The Auguries

by F. G. Cottam

  They’d just passed Kingston and the island landmark of Raven’s Ait and were more or less at the centre of the river, when the boat began to sink. There was no warning or preamble. There was no collision, no judder of sudden impact or tearing of metal or splintering of wood. There wasn’t even time for panic. Matters descended into tragedy before any of the passengers could even reach for a life jacket.

  The hull slipped beneath the surface and almost a hundred bodies were all at once in the water; thrashing, screaming, tight-packed together in a riot of summer colour for the brief second before cramp or current began to thin them out.

  Adam clawed at water, eyes searching desperately for Josh. People were sinking from the surface, disappearing with a surprised gulp, as though hauled under by strong, demonic hands.

  ‘Josh,’ he screamed, ‘Josh!’

  There was no reply to this. There had to be fewer than twenty people now with heads still above the water, none of those heads that of a blond boy. None of them someone he knew and cherished. No one seemed to have made it to either bank. Bubbles rose and broke through the viscous sheen of spilled engine oil from pockets of trapped air aboard the sunken Esmeralda.

  Adam went under then. He went down as though jerked hard, astonished at his own velocity, incredulous at the depth to which he was being dragged, lungs iron-bound, robbed of the light, but strangely relieved because this had become impossible and he knew he was only dreaming. A bad dream, sure, but one he was certain, even as his life ebbed away, that he would wake from in the morning.

  Juliet Harrington heard about the tragedy on the afternoon of the same day. Everyone did. The news reporters who rushed to the scene used the same phraseology in every bulletin. It was an event ‘unprecedented in the UK in modern times’. And all the experts invited to offer sound bites said the same: it was completely inexplicable.

  A benign stretch of river. No obstacles to hit and cause the craft to founder. A substantial and river-worthy vessel that witnesses watching on the Thames towpath said sank so rapidly it looked like some ghastly conjuring trick. ‘Like a special effect in a movie,’ said one traumatized ten-year-old girl who braked her bicycle on Barge Walk to watch the horror unfold.

  And no survivors. Not one person capable of swimming through warm slack water to the safety of either bank. It was shocking. It was mysterious. It seemed, to some of the river authorities, impossible.

  The following day, Juliet read all the stories about the sinking in all of Monday’s serious newspapers. She studied the sectioned plan of the Esmeralda. She learned about the jobs and backgrounds of the first few passengers to be identified. She read too about the vessel’s crew. She did all this as she did after every major plane crash or earthquake or avalanche, and not out of mere morbid curiosity. She did so looking for a pattern, asking herself, Is this a portent?

  After a good deal of rumination, just before turning in on Monday evening, she took out the notebook she only ever used in connection with her speculative research. The only subject matter ever discussed in its confidential pages was the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom. She sat with the notebook open on the bureau in her bedroom and her pen poised. She stayed like that for a long moment as though uncertain about the gravity, the sheer irrevocable seriousness, of committing her thoughts to words.

  Then she wrote:

  The Almanac really does exist.

  Someone has newly discovered it.

  They have used it to work a spell involving water.

  And so yesterday, as a consequence, the Auguries began.

  But that was wrong, wasn’t it? That partial eclipse no astronomer had predicted had been the Augury, the sign that some calamity or tragedy was about to occur. Something catastrophic. The price inevitably paid when the Almanac was used, magic wrought from its antique pages by someone ignorant of the consequences.

  Or someone, Juliet thought, who simply didn’t care about the cost of what they did.

  FIVE

  Early on Tuesday evening, as he did habitually each month, Andrew Baxter confessed his sins to Father Gould. The veteran priest didn’t think these transgressions amounted to very much. An apple taken from his younger brother’s lunch box. A white lie concerning the location of some missing homework. A promise to sweep the drive of their house made to his mother that he hadn’t so far kept. Thomas Gould had heard far worse in a long and eventful priestly career. And that career had honed his instinct to the point where he knew that Andrew was troubled by something far graver than the sins he believed himself to have committed.

