Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘They would have killed you,’ Duval said. He said it flatly. It was a simple truth.

  Suzanne looked at the ground. She looked up at the sky. ‘Does it always rain here?’

  Duval shrugged. ‘It suits the crops.’

  Suzanne nodded. She tried to smile. In the face of death, in the presence of its immediacy, she could not.

  ‘I must compliment you on your courage, madame. You are resolute. You have laid the curse.’

  ‘Could you not have done it?’

  ‘My father tried. It destroyed him.’

  She gestured to the van. ‘And them?’

  ‘Food for the pigs,’ he said. ‘My crime. My sin to reconcile, not yours. As much as they deserve.’

  So he was reconciled already. ‘Thank you, Pierre Duval,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving my life.’

  He looked at her for a long moment in the dripping rain. ‘It is the least that you deserve.’

  She turned back to the barn. It was a strange building, still. But it was a curiosity now of site and architecture and no longer a threat, she knew, at all.

  ‘Bonne chance!’ Duval said, as she drove away. The spear tip was in a velvet bag on the seat beside her. Delaunay had begged her not to consign it to the boot. It was an easy request to grant. She did not feel inclined to be careless or cavalier with what she had recovered. She had never endured a more difficult ordeal in her life. And then there was the artefact itself. She could feel the sacred nature of the metal radiating off it as plainly as intense cold or vibrant heat.

  It was Suzanne’s belief that the thing that had once been Harry Spalding waxed and waned in its power and grip on life. The suicide in Manhattan in 1929 had been it testing its claim to immortality. By then it had been very strong. And by then, it was no longer really human. It was not the Devil, as Jane Boyte had supposed. But it had bargained with the Devil. It had gained a sort of reckless invulnerability as reward for the desecration enacted in the barn. Then, back in 1917, the black mantle of safety from harm had extended to the rest of the Jericho Crew. It was still working, to some extent, for their leader after the war. But Suzanne thought the effect had weakened by that time. Mick Collins had not really been able to hurt Harry Spalding at the Shelbourne Hotel with his cudgelling brawler’s fists. But by 1919 the barrel of Boland’s revolver had given Spalding pause for thought with the tip of it shoved under his chin.

  Later, in Southport, he had carried out the second blasphemous ceremony. The sacrifice had been greater, the desecration all the worse. And Jane had seen Spalding’s subsequent transformation into something more diabolical than strictly human. His strength had increased. His appearance and even the dimensions of him had shifted and altered.

  But there was no harder or more demanding striker of a bargain than the Devil. Eventually, each and every one of the Jericho Crew had needed to be sacrificed. It was the fate of the Waltrow brothers. It was the fate of the gambler Gubby Tench, who rode Spalding’s demonic luck at the tables until the debt to his old commander was called in. They were all in thrall to Spalding. And Spalding was in thrall to Satan. And when Satan realised Spalding’s sacrilegious offerings no longer held, when he realised Spalding’s pledges were no longer honoured, he would be human again and fallible, and no longer able to cheat a mortal death himself. He was strong, now, though. Wasn’t he? He would be strong until it came to the Devil’s attention that there was nothing left worth having any more in Harry Spalding’s depleted account.

  This was Suzanne’s logic. This was her rationale, arrived at driving a rental car towards Calais through the French rain. And it made her laugh out loud. With the covered relic on the seat beside her, with the blood from the bodies of the men sent to kill her by Martens and Degrue still fresh in her nostrils, she had to laugh. She thought she might cry, otherwise. Her logic was the logic of nightmare. And the nightmare was not over yet.

  When she got back to Northumberland and Delaunay, he wept as she handed over the thing she had recovered. ‘Why is it so important, Monsignor?’

  ‘It was the spear used to kill Christ.’

  She knew that. She knew the story. The Romans had crucified Christ. And as he hung on the cross in the long agony of dying, a Roman soldier took the spear and pierced his side with it, draining the last of the life from him in a brutal act of mercy. But Christians did not believe in mercy killing. The Roman, Longinus, had repented, had converted to Christianity after the death himself. But she could not see that as the significant fact in the story either.

