by F. G. Cottam
‘I remember the dreams,’ he said.
‘I know you do.’
He began to cry.
‘Come here,’ she said.
But she went to him. He stood and she picked him up and hugged him tightly to her. He felt frail and the sobs shook him. She felt the salt tears and snot and saliva of his sorrow on the flesh of her neck and shoulder. And she thought him very brave.
‘Oh, Adam. Adam,’ she said.
He sniffed. ‘I know what she wants, Elizabeth. I know what it is Mrs Mallory wants. She doesn’t know I’ve heard her. She only whispers, on the edge of things. But I’ve heard her all right. And I know.’
Elizabeth heard logs collapse in the grate on the other side of the room. She heard the wet thump of something again against the stout oak of the front door. This time the impact was heavier, the door actually rattling in its reinforced frame. The boy felt light and insubstantial in the grip of her arms.
‘What is it Mrs Mallory wants?’
‘She nearly did it before. She wants to try to do it again. This time she is confident she will succeed. Mrs Mallory wants to put a tilt upon the world.’
Chapter Eight
At just after 10 a.m. the following morning the blood wagon from a ski run a few kilometres away recovered the unconscious body of Mark Hunter near the foot of the northern slope he had tumbled and skidded down. He had been very lucky. A rescue helicopter flying a routine training patrol had spotted his jacket and the vivid frozen bloodstain that leaked from his friction-burned shoulder half an hour before he was located and stretchered down by a rescue team. He was suffering from hypothermia and concussion. He awoke in the one-bed casualty unit of a clinic in Stubai to be told that he had dislocated his left knee and smashed his right elbow.
‘Recuperation will take several weeks,’ his doctor said, sitting on the bed. To the concussed Mark Hunter, he looked a kindly, middle-aged man of some professional competence. He had reassuring white hair and wire-framed spectacles. ‘Your back is another matter. That will require skin grafts. I hope your holiday insurance is of the more comprehensive sort.’ The doctor smiled and patted Hunter on his good knee. ‘You probably owe your life to the blow to the head that knocked you unconscious. It enabled a relaxed descent. I am assuming your rope snapped. But you should not have been climbing on that face, in those conditions, alone. In fact, you should not have been there at all. It is suicidal, with the avalanche risk.’ He pushed his slipped glasses back up his nose and left the room.
Hunter checked himself out the same afternoon, as soon as he had thawed sufficiently and his concussion had receded to the point where he could stand without vomiting. There was no time to languish, with the accelerating speed of events. He stilled the clinic’s protests with credit card details and bought a crutch from reception on the spot. Skiing mishaps made them indispensable in such surroundings. And he could not walk without the aid of one. He took a taxi to where he had left his hire car and for a fat tip had the taxi driver help him clear the car of the snow its body had accumulated since he had parked it there. All his stuff, his passport and regular clothes, were in the boot. He looked up at the trail he had taken the previous evening with some regret. He wished ardently that he had torched the evil place on the mountain above before his departure from it. He wished he had burned it to smouldering ruins but had possessed neither the wit nor, in the end, the time to achieve that satisfaction.
Somehow, he drove to the airport at Innsbruck. He bought a single ticket to Edinburgh. The tiny pharmacy at the clinic had provided him with prescription painkillers but he thought the nausea from the concussion would make him throw up if he took them. Anyway, he needed to be alert. There had been clues at Mrs Mallory’s keep but he had not yet pondered on them enough to provide himself with the answers Miss Hall had insisted he would find. Maybe she had been right and he was stupid. The hour he endured waiting for his flight he thought perhaps the most uncomfortable of his entire life. He kept an eye out for the bald man with the dark glasses but did not see him. He was no physical match for anyone in the damaged state he was in. The raw agony of his burned shoulder throbbed through him and he could feel the wound weeping tackily through the bandage that covered it. But mostly he just worried, as he waited for his flight, on Adam’s behalf. The protection his son had been given had gone. His respite had been very brief. Elizabeth Bancroft was a resourceful and compassionate woman. Healing was her profession and he did not think she wanted for courage. But Mrs Mallory was formidable and she was merciless. He thought he might have a chance against her if he knew what it was she wanted. If he knew that, he might be able to locate her and predict her movements.
