by F. G. Cottam
Grandpa had not been rather cool. He’d been smelly, and softer under the armpits than he should have been, when they carried him down the stairs. Sort of sticky, there. But he’d been a small man and quite thin and wasn’t heavy, which was something. They’d folded him into the chest freezer kept in the garage as a back-up and then plugged it in and heard it chug softly into life. It wasn’t perfect. They’d have to thaw him out for Dawn to attempt to bring him back, but in the meantime he wouldn’t get any worse.
What he had just read had confirmed Peter’s existing suspicion that the proximity of the Almanac gave him a bit of a problem. And he was in its proximity, all the time, because Dawn carried the bloody thing around like a toddler with a comfort blanket. It meant that going anywhere near a coffin with a body in it was for him, just then, impossible.
Nobody would know it was happening because of him and it wasn’t something he’d ever do deliberately. What worried him was the effect it would have on the mourners. He was supposed to serve at a requiem a week away, a funeral mass for one of the drowning victims of the Esmeralda disaster. It was a seven-year-old boy.
And it brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘death-rattle’. Peter didn’t want the boy’s coffin toppling off its trolley as he jerked around inside it in the church.
It had been quite subtle the last time. It hadn’t happened until the graveside and only Handy Andy Baxter had been aware of anything amiss. But he’d been around the Almanac for a lot longer now.
And he couldn’t destroy it. Great-grandpa had been right about that. You only had to look at that flesh-coloured vellum cover to sense that the book protected itself. And he didn’t think he could hide it away. If he did that, Dawn would know straight away that it had been him and she would make him bring it back, and then what would she do?
She’d punish him, was what she’d do. She’d use these new powers she was learning to possess and punish him in some awful way. Peter turned to look at their fish tank. They’d need a new one soon. Freddy the terrapin had got bigger since his death. Bigger and paler. Sort of jelly-like. And kind of see-through. You could see his innards, under his rotting shell, as though bringing him back hadn’t been a total success. He was still just small enough to flush away down the loo and without a head he didn’t have a mouth either to nip. But Dawn liked this physical proof of her new powers, the endless, sightless, circular swim.
Peter had realized that, depressingly, he was actually frightened of his sister. And possibly becoming more so. All the jokes about her being on the spectrum had been tolerated, but no more than that. In tolerating them, she was actually just humouring him, but those cracks were as far as he would go because they were as far as his twin would let him. With the adults gone, she was very much the person making the important decisions in their lives. And she was armed now with the Almanac.
‘A cold,’ Peter said, aloud. In a week’s time, to miss that requiem, he’d develop a cold of the sort that had always served him well enough on occasions when he hadn’t done his school homework and needed to delay going back by a day.
Freddy, propelled by his swollen flippers, provided a constant, sloppy soundtrack to his thoughts. He lifted his head and saw his sister standing at the study door.
‘Working on Grandpa, sis?’
‘Grandpa’s complicated. I need a fresh model to start with. Still an apprentice at this.’
She was standing with her hands behind her back. It was an unusually coy posture for Dawn, he thought, uncharacteristic of someone as generally confident as she was. It was almost endearing.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine and dandy,’ she said. She brought her right hand from behind her back and raised the attic Luger and shot her brother squarely in the centre of the forehead. He didn’t fall from the armchair in which he’d done his reading. He just sat back as though asleep. Except that his eyes, glazed now in death, remained open.
‘No time to waste, Peter,’ his sister said, placing the pistol delicately on top of her grandfather’s bureau. ‘Let’s get this done.’
SEVEN
They were almost at the end of term. There were late essays to mark and assessments still to do, but the seminars and lectures had pretty much wrapped up and most of the academic staff were simply looking forward to the long vacation and holidays they’d booked back in December and January. Her guard was down, she was feeling relaxed, and that was probably why it was a sickening shock on Wednesday morning for Juliet Harrington to get a formal summons to sit before a disciplinary panel over comments a journalist had attributed to her in the recent interview she’d given but hadn’t yet bothered to read.
It would be Martin Doyle’s doing, she knew. And it wasn’t just their differing philosophies on what constituted proper research. She thought that the truth was he’d been gunning for her ever since a faculty cocktail party almost eighteen months earlier at which he’d asked her out on a date and she’d declined.
She’d done so diplomatically. She had been polite and even friendly in saying no. But Martin was a results-based individual and ‘no’, however sugar-coated, had been the direct opposite of the answer he’d wanted to hear. Tactful rejection was still rejection.
He hadn’t persisted in trying to woo her. Instead, he’d sulked. And then he’d turned hostile. Not openly so; he was too skilful a politician to allow people generally to think he had any kind of personal agenda. But his criticism of her academic interests and even her methodology had been persistent and corrosive. It had undermined her reputation and hurt her personally. It was undeserved. What it actually was, however subtly done, was bullying.
Prior to her appearance before the panel, she read the piece. She sounded more emphatic quoted on the page than she remembered being on the phone. The claims she made concerning the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom seemed wilder. The panel would comprise the vice-chancellor, her head of faculty and the senior manager from human resources. Two of the three were perfectly reasonable people. She thought that with a bit of luck and a lot of nerve, she could ride this one out. She did not want to be forced to resign over something so relatively trivial. She liked her job.
