The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘That was most curious of all, Captain Hunter. She said that your progeny would commune with the dead. And your progeny would be afflicted with the gift of prophecy.’

  ‘Afflicted with a gift?’

  ‘Her words, Captain,’ Rodriguez said. He smiled. The effort was enormous. ‘Not my clumsy translation, I assure you. I merely repeat the contradictory riddle of the sorceress.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And just a dream,’ Rodriguez said. ‘Just a bad dream I had.’ The smile vanished from his face. ‘I was safe when the current was strong,’ he cried out. ‘I was safe!’ He closed his eyes and the breath left him. A moment later, he died.

  ‘I’m going into Magdalena,’ Hunter said, over the corpse. ‘I’m going to kill the bitch responsible for this abomination.’

  ‘You don’t know she’s there,’ Peterson said.

  ‘Oh, she’s there,’ Hunter said. ‘She’s the hostess, remember? And I’m sure she resides in some comfort.’

  ‘First, we bury our dead comrade,’ Peterson said. ‘We do it properly, with full decorum. It’s the least he deserves.’

  Hunter put a hand on Peterson’s shoulder and squeezed. He felt ashamed. His haste was undignified. ‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘Of course it is. Forgive me. I forgot myself.’

  They buried the Major deep in soft ground above and away from the ravine. Peterson erected a rough cross and they fired a volley over him. They observed a respectful silence and then returned to the camp. There were plentiful rations, now everyone but the two officers was dead. There were, too, plentiful arms and spare ammunition sufficient to defy a besieging army. But there was only one task that Hunter felt required urgent accomplishment. He looked at his watch. But his watch had stopped – he supposed in the black maze of the marquee, in an experience he could now barely credit. He asked Peterson the time. But Peterson’s watch had stopped too. He suspected both instruments had ceased to function at the same moment. No matter. He looked at the sky. He reckoned on four hours before sunset. In some ways, it had already been an industrious day. Before it ended, he intended to give it further, far greater significance. Before setting out, he asked Peterson would he await his return. The Canadian nodded. Until nightfall, he said, maybe a little beyond. And Hunter nodded back. He did not honestly think you could say fairer than that.

  It was after dark when he returned. The camp was struck, everything combustible burned, everything else buried. They marched the distance over two days through dense forest to the departure point in Brazil with barely a word spoken between them. They crossed the border without acknowledgement. There was nothing much to say. Each man had to deal with his own rationale regarding their shared experience. They were greeted at the base in Brazil with indifference. No one there knew about the specifics of their mission and no one seemed to care. This was a blessing where Hunter was concerned, he knew. A large part of him wanted to scream and bellow about the ordeal he had undergone. Despite all the thorough and sometimes brutal training he had endured, he had no context for it. But he remained composed. He avoided Peterson altogether. And he suspected Peterson avoided him.

  He thought sanity might return with the eventual touching down of the Hercules he was aboard at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire a week later. He watched the pattern of green English fields and hedgerows and sought comfort from their familiarity. He watched the shadow of the aircraft undulate over the familiar ground. He saw the silver sparkle of a stream meander gently through sunlit pasture. And none of it brought a shred of consolation.

  He broke down at the debrief with Colonel Baxter. Baxter seemed to interpret this as a delayed show of grief for his dead comrades. Peterson, evidently, had been more composed and cleverer, giving his own account, a few days earlier. Baxter had it on his desk. They had stumbled into a compound run not by a cartel, but by members of a religious cult. Its members had been territorial, hostile and very heavily armed. Their mission had fallen victim to faulty intelligence (that part at least was true, Hunter thought). Their manpower was totally inadequate to the circumstances. The odds had been overwhelming. They would have needed armoured vehicles and at least another two full-strength companies of infantry support to have won the fight. In Washington and London and in Ottawa, the main aim now was to keep the whole matter out of public scrutiny. In a curious way, Baxter said, its failure had cemented the success of the mission. Intelligence was being pooled on cult activity on a global basis, something the Americans had been pushing for since their own embarrassing failure with the Branch Davidian in Texas.