‘Have you spent a decade thinking your presence at Magdalena an occurrence of mere chance?’ Miss Hall had asked him over their dinner at her house above the lake.
‘It was a blunder,’ he had said.
‘Your arrival there was more than a simple mistake.’
‘It was duty,’ he said. ‘I was there on a mission. I was there because I was ordered to go. I tried to get out of it. The irony is that I went there at all only with the greatest reluctance.’
‘Life is full of ironies,’ said Miss Hall.
He did not know what she had meant then and he did not know now. And he thought his visit to her keep had provided him with more questions about Mrs Mallory than answers. He sat in a modular plastic chair and sipped Evian water from a plastic bottle and watched the bustle of normality around him and heard the indifferent world through the public address and it all seemed an elaborate statement of sardonic mockery. He had seen the grinning thing awaiting Mrs Mallory seated on the plush of her Mercedes under the false twilight of the trees. And he had known it was not human. Magic was real. Evil was manifest. He was twenty yards from the metal detector before reluctantly abandoning the protection of his sheath knife to the depths of an airport litter bin. If he was being watched, he thought he probably looked a sorry sight as he hobbled on his crutch towards the departure gate.
It was not until the early hours of Wednesday morning that Elizabeth was able to coax and reassure Adam Hunter into restful sleep. And she did not wake him in time to get ready for school. She considered her patient was in no state, physically or mentally, to go anywhere. She got a sedative from her medical bag and injected a measured dose of it into him shortly after she awoke herself. He did not flinch at the prick of the needle. He did not feel it. He was exhausted. She calculated that it would be the late afternoon before he stirred, by which time she would be back. She would have to abbreviate her workload for the day. She would have to see about finding a locum too. Adam’s care was the priority. She would find someone to fill in for her at least until his father returned.
When Mrs Anderson arrived, she briefed her on what she termed Adam’s relapse. The carer reacted with concern more than alarm. Elizabeth told her only what she considered she needed to know. There was every likelihood the boy would not rouse himself until her return. But he did not need to rouse himself, if provoked into wakefulness by the intrusion of something malevolent. She told Mrs Anderson only that Adam suffered waking dreams sometimes of being other people. They were a kind of hallucination. They posed no physical danger either to himself or to anyone else.
‘The poor bairn,’ Mrs Anderson said, when she had been up to his room to see him. ‘I’ll make some broth. If he does wake, he needs to eat. He looks half starved.’
Outside the front door there was snow on the gravel. But there was no sign of whatever had thumped against the wood late the previous evening. And there were no tracks except those that Elizabeth left herself on the walk across the carpet of snow to her car. She took with her the Jerusalem Smith document, intending to read it over the break she planned to take for lunch. But her mobile rang on the way to her surgery and when she picked it off the passenger seat to see who the caller was, it was Sergeant Kilbride. She called him back as soon as she had parked outside her building.
‘There has
been a development,’ he said. ‘Your postman called us first thing. He found the door to your cottage ajar and did not think it a morning suited to that quantity of ventilation. After ringing the bell and getting no response, he entered and had a look around. Pig entrails have been left on your kitchen table.’
‘Charming. Did Robert touch anything?’
‘Robert?’
‘My postman.’
‘No. The lad possesses instincts wasted delivering letters. He left the scene intact and called us straight away. There’s a message too, written in pig gore on your kitchen wall.’
‘Are you there now?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says: “Witch. Leave the boy be or you’ll burn.” I’d construe that as a death threat. Mr Galloway will have to be told, Elizabeth. This is a significant escalation.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘Is there any good news?’
