Echoes of Darkness

by SIMS, MAYNARD

  Anna mounted her horse. "Something you'll never ever forget. Come on." She set off at a slow walk, waiting for Heather to catch her up, then urged her horse into a trot and led the way down the slope.

  It was a short drive from Barts to Camden Passage in Islington. He had not been here for years but it had changed little in that time. Passage was an accurate description. A narrow street bordered by antique shops of every variety, their windows stuffed with furniture, china, brass and copper. A jeweller's displaying pieces by famous designers of the twenties and thirties, a small shop specialising in antique playing cards. Further along was a market square, not more than fifty-foot square, but today there were no stalls, just a man selling second-hand books from several cardboard boxes.

  The first two antique shops he tried proved fruitless, though he had been hopeful about them both. Each of them had windows containing a heavy predominance of Oriental artefacts; the second even had a suit of samurai armour similar to the one in Akira's room. But neither of the dealers could remember anyone fitting Foxworth's description, and neither of them claimed to have bought any jade for months.

  David was about to give up and go back to the car when he glanced up at one of the buildings and saw a sign. Faded, with peeling gold lettering on a burgundy background. `Oriental Art and Antiques. 1st floor.'

  He found a doorway at the side of the building that gave onto a gloomy flight of bare wooden stairs. There was a glass fronted door at the top of the stairs; no sign of a bell or knocker. He pushed the door and it opened with a creak. A bell sounded somewhere further back in the shop, if shop it could be called. David's first impression was that he had stumbled into somebody's cluttered attic. There was not a flat surface anywhere to be seen. The place was piled high with old furniture and bric-a-brac, and most of it looked to him like total rubbish.

  He turned to leave when a voice called out from behind the piles of junk. "Yes? Can I help you?"

  The young woman who emerged from the clutter at the back was the complete antithesis of the shop's interior. In her early thirties, dressed in a smart blue serge suit over a crisp white blouse, secured at the throat by a cameo brooch, her spun gold hair tied back in a sleek ponytail. She introduced herself as Sarah Frankland.

  David explained what he wanted, being careful not to mention the theft of the jade. He needed co-operation not confrontation.

  Sarah Frankland smiled at him. "Of course I remember your friend," she said. "Follow me. I'm rather excited about the jade. It's something I've been after for years. Until the other day I suspected that such a carving didn't actually exist, though I've heard rumours of people seeing it, but you know how unreliable rumours are."

  She led him into a small, tidy office at the back of the shop. David's eyes registered surprise at the neatness here compared to the rest of the place.

  "I know what you're thinking," she said, crouching down to open a small safe set in the wall. "It's a bit of a nightmare out there. But I only took over the running of the place a month ago, when my father retired, and it's taking far longer than I expected to get the place tidied up. Mind you, it's better than it was."

  David glanced back at the shambles in the shop and could not imagine it being worse.

  Sarah opened the safe door and took out a felt-wrapped bundle that she set carefully down on the desk. She pulled back the layers of felt and there was almost a look of triumph on her face as the figure was revealed.

  The first thing that surprised David about the piece was that it was not the apple-green colour he was expecting. The figure had been furnished from a piece of jade, black as jet, polished to a gleaming, waxy lustre. "I thought jade was green." "Green, yellow, black, white, orange, lilac," Sarah said with a smile. "Jade comes in so many colours. Though it's rare to find a piece of black jade this size without any veining and marbling."

  The carving stood about five inches high and was eight inches from end to end. It was beautifully carved and represented a creature unlike anything David had seen before. A cross between a lizard and a rat was about the best way he could describe it, though it truly resembled neither. The jade had been carved to suggest a dense covering of fur on the creature, but there was no tail, the body instead tapering down to a point, the shape echoed by the head.

