The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  He thought about the riot police outside the station entrance not half a mile away and the vacuous look behind the blue mascara on the face of the woman with the laddered stockings in the pub. He looked at the monster slouched in the shadows of the room he was in and repeated Adam’s warning out loud to himself, ‘She wants to put a tilt on the world.’

  He wanted her to know he had been here. That was his real purpose in coming. He had told Elizabeth it was just reconnaissance. But that had been a lie. He had been hoping she would be absent so that he could violate her home. He wanted to provoke her into making a mistake, goad her into hasty retaliation. He was sick and tired of her tormenting his son. He wanted her to come for him. Then he would defeat and kill her. Miss Hall had all but out-manoeuvred her at Magdalena. There was a precedent. It could be done.

  He walked back over to the seated creature. It was not a comfortable companion, he didn’t think. For all its apparent lifelessness, it possessed the sly insistence of a threat. In death it was disconcerting. In life he sensed it would have been a force of pure malevolence, only ever a bringer of dread and pain. Had the leer worn on its hungry jaw grown wider since he had entered the library and encountered it? He could have sworn it had. He fought the urge to flee, and studied it. He saw that it was armed. It wore a pistol belt and a leather holster shaped to house a Luger. It wore an SS dagger in a scabbard on the belt. Both weapons must have been hand-fashioned, their scale slightly greater than normal, individually tooled to suit the dimensions of their owner. The beast had evidently been held in high esteem. Hunter took the dagger. He unbuckled the belt and took the scabbard off it, put the belt back on and then slipped the dagger in the scabbard down his boot.

  The taking of trophies was a long-established military custom. It was only ever done of course in victory. There was a fine line always fiercely argued between what were legitimate souvenirs and what could be condemned outright as looting on the field of conflict. Hunter did not trouble himself over the finer points of military ethics in this situation. Neither greed nor profit had prompted the theft. The dagger would go through the grid over a gutter drain as soon as he regained the street. He figured that she would notice its absence straight away. That was the significant thing. Adam said she spoke to this unresponsive confidant all the time. She would not respond well to the insult his petty act of thievery represented. She did not like to be disrespected. That was the point.

  Up this close, the clothed creature stank. Its odour was an unhappy mingling of ancient sweat and feral decay. Hunter glanced at his watch out of habit, but the luminous dial did not tell the time because of course the movement had stopped and the hands were still. It did not matter greatly. Whatever time it was, he thought it was high time he left. The leer had diminished, his training for detail insisted, on the face of the beast. It now wore something closer to a snarl. Was it his heightened imagination? He could not have said. He had a night train to catch, back to the snowbound Highlands of Scotland, back to that foreign field to which he had taken, in the indulgence of his private grief, his precious son in their shared exile.

  The streets surrounding Cleaver Square sounded like a war zone. There were angry cries and screams, the barking of dogs, sirens wailing, the sound of glass shattering and the unmistakeable, staccato crack of small arms fire. When he reached Kennington Tube station, it looked more like a stockade than a place where you accessed Underground trains. Police officers armed with machine pistols stood in a grim-faced cordon at the entrance.

  ‘Nothing in or out of here tonight, mate,’ one of them said to him. ‘I’d scarper if I were you.’

  ‘Is it always like this around here?’

  ‘We have it under control,’ the officer said. Then he grinned to signal his personal contempt for the official line, the lie he was obliged to recite contradicted by the violent chaos around them.

  They seemed short of manpower, unless they were just short of willpower. Hunter walked along Kennington Park Road towards the Oval. He thought he might be able to hail a taxi back to Euston Station if he turned right on to Kennington Road. There were usually plenty going north along that route after dropping fares in Clapham and Wandsworth. When he passed the Cost-cutter branch at the T junction, its windows were smashed and a fire seemed just to be taking hold inside. Looters were fighting on the pavement over bottles of liquor and cases of beer. There were no taxis. There seemed little point in heading for Oval Station because, like Kennington, it was on the Northern Line and that line was closed.

