by F. G. Cottam
‘How is Miss Hall’s demeanour?’
‘Her demeanour? She is very sick, Colonel.’
‘What’s her mood?’
The Comte shrugged. ‘Resigned,’ he said. ‘She knows she has little time.’
Hunter remembered Mrs Mallory’s boast about comforting Rupert Brooke in Berlin, a full eighty or so years before the Magdalena confrontation. Mrs Mallory had looked decades younger than Miss Hall had done. She might well have little time. But the thought of how much time she might already have enjoyed made him shiver in the chill of the car’s interior.
‘Would you like the heater on?’
The Comte was very observant. It was interesting that the cold did not afflict him, despite his being so thin. There was not much flesh on him to insulate his bones. It was getting colder because they were ascending well above the level of the lake into thinner air.
‘Have you been with her for long?’
The Comte smiled. ‘Always.’
‘You were not there at Magdalena.’
‘That was a private encounter, Colonel. Nobody should have been there but the two protagonists. As I understand your comrades learned to their cost.’
‘It’s why I asked about her mood,’ Hunter said. ‘I have seen what these people are like when they are angry.’
The Comte drove for a while in silence. ‘I will offer you two pieces of advice,’ he said. ‘Never make the mistake of thinking of them merely as people. And do not compare Mrs Mallory, in her wrath, with my employer and benefactress. Miss Hall is far more good than bad.’
Hunter nodded. It was a claim he had heard before from the horse’s mouth. He asked no more questions because he sensed that what the Comte had said was a sort of summing-up of their conversation. The people carrier twisted along the steep incline of the road in first gear. The Comte smelled vaguely of some antique cologne. It was very faint, as though he put it on and then showered afterwards to avoid the vulgarity of being scented to excess. Hunter recognised it and knew he would remember the name. It was the women’s perfume Shalimar. There were rings on the third fingers of each of the Comte’s hands. His hands were pale and bony on the wheel and the stones set in the rings glittered blackly. After a few more minutes, they were there.
The house occupied by Miss Hall was tall and narrow and shuttered. It stood in isolation, flanked by ascending pines on the steep slope that rose behind it. The Comte had to get out of the car to open the locked gate between the walls that guarded the house. The walls were high and constructed from old stone but, despite their age, were smooth and sheer. Hunter was no authority on domestic architecture. But as they passed through the large ornamental iron gate, he judged the house to be an eighteenth-century construction. There was that classical coldness about it, that essential formality. There was no garden at the front of the house. There was just a generous rectangle of gravel deep enough to crunch audibly under the wheels of the Mercedes. There was a sundial directly in the centre of the route from the gate to the front door. The Comte got back in when he had closed the gate behind them and steered carefully round this object and parked. He was nimble enough to get out and round the front of the vehicle to open the passenger door before Hunter had quite freed himself from his seatbelt. He was not just nimble, Hunter thought, as the Comte treated him to the death’s head leer of what he supposed was intended to be a smile of welcome. He was preternaturally fast.
The Comte approached the large front door and let them into the house. Beyond the door, a spacious entrance hall led to other rooms on the right. To the left, against the wall, rose a broad flight of wooden stairs behind a carved balustrade. The whole space was lit, somewhat dimly, by a single chandelier. The chandelier was huge. But it depended from a short chain and was remote from where they stood.
‘Wait here,’ the Comte said. Hunter nodded, aware that he had no choice. The Comte took the stairs. Once more his movement was so fleet that his ascent seemed like some cinematic trick, a jump-cut rush rather than a natural progression to whatever awaited on the upper floor. The thin aristocrat had the knack of devouring space. Outside a door, he knocked and waited before he opened it. He went through and then closed the door softly behind him.