  There were more disturbing aspects to the carving. The eyes looked piercing and sinister, not the round eyes of an animal, but eyes that looked unsettlingly human. The mouth was open to reveal a row of vicious looking, razor sharp teeth. But the most unpleasant feature of all were the creature's feet. Not taloned or clawed, but beautifully wrought effigies of human hands.

  "What on earth is it?" David asked, dropping to his haunches to get a better view of the beast.

  "It's a Tashkai. The first one I've seen. Oh, I've seen drawings of course, that's how I recognised it. But the pictures don't reveal its true grotesqueness. Would you like a cup of tea? I've just boiled the kettle."

  David nodded and continued to peer at the creature, turning it around on the desk and studying it from every angle.

  "It's repulsive. I can't imagine anyone wanting to own such a piece."

  Sarah poured water into polystyrene cups. "You'd be surprised. But you're right, it is quite horrible. And their reputation far outstrips their physical nastiness. Do you know much about Japanese legends?"

  "Nothing at all."

  Sarah put the cups down on the table and pulled up a chair, gesturing for David to sit in the seat opposite. "I wish sometimes I could say the same, but I was told them by my father, the way other parents tell their children fairy tales. Dad is fanatical about the Orient, especially Japan. Probably because he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1944. Although that's about the only time he ever spent away from England." She paused and stretched out in the chair, steepled her fingers under her chin and closed her eyes.

  "The Tashkai," she said, reaching back in her memory to retrieve the story. "Tashkai was a small village on the island of Shikoku. A thousand or more years ago the villagers discovered a way to enhance their knowledge and talents by drawing out what they needed from the travellers and strangers who came through their village. Don't ask me how; that part is lost in the vagaries of time."

  "What do you mean by `drawing out'?" David asked, entranced by Sarah's honey-rich voice.

  "They were parasitic. Say you had a talent or gift, an expert potter perhaps. The Tashkai could rob you of that talent for them to use themselves; deprive you of it so that next time you sat down at the wheel with a lump of clay, it would remain just that, a lump of clay. You would be incapable of fashioning anything from it. Your hands would not work the way they had before you encountered the Tashkai. You would have lost your talent, or rather had it stolen from you."

  "And one of the villagers would become an expert potter."

  "You catch on fast. Now suppose your talent was for making money..."

  "I get the picture. It would have made the villagers incredibly powerful." David swilled the tea around his mouth. It tasted like ditch-water.

  "Well," Sarah continued, warming to her subject. "This went on for many years, and eventually word spread and people began avoiding the village, forcing the villagers to travel the length and breadth of the island in search of new subjects. By this time of course, or so legend has it, Buddha had had enough of them and decided to punish the entire village. In essence he turned all the villagers into creatures like the one you see before you. Creatures so repugnant that innocent people would naturally avoid them and thus remain safe. As a safety precaution he also flooded the entire village and turned it into a huge lake. So not only were the villagers turned into these loathsome creatures, the creatures themselves were amphibian, having to spend at least part of each day in the water."

  "It's an unpleasant story," David said.

  "It gets worse. The head of the village somehow managed to mate with a beautiful woman, again, don't ask me how. The offspring was part human, part Tashkai, able to spend some of the t
ime in human form, but then at others having to revert to type. A real mixture. But that union made the Tashkai more dangerous than before, because in human form they exerted a devastating attraction to people. People were drawn in by their charisma and their beauty."

  "Moths to a flame," David said, almost to himself. He remembered the drawing Akira had done for him.

  "Pardon? Oh, yes, I see."

  "So what became of them? Did Buddha wipe them out?"

  "Oh no, they're still around to this day. That's if you believe the legends. Seems that Buddha lost interest in them eventually and let them exist." Sarah finished her tea. "Convenient eh? But then if myths and legends followed a logical progression there probably wouldn't be that many to tell, and they wouldn't be half so interesting. Mind you, my version is pretty sketchy and I can't swear to its accuracy. My father is the one you should talk to if you're interested. He claims he actually saw one of these things while he was in the prison camp. One of the guards, or so he says. But then prisoners often hallucinated. Precious little food and water, and the heat, combined with a tyrannical regime must have made life hell. I'm not surprised that dad, like so many others, went a little crazy."

