by F. G. Cottam
Unless its custodian was a descendant owner aware of the book’s mythic status and alleged potential for dark mischief.
There was a persistent story concerning the use of the Almanac. Its influence apparently came at a metaphysical cost. Its use provoked strange events, signals that someone was using it. These events even had a name. They were called ‘The Auguries’. The problem was that no one knew precisely what the Auguries were.
There were vague allusions to the dead becoming restless. Juliet thought there might be some way she could cross-reference that with Gunter Keller’s ‘plague of the dead’. But it was insubstantial stuff and she had to tread very carefully. She was fascinated by the notion that the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom might actually be a real document she could read and study, hefting its weight, holding it between her hands, turning its time-stiffened pages, exposing its arcane secrecy.
Her problem was that her head of department didn’t at all share her enthusiasm for this sort of subject matter. It was prurient nonsense, local colour, footnotes at best. The Almanac was a pub quiz trivia question, and no more than that.
Juliet knew that more than a century after Keller, Isaac Newton was still spending as much time on alchemy as he was on mathematical calculus. Theology was another of that great scientist’s passions. But Juliet’s boss liked his history measured in bills of lading and laundry lists. He took a coolly forensic approach. He preferred the demonstrably provable to the speculative. Mystery didn’t move him; facts and statistics did.
She was a bit concerned about what might appear in the following day’s Telegraph. She had blanket approval to talk to the press but also an ongoing responsibility to the reputation and standing of the college. She was expected to be not only serious, but credible.
She picked up her gym bag from where it reposed in the corner of her office and took her key from her pocket. Her conversation with the journalist had provoked a bit of nervous energy she thought half an hour on the treadmill would usefully dissipate. It only registered with her how dark the room was when she unzipped her bag to check the contents and had to switch on her desk light to see properly.
When she got outside, clusters of students and staff stood still in the gloom, collective necks craned, staring, all of them, at the sky. Juliet looked in the same direction and saw with surprise that the sun was eclipsed. Not fully, but partially, though she hadn’t known an eclipse was expected.
‘An unscheduled event,’ a voice beside her said. It was Martin Doyle, her boss – and, she sometimes thought, her nemesis – complete with his familiar cocktail of scents: tweed, pipe tobacco, too much Polo aftershave. He had small brown eyes and the swarthy pallor of a man who needs to shave twice a day.
‘Astronomy doesn’t do unscheduled,’ she said.
Martin shrugged. His eyes had left hers. He was staring at the sun, which looked as though something had bruised it. ‘Doesn’t usually,’ he said. ‘But there’s always an exception that proves the rule.’
THREE
Peter Jackson knew that he was nowhere near as clever as his twin sister. She’d been made part of their school’s elite and prestigious Special Study Group. He’d have bet money she could take her A-Levels now at the age of only fourteen, and not just pass them but also attain excellent grades. She’d learned Italian just for fun and was now fluent in the language. She’d learned Latin after that because, she said, the similarity to Italian would make it fairly straightforward. Not Church Latin, she’d told her brother airily, but the language the Romans had spoken in the ancient world. Next, she’d said, was Classical Greek.
Dawn Jackson was the sort of high achiever who liked to tick off accomplishments. It was slightly irritating to Peter, who struggled a bit with the Spanish he was studying for an eventual GCSE exam. And her precocious cleverness didn’t stop his sister being a bit weird.
He’d accused her more than once of being ‘on the spectrum’. He didn’t fully know what this meant, but there was a boy in his class their form teacher Mrs Mahoney described as ‘on the spectrum’. This boy never made eye contact and stood in a slightly strange folded-up sort of way and liked to listen to recordings of trains through headphones attached to an old-fashioned iPod in the playground. He would rock with the rhythm of the steel wheels on the rails and pull faces. When the trains he was listening to whistled, he would whistle along with them.
In common with Peter’s sister, this boy was exceptionally good at maths and had a gift too for music. His technical drawing was also just about perfect. Peter didn’t think that Dawn had ever done any tech drawing but suspected that if she ever did, she’d be world class at that too. He didn’t really think she was on any kind of spectrum. He just said it in the way siblings do to hurt one another’s feelings and score a few cheap points. All the teachers made a fuss of her at school. It was his considered opinion that she got too easy a ride and needed a bit of pain in her life and if her own brother couldn’t be depended upon to provide that, who could?
It was six o’clock in the evening and Peter was sitting at the kitchen table in his grandfather’s house. He was constructing an Airfix kit, which, he thought, was as close as he ever got to a hobby. Most of his school friends were into computer games but he’d never really seen the attraction of those. He liked building models, the more complex and intricate the better. Painting them once they were put together could be a painstaking task, but he liked that too.
His current project was Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. The masts were a challenge and the rigging an absolute bastard. And there was the smell of the glue. But the smell of the glue masked another far worse odour.
He looked across to the fish tank in which Freddy the terrapin swam in aimless, flapping circles. Freddy’s swimming at all was a bit of a miracle, really. His clever sister had used the garden secateurs from Grandpa’s shed to snip off Freddy’s head a week earlier, two days after finding Grandpa dead in his bed and a day after finding and opening Grandpa’s antique book and deciphering some of the claims made there. Headless, Freddy hadn’t really appeared capable of swimming. Even of floating. But with the help of the book his sister had fixed Freddy … sort of.