  ‘It’s something they’ve actually been lobbying for since the Jonestown Massacre twenty-odd years ago,’ Baxter said, ‘so they’re pleased about that. And it’s precisely this sort of cooperation involved in covering up mistakes like the one just made in Bolivia that makes the special relationship seem so very special. You’ve been through an ordeal, Captain. But if it’s any consolation to you, it was worth the end result.’

  Irony might have been beyond the British Army. But Hunter discovered it was an organisation capable of tact and compassion. At some level, there was an unspoken appreciation of the trauma he had suffered. He was given a month’s leave. Then he was given a six-month secondment to a training establishment on the North Devon coast only a forty-minute commute by car from where he and Lillian had set up home. Human beings are resilient creatures and Mark Hunter was a particularly resilient example of the breed. He began to recover from what had happened to him. Denial was never a part of his strategy for coping. But gradually, because the events had been so removed from his normality, he began to perceive them almost as experiences that had been undergone by somebody else. This diminished them in his mind. The events themselves became vague and dreamlike. He could recall them only through an effort of will he was either unable, or profoundly unwilling, to indulge. And that pretty much amounted to the same thing.

  He told Lillian of course. He told her in their sitting room, in front of their pine-scented fire, on the evening of the day he returned home to her. He told her everything. She listened in silence, wearing the by now familiar expression he could never read. When he had finished, she stroked his cheek and glanced towards the shelf where he kept his favourite books. ‘Quests to slay monsters are best left to mythology, Mark,’ she said. She hugged his head to her chest and stroked his hair. And she never made mention of the Bolivian incursion again as long as she lived.

  Peterson’s suicide jolted him. He was ambushed by the obituary, glancing through a newspaper in the staff room at the college where he taught. It was five months after the mission. It was late November and a sunset flushing the room through its picture window had turned the pages of newsprint pink in his hands. Hunter rose and closed the blinds to rid the room of its hue. He switched on a reading lamp and sat back down again. Details of Daniel Patrick Peterson’s distinguished military career were necessarily vague. The obituary devoted far more space to his qualities as a painter. He had exhibited and sold as Daniel Patrick and had been a watercolourist of great critical regard and commercial success. Hunter himself had heard of Patrick. But he had never made the connection. One of his paintings was reproduced alongside the obituary. It showed the ice-bound St Lawrence River, filigrees of frost and icicles delicately rendered in the rigging of trapped sailing boats, their canvas sagging, weighted with ice. Even on newsprint, the quality of the brushwork was obvious. But Peterson had been a man habitually modest about his accomplishments. Hunter had come to appreciate that even in the brief time he had known him. He had been thirty-four when he took his own life.

  The morbid detail came to him via military gossip a few weeks after. But it was gossip experience had given him reason to trust. Peterson had hanged himself at home in his study. He had taken the decision so suddenly to end his life that a book still lay open, half read, on his desk. It was Herman Melville’s novella, Billy Budd. He had disobeyed the witch’s command to steer clear of the sea. Of course he had. He would never have obeye
d it. He had not been that sort of man. He had defied his curse and paid with his life for doing so.

  After six months, Hunter was itching to return to action. It came. And it was sometimes chaotic and always bloody and often inconclusive. But it confined itself to a reality with which he was comfortable. It gave him no nightmares. He performed his duty with courage and flair. There came the engagement in which he gained the citation that earned him his Military Cross. He won promotion. And after a year, Lillian fell pregnant. And he felt no hint of trepidation, only unconfined joy at the thought of extending their family, of becoming a father. As Lillian’s term progressed, he felt happier than he thought he had ever done in his entire life.