  ‘Is there anything that you haven’t told me? Perhaps something you’d like to share?’

  ‘It isn’t a sin, Father.’

  ‘But it’s a problem, Andrew. And you’ll be familiar with the old saying that a problem shared is a problem halved.’

  On the other side of the confessional grille blinding them to the sight of one another, there was a silence Father Gould thought to be eloquent. Then Andrew said, ‘At the cemetery the other day, I think we might have buried someone still alive.’

  ‘That’s impossible, Andrew.’

  ‘I heard movement. It was definitely coming from inside the coffin. Pete Jackson said it was probably a rat, but it couldn’t have been. Not that quickly. Unless the rat ate its way into the coffin while the coffin was still in the church, which someone would have noticed. There’d have been sawdust.’

  The boy had clearly been pondering on this, worrying at it in his young mind since the burial. ‘Pete Jackson heard this coffin sound?’

  ‘No, he didn’t, Father.’

  ‘And neither did I.’

  ‘Except that I didn’t imagine it.’

  A phrase insinuated its way just then into the old priest’s head. He didn’t know what it meant and had no idea of from where it came. A jackdaw moment. A magpie’s shiny find. The phrase was the unrestful dead.

  Father Gould’s tone was gentle when he spoke next. ‘The unfortunate fellow we buried the other day had sustained injuries no one could have survived, Andrew. The cause of death was smoke inhalation, which was a blessed mercy for him because his body was subsequently burned beyond recognition. He’d lost an arm and most of his lower limbs. The best you can do is to pray for his soul.’

  ‘I will, Father.’

  Father Gould absolved Andrew Baxter and the boy left the confessional and went to unchain his bike and ride it the distance home. But that phrase nagged at the priest maddeningly. He knew that he could fire up his old desktop computer and search the internet for its origin and its implications. Google was a powerful tool. But his preferred method was to consult someone human. Forty years earlier he’d been at the seminary as a novitiate with the colleague and friend who was now bishop of his diocese. He’d still never come across a more knowledgeable man or anyone of either sex with a finer mind. And so, it was the bishop whom he rang.

  ‘Your Grace?’

  ‘Mark, to you, Tom. Let’s have no unnecessary ceremony.’

  ‘I’m being haunted by a phrase, Mark. Though “haunted” might be a slight exaggeration. I’m trying to place it, to find a context for it, and I can’t.’

  ‘I’m intrigued, Tom. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘“The unrestful dead”?’

  The bishop was silent. It was now just before nine p.m. in early June, so light was still left in the day. ‘You’re what, Tom, twenty minutes away?’

  ‘Probably less than that, at this time of night, by car.’

  ‘Take a cab, Tom. Expense it to the diocese. You’re not driving. This is a face-to-face discussion over something a lot more potent than coffee or tea.’

  It was whisky. It was the single malt, Oban. And the only mixer the bishop had was the purist’s choice of soda water. No ice. The bishop believed whisky a drink properly consumed only at room temperature.

  They swapped the usual pleasantries. And then the bishop cleared his throat with a cough. Unlike his visitor, white-haired and ascetically thin, the bishop was ba
ld and short and prosperously plump.

  ‘“The unrestful dead” is a phrase I’ve come across formally only in a monograph written by an Oxford academic named Juliet Harrington. Professor Harrington is an authority on sixteenth-century mysticism. The phenomenon of the unrestful dead is as much side effect as affliction, according to her speculations. It’s a direct consequence of coming into contact with the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom.’

  ‘You mean dabbling in magic? Working spells?’

  ‘No. It’s just a temporary disruption to the norm. Using the Almanac’s spells has far more serious physical consequences. They’re known as the Auguries.’

  ‘I still can’t recall where I came across that phrase,’ Father Gould said.

  ‘The subject of the Almanac came up briefly at a seminar we both attended more than forty years ago. You’d have heard about the unrestful dead then, but it’s no surprise that after all this time you can’t remember.’

