess value. Polaris might be the king, Venus the queen, Alpha Centauri the feu, or bishop, and so forth. Gervaise was then allowed to choose sixteen stars as his own pieces. The night of the match was not specified in advance, but could occur whenever Satan demanded a move. Thus Gervaise had to know, by computation, where each one of those thirty-one heavenly bodies would appear on each night of the year, and how they would relate to one another if a certain portion of the sky—the coordinates are given in the poem—were divided into the sixty-four squares of a chessboard. That’s where the iron grate your father found at the abbey comes in, and the astrolabe. No doubt there were many observatories like the one at Creypool, where Gervaise could mount the grate in such a way that the stars shone through its squares like pieces on a chessboard. Now, if he could keep track of every star throughout the year, he could anticipate all the devil’s possible moves—all but one, since there was always one star, representing one piece, which the devil would not reveal ahead of time.
“When Satan appeared, each player had one move. If a piece was taken, it could no longer figure in the game. New lists were drawn up, minus whatever pieces had been lost, and Gervaise would go back to his study and his calculations for the next encounter. Each night a new chess problem was diagramed in the stars, and Gervaise never knew when he might be called upon for another move. Only a genius, and a madman, could have kept it up.”
“And are all these moves described in the poem?” the professor asked.
“Not all of them. The game lasted nearly eight years. Gervaise was a fugitive from the king’s soldiers, and after Becket’s murder in December of 1170, he must have chosen Creypool Abbey as his last place of refuge. He would have known that his old mistress was now Lord Michael Trevorre’s wife and therefore a patroness of the abbey. He counted on her protection, at least, but her husband found out about their meetings at the abbey. He arranged to have Gervaise captured, tried for witchcraft and burned at the stake. But by this time the devil had sprung his trap, and Gervaise knew his soul belonged to Satan.”
“My God,” the professor said, sitting up. “3C-213!”
“And what,” Mrs. Trevor-Finch asked, “is 3C-213?”
“A stellar radio source,” I said, “which supernovaed in March of 1175. It’s dimly visible even now, and I saw it tonight. If you transpose the stars in that portion of the sky, as Gervaise saw them in March of 1175, to a chess-board, you will find an exact replica of the devil’s mate. As it happens, 3C-213 was just a pawn, but a pawn where Gervaise never expected to find one. It was the unnamed piece, you see—the star whose position Gervaise couldn’t calculate ahead of time, the bullet in the sixth chamber. ‘Two lowly pawns have the king undone,’ as Gervaise says in the poem. ‘Two pawns where I’d have sworn could be but one.’ ”
Trevor-Finch simply stared at me, at last impressed by something I had done. Mrs. Trevor-Finch realized, however, that I’d not yet disposed of the central problem. “You’ve told us how Gervaise was ensnared. Now will you tell us how he can be freed?”
“The game is not quite over,” I said. “The devil owes Gervaise one more move—one last chance to save his soul. Everyone who’s ever tried to save the man—and there have been many over the centuries, including the monks of Blackstone and the Earl of Westchurch, not to mention your old friend Sir Percy Wickham George—everyone has naturally sought that winning move on the chessboard, or in the stars. But the solution isn’t there. It’s in the poem itself—the record Gervaise kept of spiritual torment.”
I took an index card from my coat pocket. “What I have here is a translation of several lines near the end of the poem. It’s not clearly indicated in the text, but the passage makes sense only if we assume these are Satan’s own words, addressed to Gervaise and taken down by him as the game drew to a close:
First thy flesh shall taste the flame;
Then thy soul shall know the same.
Much evil will thy own words do,
A poet’s feast and devil’s brew.
The stars shall never free thee, man—
But look to them, for fire can.
When thy first love has turned to smoke
Twill mark the end of Satan’s joke.
“Please tell us what the lines mean,” Mrs. Trevor-Finch said.
