The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  He climbed. The snow was deepening all the time. There was no moonlight through the cloud cover. Nevertheless, he could see quite well along the rising path by using the head torch, without giving himself away. Miss Hall had been adamant that his destination lay empty. But he had been too thoroughly trained to take unnecessary risks. He ascended. His breathing deepened. He climbed the gradient carefully and with deliberation but at pace. He wanted to get where he was going. He was still stiff from the bruises inflicted during the first, unpromising part of his encounter with Miss Hall. He did not want to dwell on what might confront him now at the top of the mountain. That was pointless. He just wanted to get there. In a sense, he knew he had never felt more resolute in his life. He loved his son more than anything, certainly far more than he loved his own circumscribed life. But he felt pessimistic too. The training that enabled his stealthy ascent, with his heart never climbing above sixty beats a minute, bore sometimes impressive results. But it had failed him in Magdalena. And he feared it might fail him again ranged against the same dark and powerful protagonist now.

  The summit of the climb was a sharp ridge, high and ragged and exposed. He was ascending on the southern slope that rose to it. On the other side, to its north, it descended in a vaunting rampart of ice for thousands of featureless metres, Miss Hall had told him. That too was a slope, technically. But it fell in a gradient so steep that local guides referred to it as a wall. His destination was on this side of the mountain, a building constructed on a small plateau, set against the hewn rock that provided its shelter, about four hundred feet beneath the knife-edge of the summit ridge.

  There was a narrowing of the trail as shoulders of ice-covered granite loomed to either side of him. Beyond this gully, he knew, was a field of crevasses. It was these that made the place to which he ascended so inaccessible. It was these that kept Mrs Mallory’s keep from the curiosity of climbers and mountain guides.

  ‘You need not fear the crevasses,’ Miss Hall had told him.

  ‘Are they deep?’

  ‘Deep? They are as near to bottomless as the Alps can boast.’

  ‘It goes against nature. Not to fear them, I mean.’

  She had laughed at that. It was a sandpapery, unpleasant sound. She was defiant, dying. ‘I have had nature bow to my will many times, Colonel. Perhaps tomorrow I will do it for the last time. But you will not die in the depths of a crevasse.’

  Skiing had been a joy to him, with his family, in his life. But he had known tragedy climbing in the mountains. Once in Norway early in his military career, in training, they had lost a brave American to a crevasse. They had been travelling in haste because the weather had been closing in. They had not secured sufficient lines and were testing the snow with their axes in a thickening blizzard. He had survived the drop and become wedged a long way down. They had not had the length of rope to recover him. He had been stoical, resigned in the end. But he had been the father of two young children and only twenty-eight years old. And the necessity of leaving him, the last of his words rising faintly in a brave farewell from the abyss, had stayed with his English comrade in arms.

  Hunter thought that he could see the building, now. He had been travelling for well over an hour above the tree line. The light distorted with the shifting weight of cloud, and the thickening snow on the rising ground seemed to shift with it. The wind had risen from the occasional howl through the conifers below to a withering, banshee shriek up here. He had felt he was being trailed, or stalked, for the past twenty minutes at least. Wading through the high drifts he felt the lumbering self-consciousness of someone being watched. And the hairs on his arms and the backs of his hands under his gloves had a razored tenderness, a raw itch of exposure caused by more than just the deepening chill of increasing altitude.

  He tensed. He thought he heard the sough through wet drifts of something large approaching him. And then he made sense of the scale and thunderous weight of the sound and knew what it was. Wet snow in a serac at the top of the ridge towards which he climbed had been wrenched off by its own unstable weight and pulled away. He was hearing the mournful rumble of an avalanche away on the mountain’s north face. It must be of monstrous size, he thought, a colossal fall of ice and snow for me to hear it from here. But the wind was blowing from the north. And the sound was a signal of how close he was to approaching the ridge and the summit.