Now, he could hear her coming down the stairs. She appeared at the kitchen door with the book held up at her chest between both hands. Like a shield, Peter thought. Or like a religious symbol. Powerful and sacred. She looked at the model he was building, the bright mind behind her bright green eyes quickly taking in its intricacies.
‘Do you know what this is?’
‘It’s a First-rater from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. I’m guessing Nelson’s flagship, the Victory.’
‘You know everything.’
‘That’s an exaggeration.’
But not much of one, Peter thought. He said, ‘Something weird happened today at that requiem mass I served at. Well, at the cemetery.’
‘Go on.’
‘Handy Andy thought he heard a noise coming from the coffin.’
‘Andy Baxter?’
‘Freaked him out.’
Dawn Jackson frowned. ‘The Auguries,’ she said.
‘The what?’
‘There’s a warning about them in here.’ She put the book down carefully on to the table. It was big and thick with no title on the cover and bound in cracked hide that had the look to Peter of elderly human skin. His sister had told him this stuff was called vellum. ‘It’s like fallout, or a sort of contagion,’ she said. ‘It’s a phenomenon they called “the unrestful dead”.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It happened because you were there and because of what I did with Freddy and because you’ve been around the book.’
‘That’s scary, Dawn.’
‘It would only have been for a couple of seconds. Handy Andy must be more alert than he looks.’
There was a plop from the fish tank, where their headless pet had tried to clamber out and had fallen back into the water.
Dawn had discovered the book in
the attic. The attic had been strictly out of bounds during their grandfather’s lifetime. You accessed it through a locked trap-door but Dawn had found both the key and a step-ladder in the shed. She’d gone up there and discovered what amounted to treasure.
There was a row of medals pinned to a board covered in red velvet. There was a fully loaded Luger pistol. A foot-tall marble statue Dawn said was a nymph. Four small oil paintings, all landscapes. A metal champagne bucket filled to the brim with antique gold coins. There was a ceremonial sword. And a solitary book.
Dawn had since looked the medals up. There were six of them in total: two awarded for gallantry and four campaign medals. Dawn did the maths and reasoned that they must have been given originally to Grandpa’s dad, their own great-grandfather, who had apparently served in Italy, Germany and the Far East.
‘Great-gramps was partial to a bit of looting,’ she said, leafing through a library reference book about medals given to serving soldiers in the British Army in the Second World War. ‘If they’d caught him, they’d have court-martialled and shot him.’
‘Blimey.’
Dawn wasn’t interested in the weaponry or the art. She seemed completely indifferent too to the bucket full of bling. But the book fascinated her from the moment she opened it. Maybe from before that, from the moment she first laid eyes on it. She studied its pages for hours. And then she performed her party trick with their terrapin.
Sitting in front of his ship model, with the book on the table next to it, Peter said, ‘Magic seems to have consequences.’
‘Everything has consequences, Pete. Everything worthwhile does, anyway.’
The book was written in Latin. Dawn had said more than once that this seemed to her like fate. She hadn’t deciphered all of it. Some of it was dense and obscure. Some of it seemed deliberately ambiguous. There were passages written in a code she said she’d have to crack. But Dawn was good at that sort of thing. She had a knack for it, what she called an aptitude.
Despite the scent of the Airfix glue, the sweetish odour of decay was creeping across the room, getting stronger by the day.
‘We need to tell someone about Grandpa. We should have told someone already. We’ll get into trouble. You’re supposed to tell the authorities when a person dies.’
‘It’s not like we killed him, Pete. He died in his sleep. In his own bed. He was dead when we went in and found him.’
‘We should have reported it when it happened.’
His sister smiled. In a dreamy voice, she said, ‘The unrestful dead isn’t the half of it.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
She nodded at the book. ‘There’s a formula in there for bringing people back. Properly. Wholly.’
‘He’s rotting up there, Dawn. Not to mention the fact that his soul has departed his body.’
‘Spoken like a bloody altar boy.’
‘I am a bloody altar boy.’
‘It’s probably been done before,’ Dawn said. ‘This book is centuries old.’
‘What does that prove?’
‘That it won’t be the end of the world?’
‘If you did bring him back, he’d be mad at us.’
‘What for?’
‘For using his debit card without his permission.’
‘We’ve got to eat.’
‘For going into the attic when he forbade it.’
‘Only to cover up his own father’s war crimes. If he was standing here now, Pete, he’d be pretty sheepish about that.’
‘It’s sacrilegious.’
‘Big word. I mean, by your standards.’
‘And because I’m an altar boy I understand its meaning.’
Dawn folded her hands across her chest, pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side and quietly said, ‘There’s a reason I was given the language skills to understand that text. Sometimes things happen simply because they’re meant to. I believe this is one of those times.’
Peter stared at his unfinished model. Scabs of glue had hardened, frosty and jewel-like, around some of the cannon. He’d done a crap job, really, of constructing the Victory.