  ‘The spear thrust marked the moment of God’s sacrifice of his son for the sake of man,’ Delaunay said. ‘It is the only thing physical we have of our Redeemer. It pierced His flesh. It was bathed in the blood of Christ.’

  ‘Aren’t there nails somewhere from the crucifixion? Aren’t there supposed to be wood fragments in existence from the true cross?’

  Delaunay smiled. He shook his head. ‘Medieval forgeries,’ he said. ‘They are objects with no provenance, manufactured for the profit of unscrupulous men at the expense of those desperate to believe. But this . . .’ He kissed the metal.

  Whatever endowed the spear with its significance, she had no doubt concerning its power. There were other relics claiming to be the Spear of Longinus. There was one in the museum at Cracow. There was one Hitler had taken to Germany from Austria after the Anschluss. General Patton had been most keen to recover that after the fall of Berlin. But this was the genuine article. The fact of Spalding’s continuing existence and baleful influence was surely proof of that. She remembered the thing of Jane’s she had taken from the strongbox in Southport and left hidden in the guest quarters at the seminary the previous night. She went with Delaunay to retrieve it.

  ‘I need you to bless this, Monsignor.’

  He frowned. ‘I cannot.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘I blessed the boat, Suzanne. To what avail?’

  ‘Just do it, please. Matters are different now. The circumstances have changed. I myself have altered them. Do it with the spear point held in your hand. Do it for Magnus and Martin’s sake.’

  He hesitated. Then he nodded, relenting. And when it was done, Suzanne slept eight hours of wretched, troubled sleep, dreaming of women writhing as they bled to death under the ground.

  Suzanne knew the boat would beach by night. Spalding liked to think himself the sun god, the bright, Jazz Age boulevardier who quoted poetry and possessed an incandescent sophistication and dazzled with the white innocence of his smile. He was dapper and wealthy and well connected and generous. But he was a creature of the night. He was a thing of the Devil. And all his most distinguished work had been done in darkness. The Jericho Crew, which had first given him his name and status in the world, was a nocturnal entity. The crew slouched out from their hides in the earth and killed and maimed after the sun had gone down and before it rose again. It was his preference and his habit. He had done his digging above Rotten Row in the darkness, she was certain. He played by day and worked by night. His days had been in Southport for golf with Tommy Rimmer and the track at Aintree. His nights had been for murder and ritual. Muffled to silence in its shroud of mist, the boat would beach with the sun shining on the other side of the world.

  She stood and waited on the night beach at Birkdale. She had the beach to herself. Off to her right, she could see pricks of light delineating the outline of the pier. She fingered her penny from 1927, still the talisman carried everywhere in her pocket. It seemed a long time since she had first come across her lucky coin. It had come from the pier, her penny. It seemed she had possessed it for eternity. In fact she had owned it only for a couple of days. Out over the hard-packed sand and the distant water, she could see the lights of an oil or gas rig twinkle. The structure was tiny and vague from here, miles out on the brink of a horizon she could only sense and guess at. The lights aboard it would be fierce, bright orbs, gigantic electric lamps. But from here, they were scarcely visible.

  She suffered a
moment, then, when the futility of what she was attempting came close to overwhelming her. The boat would not come. The boat had sunk in the fathomless, indifferent depths of the North Atlantic, its hapless crew of two lost in some shared, hopeless delusion at the moment they perished. And she could not fight Harry Spalding. He was a phantom and a monster and she had not the means to confront and beat him. She had not the power or the knowledge. Her legs buckled and dumped her on the sand. She did not try to get up. The sand was soft here and still warm from the heat of the long summer day. It was a small, radiant comfort through her clothes against her skin. She let it sift through her fingers in tiny, countless grains. They were very fine, the grains of sand. And she could no more fight Harry Spalding than she could guess at their number.