Hunter looked around. He was aware of his heart beating in his chest. But the rhythm was steady and his pulse rate deliberate. He was reconciled to being here, resolved to do whatever was necessary to help his ailing son. He was less afraid in truth than he had been before the call purporting to be from Mrs Mallory. Then he had been entirely without a direction to go in, beyond trying to follow a trail allowed to go cold for more than a decade. Now, however sinister the circumstances, he felt that a measure of hope had been extended to him. Looking around, he saw that there were carved reliefs in oak lining the walls. There were tapestries, reaching almost to the high ceiling, above them. The floor was a design of red and white diamonds. He thought the bold pattern on the floor engaged the eye in the dim light in a restless way when he examined it. It created the illusion in his peripheral vision that the figures in the oak reliefs on the walls twitched and shifted slyly. His gaze kept returning directly to the figures depicted there. But whenever he looked at them properly, they were cunning and bestial, clothed in human apparel and entirely still. He had seen them before. He had liked their effect no better then.
The Comte appeared at the top of the stairs and invited him up with a curled forefinger. The door behind him was open. But from the bottom of the staircase, Hunter could see no light beyond it. He climbed the stairs. They were carpeted in some rich, soft stuff that sank luxuriously under the weight of his tread. It was not a pleasant sensation. The pile of the carpeting was so deep it seemed to stick under the soles of his shoes and cling in the manner of something viscous and sticky. Approaching the landing, he heard faint music from the room beyond the Comte. And he knew it. He was almost entirely ignorant of classical music, but Lillian had possessed an ardent love for a number of romantic and choral works. He recognised the Ninth Symphony by Mahler. It was the Berliner Philharmoniker version recorded under the baton of Herbert von Karajan. Lillian had owned the CD. She had played it constantly, laid up in the late stages of her pregnancy in the weeks before Adam’s birth. It was the second time he had been reminded of his dead wife in half an hour. For Lillian had worn Shalimar perfume, also.
‘Enter, Colonel Hunter,’ a voice said. He would not have recognised it. It was not the deep, querulous contralto he remembered, or thought he did. Her voice had not lost its relish for command. But the body had gone from it. And when he entered the room and sensed the discreet withdrawal of the Comte behind him to another part of the house, he was immediately able to see why.
He had expected Miss Hall’s domain of sorcery to be lit by candles, or at least oil lamps, something suitably Gothic and antique. But the large room was illuminated by electric globes that each offered a yellowy seepage of light too feeble to cast shadows. They hung from the ceiling on chains and were evenly spaced. She sat upright on a plumply upholstered leather sofa and looked like some gaunt, living ghost. A velvet skullcap covered her bald head. He could not keep the shock from his face on seeing her. She drew shrunken lips back from her too large teeth and he saw that they had developed a tortoiseshell pattern of decay. She was dying, all right. He would have known it blindfolded. He would have known it from the odour in the room. She clapped her hands together. The impact was harsh, the skin stretched over her palms brittle sounding. He would have bet she had no more than a few days left in her. She cocked her head to the side and laughed.
‘You are no sort of actor, Colonel. But you never were. You could not disguise your revulsion for me a dozen years ago. And that was when I was well, before you took the action that condemned me.’
‘I did not condemn you, Miss Hall. You saved my arm and probably my life and I was properly grateful to you. I killed Mrs Mallory. I regret I pointed my gun at you. But I meant you no harm.’
Her eyes were large in her shrunke
n face and they gleamed. ‘You were a fool then. You are a fool now. Why should I have supposed you would be any different from how you were? Perhaps I am as big a fool as you are.’ Her hands had dropped to her lap. Now she lifted one of them and brushed away something imaginary. She looked up at him again. The glint in her eyes was still present. She was angry, perhaps even furious. Her demeanour did not seem resigned to him. ‘What do you think happened, Colonel, all those years ago in Bolivia? Have you ever allowed your mind to consider that?’
‘We blundered into something we did not understand,’ he said. ‘We had no mechanism for dealing with it. It was beyond our remit and experience. We were motivated by damage limitation and the instinct for survival, when it all went wrong. And when we discovered the mutilation suffered by Major Rodriguez, I am ashamed to say I was driven entirely by the impulse for revenge.’
Miss Hall seemed to consider this. ‘What do you think we were about, at Magdalena?’
‘I don’t know. It was beyond my scope, beyond my comprehension.’
‘Do you believe in magic?’
‘Not really. But that’s not really the point. You do. That’s wholly the point.’
Miss Hall nodded. She coughed. Affliction soughed through her like a stiff breeze through autumn leaves about to fall. ‘Look around you.’