  Adam was born, healthy and beautiful. Lillian, who had been nervous about motherhood, found that she enjoyed caring for the baby more than she could have imagined she would. She had feared post-natal resentment. A professional woman, someone who set great store by her own independence, she was the classic candidate for it. But her fears were groundless. She loved her infant child, knew that he depended upon her for his health and happiness and was proud of the responsibility of motherhood. And this was just as well. Mark’s service took him away for weeks at a time. Adam, a bright child, like most bright children, needed little sleep. He was demanding of attention and stimulation.

  Mark, jet-lagged after returning from a mission in the Gulf, drove to the Boots branch in the village four miles away and bought the boy a dummy, exasperated by his general restlessness. Adam settled his lips around the plug.

  ‘There,’ Mark said. He sat down and picked up the TV remote. Lillian observed this male duel from the sofa, from under arched eyebrows. Adam stared at his father, his eyes growing large. He sucked, experimentally. He spat the dummy out.

  ‘He isn’t the sort of child who can be fobbed off with a dummy,’ Lillian said, unable to keep the pride out of her voice.

  ‘Then what the bloody hell does he want?’

  ‘Announcements,’ Lillian said. ‘He wants announcements.’

  And announcements he got. He showed no interest in television, however baby-friendly the fare. He liked building blocks and his simple Lego set. But he enjoyed, above all else, being read to. Mark, when he was there, read to Adam for hours, the boy on his lap never tiring, it seemed, of the stream of stories related in his father’s gentle voice. He was almost three when his sister Kate was born and by then had taught himself the alphabet. By the time of his third birthday, he was reading fluently. Mark and Lillian thought little of it. They had no prior experience of children and didn’t think Adam’s accomplishment unusual. It took the reactions of other people to show them that Adam was remarkable.

  He was in the park with his father. It had snowed and there was a hill in the park and they had taken a sled. But they had been there for over an hour and Adam’s nose had turned red and his mittens soggy and Mark wanted to get him home and warm him up before the building of the snowman in their garden. It did not seem to snow in winter like it had when he had been a boy, Mark thought, and you had to take full advantage when it did.

  Adam was at a stage where he read everything out loud. His reading was a redundant skill, to Mark’s mind, because he understood so little of what he read. The pronunciation was eerily perfect. But he did not appreciate the sense of anything without it having to be explained to him at sometimes tedious length. They came upon a park bench. Snow sat on it and lay heaped on its flat arms and the top of its slatted wooden back. Adam pointed a wet, woolly finger at the brass plaque screwed into it. ‘In loving memory of Margaret Agnes Crosby,’ he said, in his piping, toddler tone. ‘Gone but never forgotten in our treasured memories.’

  A passing woman paused sharply. She was middle-aged and grim in tweed with zippered boots and headscarf. She pointed. ‘How old is that child?’

  ‘He’s three.’

  The woman shook her head. Her face soured further. She crossed herself quickly and moved on.

  Adam, who’d had his back to her, was oblivious. ‘What does it mean, Dad? What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that someone died, son. And someone who loved them is very sorry that they did and misses them very much.’

  There was a pause of no more than half a second while Adam’s infant mind absorbed this information and its melancholy implications. Then he began to bawl. And he would not be comforted.

  Mark slung the sled across his back. He unbuttoned his coat and bent and picked Adam up and enveloped his little body in its folds, in his warmth and strength. And he carried his crying son home consumed by guilt. Adam had not possessed the emotional maturity to process such a poignant sentiment so starkly expressed. His young mind had been overwhelmed by pity and grief. He was three, for Christ’s sake. Coping with a bright child was challenging. It got easier as the child got older. But Mark did not ever let himself forget the stricken look on Adam’s face on that bleak winter day and the lesson it taught him about the sensitivity and tact required in his relationship with his son.

  The years after that went by in a happy blur. Once Kate reached the age of three and began to attend nursery five mornings a week, Lillian turned her hand to writing children’s stories. Adam’s insatiable appetite for tales was probably the inspiration. She had discovered a talent in herself for improvising stories. She found that she could develop them. Characterisation came to her as easily as plots. Once she had assembled a manuscript, she used her old publishing contacts to get the stuff in front of people able to make editorial decisions. But her children’s stories were published on merit. And no amount of string-pulling could have manipulated her sales, which were encouraging right from the appearance of the first book.