  He stuck to his original plan and walked down Kennington Road. The sound of violence faded after the junction with Black Prince Road. But he was past the Imperial War Museum and on Westminster Bridge Road and able to smell the chill and damp of the approaching river before he was able to hail a black cab.

  ‘Where to, pilgrim?’

  Hunter almost did not get in. Twice in a couple of hours he had been called that now by strangers. Maybe it was a London fashion, an idiomatic craze of the sort that came and went in a month. In the back of the cab he thought about the appellation itself. It was a curious one. Where he was concerned it was ironic. He had not come to Cleaver Square on any kind of pilgrimage. Quite the opposite was true. He had carried out what Mrs Mallory would see as an act of desecration. Not that the wolf creatures were deities.

  They were mortal. The one he had just seen had died of disease or some other natural cause. Perhaps it had just been old age. The one Ruth Campbell consorted with had died very hard. Against odds of six to one, it had killed five veterans of the English Civil War, men who’d done their fighting hand to hand with the cold and bloody iron and steel of pikes and swords. But they had subdued and slaughtered it. They bled and they perished, these creatures, whatever they were. They were not God-like in that they were not supernatural. But Mrs Mallory would still see as desecration his taking of a relic from the body of the beast. It occupied pride of place in the most secret part of her home. She held its memory and remains in high regard.

  ‘Lively in Kennington tonight,’ Hunter said to his cabbie.

  ‘It’s kicked off good and proper in Holland Park too, according to the radio. And there’s aggro in Whitechapel. There’s no pattern to it, but it’s night after night. And it’s killing our trade.’

  The radio was on, Hunter realised. Someone was singing the Kurt Weill lyric to ‘Alabama Song’.

  Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar …

  It sounded like Jim Morrison’s mournful baritone. That would make sense. The Doors had covered it, hadn’t they?

  ‘It’s not been the same since the crisis,’ the cabbie was saying. ‘I mean, a coalition government? What’s that all about? People are being lynched in the streets, hung from lampposts. You can’t have that. You need decisiveness. The country needs leadership.’

  Hunter realised with a vague pang of guilt that the crisis had rather passed him by. He had an army pension, the income from Lillian’s books. In the aftermath of the crisis he’d had his grief to contend with. Anyway, soldiers were able to wash their hands of politics with a clean conscience. He had always willingly exercised that right.

  ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘Scotland. I live there with my family.’

  The cabbie didn’t comment for a moment. If anything, the rain had become heavier since Hunter had left Cleaver Square. He’d been okay in his waterproof jacket and boots. His performance clothing insulated him from the climate as surely as his guaranteed income had from the broader repercussions of the crisis. But urban violence of the sort he’d seen was the stuff of stifling summer nights in the city, not drenched and dark Novembers. The single wiper on the windscreen was batting furiously back and forth against the water streaming down the glass.

  ‘You’re facing a fair old journey home. But I envy you, pilgrim, I honestly do. London’s become a right dump. Half the town’s a no-go area. England’s going to the dogs.’

  Chapter Twelve

  He was back at home j
ust after 5 a.m. Elizabeth was not in the spare room. She was on the sitting-room sofa under a blanket with the fire built up, alternately dozing and listening out for his return. He let himself in and they embraced. Elizabeth felt a strong surge of pure relief. She had grown anxious in the hours since putting Adam to bed. She thought it might have been partly seeing the things cavort on the wooden carving as it burned on the bonfire in her mother’s garden. It might partly have been reading the ghastly account of the details of her ancestor’s death. But mostly she thought it was just concern for Mark, braving the lair of the sorceress tormenting them, braving God knew what retribution her caprice and cruelty could determine as fitting punishment for breaching her privacy should she catch him in her house.

  Hunter poured himself a whisky and Elizabeth made herself some tea. They sat down and she studied him. He looked drained.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Sunday,’ she said.