Reflecting on just how much she liked her job, seated outside the meeting room awaiting her summons, Juliet had time to reflect upon her life generally. Her marriage had ended acrimoniously when she’d uncovered her ex-husband’s ongoing affair, two years ago now. Recovery from the betrayal and its fallout had been slow and difficult. A subsequent experiment in internet dating had been almost farcically unsuccessful.
Objectively, she knew that she wasn’t physically unattractive. And she was a youthful enough thirty-five-year-old for students sometimes to try to hit on her. But her life suffered from the lack of the commitment that comes only with a partner and children. There was no romance and precious little love in it.
What else? There was the growing suspicion that the world might be seriously out of kilter. Juliet was aware that her day-to-day life lacked thrills. She was also aware of the old Chinese curse about living in interesting times.
The door in front of her opened and their HR manager popped her bespectacled face around it and signalled with a jerk of her head that Juliet’s moment had arrived.
‘What’s the evidential basis for your belief that the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom is anything other than a preposterous myth?’
The question, typically passive–aggressive, came, of course, from Martin Doyle. Martin Doyle, PhD, Juliet reminded herself: Dr Martin Doyle.
I believe it because of an unexpected astronomical event, Juliet thought. I believe it because an inexplicable catastrophe claimed every life it could. I believe it because the Auguries are upon us.
What she said was, ‘During the eighteenth century, agents of the Catholic Church were incentivized with a huge reward to find the Almanac, simply so that it could be destroyed. This was a specific instruction. The relevant paperwork is marked by the papal seal. I sourced it myself while doing research at th
e Vatican a few years ago. I was permitted to make a photocopy, which I can show all three of you.’
‘Gullibility and the Catholic Church are not mutually exclusive, and never have been,’ Martin said.
‘I believe the Almanac to have been compiled in 1530,’ Juliet said. ‘There was a three-month period when half a dozen of the most eminent occult practitioners in Europe were all in London. They came from Germany, Italy and Holland. They came for a reason. Our home-grown participant was a woman, Mary Nye.’
‘This is very speculative,’ the vice-chancellor said.
‘Speculation is a large part of what we do,’ Juliet said.
‘And that newspaper article struck me as quite sensationalist.’
‘I didn’t write the article and so didn’t determine its character. And some of my quotes were exaggerated.’
‘Completely unrepentant,’ Martin said.
Juliet shrugged, a gesture she immediately regretted.
Martin Doyle raised a forefinger for emphasis. He said, ‘You’re in danger of bringing the academic credibility of this institution into disrepute with this ridiculous obsession with hocus-pocus. So here’s a reasonable compromise. Until you can provide concrete proof of the existence of that book, you refrain from all future public mention of the subject. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ Juliet said.
On either side of Martin, the two female panel members nodded sagely.
Juliet felt quite relieved. But she knew that her card had been marked. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was five minutes to ten in the morning and she had no further appointments that day. She decided that she would drive to Kingston upon Thames, to the river, to see for herself the site of Sunday’s tragedy. She didn’t think doing so would provide her with the answer to anything, much less any solid proof. She didn’t think her motives prurient or ghoulish either, though. She felt compelled by instinct to go.
The drive took just over an hour and a half. She parked and walked over Kingston Bridge to the towpath on the Bushy Park side. She’d changed out of the suit and heels she’d worn for her dressing-down, into jeans and a canvas jacket and her hiking boots. The fine weather was holding on, a day a happy boatload of assorted souls had never lived to see.
The first sign of the tragedy was the litter of wreaths washed up against the solid obstacle of Raven’s Ait by the river’s gentle flow. Further on, at the spot itself, there was a marker buoy. It was a navigation point, she supposed, for the police or salvage divers. In due course the wreck would be raised.
The opaque water of the river itself offered no clues about what had happened there. And whatever debris had washed up on the river bank had been taken away. It was almost as though the incident itself, not just the people involved in it, had been effaced. Its legacy was the pain in the hearts of those who grieved, and Juliet suspected that would last a lifetime.
She went back to the bridge and crossed it and walked along Kingston Riverside to Queen’s Promenade and the Riverside Café. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon of a so far eventful day, but she couldn’t discover much appetite for food. She needed to eat, though, to have the stamina and concentration for the drive back. So she sat at one of the café’s little metal tables and forced down a toasted cheese and tuna ciabatta sandwich that on another day would have tasted delicious, washed down by a Diet Coke.
The river sparkled benignly under sunlight. The world was generally indifferent to what went on in it. You could despoil and pollute or overheat it, but it didn’t behave with deliberate malice. The malice came from mankind and mankind’s infernal dabbling.
There had been a boy aboard the boat. They’d run a human-interest story in the follow-ups in the papers, filled with poignant detail. His name had been Joshua Porter and he was seven years old. He’d been with his weekend dad. He’d been excited, said his bereft mother, about a funfair he was going to with his dad at Hampton Court. He’d been talking about this event for weeks. Most of all he’d been looking forward to the jousting.