‘Actually, there might be,’ Kilbride said. ‘Our SOCOs have just arrived. We think there were two intruders and we think we have traces from the DNA of one of them. They got careless.’
‘Or they were drunk,’ Elizabeth said.
Kilbride was silent on the line. Then he said, ‘Care to put anyone in the frame, Lizzie?’
But she could not think of any likely suspects. ‘Do I need to come over?’
‘I can spare you that. We’ll clean the place up once the photographer has finished and I’ll arrange for a locksmith.’
‘Be sure to send me the bill, Tony.’
‘Och, buy me a beer. I’ll have the keys dropped round to you there this afternoon. I’ll be in touch. And take care.’
The keys were delivered to the surgery by a patrol car at noon. Elizabeth spent her lunch break on a brief visit to her cottage. She did not feel as brave about the break-in as she knew she had sounded to Tony Kilbride. She would have felt better if she had been able to name a suspect. The fact that she could not freed her imagination to make the culprits more formidable than they probably were. She did not think it was Tom Lincoln, despite her mother’s story concerning the fate of poor Max Hector. Tom could be malicious, especially when he’d had a drink. But he did not possess the wit or wherewithal for a concerted campaign like this. He would break a window at most and probably trip over his bootlaces trying to scarper from the scene. The idea that she had enemies was horrible. The thought that they intended her harm was frightening.
The big new mortise lock was incongruous on her old front door but she could live with it, and with the shiny brass Yale lock fitted above it. Inside, her home was immaculate. The only sign that anything had been amiss was the strong smell of disinfectant from the scrubbing of the table and the wall. And when she opened her curtains fully a patch of kitchen wall was subtly paler than the rest of it. It signalled the dimensions of what they had written there. It had been a bold scrawl. They had been lavish with their gore. She put a couple of changes of clothing into a bag. Outside, it was snowing again. The snow earlier had covered the intruders’ tracks by the time the break-in had been discovered. But Tony Kilbride already knew what their footwear looked like. And maybe now he had DNA from one of them as well.
She got back to the Hunter house at just after 5 p.m. Adam awoke at six and she coaxed him into eating a bowl of Mrs Anderson’s excellent broth. His usual jokes about Red Bull and cola were nowhere to be heard. He was very subdued, almost monosyllabic. He had come down in his pyjamas and dressing gown and showed no inclination to get dressed. She propped him on cushions in front of one of Clarkson’s puerile efforts and hoped it would have the desired effect of lifting his spirits and distracting him while she was in the kitchen. He ate most of the bowl of popcorn she made there for him. He smiled at the schoolboy antics on the screen but laughter was absent.
‘Did you dream last night?’
‘Yes. I was aboard a naval vessel in the Aegean Sea. I was in the sick bay and I had blood poisoning and knew I was dying.’
‘You were Rupert Brooke.’
‘Yes. I was. Do you know when my dad is coming home, Elizabeth?’
‘Soon,’ she said. It sounded inadequate and evasive. But she could not be precise and did not wish to raise his hopes in vain.
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I hope it’s soon.’
At a quarter to ten he started to doze and she took him up to his bedroom. He could not hide the look of fear on his face. She gave him something to guarantee his sleep. She was generally against drugging children, reluctant normally to prescribe antibiotics, let alone opiates. But there was nothing normal about this case and, whether he dreamed or he didn’t, he needed the healing balm of deep and uninterrupted sleep.
Fifteen minutes after she had put Adam to bed, the landline on the little table in the sitting room rang. She felt that she had to answer it. She did not think the sound of the ringing would awaken her charge, but the caller might be his father and the call important. She picked up the receiver.
‘This is the Comte de Flurey,’ a male voice said. ‘I wish to speak with Colonel Hunter.’
‘He isn’t here.’
‘To whom am I speaking?’
‘My name is Elizabeth Bancroft.’
‘Bancroft,’ the voice said. ‘Such a fine Scottish name.’