  He could see his destination clearly now. And there was nothing charming or Tyrolean about it. It was a tall, rectangular building constructed of stained grey concrete. Its windows were as narrow as the gun-slits of a bunker. There was a massive steel door painted with bitumen or some other stuff to seal the metal from rust. Securing the door were two huge padlocks hanging from great, riveted hasps. The place was totally dark and still. It looked impregnable. It also looked to Mark Hunter like the most forlorn dwelling he had ever seen. Peering up at the gaunt edifice before him, he thought that no creature harbouring a soul could live free of despair in such a bleak and forbidding place.

  He reached into his jacket pocket for the keys to the padlocks handed him by the Comte in the moments before his departure from the house above Lake Geneva ready for the drive back to his hotel. They had seemed suitably impressive on their iron ring, large items fashioned from brass pitted by time. But he had hefted them thinking them merely props. Miss Hall’s fading magic would open the door for him. Mrs Mallory had not willingly surrendered keys to her mountain domain. He would insert a key into a padlock and the frozen mechanism would spring compliantly under Miss Hall’s fading spell. Even dying, she was tenacious, determined. Looking at the keep now brooding blackly over him, Hunter thought he knew the source of her determination. She really was more good than bad. And she was his ally in this enterprise. But her magic was a feeble attribute in the face of that possessed by their adversary. He turned the keys. He put them back into his jacket pocket. He unfastened and dropped the sprung padlocks on to the snow. He felt the bone hilt of the impressive weapon on his hip, in which he had, at that moment, not an ounce of faith. He pushed at the door, which opened of course on darkness.

  It was fully dark when Elizabeth completed the drive from her evening surgery to her cottage. She had already called Mrs Anderson, the childcare professional engaged by Mark Hunter, to ask whether she would do an hour’s overtime to enable the detour. Mrs Anderson seemed amenable enough. She was an accommodating woman, she was being well paid and she had described Adam as a delightful boy. Another hour would not be any great stretch. Her headlamps illuminated the front of the cottage in a bright sweep as Elizabeth turned off the road to park. And so she knew something else had been done to violate her home before she left the safe confines of her car.

  Her mobile phone was equipped with a tiny torch light and she used this to examine the recent handiwork. The skull of a goat had been hung on a flathead nail driven into the wood above the knocker. It depended from one eye socket. It sat at the centre of a crudely fashioned pentagram. Pig’s blood had not been used on this occasion. The five-sided star was described in silver paint from an aerosol spray. Whoever had done it had done it in relative haste, shy about being seen. Elizabeth walked the perimeter of her home. It had not been breached. No windows were smashed. No one had broken in. But that would be next. That desecration would certainly come.

  She did not enter her cottage. She decided that the clothes she wore would do another day. She could wash her underwear in the sink in the bathroom adjoining the spare room at the Hunter house. It would dry overnight on the radiator under her window. She scrolled through the numbers stored in her mobile until she came to that of Sergeant Kilbride. He served with a local unit of the Perthshire police force. She had a good relationship with Superintendent Galloway, at regional headquarters. But this was not a job for the brass. It was a job for a tough and resourceful local copper and Kilbride was all of that.

  He answered straight away.

  ‘Tony? Elizabeth Bancroft. I need a favour.’

  ‘Dr
Lizzie! How lovely it is to hear from you.’

  Dr Lizzie. He always called her that. ‘You won’t think it lovely to hear from me when I tell you the problem I’ve got,’ she said. ‘You’ll think me an imposition and a pain.’

  Perhaps she betrayed some of her shock or distress in her tone. It was a few seconds before Kilbride answered her. ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘So fire away.’

  She got to the Hunter house just before seven. Kilbride had promised to go and examine the mischief done to her cottage as soon as their phone conversation was concluded. But by then he knew that she had a commitment of care to Adam. And he did not anyway see the need for her to endure the ordeal of awaiting his arrival in the darkness on her own. She had been unnerved enough. She also got the impression that he was not wholly convinced that the mischief maker had gone. He did not say so, but she knew from her own experience of crime that the perpetrators of this sort of offence sometimes stuck around to watch their victim’s reaction. That was part of the fun for them. She was happy to leave the scene. And of course, she left the scene intact.