  Had Mark known how finite things were, how contingent their happiness, how brutally short-lived the lives of his wife and daughter, he would have resigned his commission long before he did. Afterwards he castigated himself for his selfishness. He had deprived his family of his physical presence to pursue career ambitions in the military. But that wasn’t really the case, he later came to realise. He had been as much deprived as they had. He had provided for them, made them financially secure. All jobs involved some sort of sacrifice, and he was probably a better husband and father for the contentment given him by his successful career.

  And then Lillian and Kate had been killed. Their deaths were a tragic accident. Nothing could bring them back, or change what had taken place before their departure. On the whole it had been a very happy life. It was gone now. He could only do his best for the child who was all he had left.

  In Scotland, in the here and now, Mark Hunter stared into the fading embers of the fire and sank into silence. ‘There, Elizabeth,’ he said to the doctor summoned to tend to his troubled son. ‘There. I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told me what happened when you went into Magdalena on the trail of Mrs Mallory.’

  Hunter rubbed his face with his hand. ‘I’m weary,’ he said, ‘sick of the sound of my own voice.’

  ‘You need to tell me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I need to know all of it.’

  It was raining when he walked into Magdalena. A summer storm had gathered in clouds as purple and livid as great bruises in the sky. They had swollen and spread and lightning had whitened them in staccato flashes and the thunder had boomed and the cloud had lowered, and with a chill amid capering gusts of wind, the rain had started to fall. The streets were quiet. The town was a cluster of flat-roofed, adobe dwellings with their shutters drawn, and shops and occasional bars with dripping awnings and blinds pulled down against the downpour. The more prosperous buildings clustered higher and were better appointed than the rest, when he saw them. They were on the eastern slope of the little town. And Mrs Mallory’s cockroach of a limousine glimmered wetly in the lightning flashes at the bottom of a high set of steps outside one of them. He kicked in a headlamp and palmed a shard of the glass that tinkled out of its chrome socket on to the road.

  Her door was not
locked. She was seated between the windows, in a chair against the far wall of a large, stone-flagged room. Light in the room was sullen and spare under the low cloud cover outside. No lamps were lit to brighten it. There was a grand piano, supporting a bronze bust. There were many photographs on the walls. There were vases of flowers, all dried, all atrophied. Mrs Mallory was as slender as Miss Hall had been obese. She was dressed in an ivory satin dress that concealed her body from her throat to her calves and was cut to show her figure. She wore a tailored jacket draped over her shoulders and her face was concealed by the blue gauze veil of a hat. She lifted the veil carefully and took a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of her jacket. She tapped a cigarette against the case and lit it with a Zippo lighter. The Zippo seemed incongruously masculine. This was because everything else about her seemed almost vampishly feminine. Hunter wondered whether the anger Miss Hall had spoken of had by now subsided. She snapped the Zippo shut and slipped it into a pocket. She exhaled smoke through her nose and it hung in a mist in front of her. ‘Come here,’ she said.

  Hunter was most wary of her eyes. He thought auto-suggestion a strong part of their armoury. He thought she would be far less potent in daylight, away from the swagger of her tapestry battle standards, outside her black, cathedral domain. But this was still her territory. She had long nails that had been shaped and lacquered green. Her jaw was firm and her mouth full and sensuous under a gloss of crimson lipstick. He thought that she was probably about thirty-five years of age. Her cigarette was filter-less and the smoke harsh. When he got close, he saw that nicotine had given the fingers holding it, over time, an ebony stain. Perhaps she was older than she looked.

  ‘What do you want, Captain Hunter?’

  ‘I want you to lift your curse.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Why won’t you?’

  ‘I won’t because my curse makes the world, to me, a more interesting place.’