  Suzanne began to cry. She looked up, blinking out at the sea, and the tears blurred and clouded her vision. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. And the cloud was still there. But it was not a cloud. It was a rolling patch of mist. It was tumbling over itself, growing or seeming to, as it neared the shore. Steadily and in eerie silence, it was approaching the land. Suzanne climbed wearily back to her feet. She sniffed. She brushed sand from her fingers. She felt for her lucky penny and clutched the strap of the bag on her shoulder. She looked around, but she sensed that she was entirely, profoundly alone. She began to walk towards where the mist approached. The sand firmed under her feet until it was packed hard in dry rivulets baked by the sun after the going-out of the last tide. The tide was coming in again though, wasn’t it? And the Dark Echo was coming ashore on the flood.

  She heard footsteps then. She heard a rhythmic plucking of feet out of the mud sucking at them. She remembered there was quicksand here. In the past, it had swallowed the wheels of their cars, those fools who sometimes tried to drive to Blackpool over the treacherous illusion of solid ground. She steeled herself for the onslaught of the beast and turned and looked. But it was not Spalding. It was a woman in a fur stole and a cloche hat, struggling through slime and seaweed in a pair of buttoned boots.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘I’m not Jane.’

  The woman came closer. She peered. Her kohled eyes were bloodshot and her face was pale. Her lipstick looked black in the darkness and she was dead. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘You’re Vera Chadwick.’

  ‘And I’ve come to say I’m sorry, Jane. I wish I’d listened to you. If I’d listened to you, we might have saved poor Helen’s life.’

  Suzanne nodded. She had seen Helen lying in the ground. They had known it was the wealthy woman from the jewellery her bones still wore. There had been a bracelet, earrings. Helen had been taller than the other victims, a tall and slender woman. And, as Bernard Hodge had observed, she had not died well.

  Vera Chadwick sighed. In the freshness of the night beach, her breath was the cold odour of the crypt. ‘It was nothing to do with you being a Fenian, of course, Jane. I only said that. Philip’s family were Bootle Catholics. He’d probably have approved.’

  Suzanne said nothing.

  ‘I discouraged you from meeting him because I thought he’d be taken with you. Everyone was, you know. You’re very beautiful, Jane. You always were. It was never fair, really. It wasn’t.’

  ‘Nothing is fair,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Anyway,’ the ghost of Vera Chadwick said, ‘I’m very sorry. I really am so very sorry.’ She took gloves from the pocket of her coat and struggled to pull them on to pale, flapping hands. Then she wandered into the darkness with that sucking noise her feet made and was gone.

  Suzanne turned back to the sea, to the direction from which the boat had been approaching. Tendrils of mist were snaking now around her ankles on the sand. She could make out the bulk of the Dark Echo, at rest and canted slightly to one side on its hull, aground and huge in front of her, wrapped in its cloak of fog.

  A rope ladder hung from the stern when she reached it. She walked from the bow, the length of the hull, unable to believe how weathered and barnacled the boat had become over the course of a single voyage. The wood was scarred and scraped. In places it looked soft and spongy with incipient rot. Patches of her timber smelled waterlogged. She dripped and oozed from a dozen small breaches in her superstructure. Whatever magic had been used to bring her here had taken a terrible toll on the integrity of the vessel. It was as though immense strain had been put on her. She had not travelled willingly. She had been aged and wearied by her perverse trail through a thousand miles of reluctant ocean.

  Suzanne climbed the rungs of the ladder carefully to the deck. There was no one there to greet her. She climbed into the open hatch at the stern, down the steps that led to Magnus Stannard’s master cabin. There was a dim, yellowy sort of illumination below, the light cast by oil or paraffin lamps. There was a smell of paraffin. And she saw that the master cabin door was open. She walked into it. And she saw that the rot afflicting the Dark Echo was not confined to her hull.

  The cabin walls were hung with mildewed pictures. They were photographs. They were framed black and white prints. Many were so rotted that the image they portrayed had been completely spoiled. But others retained some detail as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. They were everywhere on the walls. She thought there must have been close to a hundred of them. She felt compelled to look more closely.