  David got to his feet. "One question."

  "Fire away."

  "I thought jade carvings came from China. This is a Japanese legend."

  "Yes, but the jade is Chinese. Probably fourteenth century. It was the Tashkai's mission in life to spread their poison far and wide. The legend obviously reached China and, according to my father, a Russian he met at a World War II reunion had also heard of the Tashkai. So it wasn't just localised to Japan."

  "Well, thank you very much for your time. It's been fascinating. What did you intend to do with the carving?"

  "It's my father’s birthday soon. I won't be stuck for a present this year." She smiled at David warmly and walked him to the door. "That's the other thing about the Tashkai," she said suddenly. "I knew there was something even more horrible. When they robbed their victims they would give them what became known as the Tashkai Kiss. They would bite the poor devils' tongues out, so they could never again speak of what had taken place. Used to do the same to their servants as well to ensure their secret would never be revealed. Pretty gross eh?"

  David could feel the blood draining from his face. An image from last night came back to him in awful clarity. The stump of flesh waggling at the back of Akira's throat as the old man laughed.

  "Are you all right?" Sarah said. "You've gone very pale."

  "I'm fine," he said shakily and went down the stairs. Once out in the street he started to run back to where he had left the car.

  Anna led the way across the sweeping grounds of the estate. In the distance Heather could see a dense woodland area, heavily shadowed as the lush, verdant canopy of the trees robbed it of sunlight. The wood was obviously where they were heading. She said as much to Anna, but the young woman flashed an enigmatic smile and did not answer.

  Finally they reached the wood and Anna dismounted. "We'd better go the rest of the way by foot," she said. "The horses don't seem to care for this place."

  Heather had guessed as much. The closer they drew to the trees the more agitated her mount became, tossing its head from side to side, nearly snapping the reins from her hands. Closer still and the horse began pawing at the ground with its hoof and tried to turn its body away from the approaching woodland.

  Heather reined in the horse and climbed off. The women tied their mounts to a sapling and entered the shadows on a path trampled through some bracken.

  "We're really quite close to the Hall here," Anna said as she tramped down more bracken to make the going easier. "The orchard joins the wood on the other side."

  "I see," Heather said, distractedly. She was not really listening to what Anna was saying. Her attention was more attuned to the complete silence of the wood. She could hear no bird-song, no rustle and click of the undergrowth as small creatures moved through it. It was as though the wood was devoid of life.

  Prickly gorse scratched at the leather of her riding boots as she followed Anna's path, making her thankful she was wearing boots and not shoes, but the rest of her clothes were inadequate. The lack of sunlight made the wood cold, and chilly breezes seemed to spring from nowhere, cutting through the thin cotton of her blouse. She shivered.

  She stared up at the canopy of trees, her eyes searching for a squirrel or perhaps a magpie, something to tell her they were not completely alone here. The sun was blinking though the leaves, creating tiny starbursts of light, and she had to adjust her eyes to compensate. Finally she saw what she had been searching for. High above her, in the ‘v’ formed by two crossing branches of an elm, was a grey squirrel. It sat perfectly still and appeared to be watching her. Above the squirrel were birds, two song thrush, like the squirrel, totally motionless, as if suspended in time, never to sing or fly again. For an instant she wanted to hurl a stone or a broken branch at them, to shake them from their immobility, but the moment passed.

  With a shrug she looked back to the path. Anna was nowhere to be seen.

  By the time David pulled onto the motorway the traffic had eased slightly, allowing him to push his foot down on the accelerator and give the car its head. Panic was washing over him in cold waves, making him grip the steering wheel tightly and lean forward in his seat. He was replaying Sarah Frankland's story of the Tashkai over and over in his mind, aware that it was a fantastic tale, a legend, the stuff of nightmares. But equally sure he had stumbled upon a horrible truth.