  He nodded. Of course it was. He had travelled Weekend First down to London. He had travelled the same way back on an almost empty train. He opened his bag and handed Elizabeth his copy of the magazine containing the feature on Lavinia Mallory. She studied the pictures without comment. She got up and fetched the printed addendum to Jerusalem Smith’s grim account of Cromwellian justice meted out to a Scottish witch.

  ‘Jesus,’ Hunter said when he had read it. ‘It’s like dealing with a contagion. No offence to your Campbell ancestry.’

  ‘No offence taken. In my professional opinion, though, you need to go to bed.’

  He knew that was true. The visit to the house in Cleaver Square had enervated him. He felt as emptied by the ordeal as he had when he’d lost a lot of blood in combat, wounded and with the adrenaline of the moment spent. ‘I’ll go as soon as I’ve had a look in at Adam,’ he said. ‘Has he been okay?’

  ‘He’s been a dream. A good dream, that is. My mother introduced him to Meccano. I think you might have an engineer on your hands.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much he couldn’t accomplish. Aren’t you going to turn in?’

  She nodded at the discarded pages of the judge’s account where Hunter had left them on the little table before the fire. ‘I’ll be up as soon as I’ve bid for a sword on eBay,’ she said.

  Despite everything, Hunter laughed. He pulled her to her feet and hugged and then kissed her. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘They gave me a sword when I retired from the regiment.’ He looked thoughtful then.

  ‘You really own a sword?’

  ‘Probably my second most valuable possession,’ he said. ‘After an original Daniel Patrick watercolour someone was kind enough to send me.’

  The magazine Hunter had bought in Edinburgh was also on the table, open at the picture of Mrs Mallory androgynous in men’s evening wear, leaning on her piano and clutching her fistful of rose stems. Except that she wasn’t really androgynous, was she? She was too vampy altogether to be convincing as a boy. Elizabeth cocked her head to look at the image upright. ‘They must have removed the thorns. Otherwise they would have pierced her flesh, so tight is her grip on that bouquet.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have needed to bother,’ Hunter said. ‘I don’t think she bleeds.’

  She cuts, though, Elizabeth thought. If she doesn’t, we haven’t a hope. ‘She’s quite a piece of work, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, she’s that.’

  ‘I mean, she’s extraordinary. She’s so beautiful.’

  ‘She is,’ Hunter said, after a hesitation. The lie would have been absurd in the face of the graphic physical evidence. And in the hesitation, he had resolved never to lie to Elizabeth Bancroft, just as he had never lied to Lillian. And he found himself making this silent promise to himself for precisely the same reason as he had then. He kissed her goodnight, a long and tender kiss, and he went up the stairs to check on Adam and then take to his weary bed.

  Adam woke early. It was not yet light. The lines of that infuriating poem would not stop going around and around in his head. It simpered in his mind. It had begun the day before, just after he had watched that strange piece of wood burn on the bonfire. Mrs Bancroft, who had told him to call her Margaret, had thrown it into the fiercest part of the blaze. She was old. She was so old he did not feel comfortable calling her anything other than what he had. Margaret just wasn’t plausible. You did not call people that ancient by their Christian names. It didn’t seem right. Her name provoked a dilemma. Should he be sent to stay with her he would be confronted by a selection dilemma over what name to use to address her by, which of course he would from time to time be obliged to do.

  She hadn’t seemed old throwing that weird carved board into the bonfire. She had hurled it so that the sparks spat and scattered with the impact. And he had watched it cartwheel and land and settle and take, and the creatures it depicted seem to try to flee as though the subjects of some creepy, ghoulish cartoon chase. But they had not been able to. He knew that before his view of the carving was obscured by the smoke it provoked. And when the smoke cleared there was just ash, red and white and making the air distort with heat ripple when you stared at it for too long.