  The landline rang at eight o’clock and Elizabeth answered it. Adam was doing his homework at his father’s desk in the sitting room. He did not even raise his head at the sound of the phone, evidently thinking it an adult’s job to pick it up. Elizabeth was swiftly reminded by that of how isolated the boy was here. He had no neighbouring kids to mix with – no network of friends, evidently, to call or email and gossip among. It was a shame for him. It was not ideal either for his recovery.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dr Bancroft?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is Emma Davies, from the school. I teach Adam Hunter English.’

  The school had been told about Mark Hunter’s absence from home. They had been given a sketchy account of the reason for Adam’s recent absence from class. Elizabeth herself had provided that.

  ‘I’m sorry to call so late.’

  ‘That’s absolutely fine. What can I do for you?’

  ‘It might be more a case of what I can do for you, doctor. Adam’s class had to recite verse today learned as last night’s homework assignment.’

  ‘I see.’ Except that Elizabeth knew bloody well Adam had not completed any homework assignment. Jeremy Clarkson had seen to that.

  ‘Adam recited a poem comprising a hundred and forty-one lines. I counted them myself this afternoon. This was a prodigious feat of memory for a boy of his age and, of itself, would have been unusual.’

  Elizabeth’s breath felt shallow. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Even more unusual was the diction.’

  ‘Well. He is from the Home Counties of England and well spoken. His father, until he retired, was a colonel in the British Army.’

  ‘The poem was by Rupert Brooke. Adam recited it in a tone a full octave lower than his regular speaking voice. Then there was his pronunciation. For want of a more accurate word, it sounded Edwardian.’

  Elizabeth closed her eyes. She did not think there was a better word. She thought Emma Davies very astute. She thought Miss Hall and her grasp on matters must be weakening. ‘How did the rest of the class react?’

  ‘After a dozen lines, most of them zoned out. We’ve one very bright girl who stuck with the sense of it all the way through. The poem’s a dense affair, thematically, for a ten-year-old. I think she thought it impersonation.’

  ‘But you did not.’

  ‘No,’ Emma Davies said. ‘To me it did not seem like impersonation at all. It was very unnerving, you see. To me, for the duration of the recitation, it seemed more like possession.’

  Elizabeth still had her eyes closed. Now she opened them and looked across to where Adam sat. He was poring intently over his homework books, oblivious.

  ‘I know that the boy has been troubled in some way. I neither like nor peddle in gossip. I only mention it because I think you ought to know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said. She replaced the receiver.

  Later, after Adam had gone to bed, Sergeant Kilbride called and shared more with her about his conclusions regarding her violated home than she knew an officer of the law generally would do with a crime victim. After he had left, she built up the fire and opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and pondered on the absence from the house of its owner. Mark Hunter had been away for only one full night. This was to be the second. It seemed like more. Adam had been free of the nightmares for three nights. Again, it seemed like more, if only because his recovery had been so abrupt and had seemed so complete. But the poetry episode was a concern. She could not see where it fitted into the pattern of things. It seemed ominous, though. It was indicative of how fragile this respite from the nightmares was, how uncertain the prospects of his full recovery. She wondered at her own fitness to help him. Embroiled in magic from two sides, she was beginning to fear its dark contamination. She would be helplessly overwhelmed by something she did not remotely comprehend. And where would that leave the boy?

  She went over to his desk and switched on Mark Hunter’s computer and accessed her email account. She had two that were unread. One was from the British Medical Association, to say that they had been asked to confirm her identity and credentials and contact details by someone working at the British Library that morning. They had done so. The second was from the British Library and had been sent that afternoon. It was a cover note with a long document attachment. The cover note politely explained that she had not been sent a copy of Jerusalem Smith’s original transcript. Only a practised scholar would have the skills to decipher that. Instead they had sent her a version faithfully reproduced in modern spelling and idiom by a Professor Edwards of Trinity College in 1927. She did not open the document itself. She had neither the energy nor the inclination to begin to read it just then. She hadn’t the heart to face what she might discover there. This was because Edwards had been neither a professor of history nor law. His specialism, it was explained in the cover note, had been the occult.