  He recalled the party of the night before; Anna's exquisite virtuosity on the piano, and the sad, pathetic figure of Margaret Courtney, crashing her ruined hands down on the piano lid. The mute frustration of someone robbed of their talent. Mute frustration. The phrase repeated itself. He had not heard her speak all evening, and she seemed to have trouble eating, taking tiny slivers of food and chewing them endlessly.

  As incredible as he found the situation he was forming the conclusion that the Tashkai, far from being the creations of myth and legend, were in fact real, and were now resident at Desborough Hall. And he had left Heather there with them.

  He bore down harder on the accelerator, watching the miles slip past through the tears that coursed down his cheeks.

  "Anna? Anna?" Heather pushed her way through a dense growth of rhododendrons; she had completely lost the path now. It was at least ten minutes since she had seen Anna Otani and she was beginning to feel panicky. Although she tried to rationalise, to tell herself that Desborough Hall was just on the other side of the wood, she could not quell the growing feeling of unease. It was like that incident in the bathroom shortly after she first arrived, only this time she knew for certain she was being watched. If only by the impossibly still creatures nesting in the treetops.

  She broke through the foliage and found herself in a clearing. Roughly circular, on the opposite side to where she stood was a small chapel, stone built with an orange tiled roof and a heavy wooden door. The door was partially open, an invitation. Perhaps Anna had slipped inside for a rest and to wait for her.

  There was a sudden noise above her, an awful screeching and the beating of wings. She looked up. It seemed like every bird in the wood had chosen that exact moment to take flight. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them, wheeling in the sky above her head, blotting out the sunlight as effectively as the trees had done earlier.

  When she looked back at the chapel it had changed. So too had her surroundings.

  She was in the Japanese garden of her dreams, walking across a lush green lawn encircled by maples, azaleas and flowering cherries. To her left was a small pool breached by an ornate wooden bridge and fed by a small stream that trickled over rounded stones, creating tranquil water music. Ancient statues stood to her right, covered in moss and lichen, the vegetation softening their hard stone lines.

  Ahead of her, where moments ago had stood the chapel, was now an ornate temple painted a stark vermilion, its roof a blaz
e of colour and sweeping curves.

  She was totally captivated, her earlier misgivings forgotten. Rich perfumes were filling her senses, as if her nose had become a thousand times more sensitive to the aromas that surrounded her. A butterfly rose into the air from its perch on an azalea flower and she could hear its tissue-paper wings beating in flight.

  Another sound reached her ears; a soft, rhythmic chanting, coming from inside the temple. As in her dream she found herself walking forward, drawn towards the almost hypnotic music. The door opened wider and the sound increased and, following it out on the warm afternoon breeze, was the alluring, heady smell of incense.

  The smell was intoxicating in its intensity, and Heather felt her head swimming deliciously. She pushed the door open wider and stepped inside. The marble floor was icy under her feet. She looked down at herself and her mind registered mild surprise that she was now completely naked, though she could not remember taking off her clothes.

  She parted the bead curtain painted with the dragon motif and found herself again at the top of the stone steps.

  "Heather." Her name was whispered, and the whisper echoed from the stone walls. At the bottom of the steps the pool was rippling with life. Something was making a circular wake as it swam round and round, with growing anticipation and rising excitement.

  David pulled up outside the front door of Desborough Hall, got out of the car and slammed the door. He hammered on the front door and, after what seemed an age, it was opened by Akira who stared at David impassively. David pushed him aside and stormed into the house. "Where's Simon?" he said.

  The old man avoided his eyes and pointed to the morning room. David opened the door and stepped into the room. The curtains had been drawn, shading the room from the afternoon sunlight. In a high wing-backed chair Simon sat, a whisky glass in his hand, an empty bottle at his feet. His skin was pale and clammy, and his eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, giving him the look of a corpse.