The Auguries

by F. G. Cottam

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by F.G. Cottam

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  A Selection of Recent Titles by F.G. Cottam

  Novels

  THE MEMORY OF TREES *

  THE LAZARUS PROPHECY

  THE HOUSE OF LOST SOULS

  THE LUCIFER CHORD *

  THE AUGURIES *

  The Colony Series

  THE COLONY

  DARK RESURRECTION

  HARVEST OF SCORN

  * available from Severn House

  THE AUGURIES

  F.G. Cottam

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by F.G. Cottam.

  The right of F.G. Cottam to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8869-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-994-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0207-9 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For Gabriel and Avalon, the twin lights that brightly illuminate my path

  ONE

  The incense burner was properly named a thurible. The vessel from which the incense was spooned was called a boat. Fourteen-year-old Andrew Baxter had been an altar boy for six years and had handled the thurible since he was twelve. He was confident about the process. You swung it gently back and forth and the circular tablet of charcoal inside it glowed unseen with heat and the incense rose as scented smoke that, to the grieving congregation, standing or kneeling, gave the air in its vicinity a bleared, hazy look. They were in the pews on the far side of the coffin from where Andrew swung the thurible and observed their sorrow, thinking vaguely that something this morning wasn’t quite right with the world. Something seemed somehow slightly out of balance.

  It was Andrew’s task to keep the thurible actively burning incense until the priest required it. When that moment came, Father Gould would take it from him and swing it over the coffin and recite the part of the liturgy blessing the dead person in the wooden box.

  It was Andrew’s personal conviction that any blessing was coming rather too late for this particular corpse – that of a man burned to death in a top-floor flat fire after he had been unable to escape down a blazing stairwell. This event had been the grisly conclusion to forty-eight years of life. Prayers seemed both late and unlikely, to Andrew’s mind, to be very effective in improving matters.

  But it wasn’t this that bothered Andrew Baxter. He had served through a fair number of requiem masses. Generally, they involved a generous tip. On weekdays, they meant a welcome break from school. He was used to the mood that prevailed among the dead man’s friends and relatives. He even knew the word for it. It was called stoicism. Sometimes the mourners weren’t stoical. He’d seen that too, mostly when the subject of the requiem had been a child. There was a biblical phrase, wailing and gnashing of teeth. He thought that about covered it at some of the more emotional funeral services he’d personally witnessed.

  Sometimes, the coffin would be open. Undertakers went to great lengths to make some of the recently dead look lifelike. It was Andrew’s opinion that they never succeeded in this. He’d quite often overheard mourners say that the occupants of open coffins looked like they were only sleeping. He didn’t think this was ever true. Sleeping people twitched and breathed and sometimes snored or farted. The dead were just too still for sleep. Open coffins weren’t wrong, they were just a bit unnerving and odd. Anyway, for reasons that were obvious, on this box the lid was screwed tightly shut.

  The altar was both exotic and familiar to Andrew. It was the centre of a place of worship. The church had painted statues of saints and the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. The windows were pieces of religious art, stained-glass depictions of episodes from the scriptures, and against one wall a series of oil paintings described the brutal ordeal of torture and death by crucifixion politely known as the Stations of the Cross. There was a great deal of brass and gilt, and vases of fresh flowers put there by the retainers of the faith, middle-aged women Andrew’s adolescent sensibility told him were married only to the Church. There was the tabernacle, in which were kept the chalice and the hosts. None of this was wrong. It was elaborate and even lavish, but he’d grown used to it all over time.

  What was wrong, and also strange to him, was the incense, trickling upward into the air from the patterned holes cut into the metal of the object he swung by its delicate chain. Ordinarily it smelled sweetish in a gentle sort of way. Today, it didn’t. Today it smelled harsh and sour and also, somehow, cold. And old. Very old. Andrew would have said ancient, even, like a smell from another time unwelcome in the modern world. Uninvited, a gatecrasher of a scent present only by some sort of weird trickery. Almost a stink.

  The texture of the smoke – if smoke could be said to possess a texture – was wrong. Ordinarily
it was pale and dry. Today it was dark and greasy and for the first time it was stinging his eyes in a way that he thought would undoubtedly make them bloodshot, if they weren’t bloodshot already.