He did. There were more of the sly carvings on the walls that cavorted on the edge of vision. There was a sculpture on a tabletop; an expression of solid geometry featuring spheres that would not stay circular and squares undermined by their own odd angularity. Studying this piece provoked a queasiness that could easily have risen to nausea.
Miss Hall said, ‘Are you really so arrogant as to think that your species has this world to yourselves? Perhaps you are innocent enough to believe, Colonel, that the meek will inherit the earth? I do not believe you are. And I assure you, they will not.’
He thought it was odd that he had not been invited to sit. He did not truthfully want to be anywhere closer to her than he was. But he had assumed he had been summoned to provide some sort of service for her. As it was, he was the naughty schoolboy being carpeted for long-ago acts of stupidity and disobedience. Hunter felt he ought to move matters along. ‘Here’s what I think. You are a powerful hypnotist. Your rival and adversary Mrs Mallory was a powerful hypnotist. You might have thought yourselves witches or black magicians and you might think that still, Miss Hall. But the power of auto-suggestion is what you actually possess.’
‘And your son’s dreams?’
‘Triggered by something programmed in me, I think. I don’t believe I remember everything that happened to Captain Peterson or me in the canvas labyrinth.’
‘How did auto-suggestion heal your arm?’
He shrugged. ‘Positive thinking can be very beneficial.’
‘The dog was rabid and the limb already gangrenous. Either infection would have killed you.’
Hunter smiled. ‘Perhaps you are mistaken,’ he said.
‘No. But you, Sir, are very much mistaken,’ said Miss Hall. She rose frailly to her feet.
He saw how loose on her the clothing she wore had become. It had been cut to accommodate her obesity. It resembled sacking more than items of dress. She had not possessed the optimism or the energy, apparently, to replace it with something literally more fitting. She did something with her hands. She folded them in some complex choreography. It looked like origami without the use of paper. That hard glitter had not left her eyes since his entry into the room.
He was unaware of his feet leaving the floor. The process was too rapid. He was aware of the smack of his skull against the bare stone of the wall and the way his brain juddered and the fact that his nose had begun to bleed with the physical shock. He thought too a tooth might have chipped. He knew that his heels trailed the floor by a couple of feet when he hit the wall. And there was a band of iron around his chest that prevented him filling his lungs.
‘Is this auto-suggestion,’ he heard the sick sorceress say in her brittle, autumnal voice. ‘Do you die at the mercy of illusion?’
His backside and shoulders scraped stone. He was shunted sideways. He felt the breath of the night from a window towards which his body was edging. He managed to turn his head to look at it. The effort was immense. The window was arched and as tall as he was. He shunted further with a scrape of good cloth towards the carved ornamental edging, an inch or so proud of the wall. It rippled under his shoulder blade.
‘I could put you outside. You might survive the drop. It’s about seventy feet. And you are not wearing your parachute now, Colonel.’
He could not breathe in the iron corset encasing his lungs. She knew. Perhaps she wanted to prolong his agony. He felt a fractional space of relief and gasped into it. And his heels juddered and rocked on stone. He was a strung puppet.
‘Look at the arm I healed. Better, look for it.’
The limb was no longer there. His suit coat was pinned at the elbow of his left arm with the neat, tailored habit of amputation.
‘What shall I do with you?’ Miss Hall asked, approaching him.
He knew this was not hypnosis. Hypnosis could not kill you. And the sorceress was intent on his destruction.
She had come up very close to him. Shallow as his breathing was, he could smell the stink of her approaching death. In an effort to avoid the sight of her, he managed to twist his head and look at the wall to his right. The beasts in the carvings mounted there were an audience now, all pretence of innocent stillness gone. They watched the spectacle and did not hide their wolfish grins of appreciation. Miss Hall grinned too. Her voice rattled out of her. ‘Is this still hypnotism, Colonel Hunter? Perhaps this is telekinesis, or some other fashionable phenomenon. Before the conclusion of the Cold War, the Russians experimented with telekinesis. I believe they once moved a domino on a tabletop a distance of two inches. Extraordinary.’