  ‘Pretty ghoulish stuff.’

  ‘Very. In what connection did it come up?’

  Father Gould told his friend. The bishop turned pale and poured them fresh drinks. Stiff ones, Father Gould observed.

  ‘Is this a fanciful boy?’

  ‘Not usually. And he’s served on my altar for six years. Everything about funeral ritual is familiar to him. There was nothing particularly to provoke his imagination.’

  ‘Then he must have misheard. He must have been mistaken.’

  The two men were silent, sipping whisky, both, Father Gould knew, contemplating the alternative. He had remembered another detail from that last funeral service. The incense used in the requiem mass had seemed unusually pungent, the smoke acrid and darker than it should have been. The whole familiar ritual, now he recalled it, had seemed strangely out of kilter.

  Eventually the bishop said, ‘Awful business with that pleasure boat at the weekend.’

  ‘Lost two parishioners. Not a single survivor. Beggars belief.’

  ‘The sort of pointless calamity that costs people their faith, Tom.’

  But Father Gould hadn’t finished with their earlier topic. ‘I’d thought the legend of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom apocryphal. Somewhere between a fable and a cautionary tale.’

  The bishop shook his head, slowly. He said, ‘You should read her monograph. Professor Harrington thinks it real enough. She speculates on its contributors. The Vatican believed in its existence strongly enough to put a bounty on it at the end of the eighteenth century. Find it so it could be ceremonially destroyed, and you’d earn your weight in gold bullion.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It isn’t common knowledge. Rome has always been good at secrets. The only people who did know were the agents charged with the mission of the book’s recovery. And they failed.’

  ‘Do you have a copy of Professor Harrington’s monograph?’

  ‘Here, in the library. I’ll get it for you.’

  Half an hour later, Father Gould was dropped by his taxi outside the gates of the cemetery where he prayed the subject of his most recent burial service still peacefully reposed. The gates were locked, but he was a relatively agile man emboldened by two large whiskies and the wall was old and time-pocked and therefore easily scalable.

  It had grown dark, but the paler gravestones were navigable landmarks and he was able to find the plot he wanted to examine straightforwardly enough.

  Turf had been laid in neatly cut squares about a foot in length. The job had been done in haste by the look of it because the gaps between the turf squares were uneven in size. This was noticeable even in darkness, once the priest’s eyes had adjusted to his surroundings.

  He raised his eyes from their study of the ground and looked around. He was a man in a black gabardine suit and a white clerical collar with an occult-themed monograph in his jacket pocket who thought he would have quite a bit of explaining to do should an official of any sort discover him there. But there was no one around. Or at least, there was no one living around. This was a necropolis, a city of the dead. He had plenty of companionship, all of it mouldering. There was a sense in which they were all the unrestful dead.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Father Gould knelt on the turf on the grave and then got on to all fours and prostrated himself on the ground. He turned his head so that his left cheek prickled against the close-cut grass blades and he felt the cooling earth against his skin, listening for some signal or clue from under the recently turned soil beneath the sods.

  Nothing. No sound except for night wind soughing through leaf-burdened trees around the empty chapel a hundred feet away from where he lay. And his own breathing, shallower and less regular than he thought it should have been. After a few minutes he got to his feet somewhat wearily and headed off, intent on reading into the night.

  SIX

  I’m frightened of that damned book. It has power and the power is baleful. And potent. So potent that I’ve had to overcome my recent desire to destroy it. I fear the repercussions should I attempt to do so. It’s my strong belief that steps have been taken to protect its contents from physical harm. Attempt to destroy that compendium of evil and malice and perversion and I might very well be destroying myself in consequence.

  I suppose I could attempt to sell it. There must be a market for antiquarian texts on every subject and as far as I’ve been able to determine, my copy of the Almanac of Hidden Wisdom is the only one in existence. The existence of even a single copy of the book has been debated down the centuries, sometimes believed, more often scoffed at as a mere conspiracy, a baseless tale, a bit of irreligious propaganda. But I think to sell it would bring terrible misfortune. That’s my instinct, which I tend to trust and follow.