‘Is there a message?’ The Comte’s background was not entirely silent. She could hear music playing softly through the receiver. It was one of her own favourites. It was Mahler and it was the Ninth.
‘Please be so good as to tell the colonel I called.’
‘I will,’ Elizabeth said.
She settled down to read what Josiah Jerusalem Smith had penned in the autumn of 1656. He had dated the document October 17. There is no Kingdom recognised on earth but the Kingdom of Almighty God, he began. Thus were his Cromwellian credentials established right at the outset. Elizabeth sighed and sipped wine from the glass she had poured herself. She would restrict herself to one because there was a patient lying upstairs and he was in her sole care. But she felt that the one glass would be welcome. She did not expect Judge Smith to provide her with prose to raise her spirits or put very much of a smile on her face this evening.
I am compelled to commit a formal account of this case to the written word as warning to any of my honest fellows called upon to fight the vile evil of witchcraft. Such is done in the conviction that even the most expert and complete of witch finders will judge the particulars set down here more than passing strange. But every word written has been weighed in my mind at length and found to be true. Shocking as the particulars no doubt are, they occurred and were witnessed by sober and Godly men. Like all stories worthy of the telling, this one teaches a lesson. We must be brave and vigilant facing the forces of darkness. We must employ the same great cunning used against us by our adversary.
Mere gossip did not inspire my trip last month to Scotland. Nor was prejudice against the Scots generally a spur. The Lord Protector admires the industry of the Scottish. He knows their cities are fair and their commercial instincts honourable and sound. Their country might be the best mapped in the whole of Europe and their engineers are the envy of advanced nations. But the reports reaching Whitehall from an area of the Highlands to the north-east of Perth could not in all good conscience be ignored.
Their source was a Church elder residing near the village of Balloch. He was a man of high literacy and sound learning unlikely to be tempted into exaggeration and lies by the wild rumours of farmers’ wives and village shrews. In the main his reports were bald and unembroidered. But their claims were astonishing and, if they were true, an affront to nature and therefore to God. Life and death is the province of the creator. Man accepts the fate of himself and the creatures of the earth humbly and without complaint. We live, we die and we grieve. We bear the mortal loss of that which we own with equanimity. To do otherwise is arrogant, mischievous and sinful.
It was said that the woman Ruth Campbell brought sick beasts back to health and even dead beasts back to
life. It was claimed she did this for the profit of her husband’s farm and the wealth therein accrued her family. Jealousy might have provoked a neighbour into making such a claim. The land about had been sorely afflicted in recent years with the ailments and diseases that claim livestock. But the observation came from a man of the Church with no tie or connection to the land or the profit or loss to be made from its exploitation. The beasts came back but the stink of death lay about them, he said. The milk was sour and the meat spoiled to the taste. But the animals could still breed. And their offspring were healthy and well. And brought back sheep still grew wool and the resurrected horses and oxen could still strongly pull a plough despite their stench of corruption. Something was lost but something was salvaged in this reversal of nature. And if the story was true it was witchcraft of the worst sort.
The Church man was named Daniel Cawdor. I made appointment with him during correspondence. I undertook the arduous journey to the far north of the Commonwealth with my retinue. When I arrived at Cawdor’s house, he would not entertain me. His grown-up son appeared at the door and said his father was indisposed.
My first instinct upon hearing this was that Cawdor was indeed a crank or gossip, a mischief maker nervous of the consequences now his tale had outgrown its foolish intentions. I had my sergeant draw his sword. My men were formidable, veterans of the recent victorious war. But the boy did not budge.
My father is blinded, he said. He confronted the witch Campbell overcome by indignation at her blasphemous crimes and she obliged him to blind himself by the gouging of his own eyes with his own thumbs. He lies in misery and shame, a tormented encumbrance now to his family.
I dismounted from my horse. The boy was about sixteen. I had my sergeant sheath his steel and spoke to the lad as kindly as my temper would allow.