Was this really the start of the Auguries, this inexplicable tragedy, that unexpected eclipse? Juliet thought that she would need another sign before she really began to believe that. But if it did happen, she didn’t have the first clue as to what she would do about it.
She already had colleagues who thought her obsessive and possibly even a bit unbalanced. Naive, gullible, easily taken in, credulous to a fault, a bit of a professional embarrassment. A gusher.
Was that really who she was?
She sat at a table on the Thames outside a pretty café and thought about it hard, but without coming to any firm conclusions about herself. She couldn’t exonerate, but neither could she condemn. She just didn’t possess the necessary objectivity.
EIGHT
Dawn thought the revived Peter a bit of a disappointment. He’d never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but now he seemed barely able to communicate. His walk was a slow shuffle and he seemed to have a problem with the concept of walls. He’d walk towards a wall and then try to keep going, a bit like someone treading water in a swimming pool, or a stupid wind-up toy.
The most impressive bit of the procedure had been the way his head wound healed. The bullet hole had completely gone. There wasn’t even a scar. But he didn’t have the energy that her headless terrapin had come back with. Animation, Dawn thought, was the characteristic that her brother now lacked.
Though Freddy, if she was really honest with herself, was developing problems of his own. His shell had become a soft and gluey mess. Under it, his body had turned loathsomely translucent. You could see organs pulsing and blood beating along intricately patterned arteries. It was like the biology lesson from hell, now that he’d grown to about the size of an overfilled hot water bottle. She’d resolved to find a spell in the book to make Freddy disappear. He was no fun at all any more.
She was beginning to think her brother, though always dim-witted, might have been on to something talking about the hazards of coming back without a soul. When he didn’t think she was looking, he’d stare at her with an expression of pure malice she’d never seen him wear before she shot him. It could be quite unnerving, particularly now that he didn’t seem to require sleep. Before she’d killed him, you could easily have confused Peter with a hibernating animal, so much sleep did he seem to rely upon. But that situation had changed completely. This version didn’t seem to need a minute’s shut-eye.
His conversation now, if you could even call it that, was pretty random. It was like turning the knob on a really old-fashioned radio, such as the one Grandpa still owned. Different frequencies. Different voices. Different subjects, a babble of languages, all slurred, all projected, the way she knew a skilled ventriloquist could project their voice. She’d enjoyed the novelty of it at first, but now she was bored with it and wished he’d shut up.
The school had become a problem. She was still going in, obviously. But they’d taken her to task about Peter’s non-attendance and kept trying to reach their grandpa by phone. They basically wanted to see a doctor’s note confirming what Dawn had told them, which was that her brother had meningitis.
She had thought about killing him again and burying him in the back garden and that way having the problem literally vanish. But she wasn’t confident that he would stay dead. She thought that he might just revive and dig his way out. The magic seemed to be in some ways stubborn and strong and difficult to control.
Then there were the headaches. After bringing Freddy back she had required an extra-strength paracetamol. After bringing her brother back she had needed two.
Dawn did all the shopping now, obviously. And even that was proving to be more difficult since the experiment involving her brother. He’d come back with this disgusting appetite for raw meat. He’d killed and eaten two cats that had strayed into Grandpa’s garden. It was just a good job for both of them that Grandpa’s garden wasn’t overlooked by nosy neighbours.
Some of the spells in the book were really inter
esting and she was discovering more every day. One of her favourites involved copying an odd geometric shape on to a plain sheet of paper. You folded it and put it into an envelope and said the relevant spell aloud. Then you addressed it, and when the person it was addressed to opened it and looked at the shape, they became permanently blind. Dawn had drawn up a list of the people she wanted to target with this very cool bit of sorcery.
Another that had impressed her was a musical spell. You had to have a picture of the person for this one. Dawn knew that in the olden days that would have been a sketched or painted portrait, but she was sure that a photograph would be a more than practical substitute. There was a lullaby printed on one page of the book. Four verses, each of four lines in length, and no chorus. This lullaby reminded Dawn a bit of a nursery rhyme. Anyway, you propped up the picture and stared at the subject and sang the lullaby out loud. And the person pictured died in their sleep that very night.
Dawn wondered whether this spell would work with a group shot. A bride and groom, say. A school hockey team. Would it work with a selfie someone had posted on to their Facebook page? She couldn’t think of a good reason why it wouldn’t, and she could think of several people who probably had that coming. Though dying in your sleep was quite a nice way to go and some of them deserved a far worse fate.
Not all of the spells were anything like as practical as those two. If you wanted someone to lose a hand or a foot you needed to burn a bit of their fingernail or toenail as you recited the relevant words. Dawn didn’t think this terribly realistic. Access would be too much of a challenge. But she also thought the lopping off of limbs generally a bit medieval. To her mind, this was a spell that had dated rather badly.
It was six o’clock in the evening. Dawn had lured Peter down the steps to the cellar and locked him in as he did his treading water thing against the wall opposite the door. He could probably break out. She had a hunch that he had come back a great deal stronger than he’d been before, but he might like it down there in the damp and darkness and having him there increased cat safety in their locality by 100 per cent.