  So, it sits with my other keepsakes. With the pistol I took from the German officer I shot dead in a skirmish in the Ardennes forest in the weeks following D-Day. With the collection of gold coins I had the good fortune to liberate from an Italian monastery. With the paintings I had the devil’s own job smuggling back after taking them from a grand house during the fall of Berlin.

  I discovered the book in the library of a chateau about ten miles north of Paris. The chateau had been abandoned, the book left in a glass case and its most recent owner, so far as I could ascertain, in a tomb in the crypt below. I should have realized straight away that it wouldn’t bring with it good fortune. But even with my schoolboy Latin I could see that the subject matter was sensational. All I could think about was its rarity and potential value. I was blinded, not for the first time, by greed.

  The book has real occult power. I would never attempt a spell or curse or create a formula or enact one of the rituals from its pages. But you only have to be in its proximity for it to inflict its contaminating effect. And it’s extremely disturbing, this party trick the book facilitates in its owners.

  The book was in my knapsack on the first occasion this occurred. I was alone, at the wheel of a requisitioned jeep, scouting ambush locations, when I stumbled into the aftermath of one at dusk. The bodies were all about, bullet-riddled, their uniforms telling me they were Italian, all with the slumped posture of the recently and violently deceased. I braked and got out of the vehicle, intent on wallets and wristwatches. But as I began to pass among them, the bodies began to twitch and writhe. One, shot in the chest, exhaled slowly through punctured lungs. It was a ghastly sound and they were a surreal and frightening sight for the few seconds before they became still again.

  It was the first occult experience I had, but it wasn’t the last. That occurred in a hospital when I went to visit my commanding officer a few weeks before being demobbed back in Blighty. He’d taken a shrapnel wound to the foot and some boot leather had infected the wound.

  He was cheerful, and on the mend, when I saw him. It was a visit jocular enough. Then at the end, in a bid to avoid all the miles and miles of hospital corridors I’d tramped through on my route to the major’s bedside, I took a shortcut to the hospital’s rear entrance.

 
This was a mistake. Because it brought me through the mortuary. And I was treated to the thump and slap of the corpses in their metal drawers as the contamination I carried briefly animated them. It was a trapped, frenzied sound that made an orderly scream before he dead-fainted to the floor.

  I think that this only happens when you’ve handled the book recently. I have it safely under lock and key in the attic and, thank God, there’s been no repetition. I never want to experience anything like it again. It’s a waking nightmare that makes a man’s skin crawl and feels like an icicle thrust through the heart. It also makes you doubt your sanity.

  Peter Jackson didn’t know whether to call this a letter, note, boast, confession or warning. It was written in black fountain pen ink over three sheets of lined paper which had then been bound together by a single staple at the top left-hand corner. There was no date on the note, but the ink was faded and the handwriting sort of old-fashioned. And a phrase like ‘on the mend’ struck Peter as terribly dated. And who, these days, used words like ‘ghastly’?

  He’d found the document rummaging through the bureau in Grandpa’s study. He’d actually been searching for cash. There was a healthy enough balance on Grandpa’s debit card, but they got funny looks, like the cashiers knew it wasn’t theirs, when they used it in the supermarket. They’d taken to using the self-checkout, but cash was a less risky proposition altogether.

  He thought it quite cool to have shot a German officer dead in a French forest in the war, but a bit shabby to try to take personal belongings from the bodies of ambushed soldiers. He’d always thought of brave people as heroes and now knew that his light-fingered great-granddad, despite being brave, had not been heroic at all.

  Peter read the note with all the windows open, having the previous evening finally persuaded Dawn that they had to shift what was left of Grandpa before he liquified in the summer sunshine and slid off the bed in a stinking puddle of decomposition. He’d done some recent internet reading on what happens to dead people and ‘decomposition’ was a word new to him which he thought rather cool.