  When the moment came for Andrew to hand the thurible to Father Gould, he thought he saw the hint of a frown on the old priest’s face, as though something about the incense bothered him, too. He was relieved to be rid of the implement for a moment. He was even more relieved when the mass ended, and they trooped back to the sacristy and he was able to put it down, reeking now, the usual shine of the polished metal tarnished and filthy as it continued to smoulder.

  At the graveside Andrew was happier to be in the fresh air, even in a cemetery. The priest was splashing holy water with his ceremonial brush and incanting more liturgy, the coffin at the bottom of an open grave, when he experienced his second dose of strangeness on that memorable day.

  The sun was shining. Tiny droplets of holy water were rainbow-coloured, sparkling on the pale wood of the box. Father Gould’s voice was soft and soothing as he recited words he must have been saying in ceremonies like this for fifty years or so when, with his sharp, fourteen-year-old ears, Andrew heard a scrabbling sound rise faintly from inside the coffin. He blinked, and the box tremored, but he knew that was just the consequence of his blinking and the sensation of shock thrilling through him. Just his imagination, working overtime, as his mum insisted it so often did.

  He strained to hear the sound from the coffin’s interior again. But there was nothing beyond the voice of the priest, the snuffled breathing of relatives struggling to hold their feelings in, the singing of birds happy about the sunshine. And then the first few ritual handfuls of earth spattering and thumping on the lid of the box before the mourners dispersed and the gravediggers got to work with their little caterpillar-tracked earth mover. The furtive lighting of cigarettes, tobacco smoke scenting the breeze as Father Gould’s pious little troop made their ceremonial way among the bereft along the path that led to the main gate and the waiting procession of cars parked on the road outside.

  Andrew changed out of his cassock and cotta back at the sacristy and went to get his bike from the bike stand where he’d locked it. Peter Jackson, who’d flanked him holding the boat on the altar, would now ride back with him the two miles to school.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Peter said, as they pushed their bikes out of the churchyard.

  Andrew saw Peter then, almost as though for the first time. Peter, wearing a shirt with a soiled collar. Scuffed shoes. Tousled hair with white specks of dandruff in it. Trousers without a crease in them. Peter, who had a weird twin sister, whose parents had died when a lorry hit their car on the motorway and lived now with his granddad. Peter, who sometimes, in all honesty, nowadays smelled like he didn’t bath or shower very often.

  They’d been given a fiver each, the altar boys, for the service. Andrew said, ‘Just wondering how to spend the loot.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Andrew sighed. He said, ‘Thought I heard a noise. At the graveside.’

  ‘Sort of noise?’

  ‘Coming from the coffin.’

  Peter laughed. ‘He was well dead, mate. Proper barbecued, I heard.’

  ‘I didn’t dream it, Pete.’

  ‘Maybe a rat. One that likes cooked food.’

  ‘That’s gross.’

  ‘It’s what happens, mate. Rats, worms. The crem’s the better option. Hopefully not for a few years, though.’

  ‘Ashes to ashes.’

  ‘Like the old David Bowie song.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  But Andrew didn’t believe it had been a rat. It had come from inside rather than from under the box and the coffin had been too substantial for even the most ferocious rodent to chew through the wood that quickly. He had only heard it faintly and only for a moment, but there was a word for the character of the sound he’d heard. And that word was ‘frenzied’. He rode back to school next to Peter in silence and felt very subdued for the rest of the day. And that night he dreamed a burning man chased him through cobbled streets in a choking fog as a church bell clanged in a futile bid to summon the faithful to prayer.

  When he woke, early the next morning, he thought he smelled incense again: wrong, acrid, old. He lay in his bed and dozed, waiting for the impossible scent to fade. Which, eventually, it did. Brushing his teeth, dressing, he thought that maybe he should have asked Peter about the oddness of the service of the previous day. But he thought he would just have brushed the question off and maybe even have laughed at him. You were the imaginative type or you weren’t, was the truth of it. And Peter Jackson just wasn’t.

  TWO

  ‘We know that the German alchemist Gunter Keller came to London. We know from the records at the inn where he resided that he stayed in Blackfriars. He was here for just under three months. What he was doing here isn’t documented. The best documentation concerning Keller’s life surrounds the event that ended it. And that was his trial for heresy in Hanover two years after his time in England. Like many people of both sexes convicted of heresy in the period we’re discussing, he was burned alive.’