‘What’s going through what passes for your mind, Pete?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. But this wasn’t true. He was thinking of their mum and dad. You got pretty mangled up when your car lost an argument with an HGV on the motorway. Just that morning, he’d expressed a preference for cremation over burial in a conversation he’d had with Andy Baxter. But his parents hadn’t been cremated after their fatal accident back in January. They had been buried, in the same plot.
Peter and Dawn never spoke about their dead parents. On his part this was simply because it would be too soon and too painful. The grief was still too raw. Now he wondered, how much did his sister miss their folks? What would she do to have the chance to see them again? He thought the answer to this rhetorical question was probably, Anything. They’d delighted in their clever daughter. Even more than her teachers at school, they’d spoiled her. She probably missed that.
Over against the wall, in their fish tank, Freddy the terrapin slipped while climbing blindly and plopped back into the water with a noise that sounded to Peter as emphatic as the full stop at the end of a closing sentence. He’d never win an argument with Dawn. It just wasn’t possible.
FOUR
The boat was rigged up to look like a paddle steamer. But the substantial wheels on its sides didn’t house real instruments of propulsion. They turned, or more accurately churned, only for show. The boat was powered, in actuality, by twin diesel-powered screws fixed at the stern and sited well beneath the waterline.
Like all Thames passenger craft in the post-Marchioness world, the Esmeralda was scrupulously maintained. The safety checks were bi-annual, rigorous, and she always passed them with flying colours. She was licensed to take eighty passengers, had a crew of ten and on this bright Sunday morning at the beginning of June was carrying her full complement when she cast off from Westminster Pier on a voyage along the river that was scheduled to end at a berth just short of the entrance to Hampton Court Palace.
The boat was packed, probably as a consequence of the lovely early June weather. The sky was an unsullied blue so bright above the water that it almost appeared turquoise. The water shimmered, reflecting the sky. The temperature was in the mid-seventies by eleven a.m., the Esmeralda’s departure time. There was a slight, pleasant, cooling breeze for those passengers to enjoy who chose to voyage on the deck rather than in the long single cabin beneath it.
In that cabin, as the boat passed under Chelsea Bridge, the weekend festivities were soundtracked by the chink of beer and wine glasses and chortles of carefree laughter – familiar noises generated by the happy celebrants of an English summer.
Adam Porter wasn’t drinking. Adam was a reluctant weekend dad, the reluctance prompted by the fact that he would have preferred to see his beloved seven-year-old son Josh every day rather than for a mere two days every fortnight. He thought the custody arrangements involved in divorce settlements thoughtless and close to arbitrary in the way they were decided. They discriminated against a loving father. But he had Josh today and he squatted beside him, face paled by factor fifty sun cream, expression totally relaxed, mouth fully engaged in the eating of a double ninety-nine with strawberry sauce which Adam knew the boy would never have persuaded out of his organic-minded mother.
‘Happy?’ Adam said to his son, knowing the question was redundant.
Josh nodded from behind the twin chocolate towers of the Cadbury’s Flakes anchored in his ice cream. ‘Excited, Dad,’ he said.
There was a funfair scheduled to be staged that day in the grounds at Hampton Court Palace. There was to be hog roast and archery and mead tasting. There was going to be a tombola and a coconut shy. You could ride on a donkey or take part in a space hopper race. Best of all, there was a jousting tournament, horsemen in full armour riding full pelt at one another with lances in a re-enactment of what had given the palace’s Tiltyar
d its name back when a Tudor monarch named Henry had got through six wives. Sometimes bloodily.
One marriage had been enough for Adam Porter, he reflected now as his son ate through a week’s sugar ration in one go. The boat churned serenely through the water as they reached Putney Bridge and the capital began to slip away while the buildings beyond the banks of the river began to look less iconic and more suburban. One wife had been enough; the one who broke his heart and took him to the cleaners in a court of law and then deprived him too regularly of the company of his only child.
Adam looked around him at his fellow passengers. There was a group of pensioner men, jolly in flannels and striped blazers and boaters straight out of Jerome K. Jerome. A fit-looking middle-aged couple in matching denim he took to be tourists; possibly Dutch or Austrian, but without hearing them speak, he’d have bet money they were German. She wore her hair short and severely cut and he wore a Rolex Explorer wristwatch glittering on its steel bracelet on his left wrist.
There was a group of hipsters, heavily bearded and tattooed, which made Adam speculate on the correct collective noun for the species. A micro-brewery of hipsters? An inking of hipsters? The thought amused him. His son saw him smile and smiled back, ice cream smeared across his happy little face. Adam ruffled his son’s blond mop of hair and felt a surge of love for the boy so strong it made his chest swell physically and caught the breath momentarily in his throat so that a cough was forced out of him.
‘OK, Dad?’
‘More than, Josh,’ he said.
There was a group of women, piercings and tattoos, retro gypsy-themed clothing reminiscent of what Stevie Nicks had worn onstage and on album covers, and probably in life, when Fleetwood Mac had been at the height of their Seventies fame. Adam thought that they were a good thematic match for the hipster men as the two groups converged and began to chat to one another. At that moment, if asked, he would have said that the mood aboard the boat was better than happy. It was, actually, blissful.