  At first, after the burning of Mrs Bancroft’s board, he thought about that odd doodle Mr Cawdor had been so angry at him for drawing. He could hardly remember it. He had drawn it in a daydream and Mr Cawdor had confiscated it almost straight away. It had felt as if he hadn’t really had a great deal to do with it, except for Mr Cawdor’s irritation. He remembered its impossible shape after the burning of the board. He saw it as though it hung from a chain and was suspended in three dimensions in a room he knew. Then he knew with dread that it was Mrs Mallory’s library he was in. And he knew from the familiar objects around him that the thing he most feared in the world sat on its throne behind him. But then that vision faded and the queasy geometric object with it. And he was stuck with this poem.

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field …

  And without checking with the encyclopaedic mind of Mrs Davies or clever Alice Cranbourne, he knew that it was verse by the person Mrs Davies termed the English neo-Romantic poet Rupert Brooke. It was very odd, remembering something you were sure you had never learned in the first place. In certain circumstances, it was a knack that could make the whole experience of acquiring knowledge, and particularly of exams, quite painless. The trouble was, Adam did not think it exactly a happy knack. He had the suspicion it was anything but. It was of the same province as the dreams he had finally confessed to having remembered. It was in the same domain as the headless man he had seen walking outside in the snow and kept entirely to himself.

  He had seen the headless man only periodically. And he had not been particularly frightened at the spectacle. It was nothing like so disconcerting as the execution of the tall bearded man he dreamed of sometimes, who would not die. The black-bearded man roared with defiance as the men killing him stabbed and shot him and finally forced his still-living head under the ice they broke on the frozen river to which they dragged him. His blood trailed over the ice, a gleaming smear left in the moonlight. And then the turbid, freezing water in the ice hole bubbled with the man’s breath and fury and reluctance to die as he sank into its depths and the sluggish current took him. Adam hated that dream. It was a dream close to Mrs Mallory. It was a dream he had been obliged to live, in a sense. He had felt the knife and bullet wounds freeze with the stupor of the cold and stop hurting the man. He did not wish to live in the head of a murdered, murderous stranger in his dreams. But Mrs Mallory had obliged him to.

  If I should die, think only this of me …

  By comparison, the sight of the headless man was what a man he had dreamed of named Rodriguez would have called a walk in the park. He was nice, Rodriguez. He was scary at first because he had these gristly stubs where his hands should have been and he had this melancholy demeanour. But he was nice and he had said nice things in the dreams about Adam’s dad. And he talked about fear an
d courage, and how some things were a trawl through the valley of death and some things were a walk in the park. The headless man was very much in the latter category. He could not hurt you. By contrast Mrs Mallory, Rodriguez cautioned gravely, was worse than a trawl through the valley of death. Mrs Mallory was Death itself.

  He hauled himself out of bed. He looked out of the window. His window looked out upon the view from the back of the house, the slope on which they tobogganed, the slope at the top of which they had built his snowman. It was snowing again. His snowman had lost its features in the white blur of the fresh fall. There was no sign of the headless man. But the headless man was not some kind of sentinel. He came and he went and Adam had only ever seen him through the window. And he moved slowly. His progress was a blind trudge in the wrong sort of shoes through an unseen landscape. Maybe he had been gracious and agile once. His bearing and his clothes suggested that. But he was no longer so with his pitiful and gruesome handicap.

  He dressed warmly in his thermal underwear and put his clothing over that, as his dad had drilled him in the current severe weather to do. And he brushed his teeth and descended the stairs. He wanted to wake Elizabeth. He wanted company and it didn’t come much better in an adult than hers. But it was a Sunday. Some people liked a lie-in on a Sunday. She was a doctor and she worked very hard. He did not think it would be at all polite to wake her. He would have to be on his own for a while. Sometimes you had to be stoical. It was one of the words Rodriguez used in the dreams. Adam had needed to look that one up, a rare thing for him. And he did try to be stoical. But he wished his dad was back at home. His dad had said he would return after one night away and his dad always kept his promises. But with Brooke’s overblown verses echoing through his head, he wished with all his heart his dad had not gone away again and left him.