  Kilbride had said the unpleasantness at her cottage was not the work of a single individual. They could rule out the theory of the lone crank straight away. Tracks had been left on the turf around the cottage by two sets of boots. They were different sizes but, interestingly, shared an identical tread.

  ‘Do you know the significance of the shared boot type, Dr Bancroft?’ He had dropped his Dr Lizzie jocularity. Clearly, he thought her harassment serious.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s characteristic of paramilitry organisations. You know the kind of people. I’m talking about the more extreme animal liberationists and radical environmental groups.’

  Elizabeth laughed. ‘I’ve never so much as torn the wings off a fly, Tony. I recycle all my rubbish. I don’t work in the nuclear power industry. I don’t think I even have a patient who does.’

  ‘We need to meet again and have a proper talk about this,’ he had said.

  Elizabeth heard a thump and looked to see if logs had fallen in the fire. But the noise had come from upstairs. There was silence, the silence followed by laughter, keening, high and far too knowing for Adam’s waking innocence. It had begun again. It could mean only one thing. More precisely, there was one thing of significance it definitely meant. Miss Hall was dead. The protection her emissary had promised on behalf of his mistress had gone. The promise had been rashly made by its ailing guarantor, Elizabeth felt, getting to her feet. But perhaps Miss Hall had been desperate. The darkness of events seemed a deepening maw to her as she gathered her courage and ascended the stairs to do what she could for her tormented charge.

  Chapter Seven

  The door opened on to a vestibule, cold and narrow and high. From somewhere, there came the sound of a dripping tap or snow melt. Hunter did not think it could be the latter. It was as cold in Mrs Mallory’s mountain keep as the grave. And the snow was not melting this high on the mountain. He switched on his head torch. The walls within were the same rough concrete as without. Here and there the co
ncrete was crumbling and rust stained and pocked. This place would stand for another thousand years, he thought. And that had been, he was sure, the intention when it was originally built. But it was corroding. There was seepage and damp and the quiet rust of reinforcing bars no longer invulnerable to the wet of summer thaws. How long had her keep occupied this solitary spot? Hunter’s guess was better than seventy years. He was no great student of architecture. But the Imperial eagle carved in deep relief in the lintel above the door had been too stubborn a clue to ignore.

  At some point, he would have to seek and find the route to the cellar. Miss Hall had been most emphatic about that. But he would not venture there yet. He would gain his bearings and his nerve before subjecting himself to that necessary ordeal. He would explore the ground and upper floors. Glancing around, he was tempted to look for light. There were wall sconces here, pitch-tipped torches thrust into them and scorch marks behind on the dank concrete as proof of their fierce capacity to burn. He thought that they might burn still. The pitch was thickly daubed on them, viscous in the cold. He could ignite them with the waterproof matches he had bought along with the rest of his equipment at Innsbruck. But he was cautious about providing any extravagance of light. The feeling of being stalked had not left Mark Hunter. He needed to see. He did not wish to advertise himself. He remembered the gnawed wrists of Major Rodriguez very vividly. He remembered the cold, grey-eyed beauty of Mrs Mallory and her chiselled bones, and the velvet urging of her voice as she compelled him irresistibly to approach her and greet her with a kiss.

  He pushed at the door to a room off to the left of the vestibule and it opened with a whoosh. It was bronzed and engraved and must have weighed upwards of half a ton, he thought. But it rested on balanced hinges and they were smoothly lubricated. The room was vast and less of a room, really, than a shrine. Its contents were of a piece with the Imperial eagle above the entrance. Blood banners topped with gilt swastikas were heaped, leaning in a corner. Their fabric was dusty with time. But their colours were richly embroidered, deeply redolent of the hatred and pomp of the marches in which they had been paraded.