  After making this statement Professor Juliet Harrington paused with the phone against her ear. Her caller was a journalist from the Telegraph. Periodically, she had to field calls like this one. She supposed that the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom was like the Loch Ness Monster or the Mary Celeste: speculative page-filler in a season when hard news was scarce. Her academic credentials gave the titillation a scholarly sheen of respectability, but she needed to be careful. Discussions with the press about dark magic did nothing at all for her reputation at the university.

  ‘What was Keller’s specific crime?’ the journalist asked.

  ‘He inflicted a plague of the dead.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘We don’t precisely know. We know the date of his arrest. We know the castle at which he was incarcerated. The cell is still intact. We know the trial dates and we know the name of the presiding judge and where and when the sentence was carried out after his conviction. We know that he died cursing his accusers, defiant to the last. But the trial was heard in camera and if there’s a transcript, I’ve yet to see it.’

  There was another silence. The inevitable question was coming, Juliet could sense it.

  ‘Can we talk about the Almanac?’

  ‘If we must.’

  ‘Keller was one of its compilers.’

  ‘Allegedly.’

  ‘Is that what he was doing in London?’

  Juliet closed her eyes. ‘Your question presupposes that the Almanac exists.’

  ‘You’re the leading authority on that book.’

  ‘I’m an authority on a period in which practitioners didn’t differentiate much between science and magic. There’s no hard proof that the Almanac ever existed, much less that it still survives today. The evidence is anecdotal. It could just be a conflation of myth and rumour.’

  ‘Yet Gunter Keller was here for three months. And he wasn’t here for the fishing. And the authorities back in Germany thought he was the real deal.’

  ‘Two facts and an assumption,’ Juliet said. ‘It’s hardly incontrovertible proof.’

  ‘I’ll ask you straight out. Do you believe the Almanac exists?’

  ‘A cabal of black magicians, alchemists, soothsayers and practitioners of witchcraft gather in secret and pool their knowledge of the dark arts. Their aim is to compile all the most potent charms and curses in a single volume. I think the competing egos would make it unlikely. But stories that have persisted for centuries tend to have at least some basis in fact.’

  ‘If the book was found, would the spells work?’

  ‘Spells that work are either miracles or coincidences. I don’t really much believe in either.’

  ‘And that’s a neat closing quote, for which I’m grateful.’

  ‘Slow news day?’

  ‘Professor Harrington, you’ve no idea.’

  After thi
s conversation concluded, Juliet pondered on what she hadn’t shared with the man from the Telegraph.

  Rumours flourished like mushrooms in loamy darkness. And the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom had provoked a fair few. And they were colourful. It was the source of William Shakespeare’s imaginative gift and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mercurial rise to power. The book had apparently passed through Rasputin’s hands in pre-revolutionary Russia. It lay with a hoard of undiscovered Nazi loot in an abandoned mineshaft at the foot of the Alps. Its spells were the source of the almost incalculable wealth amassed in the twentieth century by the oil magnate Paul Getty.

  Juliet believed none of this. But she thought it fair to assume that Gunter Keller had indeed been in London to help compile the Almanac. When he re-crossed the North Sea and returned to Hanover, he was able to buy a large house sited in substantial grounds. He’d apparently been handsomely paid for what he’d contributed in London.

  This was what had soothed the competing egos of the men who had pooled their occult secrets. The Almanac hadn’t been a spontaneous collaboration. The book had been commissioned, its contributors hand-picked by someone with deep pockets and a profound lust for power prepared to risk the block, the gallows or even the stake in pursuing this project.

  Men, and women too. Juliet had examined the English land registry in the period of Keller’s return to Hanover to see if anyone else had splashed out with a sudden windfall.

  She discovered that someone had. The widow Mary Nye had possessed little visible means of support before buying a handsome four-storey house on Holborn. She’d also had a dubious reputation as someone gifted with second sight. Matters became graver for Mary eighteen months after her house purchase, when she was accused by a neighbour of witchcraft. After a short trial, she was hanged without ceremony at Tyburn, her body subsequently buried in unconsecrated ground.

  It was far from proof, but Juliet now thought it likelier than not that the Almanac had indeed been created; a single copy, written in English or Latin in London, where it had been compiled. And where it still resided, forgotten on the neglected shelves of a reference library. Or perhaps a private library. Or maybe even a second-hand bookshop with a particularly careless proprietor.