“The key,” I said, “is in the phrase ‘first love.’ In a much earlier passage, Gervaise described three roses, each one symbolic of one of his loves. A red rose stands for chess, ‘the scholar’s whore, whose deadly kiss shuts heaven’s door.’ The white rose represents theology, ‘which leads the saint to God’s own love.’ The third rose, both red and white, he calls ‘the boy’s first love, the man’s delight.’ I asked myself what other love could have equaled Gervaise’s lifelong fascination with chess, and then I realized that the combination of red and white, chess and theology, sacred and profane, is perfectly represented by the poem itself. ‘If thou shouldst wander this arid land,’ Gervaise says, ‘take but the last rose in thy hand. For though its thorns may make you bleed, my soul is here—a soul in need.’ ”
“Then”—Trevor-Finch frowned as he tried to put it all together—‘‘then the manuscript must be destroyed?”
‘‘ ‘Turned to smoke,’ Professor, as it says in the poem. There is a curious legend that the Earl of Westchurch ordered his own library burned before his execution. More recently there was a research student named Jameson who worked on the poem and who subsequently tried to burn down the College library. Now we know why. And we also know why the cult is so determined to reclaim the manuscript. It was given to Duke’s in the eighteenth century by a member of the cult, one Gerald Brice, who hoped to ensure its survival by setting up the Special Collections. It’s possible the cult put a spell of some sort on the manuscript; in any case, it has discouraged its few readers and defied scholarly analysis for nearly two hundred years. We have a chance now—perhaps the last chance anyone will ever have—to end this chain of horrors. Burn the manuscript, Professor, and you free Gervaise; you free Annjenette; you free yourself and all your family.”
“That manuscript is College property,” Trevor-Finch protested.
“You’re a senior member of the College—some people say you’ll be the next Master. I’d say you have the authority to dispose of College property, in an emergency, as you see fit. I’ll burn it only at your command.”
Trevor-Finch’s confused eyes recaptured some of their shrewdness. “And you will expect my protection, I suppose?”
“Of course. Both Archie and I will expect you to shield us from any criminal charges.”
“And are there other conditions?”
I had intended to point out that I was sacrificing a text which had come to mean a great deal to me, whic
h could have made my reputation as a scholar, which might even have got me a fellow’s place at Duke’s. Yet now that I finally had the professor over a barrel, I’d lost my taste for bargains.
“I suppose you will want to remain at Duke’s,” Trevor-Finch said. “You can forget that right now. You’re not the sort we want, Fairchild—not the sort at all. The next thing you’ll demand is that I accept you as a son-in-law—’’
“Daddy, that’s uncalled for!”
“You’ve always been a bore, Kenneth. Can’t you leave that to Stephany and the young man?”
I had one last move to put the professor in check. It was a move that would almost surely mean the loss of someone I had learned to care for, but it was precisely because I cared for Stephany that I made it.
“I’m not the one who threatens to take your daughter away from you, Professor. You must realize by now she wasn’t with me in the chapel tonight. Like her mother, like her grandmother, Stephany had gone to the chapel to meet—’’
“Oh, no!” Stephany cried, and looked at me with such a painful accusation of betrayal. I almost believed I had made a mistake.
The old woman reached out to embrace her granddaughter, but Stephany recoiled from her and fell sobbing to the sofa. “It’s not true,” she cried. “You’re all crazy! You’ve worked this up between you and you’re trying to drive me mad.”
Her small fists beat against the sofa cushions; her body shook with sobs. As if on cue, one of the Mortimors’ mangy cats came out from behind a chair and leapt up beside her, where it looked around at us with a victor’s smug contempt.
“Well, Professor?”
Trevor-Finch was still staring at his daughter when I sensed someone at the door. It was Archie. I didn’t know how much he’d seen and heard, but from the expression on his face, he must have seen the worst. “Three cars just entered the drive and stopped at the far end. They’re still down there, but I’m quite sure I saw figures moving across the lawn.”
‘‘Professor, I need your answer now.”
Trevor-Finch fell back into his chair and hid his face in his hands. “Yes, yes—burn it!” he said.
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