He thought it wiser to say nothing. He had antagonised her enough. Anyway, the iron corset of her spell did not allow him sufficient breath to speak.
‘I could put you somewhere, Colonel,’ she said. ‘I could put you anywhere. I know you have a fondness for the mountains. There is a storm on the Eiger just now. Here all is calm. But up there, in the high Alps, the storm rages. I could put you there, above the second ice field, clinging to scant handholds with the void below you in the shrieking gale. All I have to do is will it. You are prodigiously fit and strong. But even if I returned your arm to you, how long do you think you would last before you lost your grip and plunged the vertical mile in darkness to the meadow at the foot of the face?’
‘A minute,’ Hunter managed to say.
‘Less,’ Miss Hall said. ‘Less than half that. Trust me. I know.’
There was a phantom itch in his missing limb. The press of the stone against his back was suddenly profoundly cold. It caused the muscles in his back to spasm. It was the black chill of the Eiger’s north face. It was the merest hint of what she could accomplish.
‘But I have in mind something much more mundane,’ she said. ‘I think I shall simply put you under the ground beneath the gravel outside. Eight feet down you will discover a dark, dense berth of clay and rocks. It is very inhospitable. For a few moments, you will suffer unendurably. But after a short struggle you will suffocate and die. Then you will discover rest in your grave. The burden of grief you carry for your wife and daughter will be lifted. And your son’s predicament will no longer be of any concern to you.’
There was a knock at the door.
‘Enter.’
Hunter slipped down from the wall and fell to the floor and broke his fall with both hands, made aware by doing so that the missing limb had been restored to him. He was trembling and sweating, his suit was torn and his shirt streaked and stained from his nosebleed. There was a cut to the back of his head. He could feel blood sticky in his hair. The Comte entered wheeling a silver trolley piled with dishes under polished metal domes. To Hunter, the smell of food was impossibly rich. W
hat breath had been allowed him in the last few moments, he knew, had come from up there on the remote reaches of the Eigerwand. The trolley rattled towards the centre of the room. Swallowing blood, with his cheek against the waxed floor of Miss Hall’s dining room, he said, ‘I thought you were more good than bad?’
‘I am, Colonel Hunter. Were I not, I would have killed you at Magdalena.’
Getting to his feet would take a moment. He managed to get to his knees.
‘Let us eat,’ Miss Hall said. ‘I trust you are not a vegetarian?’
‘No.’ He was overwhelmed now by a feeling remembered from then, from Bolivia, the feeling that nothing was mundane or innocuous or really solid in the world. Certainties were built on shifting sand. Malice lurked wherever the light did not burn brightly. It was overwhelming and depressing and it was frightening. Worst of all, this feeling, this suspicion, was defeating. He had not felt it even at Adam’s bedside, listening to the sleeping child speak in forgotten languages. But he had felt it very strongly in the cathedral of black canvas outside Magdalena. And he recognised it again in himself here, in Miss Hall’s grand house above the shores of Lake Geneva.
‘You may wish to clean up. You are a mess. The Comte will show you to a bathroom where you can restore and compose yourself. Then we shall eat. And I shall tell you what it is that you must accomplish if your son is to live and recover.’
Hunter could not yet gain his feet. Strength and balance were returning to him. But it would be another minute. He smelled the rich aroma of the food. He heard the discreet clatter of the Comte laying plates and cutlery in the background.
‘Goodness,’ Miss Hall said. ‘I am forgetting my manners. You have been my guest here for nigh on fifteen minutes. And I have not yet offered you anything to drink.’
On that first full night of his being under her care, Elizabeth let Adam stay up later than his regular bedtime. He had enjoyed two good nights since the phone call in the early hours of Saturday. There had been little debate about returning him to school on the Monday morning. School would seem much more familiar to him than spending the day with a nanny he had never met, regardless of her competence or professional qualifications. His father had been anxious to try to return him to normality as soon as possible. Normality meant routine and that meant school. And Adam wanted to see his schoolfriends. He was buoyant, excited by the prospect, rested, the dark confusion of the dreams already receding from a life where Man United topped the Premiership and he’d just downloaded Girls Aloud’s killer new single on to his iPod.