  There was a shot of Spalding sharing a boxing ring with a grinning, hirsute Ernest Hemingway. A sign behind them on the gymnasium wall advertised Caporal cigarettes. There was a shot of Spalding in harsh sunlight holding up a trophy against the backdrop of a brilliant, billowing sail. In black tie and tails, he chatted to a strong-featured woman in a feather boa in front of the wheels of a giant locomotive hewn from ice. Elsewhere he was poised on his toes in a bathing costume, darkly tanned and muscular at the end of a diving board. There was a formal portrait of Gubby Tench, grinning under the ragged rim of hair and bone where the top of his skull had been. His teeth were stained and his eyes were open and he still held in his lap the Very pistol that had ended his life. One photograph showed a headless, limbless female torso puddled in congealing gore on a rubber sheet. A blood-soaked linen towel had been folded neatly beside the corpse. The victim was young and possessed a slender waist and high, pert breasts. The handle of a boning knife protruded from the area just below her sternum. In a landscape shot, three crosses illuminated by the light of burning torches had men in uniforms nailed to them with bayonets, upside down. The bayonets had been hammered to the hilt through their ankles and wrists. The left hand of each man had been hacked off and stuffed in his mouth. Fingers protruded like the scrambling limbs of pale spiders. The expressions on their faces told Suzanne that this work had been done to the men while they were still living.

  She began to back away from this image of obscene atrocity, recoiling instinctively, stumbling slightly. Then she stopped. There was a sort of rustling noise over by the bookcase to her right. She did not look towards it.

  ‘Don’t leave us so soon, Jane,’ a high, harsh voice from over by the bookcase said. And she knew it was the voice of Harry Spalding. He was aboard already.

  Suzanne risked a look across the cabin. Spalding wasn’t there. She heard his laughter, a dry and penetrating chuckle devoid of mirth. It was the recording machine. She saw the waxed cylinder on its spindle, saw the handle that had no right to do so on its own, revolving slowly to crank out the words. She heard Spalding’s disembodied laughter again. It was an awful sound.

  ‘See you soon, Jane. Can’t begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was a pause. ‘I’ve a suite at the Palace Hotel.’

  ‘It isn’t there any more. It was pulled down. It was demolished forty years ago.’

  ‘It’s there, Jane,’ Spalding said. ‘It’s there if you know where to look.’

  He slipped between worlds, voyaged through the past in the periods of the boat’s dereliction. After what she had accomplished, she did not think he
would be doing it any more after tonight.

  She turned towards the door. There was a small brass mirror screwed to the wall to the right of the doorframe. The metal was tarnished and the glass was cracked. But the reflection it showed was rich with glamour and detail.

  In the waxy illumination of a dozen or more large candles, Spalding was fastidious in spectacles and cotton gloves and a buttoned, chalk stripe three-piece suit. His hair had been carefully combed and gleamed almost a tortoiseshell colour, groomed with cream or oil. He was standing at his cabin desk unstrapping the fastenings of a circular box made from rich, embossed leather. Its buckles were silver in the candle flames. He undid the last of them. He lifted the lid and smiled. There was no sound. It had happened, Suzanne was sure. But she knew it wasn’t happening now, to her rear. It wasn’t happening now because behind her, the cabin was entirely silent. But she had no doubt it had happened. What she was seeing had occurred.

  He placed the lid delicately on the desktop and put a hand into the box. It emerged again, gripping a human head by the hair. Suzanne recognised the heavy-featured woman who had chatted to Spalding wearing a feather boa before the frozen locomotive in one of the photographs on the walls. She no longer had need of her feathers. Her hair was auburn and abundant and her neck ended in a ragged absence. Spalding smiled and turned the head slowly by the hair in the grip of his fist. In candlelight, it still wore the creamy pallor of life. Then he closed his eyes and brought the head close and kissed it passionately on the mouth.